Every person has ambition and a desire to succeed, the desire to make money and so forth.

And the great thing about capitalism is if you do it right, you can channel that into a really productive part of the economy.

That's how businesses get built, you know, that's how innovations get made.

The challenges that you've got is when you restructure the laws so that all those same ambitions

are channeled to sort of antisocial or less productive outputs.

And I would argue that's something that we kind of have with private equity right now. If you spend any time online, you probably hear the word capitalism,

thrown around as a catch-all explanation for, to put it simply, why more stuff sucks now.

And in more academic strains of these circles, you might hear the word neoliberalism, which is a philosophical approach to capitalism that

emphasizes things like deregulation and free markets.

But my guest today, the author of Plunder, Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America, and

former Special Counsel for Private Equity in the Justice Department, would direct your attention

to a particularly destructive manifestation of modern capitalism that

operates mostly in the shadows, something called private equity or PE.

Private equity is, well, as you'll see, it's extremely complicated, but in its simplest terms,

it's a form of investment that uses a combination of private capital and debt to buy businesses and generate returns.

That doesn't sound too sinister, does it? But buckle up.

My guess would probably tell you that it's not the profit seeking of the public markets,

with their stringent requirements for financial transparency that are driving a steep decline in everything

from nursing home care to veterinary offices.

It's the hundreds of billions of shadow dollars moving through our economy unaccountable

to the reporting standards of public companies and were still often aided and abetted by the forces and funds of government.

The PE industry owns more businesses than all the. stock exchanges combined.

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