Can Billionaire Backlash Save Democracy? Pepper Culpepper on our Age of Corporate Scandal

Certainly! Here is the full transcript of the conversation from the audio file provided:

Transcript of "Keen On America" with Guest Pepper Culpepper
Andrew Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Andrew Keen: Hello everybody, it’s Thursday, the 12th of February 2026. We are enveloped, engulfed in a storm of Epstein scandals of one kind or another, and one of the narratives of course is that Epstein and all the scandals around him are both a symptom and a cause of our crisis of democracy.

Andrew Keen: But my guest today, who is the co-author of an intriguing new book, brilliantly timed new book, Billionaire Backlash, Pepper—Pepper Culpepper, who teaches at Oxford, is an American in Oxford—I think has a different take, a different narrative. Epstein might actually help us save democracy, which is quite a scandalous idea in itself. Culpepper—Pepper Culpepper, quite a name in itself, is joining us from Oxford.

Andrew Keen: So, Pepper, is that fair? Am I summarizing your book right? Should we think of Epstein as an opportunity?

Pepper Culpepper: So, Epstein certainly is an opportunity. It’s not typical of the sort of scandals that we talk about. We—when we talk about the corporate scandals that could save democracy, we show how various corporate scandals—Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, for example, Volkswagen Dieselgate—they tend to bring about regulatory responses against things that people are worried about, but they come to a head in a scandal.

Pepper Culpepper: And that’s what’s happening in the Epstein scandal, though it’s not strictly speaking a corporate scandal. It turns out that the things that people were accusing the elites of doing—that people dismissed as being QAnon foolishness—they really are doing, and it speaks a lot right now to this populist moment.

Pepper Culpepper: And so you’re getting people focused on what is the overreach of the elites going on, and the thing about Epstein that makes this making it cut through is that it’s not particularly a right-coded or left-coded scandal. The reason we talk about corporate scandals is because they’re one of the few things that doesn’t have an obvious partisan charge that one party takes one side and one party takes the other, and the media associated with those two sides tells a very different story.

Pepper Culpepper: We have a pretty common narrative of what’s going on with the Epstein scandal, which is that there were a bunch of either rich or influential people behaving badly and trying to get connected to this person with lots of money and an island in the Caribbean where, you know, he carried on this sort of abuse of women and young girls. And so that focal point for anger gets people—you know, when people are concerned about populism, it gives them something very concrete to focus on. This is a sign of our elite gone bad.

Andrew Keen: Our elite gone bad. Epstein of course is a parable, you couldn’t make this stuff up. It’s quite remarkable. In your mind, Pepper, is the Epstein scandal exhibit A in what you call "elite overreach"?

Pepper Culpepper: So I think it’s more a sign that the elite is cozy and interpenetrated, in the sense that you have—to pick some words...

Andrew Keen: [laughs] Yeah.

Pepper Culpepper: You've got on the one hand academic and government elites like Larry Summers, who are deeply implicated from their friendship with Epstein. You have bankers—members of the Rothschild family were recently reported—who were relying on Epstein for advice and paying him $25 million for his services just connecting them to a lawyer (this was reported in the Financial Times), as well as people connected to high finance—the sort of people, the group that Epstein comes out of.

Pepper Culpepper: I mean, Epstein is curious because he’s obviously a very skilled person at networking and holding a good dinner party.

Andrew Keen: To put it mildly.

Pepper Culpepper: Yeah, Woody Allen would talk about how good his dinner parties are, and you see these people in the information that’s come out with the Epstein files emailing him like a friend saying, "help us out, help us understand," at the same time that he’s obviously trying to collect information about them so that he can lean on them to help him at certain times. So he’s really a spider at the center of a web, and people don’t like the web.

Andrew Keen: People certainly don’t like the web, either in metaphorical terms or in technological terms.

Andrew Keen: Later this week we have Helene Landemore, another political scientist from Yale, on the show—a card-carrying populist direct democracy advocate talking about the crisis of elites that was a bit rich coming from a professor at Yale. And I wonder whether the same thing is true of you, Pepper. You are the Vice Dean, indeed, of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, at the very heart of the British elite or of a global elite. What gives you the credibility to do these critiques of elites since you’re at the very heart of it and you’re teaching the next generation of elites to run the world?

Pepper Culpepper: Well, it’s a super question, but of course as a Vice Dean I’m nothing but middle management in a cog of the state apparatus, which is Oxford University is of course deeply tied into the state.

Pepper Culpepper: But it’s right that I’m an educational elite, for sure, as is my co-author who teaches at Harvard. We both have chairs that were sponsored by billionaires, and so we’re aware of our privilege. But what gives us the sort of authority to talk about it is we’ve actually explored it empirically for the past decade-plus, as I should say on behalf of Helene Landemore, who’s done great work on democratic innovations in politics.

Pepper Culpepper: And so I think our job is to bring evidence to bear to debates that are often devoid of evidence, but at the same time to sort of speak to things that are neglected sometimes in the political space because they’re less exciting.

Pepper Culpepper: And so talking about what it is that’s going on with public opinion—people want to talk about the horse races of who’s in, who’s out in the Labor leadership right now and whether or not Keir Starmer’s going to be defenestrated. But they don’t want to talk about the background movements that are going on.

Pepper Culpepper: And one of the things that we talk about in the book is why you get such reactions during corporate scandals is because there is this kind of latent opinion out there; it’s diffused across voters of both the left and the right—people who voted Leave, people who voted Remain—in the sense that the system is broken. And it’s trying to understand "the system is broken" and how that can lead to a better politics. We think political scientists have something to say, and it’s true that political scientists working on this who have the resources to do survey work on it are going to be elites themselves. And so we just try to tell an honest story and leave it out for the people to evaluate.

Andrew Keen: Do you think, though, that the crisis or the systematic crisis is also an educational one? I’m not just picking on your school, but since we’re talking to you as the Vice Dean (sounds rather fancy to me), the Blavatnik School of Government claims to be training students for a "world better led, better served, and better governed." You’d see the same kind of cant written on Harvard Business School, or Yale Business School, or Stanford Law School, all these other elite places.

Andrew Keen: And clearly, it’s not just you, Pepper, but your entire academic elite class have failed to give a proper moral education to these players in our global capitalist system. I’m not suggesting that all of them are Jeffrey Epstein, I mean, he’s obviously a unique case. But is there a collective responsibility of intellectual elites at these top universities—Oxford, Yale, Harvard, Stanford—to give a moral education to the kids who are going to run the world?

Pepper Culpepper: I think there is a responsibility for universities to provide an education in rigor, including in moral thinking, and I think people at many of these universities are doing exactly that.

Pepper Culpepper: The more one moves into the professional realm, the less that moral training may be forefronted, though indeed one charge leveled against many of the undergraduate institutions is that they’re doing less on morality than they could.

Pepper Culpepper: But is it a question of responsibility of the elites, and we certainly have some part to play, or is it a question of what society is asking for? Is society asking for people to be constantly professionally trained to do well on the market so that they can get the rewards they want?

Pepper Culpepper: I mean, what we try to do to live our values of being "better led, better served, and better governed" is 70% of our students are on full scholarship and they come from 62 different countries. And so they are the world’s people who’ve given up the decision to go for big money and are deciding instead to work for government. So we actually think that’s pretty much something we’d stand 100% behind. And we think that the problem with the kind of issue revealed by the Epstein files is that it seems like the elite aren’t working for anyone but themselves, and our students are selected explicitly on the promise of working for others.

Andrew Keen: Your book is called Billionaire Backlash. Of course, billionaires aren’t particularly popular these days. In my state of California, there’s a billionaire tax which is designed to, I guess, in a way punish billionaires for simply being successful.

Andrew Keen: Is that a credible argument? I mean, obviously, the title of your book is catchy and is designed to sell books. But is there an irony, Pepper, in this idea that the billionaires are to blame? After all, many billionaires play by the rules, they’re incredibly successful and hard-working, and they make a huge amount of money. There's nothing wrong with being a billionaire, is there?

Pepper Culpepper: So, I wouldn't—I’m not a moral philosopher. You can actually ask Helene Landemore when she is on the show, she’d be better equipped to answer that question than I am.

Pepper Culpepper: What we talk about as the "billionaire backlash"—Taeku Lee, my co-author, and I are both empirical political scientists—and what we’re referring to is not "the billionaire should be slapped." What we’re referring to is public opinion in the countries that we study. We look across the advanced industrial world and in six countries in particular.

Pepper Culpepper: There’s a very common demand for politics to restrain big corporations, and people don’t really distinguish between what they want to do to restrain big corporations and what they want to do to restrain billionaires. So I think that billionaires have done wonderful things in terms of founding these companies, taking some risks, allocating capital, and should be rewarded for it.

Pepper Culpepper: But people are looking and saying the reward seems out of proportion, and especially when those people are using the benefits that they’ve got from the system—from a system that’s benefited them—to then try to influence that system such that billionaire voices are more important than everyone else’s voice. So I think when you look at California, you’ll see people saying we need the wealth creators, and that’s absolutely right, but there’s also a legitimacy to the voices saying we’ve got to do something about this, the system is fundamentally broken. And in democracy, it’s not supposed to be the voices of the richest that decide, it’s supposed to be the voices of the largest number.

Andrew Keen: You’re an American, Pepper, I know you’re from the South, and you’re teaching in the UK now, which is perched precariously between the US and Europe. A lot of the cases that you bring up in your new book, Billionaire Backlash, are from Europe. You talk about the French milk scandal, the VW scandal, but some are from America—you deal with the Goldman Sachs controversies and of course the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

Andrew Keen: Are these different or are they, in your view, in terms of this age of corporate scandal—are the scandals as deep and problematic in Western Europe or East Asia as they are in the United States?

Pepper Culpepper: They all have similar things going on. The ones we focus on are scandals that bring out something that’s going on that people have been worried about for a long time, but it’s not something that’s been at the forefront of their mind.

Pepper Culpepper: And we talk about this using the notion of "latent opinion." You can think about latent opinion as something that people kind of have in the back of their mind when they decide how they’re going to vote; it may not be absolutely front and center unless something brings it front of mind. And scandals do exactly that.

Pepper Culpepper: So whether it’s VW, whether it’s the Goldman Sachs scandal you mentioned having to do with conflict of interest, whether it’s Facebook and Cambridge Analytica—let’s take Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. This is—people were concerned about privacy, but they also thought, "these things are doing amazing things for us." And yet the fact that 90 million users are having their information leaked suddenly brings home very clarifyingly that these corporations are not necessarily working in their interest, and it would be perhaps in the state interest to regulate them.

Pepper Culpepper: And that’s what’s behind the regulatory push that eventually led to the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act in the European Union, and it led to California privacy regulation which passed not once but twice in 2018 and then again in 2020. So you can have really profound effects where these scandals let out something that people were implicitly worried about, and it’s the implicit worry that is the billionaire backlash.

Andrew Keen: The subtitle of the book is The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy. American democracy, don't need me to tell you, is certainly in crisis. We did a show yesterday with John Rauch, who argues that Trump is a fascist and that America could theoretically degenerate into a fascist state.

Andrew Keen: But the American economy’s doing pretty well. The reverse seems to be true in Europe. I don’t see any evidence of fascism, certainly in Denmark or Germany, really, compared to the United States or the UK. But the economies are doing very poorly—more and more of an economic gap between Western Europe and the United States and indeed China.

Andrew Keen: Is there a connection between saving democracy and saving capitalism? In other words, is that a kind of zero-sum game, or might we need to compromise some elements of capitalism in order to save democracy?

Pepper Culpepper: Yeah, well it’s a really good question. I mean, I would say Europe and the United States have different problems. It’s not that the United States has simply, however, let capitalism rip. It’s let monopoly capitalism rip. And so anyone who’s played Monopoly knows that at the end of the game in Monopoly...

Andrew Keen: Everyone’s played Monopoly, Pepper.

Pepper Culpepper: Right, so then you know that at the end of the game there’s only one winner, and that’s not generally the way that capitalism is supposed to work. It’s supposed to be about competition and maintaining competition. So regulation is actually the key to having well-functioning markets, and certainly the United States but also the European Union in the past have kind of forgotten this.

Pepper Culpepper: And sort of what you saw in about 2014 when a new Competition Commission came in in the European Union is you began to see bigger enforcement in Europe, and that’s where a lot of the tension started between American digital companies and the European Union. They tried to push back.

Pepper Culpepper: Now, have they over-regulated, which would be the claim of many? Doubtless in certain areas. And you have a problem of this single market is a single market only in name because many individual countries are keeping their own regulations that protect a certain vested interest.

Pepper Culpepper: So that leads to a sclerosis in Europe and a sort of threat to a monopoly power group in the United States that seems to be undermining democracy and allowing for things to happen that we wouldn’t have said could happen 10 years ago.

Pepper Culpepper: So I think that there are risks on either side. I think the risks are more acute right now in the United States, and if these are sort of overshoots of capitalism—and certainly the role of Elon Musk is that—I think that the American public is really interested in doing something about that.

Andrew Keen: Is there a counter-intuitive argument to make that when you have corporate scandals, actually the economy’s probably doing rather well because you need a lot of wealth—I’m not suggesting that they’re good things, but actually mirrors a vital economy?

Pepper Culpepper: Well, I think we always have corporate scandals. You know, it’s...

Andrew Keen: By definition, right?

Pepper Culpepper: Yes, so if there are things going on and corporate scandals are fundamentally someone has an incentive to do something wrong, to hide it, and then to get caught or have that information revealed.

Pepper Culpepper: But corporate scandals only resonate, I think, in a moment like today where you have extreme wealth, extraordinary possibilities created for certain people and not everyone is sharing in that wealth. And in that moment the corporate scandals kind of shine a light on this disconnect. So I think people pay a lot more attention to them during times of plenty, especially when the times of plenty are not evenly distributed or people think maybe the rules aren’t quite right in this system.

Andrew Keen: Who are the heroes in your book? I mean, as we speak, more and more Republican politicians, Senators are beginning to distance themselves from Trump and suggest that the Epstein scandal is very real. I know in your book you write in some detail about Carl Levin, the former US Senator from Michigan, who you see in very promising terms. I’ve talked to Margrethe Vestager, for example, on this show too. Are all the heroes—the knights in shining armor—are they all politicians? Is that the only way that we can really address our age of corporate scandal, Pepper?

Pepper Culpepper: No, it’s not. So it’s a good question. We talk about the difference in the book. So scandals create the movement in public opinion, and what then happens with that movement in public opinion very much depends on people that we call "policy entrepreneurs."

Pepper Culpepper: Carl Levin a classic example, who shepherded through these Goldman Sachs hearings and then sort of later contributed to financial regulation in the United States in the Dodd-Frank Act. Margrethe Vestager the same way in the European Union; she was a tiger fighting for how we make competition really important and pushing for these new laws, the DMA and the DSA, which I talked about earlier.

Pepper Culpepper: But a lot of the heroes are obsessive people who are not in politics, but who for one reason or another decide that they’re really going to seize on an issue. And this is in the European Union an Austrian named Max Schrems, who was a student who when he was at Silicon Valley taking a year abroad studied Facebook privacy violations, and he couldn’t believe how much information Facebook had about him, including things that he’d deleted from his account which was correspondence through Facebook Messenger with his friend who was in a locked ward of a Vienna hospital.

Pepper Culpepper: And he was outraged, and so he demanded to know from Facebook the information they had, and that kind of information radicalized him and he became a crusader who eventually brought down the trade relations between the United States and the European Union that had protected companies from facing litigation on privacy.

Pepper Culpepper: And so he is in many ways the outside representative that goes with Margrethe Vestager on the inside. There’s another property developer in California, Alastair Mactaggart, who got a bee in his bonnet about privacy and then saw what happened at the national level how privacy regulation can never get through because you have dysfunctional deadlocked interest group politics at the national level, and so he pushed it through at the California level.

Pepper Culpepper: And so these are people that we all owe our thanks to because they take up the burden of organizing people collectively and getting things done, and if scandals do things, it’s these entrepreneurs who do it—these policy entrepreneurs.

Andrew Keen: And of course, they’re people like Sarah Wien—Sarah Wien-Williams, a former Facebook executive who wrote a book revealing the corruption at Facebook. She’s facing all sorts of legal threats. Are the lawyers in some way—certainly the lawyers who are employed by these big companies—are they part of the problem, Pepper, in terms of saving democracy? Is it as much a legal problem as anything else, where somebody like Zuckerberg at Facebook can hire teams of incredibly high-priced lawyers to go after people like Sarah Wien-Williams?

Pepper Culpepper: So let me say two things about that. I’ve long had a debate with my father-in-law who’s a lawyer, and he says the law is everything and I say the law is nothing—power is everything.

Andrew Keen: Is your father-in-law a lawyer? I bet he is.

Pepper Culpepper: He is a lawyer, he absolutely is a lawyer.

Andrew Keen: And where does he work?

Pepper Culpepper: So he works in—well, he’s now 93 and he stopped working when he was 86. But he was working in Charlotte, North Carolina for many, many years as a very successful lawyer. And his point of view is that, you know, the law structures things, and I think that’s right, but I think that political power underlies the way that the law is used.

Pepper Culpepper: And so that’s why right now the largest companies can afford the most expensive lawyers, and that’s why Sarah Wien-Williams is running into trouble because Facebook is sort of throwing the book at her with all of their lawyers.

Pepper Culpepper: But the thing we’re talking about in public opinion can quickly overturn this, and so you can change the public mood and how people judge these court cases and the technicalities that people will use to go after whistleblowers like her will suddenly fall out of favor, and then you’ll find that it’s actually power in public opinion that matters.

Pepper Culpepper: And if I could just use Sarah Wien-Williams to talk about what we think is really important, is going back to the age of the muckrakers—people who told us about scandals back in the Progressive Era and the state began to say, "Wow, that really is nasty what they’re grinding up into this beef."

Andrew Keen: Like the meat-packing business.

Pepper Culpepper: So that’s how we get the Food and Drug Administration, and of course this is always cyclical, but we’re at a time now where you’ve really had, as we talked about earlier, these overreach of these big companies and people are starting to look for the regulatory pushback, and it’s a politically winning formula. We find out that there’s demand on the left and demand on the right for there to be more regulation—not necessarily redistribution; not everybody wants a billionaire tax, but lots of people want there to be stronger rules on companies and restraints on what’s going on, including in AI.

Andrew Keen: Is there a danger of overreaction? I mean, in the age of Epstein, there’s a remarkable amount of paranoia. The headlines this morning are that some people believe at least that Epstein is still alive and that he’s in Israel or somewhere else plotting to overthrow the world. Landemore—Helene Landemore has faith in the people, in their wisdom, but when you go online, the people don’t seem particularly wise; they seem conspiratorial, they believe in all sorts of very odd things which, at least in your language of empirical social science, don’t seem to be provable.

Andrew Keen: Are you giving too much credit to the people, Pepper, in terms of this backlash? Could it turn into hysteria? Could we be on the verge of another Thermidor or Jacobin backlash against the rich and successful, against the elite?

Pepper Culpepper: There’s always a risk, but I will say that QAnon was right and I was wrong...

Andrew Keen: "QAnon was right," that’s going to be my headline today. Oxford Professor, Oxford Vice Dean said "QAnon was right and I was wrong." On what?

Pepper Culpepper: Well, that’s—so they were saying that there’s these group of child abusers and pizza parlors run by Hillary Clinton. And of course none of that was really true. But what was true was the sense that these elites are doing things together that in fact involved the abuse of younger people—which is what was revealed by Epstein.

Pepper Culpepper: And so people like me laughed off the QAnon charges as completely crazy, and I think that was the correct thing to do—they were crazy. But what they get at—what people get at even when they’re making crazy conspiracy theories is things that people are worried about. Now, I don’t think we should give credence to every crazy conspiracy theory, that would be insane and bad for democracy.

Pepper Culpepper: But what you talk about is you talk about the wisdom of crowds. So it may be that there’s one nutter online and you say, "I don’t think that that’s right," but when you start to see a lot of nutters online, they are sometimes expressing a view that’s worth exploration.

Pepper Culpepper: And so both Helene Landemore and I do believe that the wisdom of crowds is something that would help us out in this age when elites, and especially rich elites, are so dominating the system.

Pepper Culpepper: For a long time we had a belief that open trade is absolutely a good thing and side payments will take care of any people who are dislocated by that, and I think you’re seeing the political backlash against that because we didn’t have enough good, reasoned information from what people wanted. People never were as pro-open trade as were the elites. So I think that there has to be a balancing of elites and elite opinion against the wisdom of the masses. There can absolutely be the overreaction, the mob behavior that leads to something like Thermidor where you start getting heads chopped off. But we haven’t had a lot of that recently.

Pepper Culpepper: What we’ve had is deregulation that increasingly favors the most well-off, and I think a little bit of Thermidor—properly controlled—might be a good thing for American democracy and democracies around the world.

Andrew Keen: You talk about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which of course at the time was headline news and now is rarely talked about outside of books like yours. It didn't seem to make any difference. Zuckerberg is one of the wealthiest men in the world; he’s worth hundreds of billions of dollars, Facebook becomes more and more powerful.

Andrew Keen: In terms of the arguments you make in the book—in terms of the cases, the baby milk scandal in France, the VW scandal, the Samsung scandal in Korea, the Goldman scandals in the US—what is the best example of something that not just hit the headlines, but actually changed things?

Pepper Culpepper: So I want to push back against your characterization that the scandals that you mentioned didn't do anything.

Andrew Keen: No, I didn’t say all of them. I said that the Cambridge Analytica one doesn’t seem to have done that much, at least in terms of restraining Facebook in broad terms.

Pepper Culpepper: So I think that’s absolutely wrong. So as I said, the public opinion moves that you see post-Cambridge Analytica—so Facebook quickly became the most disliked corporation. Indeed, you could argue, though it’s debatable, that Facebook changed its name to Meta simply to dump the Facebook baggage that was created by Cambridge Analytica.

Pepper Culpepper: What happened with Cambridge Analytica was there was a hearing in Washington and Mark Zuckerberg was called before the Senate. The Senators of both left and right were grilling him. But then at a certain point, Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah says, "You know, Mr. Zuckerberg, how is it that you can make money without charging people for using all your services?" He says, "Senator, we sell ads."

Pepper Culpepper: And that moment killed the possible privacy regulation that could have come in the United States because it was a moment that revealed how out of touch many people in the US Senate were. They didn’t even understand basics of technology and the technological revolution, which you yourself are an expert on, that have so changed the economy.

Pepper Culpepper: So that stopped things at the national level, but it didn’t stop entrepreneurs at the state level from working on privacy regulation. And that’s why California has the most stringent privacy regulation in the country, and that’s why the tech companies mobilized to put in weak privacy regulation in places like Virginia because they were scared to death that California would become the new national standard and people would move and be like California and say, "Well, we’ll do like we do on auto emissions, that California will be the standard that we follow."

Pepper Culpepper: So it’s not true that Cambridge Analytica in the United States did nothing, and the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act are leading to great expressions of concern from these digital companies in Europe, and they’re mobilizing Trump behind them trying to get him to push back against these restraints on their competitive position and the extent to which they’re able to diffuse disinformation. These things matter.

Pepper Culpepper: Okay, let’s go back to Dieselgate. You say Dieselgate doesn’t matter—Volkswagen...

Andrew Keen: No, I didn’t say that. I said—I was asking you about an example of one that really did make a difference to politics because the subtitle of your book is How It Could Save Democracy, so there's a political angle here.

Pepper Culpepper: Yes, so I think the one that best represents how it is that democracy can be changed is the Korean scandal with Samsung, where there’s a Korean bribery scandal where Lee Jae-yong, who you’ve just put a picture up...

Andrew Keen: The Samsung Prince, in other words.

Pepper Culpepper: Yes, exactly. And so he’s donating money illicitly to an advisor of the President, and the President herself has a scandal around the role of this advisor—which is quite juicy, and that’s one of the reasons it’s fun to read about these scandals. The Korean scandal is particularly so.

Pepper Culpepper: And that leads eventually to Koreans coming out on the street for months in what are called the "candlelight protests," and eventually the President resigning.

Pepper Culpepper: And so if you think about where American democracy has failed in the inability to push back against illegal behavior, particularly with respect to January 6th, you don’t see that in Korea. When there was an attempt to declare martial law, you had people storming the parliament to protect opposition parliamentarians.

Pepper Culpepper: What you get in Korea as a result, I would argue in part of these scandals, you have a robust civil society. That robust civil society fires the effect of these scandals, but it also hardens the backbone of democracy. And so what we’re seeing maybe now in Minnesota is Americans finally starting to acquire a backbone because of the things that are being visited on innocent civilians and they’re having to see that. Korea, which is of course made a much later transition to democracy and has labored for a long time under the strong role of these very large conglomerates including Samsung, they’ve always had a love-hate relationship with their corporations. And so Korean democracy is in many ways challenged as you can see in, say, the film Parasite or in the show Squid Game.

Andrew Keen: And a new movie as well about unemployment—No Other Choice, right?

Pepper Culpepper: That's very good, I haven’t seen it yet, but that’s exactly what I’m looking forward to.

Pepper Culpepper: That—I think Korea is a great commentary on the fact that companies can have a big role, and so Samsung is still super important in Korea and don’t ever think that it’s not, and it’s very politically influential. But at the same time, Korean public opinion is very structured such that its politicians know if they cave too much to these big companies, there’s going to be a backlash.

Andrew Keen: I wonder whether there’s also a China angle to this. You’re a comparative political scientist, your new book is about how to save democracy. There is of course a Chinese model of dealing with billionaire backlash and corruption, which isn’t very democratic but might be more effective, at least in the short term. What do you make of that China model? Is it in any way credible, and is it really critical for the West to get its act together because otherwise the China model will acquire more and more legitimacy?

Pepper Culpepper: Well, I’m glad you said that because I disagree strongly that I think that on—at least when you look at scandals—so we start the book with a 2008 scandal that sickened babies in the wake of the Beijing Olympics...

Andrew Keen: This wasn't the French baby milk scandal, this is the Chinese one.

Pepper Culpepper: So that’s the Lactalis scandal, yes, which happened in 2017. But the 2008 scandal in China preceded it, and in that case you actually had babies who died because of melamine, which is an industrial chemical used in making plastics, was used to inflate the protein content of the infant formula they were feeding infants.

Pepper Culpepper: And so you can imagine six babies died, there’s huge outrage, it’s covered up because of the Olympics because they don’t want bad news coming out before Beijing 2008.

Pepper Culpepper: And when it finally does come out, then one of our policy entrepreneurs, Zhao Lianhai, who’s trying to make a fuss about it and to rally parents to say "this is outrageous, we have to see what’s going on with the supply chain of these infant formula companies and why did regulation fail us?"

Pepper Culpepper: And the government comes down very hard on him; they arrest Zhao Lianhai, they put him in jail, they try him, they don’t even let him present evidence. And what they do instead is they execute a couple of people—which of course you could say, "well, there’s the strong state in action."

Pepper Culpepper: But what happens when you execute people but don’t allow any political figures, any failures of regulation, actually to be aired in public and to be held to public account? What you get is a country where people don’t believe that their milk supply is safe. And so therefore you are getting shortages of infant formula in Australia, in New Zealand, in Hong Kong because Chinese were saying "we’ve got to get milk from outside this country because we don’t trust the infant formula that’s in our country."

Pepper Culpepper: So the Chinese model actually shows itself to be weak, and if you’ve been paying attention recently, there’s a new infant formula scandal where a couple of babies have died in France as a result of an infection to several companies including Danone and Nestle, but that infection actually started in a Chinese factory with something called Seralide.

Pepper Culpepper: And so the fact that the Chinese food chain wasn't fixed because scandals weren't allowed to work their magic has tragic implications even today.

Andrew Keen: So is there no argument to make that sometimes an authoritarian state can clamp down on the domestic versions of Zuckerberg or Blavatnik more effectively than in the Democratic West? I mean, the Chinese state for better or worse has done that.

Pepper Culpepper: So it is certainly true that if what you want is clampdown, authoritarian governments—at least authoritarian governments with high state capacity, which I think China is—have been successful.

Pepper Culpepper: The problem is you can never be sure that your authoritarian government will work in your own interests. And so the clampdown that we’re now seeing in China, where Xi has gone after all of his generals and he just had Jimmy Lai sentenced to 20 years in prison—who is a sort of press magnate in Hong Kong.

Pepper Culpepper: He’s pulling the same move that authoritarian Vladimir Putin pulled a while ago, which is disciplining his oligarchs and saying, "You can get rich, but don’t you cross me or you will pay for it for a long time." And when people get that powerful, the result is never good government.

Pepper Culpepper: You do see occasional authoritarian governments that actually produce good government—many people have made this claim about Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, which had repression but nevertheless had what we would generally call good governmental outcomes.

Pepper Culpepper: But you’re just lucky to get Lee Kuan Yew because he’s got few things that are sort of able to hold him to account. And systems that where you don’t have the ability to hold people to account from the public are systems that generally don’t work as well as democracies, for all the problems that democracies have. You know, we finish the book saying we agree with Winston Churchill: "Democracy is the worst system except for all the other ones that have been tried."

Andrew Keen: Finally, Pepper, you’re from the South, so you’re familiar with the great debates about pulling the statues down and whether General Robert E. Lee should even be represented in public. I live in San Francisco, it’s not possible to drive around my town without bumping into a Zuckerberg this or a Zuckerberg that—a hospital, a building.

Andrew Keen: You yourself are the Vice Dean at the Blavatnik School of Government. Len Blavatnik being, as I mentioned, Ukrainian billionaire buying Hampton houses and big yachts like so many other billionaires.

Andrew Keen: Do you think one way to begin what you call this "billionaire backlash" is not to allow them to plaster their names on universities or hospitals—that sure, they can have all the money they want, they can spend it, they can buy their yachts and their homes, but they can’t take over our cities and our universities?

Pepper Culpepper: I think it’s important that we have a public debate about what’s legitimate spending. I mean, as Michael Sandel says, there shouldn't be a price on everything. Universities are always trying to raise money as government cuts the amount of money that they have and they’re trying to do research funding as well as provide quality education, so that’s their challenge.

Pepper Culpepper: We think the place that you ought to start is that billionaires shouldn't have an especial role in politics. The problem of billionaires is they’ve generally been really good at something, and that’s how they got to be billionaires in the first place.

Pepper Culpepper: And then they think, like all of us who are good at something, that that goodness at something spills over into everything else. You know, everyone thinks—you probably think you’re a better than average driver, but that’s not true. We’re good at one thing.

Andrew Keen: I’m a terrible driver, my wife always tells me I’m a dreadful driver.

Pepper Culpepper: Well, spouses are good for accountability. So we think that the place to start is getting people out of politics in a big way and sort of reclaiming democracy as a public space.

Pepper Culpepper: And you can have a debate about hospitals and universities, but they’re both places that are desperately hungry for money and do we want to cut off all these people who are making benefactions which are often quite welcome? Do we want to say we’re going to cut that off and suffer that bad, or do we want to say the place we should really be starting is where we sort of make our own democratic rules and they should not have special rights in the public sphere about how much they can say and which messages get touted to everyone else? That’s where I think we need to start. We can all point fingers at being supported by billionaires and how that may undermine our ability to be credible, but I think the core is that people have to make their own rules and that’s what happens in democracy, so we have to start there.

Andrew Keen: Yeah, I would suggest that your school should be called the Pepper Culpepper School of Government.

Pepper Culpepper: [laughs] Thank you very much, I will certainly suggest that to my Dean.

Andrew Keen: Suggest that to Len Blavatnik. And finally, finally, it just popped into my mind, what about the Sackler scandal in terms of the pharma industry? Is that something you bring up in the book?

Pepper Culpepper: So we don’t talk about Sackler but merely because there’s not enough space and, you know, that’s a good one too. And I mean the work of journalists is important as well.

Andrew Keen: That's a good one too, and I mean the work of Patrick Radden Keefe is fundamental.

Pepper Culpepper: Yes, so that’s really important for people to see what the problem is of the opioid epidemic and how complicit the companies were. But I think that Sackler—the family and the company has paid and continues to pay, and it continues to be part of the debate that we’re having about how we should be regulating these companies.

Andrew Keen: Well, good stuff, Pepper Culpepper, the author of an important new book, perfectly timed, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy. Congratulations, Pepper, on the show. I think next month we’re going to get your co-author Taeku Lee who teaches at Harvard on the show to talk more Billionaire Backlash. So thank you so much.

Pepper Culpepper: God, thanks for having me on, enjoyed the conversation.

Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We’re on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms, and I’d be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kind of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.