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Filled with startling observations and thought-provoking findings, an award-winning BBC investigative reporter’s compelling and informative look at twelve business deals that have transformed the modern world. While the laws that guide our lives are written by the politicians we elect, much of the world around us—from the food we eat to the products we buy to the medications we take—is shaped by private negotiations and business deals few of us know about. In The Deals That Made the World, Jacques Peretti takes us inside the world of the powerful dealmakers who influence our daily lives as he examines a dozen groundbreaking business deals that have transformed our society. Peretti reveals how diet company executives engineered an entire industry built on failure; how PayPal came to conquer the online payment world (and the specific behavioral science that underpins its success); and the plan concocted by pharmaceutical executives to successfully market medications to healthy people. For twenty years, Peretti has interviewed the people behind the decisions that have altered our world, from CEOs of multinational corporations to politicians, economists, and scientists. Drawing on his vast knowledge, Peretti reveals a host of fascinating and startling connections, from how Wall Street’s actions on food commodities helped spark the Arab Spring to the link between the AIDS epidemic in 1980s San Francisco and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. He proves a sure guide, combining both eye-opening on-the-ground reporting and a narrative flair that makes esoteric financial and business concepts clear and understandable. Like Steven Levitt, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Brad Stone, Michael Lewis, and Malcolm Gladwell, Peretti takes the ordinary and turns it inside out to give us a compelling new perspective on our lives and our world.