The Beach is Closed: Patrick G. Ryan and Vinod Khosla

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.