The Art of Manliness - How Power Corrupts

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.360 Why do corrupt people end up in power? 1.00

00:00:13.620 By way of an answer, you probably think of that famous quote from Lord Acton,

00:00:17.200 power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

00:00:21.220 But my guest today, Brian Klass, would say that's only one part of what leads to corrupt

00:00:24.620 individuals and cultures.

00:00:25.680 The other being that people who are already corrupt are more likely to seek power in the

00:00:29.700 first place.

00:00:30.580 Brian argues that if we ever hope to develop better systems from our national governments

00:00:33.920 to our office hierarchies, we have to work on both prongs of this dynamic, not only preventing

00:00:37.960 people who gain power from going bad, but encouraging good people to seek power as well.

00:00:42.360 Brian is the author of Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us.

00:00:45.580 Today on the show, he and I discuss how people who possess the so-called dark triad of traits

00:00:49.420 are more attracted to positions of power, how the framing around those positions can either

00:00:53.440 amplify or alter the self-selection effect, and what a tyrannical homeowners association

00:00:57.800 president and a psychopathic school janitor show us about these dynamics.

00:01:01.680 We also discuss why power does indeed corrupt people and can in fact change their very brain

00:01:05.460 chemistry.

00:01:06.100 Brian explains the importance of accountability and keeping a system clean, and how you can

00:01:09.480 serve in positions of power without being corrupted yourself.

00:01:12.280 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash power corrupts.

00:01:15.860 All right, Brian Klass, welcome to the show.

00:01:32.700 Hey, thanks for having me.

00:01:33.940 So you have made a career for yourself interviewing despots, cult leaders, corrupt CEOs, torturers,

00:01:40.840 criminals.

00:01:41.200 How did that happen when you were 12, where you're like, I want to research human depravity?

00:01:46.080 Like, what was going on there?

00:01:47.540 No, you know, it's funny.

00:01:48.420 So I got interested in politics from a young age because my mom ran for the local school

00:01:52.240 board, which I'm sure I'll talk about later on in the interview.

00:01:54.960 But what ended up happening was I graduated from undergrad.

00:01:59.120 I worked on a political campaign in my home state of Minnesota.

00:02:02.300 Of course, I actually was a bartender before that in New Zealand for a little bit.

00:02:06.020 I started trying to find my way in life and decided to study broken systems because I thought,

00:02:10.900 you know, naively, this is more than a decade ago, I thought, oh, U.S. politics, it sort

00:02:14.960 of just works.

00:02:16.020 So I'll try to study somewhere that's totally, totally broken.

00:02:18.700 And I went off and started doing fieldwork as part of grad school in sub-Saharan Africa,

00:02:23.380 Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, et cetera, and found that the most interesting

00:02:28.780 thing to do is to gravitate towards interviewing some of the worst people in the world.

00:02:33.380 And that's what I ended up doing for the last 10 years and sort of trying to figure out what

00:02:38.940 makes people tick in this sort of depraved world with the hopes that we can eventually

00:02:43.480 stop them from inflicting so much harm on the world.

00:02:46.580 And what you've done in your recent book, Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It Changes

00:02:50.220 Us, is explore this idea.

00:02:52.040 After interviewing all these corrupt people, figure out this question I think people have

00:02:57.080 is, does power corrupt us or do corrupt people gain power?

00:03:02.300 Why do corrupt people seem to gain power? 0.99

00:03:05.040 Before we get to your findings, what do you think are some of the common ideas that people

00:03:11.340 generally have about power and who ends up with it?

00:03:14.600 And when did you start having a hunch that maybe some of our assumptions about power's corrupting

00:03:19.080 influence were off?

00:03:21.180 Yeah, I mean, the most famous thing, and this is something that, you know, to this day when

00:03:25.300 I talk about the fact that I'm a political scientist or that I study power, the standard

00:03:30.420 response people say to me is, oh, yes, I know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts,

00:03:34.020 absolutely.

00:03:34.860 It's the standard thing that you sort of trot out as a witty quote when you're dealing with

00:03:39.340 power at a superficial level.

00:03:40.980 And it is true. 0.71

00:03:41.780 There's an entire chapter of the book that talks about why power corrupts, how it corrupts,

00:03:46.580 how it changes our brain chemistry, our psychology, et cetera.

00:03:49.420 So it's real.

00:03:50.900 But what occurred to me the more that I started to think about this was that, you know,

00:03:54.880 we focus on the powerful and we don't focus on the people who never seek power.

00:03:59.520 So one of the things that was immediately obvious to me when I was interviewing, you

00:04:04.100 know, say a war criminal or a former dictator or, you know, someone who had wielded power

00:04:09.840 in a highly unjust way is that they're not a normal cross-section of the population.

00:04:14.640 And so what I thought was missing from this conversation is what about the people who never

00:04:20.540 seek power?

00:04:21.200 And also what's different about people who are really good at getting power?

00:04:24.840 Because every time that we focus our attention on the sort of tip of the iceberg, the people

00:04:29.320 who actually have power, we're ignoring a much bigger problem, which is that certain kinds 0.98

00:04:33.960 of people are drawn to power in the first place.

00:04:35.980 So the book is trying to sort of do this chicken or egg question, which is, you know, do corruptible

00:04:40.700 people seek power or does power corrupt?

00:04:43.020 And the answer is both.

00:04:45.180 But the real problem is that you have to accurately diagnose each situation according to actually

00:04:52.020 what's happening because otherwise the remedy is totally different, right?

00:04:55.380 In other words, like if an awful person gets power and hasn't been changed by the power

00:05:00.420 itself, then there's a different solution to that problem than if power has turned them

00:05:05.300 bad and they previously were good.

00:05:06.820 So even though both effects are real, figuring out which one is operating in which context

00:05:12.500 is absolutely crucial to making the world a better place.

00:05:15.920 Okay.

00:05:16.000 So before we get to this chicken and egg problem, right?

00:05:19.180 What does power corrupt?

00:05:20.600 Do corrupt people seek power?

00:05:22.340 I think it helps to understand first why humans have a tendency to form societies where

00:05:28.400 there's either one person or a small group of people who have power over a large group

00:05:33.480 of people.

00:05:33.920 Going back to through human history, was this something our hunter-gatherer ancestors did?

00:05:38.240 What did power look like for them?

00:05:40.740 Yeah.

00:05:40.980 So the sort of standard narrative around hunter-gatherers in anthropology and evolutionary biology goes

00:05:47.080 something like this, that for almost all of human history, we lived in small bands of around

00:05:53.400 80 people and societies were structured in a way that was ruthlessly egalitarian.

00:05:58.360 I say ruthlessly because the system was designed to basically cut down anyone to size who tried

00:06:03.600 to seize power for themselves.

00:06:05.620 And this was made possible by the fact that we lived in small groups.

00:06:08.760 So everybody knew each other.

00:06:10.040 I mean, 80 people is not that many.

00:06:12.840 Now, there are some wrinkles in this sort of simplistic narrative that have been emerging

00:06:17.380 in recent years.

00:06:18.280 There's some evidence that there was a little bit more hierarchy than we expected in the

00:06:22.600 past in some pockets and so on.

00:06:24.260 But this is sort of the general idea of what most of the anthropology evidence suggests.

00:06:29.220 And we know this from a few different forms of evidence, including the fact that like burials,

00:06:33.260 for example, for most of human history, don't show any sort of elevated status for individuals.

00:06:39.140 Now, since the sort of period, you know, 10 to 15,000 years ago, where a lot of this changed,

00:06:47.220 there's a few different hypotheses about why power started to get amassed in individuals.

00:06:53.360 And I call them the war and the peas hypothesis, war and peas.

00:06:56.980 And the war hypothesis is basically that as conquest started to take place, it became advantageous

00:07:02.980 to have big groups of people.

00:07:04.180 So if you had more soldiers, you're going to win.

00:07:06.040 And as it became better to have bigger societies, you started to sort of conquer other bands and

00:07:12.380 then absorb them into yours.

00:07:14.320 And all of a sudden, you've got 5,000 people instead of 80, you need some sort of hierarchy.

00:07:19.140 The peas hypothesis is about agriculture.

00:07:21.540 And it basically says, when the agricultural revolution happened, you no longer have to

00:07:25.880 move around to get your food, you can sort of set up shop in a city.

00:07:29.340 And that allows much larger groups of people to sort of put down roots, quite literally.

00:07:34.920 And as a result of that, you end up with larger cities.

00:07:38.120 And with larger cities comes inevitably the rise of hierarchy.

00:07:42.540 But the really big point here, I think, is that the way that we experience the world

00:07:48.860 with bosses above bosses above bosses, everything in society status driven, is extremely unusual

00:07:56.660 in the grand sweep of human history.

00:07:58.540 And I think that's something that's worth keeping in mind because it doesn't necessarily

00:08:02.120 have to be this way.

00:08:03.060 And of course, when it comes to abusive power holders, it absolutely doesn't have to be this

00:08:07.500 way.

00:08:07.640 We can make a better system that produces better outcomes, perhaps with less hierarchy

00:08:12.820 or perhaps just with hierarchy that functions better.

00:08:15.560 Yeah, that's a good point you made.

00:08:16.620 You pointed out that there are advantages of hierarchy because it allows you to get more

00:08:19.700 done, right?

00:08:20.660 If responsibility is diffused amongst the group, you're on the issues of like freeloader problem,

00:08:25.280 like this guy's not doing his thing.

00:08:27.280 But if there's a hierarchy, you can get a lot more done.

00:08:30.520 And the trick is, okay, if you're going to have a hierarchy, how can you organize in a way

00:08:33.760 so that the hierarchy isn't abused?

00:08:36.060 Yeah, I mean, there's a guy named Peter Turchin who I interviewed for the book.

00:08:39.200 He's one of these sort of genius types, really impressive guy who wrote this book called Ultra

00:08:44.620 Society.

00:08:45.360 And one of the quotes he had that stuck with me was he says, we're not ants.

00:08:49.560 We don't have some pheromone system to regulate our behavior.

00:08:52.340 So in order to organize human society, we probably eventually do need hierarchy.

00:08:56.320 It's probably unrealistic to imagine some sort of egalitarian collective involving 192 countries

00:09:04.180 and 8 billion people.

00:09:05.880 So the more pressing question is, does hierarchy always have to come with abuse?

00:09:12.200 And I think the answer is absolutely not.

00:09:14.620 And that's why I wrote this book, because I think there's a lot of ways that we can make

00:09:18.080 seeking power something that's oriented towards service and also ending up with systems in

00:09:25.160 which those people who do abuse their power get thrust out of power rather than promoted.

00:09:30.760 So it's all about sort of tinkering with the system and thinking of our world as this sort

00:09:36.060 of grand experiment where instead of being on autopilot, which I think we have been for

00:09:41.260 quite a long time and how we sort of deal with power in society, we start to actually think

00:09:45.300 about how would we engineer a system that's actually going to produce better leaders and

00:09:49.520 hold people to account when they behave badly.

00:09:51.340 And I don't think that conversation tends to exist.

00:09:53.280 We just tend to gripe about this.

00:09:55.820 It goes back to your question about sort of what people's attitudes are towards power.

00:10:00.240 I mean, the thing is, and this is something that I think like political scientists and

00:10:03.800 business psychologists, all sorts of people should be thinking much more about is like

00:10:08.400 pretty much everybody I talk to is unhappy with the powerful class in society.

00:10:13.600 Like I've never really had a situation where I've talked about my research and they're

00:10:17.420 like, there's no problem.

00:10:19.120 Like it's all going pretty well.

00:10:20.720 I mean, no one says that that should be a wake-up call that we just shouldn't keep

00:10:25.520 doing the same thing over and over and hope that it turns out better.

00:10:28.740 And something you point out in the book, you do a good job, is that these gripes occur

00:10:31.800 not only on the macro level, not only on the nation state level, but you see these gripes

00:10:36.120 occur within businesses, departments in businesses, within homeowners associations, within church

00:10:42.020 congregations.

00:10:43.320 You see people griping about the people in charge.

00:10:45.860 Yeah, I mean, this is a, it's a universal problem and it's not just, you know, even

00:10:50.520 though my research began in rooms with, you know, former dictators and so on, and people

00:10:56.300 who were at the highest echelons, generals in authoritarian societies and all that, what

00:11:00.880 occurred to me in writing this was that the more I would tell people who had, you know,

00:11:06.300 lives back home in the United States or in Britain where I live now about my experiences

00:11:11.460 and I describe these encounters, they would say that personality that you're describing

00:11:15.320 sounds just like the guy who was, you know, the megalomaniac sports coach or the guy who

00:11:21.220 as, as you say, runs my homeowners association.

00:11:23.840 And it sort of gave me a working hypothesis for the book, right?

00:11:26.580 That there's like, there's something about power that's worth studying, not just about

00:11:30.720 these sort of extremely high echelons that we tend to think of and that make headlines

00:11:35.460 that actually there's a sort of syndrome around power that operates even on the small

00:11:41.260 stages of hierarchy and authority.

00:11:43.620 And I think that's borne out.

00:11:44.740 I mean, I, I did try to find people and I describe, you know, a psychopathic janitor in

00:11:50.400 one of the chapters.

00:11:51.140 I said, I describe a megalomaniac homeowners association who's obsessed with palm trees being

00:11:57.520 trimmed just the right way.

00:11:58.820 And the, the gravel in the area being not imported from out of state.

00:12:02.780 I mean, we all sort of have in our mind's eye, somebody like this in our life.

00:12:06.900 Like everybody I've talked to about with this book, when I describe my work, they always

00:12:11.820 come up with, Oh, that's this guy.

00:12:13.320 You know, it's, it's this person I used to have to deal with and thank God, you know,

00:12:17.320 I never have to deal with that person again because I've just cut my losses.

00:12:21.340 It's a universal human experience.

00:12:23.040 And I think, I don't think I'm, I'm not naive enough to say we can eliminate those sort of

00:12:28.780 universal human experiences of power abusers.

00:12:30.920 It's just that we can curtail how often we encounter them.

00:12:34.580 And I think that, you know, even if we made this 20% better, the scale of human suffering

00:12:41.740 and frustration that it would reduce would be absolutely enormous and transformative.

00:12:46.760 So I think it's definitely worth, worth doing, even if we can only curb the problem rather

00:12:50.400 than eliminating it.

00:12:51.120 All right.

00:12:51.480 So let's dig in more to like why it seems like just bad people end up in power.

00:12:55.860 And the first prong of this idea is that power or positions of authority attract a certain

00:13:02.000 type of person.

00:13:02.740 So there's like a selection bias going on.

00:13:04.880 So what does your research say about the type of person that's attracted to positions of

00:13:08.520 power and authority?

00:13:10.560 Yeah.

00:13:11.060 So I think there's a, there's a few things to say here.

00:13:13.240 First off, you know, when we describe someone who's power hungry, it's always a bad thing,

00:13:17.680 but power hungry by definition is what you're describing when you're saying who is seeking power in

00:13:23.260 a competitive environment, somebody who's ambitious and power hungry is more likely to throw their

00:13:28.480 hat in the ring to apply for a job, a promotion to become a dictator.

00:13:32.440 And I think, you know, it's, it's really easy to understand the sort of selection bias without

00:13:37.260 being a social scientist.

00:13:38.420 I mean, you think about if you go to a high school basketball tryout, you would be completely

00:13:43.640 baffled if the average student at that high school basketball tryout was of average medium

00:13:49.700 height, right?

00:13:50.380 There's a self-selection effect that tall kids go towards basketball and the same thing

00:13:55.300 happens with power.

00:13:56.120 You have certain traits that self-select towards these positions more than others.

00:13:59.500 One of them is obviously those people who are power hungry, but there's also what I describe

00:14:03.220 in the book is what's called the dark triad, which is this sort of destructive chemical

00:14:07.640 cocktail of personality traits of Machiavellianism, sort of the ends justifies the means types

00:14:13.640 people, highly strategic thinkers, and then second, secondly, narcissists and thirdly, psychopathy

00:14:20.600 or being a psychopath.

00:14:21.840 And those three traits in common form something called the dark triad.

00:14:27.200 And those people are obsessed with power and they're very, very good at getting it.

00:14:32.220 So, you know, that's on the extreme end, right?

00:14:34.900 These are the people who are disproportionately likely to seek power, get it, and then wield

00:14:38.500 it with immense destructive potential.

00:14:41.100 There's also just something about the systems that we inhabit that amplify the self-selection

00:14:46.700 effect in really awful ways.

00:14:48.520 So, you know, when you think about those systems that involve public service and they're quite

00:14:55.520 clearly are designed to serve the public, like if you're a librarian, you don't have people

00:15:01.140 who are power hungry librarians because everybody knows that the job is not about sort of being

00:15:06.160 a megalomaniac.

00:15:06.880 It's about helping people.

00:15:08.400 And so the way you portray positions of power, I think is really, really important.

00:15:11.680 And there's a section of the book I talk about this with in terms of policing that I think

00:15:16.000 illustrates the point best of all, and it's basically looking at how recruitment for policing

00:15:21.760 operates.

00:15:23.160 And I found some quite different examples of this internationally.

00:15:26.320 So in the U.S., there is an ad that was put up on the Doraville, Georgia Police Department

00:15:31.260 website, now taken down, that shows the Punisher logo first, right?

00:15:36.080 A vigilante, a guy who basically captures criminals and then tortures them, and then shows these

00:15:41.460 guys in military fatigues in a literal tank screaming into view.

00:15:46.000 With death metal on screen, the sort of hatch opens, they throw out a smoke grenade, they've

00:15:50.180 got assault weapons, and then the Punisher logo comes back on screen.

00:15:55.000 And you sort of think, you know, like, what kind of person says that's exactly what job

00:16:00.000 I want?

00:16:00.500 Well, I mean, you know, like militaristic people who like the idea of sort of being viewed as

00:16:06.000 soldiers in an occupying army, not public service police officers.

00:16:08.960 And in New Zealand, they recognized this self-selection problem and deliberately designed advertising

00:16:16.180 recruitment schemes aimed at counteracting it.

00:16:18.640 Not because they didn't want people with military experience, they just figured they're going

00:16:21.560 to sign up anyway.

00:16:22.820 But because they thought, you know, we can counteract some of this self-selection by making policing

00:16:27.540 look more service-oriented.

00:16:29.420 So they designed this recruitment scheme with videos called, Do You Care Enough to Be a Cop?

00:16:35.360 And in one set of videos, there's a hungry boy walking around a city in New Zealand with

00:16:40.540 hidden cameras around to see who stops to help him.

00:16:43.920 And the implication is, if you're one of the people who would stop to help this boy, you

00:16:48.140 should sign up to be a cop.

00:16:49.360 And lo and behold, you know, what happened was quite predictable.

00:16:53.140 The diversity in terms of the people who applied for the police expanded dramatically.

00:16:58.500 The types of personality profiles changed.

00:17:00.820 They were much more public service-oriented.

00:17:02.660 The relationship between the police and various communities improved significantly and levels

00:17:07.400 of police violence decreased.

00:17:09.200 And it's not rocket science, right?

00:17:11.720 It's like if you set up a system of power to appearing to be oriented towards service, people

00:17:17.020 who are oriented towards service are going to apply for it.

00:17:19.560 And I think, unfortunately, in a lot of the modern world, the trappings of power, the

00:17:23.040 status symbols, the sort of fame, all these things, they put those self-selection effects

00:17:29.120 I described earlier on steroids and make sure that the people who are power-hungry are far

00:17:34.060 more likely to self-select into those positions of power in the first place.

00:17:37.200 And so, you know, to me, the thing that we get wrong about power that we really have to

00:17:42.040 think about is what I said at the beginning of this idea of just focusing on the tip of the

00:17:45.860 iceberg.

00:17:46.400 If we only analyze who the powerful people are and how they behave, and we don't think about

00:17:51.720 the people who don't end up trying to become more powerful in our societies, we're missing

00:17:56.420 like 90% of the problem.

00:17:58.360 Because the problem isn't to make bad people behave better.

00:18:02.640 It's to make good people want to seek power in the first place.

00:18:05.780 And I think, you know, the thing that really alarms me in modern society is that becoming

00:18:10.780 powerful comes with lots of risks.

00:18:12.400 I mean, you know, think about running for political office.

00:18:14.980 It's a vile cesspool. 0.99

00:18:16.960 Like most people listening to this would never in a million years consider running for office

00:18:21.960 because they're like, I don't want to destroy my life.

00:18:24.280 I don't want to constantly have to raise money.

00:18:25.900 I don't want to have to pretend that I believe things that I don't believe.

00:18:29.120 And all of those things, which now have become, you know, part and parcel of being a modern

00:18:34.540 politician, they're going to repel exactly the kind of person that we want to be a modern

00:18:39.260 politician.

00:18:39.680 And all the people who love the power, the money, the fame, and don't really care about

00:18:44.760 having to ask for money or pretend that they believe stuff they don't, those people are

00:18:49.420 going to, you know, make a beeline to run for office.

00:18:51.480 And so, you know, my big worry about this is that we've constructed a society in which

00:18:56.560 public service oriented people just bow out.

00:18:59.900 They just don't, they don't think about this.

00:19:01.640 And it goes back to what I was talking about with the school board member mom that I have.

00:19:06.140 She used to be a school board member and she sort of inspired me to, to get

00:19:09.660 interested in politics.

00:19:10.820 I mean, even today, like you see videos of school board members who are getting death

00:19:15.820 threats, who are getting their, their children sometimes get like harassed outside of schools.

00:19:19.960 It's like, this is totally crazy.

00:19:22.220 And it didn't used to happen, uh, in the 1990s when I was growing up and there was, you know,

00:19:26.800 the sort of the big dramas in the, in the school board locally were, you know, about union

00:19:31.780 pay disputes or, you know, some parents who's upset that evolution is being taught in school,

00:19:36.880 but not like death threats, you know?

00:19:38.980 So, so I think, I think we also have to think really carefully about how we can make power

00:19:43.120 attractive to the kinds of people who currently think it would be a terrible burden that they

00:19:49.000 don't want to touch with the 10 foot pole.

00:19:50.780 Well, yeah, you can see this again on a micro level.

00:19:52.500 I want to talk about this homeowner association guy being a homeowner association president

00:19:56.620 sounds like the most thankless job ever.

00:19:58.600 Right.

00:19:59.080 Cause you're just basically, you're dealing with neighbors snipping at each other and

00:20:03.500 like, well, this guy did this with his, his fence.

00:20:05.600 And I don't like that.

00:20:06.460 And this guy is putting his garbage cans out at the wrong time.

00:20:09.320 And he's got his RV out and like that's, and then you don't really get thanked for

00:20:13.500 it.

00:20:13.920 And so you have people who's like, I don't want to be homeowners association president.

00:20:17.680 And so there's a power vacuum.

00:20:19.340 And so it's going to attract people with these dark triad personalities who are power hungry, 0.98

00:20:23.480 narcissistic Machiavellian.

00:20:24.960 And this happened, this homeowner association, Arizona, tell us about this guy.

00:20:28.860 Cause it just sounds, everyone loves, loves to complain about their HOA.

00:20:32.720 This is like on steroids.

00:20:34.320 What happened with this thing?

00:20:35.740 Yeah.

00:20:36.400 So, you know, I, I talked to a guy who I had to change all the names for, you know,

00:20:40.740 for legal reasons in this, but I talked to this guy who went through the saga from hell

00:20:46.660 of homeowners associations.

00:20:48.040 And what you describe is right.

00:20:49.160 And it's worse though, than just being thankless.

00:20:51.300 It's actually like actively bad because you have to police your neighbors on things that

00:20:57.660 are totally inconsequential.

00:20:59.040 Like when they put their trash bins out and like how they're mowing their grass and all

00:21:03.160 this type of stuff, which attracts a certain type of control freak. 0.97

00:21:06.160 Right.

00:21:06.460 So, so in this specific example, it's a homeowners association in Arizona, you know, reasonably

00:21:11.400 small community, nobody really wants to do the job.

00:21:14.440 And all of a sudden this guy just emerges out of the woodwork and is like really, really

00:21:19.480 excited to do the job, which is like the alarm bell should be going off at this point.

00:21:23.640 Right.

00:21:24.080 And he starts basically consolidating power, purging the homeowners association and all

00:21:29.200 the other people are like, yeah, like we don't really want to be here anyway.

00:21:32.120 So if you want to like replace us, that'd be great.

00:21:34.140 But you know, unfortunately for them, the people he replaced him with were like his cronies

00:21:38.680 who were like subservient to him, never challenging his power.

00:21:41.800 And he started to target these individuals by name in various newsletters.

00:21:47.080 And I've read like dozens of these newsletters that they were sent to me so I could verify

00:21:50.760 all this information.

00:21:52.040 And they're like the craziest, nuttiest thing.

00:21:54.440 I mean, it's, it's all these like all caps things insinuating.

00:21:58.400 There's some like plot out to like not trim their palm fronds to sufficient code and so

00:22:04.900 on.

00:22:05.140 And then when, when these people start to stand up to him and say, we're going to try to

00:22:08.580 boot you out of the HOA because you've become this power hungry tyrant, he develops all these

00:22:13.880 new rules that begin to target them specifically, you know, going after the kinds of gravel they

00:22:18.820 have in their yard, a rock at one point gets thrown through their window and they suspect

00:22:24.740 it's this guy who's behind it.

00:22:26.580 I mean, it's, it's just, it's utterly bizarre.

00:22:29.060 And what's been interesting in writing the book is, is, you know, I, I found this, this

00:22:34.420 story and talked to this person and thought, you know, this is quite a bizarre situation.

00:22:39.880 It's actually the thing that I've gotten the most emails about, I would say, since the

00:22:44.440 book came out is like these people unloading their HOA stories on me.

00:22:48.900 And I'm like, you know, I, I, it's not like my professional job to like be an HOA chronicler.

00:22:54.080 It's just like part of a book I wrote about power, but these people are venting because they're

00:22:58.480 like, finally someone has captured the fact that like we have neighborhood tyrants who

00:23:04.440 are ruining our lives.

00:23:05.580 And I think this is an under scrutinized world because, um, they actually control a lot of

00:23:11.120 money in the United States.

00:23:12.260 I mean, the actual number of amount of assets controlled by HOAs is mind boggling.

00:23:17.520 I think the number is something like the equivalent of the state of Florida's tax revenue.

00:23:22.220 So you're talking about a lot of really power hungry, busybodies controlling a lot of money.

00:23:28.020 Now, if you're, if there are any HOA presidents out there listening to this, I'm not saying

00:23:32.460 that you are a power hungry individual.

00:23:34.680 It's more that there's a disproportionate selection effect.

00:23:37.660 Anytime that you have a job that is actively policing people on the most trivial stuff, unpaid

00:23:44.200 and voluntary, and the self-selection effect I think tends to go on steroids in those environments.

00:23:49.820 And that's why I think, uh, modestly as a proposal, I might suggest if you want better people

00:23:54.960 in HOAs, uh, you might want to pay them a little bit.

00:23:57.980 So at least you're not just getting the person who gets off on the power of policing their

00:24:01.980 neighbor's trash cans.

00:24:03.140 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:24:07.660 And now back to the show.

00:24:09.520 Well, another trait of people who are power hungry is psychopathy.

00:24:13.880 And you saw this again, this is like a really small scale.

00:24:16.840 This is this janitor who basically became Tony Soprano in the school district.

00:24:22.060 What's that story?

00:24:23.020 Like what happened there?

00:24:23.720 Like how was he able to accumulate so much power in the school district?

00:24:28.920 Yeah.

00:24:29.100 So this guy's name is Steve Rauchy and I don't have to change his name because he's been convicted

00:24:33.140 of crimes and is in prison.

00:24:34.480 So Steve Rauchy was someone who perhaps had modest ambitions by most people's standards.

00:24:40.820 He was a janitor at the Schenectady New York state high school, and he wanted to be a sort

00:24:47.020 of kingpin in the school district maintenance office.

00:24:50.060 So he systematically set about to achieve this through incredibly Machiavellian scheming.

00:24:56.100 One of my favorite stories, and you know, there's, I went through so many court files and so on

00:25:00.880 in researching this bit of the book is going inside the mind of a psychopath is a very odd

00:25:05.040 thing to do.

00:25:05.560 But one of the plots he hatched in the sort of early days of consolidating power was that

00:25:11.960 the school district wanted to save money by reducing its energy costs.

00:25:17.460 So they appointed an energy czar, so to speak, whose job was basically to reduce the school's

00:25:22.280 energy bill.

00:25:23.540 And this guy who's put in charge of it just sort of, you know, it's the standard story.

00:25:26.600 Like, you know, the district asks you to do this.

00:25:29.060 You have no experience in it.

00:25:30.300 And you just sort of say, yeah, okay, I'll do it.

00:25:31.900 And so Steve Rauchy sort of spotted an opportunity.

00:25:35.120 He said, look, you know, I know that you don't really understand the software that's been

00:25:40.500 presented to you to like manage the school district's energy supply.

00:25:43.980 I can just sort of manage it for you and you can take the credit.

00:25:47.080 Now, this guy accepts because he's sort of overwhelmed by the sort of software and doesn't

00:25:52.800 know what he's doing.

00:25:53.800 Steve Rauchy takes control of the software and starts manipulating it.

00:25:57.260 He starts turning on the stadium lights on public holidays.

00:26:00.940 He starts increasing the amount of time that the heating is on and that the lights are

00:26:05.820 on on weekends just to try to ramp up the energy bill, basically.

00:26:10.100 And lo and behold, his plan works.

00:26:11.920 The guy who was appointed energy czar is relieved of that position because the energy usage has

00:26:18.640 actually gone up.

00:26:20.040 And so Rauchy is then made into the energy czar for the district.

00:26:23.140 And he operated like this throughout his whole time in his pursuit of power.

00:26:27.540 I mean, he became a senior official in the union and ultimately started making quite a

00:26:32.920 lot of money as he rose through the ranks.

00:26:35.320 But he also did this weird stuff where like when people would cross him, he would make

00:26:41.180 examples of them and then make everybody else around him like observe the fact that he had

00:26:45.620 punished them.

00:26:46.180 So at one point he believes that he knows someone who has whistleblown on him, that he'd

00:26:51.560 been sort of behaving like a tyrant in the district maintenance office and needed to

00:26:55.800 be dealt with.

00:26:57.020 So all of a sudden, these people's homes the next morning has the word rat spray painted

00:27:02.580 across the house.

00:27:04.960 And Rauchy, you know, doesn't admit to it, but basically forces his employees on the clock

00:27:11.160 to make a pilgrimage in school district vehicles to like observe that these people have gotten

00:27:16.740 what they deserved.

00:27:17.520 And, you know, I mean, there's, there's also stuff about his personality where like he says

00:27:22.420 stuff in various recordings that were then turned over to the court, their wiretaps and

00:27:26.160 so on, where he, uh, he talked about, you know, I wish I could have had a Steve so that

00:27:32.120 I, you know, I wish I could have had a twin so that I could have had a Steve in my life

00:27:35.260 thinking that like, he was really sad that he didn't have himself to turn to because

00:27:39.560 he was so great.

00:27:40.380 These sort of delusions of grandeur.

00:27:41.960 Anyway, the reason he ends up in prison is because he starts going over the top with his

00:27:45.920 punishments of people who cross them.

00:27:47.660 He places explosives on the car of a colleague.

00:27:50.240 He has explosives in his office in the school district, you know, itself and has night vision

00:27:55.620 goggles in his office as well, which is quite an unusual thing for, uh, you know, a sort

00:28:00.160 of maintenance official at a public high school to have.

00:28:02.720 The reason I use him in this story though, is because what's really interesting about psychopaths

00:28:08.640 is that Rauchy is an example of an undisciplined non-functional psychopath, which is to say

00:28:15.740 when he needed to turn down these traits, he couldn't, it was impossible for him, but

00:28:21.800 for a lot of functional psychopaths as they're called, they can turn them down at times when

00:28:26.380 they need to.

00:28:27.480 And this is something where, you know, the, the sort of all the psychopath researchers I

00:28:31.400 spoke to said that superficial charm is part of the, the psychopath modus operandi and that

00:28:37.640 the functional psychopaths can switch on their empathy when they need to, they can sort of

00:28:43.080 blend in when empathy or being chameleon-like in a certain situation is advantageous.

00:28:48.740 And those people, the functional psychopaths, the point they all make is those are the people

00:28:52.860 in the boardrooms and in elected office.

00:28:54.800 Uh, not, not universally, obviously there's still a small percentage of the overall pool,

00:28:59.420 but the best research that I've read places, the rate of psychopaths in leadership positions

00:29:06.080 between four times and 100 times higher than the general public, uh, depending on how you

00:29:11.740 define a psychopath and depending on which, uh, research paper you read, but it's, it's

00:29:15.760 pretty much agreed.

00:29:16.700 They're definitely overrepresented in the halls of power.

00:29:20.700 Okay. 0.69

00:29:20.740 So there's a certain type of person attracted to power, narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic.

00:29:25.880 So these people are very confident.

00:29:27.760 They, they've, they've got superficial charm and they're able to manipulate people and

00:29:33.320 things for their ends to gain that power.

00:29:35.700 And you think, well, that's a terrible, like, why do we even let these people get into positions

00:29:39.720 of authority and power?

00:29:40.620 But then you highlight research saying like, well, actually followers, people who are

00:29:43.820 subordinates actually like those kinds of people and put those people in the power.

00:29:48.320 So what's going on there?

00:29:49.440 Why is it that we're attracted to people with these traits, but at the same time repulsed by

00:29:53.380 it?

00:29:53.480 What's going on?

00:29:54.040 Yeah.

00:29:54.980 I mean, there's, there's, there's a few things that are, are worth mentioning here.

00:29:58.600 I mean, one of them is how narcissists, for example, make more money.

00:30:04.220 And, and this is, this has been shown in lots of research.

00:30:07.680 One of the reasons for that is because in, in sort of modest levels, medium levels, I should

00:30:12.360 say, narcissism can be advantageous for getting people to like you because part of being a narcissist

00:30:17.860 is an obsession with how other people perceive you.

00:30:21.140 And when you really care about that sort of perception management, it may be good for,

00:30:26.380 for making money and also advancing in life.

00:30:28.880 Now it comes at a cost, of course.

00:30:30.500 I mean, there, there are things about narcissists that are highly undesirable and it's not a

00:30:34.880 good strategy in general, but perhaps in the workplace in modest doses, it might be, you

00:30:39.620 know, effective.

00:30:40.140 And this helps explain why sometimes managers, politicians, et cetera, are so narcissistic

00:30:45.380 and also so successful.

00:30:47.040 They're good at manipulating other people.

00:30:49.340 Now, I also think it's worth pointing out a lot of our leadership selection is non-rational.

00:30:54.800 It's irrational.

00:30:56.340 And the reason that matters is because we like to think that we're making, you know, sort

00:31:00.840 of evidence-based rational assessments when we decide who to cast a ballot for or who we

00:31:06.220 want to be in charge of us in the workplace.

00:31:08.500 But lots of scientific evidence counteracts that notion.

00:31:12.640 So the best example of this and the one that just sort of, it blew my mind when I read this,

00:31:16.980 but it's been replicated.

00:31:18.060 It's a very solid finding published in, I forget if it was in science or nature, but

00:31:22.140 one of the top two scientific journals in the world.

00:31:25.060 What the researchers did is they showed children a series of faces, no other information, just

00:31:31.360 two faces.

00:31:31.920 And they said, who do you want to be in charge of your ship in this computer simulation?

00:31:36.540 We're going to ask you to play.

00:31:37.540 So all you see is two pictures of human faces and nothing else.

00:31:40.640 And you have to pick one or the other.

00:31:42.000 What the kids didn't know was that the two faces weren't random.

00:31:45.180 One of them was the winner of a French parliamentary election in a given district.

00:31:48.960 And the other face they saw was the runner up in that same district.

00:31:52.380 So the winner and the loser.

00:31:53.260 And overwhelmingly, the overwhelming majority of the time, the kids picked the winner to

00:31:59.180 captain their ship.

00:32:00.520 And when they did this with adults, they got a similar result, which, you know, all it

00:32:04.760 says is that there's something about face that conveys leader to us.

00:32:09.480 And if that's the case, you know, that really causes us to sort of pause for a second and

00:32:15.560 say, wait a minute, if you can accurately predict the winner of an election based on faces alone,

00:32:20.820 then we have a real cognitive bias around leadership that we need to understand better because otherwise 0.99

00:32:26.640 we end up making stupid decisions based on superficial characteristics. 0.97

00:32:30.120 And I think the more that I read about this, you know, sort of realm of research in psychology 0.98

00:32:35.800 and evolutionary anthropology and so on, the more that it became clear to me that this

00:32:40.240 myth of rational leadership selection is just, it's just a myth.

00:32:44.760 It's not, it's not true.

00:32:45.740 And there are, there are some things that are rational and that are sort of reasoned in

00:32:49.460 terms of how we select our leaders, but a significant chunk of it is down to intuition and other

00:32:54.680 things that are not rooted in sort of a rational assessment.

00:32:57.980 Okay.

00:32:58.000 So, uh, we've discussed, okay, there's a certain type of person attracted to power, oftentimes

00:33:02.340 not the best kind of person us as followers.

00:33:05.240 We actually are attracted to those people sometimes, but let's talk about this idea of, of power

00:33:09.860 corrupting.

00:33:10.280 This is Lord Acton.

00:33:11.260 He said, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts.

00:33:13.460 Absolutely.

00:33:14.180 And you see, your research says, yes, power does corrupt, can corrupt us.

00:33:17.500 So what is, what happens to us psychologically when we are put in positions of power and authority?

00:33:22.340 How does it change us?

00:33:23.820 Yeah.

00:33:23.960 So it changes us on a few levels.

00:33:25.260 It changes us psychologically and it changes us physically.

00:33:28.000 There's, there's, there's a few things I'll point to.

00:33:30.020 I mean, I talk about this at length in the book, so I won't be able to talk about everything,

00:33:32.800 but there's just a few things I'd highlight.

00:33:35.060 One is that you start to think about people below you in the hierarchy as abstractions.

00:33:40.560 And there's sort of this asymmetry that produces this view of, of being an abstraction.

00:33:44.520 And what I mean by this is that, you know, you think about why is it that many of us remember

00:33:51.680 like our boss's birthday and yet we're disappointed because our boss doesn't remember our birthday.

00:33:56.300 It's because there's an asymmetry there where you have, you know, in order to get ahead,

00:34:01.580 you need to remember these facts.

00:34:03.040 You need to be carefully attuned to the person above you in the hierarchy.

00:34:06.640 And as soon as you go up in the hierarchy, your success level is not necessarily predicated

00:34:11.880 on what other people below you think as much as people above you.

00:34:15.600 And so there starts to be this sort of discounting effect, which leads to abuse,

00:34:20.000 because as you become less interested in the sort of granular details of other people's

00:34:26.220 lives below you, it's easier to sort of discard them.

00:34:28.440 And there's lots of psychology research that shows that people in power become more reckless,

00:34:35.220 more willing to believe that they can affect outcomes that they can't actually affect.

00:34:39.800 It's a system called illusory control.

00:34:42.460 They become more impulsive.

00:34:44.540 They also skirt the rules more, et cetera.

00:34:47.400 One of the things that I remember that stood out to me is a very simple explanation of this.

00:34:52.440 When I was talking about the book early on, after it came out, I was interviewed by Andrew

00:34:58.040 Yang, who was the former presidential candidate on the Democratic side.

00:35:01.800 And I asked him, I said, you know, what was this like for you?

00:35:04.740 You all of a sudden got thrust in this position where you didn't have name recognition.

00:35:09.040 Now you were a household name.

00:35:10.540 And he says it was super awful to have the sort of recognition that his mind was changing

00:35:19.040 by the basic fact that he walked into a room for a year.

00:35:23.120 Everybody stood up and cheered.

00:35:24.460 Every joke he told, even if it sucked, they would laugh uproariously at, you know, the 0.97

00:35:29.420 people around him wanted to suck up to him. 0.87

00:35:31.740 And it just changes your mindset, right?

00:35:33.740 This isn't like, it's not rocket science.

00:35:35.040 It makes sense that this would happen.

00:35:36.160 But I think for people who don't experience that, it's hard to sort of understand how corrosive

00:35:41.340 it could be in your thoughts and sort of this idea you start to walk on water.

00:35:44.760 Now I said before that it also changes your physical basis.

00:35:48.700 And this I'm specifically talking about your brain chemistry.

00:35:51.220 And one of my favorite studies in the book, it's a fascinating world of research on macaque

00:35:57.300 monkeys, is a guy named Michael Nader, who's a professor and doctor out in Wake Forest,

00:36:03.360 who works with cocaine and addiction.

00:36:06.860 And what he basically does is he takes these monkeys that are initially independently housed.

00:36:12.320 In other words, they're alone in a pen.

00:36:13.780 And then they sort of raise the barriers and put four monkeys together.

00:36:17.800 And within 10 minutes, the monkeys have established a hierarchy.

00:36:20.400 One, two, three, four.

00:36:21.320 It's super easy to tell who's which.

00:36:24.000 And then what they do is they put the monkeys in this chair that they've been trained to

00:36:27.720 use, where they either pull one lever and get banana pellets, food, or they pull the other

00:36:32.800 lever and they get cocaine intravenously injected into their bodies.

00:36:37.460 And it's like pure cut cocaine, right?

00:36:39.020 It's like really top-notch cocaine.

00:36:41.220 So the point is that when they do this, it always happens the same way.

00:36:46.440 The first and the second monkeys in the hierarchy, the top two, always take the banana pellets.

00:36:51.500 And the third and fourth, who end up in a subordinate position, always self-medicate with

00:36:55.760 the cocaine.

00:36:56.660 And when you take the monkeys and rehouse them, if you were monkey one in the first housing 0.97

00:37:01.760 arrangement, and you end up as monkey four in the next one through bad luck or whatever,

00:37:06.580 you change.

00:37:07.180 You go from banana pellets to cocaine.

00:37:09.620 And so what they found is that the dopamine receptors in the brain actually shift due to

00:37:15.280 hierarchy and status.

00:37:16.360 They actually have a physical chemical change in their brains as a result of changing place

00:37:21.640 in the hierarchy.

00:37:22.420 And this, you know, it's just, again, it's one of those hidden aspects where it's like,

00:37:26.340 okay, if we accept this, at least if we accept it's true in monkeys, it's very likely to be

00:37:30.620 true in us because we're primates as well.

00:37:32.240 So that really causes us to maybe think a bit more carefully about what we do when people

00:37:37.080 get immense, immense power, like they become presidents or congresspeople.

00:37:40.900 Because at that point, you sort of think something is actually changing about them and we don't

00:37:46.520 do anything.

00:37:47.020 We just sort of say, you know, good luck.

00:37:49.100 I hope you make the right decision.

00:37:50.200 And I think there's some of this where we need to acknowledge that power does genuinely act

00:37:55.020 like a drug.

00:37:55.580 And we have to find ways to counteract it to make the world a little bit better place.

00:38:00.680 Yeah, the research about monkeys is really interesting because it seems like the lower

00:38:04.680 status monkeys, they're more stressed out.

00:38:06.720 So they're going to go for the cocaine to self-medicate.

00:38:10.120 While the higher status monkeys, they've got power and then power acts like a natural drug. 0.99

00:38:15.360 So they don't need the cocaine to self-medicate.

00:38:18.400 But the downside is, you know, they want to hold on to that high.

00:38:22.840 So they're not going to want to give up their power.

00:38:24.640 So they're going to do whatever they have to do to stay on top.

00:38:27.780 And you see something similar with humans too.

00:38:30.180 If you look at the research, people who are higher in the social hierarchy, they often

00:38:34.660 live longer than people who are lower in the social hierarchy because they're feeling good.

00:38:38.600 While people who are, you know, lower in the social hierarchy, they've got more stress

00:38:43.360 and they've got less advantages.

00:38:44.480 So they feel bad.

00:38:46.420 But there are exceptions to this.

00:38:48.360 Sometimes people who are in positions of power and authority, they live shorter lives.

00:38:53.800 And it has to do with whether that person in power or authority has any control.

00:38:59.160 So basically, the finding was, if you're in a position of authority, but you have no control,

00:39:05.060 that's pretty terrible for you.

00:39:06.420 It just makes you feel terrible.

00:39:08.600 Yeah.

00:39:08.840 So I'm afraid I'm going to go back to non-human primates with this example with baboons. 0.90

00:39:14.940 But you're absolutely right.

00:39:16.000 So the finding that you're talking about is from something with humans called the White 1.00

00:39:19.680 Hall 2 study.

00:39:21.300 And Sir Professor, he's got both titles, Sir and Professor.

00:39:24.440 Michael Marmott is the guy who authored the study, one of my colleagues at University

00:39:28.060 College London.

00:39:29.200 And what he basically found is that, you know, if you control for a lot of confounding variables,

00:39:34.500 the actual data shows that being in a position of status that comes with stress but no control

00:39:41.780 is really bad for you.

00:39:43.560 Being low on the hierarchy without status and without control is even worse for you.

00:39:48.060 But it's actually pretty good for you if you have a position of sort of status, money and

00:39:53.040 control.

00:39:53.820 And control meaning that you can sort of dictate how outcomes are happening in your life.

00:39:58.260 So a super stressed CEO during, you know, like an airline CEO during the pandemic, that 0.98

00:40:02.440 sucks. 0.99

00:40:02.840 That's really bad. 0.96

00:40:03.900 Being someone who's in charge of like a startup that's taking off, that's really good.

00:40:08.340 And so what you find in the baboon research that I think is really, really instructive is 1.00

00:40:14.140 using this technique called DNA methylation, you can actually measure biological aging separately

00:40:21.160 from the aging that happens with the calendar.

00:40:24.580 So, you know, maybe six months have passed, but your body has aged nine months, or maybe

00:40:29.080 it's only aged three months.

00:40:30.240 And what they found is that when you look at baboons that rise through the ranks to become 1.00

00:40:34.580 the sort of alpha male, the worst, most stressed baboons are at the bottom. 0.99

00:40:39.140 Totally what you'd expect, right?

00:40:40.240 No access to good food, no access to mates. 0.99

00:40:42.540 It's, it basically sucks to be the worst baboon, right? 0.93

00:40:45.500 But as you rise through the ranks, it gets better until you become the alpha male. 0.92

00:40:50.760 And then your body is super, super stressed.

00:40:52.980 And the reason for that is because you constantly have a target on your back.

00:40:56.140 So all the other baboons are thinking about usurping you, you sort of always have to worry 0.98

00:41:00.100 about a plot against you to be overthrown.

00:41:02.960 And so even though you have your pick of mates, and even though you have the prime food, your

00:41:07.600 body is actually aging faster because of all that stress.

00:41:11.320 And so the sort of takeaway that the way I put it is, you know, it's good to be in

00:41:15.980 the court, but maybe not good to be the king.

00:41:17.980 And I think that's a lesson for all of us that actually it's different from what we

00:41:22.620 expect, right?

00:41:23.300 It's always sort of, you always want to be the alpha.

00:41:25.420 You always want to be on top.

00:41:26.980 And the science seems to suggest actually that being close to power, but not dealing with

00:41:31.880 the stress of it might be the optimal thing for our bodies.

00:41:34.840 Right.

00:41:34.980 That stress and that paranoia, you see that with that janitor guy, right?

00:41:38.640 He started putting bombs on people's cars because he was worried that people were going

00:41:42.040 after him.

00:41:42.560 So that's another downside of being a business of power.

00:41:45.500 It might cause you to lash out and do just terrible things because you want to maintain

00:41:50.940 your power.

00:41:52.540 Yeah.

00:41:52.700 I mean, that's one of the classic traps that these people fall into, right?

00:41:55.940 They become so power obsessed that they end up destroying themselves.

00:42:00.540 And I think this is something where we've all seen this play out in, you know, whether

00:42:07.080 it's celebrity culture or politics or sports, whatever it is, where someone sort of just

00:42:12.400 thinks that they get high on their own supply, basically, right?

00:42:15.440 They start to believe the lies that they tell themselves about how great they are.

00:42:19.220 And when people cross them, they really lash out and undermine their own position.

00:42:23.420 So, you know, I mean, this is one of those things too, where it's sort of a red flag when

00:42:28.680 someone views power as an end.

00:42:31.540 I mean, to my mind, power is a means.

00:42:34.320 It's something that can help you accomplish certain goals.

00:42:36.940 It can help you, you know, change the world in some way.

00:42:40.540 And the people who view power as the ultimate aim are the exact wrong people to be in power.

00:42:46.520 And at any time that somebody is behaving that way, that's a major red flag that they need

00:42:50.820 to be removed from that position.

00:42:51.960 Okay, so we've talked about, again, I want to reiterate, we've talked about the type,

00:42:56.460 the selection bias that comes with power, how power can corrupt us, can make us want to

00:43:01.140 break the rules, abstract people below us, depersonalize individuals.

00:43:05.960 But let's talk about this idea of the system that you find yourself in can actually cause

00:43:12.400 people to be corrupted.

00:43:13.520 It's not the power itself.

00:43:14.800 It's just that the way the power is manifested, right?

00:43:17.160 And organized.

00:43:17.940 What does your research say about that?

00:43:19.420 Yeah, so the sort of takeaway, the big takeaway is that rotten systems attract rotten people

00:43:24.840 and good systems attract good people.

00:43:26.760 And the evidence, I'll point to two studies briefly that I think are just, they're two

00:43:31.780 of the most fascinating pieces of research I came across in writing the book.

00:43:34.900 The first one is about the sort of self-selection effect based on the system.

00:43:40.500 So these economists ask these students to roll dice and they say, you know, roll a dice 42

00:43:45.740 times and write down what your score is each time.

00:43:49.280 But every time that you roll a six, we're going to give you some cash.

00:43:52.220 Now you're going to write down your scores.

00:43:53.840 We're not going to check, you know, we're not going to watch you do it.

00:43:56.180 So you can lie, but we're going to do statistical analysis to figure out who lied and who didn't.

00:44:00.500 So one student in India, you know, kudos to him for brazenness. 0.81

00:44:05.640 He put down 42 sixes in a row trying to get 42 times the cash.

00:44:09.880 You know, it was pretty easy to spot that he'd lied.

00:44:11.980 But, you know, there were different levels of dishonesty in these groups.

00:44:15.840 What was fascinating, though, is that because they could figure out using statistical methods

00:44:20.020 who was likely to have lied and who wasn't, they then asked the students, what do you want

00:44:24.800 to do with your careers?

00:44:25.620 And in India, a place where being a civil servant, you know, being sort of the local cop

00:44:32.220 or the local bureaucrat means you can extract bribes from people.

00:44:35.700 In India, the people who lied about their dice rolls to make more money were disproportionately

00:44:40.820 keen on becoming civil servants.

00:44:42.800 When they did the exact same study in Denmark, the result was flipped.

00:44:46.600 The people who lied about their dice rolls did not want to go into civil service.

00:44:50.560 And the people who were scrupulously honest did.

00:44:53.000 And so, you know, it's this classic sort of story of if you have a clean system, people

00:44:58.160 who are more willing to behave in clean, uncorrupt ways are going to go for that system.

00:45:04.060 Now, the other study that I think really beautifully illustrates this point is about United Nations

00:45:10.640 parking tickets.

00:45:11.660 And I know it sounds like a weird realm to explore, but it's sort of a natural experiment

00:45:15.460 where before 2002, anybody who parked illegally in New York who was a diplomat had diplomatic

00:45:21.840 immunity and therefore didn't have to pay their fine.

00:45:24.440 So these diplomats rack up 150,000, believe it or not, parking tickets to the tune of $18

00:45:30.000 million.

00:45:30.980 And finally, in 2002, the mayor of the time, Mike Bloomberg, says enough is enough.

00:45:34.460 This is crazy, right?

00:45:35.400 Not only are you annoying because you're parking illegally all the time, but it's also a revenue

00:45:39.600 source we're losing.

00:45:40.600 So we can't force you to pay it, but we can take away your cars.

00:45:43.460 We can impound your cars if you keep doing this.

00:45:46.280 And all of a sudden, there's enforcement.

00:45:48.260 There's accountability.

00:45:48.760 So what happens?

00:45:49.920 Well, in the pre-enforcement period where they can get away with everything, there's

00:45:54.560 a cultural explanation for illegal parking.

00:45:57.920 So the people who are from Norway, Japan, Germany, the sort of non-corrupt countries,

00:46:02.580 they don't really park illegally very much.

00:46:05.040 And the people who are from the corrupt countries, Yemen, Egypt, et cetera, are parking extremely 1.00

00:46:11.020 illegally all the time.

00:46:12.040 The average number of parking tickets per diplomat in the worst country was, I think, 190 parking

00:46:17.240 tickets per diplomat, right?

00:46:18.500 So really, really excessive.

00:46:21.280 And overnight, when the enforcement kicks in, they basically all become Norway.

00:46:25.940 Everybody starts parking legally.

00:46:27.880 And the kicker, though, is that the longer the Norwegians and Germans and Japanese diplomats

00:46:32.820 were in New York in the pre-enforcement period, in other words, the longer they could get away

00:46:36.940 with it, the more they started to park like the Yemenis and the Egyptians.

00:46:40.080 So the lesson is that cultures of corruption are obviously important in dictating behavior, 0.99

00:46:45.520 but accountability is also super, super important in deterring bad behavior once you

00:46:51.580 have a culture of corruption.

00:46:52.820 And so it's a mix of the two, right?

00:46:54.380 You need to attract good people into positions of power.

00:46:57.220 You need to clean up the system to attract better people.

00:46:59.940 And then within that good system, you need to really crack down on the people who behave

00:47:04.800 in corrupt or abusive ways to weed them out.

00:47:07.000 And it's not, again, it's not rocket science, but most of our systems aren't designed with

00:47:11.960 this in goal, with this in mind.

00:47:13.600 In other words, there's not like a systematic attempt to think very carefully about both

00:47:18.640 recruitment and accountability.

00:47:20.300 And I think if every organization just did sort of an assessment of these aspects, the

00:47:25.180 world would become a much better place quite quickly.

00:47:27.080 Because as I say, the interventions are not difficult.

00:47:31.140 They just involve serious thought about designing systems to attract and promote better people

00:47:36.840 and to weed out those who are breaking the rules.

00:47:39.840 Well, let's say someone's listening to this and they're put into a position of power

00:47:42.260 or authority, right?

00:47:43.380 Whether it's at work or the homeowner association, like individually, like any insights from your

00:47:48.740 research for that person to be like, I don't want to become a crazy homeowner association

00:47:53.080 president or a megalomaniac.

00:47:56.120 What can I do to prevent that from happening?

00:47:57.860 Like what sort of, I guess, breaks can you put on yourself so that doesn't happen to you?

00:48:03.000 Yeah, it's a great question.

00:48:03.980 So first off, I'd say that if you're one of these good people that's sort of driven

00:48:07.380 by service, these corrosive effects of power are less likely to be as much of a problem.

00:48:12.180 You've already solved half the problem because you're not a power hungry, megalomaniac, 0.91

00:48:15.400 narcissistic psychopath. 0.98

00:48:16.740 So that's half of it, right?

00:48:18.480 The other half, though, is that all of us will succumb to some of the psychological effects

00:48:22.660 of power no matter what, even the best of us, right?

00:48:24.520 I mean, there's pretty strong evidence that this does something to you over time.

00:48:29.680 And the best of us can counteract it, but it's not always a sort of bulletproof thing.

00:48:35.000 So what do you do?

00:48:36.200 There's a few things.

00:48:37.020 One is that you need to engineer systems in which you are constantly reminded of the weight

00:48:42.320 of your responsibility.

00:48:43.640 So if you're dealing with difficult decisions that result in harm for people, if you have

00:48:47.780 to fire people, if you have to make decisions that make people really unhappy or hurt people,

00:48:52.620 you should be well aware of the costs of those decisions.

00:48:55.920 I'm not going to go into the whole detail of it here, but I briefly talk about this in

00:48:59.700 the book with a guy who was involved in doling out money for the 9-11 Victims Compensation

00:49:04.660 Fund.

00:49:05.260 He went through the excruciating process of meeting with every victim's family face to

00:49:12.020 face when he was trying to decide how much their life was worth financially because he

00:49:16.560 wanted to agonize over it.

00:49:18.300 He said, the second that this becomes abstract to me is the second I need to get out of this

00:49:22.720 job because it has to be a reminder of how important this work is.

00:49:27.180 And I think that's true even in the smaller stages of power.

00:49:29.220 You need to be reminded of the effects of your decisions when you are affecting other

00:49:33.500 people's lives.

00:49:34.240 So that's part of it.

00:49:35.680 The other is just around sort of systems of power is engaging in a sort of team of rivals

00:49:42.420 approach.

00:49:42.840 The team of rivals is a term that refers to the way Abraham Lincoln set up his cabinet,

00:49:47.440 where he basically made people who were his rivals, right?

00:49:50.660 They were like genuinely sometimes adversaries of his debate, major subjects in front of

00:49:56.160 him so that he can make an informed decision. 1.00

00:49:58.240 And they would tell him when he was being a moron. 0.99

00:50:00.720 And, you know, he would, he would encourage this basically because he thought it would 1.00

00:50:03.700 cut him down to size, remind him of different viewpoints, et cetera.

00:50:07.780 You contrast this with the Vladimir Putin approach to leadership of the current age.

00:50:12.800 And you're surrounded by yes men, you know, and in fact, people who cross you might go to

00:50:17.200 jail or might end up dead.

00:50:18.200 And you can think about what does that do to you?

00:50:20.600 I mean, you know, it's, it's something where if you proactively try to ensure that you are

00:50:24.900 checked, you're more likely to behave in a reasonable manner.

00:50:28.780 If you behave in a way where you think I am powerful and therefore people should defer to

00:50:34.720 me, you're more likely to miscalculate and abuse people because you never get differing

00:50:39.040 opinions.

00:50:39.380 So some of this is possible to sort of proactively mitigate, but I will say that most of the

00:50:47.180 psychologists who study power argue that all of us would succumb at least to some extent

00:50:53.580 to some of the corrosive aspects of power if we were there long enough, which is why

00:50:57.380 you might want to rotate people around and indeed not have everybody inhabit a position

00:51:01.940 of immense power for, for decades and decades.

00:51:05.260 Well, Brian, this has been a great conversation.

00:51:06.680 Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:51:09.700 Yeah, thank you.

00:51:10.240 It's been, it's been great talking to you.

00:51:11.500 So Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us is the book and anywhere that you

00:51:14.940 can buy books.

00:51:16.000 You know, if you've got a local bookshop, by all means, go there.

00:51:18.600 I tweet pretty regularly.

00:51:20.520 It's just my name, Brian Kloss.

00:51:22.200 And if people are interested, I also have a podcast called Power Corrupts, which is a podcast

00:51:27.320 about all the sort of dark sides of humans and the way we screw up the world and what we

00:51:33.160 can do about it.

00:51:34.200 Well, fantastic.

00:51:34.580 Brian Kloss, thanks for your time.

00:51:35.400 It's been a pleasure.

00:51:36.460 Thank you.

00:51:37.580 My guest here is Brian Kloss.

00:51:38.760 He's the author of the book Corruptible.

00:51:40.240 It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:51:42.180 You can find more information about his work at his website, brianpkloss.com.

00:51:46.220 That's K-L-A-A-S, two A's there.

00:51:48.660 Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash power corrupts, where you find links to resources

00:51:52.600 and we delve deeper into this topic.

00:51:53.980 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.

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The Art of Manliness - April 06, 2022

How Power Corrupts

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