How Private Equity Destroys the Companies You Depend On

Culture Study Podcast

Anne Helen Petersen

Fashion & Beauty, Society & Culture, Arts

4.6 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2025

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Chances are high that you’ve heard about the way that “private equity” has acquired, hollowed out, and bankrupted some service, product, or company you depend on. For years, I understood the work of private equity only in the vaguest terms — that it was bad, and that it f*cked stuff up. I had to learn a lot more when I was writing Can’t Even, because private equity acquisitions are one of many reasons work has become a burnout factory for so many. But I didn’t fully understand the breadth and the depth of private equity’s impact on our current economy until reading Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company — which she started writing after resigning from her position of editor-in-chief of Deadspin after private equity acquired the site and began excavating and eliminating the very core of what it made it work.

In today’s episode, Megan joins me to answer your questions about how private equity actually works, how it affects industries, what companies it’s historically targeted and who it’s targeting now (hello, dental and vet care!) This episode will make you feel like you understand a structuring reality of our culture better — and will also help you understand why so many experiences and services just feel shittier. It’s a hellscape of an episode but a deeply enlightening one!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, just a heads up on a few episodes that we're currently working on. We have two book-related
0:05.0	episodes on the calendar. One is about general book trends, like special editions, collector culture,
0:11.8	anything you're seeing on book talk, all of the summer books adapted from the Dramione fan fiction,
0:18.2	really any direction you want to take this. And then the other episode is a
0:22.0	fiction concierge with Maris Kreisman. So this will be similar to the episode that we did on
0:26.8	old movies. You let us know a few books you've read and loved and whatever other parameters
0:31.9	you want. And we'll make some recommendations. Maris is one of the best read people that I know, so she is going to be full of
0:39.8	really good wrecks. We're also working on an episode about internet slang and how it permeates
0:45.3	our lives offline, and that's separate from the other really good episode we're working on
0:50.7	regional dialects. Finally, we could really use some more prompts and questions for our asking anything
0:56.6	spreadsheet.
0:57.5	So anything that's on your mind, totally trivial, very serious, whatever, just let us know.
1:03.5	The Google form for all of these can be found at tiny URL.com slash culture study pod.
1:09.8	Okay, thanks.
1:11.8	Enjoy today's show.
1:23.3	This is the culture study podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. I'm Megan Greenwell. I'm a freelance journalist and the author of Bad Company, Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream.
1:28.0	So the first line of your book is, until it cost me my dream job, I had never given private
1:33.0	equity much thought. Using that personal story, can you give us a little bit of a primer on how
1:39.3	private equity works? I remember following this story so closely. This is when we were all on
1:45.6	Twitter all the time too. So yes. Go ahead. Yeah. So I worked a dead spin. I was the editor-in-chief
1:52.3	there. And that had really been my dream job for years until I got it. I just really loved
1:58.0	the site's ethos, the way it covered sports, but also other things.
	...

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