Welcome back to the home front. I'm your host, Reed Gailen. 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 finest books. He wrote it with Harvard professor, Tekew Lee. 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 to having me, Reid. 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-Reg.

So Dieselgate spoke to you.

No, 2010.

Excuse me.

It was a 2010.

And it was a great car and it got incredible mileage.

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 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.

...