Using Corporate Scandals to Drive Political Change with Professor Pepper Culpepper

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Welcome back to the home front. I'm your host, Reed Galing. Today, I am joined by Professor Pepper

Cole Pepper, author of the new book, Billionaire Backlash, the age of corporate scandal and how it could

save democracy here. Get it wherever you get your finance books. He wrote it with Harvard professor

Taikouli. Pepper is the Blavatnik. He is the vice dean for academic affairs at the Blavatnik

chair and... Sorry, I'm going to start over. Pepper is vice dean for academic affairs and the

Blavatnik chair in government and public policy at the Blavatnik school in government. His research

focuses on the intersection between capitalism and democracy, both in politics and public policy.

Prior to becoming to the Blavatnik school, he taught at the European University and at Harvard,

the Kennedy School at Harvard. Today, he is coming to us from Oxford. Pepper, welcome.

Well, thanks very much. Have me, Reed. All right, so your book, Billionaire Backlash, it was a great

read. I killed a highlighter on it. A couple of things. One is, as you start, there are so many

things that I think, for me personally, and to take some personal privilege here, I owned a

2015 Volkswagen Tour egg. No, 2010, excuse me, it was a 2010. And it was a great car and it got

incredible knowledge. And we were like, this is the greatest car anybody's ever met. And we felt

so good because we got a rebate. And we felt good because it was a clean diesel and all this

other stuff. And it turns out the whole thing was horse hockey. Good news, bad news. We turned it

back in. We got almost as much money for it as we paid for it, bought another car, which we still have.

But give us a sense of why you and Professor Lee wrote this book and how corporate scandals can

be the catalyst for political change. Well, so we wrote that because everyone has had an

experience with a corporation, you had yours with Volkswagen and others have had theirs with Facebook,

others have had theirs with Exxon, but they've had interactions with big corporations that

increasingly make them nervous. And as sort of we were scholars of public opinion and political

behavior and we're trying to understand the sort of regularities we were seeing and how people

were responding. So strongly to corporations when in general people don't seem to want a lot of

regulation because you know, regulation is it sort of clunks up their life and so they don't

want it. But at moments of scandal that they're kind of a latent view about what they think corporations

should be doing. And the duties they think that the state has to regulate corporations come sharply

into view. And that's when we get big moments of regulatory change. We saw that during the financial

crisis, you know, we saw it in response to to VW dieselgate. We saw it in the European Union and

in the state of California in response to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. And so we wanted to understand

these regular moments. And that led us to sort of hone in on scandals as times when we get a shared

understanding that cuts across our polarized political space in the United States and the

United Kingdom elsewhere. And we think because that's the biggest problem right now getting people

to have a single view of truth, corporate scandals do that. And that's why they're so important.

No, that is true. I mean, so another, this is, that was another reason why this book was so

fascinating to me was I was helping put on a sort of a libertarian-ish tech conference in San

Francisco, probably 12, 13 years ago. And the people from Cambridge Analytica were there.

And they set up a little booth and everything else. And they were telling me about, and look,

I've been in politics all my life. And they're telling me about psychography and all this other

stuff that they're going to do. You know, Pepper, what was interesting to me is like, I'd never

heard of them before. They just appeared out of whole cloth. And here they were, right? And like,

where did they come from? How did they get here? How did they know to be here? How did they know

to get in touch with Facebook? How did they get, you know, all these other things? And then I see

what happened was that, you know, they were just mining all these people's data. And I go,

okay, well, that makes more sense. And then all of the other connections. But to me,

it seemed like that the United States or Americans tend to be far less either A upset or B

willing to make any real change in the context that they can as citizens than say the Europeans.

So I guess I would push back a little bit against that read. You've read the book so you know in

the state of California that there's the story about how so privacy regulation died in the United

States because the big tech companies essentially did not want it. And in the wake of a previous scandal,

the prism scandal, Penny Pritzker, the Secretary of Commerce at the time, now chair of the Harvard

Corporation in the Obama administration was trying to mend fences with big tech. And she did that by

gutting their attempt at privacy regulation at the national level. And so privacy regulation,

the good thing about the United States is when things don't work at the national level, where things

are often dysfunctional, you can default down to the state level. And so, as you'll know from the

book, this guy named Alistair McTaggart, a property developer in California, decides he really

cares about privacy and decides to do an initiative on it, a referendum. And he's having trouble,

he's pushing against the combined weight of these big tech companies, and then suddenly

Cambridge Analytica happens. And in California, it's like a switch has been flipped. And everybody

suddenly cares a lot about data privacy. And because it's this moment in scandal where everyone suddenly

says, this is something I've really been worried about, I think my iPhone has been listening to me,

but now I actually know that it's true. And it comes out, right? And you see how a tiny little app

on Facebook spills the data of 90 million users, and that really concentrates attention. And so,

you get in California a very aggressive privacy law through McTaggart's initiative, but

ultimately because there's public opinion behind it. And those are Americans. You may say,

that's California, that's a blue state, so you get more left-wing Americans. But you see this push

elsewhere, and you see the same thing in the AI debate now. You're having states that are purple,

red, blue, that are all thinking about, we want my AI regulation, because the current administration

doesn't want to have any state level regulation to sort of push back against tech. So I think,

when you look at American public opinion, when you look at the response to what's going on with

X and GROC, undressing girls, underage, and women against their will, you get a lot of

public push back. And I think we're kind of in a prohibition type stage right now, where we're

going to over-regulate that, because the public is so concerned about it. And then that's

where we're going to figure out what the appropriate level of regulation is. But the appropriate level

is not zero, and that's even with the American public. Yeah, but take us to why in Europe,

one young man from I was at Slovakia, or the Czech Republic, I believe, was able to basically become

what you all do, refer to as a policy entrepreneur, which he was willing to pick up this mantle,

and take on Facebook, which is not a small thing, and just keep after it, and keep after it,

and keep after it. Why do you think that the Europeans, and I don't want to lump all of them

together, but the European community, let's call it, was so much more willing at the regulatory

level, at the legislative level, at the policy level, to put these clamps on tech companies that

now you see every time you go to a website, it's like the cookie thing, right? Like, do you accept

these cookies? That's part of it. But why do you feel like their legislative process was more

activist on this, where is it just lobbyists? Because that's one piece you talk about is the European

legislative, look, we see this here in the US, both in Washington, D.C., and state capitals, which

is there could be a hundred legislatures in a legislative body, and a thousand lobbyists going

after them. But why, I'm just curious on the activist nature of the European Parliament,

as opposed to say the US Congress? Well, so I would, let me rephrase that. I mean, let me give

a short answer to your question, and then elaborate. I think a short answer to your question is that

there was always a greater latent concern about privacy in the European Union than in the United

States. So that's definitely true, and you had at least some framework, a privacy regulation.

And we can't ignore the fact that most of the companies affected by this privacy regulation

are American companies. And so there's, you know, a slightly greater willingness to regulate them

among Europeans. But let's go through the story to kind of contextualize that a little bit,

because so, so the policy entrepreneur you're talking about is Max Schrems. He's an Austrian,

actually, Austrian. But you're right to place him in central Europe. He spends a semester abroad

at Santa Clara University, and does a paper on Facebook privacy, because the Facebook's privacy

lawyer comes and talks to him, and he's like, this guy, and he uses the F-word, doesn't care about

what's going on, no, with Europeans' privacy, and Europe's not doing anything about it. So he starts,

you know, writing all these letters, he first gets his data released, finds out how much data

they've got about him. He's, you know, he's in one notable passage. He's been using Facebook

messenger to communicate with a good friend of his, who's in a locked ward in a, a psychiatric hospital.

And so, you know, she communicated with him. He deleted all those messages to protect her privacy.

But Facebook's got it all. They've just kept it on their server. And he finds that out when he gets,

you know, over a thousand pages on a, on a CD of all the things that, that they know about him.

So that really radicalizes Max Schrems. And he becomes, you know, one of these crazy donkey

hotays trying to do something about privacy regulation. And so he starts pushing and trying to use

the courts to challenge what's going on with European privacy. And then what happens, of course,

is that you have the leak of information that, that happens with Edward Snowden. And when the

Snowden information comes out, suddenly the view of the tech companies everywhere, not just in Europe,

goes from these companies have created amazing things and they've revolutionized our lives,

which is true, they have, and they have revolutionized our lives. We're having this conversation

through their, their capacities right now. At the same time, it turns out that they're spying for

the NSA, the sort of communication super secret agency of the United States and GCHQ that it's

equivalent in the United Kingdom. And people get very worked up about that. And they especially

get worked up in Europe because at that moment, there's a debate in the parliament about privacy

regulation. Now, prior to this happening, I will show you that the European parliament is not

particularly unameneable to lobbying because there were more Google lobbyists than there were

people working for the European Commission on this bill. And so the bill was being amended to death.

It was going to be a non-starter of a bill. But, but this scandal breaks out around the Snowden

leaks. And suddenly, all of the tech companies are depicted as companies that are doing things

that are really infringing on privacy. The European public gets concerned. And suddenly,

this is what always happens with politicians. They grow a backbone. They grow a backbone because

of the electoral backlash that they could await him if they don't do something. And that's ultimately

the backlash that we're talking about in this book. And so you get the GDPR, which is, you know,

the gold standard on privacy regulation in the world now. And other countries have copied it.

And I think that Alistair McTaggart's bill in California was largely inspired by it. So that

happens on the legislative side. Max Schrims, meanwhile, is suing and getting the legal standard thrown

out within which American companies didn't have to follow European law. And he didn't do that once,

but twice. So this, you know, this idiosyncratic little guy who I described as someone who probably

wears, you know, Birkenstocks with socks to class, he gets thrown out the entire trade regulation

that is allowing American companies to trade in Europe. And that puts a lot more legal risk

on the, on the European companies. But both at the legislative level and at the court level,

it's happening because he and the entrepreneur he worked with in the European Parliament are

actually taking advantage of a moment in public opinion. So let's, let's continue this. But I want

to talk about you, you, you, one of the chapters is dedicated to Exxon. And part of the,

part of the discovery that you all make through your research is that when it came to something like

Exxon and whether or not, carbon is an additive to global warming, which based on Exxon's own files

goes back to what 1970, one of his scientists knew this. But in the modern time, how you were registered

to vote was indicative of whether or not you believed the science. If you're a registered Democrat

in the US, you're more likely to believe that yes, Exxon was lying and climate change is,

you know, largely due to carbon emissions. If you're a Republican, you're not buying it. So

how do you explain that? Is it just good advertising? Is it good political communication or bad

political communication? Is the case might be like, give us a sense of how when something that

should be otherwise quantitative in nature, something that should be otherwise objective in nature,

now finds itself running up against not political, but purely partisan walls?

Well, the one word answer to your question is tribalism. And let me sort of expand on that. And

it's tribalism that exists only in the United States among the countries we study. We, we look

across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. And, and we do this study of

what information about the the Exxon scandal. I'll say a little more about what the Exxon

scandal is. It's called it's known as Exxon new and inside climate news is a small

environmental outfit broke this story in October 2015. That Exxon had excellent models of what

climate change was going to look like the rate of climate change since, you know, 1977, 1978. And

that had been reported to the board of Exxon. And then of course, Exxon as a corporation continued

to lobby largely on the basis of the science is uncertain about climate change. Therefore,

we don't want to make policy for the next, you know, 10 to 15 years and was seen to be a blocking

player in international negotiations on climate change. So that's the Exxon new scandal. It's

revealed in 2015. We exposed people to information about it in these four countries. And what happens

in any of the European countries we study is people become more, they want more climate change

regulation when they read a little bit about the about the changes that happened with Exxon new with

when they when they find out that Exxon has been hiding all this information and using scientific

uncertainty as a way to block it. And it's actually true that people on the right move more than

people on the left because people on the left were already in favor heavily in favor of climate

change regulation anyway. So, so you especially get effects on the right. In the United States,

people on the left move massively. People on the right, they don't move at all. And in some

instances, they move negatively. So they read about Exxon new and they say, yesterday's news,

it sounds like the liberal media. And so this is about a divide on climate change as an issue which

in the mid 1990s, Republicans and Democrats did not have a different opinion about climate change.

They roughly thought it was the same level of risk. Roughly thought we should do the same things

about it. Remember that Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi did an ad, a public service announcement

on climate change together back then. That that is a perfect example. Yes, but so what happens

even when they're making that ad is you're beginning to get elite level polarization. That is to say

the the the parties are sending very different messages about climate change. And that starts

to pull public opinion apart. So by 2015, you know that climate change is the most polarized issue

in the United States. And it continues to be among the most polarized issues today.

Therefore, when you find out information that would normally convince you, hey, we maybe

should do a little bit more about climate change. Your political priors tell you, actually,

this is an issue I've already made up my mind about. So it's not one that I'm cognitively open

to changing on. You know, well, I mean, in a past life, I did work for Chevron. I did work for BP.

And so I you will spend your time in purgatory. Yes, there's no question about it. And tobacco.

So yes, I'm going to spend a long time there. There's no question about it. And what was always

amazing to me was the ability of an oil company to make half the population believe that like

the oil company cares about you, which it does not. But the other part is I remember it wasn't

this year, but I think it was last year. It was the 2025 NFL playoffs here in the US pepper,

where the American Petroleum Institute is saying don't deny American energy, right? Make

sure American energy can grow as much as it needs to grow. And they're running these ads pepper

as American oil companies are pumping more oil than they've ever pumped before, right? So they

never take a day off in their messaging. Well, I mean, let me tell you, they've been successful

because I told you a part of the story about the response to Exxon new. But in fact, on both the

Democrat and much more of the Republican side, you don't get the anger towards big oil companies

that you observe in the other three countries. That's before you do any sort of exposing of them

to information, Americans on both sides, because I think in part of the campaign you're talking about,

they are, they're less hostile to fossil fuel companies. And I think that explains a lot about,

you know, the United States being kind of an outlier in international negotiations on this.

Well, we're an outlier on everything at this point. But before we go on to other examples,

give us, run us down about how you did the quantitative and qualitative research around

individual voters in the countries that you that you did this kind of study.

Okay, let me know when I'm too far down the rabbit hole read. Okay, so the basic tool that we use

is we're using survey experiments. And so the problem is many of the scandals that we want to study

have already happened when we decide we want to study them. That's true with financial crisis,

it's true with Exxon new, it's true with prison. And so in those cases, we've got to figure out

some way to figure out how reading news about a scandal has an impact on people. And the way

that we do it is kind of like the way that you do drug testing, where when you do drug testing,

some people take the treatment and some people take a placebo. And so we did the same thing where

some people would read information about an exciting company like Office Depot. And others would

read information about the particular scandal we were interested in. And we used Office Depot

deliberately in some of these studies, because we didn't want the people to react to companies in

general. We wanted them to react to corporate scandals in particular. And so say we'll compare

what's going on at Office Depot to what's going on with Exxon new or with what's going on in

crypto with response to FTX. And so that kind of information allows us to figure out using,

you know, essentially statistical techniques, the difference between the treatment group and the

control group. We can figure out what the average treatment effect is of that sort of information

about scandals. And that gives us a good window that allows us to go back and look at what we

call observation 11, survey evidence at the time of why it is that you see pickups in interest

in regulation at the time that that's happening. And so we have a big battery of information that

we know about people before they take our survey experiments. And so having that information,

we can figure out the effects of what they think about oil companies, what their political

partisanship is, you know, their willingness to tolerate complexity in life. We have we have

lots of indicators about them. And so that allows us to tell a very clear story about what tends to

influence people and scandals and what doesn't. And again, the you know, you mentioned the US

as an outlier and that climate change is an outlier of that. But other than that particular example,

was there anything that surprised you in the research you saw between people who are self-identified,

say liberals and self-identified conservatives, self-identified, say labor party members or

Tories? Anything that surprised you about that? Well, one of the things that we find in another

chapter of the book is about how the FTX scandal became a different story to the American left

and the American right. You know, crypto is something that no one at the time we do our study in

2023 says they understand, you know, and nobody understands it now. Many people think it's a scam.

Yeah, so people say they don't understand it and we test them and they don't understand it about,

you know, 70% don't really understand it, about 30% do, or at least they understand the basics of

what blockchain is. And yet, so the FTX scandal happens, which is just a classic scandal in terms of

I'm taking money out of one cup, I'm taking other people's money and I'm sort of betting it on

something else and then things suddenly go wrong and I'm out, you know, eight billion dollars, right?

So garden variety stealing is what it is. And yet, you tell completely different stories about that

in the media of the American right and the American left, right? So in the American left,

it's crypto is a wild west, you know, they've got to have more regulation and that's of course

a position that the left generally wants more regulation than the right does and voters do. But

that on the right, the story is original sin and anyway, isn't Sam Bankman freed a Democrat?

So there are two kind of stories that moral failings of the leadership of FTX and their

closeness to the Democratic Party. And those views led to a very polarized response to how people

think, how people in the United States think about FTX on the left and right. And there's no reason

that the left and right should have a difference on cryptocurrency regulation. It's one of those

things where we obviously need more regulation, but because this happened at a certain moment in time

and then you get a strong difference between left and right and the crypto companies very heavily

against the Harris campaign by betting on Trump. And it's a winning bet. And you know, Trump is

Trump is all in on crypto, as you know. So that has made a dramatic impact on what the world of

crypto looks like. I think we're not far away from a crypto scandal. I can't exactly say what

that's going to be, but you know, I think two scandals are certain. One, the AI bubble is going

to pop and two, something's going to go wrong with crypto. And I think then we're going to get

important moments of regulatory change and that's going to be concentrated in the United States.

Well, crypto.com, as we're recording this, recently gave five million dollars. It's parent

company to Donald Trump's political organization. And they poured tens of millions, if not hundreds

of millions of dollars pepper into the 2024 campaign, not just against Harris, but against

anybody else. And listen, I don't know about you. I said, I sit in a lot of airport lounges and

during the 2024 cycle, you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a crypto ad from one

group or another. And so let's talk about that. Let's bring it up to the present day, because

you mentioned crypto, which is again, to me, this is how I see it. I vaguely understand

the technology behind it. I want to talk about that. To me, here's the thing is pepper. It doesn't

seem to me to be anything other than a speculative asset, because its value is still backstopped by

the dollar, right? It doesn't have, at least in my mind, in my very non-good at math humanities

organized brain. If I had a bitcoin in my hand, I could give it to you, and I'd say it's worth

$56,000, and you'd be great, but you'd still have to sell it somewhere to get the value out of it.

Does that make sense? It's not like an almond tree, right? That has an inherent value. It's got value

because people believe it has value. It's just yet another, it's a fiat currency of a fiat currency

in my mind. Go ahead. That's right, I think, but there is a difference between stable coins,

which are linked to the dollar, and then you have to ask, what do they add? I think what financial

regulators think they add is you can trade them without friction in the international system.

More easily than you can trade currency, and that's because of the ways that banks have been

taking huge cuts on how people trade money internationally. That's how financial regulators

look at them, but of course the people who have been using them most to trade internationally

are criminals and money launders. That's what you really use crypto for, and so that's the biggest

use case for crypto, and those who are crypto advocates, so sorry, so that's the stable coins,

and then there's bitcoin where it's purely a speculative asset. It's not tied to anything,

and it's about what people believe it's worth at any given time, and that has gone up and down,

and in the most recent times we've been going down, but been going down from a very high level,

in the first months of the Trump administration, a certain crypto got a boost.

So I think the use case for it has still to be demonstrated. There are some ideological

true believers about crypto, and they're the only cases. They want to be out of the system,

they don't want money to be debased. Ever since the financial crisis, they've not believed in

states, but what exactly is replacing these states is unclear, because we don't really know who's

behind crypto, and so that's the concern that many people have, and the concern you have is something

that you find in public opinion. Right, and, and again, as you noted, for money laundering,

Binance, which is the biggest crypto trading platform, it's CEO went to prison, similarly to

Sam Bankman, freed not for as long, he was pardoned by President Trump, and just recently it came

out that they moved 1.7 billion dollars worth of bitcoin to Iranian assets, some of whom were

seemed to have been tied to terrorism. So to your point, it does not seem that this has a lot of

use cases for the individual, and there have been plenty of books, Wired's Andy Greenberg has written

a great book about crypto scandals. You read Michael Lewis's almost hagiographic biography of

Sam Bankman, freed, and you realize, like, what was anybody ever believing in this? And then why

were you believing in that guy? Right, that was the other, I was like, that guy? Really, that guy?

But let's talk about AI, because I was on the phone recently with a friend of mine, and this one

seems to be one that really is matching up with what you and Professor Lee are talking about. AI

is scaring the hell out of everybody from an employment perspective, from what I would call the

SkyNet or the Matrix perspective, but at the local level, Pepper, we are now seeing local communities

going absolutely crazy about these data centers. We just saw New Brunswick, New Jersey, a local

community overturned one. We saw one in Arizona recently, where former Senator Kristen

cinema from Arizona was lobbying on behalf of one of these things. And what I was just told by

a friend of mine is that a lot of these AI companies, I should say the data center companies

are coming in and saying, hey, city council or county commission, we want to do this, but you

have to sign an NDA before we'll even have a talk with you. And so you have a county, you know,

have an open meeting and citizens are saying, okay, well, what's this all about? And the county

commissioners who should not be signing these things and there's certainly their councils should

tell them not to or like, we can't tell you what's in it. Well, that's again, that's just terrible

public policy. But again, it just further erodes trust in a nameless, faceless group of people

who's only promised to you, Pepper, is that we're going to put you out of work. Yeah, there's

so much wrapped up in those questions. I mean, first of all, NDAs have been massively overused

to protect people in business. These just, they need to be rolled back. And that's a big problem,

well beyond the area that we're talking about. But I absolutely agree that you can't constrain

representatives from talking to their constituents about what's going on with the local community.

I mean, what's going to happen? Their energy costs are going to go up, right? Their energy bills

are going to go up. Their water supply may be challenged because these things use a lot of water.

And that's just sort of the tip of the iceberg. And so there's tons of investment going in there.

And it's kind of off the, because they're often special purpose vehicles, it's actually off the

books for companies like Metta that's building this ginormous Hyperion in Louisiana where I was

born. And so basically, they don't look like they've got any risk for it, but they've actually

got massive financial risks. So there's massive financial risk tied up. And then you, of course,

have talked about the potential labor market risks. You know, we don't quite know how it is that

AI is going to be incorporated into work and who is going to put out of work. But it's going to

be disruptive. And so all of these things are potential scandals waiting to happen or their events

waiting to happen that I think will agitate the public. And so it's a question of what goes first.

Well, so I want to ask one. Well, there's a couple of things. One, let's go back to 2000.

We can either go back to 2000. If you wanted to the first tech bubble, 2008, 2009 to the financial

crisis. To now, you mentioned something previously, just a few minutes ago about the idea of,

is there an AI bubble? And if so, what happens when it bursts? I mean, what I would tell anybody

that I'm talking to in politics is the best thing you can do. First of all, the polling against AI

right now was like 70, 30, right? So this, you don't even need polling to tell you that like being

against I know why are why are people not seizing on this? They're scared of, you know, the sort of

Republican machine in Washington. But I, it's a big, big winner. I would say it's, it's, well,

let me just say this is someone who used to be a Republican and is not anymore is that it's not

just that is that there was a recent clip of, I should say it's not a clip, a recent statement

that was released by someone in a meeting with Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer,

who said, well, I don't know how far away from these guys we want to get, you know, they got a

lot of money. I mean, you're absolutely right. The data on this are very good. Both parties have

their hands dirty. You know, it's especially hard to understand why the Democrats would be blind

in opposition. But of course, you have many Republicans who are, you know, the Republican party,

as you know, well, it has lots of people who are sensitive to this sort of anti-big company sentiment.

Josh Hawley is a classic example. Right. JD Vance was for a while, but he seems to have gone down

the Peter Teal road, which is, you know, his supporter and backer. But there's a, there's big

support for this in the mega coalition as well. And so, you know, President Trump has been trying

to balance between the two, but he seems recently to have gone all in on the big tech side and,

and I'm not sure what's left for mega. Well, again, this is, so I occasionally listen to Steve

Bannon's podcast because I think it's important to understand how the mega faithful are seeing

things. And Bannon is way anti AI is way and is little as I agree with him on just about anything.

He's like, this is existential, not just to an economy, but to the human race, right? So he's gone

full sky net, full Terminator 2. And he says, I don't like what David Sacks, who is both the crypto

and AI's are at the White House and a Silicon Valley rich guy. I don't like what he's doing. And I

hope President Trump doesn't listen to him. So this is again, I think going back to the beginning,

the premise of your whole bookpepper and you and professor Lee is there are things that are very

much cutting against traditional, at least in the US partisan lines. The question is, and I put

this in a purely political frame, who will take advantage of that simmering anger? Because if it

blows up again, right? Everybody's going to get it. Everybody's going to be in trouble for it.

But the problem is, as you know, and we look back at any of these scandals, the people who were all

the perpetrators in these scandals are still doing business. Facebook is still in business. Exxon is

still in business. I don't know that Volkswagen ever necessarily really recovered the way it,

maybe it did in Europe, but it doesn't feel like it has here. But the bad guys have, you know,

Goldman Sachs, the bad guys have gotten away with it so far. So even in these moments of

anger that overflows and leads to a regulatory scheme of some kind, one, the lobbyists are always

trying to water it down, as you noted in California. But two, the population has a fairly short

memory. Yeah, I mean, read what I would say to that is you're probably putting the goalpost in a

place that the public will not reach. They're not going to come after the big companies. So I'm happy

to bet that Exxon's still going to be here. Amazon's still going to be here. Facebook's still going

to be here in 40 years. The place we're betting on is what happened in circa 1905 to 1910

in the United States when the progressive era brought together parties of the left, parties of the

right thinking we've got we've got these big companies during the the first industrial revolution,

which brought us so much, but these trusts are out of control. They're exercising control on

Congress. They shouldn't have and we need to have a kind of social agreement that the state rules

companies because the people have influence on the state and that these companies can't do whatever

they want. And we think getting to that place is a realistic place to get because we think right

and left agree on this and we can move and the United States needs to be a prime mover on this as

dysfunctional as it seems right now because of the number of tech companies that are located there.

And by the way, the tech companies are terrified of President Trump. That's why they were sitting

behind him at the inauguration. So they understand the potential of state power, but it has to be deployed

and has to be deployed meaningfully where people understand that there are durable coalitions that

want a little more regulation that don't want the state to be so weak and allow these companies to

say, we'll regulate ourselves. Don't worry about it. Well, and I just want to talk about the regulation

as as both I believe necessary and as a political issue, which is, you know, big deregulation starts

in the US what in the 1970s. It just picks up steam through the 80s and 1990s and even into the 2000s.

And, you know, as soon as you bring up any rule that corporate America doesn't like,

you're going to stifle innovation, you're going to cost jobs. And that has become almost mantra for

all, you know, all politicians. Well, we don't want to cost people jobs. We don't want to do this.

We don't want to do that. When in fact, there's very little proof of any of that. And, you know,

what's the definition of innovation for meta, right? What does that mean? What does that mean?

What it means is they buy another company and that company stops doing patents, right? So the

absolute number of new products declines. That's what it means. Yeah. Or aquaires where they take

everybody and just take their staff away. Right. Or, you know, look, I mean, in let's just

hear this thing. If Mark Zuckerberg didn't actually own Facebook, somebody would have fired him.

First, he had that crazy pretend land, right? That cost them billions and billions and billions and

went flat. Then they bought the big, Oculus thing that went, you know, belly up, right? So like,

they're not actually very good at innovating internally. That's exactly right. And so that's the

claim I think about all of these companies. So Google, which has a sort of a better rep with the

public has nevertheless bought tons and tons of company. They bought way more. They bought lots of

things and to take it out of competition with them and to put it under their umbrella. And so

Google has succeeded in innovating more, but nevertheless, the fact that these companies are

able to do this, buy up their competitors. Amazon does the same thing as a story about a company

called diapers.com. So they, they, they just wipe out the comp and antitrust law has been so slow to

respond. It's not really built. It needs to get much more on the front foot such that you can say,

you know, mergers can't even go forward without some sort of divestment. So we need to have

innovation on how that law is practiced. But to get that, you've got to get a sort of political push

behind it. Right. And as I have said to the listeners and viewers before, remember politicians

go in the direction they're pushed. Right. And right now corporate America, the big companies

that pepper and doc and professor Lee talk about in their book, they're, they're, they're,

they got big fans blowing in their direction. Right. We, we got it. We got to provide some of that

too. All right. Pepper, give us a little bit more about the book, a little bit more about what

you're working on right now. And, and some other things that that our listeners and our viewers can

take away sort of chew on and get to work on on themselves. Well, let me throw this one out for

the listeners because we've got an article that's just come out. And so the last chapter is called

good populism. And it's what we're working on. And we actually find two strands in opinion in

the United States and elsewhere of, of what is called populist opinion. And so we just, we call them

good populism and bad populism. Now bad populism is what the one you'll be familiar with. It's where

people answer questions saying, you can't trust the mainstream media. It doesn't matter which party we

elect. There's a small group of powerful individuals who run the world. All of those views hang

together and they tend to be associated with very negative views towards immigrants towards minorities

and towards Jews. So essentially, that is the negative anti minority group that undermines the

pluralism of democracy. And that's that's why we call it bad populism. But there's another strand

out there in opinion. Often these strands are hanging together in the same person, but, but sometimes

they're different voters, which we call good populism, which is about, you know, the extent to which you

think the system is rigged, the extent to which you think elites got there by, by, by cheating the

system. Their, their views that hold the system is fundamentally unfair. And people who hold that

view, they tend to be much more positive towards minorities, towards immigrants and towards Jews.

And they're much more hostile towards billionaires and big corporations. And that is a big prize out

there, read. You're a former political campaigner. And so parties on the left and parties on the right

are going to need to shoot at that target because shooting at the target of minorities and immigrants

has, has led us into a bad place democracy wise. And we're kind of undermining our ability to work

together. And I think shooting at large corporations and shooting at billionaires is going to do what,

what political parties want to do, which is win votes. But it also tends to, to yield sort of positive

results in terms of what we think about our fellow citizens. And this is not, I should say,

an anti-capitalist view, the good populist view. And when you ask people about small business,

they're much more favorable towards small business than our others, because they think small

business is also the victim of this rigged system run by these big companies that never really

give them a chance and squash them before they can succeed. So it's about making the country safe

for entrepreneurship at the same time that it's safe for democracy. And that's what we got to do.

We got to protect these innovations, these companies that brought us. But we've got to say,

you guys are really good at one thing, which is you develop these big companies at one time,

but that doesn't make you good at everything. You and I might think that, Reid, you might think,

you know, I'm, therefore, a really good driver, just because I'm a good professor.

It's not true. I'm probably a sub-arriage driver, even though I tell my wife, I'm in the top 10%

top. But so does it believe that? Yes. So billionaires think that, though, they,

they're pouring lots of money into it. And so if we think about Elon Musk, he thinks that,

he's got lots of great ideas. I mean, SpaceX has been a tremendous success. But, you know,

is what he's doing in terms of supporting all of these populist right parties in Europe,

a good thing and inspired by his special wisdom. No, it's his political priors. And he's just,

he's gone down his own rabbit hole. And so I think we need to get a little bit of democratic

control back so that we can have the dynamism of capitalism working for us.

Well, you're not going to get any argument from me on that one, Pepper. Well, Pepper, before

I let you go, first and foremost, please send our best to Professor Lee. And I hope we can get him

in you on together sometime soon. But before we go, where can we find you and where else can we

find your work? So when you can certainly find both Takeo and my's work on our web pages and

that the book will be coming out in the United States on on 17th of March. So if you want to

celebrate St. Patrick's Day in a big way, get yourself a copy of the billionaire backlash.

You can order it from Amazon if you want or you can order it from your local bookstore.

I'd, I'd prefer the latter, but either way, I'd love you to read the book. And, you know,

we hope that you'll engage with us and, and, and we actually answer emails because we're really

interested in what people think about this. Well, that's great. Again, guys, the book is billionaire

backlash. Get it when it comes out pre-order it today from your local bookstore. I was loved it.

Like I said, it's got, I got highlights galore in here, Pepper. It was a terrific read. Here's

the thing, guys, some of these books, and I interview a lot of people and I read a lot of galleries.

I got a pile of them over on my table here, Pepper. Are very well-meaning, but very hard to get

through, guys. This is both informative. I would dare say entertaining, but certainly

imminently readable. So, Pepper, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me.

Real enjoyed it. Everybody else, you can find me on social media at Reed Gaelin or on those dreaded

meta products at Reed underscore Gaelin USA sub-stack. Also, the home front. I hope you will like and

subscribe. This makes sure other people know it, go and rate us five stars. Until then everybody,

please be safe and we'll see you next time. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know

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