Dating With Anxious Attachment

Welcome back to the home front. I'm your host, Reed Galey. Today, I am joined by Professor Pepper Cull 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 Blavottnik. He is the Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at the Blavottnik Chair and sorry, I'm going to start over. Pepper is Vice Dean for Academic Affairs and the Blavottnik Chair in Government and Public Policy at the Blavottnik School in Government. His research focuses on the intersection between capitalism and democracy, both in politics and public policy. Prior to becoming to the Blavottnik School, he taught at the European University and at Harvard at 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. So these are the days folks to do. 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 Professorly 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 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 cuncs up their life and so they don't want it. But at moments of scandal, 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 want to understand these regular moments and that let us 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. So 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 the, 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 the 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 some 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 Grock 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 pro-hibition 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 so, but take us to why in Europe, one young man from I was of 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? Part of it. But what do you think the why do you feel like their legislative process was more activist on this? Where is it, is it just lobbyists? Because that's one piece you talk about is, you know, the European legislative look, we see this here in the US, both in in Washington DC 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 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. So the policy entrepreneur you're talking about is Max Shrims. 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 Vienna 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 CD of all the things that they know about him. So that really radicalizes Max Shrims. And he becomes, you know, one of these crazy donkey hoat days 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 happens with Edward Snowden. And when this note 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 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 unaminaable 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 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 because of the electoral backlash that could await them 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 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 idiosyncratic little guy who I described as someone who probably wears Burkin's stocks 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 European companies. But both this 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 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 look across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. And we do this study of what information about 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, 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. 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 changes that happened with Exxon new, 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 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 sometimes, in some senses, 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 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 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 we 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 have 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. 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 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 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 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 use Office Depot deliberately in some of these studies because we didn't want the people to, you know, 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 our companies, what their political partisanship is, you know, their willingness to tolerate complexity in life. We have lots of indicators about them. And so that allows us to tell a very clear story about what tends to influence people in scandals and what doesn't. And again, 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? 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, 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 it's so garden, 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 the 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, there, there are two kind of stories that moral failings of the leadership of FTX and their, their closeness to the Democratic party. And that 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, 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 imported 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 $5 million. 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've sitting 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. Well, I mean, and go ahead. So I would just, 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? And I think what financial regulators think they add is you can trade them without friction in the international system. Eat 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. So that's how financial regulators look at them. But of course, the people who have been using the 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, you know, 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 it. And in the most recent times, we've been going down, but been going down from a very high level where 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 troublemakers about crypto and their, their they're. 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 it's, you know, we don't really know who's behind crypto. And so that's the concern that any of you will 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 San 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 a seam 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. Wireds Andy Greenberg has written a great book about crypto scandals. You read Michael Lewis's almost hagiographic biography of San 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 guy's 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 sky net 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 sent him a 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, 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 Meta 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 people not seizing on this? They're scared of, you know, the sort of Republican machine in Washington, but 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'm comparing. So 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 to Peter Teal Road, which is, you know, his supporter and backer. But there's big support for this in the Magicalition 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 I'm not sure what's left for Maga. Well, again, this is so I occasionally listen to Steve Bannon's podcast because I think it's important to understand how the Maga 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 rights. Right. So he's gone full sky net, full terminator, too. 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 still going to be here. Amazon 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 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 they're 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 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, in, let's just, here's the 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, 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 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 company and anti-trust 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 dot and professor Lee talk about in their book, they're, they're, they've 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 a 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, 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 is 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, 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, 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, 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, right? 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, right? So it's about, you know, 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 have brought us, but we've got to say, you know, 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 read. 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 percentile. But so does it believe that? Yeah. 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 and 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 Teku and Mys work on our web pages, and 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 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 galley, 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 @regaling or on those dreaded meta products @reed_galingUSA substack. 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.