familiar faces here. i don't have time to acknowledge all of them plus a lot of new ones and andgood evening, everyd welcome to pnp live. i'm brad graham the co-owner of politics and pros along with my

wife alyssa muscatine and we have what promises to be a very engaging program for you this evening featuring journalist peter goodman here to talk about his new book davos, man how the billionaires devoured the world. a couple of brief housekeeping notes first though to post a question at any point during the discussion. just click on the q&a icon at the bottom of the screen and in the chat column, you'll find a link for purchasing copies of davos, man. as peter notes in his prologue many people do a lot of ogling at the lives of billionaires. we marvel at their outlandish parties their trophy estates the details of their vastly expensive divorce settlements. we watch fictionalized tv shows based on their excessive lifestyles applaud their philanthropy and occasionally even elect them to public office. peter makes an impassion and detailed case that these richest people in the world have done

great harm to the rest of us describes how well often extolling philanthropy and social justice. they've deliberately engineered systems of business and government to serve their own interests and in doing so enhance their own wealth at the expense. of the welfare and economic security of many many others. all the more so peter searched during the current pandemic. the implications of this peter argues. i haven't simply been a widening of economic inequality. there have been political consequences too, including an intensifying public anger and threats to democratic governance. illustrate a personify his narrative. peter focuses on five particular billionaires whom you'll hear more about i'm sure in a minute. all in all peter delivers quite a scathing account. of greed hypocrisy and narcissism he writes with the

authority and journalistic skill that come from having covered the global economy for decades. in recent years for the new york times peter began a journalism career as a freelance reporter in southeast asia followed by three years in alaska at the anchorage daily news. you then join the washington post where he spent 10 years. shanghai is bureau chief and asian economics correspondent in washington covering telecommunications during the.com bubble of the 1990s he moved to the times in 2007 as a national economics correspondent playing a leading role in award-winning coverage of the global financial crisis and great recession. after three years. he shifted to the huffington post and four years later. he became global editor in chief of the international business times. he returned to the new york times and 2016 as european economics correspondent based in london and last august became global economics correspondent based in new york.

peter also the author previously of past due. published 20 2009 but the economic and financial excesses that led to the great recession. conversation with peter this evening will be alex gibney. a very accomplished documentary film director and producer who's one of awards for his work including an oscar and multiple emmys and peabodies. most recently alex directed the hbo two-part documentary the crime of the century about the opioid crisis. so peter and alex the screen is yours. thanks so much brad. so peter, it's a delight to to talk to you the you've written a riveting it's it's really potent. and it's given me a lot to think about i wanted to start though with how you got to where you got to did you did you approach this book right off the bad thing.

this is going to be davos man and kind of anthropological look at a new new species of economic manner. did you start someplace different and end up here? yeah, that's a great question. and first of all, i just want to say what an honor it is to be having you as as moderate or somebody who's such a skilled interviewer, and you've asked a great question right off the bat. so thanks for doing this. um, i did not come at this story originally as the story of davos or davos man. i mean it i was in europe in just in time to cover brexit trump had been elected president. i was finding myself writing about this up surge of right-wing populism across europe in italy and france and germany and you know even in sweden this supposed bastion of social democracy, we're suddenly this party that was born in the neo-nazi movement was vaulting to mainstream status and and i was just writing really about the what seemed like the breakdown of the liberal democratic order and asking how this happened and i remember i

was in davos in january 2017 and at this point we're six months into the torture. that is brexit. trump's just been elected and there's sense amongst you know, even the people i now call davos man the ultra billionaires who write the rules for all of us that there are some forces that are refashioning the global economy that we better take note of or maybe the pitchforks will show up at our doors. and so, you know davos is a bunch of things. i mean at the center is this is this very earnest program of seminars that most of the cool kids don't go to you know that it's like a badge of sophistication that you never set foot in the conference center where there's seminars on any quality. so this this particular year populism inequality how to come up with new models capitalism 2.0 all these kind of buzz words. um, and the wealthy people are wondering around trying to figure out what's happening and i just decide to sample what the solutions are, you know on offer

and i i remember listening to this conversation with the head of a giant consulting company based in india whose solution was up workers need to take responsibility for their own problems and train themselves. i remember listening to ray dalio a hedge funding investor. who's then worth about 17 billion dollars. i suggesting that the solution to inequality was a deregulatory process that would unleash the animal spirits of the market to generating more conducive atmosphere for making money, which was a curious thing to hear from somebody who seem to have figured out how to make quite a bit of money. i i listen to my one time boss our anna huffington. we just launched this new website that was about vacuuming up sponsorships from spas about, you know, wellness and her solution involved meditation and pillows. i heard everything except for the people who are here the richest people in the world,

maybe have to give something up and it was all about this was classic davos man thinking it's all win win, right you find win-win solutions and as long as we're doing well. then we invest in this cosmic lie, that wealth will trickle down and everyone will do well and it struck me that here was a the beginning of an explanation for what was happening in the world and as i continued my reporting on these these populist movements, it was always like a reaction to something on the surface like like why was sweden suddenly convulsed with hostility acrimony? this place was supposedly the spirit of collectivism lies. well because there'd been this tremendous influx of migrants and they were suddenly blamed by these right-wing neo nazis, you know, they it was a lot of racist rhetoric discomfort in a

homogeneous society with newcomers in the midst, but it was always packaged as well. we don't want to pay taxes for people who aren't gonna work don't speak swedish who hurt similar explanations for the rising of immigrants in italy i came to see brexit as essentially a nativist response to scarcity and it of course, i mean to explain where trump comes from you have to reckon with the fact that huge numbers of people have been marinated in a state of economic insecurity such that they may not understand exactly what's happened to them, but they understand that the people who are running the system don't really care that much about what's happening to them or we wouldn't have so much desperation and in each of these cases we have this opportunity for political opportunists who can demonize the other immigrants, you know, whoever it is. it's always some other forest besides the people right in our midst and so as i started to write this story i realized that the way into it was this scene.

i just described to you at davos in 2017, and then i realized i really i wanted to understand what sorts of stories these billionaires tell themselves. to justify which it seems like a straight-up pillage, right? i mean they've taken an economic system that used to function pretty well. i mean in most of these economies i've just described where you know, you you get up for work and you know, stay out of trouble get a little bit of education and you can probably go find a job that will allow you to support your family at a middle class standard and that is just so clearly broken down. what were these guys who had you know, systematically dismantled public infrastructure through lobbying campaigns through the financing of friendly think tanks by hiring legions of accountants to find new tax loopholes and using lobbyists to write new ones. you know, what were these guys who had essentially dismantled

public infrastructure and transfer to the proceeds to themselves leaving huge numbers of people in a state of desperation and happiness. what were they telling themselves? and so ultimately became my book. that's great. yeah, and we'll get the trump in a second, but i i want to stay on a for a bit before we get to the main characters. sure. i want to stay on the psychology of the archetype of davos man for a bit because i do find it intriguing. i mean there's i i recall in one instance of an old professor of mine and once said, you know economic man is not rational. he's irrationalizer and and i remember all so, you know the police have an expression called noble cause corruption the idea that once you're determined that you have a noble cause you allow yourself to become more more corrupt the end justifies the means but the other thing i found interesting is that over time and one of my films i i ran across these psychological experiments where people actually cheat more um when they

imagine they're doing it for a good cause and so i thought like what are the stories that some of the key characters in your book tell themselves to imagine that actually there he what they're doing is so good right that it allows them to i i think was it mark benny off, you know, right said i think rather famously we've been the heroes of of the covid pandemic, you know, the ceos have been so right if they see themselves as heroes. does that allow them then to believe in their own goodness in such a way that that they don't even recognize the carnage that you're doing. how would you have some psychological paradigms? how would you describe the psychological paradigm of davos man? yeah, i i think that the commonality is they all have a kind of messiah. and it's a gift. you know, i mean these guys to

to make a billion dollars. you got to be pretty good at selling something and these guys are especially good at selling themselves and their own virtue as a kind of prophylactic against redistribution. so they preempt to the conversation about progressive taxation by telling us that government is full of feckless bureaucrats who can't do anything and we need them to save us and that actually makes if you think about it not paying taxes its own kind of public service like they're sparing us from wasting our money on bureaucracy while they're then telling us about their philanthropic endeavors that are gonna be, you know, so much greater and like you i mean you're right to to put the focus on on benny off who's a particularly complex character. so here's a guy who actually is a real philanthropist and who has fought some significant fights. i mean, he's the the founder of salesforce this this large

software companies based in san francisco. he favors, you know countercultural rhetoric. he's a little bit of like a silicon valley cliche, right? he's into the whole bohemian thing. he hangs it out with the metallica drummer. he's constantly tweeting pictures of himself in the pacific on a sailboat with the metallica drummer. he has a thing called dreamforce in san francisco his own kind of davos by the sea. he flies his executives out the corporate retreats in hawaii, and they all hold hands and have blessings ceremonies. he's co-opted this hawaiian from ohana which sort of means family and he's a guy who will tell you like hit the the inspiration for his company came from going to southern india when he was having an existential crisis early in his career and visiting the hugging saint who told him he needs to give something back that's got to be, you know his ammo and so he founds this company he makes all this money and he does to his credit donate. percent of all the revenues 1%

of all the staff time to volunteering on all sorts of worthy causes. he financed a ballot initiative that raised several million dollars for homeless services through taxing, you know, big companies like his own in san francisco, but guess what? he pays as a company the modest some of zero to the federal government in taxes on several billion dollars worth of revenues. not once but at least twice and all the other stuff is like a rounding error compared to that. i mean, how are we supposed to pay for all the stuff that helped him create his fortune infrastructure the internet the electrical grid, you know, the universities that are financed by public dollars that are churning out graduates who can help him code like this is something that he just doesn't engage with if you ask him about it. he just tells you about, you know more philanthropy he'll tell you about how in the first way of the pandemic. he's selflessly drew on his connections in china to 50 million pieces of ppe, you know

gowns face masks to to fly back to the states and distribute to frontline medical workers who didn't have it. but why exactly are we dependent upon a tech bro worth 10 million dollars to outfit our frontline medical workers in the worst pandemic in a century in what it's supposed to be the most powerful country on earth. how does that happen? will it happens because people like mark benny off have systematically pillage the system through tax cuts yet. he tells this story, you know, you just pointed it out last year in davos. he says ceos are the heroes of the pandemic not frontline medical workers, and he's specifically said the government did not save you we saved you and even says we did it not for profit but to save the world so he's he's full of this sense and this is not isolated. i mean steve schwartzman who's the largest private equity investor in the world who's worth about 30 billion dollars will tell you if you ask him about the epic foreclos. disaster that you know, you just

did this fantastic podcast on meltdown. he will tell you as an investor who bought up, you know, literally thousands of homes a day on the courthouses of america took possession of them rented them out to people with this pleasing name invitation homes, and he'll say oh this was just an active, you know civic responsibility. i i did this for my nation, you know, these these homes they were eyesores they were rodents running around and overgrown lawns that nobody had taken care and we fixed them up we put on fresh coats of paint and we put families in them and you know, you can almost hear the soundtrack for like life insurance commercial with the golden retriever puppy running around on a lawn within adorable toddler. well invitation homes, it turns out jacks up the rent for all of these people cuts maintenance makes it impossible to get hold of of anybody if something goes right schwartzman runs off with the money sells bill. dollars a bonds through wall

street uses the money to the then go follow the same business plan around the world refers to how you know, once you're once there's blood in the streets of europe that will be the time to buy into real estate there and guess what right now schwartzman has not right now, but in the last couple of years during the pandemic, he's been saying publicly, you know, this is a fantastic time to be a landlord. you can jack up the rents. there's all these distressed assets. we can buy he's buying more real estate. he's got a new plan this rent to own model which seems like a repeat of the last one and yet if you ask him again, he will tell you that he is doing a favor to society. this is not the robber barons content to put their name on a building. oh, here's carnegie hall, but we'll just stay to ourselves safely protected while we enjoy all the money. these guys are playing for the whole thing. they want our adulation. they seem to believe their own narratives and that's really the function of davos more than thing is it's like a coming

together of the tribe just being there, you know is a signaling of their own virtue. they go there they engage in things like, you know stimulation of the syrian refugee experience. you can go to davos and watch billionaires get blindfolded and let around in the dark while somebody's yelling at them and languages they don't understand demanding papers and then they all feel really great about themselves and then they go off to dinner, you know thrown by some global consulting firm where they eat lobster and drink caviar and then they go home feeling. yeah. we really are the good guys which armors them to continue the real fight, which is protecting their privileges against the tax collector. yeah, it is interesting particularly in the case of schwartzman because i think when when people whether it be betty off or schwartzman, you know concocting these narratives about how they are in fact the good guys and and spending a lot of time burnishing those narratives whether it be on on the facade of the new york

public library or or through these stories, but they're very thin skin when it comes to criticism or even even more so when it comes to attacking their money making plans, i think it was seen shorts and wasn't it who who compared the end of the carried interest or hedge fund loophole to hitler's invasion of polite. he had to walk that one back that didn't go over so well, jamie diamond one year in davos after you paid a big fine involving i believe he's the london whale this disappearance of multi-billion dollars of funds based on. derivatives bad and this was you know right after he had settled the libor scandal another scandal and having paid, you know other fines to settle mal fees and stirring the mortgage-backed securities crisis went back to dallas and said, you know, my feelings were really really hurt. i feel i feel misunderstood. yeah these guys don't take having their halo challenged well because halo is so

important, you know, it's not just about their feelings. it's the way they protect themselves from democracy. it's the way they prevent the public getting the things that the public clearly wants like healthcare like affordable housing like help with education, you know, all of these things that we're told we can't afford because baked into it is this narrative that davos man is sold us on that taxes are evil that he can take care of all of our problems that if we if we try to operate like other major democracies other large economies, we you know, will monkey wrench the whole thing. we're full of these kind of false binary choices where like we can either have covid vaccines and we accept that part of that is we pay through the nose to pharmaceutical companies like pfizer and moderna. we're gonna sell them to the highest bidder. they're gonna leave most of humanity unprotected and open invitation to variance like

omicron. well, we can either have that or we can all die because we won't have any vaccines at all, you know, we can either accept that jeff bezos is gonna end up with all of our money and the people in his warehouses are gonna labor without any protection. they're not gonna have paid sick leave, but we're gonna have the wonders of e-commerce for those of us lucky enough to work from home, you know, we can either have that or we can be venezuela we can go diving into dumpsters for our dinner and you know, there are some other options on the menu, but these guys are very skilled at convincing us and and it's not by accident. it's systematic that if we try to change this system, we we you know, all of them modern. are just luddites, you know in the thrall of backward ideas. you know, i think it is fair to say in the case of covid that the federal government at least in the beginning of the pandemic didn't exactly cover itself with glory particularly the trump administration, but it's carrying on a little bit with steve schwartzman talk a little

bit about how his business model actually found a way to profit rather enormously from from the covid pandemic. oh, i mean, i think it's worse than that. i mean i think schwartzman in particular is part of the investor group that's responsible for for worsening and extending the pandemic. i mean schwartzman is a lot of things but he's no dummy and he he has a masterful instinct for going where the money is and he figured out early on that healthcare, you know, this is a fantastic arena. he sunk six billion dollars into a staffing company. that's a dominant supplier of staff to american emergency rooms back in 2016, and this was part of a huge wave of private equity investments in healthcare that injected considerations of profit into a sphere where the

stakes are obviously a whole lot higher than like how your local starbucks runs or how mcdonald's or your airline runs and yet suddenly the same, you know sense of patience or customers doctors and nurses or costs to be cut as much as possible so we can return profit to shareholds. we need to maximize our revenue which means moving quickly and we need to eliminate capacity like in the same way than an airline wants that plane to be full because that allows them to charge more for seats the private equity magnate who owns a hospital wants that place to be stuff to the gills, which is how we ended up reducing. are are stock of hospital beds in the united states by roughly a third for the decade plus leading up to the pandemic and you know in schwartzman's case going to emergency rooms. i mean what a stroke a genius and the same way that he has invested in low-income housing because he understands he's dealing with desperate people who will pay the extra fee who

will suffer the crappy maintenance because they don't have any recourse, you know, he understands that the people coming into emergency rooms boy. they may not be in the best state to wonder like does their medical insurance cover this or they get in the best deal who exactly are they in the hands up they will sign what is required to get back in the room or somebody's gonna take care of them and take care of their pain and you know, nothing a lot of comparative shopping a lot of comparative shopping when you're lying on a journey right and you know his industry this this emergency room staffing industry has been accused of participating participating in this con called surprise billing. you know the surprises not of the happy variety. it's it's about people going to emergency rooms thinking that they're dealing with medical staff that are part of their health insurance groups signing off on paperwork essentially acknowledging in whatever state they may be in that they are being treated by somebody out of network and then surprise they

get a huge bill. i mean this sends people into bankruptcy people are hassled by by collect by collections agents. so this was the run-up to the pandemic and then in the middle of the at the beginning of the pandemic in the us, i mean i focus on a guy named ming lynn who's an emergency room doc, you know, well decorated it worked at a hospital near the world trade center in new york after nine eleven. he's out in bellingham washington. he's working for this blackstone own company. that's shortsman's company blackstone naming companies team health and he's just sort of horrified early in the pandemic to see that nobody's wearing masks at the reception area when he asks the hospital. if they say well we don't want to frighten people. he asks as things develop further. how come we're still doing elective procedures like what why are people coming in for plastic surgery? shouldn't we be you know, limiting the use of our facilities and he's told that that's the money maker. he starts to protest and then he gets no traction at all because

black stones attitude is hey team health. that's our company their client is the hospital. we don't want to upset the hospital mainland is eventually fired for going on facebook and going, you know going public. he's a whistleblower essentially trying to spare us from a pandemic and for that he is fired and we then go through this hell that we're still in with the pandemic spreading like wildfire and now schwartzman's running around saying it's time to expand our holdings in healthcare. that's where we're headed. yeah, and i mean i want to jump right to politics from there because you know at a time when increasingly, you know, globe girdling companies and these davos men who sit atop them, you know control more and more of the economy and indeed the public sphere but you know in your book you say, you know, one

way of reclaiming power from from davos man, it is democracy, but right in a world where particularly in the united states we're democracy is so infused with money that is to say where you can buy those results. what is the what is the solution to that? it seems like the davos men have us corner. i mean the davos man have quite an apparatus, you know, and they're very good at confusing us and essentially exploiting discord and confusion to reinforce the status. mean anybody's ever worked in politics will tell you that it's very easy to kill a bill. it's very difficult to get one passed and they're very good at killing just about anything. you know, they they managed to come out of the 2008 financial crisis. i mean the wall street essentially causes the 2008 financial crisis. it becomes as global catastrophe. there's no real accountability for that. they essentially use that as a

moment to turn a rescue packages into kinds of corporate welfare. now, we've come through this we are still in this emergency with trillions of dollars expanded in relief this time. we did a much better job dealing with things in this country like expanded unemployment benefits genuine help for small businesses, but boy davos man, certainly make sure they get their own. i mean, there's 170 billion dollar boondoggle for real estate developers and cares act including donald trump. so, you know, you ask what do we do? well, what we need to do is actually not that complicated. right? i mean this is you don't have to be utopian. we don't need a radical kind of revolution. we need a restoration of the kind of capitalism that we've already known now, i don't want to time machine back to 1975. right? i mean there were all sorts of problems in american life in the 40 in the post world war two in 1975 period but one thing that was right about that time that we should get back to labor

unions were strong and workers were able to receive compensation that was in accordance with the overall gains in the economy if your company did well then you did. well there were opportunities for people to go out and support their families at a middle class standard and that's what's disappeared and what has happened. well davos man essentially has engineered this bottom-up transfer of wealth through tax cuts through the evisceration of antitrust enforcement through the destruction of labor unions by taking trade and let me you know caution here trade is the progressive force as far as i'm concerned. there's nothing there's nothing evil about trade trade has been turned into this sort of evil idea by the davos man like jeff bezos who've managed to harvest all the winnings for themselves, and it's the opportunist who come along and say oh our problems are in china in china is a big problem for the global

trading system. china's a complicated issue can't can't be solved so easily, but it's simply wrong to tell struggling men laid off manufacturing workers in the rust below the united states that their problems are china or mexico. they're problems are the people in boardrooms in new york and seattle and in washington in the halls of congress and successive presidential administration who have allowed davos man to engineer assistant where they get all the gains. so what do we need to do? we need progressive taxation so that we can invest in social safety net programs that will actually make us more entrepreneurial like how many people are stuck in crappy jobs that they're not happy with that. don't seem to have much upside, but they're afraid to give up their health insurance. how many people are stuck in places because they can't sell their homes their homes or underwater. they'd like to move they're just terrified that if anything goes right they could end up sleeping under an overpass somewhere, you

know, if we if we actually expand the social safety net in the us we become more competitive and entrepreneurial but that requires texting wealthy people, which is something that we just simply do not do because davos man is so successful at preventing us from doing that. we need to enforce any trust laws and we need to boost labor power and all of that involves taking on the entrenched power of davos, man, and that's not easy. yeah, so i wanted i've one more question then we're going to go to the audience the second, but i want to i want to circle back around this because of course, you know, i i agree with many of those proposed solutions that said, you know, even in in the biden administration, you know a fifteen dollar minimum wage somehow seems impossible and one of the reasons it seems impossible. is that is that it comes to economic solutions like that the davos man raise up their heads

and they say, you know if you want to get elected next time you're not going to get any money for us and particularly. the democratic party seems to have this problem where they're promising social solutions, but whenever they need to go for money they're going to people who aren't really in favor of that kind of the redistributive solutions and therefore it doesn't create a world where the people who are saying government is the solution not the problem aren't solving problems because they're trying to please the people who are trying to literally undermine the government solutions that they might that they profess to believe in. does that make any sense? oh, no that i mean, i think you've diagrammed the problem and if that were an easy one to solve it it would have been solved. i mean the money in politics is clearly corrupting there are lots of things that americans want according to polls that we just don't get we don't get expanded health where we don't get affordable education, we don't get help when we're in

trouble. we have a meager social safety net that actually saps our competitiveness and it is difficult to imagine how we solve these problems without getting the money to interest out of politics. and i i, you know, i don't know how to do that. i mean i i do have i do spend some time in the book sketching out solutions that effectively bypass government. i mean, there's some there's some interesting work being done by an african called the democracy collective that relies on cooperative. there are cooperatives in places like cleveland where they formed a cooperative that got a contract to do to handle the linens at the cleveland clinic, you know, a major medical outfit and they because they're not paying dividends to shareholders because they don't have to think about the profit margins they can actually compete while still paying out a living wage there. there are initiatives. that in england and then you know things like universal basic

income which once seemed like a total outlier suddenly the politics of that, you know, given that we've just expanded trillions of dollars in public money during the pandemic this idea that once seemed like yeah, why doesn't the us government just can't a unicorn to everybody now actually seems possible. i mean nancy pelosi has said that maybe that's something we need to look at a basic level of support given out to every american regardless of income now, i actually have some concerns about it because people like mark benioff like it davos man like it libertarians like it in part because they can imagine what we can get out from all these other social safety and programs and we'll just give everybody a little check and this will be your recompense for having your job, you know hand it to a robot or sent some country where there's no safety standards or environmental standards. you know, that that's problematic but the idea that we're talking about some kind of all-encompassing social safety

net is potentially pretty interesting. so i i to the audience members i had forgive me for this. i've got one more follow-up question and then i'm going to go to the audience but that it getting back around to how you made the shift from trying to understand what the you know what this strange trend was toward authoritarian leaders like both sonaro savini, know modi etc. it to the people in davos they as you said in 2017. they were concerned. it's like oh this problem you're gee this is terrible. so you trump and you know, there could be religions here. was there any sense that the davos men? understood that actually they were the ones leading us into this moment rather than the ones leading us out. well, not in the way in which i think you mean that i mean, they didn't feel like oh, we've really overdone it in terms of,

you know, monopolizing all the bounty of capitalism and now things are tumbling. no, it was more that some people, you know, like steve schwartzman who didn't support trump initially was just especially troubled by his rhetoric on china and his threatened china trade war because schwartzman does a lot of business in china runs, you know thing called the schwartzman scholars at shane hawaiian university and in beijing, you know has a lot of business interests there didn't like that but then came quickly to see trump who he has dinner with, you know, i mean shorts this guy who owns waterfront mansions the way most of us own socks one of his is very close tomorrow lego. he dines with trump all the time and he came to see like oh this guy can deliver something. care about more than anything else which is deregulation and tax cuts and so schwartzmann right to check for 250,000 for trumps inaugural and then goes to round essentially managing trump's problems for him at

davos. i mean i heard from multiple people the schwartzman would buttonhole them and say, oh donald trump doesn't have a racist bone in his body. oh, he loves women. he respects them. you know, you've got him all wrong. we tried to sort of launder trump's image for him seeing in trump a vessel to realize his dreams and schwartzman stuck with trump, you know, right up until january 6th, and it wasn't until trump seemed like a spent force that finally trump and schwartzman silenced the rhetoric there, you know, i was in davos in in 2018 when trump came back. well, i actually was first trip there trump trump arrived and it was a huge coup for class schwab who who runs the forum who, you know pretends to be all about corporate governance and transparency and democracy and lauded trump for boosting inclusiveness in america because it was such a coup to have in there and the the conventional wisdom on the coverage was that you know, this is like this is gonna be you know, a real clash. i mean, here's trump the

wrecking ball pointed at the liberal economic order. he yanked the us out of the paris climate according against international cooperation. this is he he's the enemy of everything that davos supposedly stands for and he quickly became clear that people just didn't understand they they were falling for like the official program and not the real davos where you know, mark benioff brings in the black eyed peas for a private aloha themed party for his banker and other tech bro friends and you know facebook rents a whole villa on the main street in in davos this colonated fortress of a hotel the belvedere is full of every bank and consulting outfit you've ever heard and these guys are licking their lips. i mean donald trump's the guy giving away money to rich people. and they understood that really clear and they would say yeah, you know, we could stand to have a little less of the misogynistic rhetoric. we don't want to have to apologize, but we really don't like him threatening to disown the american national debt as if

it's just some debt that he owes deutsche bank as part of some failing casino, you know, that's not so good. but boy, we really like the tax cuts in the deregulation and at the end of the day, that's what these guys understand. okay now i'm gonna make good on my promise and go to some some notice some questions. problem so here's a here's a question. what given the backlash over the davos conference? what are the chances it goes the way of the dodo bird or even the white house correspondence dinner where it loses prominence? that's a good question. hey, look nothing's forever. right? i mean, maybe the shine is off davos. it's certainly doesn't work anymore if it ever did as a a true virtue signaling to the rest of the world, right? i mean, i think that the the sort of the pr tap dance that here we are on the mountaintop earnestly trying to save the world does not work with

increasing numbers of people and it's kind of a cosmic joke for lots of people, but i still think it works as a sort of morale booster for the people who are fashioning these narratives that allow them to you know, not only ignore but even work as a strength the tremendous contrast between what they say they're doing and what they're actually doing right? and and i mean i've been to conferences in davos where like they'll be a gathering of pharmaceutical executives. earnestly discussing like why are drug prices so unaffordable for most people boy what a mystery, you know, i looked it must be there must be some model. it could be that we just we haven't gotten the day to write or perhaps we we're not understanding the public we need to look into this more as if you know anybody in the room is beyond reproach and so they can all feel this sense of pride that they're actually on the right side trying to seek out

solutions and moreover. look there's money in it. right? i mean davos gonna is gonna exist as long as there's money and the real secret of davos. it's not about this program that gets covered on tv. it's about multinational companies paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in membership to cloud schwab running what it's supposed to be a non-profit and he plays matchmaker he if you pay enough you get access to these secret executive suites or the rest of the davos participants can't go you get special. that allow you to pass through into you know, the land of milk and honey where there's no journalists around. there's no regulators around schwab. make sure that you're just sitting down, you know, you can be the head of an oil company meeting the the saudi prints who has the capacity to make your dreams come true, and this is bankable. so whatever the rest of us think about davos that function is what keeps the thing going. so here's the question.

are there any good guys or gals among these? davos divas that is to say do we see any reformed davos men people who are really trying to walk the walk. there are billionaires who believe in the wealth tax. i mean the people i've written about the the closest is benioff, right? i mean i benny off is on the record supporting higher taxation to finance homeless services, but but it's always in collegian with the reality. he's gonna balance yourself of whatever tax perks. are are there for him to which one might say? well, you know what ceo would keep their job if they didn't avail themselves of the tax perks. this is a guy who's actually writing the tax code affectively through his membership in the business roundtable this lobby shop that at the time was headed by jamie diamond the ceo of jp morgan chase who played a critical role in getting that huge package 1.5 trillion dollar

package tax cuts from trump. so no in my book, you're not gonna meet any reformed dav man, and if there are a lot of them out there, i i haven't met them. i mean there are lots of interesting people in davos itself, right? there's there are social entrepreneurs. there are academics the odd movie stars always walking around i once met peter gabriel who told me about how he was making music with chimpanzees. i thought that was kind of interesting. there's always there's there's this interesting assemblage of people there and it's exciting to be around so much creativity, but in terms of the people will actually have power i mean there's a guy named nick hannauer in seattle who's a billionaire who made his money in technology who's pretty impassionate about the wealth tax, but this is these are bit players. how much cooperation did you get from any of the billionaires in the writing of your book? ah, not a lot benny off did give me a long very interesting

interview and we had a long text exchange and i think he ever in in his own talking points, and i actually respected that, you know this in conversation happened with no handlers just went on late into the night one night and he even opened up about the fact that you know, he said at one point like so your thesis is the davos is just a charade and it just gives us air cover for all the nefarious stuff that we're doing and stay cold or capitalism this idea that he champions it companies are no longer devoted to milton friedmanism and shareholder maximization, but now they're actually earnestly trying to solve our props. you think that that's all you know, just pr and i said, yeah basically and he said, you know, look, i i've been to dallas. he's on the board of trustees. he said that might be you know more right than not hey that might even be 60 or 70% right? but what about you know, and then he had you know garvey. clients of vaccine experts who've pioneered a way to distribute vaccines around the world including kovacs, which is

basically an abject failure so he gave me some time i spent three days once in china with steve schwartzman at this unbelievable conference where we had an hour at the great hall the people with xi jinping and an hour with the premier league coach young, so i saw him up close. he took us to go see the schwartzman scholars the others. i don't want to give away, you know any sourcing jamie diamond i've bumped into over the years at davos. i've spent a little bit of time with him and then i've just studied these guys, but you know, the thing that was striking to me, i mean, you're a documentary film picture day. this is how much stuff is just lying out there unprocessed. i mean schwartzman's memoir came out as i was writing the book so he was going off and doing these virtual events all around the country telling the same stories over and over again. and that was just fascinating. i mean, he he told a story at one point about how like he talked.

he managed to get hold of the dean of admissions at harvard when he he wasn't accepted. he tried to talk his way in you know off the wait list. he taught he constantly gives up his origin story. he's always talking about how he's just a middle-class kid from the suburbs of philadelphia who worked in his dad's linen store. i mean this helped me sort of understand the mindset of these guys and benny off, you know, you you say famously declared that he ceos and the hero the pandemic he said that in public at davos last year and basically nobody picked up on it. i think some obscure blogged it and i ran an extra in the times a week ago and now everybody's talking about it, but all this stuff is just lying out there kind of unprocessed. um here's a question. the ftc chair is said to be activist and concerned with the private equity exploiting most of vulnerable population. the emergency department not only treats the most vulnerable population, but at the most

vulnerable moments, do you think the ftc has the will and resources to take on antitrust in a broader sense and in emergency medicine? that's a great question. i mean lina khan, who is the new chair of the ftc does represent a really interesting break from what has been the dominant conception of antitrust law i mean and again, this is i get into this history in my book. this doesn't come by happenstance. it comes through the careful engineering of the davos man. we have this idea going back to the 70s from robert boark and the chicago school, you know this sort of hot house of neoliberalism that is long as consumers or not harmed as long as prices don't go up than any merger is fine is in fact good and and this ties into thinking about how the us one the cold war and it's coupled with very

careful lobbying and use of think tanks to push the idea that hey the soviet union, that's the enemy right? they're rocket eyes the government's huge. top down. we're the rugged individualists. we gotta let business do what business is gonna do and they have to mobilize the way they did to win the second world war and this becomes this kind of technocratic worshiping of big business kind of solution to all of life's problems and this bork idea is what an animes the government green lighting increasingly huge mergers. they create a lot of them monopoly power now implicated in a lot of the shortages we talk about in terms of the supply chain a disaster. well, so lena khan who is young extremely successful, you know pens this very influential law review article a few years ago about amazon essentially saying look if we look at these tech companies just through the

borkian consumer test lens. we're gonna let a lot of damage happen to our society. i mean google facebook, they're given their products away. so if all we're interested in is what happens. prices we're going to allow these huge companies to marshal god-like treasure troves of data on us. they're gonna use that for all sorts of anti-competitive ways amazon's capable of dropping the price against, you know, even companies that are selling on their own platform to put them out of business and take over and eventually we will get higher prices and we'll just have less consumer choice less competition. so that's certainly an idea that's animated and there there has been an attempt to go after the emergency room staffing companies, but you know, they have they have resources and they've been a couple of attempts in congress and in both cases davos man has has essentially protected itself from regulation by backing a bill that looks like it's solves the problem. well actually being a tremendous

compromise and then unleashing a sophisticated ad campaign that blames all of our problems on the insurance industry, which you know, i don't have to tell you is unpopular industry in the united states. so you have the private equity people who have got their hooks into emergency rooms squaring off against insurance companies and the winner is confusion and the status quo. and a question here a complement first says the diagnosis is brilliant. but how do we avoid the despondency that has grown and feeds us to authoritarian disaster. how do we get back on track? where's the hope? what you know, my book is not written to depress people right? i mean i often hear from you. oh, it's so sad that story of those people who lost their job. it's just and in my response is always hey, it's not sad. it's outrageous. and i mean, i'm i'm catering to outrage in this book in the

service of people understanding that we have been here before. i mean in the united states, you know, all of these fights that i'm talking about and writing about we've been here before we we took on the robber barons and the result of the robber barons amassing tremendous monopoly power behaving a brutally toward labor toward competitors was you know, got any trust enforcement. we got financial regulations. we got companies broken up when that was warranted. we got the new deal. so we got social safety nets. we got a modicum of security for people. that's social security system. we got medicare medicaid unemployment benefits. we got all these things and it and it worked pretty well. i mean again, i don't have a fetish for the 1960s and 1970s right like we're talking about a period of jim crow. we're talking about the vietnam war. we're talking about a time when you know, even by today's standards of gender and racial discrimination, how can you even compare right?

we've seen lots of progress since then we should lock in we don't want to go back in time, but we do want to go back to having the government play a role in the marketplace to save capitalism and so my argument here is that doesn't require a revolution. it doesn't require a utopian fantasy. it requires using the thing. been there all along that is under assault but it's there and that's democracy. well, that seems to me like a pretty good. how are we doing on time? are we okay. or i'm asking our i'm asking brad. are we good? should we keep going? yeah. yeah. no, we got, you know, we know five six more minutes. okay, great. yeah because that was a there was such a great and hopeful answer but now let me take that i'll give you the counterpoint. so i have a question. here's his globalization's a common theme when analysts talk about the loss of blue collar jobs and the rust belt and the south trace back to nafta with

president clinton who you get into in your book. what would you say critic saying it was the government that made this deal not the private sector and so government can't be trusted to get us out of our current mess. well, i mean, why do we think the government adopted nafta in the structure in which we got it? why do we think china entered the world trade organization and got access to our marketplace and every other marketplace in the world in 2001. it came in response to incessant lobbying from industry. and by the way, that was quite a davos man. i mean people like bill clinton larry summers, you know, they said oh this isn't really even about business, you know, this is about democratizing china, you know, if we if we trade with china then we'll create a vibrant middle class and they'll demand the same things that every middle class wants. they're gonna want freedom and and the markets will require free flow of information which will mean, you know, free press.

and and this was i mean, this was the cheerleading this kind of active civic virtue it was really about shareholders gaining away to cut costs to threaten the labor with moving jobs elsewhere in wealthy places like the united states to transfer production to a place where there are no labor unions where if there is a real labor movement you can end up in in prison for the rest of your life. and so we got this tremendous kind of joint venture between walmart and the people's republic of i mean, this was the force now there are other ways to manage our trading relationships and and by the way, i'm not here even to demonize trade with china. i'm not i'm not sure that it was wrong to let china into wto. i think it was wrong to let china into wto with the few safeguards that we had without progressive taxation without some say over what workplace standards a companies have to follow. i mean without any check on the

on the process, but let's remember the us is overwhelmingly the biggest winner from globalization. it's how we have chosen to distribute the bounty that's the problem and that choice isn't by accident that choice has been dictated by davos man who finance people's campaigns who are highly skilled at using social media other forms of advertising to get the word out in their own interest. the jobless entry issues clearly golden. sorry the davos issue is clearly global how much difference? can reforms in the us make tax reform voting etc. is it is it a drop in the global bucket? well, i mean the us is the outlier in terms of the kinds of policies that we're talking about. i mean at some point in the book i look at data that's shows that in denmark, which is another bastion of social democracy, you know, six months after the

breadwinner in a family of four loses their job. they're living on i think it's 87% of their previous income because there's that much of a social safety net in the us the same family is living on 27% of their previous income. so, you know if the us becomes more like the rest of the developed world that will actually contribute to more consumption it will contribute to a revival of the sorts of approaches to government helping people out when that when they're in in trouble. i mean, it's the us that really has the most work to do on this front. speaking very i've got a question which is speaking strictly on on the matter of covid and and vaccines. how is it was there a davos man

mechanism that somehow permitted moderna to which is i understand it received quite a bit of federal funding into right research and development to sell to the highest bitter its vaccine instead of sharing. it's a it's it's mrna secrets with with nations who could desperate to use it to fend off the next variant. oh that's a classic davos man moment, right? i mean the pharma lobby full of money from large pharmaceutical companies push to the argument that we've heard time and again on precisely these question we heard this over age drugs a generation go in in the developing world that if you mess and with the sanctity of intellectual property, then you undermine the incentive of the geniuses who work at pharmaceutical companies to innovate and we'll all die basically, i mean davos man either gets paid or or we all die and i mean that's a, you

know, a an aggressive way of stating the logic, but that's really the understanding that governs how we approach the pharmaceutical industry because it is really incredible that you know, we have omicron. by due to the fact that you have frontline medical workers in africa treating covid patients at a time when we're handing out booster shots to children in wealthy countries, right? i mean, you don't have to just take umbrage here on humanitarian grounds. i mean purely selfishly essentially. we got a system where society is subsidizing davos man through their monopoly royalties on covid vaccines, and we're paying through shuttered schools that are messing with our kids education our own economic livelihood death fear the continued desperation as we go through, you know, we're into a third year this pandemic. we're all paying so that a handful of davos men can

continue to hang on to their monopoly profits on vaccines. when win but that's exactly how they that's how they put it you change that then we won't have any vaccines and that's ridiculous, but it seems to work as an argument. terrific peter, this is a tremendous book and not only is it a great book, but also, you know, we're very forceful and articulate explicator of the of the message they're in so so thank you. oh, thank you alex. i'm really thrilled that you were here. i just appreciated so much. thank you. hey alex, great moderating. what do you think? are you inspired to do a documentary now called davos man? definitely i'm in. coffee anytime alex. i'm gonna call mark benny off and see if they'll fund it seems like he actually might already been written right parts at

least here peter what i want devastating take down. a billionaires. it's really impossible to read your book without getting not not sad, but really upset an outraged as you said how the system has been. so manipulated to the advantage of these super wealthy people, but you know, hopefully by contributing to a better understanding of how the rich have gotten richer and what it's what it's cost the rest of us your book will. help bring about the remedies that you outline. to everyone watching. thanks for tuning in. reminder that in the chat column you can find a link for purchasing copies of davos, man. from all of us here at politicst

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