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 Colberg-Cravice Roberts.

The firm was immortalized in the 1989 book Barbarians at the Gate about their

leveraged buyout of RJR 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 U.S. 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 equity firms as barbarians who have

papered over their ruthlessness with a corporate sheen. One common criticism has to do with

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