189 | Brian Klaas on Power and the Temptation of Corruption

0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And you know, sometimes I'm amazed that society works at all. [chuckle] It's the ultimate emergent phenomenon, right? We have all these agents, all these individual people, they have their own agendas, they have their own desires, motivations, they have their own capacities and abilities, and somehow they come together to form a society. Now, sometimes the society is a little more well-ordered than others, but it generally happens, this sort of organization. Sometimes it's top down, there's an autocratic dictatorship. Increasingly in the modern world it is bottom-up, people actually get to vote for who leads us, but inevitably there will be some flaws in the system, there will be individuals who are not necessarily civic-minded, who nevertheless get a lot of power, right? They're not in it for the greater good. They're in it for their own good, but either we elect them or they seize power somehow. This is a problem, this is a problem for how society works, it's a very broad problem. A specific aspect of it is the idea of corruption, the idea that once people get into positions of power, they do things to benefit themselves rather than working for the good of society.

0:01:13.6 SC: So what is this corruption? How do we think about it and how do we get rid of it? Does power corrupt? In other words, if we take perfectly decent people and put them in positions of power, do they automatically become corrupt? Or are people who are corruptible, those who want to seek power and therefore use it to their own advantages? Today's guest is Brian Klaas, who is an Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London. He's also a columnist for the Washington Post, and he has his own podcast, the Power Corrupts podcast, appropriately enough. And his new book is called "Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us." He studied exactly this question of, "If you take a whole bunch of people, give them power, do they all become more corrupt or are there ways that corruptible people are able to seize power for their own pernicious agendas?"

0:02:02.8 SC: Interestingly, Brian does actually offer some solutions, there are some things you can do as a society, some easy things, some things that will be harder to implement, but some things you can do to make it less likely that people who get into power become corrupted once they're there. It's very, very important because as we've mentioned before on the podcast, we're in this gigantic phase of social history where... Gigantic in the sense that the structures that we're dealing with are gigantic, corporations, institutions, nations, pan national organizations. It's very, very hard for individuals to make an impact, and therefore we need to work harder to make sure that these institutions are not corrupt, at least to the extent that we can. It's a worthy challenge to take up, and Brian's book is a good start for it, so let's go.

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0:03:06.6 SC: Brian Klass, welcome to The Mindscape podcast.

0:03:08.7 Brian Klaas: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

0:03:10.5 SC: I guess it's kind of interesting 'cause it took me a little bit, hopefully not too long, but a little bit to figure out the angle of the book that you've written, because we've had a lot of books, a lot of chitchat on populism, authoritarianism, strong person rule, and the decline of democracy, but you have a slightly different angle of corruption and corruptibility, so what's the relationship there? How should you think about corruption? It kind of conjures up visions of old school, big city machine politics and taking some bribes to get someone their potholes fixed or something like that.

0:03:47.6 BK: Yeah, I'm trying to really understand power and also why powerful people are so often corruptible people. And I use the term corruptible rather than corrupt because it's getting this idea of, are they changing their behavior as a result of the power? There's the very famous quote of, "Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely," by Lord Acton. And it's one of those things where that's true. It is, all the psychology research shows that power does corrupt, but I wanted to understand many of the underlying dynamics, 'cause the real story is much more complicated, much more interesting than that tagline would suggest. And so what I'm trying to understand is why do certain people seek power, why do corruptible people seem to seek power more than others, why does power change people, and how can we fix it? How does the system that we have around individuals change the way that they behave once they're in power?

0:04:42.3 SC: And should we think about the corruption as specifically using this powerful position to enrich yourself or is it just sort of more a disconnect between your job and what you actually do?

0:04:55.8 BK: Yeah, so in political science literature, corruption usually refers to using some sort of public office for personal gain, private gain. And that's usually financial, but it can be involved with nepotism, and payoffs for lucrative jobs for family members, etcetera. I'm thinking about corruptibility in a broader sense, by which I basically mean... You use precise terms as an academic, but I'm basically talking about powerful people doing bad things.

0:05:20.9 SC: Okay.

0:05:22.7 BK: Harming other individuals abusing them. Sometimes it involves embezzlement and stealing, sometimes it's police officers who are doing things that they shouldn't be doing, sometimes it's CEOs who are terrorizing their employees and making them live in a culture of fear, so I'm looking at a sort of lens around power and trying to understand why it's so often the case that as we look up in society, we're often disappointed. And one of the paradoxes that I tend to find is I've interviewed some really awful people. I did more than 500 interviews for this book, war criminals, corrupt kingpins, all sorts of people, cult leaders, you name it, and yet I really believe in human nature. I believe that most people are pretty good. And so the paradox is, whenever I talk to people, they say things like, "All of my friends and family are good, normal, decent people," why is it that when I look to society in terms of the highest echelons of who we choose to put in charge of us, that seems to not be the case? And that's where I'm trying to sort of argue that the systems we've designed have rolled out the red carpet to people who probably shouldn't be in power.

0:06:32.8 SC: I guess from the point of view of here in the US, where you're from, but you're in the UK right now, I think that there's a feeling, I'm not gonna say how accurate it is, but on the Republican side, there's a lot of corrupt people, on the Democratic side, there's a lot of ineffectual people, so I think maybe your next book should be called "Ineffectual: How We Keep Electing People to Office Who Never Get Anything Done." [laughter]

0:06:54.6 BK: Yeah. And I don't think that the parties... I agree with that assessment in general, about what's going on at the moment, but I don't think that there's any sort of partisan aspect to the book in the sense that I think this is a human problem. There's been people who have been debating these questions for a very long time about why is it seem that those who get power, who drink at its trough are so often not the best among us. And I think you can take a specific snapshot in time in any society, and obviously the pendulum is swung one way or another, in the US is a quite extreme example where I think the system is really badly broken, and one of the big arguments I make in the book is that this matters enormously because rotten systems attract rotten people and good systems attract good people. One of my favorite studies from economists that have done this in the book that I mentioned is a study of dice rolls and corruption in various places, where what they do is they take these students and they say, "Roll a dice 42 times and self-report your score and the more time you get sixes, the more time we're gonna give... The more money we're gonna give you," so you can lie on your self-reporting.

0:08:04.1 BK: And this was by design. And then what they did is they used statistical methods to figure out how often people had lied to infer based on statistical regularities, and they survey the students and said, "What do you want to do with your career?" And when they did the study in India where the civil service was notoriously corrupt and had lots of graft and bribery, the students who lied on their dice rolls really wanted to be civil servants. When they did the same study in Denmark, the whole dynamic was inverted, all the really honest students wanted to be civil servants and all the really dishonest students wanted to go into business and make money. So it's one of these very obvious statements that actually I think is not appreciated enough, because we tend to think of powerful people either as good or bad, and what a lot of the book is talking about is how much the systems mediate this effect. And that's actually quite helpful, because you can change systems much more easily than you can change people.

0:08:57.9 SC: Right. No, I love that emphasis of it, and it's a very good lesson, it's almost one of those things where I have to be careful 'cause I want that to be true. So we need to be careful that we're not tricking ourselves into it, but let me just... You said it out loud and we'll get into details about it, but let's just home in on the power corrupting thing, because you said, "Yes, indeed it is true that power corrupts," so where does the evidence come for that? How do you tease out the difference between being in power corrupts you versus the corrupt people seize power?

0:09:30.4 BK: Yeah, this is the chicken or the egg problem for the book is, is it that corruptible people seek power or does power corrupt? The evidence is very strong that both happen, that corruptible people gravitate towards power much more than the average person, and that power does change you. So the evidence comes a few ways, one is just in psychology research, where what they do is... I think, frankly, these are somewhat flimsy recreations of power they're forced to do because they can't actually make people CEOs and they can't actually make people presidents and so on, but when they do studies, pretty much all of them show that there is a psychological change in how they view people below them as abstractions, they start to think of them as more disposable, they have this mechanism called 'Illusory Control' where they believe that they can manipulate outcomes more than they actually can. There's also just basic stuff that makes a lot of intuitive sense.

0:10:22.7 BK: I talked to Andrew Yang, the former Presidential candidate on the Democratic side at one point, and the point he made, which is very straightforward is, he says, "For a year, I walked into a room, everybody stood on their feet and cheered for me. Every joke I told, even if it was a terrible joke, they laughed uproariously. You start to change your thought pattern." And neuroscientists have looked at this and found evidence of actual brain changes. The best example of this is in non-human primates because it's easier to study and dissect and so on, but when you look at Macaque monkeys, I interviewed a researcher out of Wake Forest who has a Class II Drug License for pure cut cocaine, and what he does is he takes these macaques and puts them in non-house situations where they're in individual housing units, so they don't have any hierarchy. And then he basically lifts up the barriers, so that all of a sudden they're in a group of four, and they very quickly, set up a dominance hierarchy, one, two, three, four.

0:11:18.6 BK: Then he puts them in this chair that they've been trained to use, where one lever releases banana pellets and the other lever intravenously gives them cocaine. And what's fascinating about this is the dominant monkeys at the top of the hierarchy all choose the banana pellets, and the submissive monkeys all choose the cocaine. And when they re-jigger, the monkeys into a new housing situation, and it happens again, the same effect happens. So if you were a dominant monkey in experiment A and you become a submissive monkey in experiment B in a different group, the effect holds. And when they actually look at the brains, the dopamine receptors have changed. They actually have a fundamental shift in the hierarchy causing changes to some of the chemical reactions happening in the brain. And I'm not a neuroscientist to understand exactly what's going on, but the evidence is quite clear that there are biological effects, and of course with stress, this also exists, and there's lots of evidence about how stress ages people in power and so on. So it's not just a psychological thing, it's also a biological thing, which I think is important to understand.

0:12:22.8 SC: I mean maybe... I'm not sure if this is grounded in evidence or pure speculation, but I'm not sure I understand the mechanism behind the submissive monkeys taking the cocaine. Is it that they're not getting dopamine from power? Like they're not drunk on power therefore they need to get high from cocaine, whereas the powerful monkeys are happy with banana pellets? 'Cause that doesn't quite seem to match with my experience of human powerful people.

0:12:48.0 BK: It's the idea of self-medicating, that's what their hypothesis is anyway, that they say that effectively it's a stressful and difficult place to be in a hierarchy, especially in non-human primates, that is stripped of lots of other forms of meaning that we would have in human society. One of the virtues of humans is that we have intersecting forms of hierarchy, so you can be a powerless person who's low on the pecking order in your corporate world, and yet in your family or in your softball team or whatever, you can feel valued. And so the idea here is because you don't have the norms and cultures around society that it's such a singular bad thing to happen to you as a macaque to be at the bottom, that it's quite stressful.

0:13:31.4 BK: And actually one of the things that's interesting is it's not just the cocaine study, the research that's been done on baboon hierarchies is really, really interesting on this front, because what they show is that you have... You can measure sort of biological aging, and they use this process that, again, I'm not the expert on it, but it's called DNA methylation, where they're using effectively markers in genetic code to look at biological levels of aging, and it's different from the clock. So you can age faster than the calendar. And what they found is that as you go down to the bottom, it's the most stressful, because you don't have access to resources, mates, food, you're being picked on all the time, so you age faster. As you go up, you age a little bit slower, and then when you get to the apex, when you get to the alpha male, you age a lot.

0:14:20.3 SC: Right. [laughter]

0:14:20.8 BK: And the reason for that is because you've got a target on your back, so all the other baboons are going for you all the time. And so it's this acute level of stress, and it leads to this somewhat counter-intuitive conclusion, which actually the beta baboon is actually the best, it's the one that doesn't have the stress, but it has the resources. Sort of in human terms it'd be like, "It's not good to be the king, but it's good to be in the court," so to speak. And again, this is something... It's biological, it's a question about aging, it's a question about stress levels. There's a lot of evidence in the human world as well, but these ones are interesting because they strip away the sort of complexity of modern culture and so on, and show there is actually a biological effect tied to hierarchy.

0:15:03.9 SC: Yeah, and it's not surprising, but I like the turnover effect there, that you age more when you're at the very top, but people still want it. Okay, so we're gonna get to that. Let me... I love the experiments in primates and what we learned from that, but let's go back in history a little bit and talk about human beings, 'cause this has been hot in the news late... I guess in the news in certain circles with the new book out by David Graeber, and David Wengrow, was it? Claiming that we were all anarchists back in the day, or we could still be, and there's a... That's in conflict with the standard story where I guess there was no hierarchy and then agriculture came along and that gave us the impetus to become more hierarchical. What is your take on the origins of the existence of hierarchy in the first place?

0:15:54.8 BK: Yeah, so chapter two of the book is called The Evolution of Power, and it touches on this idea, and I think what is clear to me is that the story that's been told for a very long time, which I detail in the book, and I explain it, the one of what's called reverse dominance hierarchies, where you had deliberate efforts to try to tear people down if they tried to seize power in hunter-gatherer societies, and you had more egalitarianism among small bands of people up to 80 people mostly, I think that that broadly, the gist of that is true in some pockets, and is probably over-simplified in other places. There's some evidence for example that's often talked about in the standard story, that one of the arguments for this is agriculture creating larger societies and then hierarchy emerges. I refer to these various hypotheses, somewhat pitifully in the book as The War and Peas hypothesis, peas being P-E-A-S. So it's either a conflict causing aggregation of hierarchies from conquest where societies are getting bigger and becoming hierarchical, or peas, one of the early crops that's been used to build larger societies and create a hierarchy, and sort of war and peas works nicely.

0:17:00.9 BK: But I also cited in the chapter that there's evidence from a guy at Harvard named Manvir Singh who said, "Look, this predicates... This argument is predicated on the idea that you couldn't have had sedentary lifestyles in the hunter-gatherer period, what about all the fishing communities? They were sedentary because they were getting their food from fish, so they weren't moving around the same way, and there is evidence that there was more hierarchy there." So I think it's overly simplistic to suggest that we didn't have hierarchy in the human past, and yet I also think that something is fundamentally different about the way we live now and in these extremely hierarchical societies where you're constantly reminded where you are in status every single thing you do.

0:17:45.2 BK: One of the more interesting bits of research I read in researching this section, because, you know, I'm a political scientist, so I don't always read Evolutionary Biology text, but I love this research also came out of Harvard where they're looking at why humans are uniquely able to throw objects with extreme speed and accuracy and the sort of evolution of our shoulders and how that's affected the development of the species. And effectively the way the story goes is that because we're able to effectively kill other humans at a distance, we have severed the link with range weapons between size and dominance, which is not true in many non-human primate species where to kill a male chimpanzee, you better be big, whereas in human society that I looked this up, it's one of the most depressing statistics I've seen, but about three people are shot by toddlers in the United States every week. And so we have found a way to make it so even babies effectively can kill adult male humans, and that has had profound effects on the way you determine who's in charge because it no longer has to be the physically largest or one of the physically largest males of the species.

0:19:00.0 SC: But I guess I'm confused because you've already alluded to the fact that primates have very pronounced dominance hierarchies. I guess I'm skeptical that we were ever hierarchy list, it seems to be... And I'm completely ignorant about this, I could be completely wrong, but it seems to me that once the size of the community gets beyond a handful, we tend to have leaders and followers, even in a group of friends, we have leaders and followers. Are we glossing over some of the differences that were always there?

0:19:31.5 BK: Yeah, it's possible. The standard story, the one that's being challenged more recently, points to this separation between us and non-human primates using range weapons, and also talking about how most humans were in small bands of 80 people. This doesn't mean there weren't leaders that emerged in some facets of life. If you were good at something, it's pretty nonsensical to believe that you didn't have some sort of clout within your community for being good at something. But there's some interesting evidence, this is often trotted out by the anthropologist who make this argument of the Kung community which is one of the modern-day hunter-gatherer communities. And they have this ingenious system that I think really speaks to this reverse dominance hierarchy in which you try to ensure egalitarianism against the people who try to seize power.

0:20:16.3 BK: So the way they figure out how to do this, is they think, look, in a hunter-gatherer society, if you're good at hunting, you're gonna become the powerful figure because you're providing for the community. So instead, what we're gonna do is we're gonna create a communal ownership of the arrow heads that are used in hunting, and we're gonna rotate them regularly, and the credit for the kill doesn't go to the person who actually killed the animal, it goes to the person who owned the arrowhead, which we swap around the community at regular intervals. And that ensures basically through randomization that nobody ever gets too much credit for being a hunter, and in fact, the anthropologists who have talked to these modern day communities or 1960's research, a lot of this was, they have this amazing ritual called "Insulting the meat" in which when the hunter comes back with a great kill, they basically make fun of it and say, "How could you come back with something that's so tiny," like, "Why did you fail so badly," and it's a ritual to ensure that the hunter doesn't emerge as someone who's too big for their britches, so to speak.

0:21:19.3 BK: Again, one of the things that I do in the book is I say some of this stuff is unfalsifiable. We can't go back... Evolutionary anthropology, most of it is unfalsifiable because we can't interview people from 50,000 years ago and ask them what they're thinking. I think what is clear, and this is worth pointing out in the research on hierarchy, is that the evolution of our brains has not proceeded apace with the evolution of our societies, in other words, the time scales of 50,000 years or whatever, for us, from the Stone Age, hunter-gatherers are not sufficient to say that our brain structure has changed dramatically, but our lifestyle has changed profoundly. And so I do buy into the hypothesis of what's called the evolutionary mismatch that says some of the templates that are in our brains for leadership selection might have been adaptive for a very, very different time, but again, I have a footnote in the book that says, we can't falsify this, we can't say for sure. It makes sense, but there's no way to prove it, and I that's why I have a healthy dose of skepticism about some of the sweeping claims that come from this world of research.

0:22:23.5 SC: Yeah, now, I'm very happy to entertain these hypotheses and let them inspire us, but like you say, healthy skepticism makes sense because the data are not enough to really constrain things. I did wanna ask one little follow-up on that wonderful reverse dominance hierarchy thing, because even though it's an amazing story, I love it, but it's also clearly a sophisticated intentional response to people trying to get too much power if people trying to become overly powerful so it's clearly a mechanism that is responding to something that already existed.

0:22:57.8 BK: No, I don't think that the evolutionary anthropologists are arguing that humans didn't ever have power seeking, I think the idea is that some societies that were smaller, that had more communal living of 80 people, which is a threshold that is manageable to imagine the idea you know everyone, if you start to abuse them, there's going to... They say, "Look, there are people who try to seize power even in the un-contacted tribes that then become part of the world of trying to infer the past," which it's a flawed research technique, but it's all there is really. What they say is, "Yeah, there's people who try to seize power all the time, they're often the personality types that we would recognize in modern society, some of them are shamanic leaders where they claim some divine power legitimacy, some of them are warriors who do particularly well, and then say, 'I should be in charge.'"

0:23:47.3 BK: The reverse dominance hierarchy is saying that there had to be a deliberate systemic mechanism to counteract this, and the reason I'm somewhat skeptical that this was always the case is because surely it failed sometimes. Surely there's the person who would have emerged as a leader, and that's why, I think, the evidence is probably at best a bit mixed about this. I do think that there is something, as I said before, profoundly different about how they lived, and also the size of the group does make a lot of sense that it would have a different function of hierarchy, because one of the aspects of modern living is that you don't know the people you're ruling over.

0:24:27.6 SC: Right. Very much.

0:24:28.6 BK: There are people you're never going to interact with, and that is strikingly different from how humans lived for much of the history of the species.

0:24:36.1 SC: Okay, so once we start having these formalized power structures and hierarchies, we can easily distinguish between two different ways in which people might get power, one that they seize it, 'cause they're the biggest or the best, and the other is that they are granted it by some communal agreement. Are both of these common in the ancient world, or was there one that is almost always the case?

0:25:00.8 BK: Well, it's hard to know again, because we don't have... They don't leave traces. In the prehistoric periods, we don't have good evidence of how somebody may have emerged, and there are, to be fair, some exceptions, as I say, to the egalitarian hypothesis that are worth considering because some burial sites around the world do show evidence of hierarchy where you have effectively what might have been a local leader or prince or something like that, buried with much more than the average person. Whereas other places, this is one of the pieces of evidence that the egalitarians point to, it's completely equal. There's just every... But that might also be because they were all poor and they didn't have any sort of...

0:25:43.3 SC: One way to be equal.

0:25:43.4 BK: So we can't say with certainty one way or another, what we can say is that the way that we see this in the modern world is, we focus a lot on the people who gain power as being morally condemned, and we very rarely turn the mirror back on ourselves and say, "Why did we give somebody so unfit power?" And that's something that I try to talk about more in the book of why we're seduced by certain things, why we have cognitive biases that cause us to make irrational judgments about leaders and how... Actually, you're totally right to point to the fact that there's two sides of the coin, and that the side of the coin that points back to us, the uncomfortable side, is rarely interrogated by people who like to condemn leaders as being fully responsible, even in democratic societies where of course were part of the picture.

0:26:33.1 SC: Well, let's talk about the kinds of person who tries to get to power, whether it's through outright seizing it, or being elected or whatever. We've already alluded to this, but I think we can go a little bit deeper now. Are the ones who are either corrupt or obviously corruptible, are those the natural candidates to run for office, roughly speaking? [chuckle]

0:26:54.5 BK: Yeah, so there's a few things that are happening. This is the classic self-selection effect with power. We often give power to people who put themselves forward and say, "I should be powerful," that's what elections are, it's what often job promotions are, and so on. I try to tackle this question and the conclusion to this, spoiler alert, was it's an unsatisfying conclusion, 'cause we can't know for sure. But I try to tackle the question of whether there's any sort of genetic basis to this, a genetic basis to power seeking. Which is an uncomfortable thing to think about sometimes in humans, but it's a reasonable thing to contemplate because in non-human species, you do have dominance inherited, hyenas inherit dominance, zebrafish, there's documented inherit sense of dominance and when they manipulate mice genes they can manipulate their dominance levels and so on. It would be odd if genes had nothing to do with power seeking behavior, so researchers have identified what they call a leadership gene, now they've over-claimed the work because...

0:27:52.7 SC: Okay, now I'm getting a little bit more skeptical, but... [chuckle]

0:27:56.2 BK: Yeah, so I find this... What they did was a reasonable research design, they compare fraternal twins and identical twins in a way of trying to isolate nature and nurture a bit, and then they try to do surveys to figure out who ends up in leadership positions later in life. My problem with the research is that it doesn't actually cover power seeking, it covers power obtaining, and those things are not the same. And so, to my mind, I present this research in the book, I say, "Look, there's a correlation that does exist between this gene and obtaining leadership later in life. The sample is reasonable, it's not too small, so maybe something's happening there, but I can't say whether that gene that they're finding is just co-varying with other genes that make you more affable or outgoing or attractive or whatever it is," so I think it's quite weak evidence that power-seeking is necessarily genetic. I tried to triangulate this a bit. I interviewed people who are the offspring of very powerful people, again, it's a flimsy source of evidence, but you take what you can get, it's one of the most interesting parts of the book in a way, 'cause I sat down with the daughter of Jean-Bedel Bokassa who was a cannibalistic dictator in the Central African Empire in the 1970s.

0:29:11.0 BK: And she had quite a traumatic childhood and still sort of reveres her dad, even though he fed dissidents to crocodiles, and at one point allegedly fed a dissident to a visiting French diplomat as human flesh.

0:29:24.6 SC: Tough crowd.

0:29:25.8 BK: So not a good guy, basically. And this is a situation where the aspects of... She was talking about the idea of returning to power herself, again, it's anecdotal, it's not compelling evidence. So we're back at square one because you can't disentangle nature and nurture that well, and even the genes that we do find that correlate with leadership may because of other things about society, not about power seeking itself. I think what is reasonable to conclude is that power-hungry people by definition, whether it's genetic or otherwise, are those who gravitate towards power, that's what we mean when we say power hungry.

0:30:03.1 BK: And what I often describe this as I say, when I met 500-plus very powerful people often who did bad things, there was a diverse group, there's different types of people, some were likeable, some were monsters, some were really callous, some were charming. The thing I could say with certainty about all of them is they were not representative of the general public. And they were unusual, they were all unusual people. And I often describe this as saying if you went to a high school basketball tryout, it would be really weird if the height among the people who are trying out was average. This is exactly the same with power, you don't have a self-selection mechanism that's randomized, so people who covet power put themselves forward.

0:30:44.5 BK: And as a result of that, the people who are in positions of power are almost by definition, people who find power to be an end in itself, disproportionate to the general public anyway. And that itself is a problem because you want the... Douglas Adams has a series of quotes about this, but he effectively says, "Anybody who can be made president of the galaxy should on no account be allowed to do the job," and I think he's pretty much hit on a lot of aspects of my research in this, that the people who think they should be president, there's probably something a bit wrong with them, and the people who can get themselves made president, there's certainly something wrong with them. It's one of those aspects where it's a very long-winded answer, and at the end, we're stuck, we don't have good evidence that power-seeking behavior is discernibly genetic or otherwise, and I know it's unsatisfying, but that's where I think we are with the evidence.

0:31:37.7 SC: Both of these make sense. Both the fact that power-seeking people are different than non-power-seeking people, who could argue with that? And the fact that it's hard to figure out whether it's genetic or not, that's also fine. But I am interested in pushing a little bit on this potential connection between power-seeking and corruptibility, just like Douglas Adams. Within academia, as you know, there's a rule of thumb that any person who wants to be department chair should never be allowed to be department chair. You should force the reluctant people to do it 'cause they'll be better at it, and there's somewhere either in your book or in an interview you did that seems to suggest that narcissistic psychopaths are over-represented in positions of power. Given that people who want to get power are different in various ways, is one of those ways that they are more likely to be narcissistic psychopaths?

0:32:31.9 BK: Yes, so this is where we get into the realm of psychology, and I'm not a psychologist, but what I do talk about in the book extensively is this concept of the dark triad, which is narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. And psychopathy is actually a clinical diagnosis, there are brain differences, whereas the others are more personality traits, but if they come together in a chemical cocktail known as the dark triad in high levels, those people are disproportionately likely to seek power and disproportionately likely to get power. And this is where the research is not necessarily pointing to something that's innate to human nature, but is also mediated through the way we've set up modern systems. And what I mean by that is that a lot of the ways you get power in modern society are unavoidably performative. In other words, your job interview is a performance, your election campaign is a performance, and people who are narcissistic are highly attuned to what other people think of them, people who are psychopathic... The two words that every psychopath expert I talked to said to me was superficial charm, and very chameleon like, they're very good at blending what they think the person wants them to be with what they become and Machiavellian in terms of just very strategic thinkers.

0:33:49.0 BK: And the evidence that we have when they've done observational research, which again, it's flawed in some ways, there's some aspects where when you measure psychopathy, it depends on what scale you use, etcetera, etcetera. What they find is, depending on the research you look at, is between four and 100 times more psychopaths are in positions of leadership than the general public, and they're rare in the general public. And I focus on them because I think it's important to understand that when they do emerge, even though most leaders are not psychopaths, they're particularly destructive. One of the really interesting bits of research, I interviewed a neuroscientist who studies psychopaths, and the way that she put it is that people with the dark triad dialed really far up on all three traits, effectively have, and especially psychopaths, have empathy switched off by default. And what she did was she did MRI scans, FMRI scans, where she would show people, both psychopaths and non-psychopaths, really disturbing images of children in distress, animals being abused, etcetera, stuff that would make you wanna get out of the MRI machine if you were a normal person. And what she found is that there was a massive difference.

0:35:00.1 BK: The brains of normal people are lighting up with anguish and psychopaths have a very muted response. But then she had this moment of, "Let's just try something else out." So she told the psychopaths, try to imagine what it would be like to feel the pain of these people to sympathize with them, to sympathize with the animals, and all of a sudden the scans looked remarkably similar to the normal individuals. And so what she was saying is that it seems to be the case that psychopaths can dial up empathy in moments when they need to persuade people that they're normal functioning individuals, those who can't do that are called dysfunctional psychopaths in the psychology and neuroscience literature around this, and those are the serial killers. They can't turn it off and they just... They're impossible to manage because they just can never dial their traits down.

0:35:48.5 BK: The functional psychopaths as they're sometimes called are the ones that the psychologists argue are in boardrooms and in elected office, because they're able to moderate their traits when they need to in those moments of performance. But I think it's a difficult one as all of this research, social research in general is very difficult to disentangle some of these things because humans are immensely complicated and you're trying to study something that, first off, is aware it's being studied sometimes, and secondly, is also moderated through a system that is not necessarily part of human tendencies, but is just modern culture and you can't disentangle them as much as we like to imagine we can sometimes in social science.

0:36:31.1 SC: Yeah, and I certainly get that the psychology aspects are not your professional interest, and we'll get to the systems, 'cause I think the systems are ultimately more important, but boy, this psychology is still a fascinating. I gotta ask... I gotta dig in on this issue of the fact that the functional psychopaths, anyway, have this aspect of performativity, which fascinates me, 'cause you might naively think that if you're just a psychopath, you just... Not only do you not feel empathy, but you have trouble relating to ordinary people or acting like them or whatever, but you're hinting that there's kind of an opposite aspect that the psychopath is one who can put on the right mask and play the right role, to get what they want in a consciously manipulative way, I'm not sure.

0:37:18.0 BK: Yeah, I think they are consciously manipulative, and there's some really interesting research on this that... I think I have one sentence in the book that talks about, this is not something I go into, but all of this research, I think has caveats and flaws because there's no perfect method of actually studying this stuff by virtue of the subject matter, but... Especially because psychopaths are constantly trying to deceive you, they're not saying I'm a psychopathic narcissistic Machiavellian, [chuckle] but what they have done... I found this study really interesting about how strategic thinkers that are psychopaths can be very good at getting power and how psychopaths can be very rational in times where empathy might actually be a hindrance to others, so what they're talking about is basically this game in which you have, I think it's 100 Yen in the example, but let's say it's 100 dollars and you got a pair of people in an experiment and the first person who's randomly assigned is the proposer, so they propose a split of the 100 and the acceptor or rejector is the other person, who can either accept or reject the offer, if they reject the offer, both players leave with no money, if they accept the offer, they both get however much has been proposed, so it's sort of a game theory dynamic.

0:38:35.3 BK: And what they found is that most normal people hit their breaking point about 70-30, so if you get above that, the average person starts to say, "Screw you," to the other person, "I'm not gonna let you take any money, I'm gonna lose... " It's in 80-20's, but you proposed, "I'm gonna be $20 poor, but at least you're not gonna get $80." And they have this thing called skin conductance response where they also were measuring things on the skin, the electricity on the skin... Again, this is beyond my pay grade in terms of political science, but skin conductance response, they had electrical... They're measuring how the skin reacted in these situations and how much it was sort of affecting you, and what they found is that the psychopaths would basically accept almost anything, and that their type of response... And they did this again, I think, in FMRI machines. The type of response was different, it was not a sort of response that was about any sort of thing about justice, it was more of a response to do with anger at the person, but anger that didn't cause them to reject the offer. So there was both a qualitative difference in sort of how the person perceives the interaction, but also in terms of the actual behavior, they didn't hit a breaking point.

0:39:51.5 BK: They just say, "I'll take the $5 because it's better for me." And so the suggestion that the psychologists have grafted on to this research is that perhaps this help psychopaths rise through the corporate ladder a bit, because they will do things that are objectively in their self-interest when other people would say, "I can't possibly live with this, because it's not fair." So whether we can take one small study and infer that this is how society works, I don't know, but I do suggest that there are fundamental differences in how these people behave, and I find the psychopathy research somewhat more persuasive because there are both clinical diagnoses and aspects of brain functioning that are objectively different under circumstances whereas some of the psychology trait research, I think sometimes ends up being a bit more wishy-washy.

0:40:46.4 SC: We did a podcast with Herbert Gintis, the economist, and he mentioned this kind of game theory studies and apparently, exactly like you said, except that there can be pretty wild cultural differences from place to place, there are some minority of cultures that people get insulted if you try to give them any money at all, they think they're being condescended to, but I like the idea that psychopaths are just really good utilitarian and we'll take whatever money that they're offered.

0:41:15.6 BK: It's great that you mentioned that though, because this is one of the areas, again, where I mentioned this in the book at length, where I talk about the deficits and psychology research related to the samples they have, and of course, with the replication crisis and all these other things, they have been hyper aware now that they're over-representing basically affluent white college students at Ivy League universities when they claim to be explaining humans, which is a pretty big problem, especially 'cause they're also in 2020 or 2021 or whatever it is, the psychopath research is the same sort of thing, I asked lots of the psychopath experts who said, "Is a Chinese psychopath different from an American psychopath?" And they're like, "We don't have good enough data on this,"

0:41:52.2 BK: There's some initial studies that are being conducted this way, but a lot of the focus is on Western psychopaths, and it's crucial, I think, to understand this because it disentangle the aspects of what's actually happening on the neurological level, from the cultural level, and I don't know the answer to that, I wish I had better information because I think in a way, it would have actually strengthened some of my arguments to say that the interaction between even a psychopath who there's something objectively wrong about their brain can be mediated by a culture, that would be quite a profound insight, 'cause one of the quite uncomfortable things with psychopathy research is that a lot of the criminal justice systems that find that dysfunctional psychopaths... Effectively write them off and say, "You can't be paroled because there's nothing to fix you."

0:42:41.0 BK: Rehabilitation for a psychopath isn't deemed to be something that's attainable, but for my work, it's more interesting in the sense of What's the diagnostic tool to fix the problem, because if somebody's a psychopath, changing the system to try to remind them of the sort of responsibilities they have just to others is totally ineffectual, it might work for some other people's, shame might work for some other people, it's not gonna work for a psychopath. So I think this question of, "Is power changing someone?" Yeah, I think it is, but I don't think it's changing psychopaths the same way it's changing everybody else, and so one of the arguments I'm making is accurate diagnostics of understanding why a bad outcome is occurring from someone in power is crucial to fixing it. Sometimes it's the system, sometimes is the individual, sometimes their chemistry is out of whack in their brain, whatever it is, but understanding that is the first step to fixing it, and if you apply the wrong tool to a certain problem, you're gonna actually make it worse probably, so it's really, really crucial that we don't just say, "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." And move on.

0:43:45.7 SC: Well, and it's probably also crucial to say that not every person who seeks higher office is a psychopath, right?

0:43:50.6 BK: Most are not.

0:43:51.5 SC: Are there people who are not just non-psychopaths but actually have higher motivations? Tell me those people exist, please.

0:44:00.8 BK: They absolutely do. And the reason... It's funny 'cause I think when you read my book, you can get a bit of a sense that I think that all leaders are awful people, and I don't think that. I think there's many, many, many wonderful leaders. In fact, the way that I got into politics was my mom ran for school board when I was eight years old, and she just wanted to serve the community, but I think this is where even on this example, it's the systems because we talked earlier about modern Republican politics and modern American politics, the people who run for school board now are facing death threats, harassment of their children, people posting their addresses online, my mom didn't have to weigh up serving the community versus immense personal costs and risks to safety. She had to deal with a pay dispute or one parent who was upset that there wasn't creationism taught, and it's a totally different world, but the point that I try to stress in the book is that there's lots and lots of wonderful people who want to lead, I just think we've made a lot of systems in the modern world that have made it so the people who accept the burdens and costs of those leadership positions, particularly the publicly scrutinized ones, are the ones who are most likely to find power itself a reward, because it's worth it.

0:45:20.9 BK: Everybody else who thinks "I wanna serve," is just gonna bow out and do something else with their time, and the most extreme example of this that I've come across in my research, I've done a lot of field work in far flung places around the world, and in Thailand, I've met lots of people who are young, up and coming talented people, some of them former students, some of the people I've met in field research in Bangkok, and they all say the same thing like, why would I go into politics? Because that's where you lose all your money, you end up in exile or you die because the military is gonna take over power every so often, and when you're on the wrong side of that coup, everything falls apart for you. If I go into a business where I sell auto parts, I will make money and my life will be fine, and so you have a real self-selection effect out of politics in places where it's dangerous, and in those places, this is one of the angles that I also have done in my own research.

0:46:09.3 BK: In Sub-Saharan Africa, I crunch the numbers from 1960 to 2010, the heads of state that lost power in that period, 43% of them were jailed, exiled, or killed, and you think about what are the incentives for someone who thinks, "If I lose power, these horrible things will happen to me," Well, this is why you rig elections, and also who goes into those positions, who thinks like, : Okay, yeah, it's a coin flip whether I end up with this horrible thing happen to me that possibly ends my life or ruins my life, but I can get away with it because I'm smarter." Well, there's a self-selection effect for someone who thinks they can outfox the system, it's something where there are lots and lots of good people, but the systems we've designed, I think have disproportionately pushed those people out of leadership positions.

0:47:00.0 SC: Yeah, this is sort of weirdly, the optimistic part of your book, because as you said before, it might be hard to change people's innate humanity or their predilection, but we set up these systems, and it seems to be strongly the case that some systems just allow corruption to flourish and some go against it. I can't resist asking you to tell the New York City parking ticket story for the UN diplomats, 'cause I'm sure that many people have heard it, but it's just such a perfect natural experiment.

0:47:31.5 BK: It is, yeah, it's one of these sort of great moments where a researcher has just stumbled upon something that's quite elegant, so basically in the late 1990s into the early 2000s, diplomats at the United Nations had diplomatic community from at least minor crimes and this meant, they didn't have to pay parking tickets, and quite astoundingly, this meant that there were 150,000 parking tickets to the tune $18 million racked up by various UN officials who had diplomatic community. In 2002, I believe it was, Mike Bloomberg, who was Mayor at the time, said, "Enough is enough. I'm gonna start impounding the cars, I can't prosecute you or make you pay the money, but I can take your car away."

0:48:09.7 BK: So it's basically a pre and post accountability, natural experiment, the wild west of lack of accountability, and then all of a sudden the risk of real consequences, and what they found was that in the pre-enforcement period, all of the sort of non-corrupt countries diplomats parked pretty much normally legally, and all of the corrupt countries diplomats parked illegally a lot. Some of the countries... It was hilarious reading this, 'cause it's like 196 parking tickets per diplomats, I believe was the case for either Egypt or Yemen or something like that, and almost overnight, the enforcement made it so the Egyptians started parking like the Norwegians, but the little wrinkle that I love in this was that if you then put in the time that the person was in New York in the pre-enforcement period, the Norwegians got worse over time.

[chuckle]

0:49:02.3 BK: So the more they can get away with it, the more they started parking illegally, and the thing that's so elegant about this is it's just a perfect encapsulation of how culture is crucial to understanding corrupt abuse of behavior, but also how accountability and the sort of second guessing that comes with enforcement can shift behavior over time, and it's why having sat down with lots of really, really awful people, I pose a question early on in the book where I sort of ask people to imagine being thrust into the role of the dictator of Turkmenistan and I like to think that I would not behave in an awful way if I was in that role, but I also as a political scientist who studies these systems, I know that if you don't make the military happy they might kill your family, and so... I have this line that I think captures most of my views about Social Research, which is a very simple one of three words, it says, "People are complicated," and there's a lot of behavior that we chuck up in the sort of popular imagination of discussions of leaders to they're good or they're bad. That's actually much more systemic and situational than we give it credit for, which as you say is optimistic, because it is the lever we have to make society better.

0:50:13.1 SC: Well, and what I love about the New York City example is that there's sort of two things going on, on the one hand, the local conditions from which diplomats came clearly mattered. Diplomats from Norway acted different. It's not simply where you are in New York City that the rules matter, but then when enforcement kicks in, you change so quickly, it wasn't... The behavior wasn't very sticky, it wasn't deeply ingrained in themselves, it was just kind of, "Alright, this is what I do, but in different circumstances, I like very differently." There is the germ of an optimistic message there.

0:50:49.5 BK: Well, the other example that's exactly on this point that I've... What I found maddening in writing this book was that I think there's a lot of pretty simple interventions that can make a difference, they're not silver bullets, we're never gonna fix this problem, but we can really blunt the effect of it and my favorite, I think, bit of research I did was on police, actually, it's a hot button topic in the United States police reform. And I kept getting so annoyed when I was watching the coverage and discussion of police reform in the US, because there's this huge area that's just not discussed, almost everything... The way I put it is almost everything in the police discussion is about what the police do, and very, very little is about who the police are, and so I started to study recruitment methods across different cultures for policing, and I cherry-picked this one example because I think it's just so unbelievably over the top that this exists, but there's a case in Doraville, Georgia, town of 10,000 people outside of Atlanta, where the recruitment video that was on the website flashes the punisher logo to start, which is already a bad start, 'cause it's like the vigilante tortures criminals.

[chuckle]

0:51:58.7 SC: He was not the law-abiding citizen.

0:52:01.2 BK: Yeah, and then it shows these guys in military fatigues driving around in a SWAT tank, like a literal tank, throwing smoke grenades out of it, and. The music is Die Mother-Effer Die by Dope, this heavy metal band, and it's like 30-second clip, and then it's like, join the police...

[laughter]

0:52:23.2 BK: And I sat there and I was like, "Who would respond to this ad, like who is going to apply for this policing ad?" And you see that there's a lot of research I detail in the book in more depth, but that talks about militarization of police and how it's also affected the culture of departments and so on, and my favorite example to decide, but I love this, is I think it's called Boon Township in Indiana has one small pond in the entire area, and they have an amphibious assault vehicle [chuckle] from like a...

[laughter]

0:52:54.3 SC: You never know.

0:52:54.9 BK: What do you say?

0:52:55.7 SC: You never know, Brian, there could be an amphibious assault.

[laughter]

0:53:00.1 BK: Well, it's one farmhouse's pond, so if that place gets attacked, they have the right tool.

0:53:04.1 SC: Constant vigilance.

0:53:05.4 BK: But New Zealand, New Zealand did something totally different. I talked to the head of Human Resources for the... What they call the vice president for people, it's this nice corporate speak thing, because New Zealand has a national police force and they recruit nationally, so they spent millions of dollars on this recruitment scheme called, "Do you care enough to be a cop?" So already, we're not in the punisher territory, right? And they have this video, it's one of the most viral videos in New Zealand, it's been viewed by millions of people in a place where there's only five million people, and it's this funny recruitment video of these very diverse demographically representative police officers chasing this unseen suspect, and they stop to dance with people, they help an old man cross the road. [chuckle] And then at the end, they catch the suspect and it's a border collie that's stolen a purse.

0:53:50.7 SC: Aww. Too cute.

0:53:51.5 BK: And then it says, "Do you care enough to be a cop?" And they do this other experiments where they have this emaciated-looking hungry boy, the video is called Hungry boy, and they have these hidden cameras and some people stop to help him and some people just walk by him, and then it just says, "Do you care enough to be a cop?" and it's saying... The inference is obviously, if you stop, you should be in the police force. And the demographics of their applicants change radically, they got massive differences both in the numbers of applicants, the personality traits when they did screening, and also the diversity of the applicants, and the policing relations have improved in New Zealand with the indigenous community, the Māori community, and the thing that I just, I kept thinking to myself like, this is so easy.

0:54:33.9 BK: This is not a thing that you have to really think about, it's just the way you depict power in this instance is obviously going to affect who thinks, "I have a place there." And so the way I've always described this is so many systems are on auto-pilot and we all complain like, "Oh, why is it that all these people are corrupt?" Why do the police abused people sometimes?" And it's like, "We don't do anything about it," It's something where it doesn't take a quantum physicist to figure out the answers to some of these issues, but you have to actually try. And I think that is sometimes missing, which is, again, it's the low-hanging fruit of a lot of these systems that could actually be reformed with small changes that add up to big effects.

0:55:20.2 SC: Yeah, I think... And this is good because it's pointing out that if we wanna fight corruption or tweak the system to make it less common place, there's sort of an obvious set of things, and I think we will talk about them in a second about surveillance or keeping track that, you know, make it hard for people to be corrupt, but like you say, there's also the thing like, try not to get corrupt people in there in the first place, and it almost makes me think of when I had Astra Taylor on the podcast quite a while back, I had never heard about sortition before, this idea of making choices for a national government by picking random citizens and having them really think about it, and the good news is that in the cases where it has been tried, it actually works pretty well, the outcomes are ones that people generally agree with and that's sort of an extreme, an example of how to avoid this problem that it's more than an average number of psychopaths wants to be in these positions of power.

0:56:19.0 BK: Yeah, in the last third of the book, I have these 10 solutions, and one of them is sortition for oversight, it's not sortition itself, it's sortition with a twist, because for people who are unfamiliar with this, the ancient Greeks, in some instances, use this thing called The kleroterion to effectively create random jury duty for a citizen government, and they suggested it worked reasonably well. My problem with it in 2022 is that some of the aspects of being a politician requires specialist knowledge. If you negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty, you had better understand aspects of statecraft and diplomacy and nuclear weapons that the average person probably doesn't. But why I do think we should do a sortition is create effectively oversight bodies that provide accountability, so my proposal, both for businesses and for politics, is to create a shadow House of Representatives or a shadow board in a company that is totally randomly selected that debates exactly the same things that has exactly the same access to experts and information as the actual people, and then produces pronouncements or decisions that are non-binding. And the reason you do this is because if you are having the house of representatives make a decision, either due to partisanship or lobbying or re-election, a lot of those effects would be neutralized as would the self-selection effect by the random sortition shadow House of Representatives.

0:57:41.1 BK: That won't change anything, they could still do it, but it would be quite a cudgel in terms of rhetorical challenging to these groups, to say... A journalist in an interview saying, "When we randomly selected a group of Americans, they had a different view of this. They did quite different. Why was that?" When they thought about an infrastructure bill, it didn't take them six years to figure it out, they just sort of hashed out the details and came up with something. Why couldn't you do that? And I think it's that sort of thing where the same would be true for a business, you could say, "Wait a minute, you seem to have this myopic profit motive in the board of directors of the company, why not look at what the employees are saying, the random selection of employees, that's quite divergent from what you're proposing?" and there are shadow boards, by the way, in some German companies, they're just not randomly selected, so they have a shadow board of employees, which does provide some of the help, but because it's not randomized, it's people who are also trying to get ahead and I think that's why I think randomization for this oversight body would be a good thing.

0:58:43.6 SC: I'm sure that this is a wild plan, this kind of thing, but I kind of like the idea just adding a whole new chamber to the US Congress, so there are three of them and one of them is completely sortitioned, and if any two of the three can agree on some legislation, it gets sent up to the President, I think there are crazier things we could try.

0:59:01.5 BK: Well, there's also... The thing is, I know this sounds... It's one of those ideas where I'm thinking about this while I'm writing the book and I'm like, "Yeah, this probably will never happen," but it's actually one of the ones that's easiest to make it happen because you don't have to be official, in other words, some billionaire could just say, "I'm gonna set up a shadow House of Representatives, I'm gonna pay 435 random people a year salary, the same as a congress person salary," which they would jump at 'cause you get rich on this, "And I'm gonna have them do this, and I'm gonna use it as a way to sort of hold politicians accountable." Now, you have to have journalists pay attention to it, you have to make it sort of matter in a certain way, but it wouldn't require anything legal, because the power of it is not legally binding, the power of it is showing the divergence between how politicians behave and how the rest of us would behave in the same situation, and I think that's the magic of it so to speak.

0:59:52.4 BK: The same is true, by the way, for awarding contracts, if you're awarding contracts based on lobbyists and you ask the shadow House of Representatives or a shadow White House or whatever, to do the same job, they wouldn't do it based on who's greasing the wheels and it would be quite informative for people to say, "Wait a minute, maybe you should look at this a second time because there's such a massive disconnect between this group of unelected citizens that are just sort of a parallel body funded by some benevolent person in society," but I think it could actually provide some crucial checks on people in power.

1:00:28.9 SC: Now, I do like that my plan was entirely fantasy land, but yours is quasi-realistic. I could imagine something like that happening. That's interesting to contemplate. And you mentioned something very quickly that I wanted to ask earlier, but let's just emphasize it, we've been talking about politics and government, but you said also corporations, boards, presumably universities, local organizations, whatever, all of this discourse that we've had about corruption, is it more or less the same discourse in every organization, or is there something special about politics?

1:01:00.8 BK: No, I think that there are... I think that the dynamics that exist in other organizations are basically on steroids in politics because in most systems, not all of them, but in most systems, money and power are twinned, and so it doesn't just have the one or the other, it has both, but I think one of the things I talk about in the book that's gonna be more familiar to listeners is the idea of these sort of dynamics closer to home, and I have one intro of the... Each chapter sort of starts off with this interesting vignette, so to speak, and one of them is a Homeowner's Association tyrant who is just utterly obsessed with power and doing things that are quite absurd, where he's writing up his neighbors for having the wrong kind of gravel or their palm tree hasn't been trimmed in the requisite 24-day period, or whatever it is. And it's such a recognizable pathology for most of us that we know someone like this who just loves the power, who gets off on the power. So I don't think it's unique to these certain organizations, I think there is a universality to this, what I do think is that some organizations think about it more, and those organizations tend to avoid the problems more often.

1:02:11.5 BK: My dream with this book, which it's the naive author dream, I'm sure for your work, you hope that people who have never come across quantum physics idea as well, discuss them and it'll profoundly change their world view. My dream with this one, is that powerful people in some of these organizations will think carefully about how they design systems around power and imagine that their system has to exist to prevent the worst person who is trying to scheme to get into a position of power at every level, so they design a system that deters the bad people, that constrains them when they get power and finds a way to boot them out when they actually stay for too long and so on. And just design the system with that in mind, not because we have to be distrustful of our fellow citizens, but because those people exist and we'd be better off if the system was designed to counteract those people, and I think it's something where... I don't know whether this will ever happen. I'd love to get an email at some point where some police chief in Louisiana says, "I read your book and how we recruit differently," but it's the sort of idea is that it doesn't take massive, massive changes to make things better, it takes around the edges reforms that can dial down some of these human tendencies around power.

1:03:32.7 SC: Yeah, no, I completely agree. It's nice to think that you could have some even minor real world tangible effects and the local areas are probably where you could actually have pretty big effects, but also this is a great segue into... I really wanted to sort of wind up with these programmatic things we can do to prevent the people who would be susceptible to becoming corrupt from actually carrying it out, but on a rather detached angle. I wanted to start with the insects that you talk about, we're getting hints from other sorts of species in what they do, and unlike the... With the primates, we think it's pretty close and we can relate to them, the insects are very, very different than us, and their social structures are very different than us, but you can see the game theory at work, and so tell me how insects sort of scheme to prevent free riding insects from becoming queen or whatever it is that they wanna try to do.

1:04:29.3 BK: Yeah, this is a fun bit of research, it's about bees and wasps, and the ways in which the systems in which their hives function across species affects what I call corruption. I think probably a biologist would take issue with this, but I'm trying to get at the point of sort of anti-hive behavior, in other words, behavior that is not adaptive for the hive as a whole, but might be adaptive for the individual. And effectively, you have these different species that are quite similar, but with key divergences, one of them is how the hive is designed. So in some species, the hive is designed in a way that is more or less transparent, in other words, you don't have sort of a cap over the larva, so you can see what's developing in each sort of little capsule, I might be getting some of these details wrong.

1:05:15.8 SC: That's okay.

1:05:16.2 BK: Again, I'm not a bee expert but the gist of it is that you can see into the area where the larva has been deposited.

1:05:23.5 SC: So it's a literal transparency.

1:05:25.9 BK: Yes, there's transparency, exactly. There's this like transparency for which you can see if someone's trying to basically make a queen or is trying to make a worker, and the problem is it might be adaptive for some excess Queens to exist for the individual, because this is the way you replicate your genetic code and so on. But excess Queens can't exist in the hive, you have to kill them, so there's only one queen per hive. And they have what are called by the biologist 'Police Bees' that go around to inspect if there are any excess Queens in the making and if they are discovered, they're killed. They're brutally beheaded basically. And what's fascinating is in the difference between the hive structure, the transparent versus the non-transparent cells have very different levels of shirking or free riding in this instance, because the police bees or police wasps in this case, are ineffectual, they can't tell very well, and it's also about the size.

1:06:24.7 BK: So in some of the hives, the size of the cell for the queen is much bigger than the size of the cell of the worker, and that also makes the inspection much, much easier 'cause you're not just looking at all of them at the same time, you can gravitate towards the cells that are big and see if there's excess queens, it's a nice little way of showing how much structure affects levels of what could be deemed in the human world to be corruption, although I haven't gotten any emails yet from angry wasps specialist saying I'm anthropomorphizing insects to an extreme degree, but I probably am. So there you go.

1:07:00.8 SC: So what do we learn from this? Does it work differently for different kinds of insects, is there a right level of police bee surveillance that we need to have to stem the corruption without being too authoritarian?

1:07:13.8 BK: Well, I think the lesson from it is that it does matter if you have transparency and accountability that is made more easy, and I write in the sort of last part of the book about surveillance systems and how... The more I pondered this, the more I was confused about why we've sort of tolerated the system in which the most surveilled are the least powerful. Because you think about all the corporate scandals, the political scandals, the things that actually have created profound and disastrous consequences, they're happening at the top, and the pandemic has created this new dystopian level of surveillance for work from home people where some companies in the US, now have installed chair sensors to figure out whether you're actually sitting on your chair when you claim to be, and they're trying to make sure you don't take an extra 10-minute lunch break, and it's like... Enron didn't get brought down by lunch breaks being too long, this was the corner offices where the surveillance is deliberately avoided. And so my view is that power should be a burden in some ways, and therefore it should come with scrutiny attached to it, and people should really worry when they behave badly in positions of immense power, that they will get caught.

1:08:23.4 BK: So I think that the surveillance systems that we've designed in the corporate workplace, they do, as you speak, when you asked about the insects, there is sort of a Goldilocks solution to this, which is you don't want a workplace in which you feel constantly distrustful of everyone, you don't wanna bait the break room fridge and see who steals the sandwich or something like that, but you do want to have a level of second guessing for people making really corrupt decisions or abusive decisions in management, such that they think they're going to get caught and that's the police wasp example, is to say, "Why have we designed a system in which we've effectively said, 'There is no transparency in the cells of management, there is transparency only in the cells of the worker bees,'" and the worker bees in the analogy, of course, are the ordinary employees taking the extra long coffee break.

1:09:10.6 SC: Yeah, and of course, it's gonna be very different in countries or societies that have long struggled with corruption, like the examples you said earlier where there's a coup every so often and it's very dangerous, but in grown up, democratic arrangement, I'm kind of shocked that we... Or maybe I'm not shocked but depressed that we don't make it harder for politicians to benefit off of their positions. I would go so far as to say that if you really wanted to run for office, I would love to see if you had to give up some of your wealth. 'Cause not only do we make it possible for you to manipulate things once you're in office so that your wealth grows, but it's hard to run for office unless you're already very, very wealthy. And that's just a connection that seems wrong to me.

1:09:58.7 BK: I agree completely. I mean, stock trading is the obvious example in Western democracies, that debate now is existing in the US a bit, but it's absurd, the amount of money, if you just look at how people get much richer in their time in Congress, that shouldn't exist. But I also think... I think we have to think outside the box a little bit on this, I think that people should worry that they're gonna get caught. I have a bit in the book where I talk about sting operations in the NYPD where they do these integrity tests and basically test cops in these fake crime scenes that they think are real, and the really profound insight of it was that they did 500 integrity tests where they come in and there's cash on the table and they see if they steal it or whatever, and they fire them or arrest them, if they do. But they did 500 of these tests when they surveyed the police, 12,000 police officers said, "Yes, I have been subject to an integrity test," so 11,500 had real crime scenes that they thought were fake and behave better as a result of it.

[chuckle]

1:10:55.9 BK: And then the rest of the police thought that every time they walked into a crime scene, it could be fake, so the obvious question is, "Why don't we set up sting operations for politicians more often," like why don't we set up systems where a contract is being awarded and there's an elaborate sort of attempt to make a fake company that pays all the right lobbyists and gives kickbacks and catches the politicians who ensure that that company gets a contract. I mean, these are the kinds of things where it requires a paradigm shift of saying, "You know what, there are things that you have to accept that you might not like for being in power, but that is the responsibility of the position." And it's the same for the police, there's instances where, yes, okay, if you do stings in your standard company, in your HR department, it's not a great world to live in, and I don't wanna have that, but the police are in a unique position where their abusive behavior when it happens is so destructive that they should be put in these positions, and so my view is that the positions of power that are the most prone to abuse are the ones that should be most surveilled, and very often, they're the ones that are least surveilled, unfortunately.

1:12:04.5 SC: I know, I think that makes sense, and I especially like the idea that you should be willing to give up on some things if you are going to serve in these positions. The politicians love to refer to their time in public service as if they're really giving up everything they wanted, but they campaigned for it, they really wanted to do it. So I'm not giving them credit for humility, getting there, but there's one question that comes to mind when you talk about the companies or the sting operations or whatever, which is that that seems like the most blatant kind of corruption that we're targeting there, isn't it a bigger worry the softer kinds of corruption where people are just voting or signing bills based more on what their donors want them to do than what would be good for the country or even what their constituents would like them to do?

1:12:51.0 BK: Yeah, absolutely. I think they're not mutually exclusive, I think... I have these 10 examples that I talk about at the end of the book. As I say, they're not silver bullets, they're all things that would slightly help if done in tandem, and none of them solve every problem, so as I said before, there's one of the examples that I talk about of creating visceral reminders of the weight of responsibility of power for a lot of normal people that actually could help, it will make them feel bad about hurting other people. For psychopaths it will be totally useless, so you can't... But I do think that with this sort of more run-of-the-mill corruption, this is where things like sortition could help with oversight, where you're exposing the motivations, but also one thing we haven't talked about is why do we accept self-selection. Why do we say that the people who are in charge of us are the people who put themselves forward to be in charge of us, why don't we proactively recruit more? Political parties should be spending a lot more money as should organizations of seeking out people with track records of integrity and service, genuine servers, not serving themselves and saying, "You should be in power, and we're gonna try to make it attractive for you to be in power."

1:13:56.0 BK: And again, it's one of these things where, yes, it's sort of pie in the sky thinking, it's a little bit of a broad brush but it's not happening at all. Even if we did 10% more of this, it would be worthwhile, because what you usually see in political backgrounds is like somebody makes a lot of money and then they have a vanity project, which is all become a politician and also met my legacy after I've made millions of dollars in business or whatever, and you don't have these people who are like, they serve the community, they're exceptional individuals, they're clearly full of integrity, let's really head hunt them, and I wish there was a lot more of that sort of drafting mentality of people in power. A lot of them would say, no. A lot of these people would not accept it, but you get more of them, and this is the thing, as I say, I feel like I'm banging my head against the wall as I've watched the world unfold in all these sort of horrible ways, is like, it's not written in stone that it has to be this way. There's not gonna be a world that's a utopia, I'm not some naive idealist, but you can blunt a lot of these things with careful interventions and systemic reform and we don't talk about it.

1:15:05.1 BK: And the news also... I am a participant in the news, 'cause I write for the Washington Post and so on, but the news is uniquely bad at talking about systemic reform, it's very, very good at talking about the outrage of the day, so all of the attention is like, "Why does the current crop of powerful people behave badly," and it's caused us to zoom in on such a tiny subset of the real problem, which is if you zoom out, it's like the current subset of people in power are not the right subset of people in power. And the who question is just totally taken out, and instead it's the what they do question that we focus on, and that I think is the big thing that I hope people take away from the book. And for my research.

1:15:45.5 SC: I guess, one question... I like the idea, it sounds good. One question is about who would have the incentive to set up things like this, Who's incentivized to try to get more selfless people into government. The people who presumably are supposed to be doing this are the ones who are already in government. So there's kind of a chicken and egg problem.

1:16:05.1 BK: This is like a totally dystopian answer that I have to give based on US politics, this is probably some billionaire. Because we have a system that's so broken that the only people that can basically wield power above the politicians are probably the people with very, very deep pockets. So you need some pro-social, very rich person, which itself is like such a damning indictment [chuckle] system, like the reform would come from the person who's already super rich, but I think that's the only most realistic answer. You're right, it's asking the foxes to basically police themselves in the hen house and it's not gonna happen. But again, it's one of these things where you work on social research, you're like, "I'm gonna try to put my best answers forward, and I hope that some people will listen to them, and I hope that the people who don't actually cause the change start thinking this way," and you hope it has a sort of domino effect, any exercise in trying to write a book about how we can make a better world based on corrupt powerful people does run into this inevitable problem that corrupt powerful people are the ones who make the rules, but it's still a worthwhile endeavor because I think you can get closer to a better world than we have now.

1:17:19.8 SC: Yeah, no, look, I work on theoretical physics, I cannot complain that other people are doing unrealistic things. I'm trying to think about where the universe came from, but speaking of unrealistic things, one last thing that I wanted to ask you about, let's home in on this idea that we should sort of recruit better people, that kind of begs the question of, do we know who the better people are? Maybe, yes, we want people who are not completely psychopaths or motivated by greed or power but at some point you seem to be suggesting that there could be hyper-competent people who are just too introverted to run for office or whatever, and it made me wonder, Would such people actually be good at the job of being a politician, there is some overlap between the skill set that gets you elected and the skill set that makes you effective once you're in office over and above technocratic competence.

1:18:16.8 BK: Yeah, I think that's true. I think that there are some people who are very extroverted, charming individuals who can build coalitions in politics that can get stuff done, and that's absolutely the case, but I do think that we have to have a higher bar for political leaders, and it's not just politicians, there's also, people in positions of power in other parts of life. So first off, the thing you'd say is you want a track record. So you'd want somebody who has proven public service in a different realm of their life outside of politics, and perhaps someone who has shown integrity, those people would be top of my list for head hunting for a political party. The other thing I think that's an oddity about, if you sort of, again, you sort of just to look at our system and say, "Well, does it always have to be this way?" Is we have no requirements whatsoever to be president, and for Congress too, I said this sort of tongue in cheek in one of the interviews I did about the book, but it's true is I'm a total history nerd. So I'm training to be a tour guide at a Cathedral where I live in England, and I have six months of training. It's two and a half hours a week, two different tests, one written, one verbal.

1:19:26.5 BK: And I'm like, this is much more robust training and oversight than any politician ever goes through other than the election where they just have to make people like them, and I know these things are sort of naive, so I thought that, how can we actually do this 'cause you're not gonna get most politicians to submit to a psychopath test, but one way you couldn't do it is the ones who are quite confident that they're not psychopaths would start to voluntarily do it and it would put pressure on the other ones, because the voters would then have a short kind of like, "Why aren't they doing the psychometric tests?" And some businesses, by the way, do do psychometric tests and evaluations for their elite team. The other thing that I think about is, "Why don't we have a situation occasionally where these presidential candidates go to the New York Times for their interview that they all do, and they have the write-up and all this stuff? Why don't they ever get surprised by the fact, in New York on the interview says, 'Oh, by the way, we're gonna give you a test, and you don't have to do it, but we're gonna publish whether you agree to it or not,' and the questions are basic things that you should know if you're president. What is the defense budget?"

1:20:28.8 BK: And I think it would be really, really useful because I think you're right that there are some skills that do overlap between campaigning and governing, but they're not perfectly correlated by any means, and I think the knowledge aspect of governing has been decreased so much where you don't have to know anything. Without getting too political here, in the last five years, six years in US politics have been a pretty profound education that you can know literally nothing about the way the government works and still be president. I was banging my head against the wall as well when I was teaching students about NATO, and they kept saying, Trump keeps talking about how they're not paying into the fund and I'm like, "There is no fund."

1:21:08.0 SC: Type of thing.

1:21:11.6 BK: Like 2% of their national budget is to defense spending, this is different from a fund, and it's 2020, and he's still talking about how they need to pay into the fund. So you have aspects of political life for which there are no barriers, and it's not to say that we should subject people to something extreme, but let's have something, [chuckle] I think maybe you should be qualified for this job, where a cathedral tour guide is not actually a more rigorous training process than being the prime minister or president of the country.

1:21:41.2 SC: Well, I always like when possible, it's not always possible to end up a beat note, and now you've given me the thought experiment that every politician would be given a test to see how psychopathic they are, and the results would be made publicly available. So I don't think it's gonna happen, but I'm just gonna go with that fantasy in my mind for a little while, so Brian Klaas, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:22:04.0 BK: Thanks. It's been brilliant to talk to you.

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