Private Equity: Your Ears Will Bleed

This is an iHeart podcast.

Hey, everyone.

I want to talk to you for a sec about Squarespace and specifically Squarespace payments.

If you're running a business and you're using Squarespace, you're doing the right thing because Squarespace payments is the easiest way to manage your payments in one place.

Onboarding is fast and simple.

You can get started in just a few clicks and start receiving payments right away.

Plus, you can give your customers more ways to pay with very popular payment methods like Klarna ACH Direct Debit in the U.S., Apple Pay After Pay in the US and Canada, and ClearPay in the UK.

Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff and you can get a free trial.

And when you're ready to launch, use our offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

AutoTrader is powered by AutoIntelligence.

Their tools sync with your exact budget and preferences to tailor the entire car shopping experience to you.

Want a pink mid-sized SUV with 22-inch rims and a V8?

They got it.

Nothing's too specific.

Find your dream car at the right price in no time because AutoTrader, powered by AutoIntelligence, puts you in control of the whole experience from search to close.

It's the totally you way to buy a car.

Visit auto trader.com to find your perfect ride.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, and this is Stuff You Should Know

the podcast.

Oh, wow, fancy.

Yeah, I wanted to dress it up a little bit because

it's our job, Chuck, to yank

what could be a bone-dry, boring economics lesson from the maw of, well, boredom.

Shake it up a little bit by the collar.

Look it in the eye and say, you will not be boring today.

And then do all that.

All right.

Okay, we can do it, Chuck.

We're professionals.

I'm glad you feel good about it.

I do.

And I'm going to make you feel good about it, too.

Because what we're talking about today is no mere typical economics.

And we're famous for having trouble wrapping our heads around economics.

This one can be that way, too.

We're talking about private equity today.

We'll explain all about it.

The reason it can be hard to wrap your head around is because it's so insanely unfair, the structure of it, that it just doesn't make sense.

So you just kind of have to accept accept it on its face that this is actually how it is.

Yeah, I would agree.

It's nuts.

So, private equity, I guess we should probably start out with a little bit of a definition, Charles.

It's an alternative investment vehicle.

And essentially, what it is, is it's a fund, a private fund.

You have to basically be in the club to even invest in this, at least traditionally, they've kind of opened it up a little more.

And private equity goes around and essentially either buys huge controlling interests in companies or just buys the companies outright, trims them down, makes them lean, mean, and efficient, and

ideally turns them around for a healthy profit, walks away, does it again.

Everybody who invested gets even richer than they already were.

And that's the basics, the very most basic definition of private equity.

Yeah, it's

something that's become much more popular in the past 20-ish years, but really kind of started in the 70s, as we'll see.

And it's an alternative investment.

So it's not like stocks or bonds or anything.

It's generally a little riskier.

There's less oversight.

There's less transparency.

And they want to keep it that way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They've actually gone to great lengths to make sure that it's much less transparent.

One reason why the government, who is in charge of regulating stuff to make it transparent, like stocks and bonds and disclosures and all that, is that you or or anybody could walk along, open up a brokerage account and start buying stocks and bonds.

You don't have to be savvy at all.

To invest in private equity, because of the risk, because it's just so different from traditional stocks and bonds and normal investments,

the government says you're on your own.

As a matter of fact,

you have to register as an accredited investor, which says that you either know what you're doing so much that we don't have to worry about you losing your shirt.

Like you're you're going to just deal with it if that happens, or you have so much money, it's not really going to matter if you lose your investment.

Those are the people who

can invest in private equity.

And usually they're, what, institutional investors, right?

Like huge, massive like funds or college endowments or something.

Yeah.

And the people who really come out on top are the people that manage these.

If you're a managing partner, there's a formula known as 2 and 20, where the company that you're managing, that you have taken over, they pay you 2% of the total assets of that company plus 20% of the profits above whatever threshold that you agree on, I guess.

And then there's all sorts of other ways that they can make money, as we'll see, like, you know, selling the land that the business sits on,

maybe to yourself, and then renting it back to

that same company at a higher rate.

So, yeah, we'll dig into all that.

But

the people that that are really getting rich are the people that are

investing in these, but really managing these.

Right.

So, if you ever hear a news story about some guy who ran some

great venerated company into the ground and they're like, yeah, I mean, even I lost my investment.

Do not feel bad for them because they made probably hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for themselves from those fees.

And those fees can't be taken back like because that company's in bankruptcy, because you can show that they did a terrible job of managing this company.

Doesn't matter.

They get to keep that money no matter what the turnout is, no matter how many people lose their jobs.

And that is why almost everyone in the world hates private equity people.

Yeah, and they generally do this to private companies.

Sometimes it'll be a controlling interest in a much larger publicly traded company.

But you know, generally we're talking about private companies here.

And, you know, we're going to go through industries and different examples of specific companies in a bit.

But it's usually almost always what's called a leverage buyout in which the money to buy this company comes from a huge loan that that company is also then responsible for.

So

it's really...

Whoever came, I mean, I guess we'll get to who basically came up with this stuff, but it's a sort of evil financial genius on a level that is kind of hard to comprehend that it was ever allowed to happen.

Yeah, it's the best analogy I've been able to come up with is it's like if you went and bought a house, the house had to go take out a loan and a mortgage so that you could buy and own it.

And you didn't actually care about the house because you're planning on selling it down the road.

So you didn't keep it up.

And then you just decide to walk away from the house and the house is responsible for paying off the loan it took out so you could buy it.

That's the best I can come up with.

Yeah.

I mean, that's a thing.

And it's a big thing.

Right now, private equity firms, the companies they own in the United States employ more than 13 million people.

And they account for about 2 trillion of, which is about 7% of the GDP.

And like I said, it all started out in the 70s with a guy named Milton Friedman from the University of Chicago who was,

I mean, it seems very sort of old hat now to hear, but he was kind of one of the first people to step forward and say the only thing any corporation should ever worry about is their shareholders uh that the the people don't matter the product don't matter uh doesn't matter rather uh english grammar doesn't matter

and the only thing that matters is the profits that we turn for our shareholders and once somebody kind of said the quiet part out loud everybody's like, oh, well, he said it.

So that's what we're going to all try and do now.

Yeah.

One One of the worst ideas in the history of the world.

And it's, it just took off.

So, yeah, Friedman, that was step one.

Step two was laid, well, step two through 10, I would say, is laid out by a guy named Michael Jensen, who was an economist with Harvard Business School in the 70s and 80s.

And he basically said, traditional companies that have, you know, you've got a CEO and you have employees, and the CEO is paid a certain salary a year and everything's great.

That doesn't work because the CEO, the person making the decisions and what moves the company makes, they might be in conflict with the shareholders.

They might be spending a bunch of money and they don't care.

They don't care about the shareholders, the investors who, again, as Milton Friedman said, the entire purpose of the corporation is to enrich the shareholders.

So how can you bring a CEO in line?

And he said a couple of things.

One, you can pay him in stock.

So that whole thing about how CEOs get huge stock packages now, that came from Michael Jensen.

And the reason why is because now suddenly they're a shareholder.

So they care about what the shareholders are getting, right?

That's number one.

Then, number two, if you buy a company using that leverage buyout technique where you make the company take out tons of loans so that you can buy that company, it's saddled with so much debt that it immediately has to figure out how to get lean and mean, emphasis on mean,

so that it can keep afloat and pay off of those debts.

So like immediately managers have to trim the the fat and it just gets more efficient and outperforms just a traditional company traditionally run company that was michael jensen's contributions yeah and you know we're going to talk about the different ways this happens um obviously uh firing people is a big way to to trim the fat to pay back those huge loans that someone took out on your behalf that you're now responsible for once again um so you know mass layoffs is one way to make that happen that's one way to trim the fat um even if it, you know, makes the company not function as well, it doesn't matter.

Right.

You know, sometimes there is fat that can be trimmed.

So we're not saying like no one should ever be laid off or anything like that.

Like we're realistic people.

But we're talking about, you know, leverage buyouts and kind of how they work.

So another thing they can do is break them apart.

And if you've ever seen the movie Wall Street

with the great Michael Douglas, I just watched that again for the billionth time recently.

Oh, really?

Yeah, very, very good example.

It's one one of my favorite movies, but very, very good examples of all this stuff in there as far as like buying in his case when he bought Charlie Sheen's father's airline just for the sole purpose of breaking it apart and you know driving it into the ground to get rich.

Right.

But,

you know, selling off assets is another way to do it.

Like I mentioned, like selling off the land that the business sits on.

Sometimes that equity firm owns

the real estate company as well.

Yeah.

That buys the land that the company sits on and then leases it back to that company sometimes against their best interest at like higher rental rates.

Yeah.

I'll give you an example.

We'll talk a little more about Red Lobster, but

they got taken over in a leveraged buyout, and the company did exactly that.

They sold off all of their assets, all of their restaurants, just sold them off.

And then they sold them to a company who turned around and leased them to Red Lobster, right?

The Red Lobster was paying an estimated $16 million a year for just a 1% property tax on its locations, all of them, $16 million.

Now their leases amount to $158 million,

right?

So these are just terrible, terrible business decisions.

And the reason why is because anytime a big influx of cash comes in, it gets divided up among the investors.

They get tons of money.

And it's not just like from selling properties, Chuck.

One of the other ways that investors get their money back, they get a return on their investment, is they'll take out more loans from the company.

After the company's been bought and has all this extra debt, they'll take out even more loans.

And when that money comes in, rather than spending it on the company, they'll divide some or all of it up among the investors.

So it's like a vampire process at its worst.

I feel like we really should say something to be fair.

There is a lot of well-run, well-thought-out private equity firms that know what they're doing that actually have saved companies from going under.

It happens.

It's just when it's bad, it's so bad that

it almost makes it seem like there shouldn't be

this type of business model.

Yeah, for sure.

Sometimes it's a real quick thing.

Like in the case of Wall Street, like there was no long-term plan for Gordon Gecko and Blue Star Air.

It was like a house flip.

You buy this company, sort of a smaller company, and you want to make it look good for maybe another private equity firm to come along and buy.

So you're going to, if you're a manager of that firm, you're going to make a lot of very short-term decisions that make it appear much healthier than it really is on paper.

So they can just kind of turn it and flip it and get a big payoff.

And then it's someone else's problem where they're going to do the same thing probably.

Yeah.

And like you said, one of the big things that happens is including layoffs, including just sucking the company dry of its money, is the customer suffers as well.

Usually the product or the service takes a really big hit because you're trying to figure out how to put that same thing out and charge as much as you can for it by putting as little as you can into it.

Because the people who bought the company don't really care about the company or what it does.

Good time for a break.

I think so.

And then we'll come back and talk some more about the history of this whole thing, huh?

All right, I need to go get some pomade and grease my hair back real quick.

I'll be right back.

Okay.

The reviews and ratings are in, and Ice Cube's Big Three is the surprise hit of the summer.

And to cap off the season, iHeart presents the Big Three Basketball Playoffs.

This Sunday at 3 p.m.

Eastern, the remaining four teams battle it out for the right to make the Big Three Championship Championship in the most physical, fierce, and competitive basketball league in the world.

The action starts with the Big Three Monster Energy Celebrity Game, where your favorite stars compete in Big Three 3-on-3 basketball.

Then the first of two semifinal games features Dwight Howard and the LA Riot taking on Montrez Harrell and Dr.

J's first-placed Chicago Triplets.

The finale will see popular Miami 305 with stars MVP Michael Beasley and last will make you Dan Stevenson take on Nancy Lieberman's Dallas Power who finished the season winning five straight weeks to capture second place.

Can Glenn Rice, Greg Monroe, and Paul Milsap stop Miami's physical assault, or will Miami and Beasley put an end to Dallas's winning ways?

Who will make it to the big three championship?

This no-holds-barred action starts Sunday at 3 p.m.

Eastern, 12 Pacific, only on CBS.

Hey, everybody, host Nora McInerney returns for season three of The Head Start, Embracing the Journey, a podcast from Ruby Studio and AbV.

Yeah, in each episode, Nora shares intimate conversations with real people living with chronic migraine as they try to find the doctor that is right for them, navigate their treatment journey, and be present in the moment in spite of it all.

You'll get a glimpse into their day-to-day navigating not just the physical symptoms, but the effects chronic migraine attacks have on their careers, their relationships, and their family life.

Joined by headache specialist Dr.

Christopher Rine, Nora listens as guests share their chronic migraine experience, all connected by a common theme of resiliency.

New to the show?

Well, check out the first two seasons available now and definitely worth a listen.

And join the conversation for season three and create more space for empathy and understanding for this invisible chronic disease.

Listen to The Head Start, Embracing the Journey, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

Now through September 2nd, get up to 50% off store-wide on carpet, hardwood, laminate, waterproof flooring, and much more.

Plus two two years interest-free financing, and we pay your sales tax.

The Floor Stores Labor Day sale.

Don't let the sun set on this one.

Go to floorstores.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

The Floor Store, your area flooring authority.

I should mention real quick that

I love Wall Street so much that I was watching it again and I was like, I wonder if there's a t-shirt that says Anicott Steel.

It's just one of the companies that they, you know, one of the fictional companies that Oliver Stone wrote into the movie.

And sure enough, there's an Anacott Steel t-shirt.

I bought it.

I love it.

I hate the message of the movie and Gordon Gecko.

I don't think he's the hero or anything like that.

But it's just a movie I've always loved.

And now I got my Anicott Steel shirt.

Just kind of as a movie crusher type.

when people see me that know that movie, they'll be like, oh, Wall Street.

Right.

No, I get it.

I get it.

I used to have a sweatshirt that was like the print of Danny's sweater, the Apollo 11 sweater.

I loved that thing.

That was one of my more beloved pieces of clothing.

You know, I met the guy who owns that sweater.

Oh, really?

Tim Johnson?

No, Lee Onkrik, I think is his name.

He's a big

animation guy.

I think he did Coco and a bunch of other big

animated films, and he was such a fan of The Shining that he bought that real sweater at auction.

Good for him.

I hope he's never tried it on because that's a tiny sweater.

Well, he wasn't a big guy.

It doesn't matter.

That is still a very...

Danny was not a...

He was a tiny guy.

Yeah.

Should we talk about history?

Yeah, I think we should, Chuck.

So this whole thing is kind of newish, right?

I mean, we usually associate it with the 80s, and it's pretty accurate, but it goes back a little further.

It's just the 80s are when it really took shape and got off the rails the first time.

Yeah, for sure.

The first leverage buyouts, though, came after World War II.

There were some dudes from Bear Stearns,

Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis with a K, and George Roberts.

So they were KKR.

They got together.

They started

with this idea of leverage buyouts for small companies like family-owned businesses.

This is in the 1960s.

And in the mid-70s, they formed Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts, the KKR business.

And their first big success story for them as far as making a ton of money doing one of these was a machine tooling company or a tool company rather called, is that Holdale?

Hoodale?

Hoodale, maybe?

Hoo Dat?

H-O-U-D-A-I-L-L-E Industries.

This is in 1979.

They bought it for $380 million,

of which they paid about a million bucks.

Once again, as we've already learned, the company was saddled with debt immediately, covering the remainder of that money.

And they got a new CEO.

They said, hey, we're going to pay you double what the previous CEO got.

And we're going to start raking in these fees as the fund manager.

Yeah.

And so Hoodale, which at the time of this purchase was doing really well.

It had been around since I think the 19 teens.

It was fat with cash.

The employees were happy.

And these guys just ran it into the ground and sucked as much money as they could out of it.

And what usually gets companies in this case is they're so saddled with debt that a recession comes along or things shift, like we go from brick and mortar stores to online, and they don't have the cash to keep up because they're spending too much of it, either giving it back to investors.

Well, you can't even say back, just giving it away to investors or keeping up with their interest payments on these loans that they eventually just sink and end up in bankruptcy, and their debt gets restructured and if they're lucky they can come back out of it and try the whole thing again yeah for sure uh about 10 years after that one of the big big ones uh early ones took place uh such that they wrote a book about it and made a movie about it if you've seen the movie barbarians at the gate with james garner i haven't have you uh no i've always wanted to hey it's out there buddy okay that's not a that's not a tom wolf book i'm thinking of a man in full aren't i yeah i think so I can't remember who wrote the book, but the book was called Barbarians at the Gate, colon, the fall of RJR Nabisco, because it's about RJR Nabisco, and there is no more RJR Nabisco.

There's RJR and there's Nabisco, but that company ceased to exist after that leverage buyout.

Yeah, and I think 2,000 people lost their jobs as the company was sold off in pieces.

And then finally, like you said, the whole thing went down.

And at the time, this is 1989, I think you said, 2,000 people losing their job because some corporate raiders came in and screwed up a good thing.

That was enormous news.

And that really kind of put a period on the end of what had become

almost like the Wild West.

Like these people were, in some cases, like outlaw folk heroes who were just coming into corporates and taking everything.

People getting laid off and then they go off.

50 times richer than they were and do the whole thing again, right?

So they got a bad name in the 80s.

And by the time the 90s rolled around,

things got a little more legit, a little more structured.

Some of the players involved got a little more,

I don't know, it was more legitimate players than just some Maverick guy who worked at Bear Stearns or, you know, Goldman Sachs for a little while.

And then additionally, some other firms whose names we know because this stuff is just so nuts that it makes the news.

Bain Capital was founded in the 80s.

Blackstone founded in the 80s.

Carlisle Group founded in the 80s.

So the 80s were a big deal.

The 90s, everybody kind of kept a low profile.

And then the 2000s, a boom started to come back again.

Yeah, a big boom.

You know,

everything crashed.

We've done a couple of episodes kind of around the 2008 crash.

But a lot of private equity firms did okay.

It's not like they were completely unscathed or anything like that.

But they were better off than a lot of financial institutions after the crash.

And after that, Congress was was like, hey,

maybe we should have some more guardrails and reporting requirements on this private equity business, because that's a term that kind of just came around in the 21st century, even though it was happening.

Private equity as a term came around, I think, in the early 2000s.

And even though they put some more reporting requirements around it, still way less transparent and way fewer requirements than you know, the publicly traded companies and the stock market and banks and stuff like that.

Right.

But there's been a real boom since that time.

The number of companies publicly traded has dropped about half since 1996, where it was at its peak.

And a couple of years ago in 2023, there were five times as many private equity-backed firms as publicly held companies.

Yeah, because it's just you don't have to worry about the government meddling with your stuff.

It's crazy.

So

some of these deals make headlines.

and usually when it makes headlines, it's because it's gotten so bad that the average person wants their blood to boil reading about it.

So the news says, here, read this.

One of the big ones that I remember was Toys R Us.

Yeah.

And this is another thing.

It will also make news if a beloved nostalgic brand just gets torn apart by corporators.

And Toys R Us definitely fit that bill.

You know, most people our age have memories of going to Toys R Us and it being like, how does this place exist?

This is the most amazing place on the planet.

In addition to that, even more importantly than that loss of nostalgia, is that 30,000 people lost their jobs because of a private equity takeover of Toys R Us that eventually ran it into the ground.

Yeah.

I mean, it makes some of those earlier ones where, you know, 1,000, 1,200 people lose their jobs seem quaint.

Yeah.

30,000 people just, sorry, you don't have a job anymore.

Yeah, there's this guy.

I mean, we got to talk about Sears because that's another one.

Iconic brand, iconic brick and mortar store.

I would say there's some nostalgia tied up in Sears for sure.

And a guy named Edward Lampert is someone who may not be on your radar unless you follow this stuff a little more closely.

Kmart files for bankruptcy in 2002.

And Ed Lampert comes in.

He was a Goldman Sachs guy.

And he, I think, former by this time.

Right.

But he buys up a bunch of the debt from Kmart.

They come out of bankruptcy and then he has a hedge fund, ESL Investments.

And they were the largest shareholder.

And so thus, he becomes the chairman and can then run the show.

Right.

And he says, Kmart, I think we should buy Sears.

And he had a pretty big stake in Sears, too.

So much so that he was later accused of devaluing Sears so that he could buy it through Kmart for cheaper.

Regardless, Kmart bought Sears and they formed the Sears Holding Company, which was this huge, massive retailer.

Kmart was not doing very good.

Sears was doing amazing, tens and tens of billions of dollars in sales every year.

And for the first couple of years, things were going pretty well.

But Edward Lampert, being a corporate rating, private equity guy, again, this is his firm.

So he is directly taking hundreds of millions of dollars, that 2% of the assets every year, plus that 20%

when he gets above performance goals.

So by juicing this company and like boosting the stock price and the value of all this stuff, he's getting huge percentages of that every year, right?

The problem is these bad management decisions.

This is when it goes bad, and this is when you end up reading about it.

One of the big things they did was a stock buyback, right?

And if you have a bunch of stock out there, a bunch of shares out there on the market,

just by like the laws of supply and demand,

they're worth less than if they're scarcer.

So you go as the company and buy those shares back.

And because there's fewer shares on the market, your share price can increase, right?

So if you're holding shares in the company, your share price goes up and you make the company buy the stocks back.

It's not like you're out there doing it yourself, right?

The better thing to do traditionally, if you want your business to keep running, is to use that money to keep your business running.

But instead, they took $6 billion and bought stock back to raise the share price.

And they only spent, I think this is over a couple of years, they only spent half of that on capital expenditures, like keeping up your properties, maintaining your buildings, stuff like that.

And so the company just almost immediately started to just falter.

Yeah, so things start faltering.

This is around 2007 or so.

And ESL, which again was Ed Lampert's company, they and some other firms then loan money to themselves, almost $2.6 billion.

And so they're now also collecting interest and fees on that.

So about $400 million in interest and fees to the big loan that they gave themselves.

And Sears continues to sort of tank, or the Sears Holding Company continues to tank.

That's when they break it up.

They spun off, they start spinning off different divisions.

ESL is buying shares in most of those smaller divisions as well once they break it apart.

And then in 2015, Ed Lampert founded a real estate company called Seritage Growth Properties.

They bought 266 Sears and Kmart buildings and then rented them back to themselves.

Right.

It's like robbing Peter to pay Peter.

Yeah, it

just sounds like such an obvious fleecing.

It is.

And grift.

And it's totally legal.

That's the thing.

They're not breaking any laws.

All of this is completely legal.

It's just despicably unfair.

Um, so obviously, after a fairly short time, seven years, um, this company, Sears Holding, filed for bankruptcy.

And again, bankruptcy doesn't mean like, oh, that's it, I'm out of money.

It means like, hey, I can't pay my debts back, so I'm going to negotiate with all these people and hopefully reduce it by two-thirds.

And then I can manage that.

So I'm going to come back out of bankruptcy and try to continue on.

That's what that's

the result for Sears Holding.

But part of this restructuring was that they started slashing costs.

And the first thing you do to slash costs if you're a corporator is fire people.

They closed stores, Chuck.

They had 3,500 Sears and Kmart stores when those two companies merged.

Okay.

By seven years later,

they were down to 700.

And today there's eight.

Eight.

80?

Eight.

800?

Zero eight.

Yeah, there's eight of those left.

It was, you know, again, tens of thousands of jobs and $11 billion in unpaid debt to creditors.

And Ed Lampert ends up making about $1.4 billion

about $1.4 billion

from managing that fund.

Two things.

I saw the Wall Street Journal estimated that under Lampert's watch of this, I think, seven years,

200,000 people lost their jobs from Sears and Kmart.

Yeah.

That's got to be a record, man.

And then also, he was quoted as saying, Yeah, I'm really bummed about this whole thing.

It was a real loss.

It was a real opportunity cost for me, meaning he could have done this with a different company and maybe made out even better than he did.

So you mentioned Red Lobster, and this was very much in the news.

It feels feels like it was more recent.

Well, I guess some of this stuff was a little more recent, but in 2014, Golden Gate Capital, a San Francisco company, bought Red Lobster $2.1 billion.

They said it was, quote, an exceptionally strong brand with an unparalleled market position.

And in order to pay for that deal, they sold, as you mentioned, they sold the real estate of 500 restaurants for about $1.5 billion.

And a company called American Realty Capital Partners bought that land and then, once again, leased it back at a higher rate, like above market rates.

Yeah.

And again, that $1.5 billion,

a significant portion of it just went right to investors.

I'm not sure how much, but that's the playbook, right?

I also have to say I worked at Red Lobster as a server for a little bit.

Whoa.

You and I have dined at Red Lobster before one time.

It's probably the only time I've been there in the past 40 years.

And you never, I don't think, disclosed to me that.

Did I not?

No, all you talked about was how much you love those, what are they, little cheesy biscuits?

The Cheddar Bay biscuits.

That is why I worked at Red Lobster, so I could be closer to them.

It was only for a couple of weeks.

I was like, I got to stop eating these.

I didn't know you ever waited tables at all.

So the reason why I don't talk about that that much is because that I'm one of the worst servers of all time.

Something happens to me between walking from, you know, the kitchen to your table, and my personality just drops out of me somehow.

And I forget stuff, and I'm just terrible.

Like the kind of waiter where you're like, you just, you ruined our dining experience.

You're so bad.

That was the kind of waiter I was.

So I learned after probably six or seven places to just stop trying to be a server.

Yeah, you and Emily, Emily was

waited tables for a very, very short time for similar reasons.

Yeah.

It's just, it's, it, yeah, you have to be in the right kind of mindset to pull it off.

It's, it's not as easy as it looks, I found.

Yeah, I was pretty good at at it i believe that you know also glad those days are behind me yeah i think my retirement job is going to be uh stadium worker i want to i want to say that before i want to like sell beer at a base at brace games let's hear what you got

cold beer here cold beer here that's pretty good you you gotta um you gotta grow one of those walrus mustaches two for one and they're like you can't do that you can't make deals the one i always remember is popcorn peanuts carmicorn here

Is that it the best?

You always got to finish it up with here?

Yeah, that's how you get people's attention.

So, oh, yeah, back to Red Lobster.

Yeah, I can smell the cheesy biscuits.

They're so good, man.

And their ranch dressing is world-class as well.

It's just unlike any other ranch.

It's really good.

Oh, all right.

I'm glad that Red Lobster is still around.

As far as I know, despite all these different companies trying their best to run it into the ground, COVID definitely didn't help.

Yeah.

2020 hit, COVID hit, and Red Lobster, which is already, this is what I was talking about.

When a company is saddled with a bunch of debt and new costs, it's hard to keep up through rough times or changes, right?

Same thing with Red Lobster.

And I guess one of its seafood suppliers, Thai Union Group, stepped in and was like, hey, we'll buy Red Lobster.

We have a really good idea.

So this is their seafood supplier.

They became the exclusive shrimp supplier to Red Lobster, the company that owned it, that now owned Red Lobster.

And the CEO is like, you guys get this.

You know, the endless shrimp promotion for 20 bucks?

We're going to make it a permanent menu item and we're going to sell them so much shrimp because we're their exclusive supplier of shrimp.

Bam.

And he said, bam, that's a quote.

And they lost like $11 million in just three months of trying that because they grossly underestimated how much shrimp people would eat if there was no bottom to it.

Yeah.

I mean, if you're talking a,

you know, medium-sized shrimp, I can eat, you know, if I'm really trying

30

meal.

Wow.

That's a lot of shrimp, dude.

Not the huge ones.

No, I get what you mean.

I get it.

If it's endless and it's all for a very set rate,

and I'm, yeah, you know, maybe trying to impress my date.

Surely not fried, though, right?

You're just talking like peel and eat.

Oh, Oh, that's more like 40.

Oh, my God.

You could eat 30 fried shrimp.

No,

I probably could not eat 40 peel and eat.

I don't know if I could eat 40.

I mean, if I'm not eating cheesy biscuits and french fries and coleslaw and stuff.

No, you're being serious.

Then I could probably eat 30 fried shrimp for sure.

Okay.

I'm going to be your date for that one.

Well, I hope to impress you.

Oh, what else?

Oh, I've got one.

One of the things that a lot of these companies do is they take over and buy a business that they just don't understand understand the business of, and that's how they run it into the ground.

That'll happen a lot.

We'll talk about that here or there.

But there are some niche private equity firms that focus on specific kinds of businesses.

They know what they're doing.

And one of them is Roark Capital.

They're big on fast food industry.

And when you have a

very powerful, wealthy firm like that that's zeroed in on the ups and downs of their particular industry, you have the kind of people who will lobby successfully to get the $15 federal minimum wage taken out of the stimulus package, which is exactly what Rourke Capital managed to do several years back.

That's right.

And if you're wondering, is that named after, you know, Mr.

Rourke from Fantasy Island?

No, it's named, like seriously, named for Howard Rourke,

Ayn Rand hero, and do with that what you will.

Yeah, from the fountainhead.

That's right.

All right.

I guess we could talk a little bit about newspapers and physical print media because,

I mean, they have been in trouble anyway.

So not all of the losses of the print media industry are due to private equity firms.

But

private equity ownership of newspapers rose from 5% in 2001 to 23% in 2019.

And,

you know, there have been supposedly analyses done that show that ownership of print media by a private equity firm firm can improve circulation.

But

it also will lead to a reduction in editorial staff, like massive cuts in staff,

which means cuts in things like local government.

And they've shown that results in a decline in participation in local elections.

Oh, yeah.

Like

the loss of local government news reporting has had an enormous effect on the United States.

It's just crazy, like the cascading effect it had.

We're going to do a whole episode on that right after this, okay?

Great.

We'll make it up as we go along.

Great.

Vice is another one.

They were sitting pretty.

I think they were worth almost $6 billion in 2017, got bought out.

And by

2023, they were worth $350 million because it just got run into the ground.

That's a good example of a company that didn't know what they were doing buying a business that they didn't know anything about that, and then they just made terrible decisions.

For sure.

I think we should take a second break.

Okay.

And we'll be back right after this.

The reviews and ratings are in, and Ice Cube's Big Three is the surprise hit of the summer.

And to cap off the season, iHeart presents the Big Three Basketball Championship and eighth annual Big Three All-Star Game this coming Sunday, August 24th, live from Orlando.

The remaining two teams fight it out for the Big Three Championship Dr.

Jake Trophy in the most physical, fierce, and competitive basketball league in the world.

Don't miss the wild conclusion of Big Three's eighth and most historic season ever.

This is the game no one wants to lose, and there's no crying in the Big Three.

The action starts with the Big Three eighth annual All-Star Game.

Don't miss All-Stars Dwight Howard, Montrez Harrell, MVP Michael Beasley, Lance Will Make You Dan Stevenson, Jordan Crawford, Greg Monroe, Earl Clark, Nazi Ercor, and more show you why they are the best three-on-three basketball players in the world.

Big Three's exciting all-star game plus the crowning of a new Big Three champion.

The no-holds part action starts Sunday at 2 p.m.

Eastern, 11 Pacific, only on CBS.

Hey, everybody.

Host Nora McInerney returns for season three of The Head Start, Embracing the Journey, a podcast from Ruby Studio and AbV.

Yeah, in each episode, Nora shares intimate conversations with real people living with chronic migraine as they try to find the doctor that is right for them, navigate their treatment journey, and be present in the moment in spite of it all.

You'll get a glimpse into their day-to-day, navigating not just the physical symptoms, but the effects chronic migraine attacks have on their careers, their relationships, and their family life.

Joined by headache specialist Dr.

Christopher Rine, Nora listens as guests share their chronic migraine experience, all connected by a common theme of resiliency.

New to the show?

Well, check out the first two seasons available now and definitely worth a listen.

And join the conversation for season three and create more space for empathy and understanding for this invisible chronic disease.

Listen to The Head Start: Embracing the Journey on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You didn't start your company to manage payroll, file taxes, or chase invoices.

But someone has to do it, and that someone doesn't have to be you.

Escalon Services handles your finance, HR, and accounting needs under one roof so you get back to what you love: building your business.

Head to Escalon.services and use the code SanFran for a special listener-only deal.

Escalon, because founders deserve peace of mind too.

Okay, Chuck, we're back, and here's where we really get into the problems.

I mean, aside from people getting laid off, people being neglected in the hospitals they go to because they're owned by private equity firms, that's become a big problem in the 21st century and in the United States, too.

Yeah, there's in 2024 alone, by one count at least, there were 166 leverage buyouts in healthcare just in that one year.

And seven of the eight biggest healthcare bankruptcies that year were from companies owned by private equity firms or hospitals and healthcare organizations.

Right.

The private equity firm dental practices rose dramatically from the teens to the 2020s.

And that results in things like companies push.

I read an article about the Dental Express in Ohio telling a mom that her three-year-old needed seven root canals.

Yeah, for sure.

And the same goes with hospitals.

Hospitals, if they're owned by a private equity firm, they result in higher charges, more safety issues.

There was one study that said there was a 25% rise in hospital-acquired complications, like something you got while you were there.

Right.

And I think 38% more blood infections from IV ports.

That's just from not having enough staff or inexperienced staff.

It's just not good.

And it gets even worse.

They're also into hospices, nursing homes, and it just follows the same pattern that you would expect.

A study found that private equity ownership increases mortality rates by 11%

just because PE's cutting corners to save costs.

So that's a huge, huge issue.

I think that that one needs regulation where it's like, you can't, sorry, you guys can't own healthcare stuff.

That's just off limits for you.

Yeah.

I mean anyone who's been through the trauma of a loved one and having to go to a nursing home in the past, I mean, I don't know when it was good, but we had to go through that with Emily's grandmother.

And just the state of that industry is horrific.

It's the opposite of what it should be in almost every way.

Yeah.

And housing too is another big deal.

I think Blackstone, which we mentioned was founded back in the 80s, they're known as the United States' largest landlord.

They own 300,000 units of rental housing in the U.S.

as of 2023.

And as you would expect, when private equity comes along, rents go up.

The maintenance people are slower to respond because they've been laid off and just things kind of go downhill rather than get better.

Like they're supposed to.

That's the reason private equity is supposed to exist.

It's supposed to take

kind of slow lumbering companies that are in a position to do better than they are and make them do better.

It's not supposed to make everything go downhill, but that's how it happens a lot.

Yeah, I mean, sometimes it does happen for the better.

Like one great example is Hilton, the hotel chain.

There was a leverage buyout from Blackstone in 2007 of Hilton.

And the Great Recession, you know, hit, I guess it was like the next year in 2008.

And obviously it's going to really affect the tourism industry.

But they brought in a CEO from Blackstone, a guy named Christopher Neseta, who actually made things better.

He said, hey, let's invest in emerging markets.

Let's invest in the future and like digital strategies like apps where you can check in and get your hotel key through an app and things like that.

Just, you know, instead of just shuttering things like actually investing, reinvesting in the company.

And it turned out to be really, you know, all these things were really popular moves.

And Blackstone sold Hilton back to the public market after it had been yanked out of the public

They sold it back in 2013 and sold out of their stake in 2018, made a ton of profit, $14 billion over 11 years.

But the company itself, Hilton, was doing great and continues to do great.

Yeah, they doubled the number of rooms today that they had in 2007 when they took over, when Blackstone took over.

So, yeah, that's a big success story.

It wasn't like a pump and dump.

Hilton's still doing well, like you were saying.

Burger King's another one, too.

They got bought by a Brazilian firm called 3G Capital, and they

just

made some really good moves in a lot of ways.

Again, this is from an investor standpoint, not necessarily from the standpoint of the people at corporate who were laid off or anything like that.

But as far as firms go, 3G made something like $28 billion over 14 years, and it had only invested $1 billion.

So that's a pretty good return on investment.

Private equity coming in.

Why'd you do that?

Oh, just because I know you hate it.

You got me.

So here's the thing.

Alternative investments make a lot of money.

We've seen that there's less oversight.

So, you know, one of the ways that they can make a lot of money is that they're just allowed to do things that you can't do in traditional sort of slow growth.

investments like stocks and bonds and things like that.

But you also mentioned earlier that like pension funds, like 401ks, are where a lot of this money comes from.

And

like, do you have a choice whether or not the 401k that you invest in ends up being a part of this thing?

Yeah, I think you can also invest your 401k now, which for a long time was off limits because that's your,

you, the non-accredited investor who doesn't know what they're doing with private equity.

That was off limits, but now you can if you want.

Although they say that's probably not a good idea unless you know what you're doing again.

Well, 89% of public pension funds have some of their money in private equity.

I think 13% average of 13% of their assets is the average.

Sometimes more than 25%, but that's almost 90% of public pension funds.

It's a lot.

Yeah.

And then I guess one of the other big things, so the reason why well, another reason why people are like, this is so not right.

All of that money that those people like Edward Lampert make, he made that $1.4 $1.4 billion by running a huge venerated company into the ground.

He paid at most 20%

on those profits.

Even though it was personal income for him, he didn't pay the personal income tax of like 37%.

Instead, he paid 20% in capital gains tax because the fees that he charged are treated like gains from an investment rather than personal income, even though anyone would call those fees personal income.

So not only are the PE firms robbing companies for their own personal enrichment, getting people laid off, they're not even paying their full share of income taxes on it too.

So not only are they robbing companies for their own personal enrichment, getting people laid off, they're not even paying their full share of income taxes on it too.

Yeah, this is the kind of thing where in the movie version where this is first born as an idea

and the person is explaining it to like the people at dinner, they keep asking questions that start with, yeah, but what about, and then the answer always starts with, oh no, that's the best part.

Right.

Exactly.

It just keeps going like that.

Yeah.

And they're like, no, no, no, but what about this?

No, no, that's the best part.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of best parts.

And one of the guys finally puts his fork down and stands up, hits the table and goes, bam!

That's right.

But you were talking about the carried interest loophole, right?

That's what it's called.

Yeah, where your personal income is magically treated treated as returns on an investment and taxed at 20 rather than 37 or whatever so if you make a hundred million dollars you pay 17 million dollars less taxes on that hundred million dollars and at that point really who cares anyway right yeah

you would think so that's private equity i feel like we kind of showed our bias a little bit but it's really tough not to be when you really dig into this stuff you know yeah i mean it's not the sole cause of the housing crisis, but it's a major player.

And all the other crises that we're facing too, economically and socially and politically and probably religiously too, if I gave it some real thought.

Yeah, personally.

Yep.

Since Chuck said personally, I was waiting for it.

I got you there because now we just unlocked listener mail.

Hey guys, this is in response to a tangent that you went on during this Saturday's classic episode when Chuck was talking about arguing with his mother about who gets to pay for dinner.

It reminded me of my grandmother Sheila.

She always likes to pay for her big family dinners and has engaged in tricks in the past.

For a graduation dinner for my brother, my father knew what she was doing when she took her purse to the bathroom.

So that's a good trick.

I've done that before.

Yeah.

That wasn't her best trick, though, as even Josh mentioned that very trick.

The best part...

Did you mention that?

Yeah, I mentioned that.

I remember that.

I've done that for sure.

Yeah, yeah.

That's what you got to do.

The best was when part of the family was in upstate New York for a triathlon.

Sheila wasn't even there.

She lives in Massachusetts.

The bill came when dinner was over the night before the race.

My father and my aunt reached for their card and the waitress said it had been taken care of.

All the adults looked in accusation at each other and there was a long silence.

And at the exact same moment, they all threw up their hands crying, Sheila.

And all the way over in Massachusetts, Sheila went BAM.

That's right.

My aunt had made the mistake of telling Sheila on the phone where we were going to have dinner.

Our grandmother called the restaurant and gave her the credit card number.

Beautiful.

Thanks for all the pods.

That is from James.

James, that's wonderful.

Sheila sounds great.

I just hope she tips well.

Oh, good point, Chuck.

Nicely done.

If you want to be like James, thank you by the way, James, that was a great email.

You can send us an email too.

Send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

This is an iHeart Podcast.