The Daily Stoic - Brian Klaas on the Pursuit of Power and How It Corrupts | It’s About What We’re Willing To Give

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to professor Brian Klaas about his new book Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, why we should minimize the psychological distance between leaders and the people they lead, the differences between functional and dysfunctional psychopaths, and more.Brian Klaas is an associate professor of global politics at University College London and the host of the award-winning Power Corrupts podcast. Klaas is a contributor to The Washington Post and a regular guest on CNN, MSNBC, BBC News, Sky News, NPR News, BBC Radio, Bloomberg and CNBC. He has advised NATO, the European Union, and several major international NGOs. Klaas received his doctorate in politics from the University of Oxford.Get a copy of Ryan Holiday’s new book Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave. Academy Award Winning Actor Matthew McConaghey called the book an “urgent call to arms for each and all of us.” General Jim Mattis called it “a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life.” And Classics Professor Shadi Bartsch wrote that it’s “a heartfelt and passionate book.” You can get your copy signed and personalized as well! As a participant in Daily Stoic’s Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life, you’ll not only learn all you need to know about Stoicism, you’ll learn it from one of the world’s foremost thinkers and writers on ancient philosophy and its place in everyday life!Join Daily Stoic Life now! As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/ Our Daily Stoic Leatherbound Editions are back in stock! The Daily Stoic is the first collection of all the Stoics in centuries and the only book to ever put them in a page-a-day format—366 days of the best Stoic quotes, insights, and exercises. You can get your copy signed and personalized as well! Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Brian Klaas: Homepage, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace in wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got

a quick message from one of our sponsors. It's about what you're willing to give. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Marcus Aurelius would have never chosen to be emperor. It was destiny that chose him, as I tell about in my book The Boy Who Would Be King. And Marcus Aurelius accepted this at considerable sacrifice. Rutilius Rufus, whose story I tell in lives of the Stoics, wanted simply to be good and honest,

which in Rome at that time meant he was attacked and ultimately exiled. Kato gave his life in an act of devotion to the Republic. James Stockdale could have maneuvered for special treatment in the Hanoi Hilton, but the very least made things easier on himself by not resisting and fighting for his men. These are the things that Aesthetic does, though. Not only do they not take the easy way in life and work in moments of crisis, but they take the right way, even at considerable cost to themselves. It's silly that Stoicism is criticized as a philosophy of resignation. When the reality is that for centuries the Stokes have been involved in public life, often selflessly and painfully. There is a verse that captures the Stokes sense of duty and

commitment to the public good as well as anything in the writings of Marcus Aurelius or Senica. Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, it reads, and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all, for even the son of man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for the many. Marcus Aurelius gave up the academic life for the burden of leadership. Seneca, for all his contradictions, clearly felt obligated to serve the state, even when it was seemingly beyond help. Kato went out like that Buddhist monk,

ransoming himself to send a message to the future he would not live to see or serve. And you, what are you willing to give? What are you serving? Who are you helping? If your life was a ransom, how many would it save? Remember that acts of service don't have to be grand or glamorous. They can be small, like Rutilius' simple refusal to take bribes.

Can be the decision to get a vaccine, to let your employees work from home. Can be a personal one, like the decision to adopt. Regardless, the obligation to be of service will always stare you in the face and hold your gaze and more successful you become. You are here for other people. Life is about what we give for the many. That's what I talk about in Courageous Calling. I'm so inspired to tell these stories, whether it's fertility, it's rufus, or cato, or stockdale. If you haven't read it yet, I'd love for you to check it out and get signed copies at store.dailystoke.com or pick up an audio book and ebook,

anywhere books are sold, really proud of this one. Thank you to everyone who helped make it a bestseller and hope you guys check out the book. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. Today we're talking about power. As Lord Acton's dictum says that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But as I've talked about in many of my musings on Marcus Aurelius, it's an interesting exception.

So why does that happen? How does power affect us? What systems and safeguards do we need to put in place to prevent that from happening to both limit power and Put people good people in a position to effectively wield power These are of course questions that go all the way back to Plato and beyond and my guest today Professor Brian class who is a professor of global politics at the University College London and the host of the award-winning podcast, Power Corrupts.

His new book, Corruptible Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, is really interesting. I enjoyed it quite a bit. His past books include How to Rig in Election, The Despits Apprentice, and The Despits Accomplice. He's a contributor to the Washington Post. He's a regular guest on CNN, MSNBC, BBC, Sky News, NPR, BBC Bloomberg, and CNBC. He's advised NATO, the EU,

and several major international NGOs. And he's received his doctorate on politics from Oxford. But I think what's most interesting is he's not stunning power in the abstract, but as you read in the book and you hear in this interview, he got up close and personal. He actually talked to exiled tyrants, you know, psychopaths, gang leaders, controversial political leaders of all types. And as a result, has some really interesting insights to share. And I think you'll really enjoy this interview. You can follow Brian at at Brian class.

That's C-L-A-A-S. And you can go to his website at BrianPclass.com and enjoy his new book, Correptible Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us. And of course, enjoy this interview. So my first question for you, I took this from Robert Carrows' book on Linden Johnson. He says that power doesn't corrupt, he says that's too simple.

What power does is reveal. So given obviously the title of the book and your study of powerful people, what do you make of that? Is power something that changes us? Or is it something that more accurately reveals who we always were? Yeah, so that's the chicken or the egg question that starts the book, right? Do corruptible people seek power? Does power corrupt? Does power reveal the answer? Is all of the above? But the important thing is to figure out which one refers to which person, or which system. Because if you have a rotten person to begin with, a power hungry, corruptible person who obtains power, the remedy to that is different than if someone has turned

bad by power. And so what I think we're paying not enough attention to is this sort of intervening aspect we don't think about, which is how the system functions. And that's why I start off the book by saying, you know, if you were thrust into the position of being the dictator of Turkmenistan or North Korea, how would you change? And I think the answer, if we're all being honest, is we'd probably behave a lot worse. So what I'm trying to do in the book is explain this complexity that's too often boiled down to these little taglines that end up really obscuring some much more nuanced dynamics and if we want to fix the problem we have to understand that complexity

yeah there's a there's a stoke named mousonius rufus who is an advisor to like syrian king a syrian king and then and then ultimately is exiled so he sees power up close in Rome and he i think he's talking about this in one of the essays. He says, like, it's actually not fair to judge powerful people for the things that they do because you have no idea what you would do if you suddenly could do anything and everything and get away with it. So I think that is a fascinating question. What would you do if you suddenly were a powerful person? How would that change you as opposed to this sort of Monday, morning, quarterbacking of like, well, how could they do this?

It's like, how would you, how do you think you would act if you were suddenly in the same situation? Yeah, I have a chapter in the book, chapter six, the deals with this question head on. And I think there's sort of two quick examples I want to give you. One of them is it's a natural experiment that actually tackles this question because King Lee pulled the second of Belgium

over saw two different places at the same time. He was the King of Belgium and he was also the sort of tyrannical dictator of the Belgian Congo at exactly the same time. And in Belgium, in a good also the sort of tyrannical dictator of the Belgian Congo at exactly the same time. And in Belgium, you know, in a good system with lots of constraints and oversight, he was a reformer. He was known as the builder king.

He's established a lot of modern Belgium. He had educational reforms in the Congo where all of the sort of rules were taken away, and he didn't view people as fully human because they were, you know, this is in the late 1800s. He was a monster. He was responsible for millions of deaths. And one of the things that I set out to do in the book was I tried to actually sit down with these people and understand them. So probably the weirdest thing I did was I went and took a ski lesson with Paul Bremer, the guy who ran a rack after, you know, the Bush administration invaded. He's now a ski instructor in Vermont. And so I said, can I interview you? He said, sure, just come on the chairlift and we'll

spend a day together. And whatever you think about the invasion of a rack or a repel brimmer, is sort of irrelevant for this, the point that I took away from him was that he was the ambassador to Norway and Malawi, and he served with distinction. Nobody criticized him. He gets to Iraq, and one of the first things he does in the first meeting he convenes is he raises the possibility of shooting looters who were stealing TVs and creating general chaos. And the thing he said to me is,

I never would have suggested this in Oslo, right? I mean, but we're just, I inherited a dictatorship. And all of the sudden, everything that he was dealing with was the choice of one bad option versus another. And I think when we evaluate people in power, we have to think carefully about what we would do in their position so that we can have fair assessments. It's not to absolve them. It's just to say, you have to understand them. Isn't it strange just sort of how timeless all this stuff is, right? Like, he's basically made a pro-console of a territory of the world's largest empire in the same way that, you know, Cicero is a pro-console.

In the same way that MacArthur is, you know, suddenly thrust in charge of, you know, war-ravid Japan, that like like we think this stuff is so distant and yet it's like 15 years ago, this guy, just a normal guy is suddenly not quite an absolute ruler but like close enough that the ancients would have been like, oh yeah, we have the same job. Yeah, and I draw on ancient ideas in the book multiple times because I do think they're timeless.

I mean, remember Thou art mortal as a chant that's given to sort of bring people down to size to remind them that they're not just complete deities on earth. And also, you think the last chapter of the book is called Waiting for Cincinnati. And one of the points that I try to bring up is since an attice is this guy who's thrust into power and doesn't want it. He tries to get out of power as soon as he can, he does his job with integrity,

and then he goes back to his farm. And I think too often we're waiting for that person and not thinking enough how we can create that person. And that's what, when I talk about systems, I'm talking about let's try to make sure that Cincinnati's like figures emerge, rather than just sort of hoping that someday they'll find themselves into positions of authority. I want to talk a lot about Cincinnati. I have that written down. And I remember a couple years ago, I went, someone had read one of my books in the United Arab Emirates, and I went and I spent some time with this member of the royal family.

It was sort of very high ranking. And I remember walking into this room with this person and going like, yeah, you have the same job as a medieval king or a medieval prince. Like, I mean, you're literally a prince, just as there have been princes for all this time, but not in the prince in the UK system where it's like a figurehead. You actually are making the decisions of government, and I think you're right, it's like, he's thrust in essentially an impossible position. He didn't choose the family,

sorry, choose the position, certainly benefiting from it, but like still has to solve the problems of day to day governance and the day to day problems of being a human being who is put in the impossible situation of, as you say, remaining uncorrupted in an inherently corruptible position. Yeah, I mean, and this is why when I try to encounter these people to understand them, to sort of, you know, sometimes have breakfast

or drink wine with them, whatever it was, to sort of actually get them to open up to me. You draw these experiences and then you try to figure out what they mean for the rest of us. And so, you know, one example of this, I start early on in the book. I've been to Madagascar several times. Madagascar is this country of extreme poverty

off the east coast of Africa. And this guy that I've gotten to know reasonably well is named as Mark Ravalo Manana. He grew up completely penniless, selling yogurt off the back of his bicycle. And got a small business loan and sort of built this into becoming the richest person in Madagascar,

the dairy kingpin of the island, and then the president. And after he had been deposed, he was very strangely deposed by a radio disc jockey who was 34 years old. He had this situation where I go to his house and he's got this breakfast table laid out and every single inch of the breakfast table is full of food.

I mean, he goes up penniless. He was from an origin story of scrounging for food and now he's got this like 30 foot table, filled the food for the two of us. And he has this little bell on his table and he rings it when he wants a pen and these two guys compete to try to be as fast as possible to get the pen to him. And you know, it's one of these things of how you lose sight of being grounded, being

sort of understanding where you came from. And I think that's something that is part of power. I think, you know, there's a lot of neuroscience research, for example, I go into the book, that it actually changes your brain chemistry. This is true in humans, it's true in non-human primates. We can actually measure this. And so you have that effect, and then you think, why aren't we trying to figure out how to counteract that? I mean, I think this is the issue that I dove into in writing this book is, okay, we can accept that power corrupts. We can accept that power hungry

people are drawn to power. So what are we going to do about it? And I think that's the sort of driving question that caused me to write the book. Well, and there's a John Mulaney joke about he was writing a skit for SNL with Mick Jagger. And they're sort of sitting there and Mick Jagger just shouts out like diet coke, like just expecting a person to fetch him a diet coke. And John Mulaney's sort of joke is that when you're Mick Jagger and you've been Mick Jagger for 70 odd years and you've been famous for almost the entirety of that, he's like human beings are basically like Siri is to us, like just an appendage, a tool,

just like the guy you're talking about rings the bell. And so I imagine it, one of the problems of power, wealth, influence is that it changes your relationship to other people. I interviewed Stanley McChrystal and we were talking about, you know, risk, because you wrote this good new book about risk. But like as you become a leader, suddenly you're not calculating like the, you know, risk, because you wrote this good new book about risk. But like, as you become a leader,

suddenly you're not calculating like the way you and I would, like, hey, do I want to wear a mask to avoid getting COVID? You're making risk decisions about whether other people live or die. And so I've got to imagine that's the most warping part of power is your life or deathness or controlling the outcomes of other people's lives. Yeah, and so this is actually another one of those

sort of timeless ideas. Hagel talks about the master slave relationship that makes a lot of sense. He basically says, look, for the master understanding the slave doesn't actually really matter for their life chances. They're gonna be fine no matter what. But if the slave doesn't understand the master, their life chances. They're going to be fine no matter what. But if the slave doesn't understand the master, they might get beaten, they might die.

So you end up with this asymmetric relationship. This explains why you probably know your boss's birthday, but your boss might not know yours, right? Now, what I try to do, and I think is part of the modern world, that's a little bit different and a little bit more corrosive, is understanding how people have become of abstractions to those in power in ways that weren't possible or weren't as frequent before. You have this sort of downsizing consultant

that fires you from some corporate headquarters you've never been in. And so I juxtaposed two stories in the book of people I interviewed and sat down with. One was Ken Feinberg, who was in charge of the 9-11 Victims victims compensation fund. He had to decide how much a life is worth and actually give a payout for someone who died in 9-11 to their family. And he met with every single family. He said, you know, his day was like the worst

day you could imagine. You sit down. Every day for days in a row. Just for, I think, 800 different families he met with, it was excruciating. But he said, if I don't feel this excruciating pain, I'm not going to make a just decision. Whereas when I sat down with John Yoo, who was the guy who's the lawyer for the Bush Administration who, depending on your politics, either wrote the torture memo or the enhanced interrogation memo, what's interesting about that is regardless of your view on that topic, you'd think that it would cause you to really sort of be unsettled. You're making a decision about whether people

can be water-borted or in one case, put into a box with live insects and so on. And I said, did you lose sleep over this? And he just said, matter of fact, you know, no, it was just a legal question to me. I didn't really think about it that much. And he said, some of my colleagues did. And what's just, you know, I kept pushing him on this because I'm like, you know, I've studied

questions and thought about things and I lose sleep over much smaller issues. And yet, you know, this is something where you're deciding treatment of people in detention. And he said, you know, it was a legal question. And I thought to myself, I wonder if he's ever seen somebody experience that. And I think that's the lesson there is that, you know, the more that we distance people who have control over our lives from understanding the harm that they can impose on us, the easier it is for them

to do that psychologically. And I think we've built a lot of systems that have made that very easy to do because we have lots of people in far away, you know, corporate offices or in, you know, Washington DC who don't see the consequences of some of their decisions. Well, it's interesting too, right? Because we often think, when we think about power, we think about a politician or we think about a general or we think about a billionaire with thousands of employees. or we think about a general, or we think about a billionaire with thousands of employees.

But maybe even this is a way to not have to think about the power we have over people. I think about this as a writer, and then obviously, I wrote a book a few years ago about journalism, and you can watch how easily, even for a journalist, right? Because like your job is to write about this thing, you're thinking about what's true or not, maybe you're profiling someone you decide you don't like them.

But the idea that like the people you're writing about are not words on a page or abstractions, but real people with families or feelings. And how easily I think it's just a human tendency, I think, to turn things that are not us or things that get in the way of what we want into abstractions so we don't have to think about them. Like celebrity journalism, it's like, how can we not, how can we pretend that this celebrity

we're writing about their nip slip or something isn't a human being who is mortified by what happened, but it's actually good for me financially, so I'm just going to pretend they're not real. Yeah, there's this whole realm of research into this that I go into in the book about this concept called psychological distance. And basically, the idea is that humans, we conduct triage in what we care about. You can't care equally about everything. So you sort of say, okay, I'm going to care about my family first and foremost, then my friends, then my coworkers, you know, depending on your coworkers, of course. But then, you know, the point is that eventually you get outside of the realm of people that you actually care about. And that's the concept of psychological distance. How far away are they from that sort of inner circle? And when they, when they do studies with this,

very simple study where they have this machine, they tell, they tell people, look, there's a machine over there. And when you push this button, it squishes ladybugs. And then there's another group for which they have the same study, but the machine is in a different, it's in a different building, they can't see it. And of course, what ends up happening is the people are willing to squish ladybugs much more often

if they're in a different building than if they're in the same room as the machine. Now, thankfully, they weren't just doing that they weren't actually killing ladybugs. They were just testing to see what would happen. But it's one of these things where I think we have a lot of systems that have engineered distance. And you think about how this is going to impact society.

It's just creating barriers between people who normally would interact. And one thing we definitely know about in all sorts of research around polarization and hatred and things like that is that when somebody is a category to you, it's so much easier to discount their worth and their value than if there are somebody who you have rich nuance understandings of. So, you know, I mean, the example I have in the book is if you just think of somebody as like a migrant, that's different than if it's, you know,

somebody who's on the company softball team who brings in sourdough every, you know, Thursday, all the sudden your thoughts about somebody who immigrated to the country is different. And that's true across all sorts of realms of, you know, politics, business, sports, etc. So I think we need to pay more attention to how we engineer societies to try to minimize psychological distance between rulers and ruled. If you're new to stoicism and you want to do a deep dive into the philosophy, how it works, how you apply it, what you need to know, where to start, I suggest you check out stoicism 101 engine philosophy for your actual life. And that's our entry course into Stoic Philosophy.

It's 14 emails over two weeks. There's five hours of office hours sessions with me where I've answered a bunch of the most pressing questions about Stoicism. We really get into how the philosophy works, how you apply it, what it can do for you, and where to start in your study. So check that out at dailystoic.com slash 101.

And of course, remember if you join us in dailystoic life out at dailystoke.com slash 101. And of course, remember, if you join us in dailystoke life at dailystokelife.com, you get this course and all our other courses for free. I mean, I think that's really what what makes outsourcing so effective is that by sending it far away, you allow things to happen that you would never tolerate if your office was on the top floor of the factory, right? If you had to walk through, or just be in the same place as the people, you would not tolerate the same squalid conditions, you would not tolerate them dropping over dead, you would not let the building be so precarious, it could fall down on them. So it's not just that, oh, hey, labor is cheaper, you know, across the Pacific

or whatever. It's that by making it far away, you can pretend that it's not happening in your name or that it's not happening at all. And so perhaps part of what power is, is the, that's the ability, but it's like the, the, the willingness to create that artificial distance. Uh, so you can wield that disparity over other people. Yeah. And, you know, I think one of the things that that's, that's half the battle because that's for good people who normally care about other people. They're losing that ability, right? You also have the other side of the coin, which is the psychopaths and power and so

on who just don't care. Right. So I think you have to think, okay, let's start with the good people. I mean, one of the things that I talk about, it's a bit of trivia, but it's sort of an interesting aspect. I'm over in the UK. And they have this thing that happens when prime ministers take office because the prime minister can't actually know everybody. they're going to govern, right?

But they have this thing that actually accidentally reminds them of the way of the responsibility of the office. So the way the nuclear weapons work in Britain is they have four submarines that have nuclear weapons on them. And the prime minister on their first day in office hand writes these letters that are put in each of the submarines with instructions for what to do if London is wiped out in a nuclear blast. And it's sort of, you know, should you retaliate? Should you do nothing? Should you turn the subs over to the US Navy, whatever.

But the point is that the prime minister has just finished this electoral campaign, has just sort of celebrated with, you know, a glass of champagne. And then they get handed these four envelopes and four letters. And they say, you can write whatever you want on them. They'll only be opened if London doesn't exist anymore. And I think that sort of provides a lesson to more normal people that those weight of responsibility reminders are the things that prime us

to think more carefully about our actions. And I think we're not going to all control nuclear weapons, thankfully, but we all do experience these sort more carefully about our actions. I think, you know, we're not gonna all control nuclear weapons, thankfully, but we all do experience these sort of aspects in our lives. And I think engineering systems that force us to reconcile the way of those responsibilities, even for small amounts of power, I think we'll create more virtue in our society.

Yeah, I forget what academic propose that instead of having the nuclear football in the United States, the way for the president to have to use nuclear weapons should be that the codes are implanted in the chest cavity of a single human being who follows the president all over the place. And then the president has to murder this person and get the codes out of their chest, which obviously is gruesome and horrible, and this is just a thought exercise.

But the point of that was to get rid of the distance that we're talking about, to go like to drop a nuclear weapon, which would mean the annihilation of millions of people and likely perhaps end life on the planet entirely, you would have to first personally commit violence against a single human being. And by making that abstraction real, I think we demonstrate just how unthinkably awful that kind, having that kind of power is. Yeah, well, that gets us to the second side of the coin, which is the awful psychopaths that we hope don't end up in power, but sometimes do because for them, they wouldn't reflect on this.

I think one of the things that I found really interesting in researching the book, I mean, I'm quite certain I spoke to many psychopaths, even if they're undiagnosed in researching this because I talked to a lot of the worst, the worst of the worst, bioterrorists and cult leaders and despots and all this. But one of the things that's interesting about psychopaths is that they have an opposite view or an opposite trait of empathy to the rest of us. So the rest of us have empathy switched on by default. They have empathy switched off by default.

But what's really interesting about this is when you put a psychopath in an MRI machine and you scan their brain and you show them images that would make most of us very disturbed, you know, children suffering abuse, animals being killed, etc. When you do that with a psychopath, they don't see anything. There's not really anything in the brain that's lighting up in the normal spheres of brain activity. When you tell them you need to now feel empathy, try to understand what it's like to be that child, they can turn it on and what's really interesting about that is they can they can function can really like as though they're us as though they're normal people which is part of the reason why they're so good at getting power.

Now another amazing thing about this is that we can sort of briefly glimpse what it's like to be a psychopath there's new technologies that when you put them against the head of a normal person, they blunt your empathic response and they can sort of make you feel the same way where you can watch these images and you don't really feel the same way. And I think the lesson there is that there's actually a fundamental brain difference between some people who are disproportionately in power. We have evidence that psychopaths are overrepresented in the highest echelons of business and politics and so on. And so what you have to do is you have to think about power in a full sort of 360 degree format. You have to think about, okay, who's seeking power? Who's good at obtaining power? Who's good at holding on to power? And then once the bad people slip through the cracks, how do we get them out of there? How do we constrain them? Because, you know, I think that we're sort of on autopilot.

I think that when I talk to people and I say I'm a political scientist or I study power, how power operates, what they always say to me is, why is it that the people I know are all good and decent and full of integrity and virtue? And then I look up and I don't see the same thing in leadership and that disconnect is one where I think it's solvable.

And that's, you know, again, it's one of the main rationales for writing the book is that I think we're just sort of drifting where we're unhappy with this and we're not trying to change it in sophisticated ways. No, I think this is something we're struggling with in America, which is like, I think actually taking a cue from you guys. So much of the American system, it turns out, was sort of relying on a certain set of unwritten rules, or unwritten norms, like that a person would care about their reputation, that a person would not want to be outwardly hypocritical or dishonest, that a person would not want to be seen as uncaring or unfeeling or stupid or, you know, all these things. And so then when, when, not just one person, because I think

it's worse than that, but then when a person comes into power, whether it's a psychopath or just a narcissist or just a shameless person, you realize, oh, a system that relies on people checking themselves is very vulnerable. And whether you're talking about a Hitler or whomever, the system, people just go, oh, eventually someone else will do something about it, or eventually they'll check themselves. That's who manages to run roughshod over the system because it wasn't meant, it wasn't designed with an acknowledgement that those people exist. We're not fully taking into account the lengths or things that those people are willing to do.

Yeah, you know, this is, it's another area where I've been blown away by some of the research that I read in trying to figure out the answer to some of these questions. And one of the ones that really stood out to me is this amazing sort of natural experiment. It wasn't created by scientists. It was just sort of accidental that it happened. But in New York City, diplomats, the United Nations don't have to pay for their parking tickets. Right. I used to not have to pay for them anyway. It was sort of like, you know, you get out of jail free card because you had diplomatic community.

So what happened was, you know, over the course of several years, $18 million worth of parking tickets were being racked up by all these diplomats. And what was fascinating was that what you sort of would expect is what happened initially, like the Norwegians, the Scandinavians, the Japanese, they sort of didn't park illegally, they mostly behaved. And the people from more corrupt countries, you know, Yemen and Egypt and so on, they parked illegally all the time. I mean, some of them had hundreds of parking tickets per diplomat.

And all of a sudden, Mike Bloomberg said, okay, enough is enough. We're going to start impounding these cars. And overnight, the Egyptians started parking like the Norwegians. But what was really interesting was that the longer the Norwegian diplomats were in the sort of wild west where they could get away with it, the more they started parking like the Egyptians. And so, you know, it's one of these things where obviously culture virtue, personal choice matters, but the system and the consequences matter enormously too. And I think that's where we have to sort of understand there's a much more complicated nuanced dynamic than I think is sometimes appreciated. So as you talk to some of these powerful people, which I think doesn't happen enough, right?

You talk about abstractions. I think often academics or political scientists are just sort of observing from the outside or philosophers are just sort of observing from the outside. What I particularly like about the Stoics is it's like, oh no, not only were they advisors to emperors or kings, but they might have found themselves to be a general or a pro-consider and Marx to realize his case actually an emperor. As you talk to some of these people, like, what really stood out to you? Like what's something you heard that you were like, it stopped you cold.

Because I think when we talk to a psychopath or you just realize, oh, this person is operating under a totally different world view or frame that would have been inconceivable to me until I heard them say it. Yeah, it's a great question. And I could not agree with you more about the sort of armchair academic. It's something that has bothered me for a long time where I've always said to other political scientists, like if you had a scientist, you studied elephants.

And they'd never seen an elephant up close. You'd find that very weird. And yet there's all these people who study politics or authoritarian regimes like I do who don't go there. They don't talk to these people. Yeah, it's like you look at those medieval drawings of animals they never saw. They're like trying to draw giraffe or rhinoceros from a description from planning the elder or something and it looks grotesque. But yeah, but that's what

it is because it's a it's a refraction of a refraction of a refraction. Exactly. So that's why I sort of said, look, my business here is not to judge these people. I have personal judgments, look, my business here is not to judge these people. I have personal judgments about them, but my business is to understand them so we can make the world better. And so what I did was I sat down with quite a lot of vile people. Now, one of the ones that stood out to me, and she's not particularly vile, but she's a fascinating case study. She's the daughter of a guy named John Badell Bacasa, who took over the Central African Republic in the 1970s and made it the Central African Empire.

This is a place where most people were living on a dollar a day and he spent like $27 million on his coronation. And then after he was coronated, he started killing people, serving them to his crocodiles and at least on one occasion, allegedly served human flesh to a visiting French dignitary. So I mean, this guy is pretty bad, right? Yeah.

Now, I met his daughter in Paris, this bistro, we had wine together, and I was asking her about him, and it was so jarring because she's one of the only family members who has broken with the sort of legacy and actually criticized him. But she still has this Stockholm syndrome of like, he's dead. He's, well, it's not just, this Stockholm syndrome of like, he's dead. He's, well, it's not just, it's not just that he's dead.

It's like, yeah, but he was powerful. You know, he was decisive. Like, she can, she can, in one sentence say, oh yeah, he was a monster. Like when I didn't do the right thing as a child, he burned my clothes in front of me. And then in the next statement, she'll say, but he was, you know, he provided a name

that should be respected. Cause I said, you know, don't you want to change your last name because you're like affiliated with this cannibal dictator? Yeah. And she's like, you know, no, not really. I'm sort of proud of the last name. And then I asked that question of, you know, do you think you're going to end up on the throne, you know, in the Central African Republic someday? And she had that answer like, you know, American politicians usually have,

which is, I'm not really in anything out. Yeah. And what was striking to me was this question of, you know, is this, is this genetic? Is there some aspect of power hungry people that is inherited? And it's not an insane thought because Hyena's inherent dominance,

so does zebrafish with mice you can knock out certain genes and make them super dominant or super submissive. And there is a lot of evidence that power is genetic. It's a trait that seems to be correlated. We have this thing called the leadership gene that some people have found. But the problem is we still can't pinpoint what exactly that gene is doing. Is it that the gene is causing people to obsess over power or is it that it makes them better at getting it? And despite all sorts of studies that are clever, that use twins and so on, we still don't know. So I think it's inherited, but I don't know to what extent or exactly how that operates. And I think that's one of those big questions that we still have to

do more work to fully understand. Did you find, what about this idea of self-awareness? Like I heard someone ask a question once, which was like, it's probably a historian, but can you name a US president that you might describe as self-aware, right? Like having Andy said, is it that maybe the things that get you to positions of power sort of also select for deficiencies in other characteristics,

or did you find, hey, it's just slightly overrepresented, but there are plenty of powerful people who are well-adjusted, self-aware, self-critical, et cetera. Yeah, so this again depends on where you're talking, because if you're talking in a well regulated system with lots of oversight, having blind spots of understanding how people see you can be really, really bad. Because it ends up creating consequences where you actually might lose power or not obtain it. Now, that's, you know, a positive thing, but it also is one of the reasons why I explore this in the book,

briefly, why narcissists actually make more money in Western governments and Western business, because they tend to be at least somewhat aware of how people see them because they're ego obsessed, and that does help them climb through the ranks. Now, I think when you think about other places where it's not very regulated, where you can get away with more, and this can be corporate structures where there's not good oversight. It can also be Turkmenistan or Madagascar. In those places, having a blind spot doesn't cost you. It's something where you can wield power in such a heavy-handed way that those blind spots

can accumulate and you don't really have to care about them. And what I found fascinating was the differences in how people who were, you know, like I interviewed the former deskbot of Thailand, a guy who, you know, he used, he ordered the use of live rounds allegedly on protesters. I mean, he did some bad stuff. But he went to a very rich prep school in the UK, the same one that Boris Johnson went to. He was classmates with him. And so he really understood like how I saw the world roughly in the sense of like, I'm a Western educated person as well. He knows that I care about like human rights.

So his answers were so self-aware because he gets that I'm about to write about him and he's saying all the right things, right? And then there's these other people who are just, they're the products of their system. They think, you know, the little people are disposable. So when they talk about it in that way, and I'm like, oh my God, that's horrible.

They're not even aware that they said something controversial. And so, you know, I think that speaks to this idea that we're a product of our cultures, but we're also a product of our constraints. And, you know, if you have good cultures and plenty of constraints, the blind spots hurt you. If you don't, you can get away with it for a long time

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the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. As you met these people, how often did you feel like envy or respect? Like, you know, there's that saying sort of like a heavy is the head that wears the crown. There is this idea that like, maybe it's actually not any fun, right? Maybe it's actually terrible. Or maybe this is just something we tell ourselves

and that maybe the psychopaths are having a better ride. Like as you talk to these people, what was the sense, the sort of energy you were getting back? Yeah, it's a great question because to me, I was interviewing a lot of the outliers, the people at the extremes. These are the people who, you know, you talk about the dark triad of Machiavellianism,

psychopathy, or being a psychopath, and narcissism. These people have the dials turned pretty far up. And the reason I focus on them a lot is because they do disproportionate damage. But honestly, a lot of the time I felt a sense of pity. And it wasn't, you know, something where I'm trying to just say that to sound like I'm not envious of powerful people.

It's because they were so obsessed with it that they could never, you know, satiate this goal. They could never, they were always looking for the next little bit of power. And once they got it, they still weren't satisfied, and they had a target on their backs. And, you know, I think there's something

that was confirmed to me when I started reading about the effects of power on bodies. I said before it changes your brain chemistry, it also affects your body a lot. There's some counterintuitive examples from both non-human primates, baboons, and also from humans that shows the costs of power. So with baboons, what's really interesting

is they have this new technique called DNA methylation where they can study the Biological aging process that's happening in your body. It's separate from Calendar aging. So you know how fast is your body actually aging relative to the calendar? And what they found is you know sort of what you'd expect at first the the lowest ranked baboons age really fast because No resources, no mates, lots of stress. As you went up the ladder, it got better, except for when you hit the alpha. And the alpha aged super fast because even though they had resources and mates, they always

had to look over their shoulder. So the sort of takeaway from this was that being close to the top, but not in the top, sort of being in the court, but not the king, so to speak, is maybe the most advantageous position. And when you look at President's CEOs, we have evidence of this, too, CEOs age faster when they undergo a crisis in their industry. And there's this amazing study that looks at presidents across 200 years, 17 countries. And they compared the person who won the presidential election or gained power through some other means with the person who won the presidential election or gained power through, you know, some other means with the person who lost and the person who won died on average 4.4 years faster or sooner than the person who lost. So, you know, I think both in terms of happiness and in terms of longevity, there's actually some significant cost to huge amounts of power. And it makes me sort of question whether it's right for all of us unless we're a power hungry, obsessive to really angle for the very, very top.

Yeah, I think this is a question that people might think it's political, but I remain fascinated like, what is it like to be Donald Trump? Right? Like, what is it like inside the head? Not like if I put you inside of his head, right? Because you're still you, that there'd be so many feelings and judgments you have, but what is it like? It's almost as inconceivable, you know there's that famous essay,

like what is it like to be a bat? Like what is it like to be Napoleon or Alexander the Great or Hitler or Trump? You know, not that they're all the same, but like when the dials are turned all the way up that way and then you get what you think you wanted, what is that like? Is it terrible or is almost like the Dunning Kruger effect,

like the terribleness of it is hidden from you because you don't have the self-awareness. I remain fascinated by that question. Yeah, so I think that there's two things that are worth pointing out with this sort of experience of immense power. One is the stuff that's hidden from us, the stuff we can't really always tell, but is actually happening to us. And the other is the experience-based stuff. I mean, whatever you think of Donald Trump, he has had some very weird experiences in his life. I mean, it's an unusual life he's led. Yeah, it's an experience. Yeah. And it creates some really bizarre sort of thought processes

that will happen to anybody who's, I think, had that life. Now, you can debate what you think about Donald Trump. It's not my purpose to say here, but, you know, I think that the other thing that's really important to point out is that there are biological effects that happen led to power. It's not just the power corrupts because of some thought process or some sort of mentality, which those things are all true. But there's an amazing, this guy that I talked to, I absolutely found fascinating. He studies Maccax, these monkeys, and he's got a class II drug license from the DEA, because he has perfectly cut cocaine in his lab.

He's at Wake Forest, his name's Dr. Nader. And basically what he does is he takes these monkeys and he puts them in individual housing situations. So they're all sort of alone. Then he puts them into groups of four, and he says it takes like five to ten minutes and they establish a hierarchy. He can point to them, one to them one two three four. So it's very very clear cut And then he offers them the choice between cocaine or banana pellets and they have this little chair They they they learn like what's lever is which and they have this little chair

They sit in and amazingly that the top two monkeys always take the banana pellets and the bottom two monkeys Always take the cocaine and then if you re-house them if you take the banana pellets, and the bottom two monkeys always take the cocaine. And then if you re-house them, if you take the monkeys and put them in a different group, and the top monkey, all of a sudden, ends up in position three or four, it switches. And when they open up the brains and they dissect them, they find that there's different levels

of dopamine receptors, different kinds of dopamine receptors, in the monkey, depending on which position they had in the hierarchy. So, you know, this is where, when I started doing this research, I was talking to all these people. I was understanding their experiences were really weird. They're also treated very differently. But things are actually happening at the physical level. So, you know, I found it, I found it endlessly amusing. I tell people what I was writing the book about and everyone would sort of look at me knowingly and say, oh, yes, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts,

absolutely, I already know all that. And I'm like, yeah, you're just scraping the surface. This is a much, much bigger problem than what you think it is. Well, because it's so unknowable, for exactly the reason you said earlier about, you know, the guy sort of, he's itself aware enough to know that you're writing about him

and he's concerned about his legacy, because power is ultimately a performance, right? And so we have such a little insight because really powerful, well-adjusted people know what they can say and not say. Like, I'll say this was years ago, so no one can guess what it was, but I had a guest on the podcast,

and he was a billionaire. And so he got on and you know, when we logged into Zencaster, there's sort of like in the waiting room or whatever. Anyways, I could hear him talking and he didn't know that I could hear him talking. And he was talking to what I believe was like a real estate agent. And they were talking about a house and she goes, it's very nice. And he goes, but is it livable?

He says, because I've seen $80 million houses that are total tear downs. And so the mask slips. He doesn't know I'm observing. And he's talking about whether an $80 million house is good enough for him or not. And then we get on the podcast and he has, we have a totally normal conversation. You would never guess that his sort of needs and expectations about reality were so preposterously skewed. And this is also a very philanthropic, like, a good person as far as like the world sees. And I just, it just made me, it was like, yeah, you just never know what it's actually like

in those rooms. And, and even their recollections, you know, you just never know what it's actually like in those rooms. And even their recollections, you know, you read a presidential memoir. And it's like, of course, it's about securing their place in history. It's not actually what happened in the situation, room or not. They're not actually reflecting on the struggles of power. It's all through the prism of fame or reputation management. We just don't know. Yeah. So the flip side of that, I think that's that love that story because what's so interesting

to me about that is I've had to try to tangle through this web of lies that are often told to me. I mean, you know, when you ask somebody who's like a coup plotter or a rebel leader, you know, I talk, I sit down with these guys and I'm like, why did you do it? They're never like, oh, for the money. They always say something. But the flip side of that story with the billionaire is also, what about the times when the performance

is happening and you're not sure it's a performance or not? So this tie leader that I've had coffee with this guy five or six times when I go to Bangkok and sit down with him. And he's a very, very polished speaker. The first time I met him, neither of us knew what the other person looked like particularly in the flash. I'd seen pictures of him or whatever.

And we're meeting at this little cafe at this superposh hotel. I mean, it's like $600, $800 a night, which in Bangkok is a lot. Yeah. So anyway, I'm in this little cafe and I'm early and there's only one guy there and he's in like a t-shirt. It's just like, you know, it's this yellow t-shirt. And I'm like, okay, that's not the four prime minister because like, you know, he's gonna be in a suit and tie. And he thinks because I'm, you know, this professor,

he's like, oh, that's not him, he must be much older. So both of us are sort of sitting there, and we end up like emailing each other in the same cafe, and I'm like, I'm sitting here, he's like, oh, I'm in this yellow shirt. Now, when I get over to him, he says to me, oh, sorry, I'm dressed so informally, I was just donating blood.

And I'm like, I leave that conversation after an hour, and I'm like, was that whole thing like set up? You know what I mean? Like, I don't know. I have no idea. Maybe he was actually donating blood and then he came and wanted to chat to me and it was on the way back and that's why we ended up at this hotel. Or he's actually plotted, you know, because I write for the Washington Post sometimes.

He knew that I was going to write about him. And so it was like, okay, was this calculated? And I have no idea. I have literally no idea. And that's always the dilemma. That's for somebody who's up close to someone in power. Then you think about how we assess politicians or business leaders who we've never met,

never encountered, never talked to. And you think it's another layer removed. So that's one of the big problems. And this also goes back to that psychopath aspect or never talk to you, and you think it's another layer removed. So that's one of the big problems. And this also goes back to that psychopath aspect is every time I talk to psychopath experts, not psychopaths, but people who study psychopaths, they said two things in every single interview that I asked them. They said, one is that they're very, very good at superficial charm.

And two is they said, the successful psychopaths are in the boardroom and in politics, the unsuccessful psychopaths are in jail. So there's this level of discipline, and there's also this level of sort of superficial manipulation. And I'm not saying this guy is a psychopath. He was a very nice person to me. He's made some decisions that I have issue with,

take issue with. But how are we supposed to know? You know, I mean, these people are exceptionally good at it and our systems distance us. So we're trying to make judgments of like, is this a good person, is this a good leader? And we have almost no information that's actually credible to base it on.

And that's a real problem in modern society. No, that's what I mean because power is a performance. And it's a mask. And so it inherently shrouds this, the thing we need to know about the most, we are in the least position to ever truly understand. Yeah. Well, and I think that's why, just very briefly,

that I think is why the best people, and this is one of the arguments I advance in the book, is the best people to have in power are those who don't want power. Yes. Because they're not making performances, right? They're the people who think, this is going to be a real drag, but things have gotten so bad, I need to sort them out. And then I want to go back to my life.

That's the sweet spot of finding power and a lot of our systems don't find those people. And in fact, they repel them very often. Well, that's the thing about Cincinnati, right? Cincinnati didn't work his whole life for power and then give it up. Cincinnati was effectively drafted briefly for power and then gave it up, right? And so this is why I think things like term limits and constraints matter so much. If it is an end to itself, people are much more likely to be permanently attached to it and probably corrupted by it, then if it is a temporary phase. I was thinking about that the other day because you talk about

cops in the book. You know, we talk about how, you know, maybe we need like a national service in the United States, like bringing back the draft. I was what, it's like, maybe that's how you solve some of the policing issues in the country, which is that police are not full-time, professional enforcers of the law, but this is like a thing that we all do temporarily. Like if it was something you were doing for a brief amount of time,

maybe you would have a different relationship to it, then if you did it for a career which involves becoming jaded or cynical or attached or trying to move up in the ranks, so to speak. Yeah, so the way I talk about police, I think you're right about that. And I think the way that I tried to approach this was thinking outside the box a little bit because the police reform debate in the United States is, you know, extremely toxic. It's extremely divisive. There's defund the police. There's do nothing to reform the police on the other side. And so, you know, I think we have to think about

it slightly differently. I think we don't just need to think about what the police do. We need to think about as you're pointing out who the police are and who ends up in uniform. Now, there's a lot of wonderful cops who are absolutely trying to serve their communities and do so with distinction. But one of the things that pretty much every police recruitment official that I talked to said to me was that while that's true, if you are somebody who's a bad apple, if you're a bully or a bigot or you're just drawn to violence against people, you know, the idea of being a bully or a bigot in a uniform with a badge and a gun is really attractive.

So what you have to do is design a way to stop those people from ending up in positions of leadership. So I was looking at different ways that we recruit police around the world. And there's this video that stood out to me in the US in Indoraville, Georgia, a town of 10,000 people just outside Atlanta. It's extremely over the top. I mean, it starts with the Punisher logo, which is this vigilante comic book,

sort of hero or anti-hero who punishes and tortures criminals. And then it goes to this tank, which these cops are in. They're in a literal tank. And they're all in Kammo and they're sort of getting out of the tank and throwing smoke grenades and shooting their weapons and so on. And then the tank screams off. And you think, you know, if you're just somebody who like wants to serve as a community support officer, you know, look at this video and think, maybe not, you know,

yeah. Now there's definitely a place for that. For the SWAT teams and so on, you absolutely want to recruit those guys. But for the person who's just sort of doing the foot patrol in a in a sleepy little town outside of Atlanta, maybe not, right? So New Zealand, what they did, I thought was very clever. I interviewed the person who was in charge of recruitment for the whole country for policing. And she helped develop this amazing glitzy recruitment video that went viral on YouTube,

it has a couple million views in a country of five million people. And it's very, very funny. It depicts police in this sort of fun, lighthearted, service-oriented way. We're like, there's a cop who's crossing, helping an old person cross the road. And then a guy comes in with a boom box and he starts dancing with him.

And they're chasing this unseen criminal the whole time. And at the end, it's a border collie that's stolen a purse from some lady. And at the end, instead of the Punisher logo, it says, do you care enough to be a cop? And what happened was they got a different profile of people applying, the rates of police abuse decline, the rates of police violence decline, et cetera.

Now, can you just do that and expect it to solve problems in the US? No, I mean, we have much deeper issues than New Zealand. But I think the lesson there is, well, at least New Zealand thought about it carefully. There was sort of like an actual strategy of thinking, who do we want to draw in? How are we going to portray this position of leadership? Who are we going to get on the other side? And I think, you know, whether it's a company, a political party, whatever it is, the way that you portray a role affects who applies for it. And I think we're on autopilot too often,

we just sort of do what we did last time and hope the results turn out better. When it's also, as you said, how does the system sort the talent once it's already in? So my father was a cop, and I remember him telling me, like, look, and obviously this isn't a hard and fast rule. So if there's any police officers listening,

I'm not judging you for your career choices or where you are, but he's saying, look, the good cops get promoted, right? So when you look at someone like Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, like, he's like 20 years in, still basically walking a beat, like he's still like a low level police officer. That's because it nowhere did anyone find potential in him? Did they think this guy is a leader? This is like a guy we should have in charge of other people,

right? And so it's also, you know, you think about politics like who is the system not just retaining, but then how is it promoting, rewarding, incentivizing, and you just, you can often find yourself where it's like in the most sensitive, important positions, you're actually, because of the Peter principle or whatever, getting stuck with precisely the people, the most correctable people in the most vulnerable of positions. And then you wonder why you get the results that we get. Yeah, well, and I also think that there's some positions where you require additional oversight. The positions where you can do the most damage. So one of the people I interviewed for the book was the former head of Internal Affairs at NYPD, and he developed this new system that I think it

was very, very clever, exploiting the power of randomness to try to get cops to behave better. And so what he did basically was, there's this story that he told me of, this one day, this police officer gets told, hey, we've just done a drugs bust, the DEA is gonna come and check it out, but they can't get there right away. Can you just go babysit this place and the Bronx or whatever?

And he arrives and of course there's $20, $20,000 in cash on the table and a whole bunch of cocaine. And he pockets like six grand and says, oh yeah, I've just discovered $14,000 and all this stuff. What he doesn't realize is the whole thing is a setup. And they, you know, wired the whole thing like Fort Knox, they have all these cameras everywhere.

And as soon as he's tries to go home with the money, you know, they sort of haul him in. What was really interesting, though, and I think this, you know, the story makes sense. It's fair enough. It's straightforward. But the wrinkle here is they only did 500 of these. They did 500 different stings across the entire police department. When they surveyed cops and said, were you set up in a sting? 12,000 cops said, yes. And that's because 11,500 encountered situations that were real that they thought were fake. And so it caused them to behave differently because every time they encountered,

$20,000 cash on the table, they're like, ah, this is the internal affairs trying to set me up. And it creates this sort of healthy dose of worry in people in positions of power that maybe this is not a real situation, so you need to actually care about that. Now, I don't want to live in a dystopian society where like, you know, the break room fridge has like baited, you know, sandwiches. But I think for certain positions where you have immense authority and the ability to do disproportionate harm,

a little bit of randomized oversight like that might be a good idea. Well, this goes, we talked that we opened with how ancient this is. This is Juvenile's famous quote of who watches the watchman, right? Like who is the check? Like the police are setting up stings all the time to catch ordinary citizens in moments of temptation or wrongdoing, but would be aghast at being subjected to the same level of scrutiny or temptation. And this is why they have unions and public figures who advocate for them because they want there, they don't wanna be subjected to that.

Yeah, this is one of my favorite stories in the book that I tell is this guy I interviewed, he's this amazing journalist in Ghana. And his name is a Noss, he goes by. When I interviewed him on Skype, he was wearing, as he always does in public, this hat with beads over the face, he's never seen. There's no pictures of him in the world. He's deliberately never photographed. The reason why he does this is because he wears disguises. He does undercover journalism. And at one point, he dressed up like a rock. It's like, it's the funniest costume.

It's so amateurish. But it's got these little eye holes. It's like this lump of sandstone and all this. But what he does is he pretends to be other people, or he just is literally a rock on the side of the road and you're somebody who's getting away with some bad behavior. And the idea that's so powerful about him in the same realm of who watches the watchers

is because nobody knows who a NAS is, everybody could be a NAS. And that's the power of his brand of journalism. That's what he always says is that, if the second people know what I look like, is the second that these people can get away with it again, because they're never gonna wonder is this person actually an undercover journalist? Again, it's about balance. I mean, he's exposing judges who are

basically, you know, getting bribes or whatever it is, but you have to ensure that that sort of element of oversight is deployed in a way that's not dystopian for the rest of us, but he's deployed for the people at the very top. Although ironically, you look at journalism, the so-called Fourth Estate, and how little self scrutiny it has, right, and how often journalists themselves would be, could be found abusing their power just as some of the Me Too scandals illustrated in set. Anyways, the last thing I wanted to talk to you about was obviously, sort of, here I've mine someone I write a lot about, what I find so inspiring and intriguing about the story of Marcus Relius is you have one of the few examples or exceptions to the rule of

the idea of absolute power corrupting absolutely. And it's this weird story, right, because for three or four emperors in a row, they don't have a male heir. So they have to choose a person, but they choose them. Sometimes it's an older man, sometimes it's a younger man, but in Marcus really is his case. He's chosen as a young boy, but then there, then another man, Antoninus Pius is chosen as the stepfather, basically, so it's too removed. But going to your point about you want people who don't want power, supposedly the story is

when Marcus really says told, he's like in his teens that he's chosen for this, he starts to weep. And he weeps because he's like, from my study of history, he's like, I know this doesn't end well. Like he knows about bad kings. And ultimately does become, the emperor does largely a good job although certainly not perfect.

But you have this example of someone who becomes the most powerful person in the world, literally worshiped as a God, it doesn't seem to go to their head. And then he writes this book that was never intended for publication. And you see in meditations, him kind of wrestling with the stuff that we're talking about.

He talks about, he says, you have to be careful not to be imperialized, be stained purple by the Emperor's cloak. And I just wonder, you know, is he the only one or is it that we just hear so much more about the awful cases and there are more figures like that? As you pull, I think something like 500 people, does it, were you encouraged, were you discouraged? Do you think there could be more exceptions to the role or are you pretty pessimistic? No, I mean, I think in general, I think that there are serious problems with corruptible people

seeking and obtaining power and power turning decent people worse. But there are plenty of examples of good leaders. I mean, all of us know a good leader in our life. And the point is not to denigrate them or to sort of say that there's no Marcus Aurelius' under modern, you know, modern politics, modern business, whatever. It's more to say, can't we make more of them? Can we ensure that we have not some luck principle that's going to get these people into power, but actually try to engineer a system that draws them in? Now, I think what's particularly interesting about Marcus Aurelius is that he's so self-reflective about this. And a lot of these people weren't.

A lot of them just didn't do that. There was one example I don't actually write about him in the book, but he's somebody that I interviewed. He's a man who, an amazing figure in Tunisia, who basically, he plotted a coup in the 1980s, failed, was tortured, fled into exile in the UK, and then came back after the Arab Spring and ended up near the highest echelons of power in the new sort of democratic government. And he convinced his party to step down after one term. He said, look, we shaped a lot of the debate

around the new constitution. We had the first crack at the presidency. It's healthy for our country in reform terms to have somebody else in power. And this just doesn't happen, right? I mean, a whole political party just will link machine power voluntarily, not contesting elections.

So it happens. There are people out there who have that vision. I think the problem is that there are the exceptions when you get to the very high levels of power. There's a lot of good people and sort of mid levels of power. I mean, we have the coaches in our lives, the people who sort of wheeled power justly because they just want to help other people. They're all around us. But the higher you get up the hierarchy, the rarer those markets the release figures are. And that's why I think it's so important that we think about how can we ensure that they're attracted and drawn into power much more often than they actually are now. Yeah, I think about someone like Eisenhower. I mean, literally

the greatest conqueror who ever lived, he won a world war, then he inherits America as it's the sole nuclear power. And he not only serves two terms before walking away, but his final speech is about the perils of exactly the system that propel him to power. And you just think about sort of how rare that kind of temperance really is, it just doesn't happen. I wish it did a lot more. And I think, you know, that's the last third of the book is 10 principles that I think

can help us get better people into power, draw them in, promote them, find ways to bring the markets to releases and the Eisenhower's to the forefront of modern society. Because I think as divided as the United States is, one thing that most Democrats and Republicans agree on is they're not totally satisfied with the core of leaders that we have. And I think that's something that actually unifies us. And that's because some of these systems are fundamentally broken. Yeah, and I think it's worth noting too, because we talked about a lot of dudes.

I was just, I just read this biography of Anhel a Miracle, which I thought was fascinating. Like, how do you get a leader who is the leader of the free world who's still shopping for her own groceries, right? Or there's a scene in the book where she, she chides her aides for laughing at a joke that she knows they've heard before, right? She's like telling it in

front of someone and her aides are laughing at it and she's like, you guys don't think this is funny. You're doing this because you think I want you to do it. And I just think about the self control and the self awareness that something like that would require. It leaves up much to be desired in the leaders that we see pretty much everywhere else. Yeah, I have a significant amount of time that I devote in the book to understanding the sort of gender dynamics around power

and also why it is that women are so underrepresented to our detriment in positions of leadership. And there's an amazing study about this with, again, with monkeys, where they sort of say that the combination of huge amounts of power in the animal hierarchy, combined with injections of a surplus of testosterone, like abnormal amounts of testosterone,

the monkeys get awful. They start to just like pick on the the the week was they start to bully them, they attack them, sometimes they kill them. So, you know, I think there is something to this, but I think we need to grapple with that question a lot because one of the worst things I read in studying this book and sort of figuring out these dynamics was there's this poll question people are asked says, you know, can you name a female tech leader? You know, they say, name a male tech leader. I mean, people can rattle them off.

They say, name a female tech leader. 8% of people say, yes, I can name one. So then the follow up question is, okay, name one. And most people couldn't come up with a name. When they finally did the most common answers, this is the most depressing thing. The two most common answers were Alexa and Siri. Oh, yeah, it's, right.

At least it wasn't Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah, well, that's true. That's true. Could be worse. No, I think it's about balance, right? The idea of sort of masculine, feminine, energy, different personalities, different viewpoints, that's almost a final check against the corruption of power

is just not being around lots of people who are exactly like you with the same experiences, desires, incentives, whatever. You wanna be checked by the examples of other people. Yeah, and I think that's something where, you know, what, when you do actually look into studies of how women wield power differently from men, the conclusions are either pretty much the same or better. There are no studies that I found that that suggests that women are more likely

to be prone to abusive behavior and most of them suggest exactly the opposite of that. But I'm very careful about that because I think one of the things that's problematic is when you have gender essentialism, and you say like women are good at some things and bad at other things. It actually, you know, is quite a dangerous way of thinking. And I don't think it's supported by the evidence. But if you were to look at the psychology studies about power and so on, if anything, they tend to point in the direction

of less despotic, less abusive, less prone to corruption, et cetera, for women. Well, my book, Ego is the enemy, is a bunch of people wrote in and they said, why aren't there more female examples in the book? Is it that women don't have egos? And it's, it's, it was, no, of course, of course they do. I'm not, I don't think it's really a male or a female thing.

It's just the male ego has for thousands of years prevented the female ego from, from destroying itself the way that the male ego has, right? So there's a certain historical bias to, like, we hear a lot more, there's a lot more Julia Caesars than Cleopatra's. So we tend to associate this with the sort of a male, energy, a male focus. But if things were reversed, we'd be talking about it the same way because I think you're right. There's nothing inherently gendered about the way that power works, this human psyche. Yeah, you know, I think there's also another wrinkle here,

and it's about how we study power and gender, which is, okay, so there's loads and loads of studies that show if you take the same resume, the same CV, and you put a female name on the top or a male name on the top, differential rates of callbacks and job interviews happen. I mean, may as get offered job interviews more, even with the exact same qualifications. So if you take that as given, which I think is pretty well established, then when you're

comparing people who are in positions of power, men and women, you're going to have some mediocre men who have sort of fallen upwards. Whereas because of the barriers, a lot of exceptional women are going to be the ones who are in positions of power that skews the data a bit. So there's a lot of complexity because it's not just like comparing apples to apples. It's that we're comparing apples to oranges in a system in which the oranges might get promoted more easily than the other different sample sizes. Exactly.

All of these things, and that's why again, I'm sort of careful about this because yes, the studies seem to show that women are all of these things, and that's why again, I'm sort of careful about this because yes, the studies seem to show that women are all of these things. But if you say definitively that there's some fundamental difference between men and women, I think that's been used to subjugate women, that sort of viewpoint for a very long time. So I'm careful about threading the needle between those two sort of ideas, and I think it's very important to be careful with them in general. No, I think that's totally right. And I think your overall point is connected to that, which is that awful people are over-represented when we think about power. And because psychopaths have an advantage over regular people in the way that they're willing to do things that other people perhaps are not.

And I think that all of us would agree that a better level of representation and more levels of voices around power would provide that check that you're talking about. I mean, you know, good leaders like you talk about whether it's Marcus Relius or Angela Merkel, understand that and put those people around them. But you can't always expect that every leader is going to do that. So it's best if we have a level of sort of different perspectives in and around the people who govern our lives in the end. Well, to rejigger the phrase of a particularly awful person, we're not sending our best. That's the one way that I've, yeah,

that's the most charitable way I've ever heard that quote presented, I think. No, I think we're sending our worst and then hoping for the best. And indeed, yes. Well, Brian, I love the book and I love this conversation and thank you very much. Thanks so much for having me on.

It was a pleasure to chat to you. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. you