So Pete, over the past few years, we've produced a handful of episodes on the show looking

at the rise of private equity, which has been really astonishing, and the results haven't always been pretty for consumers, employees, and so on.

Do you find yourself having to explain or apologize for your industry often or maybe

you don't hang out with people who dislike the idea? I hang out with plenty of

people who don't love private equity.

Pete Stavros is co-head of global private equity at KKR which was founded nearly 50 years ago as

Colburg Kravis Roberts. The firm was immortalized in the 1989 book

Barbarians at the gate about their leveraged buyout of R. J. R.J. Nabisco, just to be clear,

KKR were the barbarians.

But today, the firm is a mainstream corporate citizen

and the world's second largest private equity firm after Blackstone.

KKR has more than 250 firms in its investment portfolio ranging across nearly every industry you can name. Those firms employ nearly a

million people. As I mentioned to Pete Stavros, we have already made a few episodes

about private equity.

There was a two-part series about how PE firms are taking over the pet care industry.

One was called Should you Trust Private Equity to take care of your dog?

The other was, do you know who owns your vet?

We made another broader episode more recently called Our Private Equity

firms plundering the US economy. These episodes cover a lot of the mechanics of what

private equity is, who it tends to help, who it tends to hurt. You can listen to them

before today's episode if you want, but it's not necessary.

As you can tell just from the titles of those episodes, some people still think of private

...