Zero Sum Empire

Your hosts are back with another hot track. This time, we talk about The Baker Center for Leadership and Governance's 2018 poll on American confidence in social institutions. You'll never guess who Americans trust the most (just kidding, you'll probably guess). This leads us into some discussion of how philanthropy works as a conservative strategy intent on reproducing the status quo. Then we talk about Patrick G. Ryan, founder of AON insurance and we muse on the fact that commercial insurance is a financial prerequisite for modern infrastructure as we know it. Our second billionaire is Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Khosla's Twitter bio reads "entrepreneurship zealot, grounded technology possibilist, believer in the power of ideas." We don't know what that means, but it apparently underwrites his belief that he can seize public land for his private use, as he did with Martins Beach in California.

In this episode's "Billionaires in the News," Joe and Chad discuss Elon Musk's decision to chief that loud with Joe Rogan to prove to the world that he's a Normal Man. Then they talk about Clemmie Dixon Spangler, the recently-deceased billionaire owner of National Gypsum Co., gypsum's role in the history of American agriculture, the Plaster War of 1820, and the relationship between gypsum mining and the standardization of walls in homes and other buildings. Then they talk about Kunio Busujima (also recently deceased), who made his fortune on the Japanese gambling pastime pachinko. Pachinko is sort of like a cross between pinball and slot machines and it's so popular that in Japan alone it generates more revenue than Las Vegas, Macau, and Singapore combined.

NOTE: This was the first episode we recorded and we didn't have our process completely worked out yet. We didn't use our random selector to choose these billionaires. Instead, we chose two who had recently died. In the future, all choices will be selected at random. Also, all future billionaires will be American to make things easier on us in terms of research.

Welcome to Zero Sum Empire, the podcast that introduces you to the mostly anonymous billionaires who own the majority of the world’s wealth. Each week, we randomly select two lesser-known billionaires from our top secret list. Then, we do a little research into who they are and try to link them to larger ideas about power and infrastructure. We’re interested in the ways that massively concentrated wealth shapes our experience of daily life—especially in ways that we are unlikely to notice.