The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire by Hans Greimel, William Sposato

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire by Hans Greimel, William Sposato Named one of the Best Business Books of 2021 by The Wall Street Journal In Japan it's called the "Ghosn Shock"—the stunning arrest of Carlos Ghosn, the jet-setting CEO who saved Nissan and made it part of a global automotive empire. Even more shocking was his daring escape from Japan, packed into a box and put on a private jet to Lebanon after months spent in a Japanese detention center, subsisting on rice gruel. This is the saga of what led to the Ghosn Shock and what was left in its wake. Ghosn spent two decades building a colossal partnership between Nissan and Renault that looked like a new model for a global business, but the alliance's shiny image fronted an unsteady, tense operation. Culture clashes, infighting among executives and engineers, dueling corporate traditions, and government maneuvering constantly threatened the venture. Journalists Hans Greimel and William Sposato have followed the story up close, with access to key players, including Ghosn himself. Veteran Tokyo-based reporters, they have witnessed the end of Japan's bubble economy and attempts at opening Japan Inc. to the world. They've seen the fraying of keiretsu, Japan's traditional skein of business relationships, and covered numerous corporate scandals, of which the Ghosn Shock and Ghosn's subsequent escape stand above all. Expertly reported, Collision Course explores the complex suspicions around what and who was really responsible for Ghosn's ouster and why one of the top executives in the world would risk everything to escape the country. It explains how economics, history, national interests, cultural politics, and hubris collided, crumpling the legacy of arguably the most important foreign businessman ever to set foot in Japan. This gripping, unforgettable narrative, full of fascinating characters, serves as part cautionary tale, part object lesson, and part forewarning of the increasing complexity of doing global business in a nationalistic world.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss ladies and gentlemen entering the ring now your host chris voss whatever man uh we improv something different every time welcome to chris voss show everyone those who haven't met me yet after 13 years, I'm your host. At least that's what it says here on the card.

I'm your host, Chris Voss, and this is the Chris Voss Show podcast. So welcome. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by. Thanks to everyone who's helping the show just do awesome. We're on the cusp of hitting our 13th year at the end of this month. I believe it's either the end of September or the end of August or the beginning of September. And we're just killing it.

Like it's up 30% just this month alone, let alone the doubling and tripling we seem to do every year. It's just amazing to me every day. So we certainly thank you guys for referring to the show, your family and friends. Go to YouTube.com, Fortunes Chris Voss, Goodreads.com, Fortunes Chris Voss, all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, the big LinkedIn newsletter, the big LinkedIn group over there as well. Today we have two amazing authors. It's a two-for-one special value that we're running today. Normally you have one author per show because, you know the authors know a lot we have two for one

so you're getting double the value on this show so if you don't want to listen to the show till the end you won't get double the value uh they are the authors of the book collision course carlos goshen i think if i got that right, and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire, June 22, 2021, this came out. We have Hans Greimel on the show and William Sposato on the show. They're going to be talking to us today about their amazing book, What's Inside. Hans is an award-winning American business journalist based in Tokyo, where he serves as an Asian editor for Automotive News, overseeing coverage from Japan, China, and South Korea.

He's been writing about Nissan and the Alliance for more than a decade and has interviewed Carlos multiple times, the gentleman he wrote about, including a one-time interview after Goshen's arrest. Clearly, that must have been the Oscar timer telling me that my time on stage was up. I'd like to thank my wife and my God. Never mind. I'm just kidding. William is a Tokyo-based correspondent and consultant who's been active in Japan for more than 20 years with senior roles at Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. He's currently a writer and regular contributor to Foreign Policy Magazine. He's also a consultant to corporations and government bodies on economics, corporate issues, and regional diplomacy. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. How are you? Very good, Chris. Thanks for having us.

Yes, thanks very much. Looks like it'll be a fun time. Look forward to it. There you go. I mean, the clock has already struck. So there you go. Somebody's got a grandfather clock or something there. Did I get this right, Goshen? Actually, he pronounces it G-O-N, like a long O sound, like right into the phone or phone. So that's how he's known. But I think in certain corners of the Middle East, it is pronounced the way you're suggesting, but

in the automotive world, it's a long O sound, GONE. So we'll stand with the correction on that. Collision course, Carlos GONE, and the culture wars that upended an auto empire. That'll work for my edit. Thanks for coming to the show. Give us your.com so people can

find you guys on the interwebs. Well, I'm on Twitter at Hans Grimel and you can check out our book on Amazon. It's there under Collision Course. It's the easiest way to find it. There you go.

William? Yeah, that's the best way. Amazon, I do have a site, Spazato Media Training, but mainly we're looking at the main sites for the book. And LinkedIn, of course, I use quite a bit. And LinkedIn was actually part of the saga in how the book came about. Oh, really? That's an interesting story.

I love to hear it. We have a big 120,000 group, LinkedIn group over there and a big newsletter that does well. We like LinkedIn. It's pretty good. So have you guys written a book together before? What brought you guys together for this book? That's a good question. I'll let William take this over because he's the real linchpin here.

He's the genesis of that whole book kickoff. Go ahead. Yeah. So, no, we've never written a book together. And actually, we've known each other for quite a few years here in Japan. Hans used to be with the Associated Press, and now I knew him when he joined Automotive News. And, yeah, an agent got in contact with me, actually. And the Ghosn saga was all in the news and said, can you write a book on this?

And I said, no, I can't write a book on this. I don't know enough about it, but I do know someone who does. So I got in contact with Hans and we talked it over and looked at what each of us thought we could do in terms of a book and contribute in. And the two dovetailed perfectly. So basically you knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. Absolutely. So the book is very much like what we first mapped out in terms of the content. Because the story does tell itself.

It's just a great saga. And there's so much more to it as well. So that's really how the book got started. There you go. It's an astounding story, man. I mean, it's like when you, you know, the first time it blew onto my radar was, you know, when he gets escaped or, you know, taken or expatriated in a box on a plane, you know, and it just hit the news everywhere. And then you just started hearing about it. You're just like, this is like a movie script. Like who wrote this it's crazy so i think that's what put him on the radar screen for a lot of people worldwide was that daring escape that he had in a box from japan um but you know even before that the story itself was just wild it was a classic rise and fall of a all-star

international executive suddenly picked up at the airport one day out of the blue and accused of all kinds of financial misconduct going back for a decade. So even before the escape, the story was wild and unbelievable. Yeah, and I think at one point he was either almost a billionaire or a billionaire. I don't know about his total net assets, but I think in terms of salary, he wasn't quite at a billionaire level, but he probably had aspirations to get as close as he could. I think if I recall, he was negotiating a deal to get paid an enormous sum that would

have put him close to that. So give us an overview of the book, the picture that you guys paint in the book of this gentleman. Well, I mean, we start off just telling the story of his rise and fall. I mean, he was quite one of the most famous automotive executives in the world and still is. He was a transformational character in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was a pioneer in things like consolidation of the industry, the drive for massive scale.

He was a pioneer of electric vehicles. He was also a pioneer of autonomous vehicles. He was the first CEO to run two Fortune 500 companies at the same time. And he parachuted into Nissan at the tender age of 45 years old, and basically saved a national icon from the scrap heap. So by the time right on the eve of his arrest, he had basically cobbled together what became the world's largest automotive group or consortium. It had Mitsubishi nissan and renault together and they were sending selling in excess of 10 million vehicles a year to make it the biggest automotive

group on the planet it's just crazy i mean he he's he's doing what just about any fortune 500 you know ceo would do in america and uh where does he go where does he go wrong he's i think he he lives a kind of a vault a vaulted life for like 10 20 years or something yeah you're yeah you're right i mean the arrest came out of the blue and and and at the time he was thinking about how to um knit the these this alliance a little bit closer together because it was a concern about legacy. What would happen after he leaves the scene? He was already 64 at the time of his arrest. And, you know, retirement was right around the corner.

So even a workhorse like Carlos Ghosn can't stay working forever. And the concern was, how can they keep these companies together in what was then a loose alliance to keep working after he's gone? Because he had always positioned himself as the essential element, basically, the one missing link that kind of held the whole company together. Without him, the concern was, well, maybe they'll go flying apart and this whole automotive empire will just crumble. So that was where we were at the time of his arrest. Now, you guys write in the book about how Carlos had an un-Japanese management style and that it was tolerated. Why was that? I know that Japanese, I think, used to have a kind of real rigid, kind of a military sort of employment style, didn't they?

Well, the word used to is probably not quite accurate. A lot of Japanese companies are still very hierarchical. Wow. The boss tells you what to do. Now, Gon wasn was amazing. When he came to Japan in 1999, anyone driving a Nissan today, it wouldn't be there if it weren't for Carlos Ghosn because the company was probably going to go under at that point. They were in serious, serious financial trouble. And this was a huge shock to Japan, which had been used to in the 1980s, to really rising up and becoming the world's provider of electronics, goods, automobiles, et cetera. And here was their number two automaker now in huge trouble. And Ghosn was actually quite

smart. He had never worked in Asia before. And he came in, as you say, to this very hierarchical Japanese corporate structure. And he seemed to have an instinct on what rules he needed to keep to and which rules he could break. And so he brought his own style to this and it obviously succeeded hugely. So as Han said, it's a 19-year saga. For the first 17 and a half years, it was all going brilliantly. Wow. And so he's basically, you know, he kind of knows where to bend the rules and get things done.

He had $60 billion in value to Nissan, which is quite extraordinary, actually. And there's some Japanese who say, well, you know, no matter what he did, we have to remember that he had, you know, gave, you know, created all of this wealth. So for any CEO to be able to turn around and say, look, look at the wealth I created. And that is one of the points that Ghosn makes in his defense.

Do you think that he would have been prosecuted if he'd been an American CEO? Well, that's an interesting point. And one of the topics that we address in our book Collision Course is the kind of relevance or the relativity of the laws in Japan versus the United States versus other jurisdictions and how similar actions can come under different scrutiny in different places. You know, in the United States, if we look at one of the the accusations against Ghosn, which was the deferred compensation accusation in the United States that was handled as a civil matter by the FSA, is it? No, that's the SEC. And he was simply handed a fine for that. But in Japan, on the other hand, it was a criminal matter with a prison sentence, a possible prison sentence attached to it of up to 15 years. So the severity of the action or the accusation varies across different jurisdictions. So it's doubtful whether a white-collar executive like Ghosn would have been taken to court or dragged before a criminal case with the penalty of prison time held over his head in a place like the United States.

Yeah, he should probably just run for president in America, because it seems to work for some of the people here that get away with everything. Yeah, the legal differences are quite something. There is some view internationally that the U.S. is too light on white-collar criminals. But on the other hand, does Japan really understand the complexities of doing business? Yeah. There was a trial of his lieutenant, Greg Kelly. And in the trial, the prosecutors made a big deal over lawyers' statements from Fort on Kelly's side that they were looking for loopholes on various issues. And for the Japanese prosecutors, the word loophole was enough to suggest sort of nefarious doings.

So there was a real clash. I mean, that's why we call it collision course. There was a real clash of corporate sensibilities here over what's done in Japan versus what's done in the U.S. At the same time, there are Japanese executives who can't go back to the U.S. because they're charged with crimes there for things that probably would not be criminal actions here in Japan. So it cuts both ways. Yeah, and I probably should do a summation for people, those who are not aware. Do one of you want to do the summation of what happened with him getting expatriated that hit the news

and where he's at now and that or do you want me to do it sure I can bring the listeners up to speed on that well we had him up in 2018 where he was at the top of his game at the top of the industry

a legend a walking living legend And he was here for a regular business meeting and he was picked up at the airport upon landing and taken directly to the biggest prison jail detention center here in Tokyo. And he spent 130 days in confinement over a period of months. And eventually he was released on bail and he was preparing to fight what was by all accounts would be like the biggest business trial in, you know, in Japan's history, putting a foreign CEO of a Japanese iconic company on trial for criminal, possibly putting him in prison after having saved the company. And it looked like he was going to prepare to face trial and prove his innocence in court.

And suddenly, over a New Year's weekend from 2019 to 2020, he announces that, by the way, I've slipped out of Japan and I'm now safe and sound in Lebanon. And because he has Lebanese citizenship, they won't extradite him back to Japan. So he slipped out of Japan in a daring escape. Late night, he went on with the help of literally a former U.S. Green Berets. He arranged an escape plan where he dashed halfway across the country on the bullet train

and packed himself into a crate at a packing box for like audio equipment at a hotel they wheeled him secretly onto a private jet that was at the osaka airport and they flew him to turkey where he changed changed planes and flew to lebanon and um and uh japan will never forgive him for humiliating the justice system in that way. Oh, and then he thumbs his nose at them in Peru. He's like, no. He's like, yeah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. And then freezes. His justification for it was that he had, his quote was,

I have not fled justice. I have escaped injustice and political persecution. So he really, yeah, thumbed his nose at them and and um was a massive humiliation to the japanese system it caught them completely off guard and that's where he lives to this day uh trying to resuscitate his reputation wow that's the same language i use on my last five divorce decrees um the uh political persecution, damn it. I don't know what that means. It's a joke, people.

Um, so, and France is after him too, right? That's right. Yeah. Wow. And now they have their own arrest warrant out for him. So I think at one point he harbored a hope that he might be able to return to France where he also has citizenship. But, uh, going back to France now, uh, poses its own set of, uh he also has citizenship. But going back to France now poses its own set of risks. Wow.

So what are the allegations against him that you guys write about in the book? And did you guys get a chance to interview him? Yes, we interviewed him for the book. And, you know, I first met him, I think, in 2007. So I've been covering him over the years on my day job, which is being the Asia editor here in Tokyo for Automotive News. And so, you know, I've watched him develop over the course of more than a decade now, interviewed him multiple times over that period. And, yeah, I just it um an interesting development of the the personality you could say at the end of his career or at the end of these years he was kind of becoming more distracted

he wasn't as focused on the day-to-day operations of the companies as he uh used to be, you know, with the reputation of being a hands-on active manager. He was seen by some as kind of the emperor with no clothes. No one could tell him no. The oversight of him was lax. He kind of, no one was brave enough to challenge him because he had been in the position of power for so long that he was kind of the emperor, so to speak. And that's why you see a lot of the oversight or the corporate governance issues crop up around Nissan in particular, because he just didn't have the oversight that you would have at a lot of more international companies, especially those in the United States.

Wow. So what did you guys find in your research on him? Was he a victim of power, or was he trying to cash in a little too much, or where was it? Probably both. I mean, we do know that there was a conspiracy, if you want to call it that, to get rid of him.

Oh, really? At the trial that came out, the three sort of mid-level senior executives had gotten together, had decided Ghosn was dangerous and went to the prosecutors. So they didn't even go to the board of directors of Nissan. They went straight to the prosecutors. Who originally said, well, you don't have enough here.

Go find more. Serious. I did not know about this. And so the prosecutors at first said, no, you don't have enough information here. So here you had this group within Nissan all looking around to try and find new charges against the boss. Wow. And they finally persuaded the prosecutors. Now, Ghosn will tell you it's a political setup,

that basically he was being pushed out by certain elements within Nissan who were working with certain elements within the Japanese government who thought that Ghosn was now potentially going to merge Nissan with Renault, and therefore Japan would lose one of its most famous companies. Oh, wow. And so that was, from Ghosn's perspective, the motivation for what happened. But you guys found it was really kind of an inside hit job, basically. Well, that was one part of it.

But on the other hand, was he actually guilty of the allegations? And guilt becomes very tricky. In the book, we call it the gray world of white-collar crime. So some of the things that Ghosn is alleged to have done probably wouldn't have been that big an issue in other countries such as the U.S. But on the other hand, you know, they were prosecuted in Japan at a very high level. And there's always this question of, you know, this is the way things are done. So the initial charges were that Ghosn had sort of hidden salary that was not disclosed. It was a very technical charge that basically Ghosn's real

compensation was not in the annual filings that they have to make to Japanese regulators. So that was sort of charge number one. And that went into a lot of, you know, little details about, you know, letters and was he going to have a consulting gig with the company after he retired. And then other more serious charges have never really come out in full light. All we know is what's from the prosecutors, leaks, various reports. And those are always, you know, to be suspect to some extent. But the case seems to be building. Hans really went into the other two charges more fully, and they're quite complex.

Maybe you could explain them a little better than I can. Well, yeah, there are two other, there are a lot of charges against Goen and lots of all kinds of wrongdoing or misuse or misconduct. Now, in Japan, only there are basically three issues that only rose to the level of the prosecutors that were taken to court or that ended in indictments. Those are the deferred compensation, the kind of like not fully reporting how much he's being compensated. But there are two more breach of trust allegations, which involve millions of dollars that were allegedly misused, that company monies misused by Ghosn for his personal use. And those are the serious charges that really haven't been aired in court.

And those charges are also mirrored in the more recent charges leveled in France. Apparently, they seem to believe that Ghosn was doing the same thing at Renault as he was doing at Nissan. And that's what they're after him for in, apparently after him for in France as well. Now, on top of that, there are all kinds of other misconduct things that didn't even rise to the level of the prosecutor's office. And those include taking big bonuses at various subsidiaries that were under his watch, excessive expense accounts, handlings, taking special, basically mishandling and taking inappropriate payouts from a stock-linked award system. All these kind of things are a huge pile of accusations that didn't even rise to the level of prosecution,

but created a feeling within the Nissan of kind of just abuse of the system expenses for a private and family oriented airline ticket so that is kind of what triggered the the the inside click down this rabbit hole of looking for ways to snag going well this shows don't be cheap because, I mean, the initial allegation or the problem was that Nissan had an in-house travel agent. And, you know, any of us that work at a company, you always think when you book a ticket that the company, you know, the company price is much too high and I can do better than that. So Ghosn was being charged for some of these family tickets. And he went to the guy and he said, you're overcharging me. This is ridiculous. I want a refund. And so the guy said, well, no, this is

what we paid. There's no way around it. And so his own little unit was now going to suffer a loss because of this. And so he was all upset. So he went to one of the guys who later became one of the sort of co-conspirators and said, look, I've got this problem. And he went to one of the guys who later became one of the sort of co-conspirators and said, look, you know, I've got this problem, you know, and he was very upset as you would be, you know, in Japanese, take these things very, very seriously. And so that's sort of what started the ball rolling. Wow. It's always, you know, you just push a little too far. You guys write that he was ultimately accused of secretly setting aside $80 million for himself in deferred compensation to be paid out after he retired. I think that was also in

the wording of my last nine divorces. I mean, was that illegal? I mean, it seems like in America, that would be fine, but I don't know. Everything's illegal here, but it shouldn't be or should be. I don't know. One of those two. Well, it's illegal if you don't report it. Ah, there you go. And so the question was very technical. The question was, was this money that was promised to him?

Or as he claims, was it just, no, I was going to get it, you know, potentially an $80 million consulting gig with the company because I'm so valuable. And indeed, he was valuable to Nissan. And so there was a trial of more than three months of one of his lieutenants that dragged on and on on this very question, whether the letters that were written and the contracts that were drawn up represented true compensation. Wow. Wow.

There was an American executive, a board member, actually, who was arrested on the same night with Ghosn. They were both lured to Japan together, arrested at separate airports in Tokyo. The American was stuck in Japan after Ghosn left. His name is Greg Kelly, and he had to face trial all alone. So the prosecutors had expected to make Ghosn the main focus of the trial, but instead they were left with this consolation prize of just having to put on his American lieutenant, who in the end, I might say, was found guilty and given a suspended sentence on only one of the eight years that he was charged with misconduct for. So the judge seemed to buy into Kelly's defense quite readily.

But at the same time, in announcing the verdict, the judge was very clear that if Ghosn had been there himself, he would definitely have been found guilty. His work was focused as much on Ghosn or even more so on Ghosn than it was on Kelly, the actual defendant in the courtroom. That is some wild stuff. This has got to be a movie. I would watch it. The whole

thing is just, everything I ever learn about it, and the more I hear about it, the more it's just like, you just, what's that old thing about Hollywood? Truth is stranger than fiction. There's some things you just can't write because life writes it itself. You guys talk about how more than 97% of the cases that go to

trial, prosecutors win. I wish we had that here. Actually, the U.S. numbers are not that far off. It's a misconception. At the federal level in the U.S are not that far off. It's a misconception. Yeah. At the federal level in the U S it's around 90, 95%. Really?

Most people, most people cop a plea. That's true. What you see on TV is not at all realistic of any judicial system. Most of it is done by plea bargain deals, uh, which don't actually exist in Japan, which is part of the reason for the difference and why, uh and why there's so much pressure for people to confess. And that was one of the things about pre-trial detention, that people are locked up until they basically confess to the crime. And that's what gets the conviction rate so high.

Do you feel like the Japanese court system would have definitely thrown the book at him then based on what that judge was going on about? Yeah. I mean, I think the court system here is a lot different from, from the United States. For example, if you're in prison or in detention, pretrial detention,

the prosecutors can come in as often as they want and interview you and interrogate you without your lawyer present. Really? Yeah. So there's these very fundamental liberties and rights that we have in the United States aren't aren't taken for granted, aren't even thought of here in Japan. The rules for sharing evidence are, you know, very different as well. Greg Kelly, the American who was stood trial after after going left, was given boxes and boxes of documents as evidence literally just days before the trial. And even now he's still receiving boxes of evidence from the from the prosecutors after the trial is over so these are you know he is basically fighting the the case with one hand behind his

back because he didn't have the full set of evidence holy crap so you can imagine and that was kind of the small fish uh that the prosecutors were after so you can imagine the kind of hardball they would play with the real target, someone like Gollum. That sounds almost like New York police precincts when they used to interview suspects with a phone book. Big old yellow pages. If you don't know that joke, you can go see. What's the movie with Al Pacino?

Anyway. No, but there is in new york the the perp walk is very similar so is it you know prosecutors will selectively leak things in new york when i was reporting there uh they would do what's called the perp walk where they arrest someone in a high profile case and they want a picture of that suspect in handcuffs being brought out of the precinct to go to jail and so uh they can't expect the media to wait around all day so you can call up the pr office in the new york city police and ask them when's the guy going to get walked and they'll tell you what the time and therefore all the cameras are ready and the implication is clear this person must be guilty look he's being clearly carried out in handcuffs so prosecutors are not always

the most reliable people and there've been there were actually some big cases of fraud here in japan that really shocked the nation wow about prosecutorial misconduct yeah serpico was the movie al pacino reference i was looking for there so So there's that. No one knows what I'm talking about because clearly it's an old movie. But yeah, I mean, there was an old thing, I guess, in the 70s where in New York they would use the phone book to get your confession out of you. So that's what that joke's about um so what do you guys think do you guys think he did it or he didn't do it do you think he should have went to jail or do you want to comment on that i don't know i figured i'd put you on the spot hans can go first and we're just doing this for fun boys so you don't have to throw down if you don't want well the first thing i'll have to say is that i'm not a judge i'm not privy to the full raft of evidence that's out there. I don't know the legal, the full legal implications and ins and outs of all the laws that he is accused of breaking.

So I can't come up with a conclusion here on his guilt factor. You know, on one sense, where there's smoke there's fire he fled and didn't decide not to stand trial after saying that he could he would prove himself innocent but there's mates in in the japanese eyes of japan uh that just proves his his guilt on the flip side he says he fled a system of injustice because he can't get a fair trial in Japan. And from an American point of view, it's hard to argue with that because the system here is very different. Now, Greg Kelly skated by. He stayed and he stood his ground and he defended himself as best he could.

And he got a six month suspended sentence and then was allowed to go back to the United States. So he's back home right now. But he lost three years of his life basically trying to fight the allegations here in Japan. And it now is basically financially strapped because of all the legal rules. He's appealing the one guilty verdict that he had. And the prosecutors here, that's another difference, are also appealing the non-guilty verdict And the prosecutors here, that's another difference, are also appealing the non-guilty verdicts because prosecutors here can keep you basically strapped to the legal system by even appealing non-guilty verdicts over and over again and bleeding you dry. So his life is hardly very fun now. And you can imagine that that would be what would be awaiting Ghosn.

Ghosn said that he would basically, because of the legal system here, he would spend the rest of his life in Japan and might even die here because he didn't expect to be found innocent. So I'll put you down for plausible deniability, defense, and possible non-denial denial. So his partner, Mr. Kelly, ends up only getting six months and left off. Do you think they're ever going to get – oh, is France after him? That was the question I had for you. Is France after him as well?

Well, yes, France is after him, but I think from the Japanese point of view, the best thing to do is just to keep him bottled up in Lebanon. I'm sorry. I should have clarified. Greg Kelly. Is France after him too as well? No. Where does Greg Kelly reside? He's American, right?

Yeah, he's American. He's back in Tennessee at his home outside Nashville. There you go. Nashville is where Nissan has its North American headquarters. Do you guys get into the story of the guy who expatriated him, the craziness of that whole thing? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we covered the trial. here last year and both pleaded basically guilty right away. And they were sentenced to jail. So the father and son are still here in jail and prison in Japan. And the father has two years.

I think the son has a year and eight months. So they'll be out before you know it. And then they'll be able to tell their side of the story and maybe play a role in that movie that you talked about. That movie, yeah. Because it was quite extraordinary. The guy was like, he'd spent, I think, at least a decade or two being a, he would go find people that had been taken hostage and free them, I think, or go find people that were trapped in countries and get them out. And so he just kind of thought, like, this would be, to my understanding, he kind of thought this would just be, like, one of those things where you can just, you know, enter

Afghanistan and leave and no one gives a crap. Yeah, I think he got bad legal advice of his own because after he did all this, number one, they sort of leaked their involvement, right? Yeah. For publicity purposes. They're really proud of it. Yeah. And then he goes back and he lives in Massachusetts where, you know, he's obviously findable. And apparently he had been told that this wasn't actually a crime in Japan. Wow.

And as I say, you know, that turned out not to be quite correct. Yeah. So they were very smart at trial. They copped the plea very quickly. They expressed remorse in the Japanese fashion endlessly. The older one cried during the trial about how guilty he felt about all this. And that was, you know,

the right thing to do from their point of view. They were never going to be found innocent. Right. You know, there was the videos, et cetera. And so, you know,

get the sentence down to as much as possible. Japanese was the videos, etc. Get the sentence down to as much as possible. Japanese prisons are tough, but at the same time, they're not Rikers Island. They're safe. There's no inmate-to-inmate violence. There's no drugs. As long as you're

subservient to the guards and do what they want, it's not that bad in existence. So I think they figured they'll just sort of ride it out. That sounds boring. When I want fun, I go to Rikers. But, you know, in a classic episode from the trial, Ghosn had led them to believe that, you know, Ghosn was being tortured in Japan

and that torture was the normal thing in a Japanese jail. And the commando, the former Green Beret, was all up in arms about this and thought he was really doing a service against injustice to save Ghosn from this torture. And then after spending time in jail himself, he was asked in trial, well, what do you think of jails now? Oh, it's not at all like I saw. No torture going on at all.'s not at all like I saw. No torture going on at all. This is much better than I expected. I realized

I was wrong. I was misled. Well, you can figure Carlos has a different view of what represents torture. It's a small room. You have to sit on the floor. Oh, really? And when you have to sit, you have to sit.

You can't lie down. Oh, wow. You can't do exercises in your cell. Wow. It's all very, very regimented. So I can imagine Fragon, you know, used to having his own jet flying around. This was torture in some respects. Yeah.

This sounds like my first seven divorces, actually. It was just a kid. Sometimes we come up with a good callback joke and we just keep abusing it. in some respect. Yeah. This sounds like my first seven divorces, actually. Just kidding. Sometimes we come up with a good callback joke and we just keep abusing it. So I've actually had people write me and they go, how many divorces have you been through? Because the number always changes.

And it's like, that's why it's a joke. I've never been married. So there you go. But no, I think it would be really interesting just to interview those guys when they come out. I mean, the whole way that everybody thumbed a nose at the Japanese, like, no, no, no, no, we got away. You're just like, holy crap. And I think he has to walk around with a security detail, right?

Do you think Japan would ever go in and snatch him? That would be wild. That would be the perfect cap. Yeah, that would be the great ending. Because the story is still open-ended. We don't really have a conclusion to how this story will end, which is somewhat dissatisfying. But you can't imagine, you know, I wouldn't put anything past it. There is past this story because every time we get further into it,

something unexpected happens. So it could happen. He could end up back in France or Japan, but I can't imagine like a team of command, a Japanese commando storming through with like a black helicopter and like hauling them off in a straight jacket or something. I just, that's not the Japanese style.

That happened to me. Just keep them bottled up in, in, in Lebanon and try to forget that this ever happened. There you go. I mean, that happened to my first six marriages, the,

uh, black helicopter stuff. You know, yeah, if we can get a whole Bruce Willis ending there, you know, where I don't know how that works out, but you know,

you'd be crying motherfucker. And the, and the, and the end comes up, you know, that sort of thing might be, I can see that being a great movie. Blow some shit up. You get shit up. Who's that director?

Bring him in. Stuff blows up a few times. You got yourself a... That's at least a billion dollar movie right there. Maybe, I don't know, put Yoda in. You got some Star Wars spin on it. Put Disney on the front of it. You're going to make

gulags of bucks there. Lebanon is not the world's nicest place to be at the moment. That's true. I wasn't going to shame Lebanon, but now that you've done it, it is kind of a prison unto itself. He does have a nice house there. There was an explosion. There was that huge explosion

I believe last summer with the fertilizer ship. His house was damaged in that explosion. Oh, was it? Yeah. They're like, holy crap, they found me. They're coming. But, you know, he's 68 years old now.

He was 64 at the time of his arrest. He's 68 this year. And, you know, he's no spring chicken anymore. So I think, you know, he may just be, you know, just accepting his fate and living his life in Lebanon as best he can with his family. He's teaching some courses, right? He's teaching some courses. He's doing some advisory and consultancy work, he says, for other startups and things in the auto industry and trying to mentor Middle Eastern up-and-coming

business people. So he's trying to rehabilitate his reputation and stay with one foot in the business world. There you go. You know what he reminded me of? He reminded me of Mark Rich. Remember how Mark Rich in the 80s escaped? I was coming up as a stockbroker back then, and he just escapes to Swiss, and they can't extradite him.

He's just like, nah, nah, nah, nah, I got my billions. And then eventually I think his wife paid off Bill Clinton, and he got a pardon. But he escaped them for, I think, two decades or something, U.S. punishment. Crazy stuff, crazy stuff. Well, this is a wild ride, man. And a wild read guys. People are going to love this. Anything we want to tease out more on the book before we go? Um, well, I think it's a fun story. Number one, the going story,

but also we, we tried to capture a lot of Japan, a lot about Hans wrote a huge amount about the auto industry and Nissan's role and the future of it so it sort of goes beyond just the Ghosn saga and we hope it's it's a good book for anyone involved in international business anyone who's obviously thinking of coming to Japan there's some good elements in there for you so that would be sort of my plug for it. There you go. Anything, Hans? Well, we tell the Ghosn story, which has plenty of drama in its own right, but we tell it through the lens of different angles.

We tell it through the collision, the various collisions, the collisions between the countries of Nissan, sorry, of Japan and France. We tell it by the collision of the companies involved, too. We talk about the collision of the different legal systems, the Western system versus the Japan system. And we also talk about the collision going on throughout the automotive industry with all these new technologies, electrification, autonomous driving, and the pressures that it's putting on the players and especially the CEOs who are running these companies

to stay ahead of the new entrants like Tesla and startups from China. So to us, the story is gone because that's where the drama comes through. But there's a lot more drama and tension that's coming through these other collisions that play a big role in the whole story. Yeah, it's just really interesting. And it sounds like you guys cover a lot of Japanese culture in there and why that was a collision. Yes, absolutely.

We talk about Japanese culture, French culture, and how the two played together in terms of how they view corporations. Japan, you know, or I'm sorry, France, you know, was nationalizing companies not too long ago. So there's a different view there, but also some similarities. It's different than the American system by no doubt. It's so funny when you look at Ghosn's behavior compared to U.S. CEOs' payouts and, you know, the extraordinary payouts, you know. Oh, you laid off 40,000 people. Here's $10 billion. This, uh, this, uh, quarter for you or what year I'm being a little bit over the top,

but you know what I mean? And, and different payouts, like somebody does a horrible job. The companies, you know, you look at the, like, for example, look at the WeWork, uh, ex CEO, and he just got like, what was it? $350 million or $330 million from Anderson Horowitz? And I think SoftBank is still losing like billions over that whole deal in their reporting. And you're just like, what the hell is going on? Like, who gives this guy money? And who keeps giving him money? But, you know, welcome to America.

This is what we do. That was part of Ghosn's resentment. He saw those numbers around, and he saw what he was making, and he saw, okay, I added $60 billion, and what's my salary? In some ways, he was in the wrong business. He should have gone into private equity.

Or politics. There you go. It's been wonderful to have you guys on the show, guys. Thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. Yeah, really insightful. People need to read your book, man. It's a hell of a ride, man.

And it's just like, I mean, you couldn't write a Hollywood script this good. Give me your guys' dot coms, your plugs, so people can find you on the interwebs, please. Well, I'm on LinkedIn, and you can find my writing on a daily basis at automotivenews.com. Autonews.com, that is. There you go. And I'm mainly on LinkedIn. I do some work for foreign policy as well, writing about some of the political actions going on here, so you can find my material there as well.

So those are the best two places. There you go. There you go. There you go. And make a note, if I ever want to just make lots of money, I'm going into politics. Anyways, thanks for being on the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Remember, go to wherever fine bookstores are sold, but sales alleyway bookstores.

I got tetanus. I had to take a tetanus shot the other day when I got one. Order it up today. Collision Course, Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars that Upended an Auto Empire. You want to check it out. And like I say, I mean, few stories are as crazy as what this guy goes through. And who knows? You may have a second book. There may be that whole Bruce Willis thing that comes into play with black helicopters

and all that sort of good stuff. What was the old thing we used to do? And we used to take people to Poland and black helicopters or secret prisons that we used to run. I think that was under the Cheney presidency. Anyways, thanks for tuning in. Be sure for the show,

your family, friends, and relatives. Remember the Chris Foss show is the family that loves you, but doesn't judge you. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.