Brian Klaas (political scientist)

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert.

[1] I'm Jack Shepherd.

[2] I'm joined by Monica Lily Padman.

[3] Hi there.

[4] We were just talking about Santa Claus and then I got excited about Christmas, but then I remember Christmas is a long way away.

[5] Right.

[6] And even if you bring up Christmas right now, people will be probably inclined to think this intro was recorded months ago.

[7] No, I'm just saying I love Christmas.

[8] I know, I know, I know.

[9] But if they thought like, oh, they have Christmas cheer, they must have recorded this intro like in December.

[10] It's Christmas cheer all year.

[11] Oh, okay.

[12] Cheer, ding, ding, ding.

[13] No, not for this.

[14] but ding ding ding ding people liked the easter egg of stew yeah and far less people got it than i i would have predicted that's good but alas the ding ding ding ding for cheer is not in this episode dr brian class is a political scientist and author he is currently a columnist for the washington post and an associate professor in global politics at university college of london he has an array of wonderful books the despots apprentice the despots accomplice and how to rig an election he is a new book called Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us.

[15] And that's what we talk about.

[16] It's really fascinating.

[17] It really is.

[18] It kind of explores the old axiom.

[19] Does power corrupt or people corrupt and gain power?

[20] Something like that.

[21] You know, too simple.

[22] Listen for the more complicated.

[23] Please enjoy Dr. Brian class.

[24] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to armchair expert early and ad free right now.

[25] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[26] Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[27] Hi there.

[28] Hey, how you doing?

[29] I'm so good.

[30] You know, Monica has a gift guide for the holidays.

[31] You don't know this, but I'm telling you this.

[32] Okay.

[33] It's on Instagram.

[34] It's on Instagram.

[35] I can't speak highly enough of it.

[36] It's incredible.

[37] If you're a dude, which you appear to be, and you have any one, in your life that you need to buy for, you must be out to lunch, right?

[38] Like I am, just terrified?

[39] Yeah, I mean, my family is hard to buy for.

[40] Right, and just, we're not good at it, right?

[41] I mean, I hate to reinforce these stereotypes, gender stereotypes, but every dude in my life's like, I don't know what the fuck to get anyone.

[42] Yeah, except Wobby Wob.

[43] He's good at gifts.

[44] Where are you at, Brian?

[45] Like, what eases it for you to find gifts for people?

[46] I think the hardest thing is my dad, honestly.

[47] Because he just buys everything that he wants.

[48] Yeah.

[49] Dads are notoriously bad.

[50] I'm one of those dads.

[51] You don't have children yet, do you?

[52] No, I don't.

[53] No, no, no. But were you 35?

[54] 35, yeah.

[55] Yeah.

[56] I'm still the youngest one here, thank God.

[57] Another thing, I don't want to make this whole thing about Monica, but it's best if we do.

[58] She generally is younger than our guests, but we've been in a bad rut where she was older than a lot of our guests, and it's not been sitting well with her.

[59] I don't like that feeling at all.

[60] Am I on the wrong side of it?

[61] No, you're right.

[62] You're good.

[63] One year her senior.

[64] Good, okay.

[65] Thank goodness.

[66] Where are you at, Brian?

[67] I'm just south of London.

[68] So I moved out of London for the pandemic, but yeah, near London.

[69] Okay, we were just there.

[70] We were just there.

[71] In fact, one of my gift guide items today is tea from the Wolseley.

[72] Oh, I used to have breakfast there a lot.

[73] That's awesome.

[74] It's so good.

[75] So you're in a foreign country That's right, yeah I've lived over here for 10 years I grew up in Minnesota though So Right You have a very Minnesota quality Yeah just right away Face value You get a lot of big dose of Minnesota In there big hit Are you Scandinavian by design No I'm one of the rare ones that isn't I'm German Irish I guess you'd say So Dutch Irish really Oh but did you fold neatly Into the like community ethos of humility and Scandinavian allergy to attention.

[76] Yeah, and like my friends growing up were like, there was a guy I knew named Ivor Iverson, right?

[77] I mean, so it was like, and like they had like Lutifisk and Lepsa and these like Swedish things for Christmas.

[78] So yeah, it was, the stereotype existed.

[79] But I don't say you betcha and don't you know and oh sure.

[80] Oh, well.

[81] But you pulled it off.

[82] You're still only 35.

[83] You got some time before you can enact that.

[84] It's so disarming and wonderful.

[85] It is.

[86] It's nice.

[87] Why are you interested in power?

[88] I guess let's start there, because you're a kid from Minnesota.

[89] It's not like you were growing up in the shadow of backroom, Wall Street dealings and brokering and all that.

[90] What got you interested in this topic?

[91] Yeah, it's a good question.

[92] So actually, you know, I was exposed to good people in power when I was growing up.

[93] My mom ran for the school board.

[94] Jesse Ventura.

[95] Oh, well, there was Jesse the Body Ventura.

[96] That's true.

[97] My mom ran for school board when I was like eight years old, and that's how I got attuned to the world of politics.

[98] And she just wanted to sort of help the community out.

[99] And I actually, I worked in Minnesota politics for a little while after I finished college and so on.

[100] And I thought this sounds ridiculous in 2021, but I thought American politics were a little boring because things sort of worked.

[101] And so I left, and I started studying broken places.

[102] So for my PhD, I traveled around to all sorts of places, Thailand, Madagascar, Belarus, Tunisia, Zambia, Ivory Coast, et cetera, and interviewed bad people doing bad things, basically.

[103] And former despots, torturers, war criminals, rebels, coup plotters, cult leaders, and so on.

[104] And I think there's this innate fascination with bad people who do bad things because they screw up the world so much.

[105] So that's why I set out to write the book was to figure out how we can get better people in power and how we can stop the bad people from behaving so badly.

[106] Yes, okay, but let's dive in a little bit.

[107] personally, because I have a similar proclivity towards bad, corrupt.

[108] One of the people I'm most obsessed with is Pablo Escobar, but I've really done some internal digging as to what it is that appeals to me. And I think because I had a chip on my shoulder and I felt less than a lot and we were lower middle class, the notion that someone could just decide through their own sheer will to become the eighth richest person in the world, I don't know why that is so.

[109] You have some reverence for it.

[110] I think you have some reverence for.

[111] I mean, I recognize the brutality and wreckage, but there's something, I don't know, if you've gone inward as to what it is that's intriguing about it?

[112] Yeah, I mean, I am fascinated by these characters.

[113] I mean, one of the things that sometimes people say to me is like, why do you sit down with somebody who's a monster?

[114] Yeah.

[115] And what I always say back to them is I'm like, if you had somebody who studied elephants and they'd never, like, seen an elephant, it would be super weird, right?

[116] It would not be a normal way of researching something.

[117] And I'm studying bad people doing bad things in power, so I go and talk to them.

[118] And I think what you said resonates with me because the opening in the book, I talk about this yogurt kingpin I met in Madagascar, who became the president and sort of rags to Rich's story.

[119] Can we go back to yogurt kingpin?

[120] Just because I think that deserves a little more description, because I love the summation of it, but how does one become a yogurt kingpin?

[121] Okay, so I'll tell the story.

[122] So he grows up selling yogurt off the back.

[123] of a bicycle.

[124] His neighbor gives him a bicycle, which like is a shot in the arm to his business, because he can now travel farther.

[125] This is like Bill Gates living next to the library with the mainframe.

[126] This is serendipitous.

[127] This is the Madagascar version of that story.

[128] So he basically starts selling yogurt, and then he gets a small loan and builds this up into a dairy empire and genuinely becomes like the richest person in Madagascar.

[129] Decides he wants to be president and runs and successfully wins the election.

[130] So as he's in power, he gets more and more corrupt over time.

[131] One of the things that I love that he does is he license a presidential aircraft to himself personally, even though he buys it with state funds, and he calls it Air Force II somewhat ambitiously.

[132] Like, Madagascar is second to the United States.

[133] And then he does all this sort of corrupt stuff in his second term, and I met with him, because again, this requires a little bit of exploitation, but he was overthrown by a radio DJ who was 34 years old.

[134] So there you go, Monica.

[135] Oh, Jesus.

[136] A true peer.

[137] Yeah, contemporary.

[138] So he's overthrown by this radio DJ, and I meet with him, and he's trying to, like, get back into power.

[139] And he's Googled me. So he says, how am I going to win this election?

[140] I saw that you worked on U .S. campaigns previously.

[141] I want some advice.

[142] And so I was there to interview him, but I figured I needed to build some rapport.

[143] So I said, okay, I'll come up with some answers.

[144] I said, when I was working on this campaign in Minnesota, we had 87 counties and 87 days.

[145] It was this gimmick to show we cared about the whole state.

[146] You've got 119 districts, do 119 districts in 119 days.

[147] and ride around on a bicycle, like sort of saying, I'm a man of the people who knows where I came from.

[148] And he turns to his chief of staff and says, buy 119 bicycles.

[149] Oh, my God.

[150] And what do you think that was a response to?

[151] He was nervous.

[152] He wanted to be on a fresh bike every time.

[153] He thought he didn't want to have to travel with the one.

[154] He didn't want to do it, really.

[155] No, I wanted to cut corners.

[156] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[157] This was one of my questions right away when I looked at who you get to talk.

[158] talk to.

[159] Like, you're just in the cold call business?

[160] Like, how on earth do you come to make the introduction and break the ice with these folks?

[161] Yeah, it's a great tidbit on human wisdom or human nature, I think, that I picked up from my PhD advisor.

[162] And he said to me, he's like, okay, cognitive dissonance and ego are really powerful.

[163] So what you should do is you start low on the food chain.

[164] And every time you talk to somebody, you say, oh, I hear you're the most connected person in politics in Madagascar or Thailand.

[165] If it's a colonel, would you be able to put me in touch with the general?

[166] And as soon as you say that to them, they feel like they're not the most powerful person or the most connected person if they don't hook you up.

[167] So they may not be able to get you to the palace, but they're like, oh yeah, I'll put you in touch with the advisor.

[168] And so I would go to these places and I'd live there for like two, three months at a time.

[169] And some days I would do literally nothing because nobody would call me back.

[170] Some days I would sit in a waiting room for eight hours until it was more advantageous to them to just meet with me rather than having me sit there and annoying them.

[171] But yeah, I mean, I met lots of heads of state, lots of generals, lots of very interesting people, but it was just sort of elbow grease and flattery.

[172] That's what worked.

[173] How do you make peace with the notion that you're studying it not because you think like corruptions the way to utopia?

[174] So I mean, I guess what I'm saying is like in your pitch for why you would like to talk to them, you're saying either, well, I guess it's sometimes in your career like I'm a college student, I'm writing a thesis, then other times I have a podcast.

[175] They must assume it's not going to be like a celebration of this deception.

[176] That's the thing that's amazing is some of these people just never Google me. Like I've written extensively on how dictators are awful and so on or how generals who, you know, take over governments are highly corrupt.

[177] And then I like message a general in the Thai junta and they're like, sure, come by.

[178] Let's have coffee.

[179] So the only thing I can assume is they just haven't.

[180] Googled me. It says something about the psychology and the hubris involved there.

[181] And also, I think some of them enjoy the notoriety.

[182] I mean, you mentioned Pablo Escobar.

[183] I think Pablo Escobar liked being the bad boy of international narco -politics.

[184] And I think there's some of that with these people as well, that they have interest from somebody who is from a Western country that means that they've made it in Madagascar, Thailand, or Belarus, because the person from the Washington Post wants to talk to them, that means they've got some cachet for having done bad things but actually becoming prominent because of that yeah i mean i guess that's the great calling card you now have you can say the washington post but prior to working there you were doing this kind of thing yeah i was a phd student i mean i was yeah so a lot of a lot of flattery and a lot of elbow grease that's that's what i can chalk it up to really that was it i mean i at one point i got off the plane and i had no contacts so i bought a newspaper and i found the email of a political journalist and i wrote to him and that's how it started i just went up from there so yeah Yeah, it took a long time.

[185] Well, so with the yogurt kingpin, going back to him, knowing his story, were you like, yeah, I get it?

[186] I get why he's become this.

[187] Like, does it make you feel like these bad people aren't really bad people?

[188] No, I mean, I think you can understand the psychological compromises that people start making with themselves.

[189] And one of the things when I started writing this book, because what I'm really doing in the book is I'm trying to grapple with this chicken or this.

[190] the egg problem?

[191] Is it, does power corrupt or do corrupt people seek power?

[192] And the answer is pretty much both, but it depends on the situation, it depends on the system, it's much more complicated and nuanced than that.

[193] And so for someone like him, I can understand why power made him worse.

[194] But there's a lot of times where it's, it's a self -selection problem.

[195] So one of the examples, I'm sure you've come across this when you've had prominent psychologists on the show and so on, or any pop psychologist usually references, the Stanford Prison Experiment, the like standard.

[196] You put the college kid in a uniform, they become abusive.

[197] What's really interesting is I think all of us are getting that wrong.

[198] So when I was researching the book, I found this study that has escaped detention.

[199] I don't know why no one's picked up on this, but in 2007, these researchers, they tried to replicate the Stanford Prison Experiment, Ad.

[200] So they looked at the original advertisement that was placed, and they said, okay, it says for $15 a day, we were recruiting people for a study on prison life.

[201] They said, let's do the same thing.

[202] We'll update it for 2007, but we'll make it $70 instead of 15 because times have changed, except for in half of the cities where we place the ad, we're going to say for a study of prison life, and in the other half, we're going to say for a psychology study.

[203] And then we're going to measure who replies to the ad.

[204] And what they found when they did personality testing was that the people who applied for the prison life study were more Machiavellian, narcissistic, abusive, coercive, authoritarian.

[205] Oh, interesting.

[206] And like, by a large degree than the generic psychology study.

[207] And so I think we've completely taken the wrong lesson.

[208] The lesson from the Sanford Prison Experiment usually is, power corrupts, the uniform turns people bad.

[209] I think that systems of power attract corruptible people to a large degree, and that's what we misread about that study.

[210] And that's laced throughout the book in different examples that show how you can counteract that because power is magnetic to the very wrong kinds of people.

[211] Yeah.

[212] There's so many layers to that Stanford experiment, right?

[213] It does point out just how impossible it is draw conclusion about humans or even just how many ways there are to look at any data set in the social sciences like well what really did it test for yeah i mean i think that's true i think that's completely true but i also think that the way we're doing it now isn't working right i mean one of the reasons why i wrote the book is because you tell anybody you're studying power or you're political scientists and and the thing that always comes back is why is it that we have all these good people around us right my friends are good my family's good and they would make great leaders and then When I look at our leaders, they're all terrible, right?

[214] And I think there's a disconnect here.

[215] So you're right that diagnosing humans in sort of the grand sweeping theory is difficult.

[216] But I think that there's some pretty low -hanging fruit, actually, of how we can make this better.

[217] And along that lines of the attraction aspect, one of the parts of the research that I did that I found most interesting was around policing.

[218] There was a huge hot -button issue in the U .S., right?

[219] And all the debates, defund the police, do nothing, body cams, right?

[220] everything is focusing on what the police do.

[221] And what I said is I think we need to think about who the police are and how we can reshape that in a way that's beneficial to avoid abuse.

[222] So I looked at this recruitment video.

[223] I looked at how police are recruited in the United States.

[224] And in Doraville, Georgia, which is a town of 10 ,000 people outside of Atlanta, there was this video on their website that has, basically, it's flashes the punisher logo first to start, which is like, you know, it's a vigilante who tortures and kills criminals.

[225] And then it has these guys in military fatigues, literally in a tank.

[226] Doraville has 10 ,000 people, so they've got a tank, and they drive through this, like, training ground, throw some smoke grenades out in their camouflage, shoot some guns, and then jump back in.

[227] If you're like somebody who wants to be a community support officer in the Doraville PD, you're not going to sign up after that, right?

[228] So I reached out to the head of New Zealand's police and the police recruitment.

[229] I interviewed her, and they had this program they set up in 2017 that was like, look, if you're somebody who's abusive or a bigot or a bully, which, by the way, not all cops are.

[230] Many cops are wonderful people, but if you are abusive or a bigot or a bully, the idea of being a bigot with a badge or in the U .S. a gun is really attractive.

[231] So those people put themselves forward automatically.

[232] So what they decide to do was make this video that's really funny.

[233] I mean, it's been watched millions of times and New Zealand has five million people.

[234] So it's done well.

[235] And basically it shows all these series of gags featuring police officers that don't look like the stereotypical police officer.

[236] There's more women.

[237] There's more Maori indigenous people, for example.

[238] And they're chasing this unseen perpetrator.

[239] And at the end, they catch them, and it's a dog that's stolen a purse.

[240] And on the front, then on the screen, instead of the Punisher logo, it says, do you care enough to be a cop, right?

[241] And I watch that.

[242] And I watched the Doraville one.

[243] And I'm like, what kinds of people are going to respond to these?

[244] And of course, what happened in New Zealand was they got.

[245] totally different applicants coming in after this campaign.

[246] Their abuse rates dropped.

[247] Their outreach to minority communities got much better.

[248] And they have really low rates of police violence.

[249] Now, it's not perfect.

[250] The U .S. has worse problems than New Zealand does.

[251] But I think we don't even think about this.

[252] We don't talk about how we can redesign systems to attract better kinds of people to power.

[253] And I think that's what we're really missing in a lot of these debates.

[254] And here we get to one of your great questions, which I find to be really, really valid.

[255] But so one Something I would love to explore is like police corruption.

[256] This on the surface when you just hear it, it's like, well, it's, what a betrayal.

[257] You're brought in to protect and serve and here you are a criminal yourself.

[258] It feels like the most hypocritical betrayal.

[259] But when I put myself in a situation where me and my best friend Aaron Weekly, let's say we had joined together and this drug dealer tried to stab Aaron.

[260] He just barely got out of it.

[261] We got the guy cuffed.

[262] We found $100 ,000 on him.

[263] You know, whose money is that?

[264] Like, who am I stealing from?

[265] That's a relevant question.

[266] Like, if I steal from a bank or a family, that's something.

[267] But I know that money's never going to find its way back to the addicts who gave it to that person.

[268] Then I'm in a, you know, I'm in a much more compelling situation to violate my principles.

[269] Yeah, so you've actually set me up really well because I have a story about almost the exact situation you describe in the book.

[270] Oh, okay.

[271] The last third of the book is sort of ten ways to make our systems better and attract better people to power.

[272] And one of them is using randomness to scrutinize people who are in positions that can do disproportionate harm, including police, right?

[273] So I interviewed the former head of internal affairs at NYPD.

[274] And one of the things he pioneered was these random operations where what they do is they would set people up, cops up.

[275] They'd say, like, look, could you go and babysit this apartment in the Bronx?

[276] Nobody's been there yet.

[277] We've got some guys from the DEA who are going to come down.

[278] and you just need to like check it out.

[279] And what they would do is they would have this person come and sure enough, there's a whole bunch of cash on the table.

[280] And the whole thing is wired up like Fort Knox with microphones and cameras.

[281] And they're just sort of watching the guy and he pockets $10 ,000 out of the $50 ,000, figuring he'll report $40K.

[282] And then they sort of wait and see to the end of the day, is he going to hand it in, is he not?

[283] And when he goes home for the day, they arrest him.

[284] And what was really interesting about that is when you then pull cops, so after this becomes known, like the police figure out that this is happening because they hear about other people getting arrested for this stuff, when you pull police and you say, how many of you have been subject to these sting operations?

[285] Like 12 times the actual number say they have because they're actually encountering real situations in which they could steal the money, and they assume it's a sting.

[286] So what ends up happening is it has massive knock -on effects because you start with this thing where it's actually trying to just set them up, And then every time they encounter a real -world situation where they could abuse someone or behave badly, they figure, oh, this is just internal affairs trying to screw me over, I'm not going to do it.

[287] And so the rates of corruption in the department just plummeted.

[288] And they did this, by the way, when you said, you know, your friend gets beat up by a criminal.

[289] They did this actually with actual violence, too.

[290] They would have, like, a guy shout at the cops, like abuse and so on, who was like an actor or a cop.

[291] And if they punched him, they get fired.

[292] So it was both for embezzlement and for violence.

[293] What an interesting job for an actor to take on.

[294] So you're going to go.

[295] That'd be perfect for you.

[296] You'd love that.

[297] It really would, except for the getting punched part, which is like the goal.

[298] Oh, yeah.

[299] Very right.

[300] But even there, okay, okay, we've got to think further about that one.

[301] So right out of the gates, I'm like, well, a little nervous about the entrapment nature of it, right?

[302] Like, if they're truly arresting it, one thing is to go like, hey, you failed that test.

[303] but it's entrapment to arrest them over it.

[304] What do you think about that?

[305] Well, it is illegal what they did.

[306] What I say in the book is I think this is only legitimate as a sort of style of deterring abuse for the types of jobs for which there's a higher standard.

[307] I mean, if they did this in a corporate setting, it's insane, right?

[308] And one of the points that I make is that we've actually set up a society where we're watching the wrong people.

[309] I mean, there's like a whole industry to make sure that people in their cubicle at work don't take five minutes extra on their lunch break.

[310] I mean, Enron didn't get destroyed because somebody stole a paperclip, right?

[311] And yet these companies have, there's actually like chair sensors now that are installed in some companies where they check to make sure you're actually sitting physically in your desk and some of the work from home people are being forced to use them.

[312] So what we're doing is we're surveilling people in ways that are like totally inconsequential.

[313] Hold on, do these people not on a bowling ball?

[314] Just put that on your seat.

[315] Well, they have webcams though too.

[316] I mean, honestly, there's things where they have like to check.

[317] The whole industry is crazy.

[318] And some of them have GPS trackers on their phones that they require now as well.

[319] Oh, my God.

[320] And the point that I make is that's looking at the wrong people.

[321] Like, if somebody takes five minutes for an extra lunch break, like, is that really going to tear down the company?

[322] Whereas if somebody's embezzling in the corner suite, they're not being watched.

[323] So, you know, I think these sort of random tests make sense for people who can do disproportionate damage who are supposed to be held to a higher standard and not to other people.

[324] Yeah.

[325] Yeah, I think that's fair.

[326] Because people need consequences.

[327] They need to know there are consequences.

[328] I know the only problem with that, though, is that you take someone who wouldn't have perhaps, at least theoretically, me, I wouldn't go out of my way to steal anything.

[329] Yeah.

[330] But if you put like 80 grand in front of me and then you say no one knows about this money and then someone's going to come to count it in 10 minutes and I take 10 grand because no one knows.

[331] Oh, and it's also a murderer's money.

[332] You say that.

[333] Now all of a sudden, like, You've tempted me enough that I wouldn't have otherwise been guilty of a crime had you not plotted this whole thing against me. Well, no, because you...

[334] But you're not a cop.

[335] You would.

[336] Well, also, but yeah.

[337] But it goes to show that you would have done that in a real situation, which is illegal.

[338] I know.

[339] I can understand getting in trouble.

[340] I can't understand getting arrested.

[341] Okay.

[342] Okay.

[343] Anyways, I'm getting too hung up on that part of this thing.

[344] But I have a kind of broader question, which is like, okay, so that sounds like a last -ditch effort to deal with this because I guess my overall opinion is people actually are probably tilt good but anything that now gets framed as victimless or in a very intriguing situation where I think some other thing would need to be implemented to help people feel like it was a victim by the way I don't know if I care that anyone steals the drug dealer's money I mean, really?

[345] Is that an ethical?

[346] I mean, of course, if they do that, then now they're tempted to kill the guy and plan a gun so he can't say, no, there was two million.

[347] I guess there's a lot of stuff that follows from it.

[348] I mean, the cop shouldn't have the money.

[349] It's just too corrupt.

[350] You need it to be a cleaner system.

[351] You can't have people stealing money.

[352] I know, but they got to attach something to it for me. Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[353] We've all been there, turning to the Internet, to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange rashes.

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[361] What's up, guys?

[362] This is your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season, and let me tell you, it's too good.

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[371] I'll give you a different example than that.

[372] It's still in policing, but I think you'll be on board with.

[373] There's also suggestions that you should rotate partners in the police.

[374] And over here in the UK, they do this as standard.

[375] And one of the reasons for that is because there were a series of corruption scandals where the police were actually seizing and then selling the drugs.

[376] So there's actually victims there, right?

[377] They were seizing and selling the drugs.

[378] And in some cases, embezzling money and actually becoming like basically players in the drug trade.

[379] And the reason they were able to do that is because they had this small unit, it was the anti -drug unit that had like six people who had been there together for like five years.

[380] They were all in on it.

[381] And so what they start doing now is they rotate someone through because this is backed up by psychology research too where if you have a simulation where people can play a game, but one of the ways you can win the game is by cheating, if you rotate people through, they cheat less because they don't develop a relationship with someone enough to feel comfortable colluding with them.

[382] They don't figure that a person's actually going to protect them if push comes to shove and they have to lie about what they've done and so on.

[383] So whether you do the studies in China or Germany, wherever, rotation actually reduces abuse.

[384] And this is done in some banks, for example, where they figure, okay, if we force somebody to take a vacation, for two weeks and they've been embezzling and all of a sudden the accounts start to change we're going to realize that happens so some of these companies will actually do forced vacations as a method of rotation the point is there's things we can do we can disagree about whether you get fired or arrested in some of them but I think the point is that we're not even trying some of these things in a lot of the places where abusive power happens I agree with you by the way about humans being generally good I meet with loads of awful people and I've interviewed some of the worst of humanity but I actually have a very optimistic view of what human nature is.

[385] I think we're mostly generally good with all of us having a bit of dark in us.

[386] And I think the thing is like when you look at how you can then maximize how we're going to get actually good outcomes and good people in power, I mean, we can reshape this with the system.

[387] So there's an amazing study.

[388] I think this captures so much of what I'm talking about where they basically said to these students, roll a dice 42 times, and every time you get a six, we're going to give you money.

[389] But you had to tell us how many times you roll the six.

[390] not going to actually check.

[391] So you can lie about it.

[392] Oh, wow.

[393] And one guy, I love this in India.

[394] One guy wrote down 42 sixes in a row.

[395] He was just like, you know, screw it.

[396] I'm just going to go for it.

[397] But the thing that's amazing about this was that they could figure out who lied, right?

[398] They could figure out whether you actually had rolled the sixes based on statistics and so on.

[399] And when they surveyed the people in India who had rolled these sixes and cheated on the reporting, they were more often than not planning to go into the civil service, which is a place where you can extract bribes.

[400] When they reran the same study in Denmark, it was exactly the opposite.

[401] All the people who cheated wanted to go into business and all the people who reported honestly wanted to go into government jobs because the civil service in Denmark is squeaky clean.

[402] You can't extort bribes.

[403] So it's one of these things where a rotten system attracts rotten people, a good system attracts good people.

[404] Well, I heard some interesting data point about Russia that the most like impacted major there is government operations or something, which goes to show you.

[405] like, yeah, no one's going into law or business because all the money's in government.

[406] Yep.

[407] That's freaky.

[408] It is like, can you imagine you go major at Harvard and you're like dying to get into municipal management?

[409] You'd be like, wait, that's so counter to Harvard.

[410] The DMV is the coveted place to end up.

[411] Yeah, yeah, like get your DMV certificate.

[412] You're on the fast track to riches.

[413] Okay, are we naive about potential dictators?

[414] Like, I guess I feel like the dictators of history books are gone.

[415] Here's what I mean.

[416] Like, Putin, by all measures, has as much control over a country as someone can have, short of Hitler or something.

[417] Yet I feel like everything's gotten so increasingly transparent through social media, people holding phones, all this different, all these different means by which everything gets out into the light of day now.

[418] Does that force prevent Putin from killing?

[419] 20 million people like previous Russian leaders have done?

[420] Or am I naive?

[421] Is that possible still?

[422] Well, I mean, I think you're right that things have changed a bit.

[423] But I mean, the standard dictator of the modern era would be like Kim Jong -un in North Korea.

[424] And he has gulags like old style.

[425] He kills people with anti -aircraft guns and flamethrowers and things like that.

[426] So it's still pretty gruesome.

[427] And there's places like Turkmenistan where it's like old school dictator, right?

[428] I mean, there's videos that are amazing of the dictator of Turkmenistan like raising a barbell made out of solid gold above his head and then like 25 cronies applaud him and give him a standing ovation and so on and he like shoots a handgun while he's riding a bicycle and they all cheer for him and so on there's still these old school dictators around but you're right that they've mostly changed I think one of the things that I was looking at when I was writing this though is that a personality right in other words what you're describing is how like maybe with some more transparency or a system there's certain constraints that didn't exist for Stalin.

[429] And that's probably true.

[430] But when I talked to people and I was like, here's what it was like to meet with a former despot from this country.

[431] Sometimes my friends would say, oh, it's just like the guy who's in charge of my homeowners association.

[432] Right, right.

[433] One of the things that I was trying to do that was part of the impetus for this book is like, is it just that we've got like little tyrants, like petty tyrants all around us and that they're just not put into the palace and that if they were, they would become like the dictator of Turkmenistan?

[434] And that was one of the things that I was grappling with was, as I was researching the book, was trying to figure out, like, how much of this is something that's in us and how much of this is just shaped by the people around you and the system and the necessity of how you stay in power means you've got to kill off some people and so on.

[435] And I kind of want to parallel this maybe with our corporate business culture somehow.

[436] When you create an incentive for somebody like that where it's either stay in power or go to prison, I just don't know how shocked we can be with the outcome.

[437] My parallel to it is like, this is a complaint I've been airing a lot on here lately is like it feels like the system we've created where we police big business through our litigation process has created this conundrum where in order for Facebook to admit their wrongdoing they'd be opening themselves up to a level of litigation that would likely be an existential crisis for the company so it's like we wonder from the outside why these businesses aren't more ethical but at the same time we have a system that is existential if they had been.

[438] Punishing honesty.

[439] Yeah, and it's life or death for the company.

[440] So once it's positioned that way, like, I can't imagine we're all that shocked when they didn't own up to stuff.

[441] So I think you're right that the lowering of consequences for losing power has a good effect on people because they're willing to step down.

[442] And so, like, I crunched the numbers in some research I did earlier where I was looking at sub -Saharan Africa.

[443] And in sub -Saharan Africa over like 50 years, 43 % of presidents who lost power ended up in jail in exile or dead, right?

[444] Oh, my God.

[445] So it's almost a coin flip, right?

[446] You basically, you're either going to be in prison, you're going to never go home, or you're going to die.

[447] And is it any wonder that they rig elections and that they kill people to stay in power?

[448] I mean, it's a terrible cost, whereas like Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton go on book tours, and they have life after loss and so on.

[449] So a better life, general, a lot wealthier and yeah.

[450] Well, it's funny, it's funny you say that because there's a study that I also talk about the book, the costs of power.

[451] looked at over 200 years.

[452] They looked at 17 countries of people who won presidential and prime minister elections and lost them, the runner up.

[453] And the people who lost lived four and a half years on average longer.

[454] So there's actually a...

[455] Oh, no kidding.

[456] Oh, that's interesting.

[457] Tell me about how facial appearances determine who we pick as leaders.

[458] Like, is it more basic than we'd want to admit?

[459] Yeah, it's really embarrassingly basic.

[460] And it suggests that political, it suggests that political consultants are really overpaid.

[461] So there's this study that they did in Switzerland where they showed these kids two faces.

[462] And they're like, pick somebody to captain your ship in this digital game.

[463] And all you get is these two faces.

[464] Now the kids didn't know that one of the faces was the winner of a French election and one was the person that lost.

[465] So they came in second.

[466] And the kids overwhelmingly picked the winner as the captain of their ship.

[467] And then when they did it with the adults, it was the same thing, exactly the same thing.

[468] And there's all sorts of research as well about this.

[469] I'm not making this up.

[470] There's a technical term called baby -facedness, which also plays into our selection of leaders and has really bizarre and depressing intersections with race when they do the studies as well.

[471] The point is that, yeah, there's a lot that goes into leadership selection that is just literally face value, basically.

[472] Yeah.

[473] What's baby -fi?

[474] Tell me about baby -fa.

[475] I feel like this would keep monocata politics.

[476] Does she have baby -facedness?

[477] I can't measure it myself But what does it mean?

[478] Yeah, okay.

[479] So it means exactly what you think it means.

[480] It means the characteristic of looking like you have a baby face and looking quite young and innocent and so on.

[481] And that's a con or a pro?

[482] Con, right?

[483] Yeah, so this is the thing that's really messed up.

[484] So if you have white people evaluating other white people, they view baby -facedness as a weakness and they view less baby -faced people as strong.

[485] And there's a whole series of reasons that researchers go into for why this is because there has been a history of people from other races being viewed as a potential threat or a stranger, that people with baby faces from other races you actually view as more acceptable to you.

[486] Dr. King, textbook baby face.

[487] Wow, yeah.

[488] Malcolm X, not a baby face.

[489] But it's terrible because it means that, when they look on corporate hiring and promotions in white dominated companies, black people with higher levels of baby face, baby faceness, tend to rise faster in the hierarchy because their views less threatening to their white peers.

[490] So one of the things that I talk about in the book is like we can either pretend some of these cognitive biases don't exist or we can acknowledge that when they repeatedly do these studies, they show up and then we can counteract them.

[491] But there's stuff with this, by the way, with height as well, where when they look at political leaders, taller leaders do better than shorter leaders.

[492] And interestingly, the effect only works for men.

[493] It doesn't matter for women.

[494] So this was lost on this Australian politician.

[495] This is a woman named Hajnal Ban in Australia who read one of these studies and she had her legs broken and surgically stretched by three inches to try to win.

[496] And she did win, but it wasn't because of her height, I don't think, because the surgery only applies, or the height effect only applies to men.

[497] Well, I would argue it was, it was the surgery just because this bitch would go through anything to get the range.

[498] Like, you got to respect someone who would add three inches in their pursuit.

[499] Also, you can do that?

[500] Oh, shit, girl.

[501] I might think about it.

[502] Okay.

[503] Again, as someone who majored in anthropology, ding, ding, ding, I have to say it that way.

[504] I can make a pretty easy evolutionary biological explanation for why you want a dude who looks tall and strong to be the leader of the group in an era where physical threats are the priority of the day be it from predators or marauders whatever so that one totally makes sense to me that that would be our wiring that we've got a step beyond to make a sound logical decision i guess i'm wondering what attributes then primitively do we latch on to with women is it like is it a sense of great nurturing in which height makes no difference in that scenario or equation what do you what do you it is?

[505] Or are there popular theory?

[506] Yeah, so most of the work has been on men, to be honest.

[507] As it should be, as it should be.

[508] But what you were saying before is completely right about, when we talk about strong man leaders, it's not a mistake.

[509] It's what we're referring to is that they're very good at activating that evolutionary psychologist called the latent template in our brains, which says when we're starving and we need a hunter to go out and get us food, then in a moment of crisis, you go for the big male.

[510] And so one of the things that I think is really interesting about that is that politicians have figured this out.

[511] And so it's not a mistake that certain politicians will either manufacture or play up crises around elections when they're trying to do this.

[512] But one of the things I say in the book is like, what would you do if you went to like any other situation and the person tried to like do pushups to show that they were going to be a good dentist?

[513] I mean, it'd be insane, right?

[514] It's like Vladimir Putin is shirtless all the time to show his masculinity.

[515] And if anybody did that in like any other field, like a Fortune 500 CEO is like shirtless in the board meeting, it would be lunacy.

[516] But they've figured out this about when we actually have to select leaders that it does play to their strengths.

[517] So the height one is interesting, though, because it reaffirms that it's called the Savannah hypothesis, what you're talking about.

[518] And it reaffirms that it's a real effect because it doesn't play in for women.

[519] Because if you are going to turn to the physically large.

[520] person to get you out of a jam when you're starving, you're not going to turn to a female most likely in that situation in the Stone Age.

[521] And therefore, the effect in our brain isn't swayed as much.

[522] So perhaps we're more rational in some ways when we're assessing female candidates because we're not grappling with this evolutionary aspect of what our brains tell us.

[523] Yeah, and I'll just point out that like over 90 % of all the food that was eaten for 150 ,000 years was gathered.

[524] This whole hunting thing is a joke.

[525] It barely ever happened.

[526] and it wasn't the main source of food.

[527] But certainly height in that situation is advantageous.

[528] As a gatherer, a woman who's shorter is probably closer to that stuff she's gathering.

[529] You know, it'd almost be the opposite.

[530] Well, I do think there is something in the nurturing, this is my mom type thing.

[531] Like that's, I think that was a big issue with Hillary.

[532] So many people were like, she's cold, she's this because she wasn't their mom.

[533] Yeah.

[534] So I think with women, it's just a different evolutionary thing that we're activating.

[535] Yeah.

[536] Now, why do narcissists make more money?

[537] It's a good question.

[538] So I've got a chapter in the book on the dark triad, which, as the triad name suggests, three parts, narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy, or psychopathy being a psychopath.

[539] And what you tend to find when you talk to people who study these people is that all of us have a little bit of all of this in us.

[540] I mean, we're all a little bit narcissistic.

[541] We're all a little bit machiavellian, and maybe we have traces of psychopathy in us.

[542] And that's fine.

[543] It might actually help us in small amounts.

[544] So if you're narcissistic a little bit, maybe you care about what other people think of you, and that actually can be really advantageous for making more money because you're trying to make sure that the people around you think you're a leader or think you're excellent at your job or whatever.

[545] So in small doses, it's helpful.

[546] And that's why there are lots of studies showing narcissists do make more money.

[547] But in large quantities in the dark triad, they're totally dysfunctional once they get power.

[548] And this is the paradoxes.

[549] They're actually people who are Machiavellian narcissistic psychopaths are really good at getting power and they are drawn to it like moths to a flame.

[550] And we've actually set up systems that ensure that, right?

[551] I mean, if you think about the standard job interview, I mean, it's a 45 -minute or an hour exercise in making other people like you.

[552] And psychopaths are chamelein -like.

[553] They're very good at being what they need to be.

[554] They have superficial charm.

[555] I mean, it's why Ted Bundy got people to come and do his car.

[556] So you think about how we've designed a system to amplify people with the dark triad, but the evidence is very clear that when they get to the top, they're completely dysfunctional.

[557] Now, it depends on the person, right?

[558] Because one of the things also when you talk to psychopath experts that they'll say is, okay, Ted Bundy is a dysfunctional psychopath.

[559] The dysfunctional psychopaths are in jail.

[560] The functional psychopaths are in the boardroom and they're in office.

[561] In other words, they're elected.

[562] So there's this sort of aspect of not just how much of each of these traits, you have, but how able you are to control them.

[563] And the people who are very good at controlling and suppressing them when they need to, they're people who are disproportionately destructive, but are really, really good at getting into power and staying there.

[564] And so, you know, I think some of these aspects are, again, it's an interaction between the system and the person.

[565] There's a bad person trying to get in power.

[566] You have to screen out those people or try to find a way to get them out of power when they actually make it to the top.

[567] Is there a gender deviation between these the Dark Triad?

[568] Do men track higher on all three of these?

[569] Yeah, they tend to, especially on psychopathy.

[570] Yeah, let's get into that.

[571] Yeah.

[572] I have a whole theory on this, but I want you to tell me what you know.

[573] Yeah, yeah.

[574] Okay, so, yeah, so there's a series of studies that get into how to measure psychopathy.

[575] And I think, psychopathy, and I think one of the things that's difficult is that it's measured a whole bunch of different ways, right?

[576] There's lots of tests.

[577] There's lots of, one of the problems they have with figuring out the gender aspects of it, two are how effective are people at lying when they're given psychopathy tests because very often they're trying to.

[578] Yeah.

[579] There's a whole bunch of manipulations.

[580] We don't know for sure whether some of the tests are biased in ways that pick up psychopaths that are men better than women.

[581] But the research I've seen suggests that there's much higher quantities of male psychopaths than female psychopaths.

[582] One of the things I really found interesting in researching this, though, and I talked to some people who did some amazing, amazing studies of psychopaths, is that basically, Psychopaths are very, very good at, as I said before, being chameleon -like, and that means even faking empathy.

[583] So the difference between us and psychopaths in a very simplistic way is that our empathy is switched on by default.

[584] We can try to downregulated if we want to.

[585] We can try to not care about things if we try to, but it's harder for us.

[586] Whereas psychopaths, it's switched off by default, and they can turn it on.

[587] And the way we found this out, or researchers found this out, is they put psychopaths in an MRI machine, brain scan, and they showed them images that would make all of us find it horrific.

[588] I mean, children and animals being hurt and so on.

[589] And the psychopath's brains were just, they just were dull.

[590] They didn't light up at all in this.

[591] And then one of the researchers thought, what happens if I tell them to try to think about what it would be like, try to turn on the empathy, and all of a sudden they look like normal people.

[592] And the opposite is true, by the way, for us.

[593] So there's actually these machines, they're these sort of devices that can dull empathy within us if they put them on your head.

[594] And you can go into the machine and basically feel briefly what it's like to be a psychopath and not be affected by it.

[595] I think it's fascinating with the psychopaths being able to turn it on because that helps explain why they're so good at getting power.

[596] They think tactically, and they're able to sort of turn off that base impulse they might have and think, how am I going to get from point A to point B?

[597] while I have to understand the people around me, and even if I'm not naturally predisposed to doing that, I can make myself do that, which is I think one of the reasons why they're so successful at rising through corporate and political hierarchies.

[598] Wow, that's crazy.

[599] Okay, here's my completely dataless, unresearched theory.

[600] Armchair theory?

[601] Yeah, which is because of the division of activities that hunting and gathering humans had, men had to do some of the more gnarly stuff that I think required some compartmentalization to survive.

[602] Just the act of murdering and warfare and all these things like, I just think it would make sense that we were predisposed to have a little more compartmentalization ability in our head.

[603] Like, oh, I'm switching into this mode where I'm going to toe to toe to with this thing and then ultimately I'm going to take all of its skin off and pull its organs out.

[604] And, you know, the whole thing is fucking gnarly.

[605] And then obviously that person that can compartmentalize that also needs to turn.

[606] turn it on for their own offspring so that they can care for their offspring so that their genes will pass on.

[607] So I don't know.

[608] I just feel like somehow that division of what we did might be at play here.

[609] I buy into a lot of the evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology research on this.

[610] The second chapter in the book is the evolution of power and it looks at sort of, I mean, exactly what you're describing, I think is very persuasive because if you think about the 200 ,000 years that we've been around on the planet, there's been about 8 ,000 generations.

[611] I mean, give or take.

[612] It's a rough estimate.

[613] But 7 ,980 of those involved a world in which being bigger was helpful for your survival.

[614] Is that going to have an impact on how we think about things?

[615] Yeah, definitely.

[616] There's evolutionary mismatches that the evolutionary psychologists put it this way, which I think is very nice.

[617] They say we have a stone age mind in a modern skull, basically.

[618] Yeah, yeah.

[619] And that's causing us to make some stupid decisions.

[620] And I think one of the things I talk about that I also found really intriguing was we are the only species, for whatever reason, I mean, basically we got some lucky cosmetic surgery put on our shoulders a very long time ago that allow us to throw things quickly and accurately.

[621] And we're the only species that can do this.

[622] You give a chimpanzee the best training.

[623] You put them in a baseball uniform.

[624] He can throw about 20 miles an hour and it'll go sideways, right?

[625] And that actually matters a lot for understanding how our hierarchies are different.

[626] Because when you actually look at the ability, to kill somebody at distance by throwing a rock at their head, it all of a sudden changes from brawn and size to brains and savviness or smarts.

[627] And all of a sudden being clever is a pathway to the top, right?

[628] And I think that's very, very different.

[629] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[630] We have this in the U .S. right, when you think about, it's a terrible statistic, but two or three times a week, a toddler shoots an adult in the United States.

[631] The idea of a chimp baby killing an adult chimp is, I mean, it's ludicrous.

[632] It's never going to happen.

[633] And that's how most of the animal kingdom is where there's a direct correlation between size and dominance.

[634] And so one of the things that I try to point out is I say, well, this is great, right?

[635] We get to choose.

[636] We don't have to be beholden to this stupid way of figuring out who's in charge of us based on who was just born bigger.

[637] And as a result, we can accept that that still makes a difference in how some people think about power, but we can also counteract it because you don't have to be the alpha male in size in order to rise to the top.

[638] And just to add more to that chimpanzee scenario, what's so fascinating about chimps is unlike guerrillas where the sexual dimorphism is like 2x, right?

[639] The males are twice as big as the females.

[640] It's not that crazy in chimps, which lets us know, yes, that there's more than just the size, being a determining factor in the evolution like it is in lions.

[641] And I think what's so fascinating is like, yeah, some of the chimps, Frodo, do have access to more females.

[642] They are spreading their genes.

[643] But also the most clever member of that group is also tricking his way into reproducing at a similar rate as the really big one.

[644] So you've got both kind of working in concert, which is unique and interesting for humans.

[645] Yeah, I did a lot with non -human primates for the book, baboons, macaques, chimps.

[646] and so on.

[647] And, I mean, they provide us really interesting insights into power because there's similarities, but then all the sort of social norms and culture is stripped away, right, that we have to deal with.

[648] And so one of the things I found really interesting, two studies that stood out to me that I interviewed the people who worked on this and so on.

[649] One is with baboons.

[650] And I talked to this PhD student who, like, I was telling him about how I met with, you know, various former despots and how, and he was like, yeah, I blow dart baboons.

[651] So slightly different PhDs, but Anyway, he would blow dart these baboons, and then they would test them for this thing called DNA methylation, which is basically the easy way to explain is biological aging.

[652] So our bodies age at a different rate from the calendar.

[653] It's not always one to one.

[654] And what they did was they looked at that relative to hierarchy and changes in where the baboon was in the hierarchy.

[655] And as you'd expect, the baboons that were at the bottom, were super stressed.

[656] They were aging really quickly.

[657] They didn't have resources.

[658] They didn't have mates.

[659] It sucked.

[660] As you went up, the pecking order, it got better.

[661] except for when you hit the top.

[662] And as soon as you got to the alpha, it was really stressful and really fast aging.

[663] And there was one baboon that aged three biological years in 10 months after rising up the hierarchy.

[664] Oh, wow.

[665] By the way, we watched this real time with Obama.

[666] That was the best part of the correspondence dinner.

[667] Yeah, well, I mean, and this is something, the aging aspect, they've done this with CEOs.

[668] They use machine learning now to look at CEOs' faces, and the CEOs who go through like a crisis in their industry versus the ones who have had, like, a growth period, they age a different, they physically age in different ways.

[669] Ooh, that's scary.

[670] Yeah, and so, you know, I think one of the conclusions from this is actually being, like, in the court, but not the king, is the good place to be, because the second -in -command -baboon doesn't have a target on his back, and he's got the pick of mates, and he's got lots of food.

[671] So maybe it's just good to be sort of out of the spotlight, but in power.

[672] Well, that's great, because I was going to ask you, because Monica and I, we're on this topic endlessly, which is alpha beta.

[673] And I always try to distinguish, like, I'm never referring to it as it is the premium status position.

[674] Like, there's so many ways to look at alfanness.

[675] Is this the alpha earner in the group?

[676] Is it the alpha leader?

[677] Is it the alpha, you know, there's so many lanes to be alpha.

[678] And I'm never really meaning it in like what's desirable, but I am meaning it in the prime.

[679] make group sense and so that makes total sense to me we had a dog shaky and his fucking heart standing heart rate was probably like 185 because he was tiny yet he was the alpha of all these dogs he did not have the shit to back it up so he just lived in this heightened state of arousal if i was around he could fucking chill for a minute right he could actually take a nap he felt like i was on it and i used to look at him and i'm like man the price he's paying but well how did he become alpha to begin with then.

[680] So here's my theory that I don't know if you'll agree with or not agree with, but I think it's so genetic, man. I just, I look at my father, I look at my children.

[681] It just, I didn't make a decision to be a way.

[682] I just feel like genetically, my father, he's a textbook shaky, man. He's fucking adrenal dumps every day.

[683] He's fighting guys on the car at Costco over fucking samples.

[684] It was a plight.

[685] But he's bit, your dad.

[686] Like, I'm saying, but his testosterone thing was too high, his hair fell He was just, naturally he was aggressive as a motherfucker.

[687] As are chimps, certain chimps that are born of alphas tend to carry on that genetic path.

[688] What are your thoughts on all this alphanus?

[689] Yeah, so I go into the gene stuff because in the animal kingdom there are some species that like just inherit dominance.

[690] Zebrafish, right?

[691] It means like random stuff, but like also with mice.

[692] And they actually isolated a gene in mice where they could either knock it out or basically put it on steroids.

[693] And the mouse would either get much more dominant or.

[694] much more submissive.

[695] And hyenas also, they end up inheriting dominance.

[696] I looked at some studies.

[697] I talked to some people who tried to figure this out in humans.

[698] They said, you know, is there a power gene?

[699] Is there a leadership gene?

[700] And they did it with twins.

[701] So they looked at fraternal twins versus identical twins.

[702] And the idea is, right, the identical twins are genetically identical.

[703] The fraternal twins are very similar, and they have a similar upbringing, but they don't have the exact same genes.

[704] And they identified what they call the leadership gene.

[705] Now, it's correlated strongly with ending up in a position of leadership.

[706] But the thing that I found unsatisfying about it was you can't tell whether that gene is correlated with like power -seeking behavior.

[707] Like you actually want power and you have a thirst for power and you need to be the alpha.

[708] Or just power -obtaining behavior.

[709] Like you're charismatic and affable and good at manipulating people or whatever it is.

[710] So we know there's a genetic basis to who ends up in leadership positions.

[711] We don't know why that is.

[712] And so one of the things that I think shows like the method of how I researched this book was I tried to tackle it from all sides.

[713] So I've got the animals, cut the jeans.

[714] Then I went and I met the daughter of a cannibalistic dictator who ruled the Central African Empire.

[715] He called that he was an emperor.

[716] He crowned himself in the 70s.

[717] And he quite literally, allegedly served human flesh to visitate diplomats and so on.

[718] I mean, pretty much the worst you can imagine.

[719] What was this gentleman's name?

[720] Jean Bedel Bocasa.

[721] He's not well known in the West, but he's, I mean, he's spent like half of the country's budget on his coronation.

[722] Oh, boy.

[723] Total sight.

[724] He had like this ermine cloak and like, you know, jeweled scepter and all this stuff.

[725] Anyway, so I go and meet one of his kids who's now, she's, I think, in her 40s and she lives in Paris, and we have a glass of wine.

[726] And I'm asking her about these genetic, I'm like, what do you think?

[727] Your dad's a monster.

[728] Are you a monster?

[729] You know, I was sort of saying that in more polite ways.

[730] And what was really fascinating to me was like, she was one of the only family members that and has, like, acknowledged that what he did was bad.

[731] The rest of them were like, no, no, no, he was a good guy.

[732] But even still, when I asked her, I was like, have you thought about changing your name?

[733] Because her name is Marie -France Boccasa.

[734] I mean, she's still a Bacasa.

[735] And she lives, like, in the shadow of one of his palaces that he bought outside of Paris when he was a dictator.

[736] And she's like, no, I had a portrait of him in my house.

[737] I used to always, like, tell him he'd be proud of me and so on.

[738] And I'm still proud of our family name and all this.

[739] And then I asked her the question that you ask American politicians, like, are you going to run first?

[740] officer, you're going to be putting the Bacasa name back on the throne?

[741] And she gave the U .S. politician response, which was, I'm not really in anything out.

[742] It's just like, it's a classic thing.

[743] It's hard to say she was really open with me and she said, I think I inherited his temper.

[744] I think I inherited like his, some of the aspects of his disposition.

[745] I think I inherited how strong he was as a person, some of his positive traits as she saw them.

[746] But I mean, he did some great, again, you can't tell whether it's nature or nurture because like, in their childhood, I forget whether it was her or one of her siblings, like did something wrong, like brought him the wrong drink, and he burned their clothes.

[747] So this is not a happy upbringing that they had.

[748] And this is one of the fundamental problems is like you can explore the genetic basis of this with genome sequencing, and you can look at twin studies, you can talk to the daughter of a dictator, and you can't really solve that problem of nature, nurture, or is it that they're driven to power because they're obsessed by it, or just that they're better at getting it?

[749] they're born leaders in terms of how we set up the systems that make it so if you're charming and outspoken, you're better at getting promotions than if you're quiet and introverted and awkward.

[750] And it's very, very difficult to know.

[751] It is hard to draw a conclusion because as many examples as there are, like we recently interviewed Anderson Cooper and he, of course, is the great, great, great grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

[752] And he's examining his own legacy or the legacy of the Vanderbilt's and feels so distant from the opulence and all that stuff.

[753] But yet part of me is watching him and I'm like, no, you're a absolutely fearless, brazen at all costs, pursuer of your, I can see the genetic links.

[754] But then you have all these other children of leaders and they're absolutely impotent and useless.

[755] I guess it's probably kind of like the addiction thing where it's like maybe genetics loads the gun and then your nurture pulls the trigger.

[756] It's also what you grow up seeing.

[757] Like if you grow up seeing power as attainable, then it might be a self -fulfilling prophecy.

[758] You just, whether you have it or not, you might be like, that's something I can have.

[759] That's an option.

[760] Yeah, so I think two things I want to say that.

[761] I mean, one is you're absolutely right, Monica.

[762] I mean, there's lots of studies that show that, for example, they've done randomized experiments in India where they have to pick like a head of a village.

[763] And in the ones where women end up being selected in the next generation, more women.

[764] try to become political leaders, because they see it as possible.

[765] But, Dax, what you said about addiction, it's also really interesting because going back, you know, the book's not exclusively about primates, I promise, mostly about humans.

[766] But the primate stuff stands out, and there was this guy, his name's Dr. Michael Nader out at Wake Forest.

[767] He runs this lab.

[768] He's like a mini Pablo Escobar.

[769] He's got his Class 2 DEA license where he has Pure Coke in his lab.

[770] He's got like two keys you have to turn to get it because it's like street value is off the charts.

[771] And what he does is he's got these amazing devices.

[772] invented, I forget, it's called like an intelligent panel for the chimp.

[773] Sorry, it's a macaque monkey, it's a macaque.

[774] And they put the macaque into this chair and they can either like pull a lever on one side or the other.

[775] And if they pull one lever, like banana pellets come out.

[776] And if they pull the other one, intravenous cocaine goes straight into their bloodstream.

[777] And what they did is they looked at this where they would take the monkeys and they put them in like individual housing units, so they're all on their own.

[778] And then they put him into a colony of four.

[779] And like, he was like, 10 minutes later, you've got the one, two, three, four.

[780] You can rank them.

[781] They have a very, very clear hierarchy.

[782] And what was fascinating was that the powerful monkeys wouldn't take the Coke.

[783] They would always eat the banana pellets.

[784] Whereas the weaker on the pecking order monkeys always self -medicated.

[785] They wouldn't take the banana pellets.

[786] And the doses were much higher that they wanted and so on.

[787] And even when you reran it, so like if you took a dominant monkey and then put them into a group of four other dominant monkeys and the monkey ends up on the bottom goes to Coke.

[788] So it's like, you know, there's lessons about this.

[789] And it actually, they checked the brains.

[790] They've looked at them and analyzed them.

[791] And it actually changed the chemistry of the brain.

[792] The dopamine receptors changed based on the pecking order.

[793] And I think one of the things that I try to grapple with, I'm a political scientist, not a neuroscientist.

[794] But I talked to these leading minds on neuroscience.

[795] And power changes your brain.

[796] I mean, it just fundamentally changes how you think about people.

[797] It changes what you are willing to risk, the way you calculate risk, the way you think about empathy and other people being affected by your decisions.

[798] And I think at some point, it's not just this sort of, you know, we have that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely saying everybody says that to me when I ask, you know, I tell them about my book.

[799] It's more complicated than that.

[800] It's not just that there's some uniformly corrupting influence, it's that it actually is fundamentally changing your brain chemistry in some ways and your body.

[801] There's stress levels that change all sorts of stuff.

[802] And I think we have to understand that because it's one of the keys to making sure people behave better is acknowledging that something's actually happening to them on a physical level.

[803] Well, that's what's really tricky for us to evaluate, I think, or to navigate in our mind is that when you talk about this status, this pecking order, the 1, 2, 3, 4, it sounds so trivial, but on some genetic level, we recognize, all you have to do is look at Japanese snow monkeys.

[804] So the lower status members have to literally sit on the outside of the high, hot tub and watch all the Japanese snow monkeys go swimming all day and be warm in these thermal pools.

[805] But the low -ranking members have to just sit and freeze and shiver and be miserable and excluded.

[806] And so, yes, if you offer that thing a metaphorical blanket, i .e. intervenious cocaine, guess what?

[807] They're going to fucking take it.

[808] And so we have to recognize first why those status markers feel so goddamn imperative to us.

[809] We have to first come to terms with why it was at one time life or death.

[810] It did mean whether or not we would pass on our genes or whether we would eat or get beat to death.

[811] And that's why they're so powerful.

[812] And yet we must transcend them.

[813] It's a very tricky, it's trickier than I think people give it credit for.

[814] It feels existential your status in a group because it once was.

[815] By the way, you are the most well informed on non -human primates of any interviewer I've ever spoken to, which is awesome, which is great.

[816] But it's one of the things that I think is where we make the jump to humans is also gives us a blueprint for how to deal with this because a lot of us we end up in low status situations that feel existential.

[817] So what do you do?

[818] I mean, there's evidence that in that situation it's bad for your body.

[819] It can actually make you die sooner.

[820] It can make you have real mental health problems.

[821] And one of the things that's cool about humans is that we have intersecting statuses.

[822] So we're not just one, two, three, four.

[823] You could have like a terrible job where you're treated like crap, but then you're like the leader on your company softball team or you're in your church group and you're really well respected.

[824] And like that's, I think, one of the really hopeful aspects of humans is that we don't have to just be defined by this singular pecking order, which means that if you think about it that way, you think, okay, well, I hate my job, but I can still be number one in my family or in my church group or whatever it is.

[825] And I think that's a really profound insight that you can get from animals that are quite like us in some ways and quite unlike us in others.

[826] And I think it's something where we have to keep it in mind because we can have statuses that are much more textured than Japanese snowmuckies looking at a hot tub with envy.

[827] Yeah.

[828] So my last question for you is what you suggest kind of a series of reforms that would help us put better people in these positions.

[829] So what are some of the methods we could use or systematic changes?

[830] Okay, good.

[831] So there's a few things.

[832] I've talked about one of them before the rotation aspect, which is important.

[833] How about I do two of them?

[834] Is sound good?

[835] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[836] Okay.

[837] Cool.

[838] So one of them is this idea called Sortition.

[839] So it comes from ancient Greece, basically.

[840] And in ancient Greece, in Athens, they had this thing called the Claritarian, which basically randomly selected people from the community to serve in a citizen assembly each year.

[841] It was like jury duty, but you're for your politicians.

[842] Now, I think that's a terrible idea in general because there's actually a lot of things that politicians need to learn over the course of a career, like should we sign a nuclear test ban treaty that you probably need a little bit of expertise to understand, right?

[843] What I think we should use it for is for oversight.

[844] And so what I mean by that is you can imagine this with a company.

[845] Let's take Facebook.

[846] Facebook's got a board.

[847] And Facebook doesn't have a shadow board that involves randomly selected employees, but it could and it should.

[848] And if you randomly selected employees and then you had them grapple with the same decisions the actual board is making, then if the board is making a short -sighted decision, based on quarterly profits, or if it was because Mark Zuckerberg was pushing them to do something, meta, I guess now, then it would be visible because the employees would go quite a different way.

[849] Now, the employees wouldn't have any power, but it would force the board to confront what the random assortment of employees thought.

[850] You could do the same for Congress, right?

[851] I mean, there's a lot of common sense people when it comes to something like an infrastructure bill who, if we randomly put 435 Americans in a fake house of representatives for a year and said, what should we do about fixing the roads and bridges in the country?

[852] You'd get an answer that would be definitive.

[853] They would actually come up with something.

[854] There would be bridge building both in terms of actual bridges and in terms of people from different parts of the party dynamic agreeing on stuff.

[855] And then it would expose when politicians are making decisions based on lobbying or interest groups or so on because that's where the divergence would exist.

[856] And it would give journalists like an opening to say, why did you come up with something so radically different from what, 435 random?

[857] citizens thought we should do on this problem, right?

[858] So that's one thing where I think you could have oversight boards to basically hold politicians and business leaders and so on accountable.

[859] And the other one that I wanted to talk about is this idea of the weight of responsibility.

[860] It's a bit psychological, but I think it's important in the modern era.

[861] So in 2021, it's really easy for people who are inflicting damage on other people to never see those people, right?

[862] You mean, you get fired by a corporate downsizing consultant.

[863] The people who are screwing you over at your business are a thousand miles away and you've never met them.

[864] So there's a lot of evidence of this phenomenon called psychological distance.

[865] And psychological distance is basically we can't view everybody equally.

[866] I mean, if we did, it would be a huge problem for us because, you know, when somebody's suffering in Malawi, we would feel the exact same as if our family member was killed.

[867] So we triage it in our brain.

[868] We sort of say, okay, here are the people that are really close to us and so on.

[869] And psychological distance is basically how far away from your family, member is the person you're interacting with.

[870] Are they really far or really close?

[871] And they've done this study where they have people kill ladybugs.

[872] They don't actually kill them, but they think they're killing them with this machine.

[873] And when the people are in the same room as the machine, they kill a lot fewer ladybugs than when they're just like on a computer screen and it's off in the distance, which I think has relevance for the way we've set up modern society and all these sort of call centers that are horrible, that are thousands of miles away and so on.

[874] But the real point here is that for people in massive positions of power, you have to remind them that human beings are not abstractions.

[875] They're actual individuals.

[876] The way I talk about this, I interviewed two really interesting people.

[877] One was this guy named Ken Feinberg, who ran the 9 -11 Victims Compensation Fund.

[878] He had to decide how much each person's life was worth based on their life circumstances before 9 -11.

[879] And what he did that I thought was really admirable.

[880] He was a controversial figure because he gave money to different people at different amounts.

[881] But what I thought was really admirable is he met with every family face to face.

[882] And he said, tell me about your dad, tell me about your son, whatever it was.

[883] And before I decide how much I'm going to give you, I want to meet you, sit down, look you in the eye, and understand what it's like to be you.

[884] And he said it was crushing.

[885] He destroyed, he did this like hundreds and hundreds of times.

[886] He'd go to the office.

[887] He'd meet with families all day.

[888] It was the worst thing.

[889] But he said, if I didn't feel that way, then I need to quit this job because I'm making their lives, either better or worse, depending on what my judgment is, and I need to know that.

[890] And the juxtaposition I have is with John Yoo, who is the lawyer out in Berkeley, who I flew out to interview.

[891] And he's this lawyer for the Bush administration who wrote the memo that, depending on your politics, you'll either say, is the torture memo or the enhanced interrogation memo, right?

[892] But it's a memo that basically allowed the U .S. government to use waterboarding and other things like that.

[893] And I kept pressing him on this point.

[894] I was like, you know, do you lose sleep?

[895] Did you lose sleep over this ever?

[896] Like, was this something that was difficult?

[897] And he was like, not really.

[898] It was a legal, it was a legal question.

[899] And I was like, yeah, but like, you said that it was okay to, like, put a person in a box full of live insects.

[900] That was allowed, according to your legal assessment.

[901] Like, if somebody had that happened to them, wouldn't that bother you?

[902] And he was like, no, it was just like a legal question.

[903] And when I left that interview, I was like, I don't think John Yoo has ever seen someone get tortured, right?

[904] Right, right, right, right.

[905] And, like, I've talked to torture victims, and I've interviewed torture victims, and I've interviewed torture.

[906] and I mean, it's horrible.

[907] I mean, it's one of the worst things to have somebody tell you about being tortures, like one of the worst things I've ever experienced in my life.

[908] And I think that lesson that I took away from those two stories was that you have to make sure that people in positions of power understand that they're playing with real people's lives.

[909] And it's so easy to abstract when you're a politician or president.

[910] I mean, the good ones try to force themselves to be exposed to the people who hate them because they have to understand why those people are upset, and then they have to live with that.

[911] That's hopefully why they die sooner out of stress.

[912] I mean, politicians often will die sooner if they're presidents, as I said before, and hopefully that's because it actually weighs on them, right?

[913] I mean, it's supposed to be a burden of responsibility rather than a thing that you seek for your own enjoyment and gratification.

[914] And so there's 10 total examples of sort of how I think we can reform systems, but there's two examples there.

[915] And no, they're not going to fix it.

[916] everything.

[917] I mean, you know, you can't remind everybody.

[918] Psychopass not going to care about the weight of responsibility.

[919] But I think in aggregate, they can make a much better world.

[920] And I'm still very optimistic, both about human nature and about making the world a better place, despite the fact that I've encountered some of the worst people in it.

[921] There's a version of the utopia I believe in, where it's like somehow we have a metric to assess the threshold of temptation humans, on average, can endure and that anytime we have a job or a situation where we recognize this is going to put the human in the red that's going to be a CEO that has to make this.

[922] I think if we had a method by which we could evaluate that, I guess I don't like systems that set humans up for failure.

[923] I've never liked abstinence training sex.

[924] It's just like you might even be ethically correct.

[925] I have no idea.

[926] It doesn't fucking matter.

[927] are going to fuck there's no way around that so once you acknowledge that then you're like or what's the next the least worse outcome well that they would not get pregnant while doing so okay so let's jump to i just think i'm a little suspicious of any system that's like the way we fix this is we call on people to be their best at all times makes me a little nervous so i guess i wish our systems accounted for our fallibility in a non -judgmental realistic way we're like hey man we're not fucking AI.

[928] Guess what?

[929] You put a single mother of three in a fucking evidence locker and no one's going to know that 10 grand went away.

[930] Let's be realistic about that.

[931] I think the lesson there, which I agree with, is that also you have to accept that the same person will behave in totally different situations, right?

[932] And that's one of the things where you have to understand that it's not just like, if you do something bad, it's not because you're a bad person necessarily.

[933] So the weirdest thing I did researching the book actually is one of the last things I did before the lockdown was I flew out to Vermont, and this guy, Paul Bremer, he ran a rack from 2003 to 2004.

[934] He was, Bush put him in charge of running Iraq.

[935] Now he's a ski instructor in Vermont.

[936] So I took a ski lesson with him, chatted on the chairlift and so on.

[937] And it was just funny because I grew up in Minnesota.

[938] I was a down -hill ski racer when I was a kid, so I was a better skier than him.

[939] Wait, wait, were you under the guise of just a student, or did you tell him I want to interview you and get a lesson?

[940] No, I told them beforehand.

[941] I didn't like spring out and be like oh by the way he actually said to me he's like yeah I'll do the interview but like let's do a ski lesson because I'm working that day so I can't and he's like my bosses will be upset you know it's like this is the guy that ran a rack oh my god also best way to talk to a man you're both facing forward no eye contact then you're going down to hill facing for there's a lot of psychological tricks here but but was interesting about it you guys like he was this guy who's again depending on your politics you view him positively negatively whatever but the thing that was interesting to me about him was that he did a really good job when he was ambassador to Malawi and Norway.

[942] That was what he was before, right?

[943] It was two of these jobs.

[944] And then he gets to Iraq, and he's living in, like, Uday Hussein's palace.

[945] And Osama bin Laden puts a bounty of 10 ,000 grams of gold on his head, which I think is a first for a ski instructor in Vermont, but I haven't checked.

[946] And he's getting woken up by mortar fire trying to kill him.

[947] And at the same time, he's responsible for, like, restoring order, electricity, all this stuff.

[948] and so in one of the early meetings he makes an offhanded comment where he's like okay Baghdad is like collapsing there's all these looters that are taking over sectarian civil wars like brewing could we shoot some of the looters like in the leg to sort of like reestablish order now okay I'm not in favor of shooting looters right I mean let's be clear on this but like the thing that I think is the profound insight there from him talking to me that I took away from that was like he never in a million years would have had that conversation in Norway.

[949] He never would have said, like, oh, should we shoot some people in Norway?

[950] And he inherited a dictatorship, right?

[951] I mean, it's like...

[952] That had been ruled in that manner, very, very violently, and yeah.

[953] Exactly.

[954] And so, like, the New York Times picked up, you know, somebody leaked this to the press and there was this horrible PR story early on that was like, they were talking about shooting looters.

[955] And the weird thing about it was, like, the quotes from the Iraqis were like, please shoot the looters.

[956] Whereas, like, in the U .S. context, it was like, this is the worst thing imaginable.

[957] And what he was saying is he's like, nothing we were doing was like in the U .S. I mean, I was in a palace built by Saddam Hussein's sons.

[958] I mean, it was like, I can't play by the old rules.

[959] And I had another experience I interviewed.

[960] I don't know, have you guys seen the documentary on Netflix, Wild Wild Country, you ever see?

[961] Oh my God.

[962] Yeah.

[963] The Rajneishi's Ma Nad Sheila.

[964] So I flew out to Switzerland and I met Ma Nan Sheila.

[965] Oh my God.

[966] I'm most attracted to her of any human that's ever lived.

[967] I'm so hot for her.

[968] It's crazy.

[969] Are you single?

[970] No. Oh, fuck.

[971] Okay.

[972] All right.

[973] Go ahead.

[974] She's the worst bioterrorist in U .S. history, right?

[975] She's like, poisoned 1 ,000 people with Selmanel.

[976] She's known as the worst bioterrorist in U .S. history.

[977] She serves like four years in jail, gets deported.

[978] And she did some crazy stuff when she was Bhagwan's right -hand woman, right?

[979] I mean, she was plotting to assassinate, like, a U .S. attorney.

[980] There were attempts to try to, like, weaponize HIV, which is just like a new virus at the time and like they were looking at salmonella variants that were much more deadly than the one they actually used in the end all options were on the table all options right that's that's right so so where i met her is she's in charge of a care home for people with schizophrenia in Switzerland vulnerable people right and it was funny because i walk in and she's she like offers me some water and like she poisoned four people with water so it's like i was like uh i didn't know what to say so i was like no thanks I've already had some right you don't say that about water but I was like flustered because I was worried she's going to kill me so so anyway but she's like this lovely old lady she's like this tiny like I think she's like 70 72 and she's just like really nice she's got a portrait of her parents and baguan in her room and the residents clearly love her and I was like this is like a classic case study because she's like this art student who then like becomes the voice of a guru and like a guy and like poisons people Builds a fucking city.

[981] Yeah, and an airport.

[982] Yeah.

[983] She tried to also, she was plotting to poison the water supply by puring beavers.

[984] This was one of the plots that they came over.

[985] Yeah, I'm going to put it in that big water tank.

[986] Yeah, so anyway, but then she leaves, and she's like, never done anything bad since as far as I can tell.

[987] And she's taken care of vulnerable people and it's just like a lovely person, and you're like, wow, that's pretty weird, right?

[988] Like, you can have this taste of power and end up plotting massive assassinations and killings of people and then all of a sudden be the Swiss government's like, yes, you are the person who should be in charge of schizophrenics.

[989] Like, I mean, it's, which, you know, I sort of think probably shouldn't happen, but...

[990] Well, although, like, I guess it depends, like, what you're attributing her behavior to.

[991] So I wouldn't attribute it to, like, a bent of power as much as, like, ultimate in -group survival.

[992] Like, what you saw was someone who would have killed all -out group members to protect in -group members.

[993] and in some bizarre way, if I'm Switzerland, like, yeah, the schizophrenics, they need a fucking actual ally that's going to fight for them and make them their in -group and care about them.

[994] So in a very bizarre way, maybe that is the skill.

[995] She does well with a purpose.

[996] Oh, my God, yeah.

[997] She really goes to town, yeah, it's true.

[998] And it's weird, too, because it's like when I met her, she lives in this time.

[999] Like, if you took like a postcard of Switzerland, like that's where she is.

[1000] Did you get a sense if she had a lover?

[1001] I asked her about it with Bhagwan.

[1002] And she was sort of coy about it, but I think she was basically like, yeah, it happened with the Bhagwan.

[1003] But she, as far as I could tell, isn't living with anyone, she had a single bed, so like a twin.

[1004] So I don't know.

[1005] So you want to get her into at least a queen.

[1006] I can make that work, though, a twin?

[1007] Well, whatever, whatever is necessary.

[1008] Brian, I can't imagine you thought you'd be ensnared in a sexual debate about Ma Nod Sheila, but here you are.

[1009] Or someone so knowledgeable about Japanese snowmuckings.

[1010] Brian, this has been awesome.

[1011] I just want people to know for your book, Corruptible.

[1012] You talk to 500 people and some of the most bizarre people one could sit down and talk with.

[1013] I mean, it's so juicy in that respect.

[1014] And I also want to mention to people that you have a podcast that I've listened to, Power Corrupts.

[1015] I listened to the Nauru Island, the billion -dollar shack episode, which was fantastic about this little island in the Pacific that first discovered they had a lot of phosphate in the way of guano and they started exporting that and then they got all this money they didn't know what to do with and then they got involved of all these ventures.

[1016] Oh, wow.

[1017] Yeah, again, so much of these, like, I think our knee jerk is to like, we want to vilify people, but it's like back to the Iraqi leader's example.

[1018] It's like quite often you should be looking at did they make the least terrible fucking decision in a lot of terrible decisions?

[1019] Circumstance.

[1020] Yeah, and that all these different countries have varying degrees of good and bad options.

[1021] And that must be taken into account when we're trying to cast judgment.

[1022] This is Chapter 7 of my book is why it appears power corrupts, because some of that is that these people have terrible options exclusively.

[1023] So when they do a bad thing, it's not that they turned bad.

[1024] It's that they didn't have a good choice.

[1025] But there's also like the learning aspect of it, right?

[1026] Like if you've got a psychopath who like gets into power, at first that person is not going to be good at wielding it.

[1027] not going to figure out all like the levers to pull and like the people to manipulate and so on and over time they're going to get really good at it so on paper it's going to look like power corrupted them because they're going to inflict more harm but actually they just learn to be good at being bad and there's like a lot of stuff like that so it's one of the things I loved about researching this book I mean it's the most fun thing I've done professionally by far because like I talked to these weird people I mean they're bizarre but also like everything is so much more complicated than it seems That's why when people always like, I talk to them and they trot out like, oh, power corrupts, absolutely power corrupts, absolutely.

[1028] End of debate.

[1029] I'm like, yeah, okay, well, there's 250 pages about how much more complex this is I can offer you because it is not that simple.

[1030] It's a much more nuanced.

[1031] And I think you guys did wonderful questions in asking about this because it's nature versus nurture.

[1032] It's human behavior that can be shaped.

[1033] It's the same person in two different situations as a monster in one and an angel in the other.

[1034] And I think one of the things that I struggle with is that all the, debates are like racked with moral judgments like oh you sat down with somebody who is a terrible person or you're saying this person took the least bad option but they killed people and you're like yeah but i mean this is not a situation where nobody was going to die they were in a situation where someone is going to die and they decided who it was now i'm not absolving it it's not like you're saying like this was cool it was good but you're sort of saying like let's try to figure out why this happens so we can stop it in the future and like i think it's counterproductive to have those conversations be just, this is the end.

[1035] You shouldn't ever talk to these people.

[1036] You shouldn't ever entertain their ideas or anything like that.

[1037] Well, just first and foremost, the notion that you can or cannot talk to anybody is patently absurd.

[1038] Like, what are you afraid of?

[1039] You're going to hear something that's harder for you to wrestle with.

[1040] That's really what your fear is probably.

[1041] Brian, you rule.

[1042] Keep writing.

[1043] We need you.

[1044] If you're in London, get enrolled at the university college so you can have Brian as your professor.

[1045] That's where you teach?

[1046] Yeah, UCL, University College London.

[1047] So go down, take a class from Brian, read Corruptible, and then listen to Power Corrupts podcast.

[1048] Thank you so much, man. It was such a blast having you.

[1049] Oh, it was awesome talking to you.

[1050] Thanks for having me up.

[1051] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate, Monica Padman.

[1052] First of all, you're wearing the sweater, the coveted sweater that no one...

[1053] I guess today's the day, or have I already told people what the brand was.

[1054] I don't think we told people.

[1055] Okay, I'm coming over.

[1056] Okay.

[1057] Hold, hold, hold.

[1058] Okay, holy shit.

[1059] I had a total hunch it was this.

[1060] It's Kmart brand.

[1061] Oh, yeah, I should have known that.

[1062] It's Stein Goya.

[1063] Is that the right word?

[1064] Stein Goya.

[1065] I guess it's a division or a like of Amar brand.

[1066] Whoa, Rob, that was weird.

[1067] What just happened.

[1068] Okay, so I was turned around, and Dax was looking at my tag, and Rob was talk, you said something.

[1069] And it...

[1070] I didn't hear because I didn't have headphones on it.

[1071] But so, exactly.

[1072] So I had headphones on it.

[1073] I thought Rob also came over to look because he was speaking right in my ear.

[1074] Yeah.

[1075] That was interesting.

[1076] ASMR.

[1077] Yeah.

[1078] So it's Callie's Bacheloretta's coming up.

[1079] And there is this idea of a group gift.

[1080] Mm -hmm.

[1081] Mm -hmm.

[1082] And what was suggested, I felt like, I just don't know.

[1083] if she's gonna love it.

[1084] And I think she's going to love this $600 present.

[1085] Uh -huh, sure.

[1086] And it's a good.

[1087] You know her well, and you guys have a similar aesthetic.

[1088] Listen, we're friends on Instagram, so I'm very aware of her home decor.

[1089] Oh, she's incredible.

[1090] It's top -notch.

[1091] Yeah.

[1092] Very top -notch.

[1093] The curation of the flowers, this, that.

[1094] So, yeah.

[1095] So I'm like, fuck, I don't.

[1096] I mean, look, what they suggested was great.

[1097] Like, it was beautiful and great.

[1098] and lovely, but I'm like, but it's a group gift, and I think she might wear that one day and not wear that again.

[1099] And I'd like to get her something I think she's definitely going to wear again, even though it's really, really, really expensive.

[1100] This is a group gift.

[1101] This is the opportunity to do it.

[1102] But hold on, the 600 is really, really expensive.

[1103] Not for a group gift.

[1104] I thought the 600 was the cheaper gift.

[1105] Yes, I did too.

[1106] Again, guys, you're going to go like, bullshit.

[1107] In my group, that's a...

[1108] Yes, that's right.

[1109] That's right.

[1110] But Kelly does well for herself, so she can go get herself something.

[1111] So that needs to be brought into the equation and you do quite well for yourself.

[1112] So all these things are relevant.

[1113] They're all relevant and I understand not everyone wants to put in $50 or $75 or whatever.

[1114] I get that.

[1115] So throw in $10.

[1116] So that's what I said.

[1117] But now you can't because we talked about it.

[1118] No, I said I tried this.

[1119] I already tried this.

[1120] So I sent the picture.

[1121] I said I think she really loved this.

[1122] I'll buy them and then everyone just pay what they would pay for the group gift.

[1123] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1124] I felt kind of weird saying that but also was like, fuck this, like exactly what you said.

[1125] Callie can buy, she can buy this on her own.

[1126] Yeah, yeah.

[1127] But it's also, they're too much for pajamas.

[1128] So she won't buy them on our own.

[1129] Right, right, right.

[1130] So this is why.

[1131] Perfect time for a gift.

[1132] Exactly.

[1133] Can I advise you?

[1134] Sure.

[1135] Do whatever group gift they suggest and then buy her those pajamas.

[1136] That's exactly what I did.

[1137] Great.

[1138] But you're in the position that I'm in regularly and then I think I get some criticism for it, which is like, it's a very tricky situation.

[1139] You don't want too much sway over your, group.

[1140] Of course.

[1141] Okay.

[1142] But then you're in another position which is just like I will say, hey, I'm going to Austin, which is I'm going to do.

[1143] Yeah.

[1144] If anyone wants to join, I'm happy to get some houses.

[1145] Yeah.

[1146] And that may come up for me three, four times a year where like I'm going to Austin.

[1147] I'm going to Miami.

[1148] I'm going to hear anyone who wants to join can.

[1149] But now, net total at the end of the year, people took three or their four vacations where I wanted to go.

[1150] It's tricky I get it The truth is I want her to have this nice thing And they want her to have a nice thing too Like it's not And so that's fine So I bought them And I will give them to her Separately Kelly are getting pajamas She doesn't listen to this show I know she doesn't follow me on Instagram She doesn't listen to show She made her position very clear Yeah But I think I'm working her back to Over here Slowly yeah I have dinner with her to make With this new friendship Hit her from the left I'll hit her from the right Okay.

[1151] But certainly she must have a friend that listens to this show.

[1152] But I guess that friend would be a real jerk if they try to spoil her pajamas.

[1153] So you're not worried?

[1154] I'm on text from getting her the pajamas.

[1155] Just to nip it in the bud.

[1156] Okay, great, great.

[1157] Yeah.

[1158] Oh, man, this is a...

[1159] What do they call these problems?

[1160] Stupid.

[1161] Stupid.

[1162] Unnecessary and dumb.

[1163] Private plane problems.

[1164] First world problem.

[1165] They are, yeah.

[1166] But I've been hearing a new one recently that I kind of like.

[1167] Champagne problems.

[1168] Champagne problems for sure.

[1169] Big time champagne problem.

[1170] We'll probably have champagne at the Bachelorette, so that's a ding, ding, day.

[1171] Yeah, CP.

[1172] Yeah, I'm excited to give her those.

[1173] They're silk.

[1174] They're green.

[1175] They're adorable.

[1176] These are the ones I've seen.

[1177] You were wearing them...

[1178] I had them in white.

[1179] Right, yeah, and you were wearing them in England a lot.

[1180] It was wearing them in England.

[1181] I wore them in Austin, speaking of Austin.

[1182] I love them.

[1183] How are they holding up?

[1184] Okay.

[1185] Great.

[1186] except they were washed in the laundry.

[1187] Oh, in the famous debacle.

[1188] That's right.

[1189] In Laundry Gate.

[1190] In Laundry Gate, 2021.

[1191] But it's fine because...

[1192] You like them tight.

[1193] You wanted them to be sexier anyways.

[1194] You wanted Lycra silk anyways.

[1195] Look, they're no longer pajamas, but they are a great cycling outfit.

[1196] Yeah, sure.

[1197] They've become workout pants.

[1198] No, what happened to them?

[1199] No, they actually kept in.

[1200] They're just not as soft as they were, which is a bummer.

[1201] Yeah.

[1202] It's going to be years before we get over Laundry Gate.

[1203] We'll be feeling the ripple effects for a long time.

[1204] We really will.

[1205] It'll just take lots of time.

[1206] This might even rear its head in some interesting romantic outcome.

[1207] Oh, I hope so.

[1208] Like you might have, you might end up being some kind of story where some romantic thing, then you hop in those things, and then that person concluded that you were wearing fake silk, which is like kind of a revelation to them.

[1209] and it may lead to either a proposal or a rejection.

[1210] Oh, fuck.

[1211] Well, I have a feeling where that's going to go.

[1212] But speaking of that, Rob, you're going to be mad.

[1213] You're going to be mad.

[1214] So, Monica's been naughty.

[1215] Some people have been going through the applications.

[1216] Oh, okay.

[1217] Before me. Oh, right.

[1218] Like, I haven't seen any.

[1219] They're going through them and they're going to narrow some down.

[1220] Yeah.

[1221] And two people were excited.

[1222] about a person and I said I want to know I want to know more but it's cheating to know more but then we cheated oh boy you already broke your own rules oh my gosh well we already have like a favorite well I don't want to like it's probably like bad to do that because you're not supposed to do that on The Bachelor like have talked before I mean I'm not going to talk before him but you're not supposed to do that it's against the rules but um we broke the rules a little bit oh great So I love that there's a frontrunner, though.

[1223] No, so, I mean, he might be the pajama guy.

[1224] Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.

[1225] I watched the pilot of Cadems and Ricky's new show.

[1226] How is it?

[1227] Oh, my God.

[1228] Is it great?

[1229] Ricky's so good.

[1230] He's so good.

[1231] I can't wait to watch it.

[1232] And I'm just so proud of him, and I'm so proud of Cadems for telling that story.

[1233] And it's also, you know, I think they're expressed goal with this.

[1234] It's called As We See It, and I believe it was an Israeli show prior to it being here.

[1235] on Amazon.

[1236] Yeah.

[1237] And again, if you don't know Jason K &M's, he created Friday Night Lights and Parenthood.

[1238] God, two of the best shows ever.

[1239] You just love them.

[1240] Yeah.

[1241] I also, I was noting that he did Friday Night Lights, which was first a book, then a movie.

[1242] Yeah.

[1243] And he wanted to make that a TV show.

[1244] And then Parenthood, again, was first a movie, and this was first an Israeli show.

[1245] So I thought that's a confident place to come from.

[1246] Like, I would get in my head about, like, oh, well, I didn't originate the idea.

[1247] I'm not going to get all.

[1248] all the credit for this.

[1249] That's true.

[1250] I probably would too.

[1251] Yeah, and he doesn't give a fuck.

[1252] And then he makes these amazing things out of, he's not hung up on that, which I kind of admire.

[1253] And then his thing is so specific.

[1254] Like if anyone says parenthood, I'm obviously not thinking about the movie.

[1255] Right, and it's just two completely different things.

[1256] And they're both fantastic things.

[1257] And he's happy to have been, you know.

[1258] Well, the movie is not as good as a show.

[1259] No, the movie's spectacular.

[1260] The movie's bad and the show's good.

[1261] No, no, no. The movie's one of the great movies.

[1262] Ron Howard, one of his very best movies.

[1263] Well, you aren't in the movie.

[1264] To my knowledge, I wasn't in the movie.

[1265] So it's not good.

[1266] Although, what's weird about the movie, okay, if I can just say that.

[1267] Have you seen the movie?

[1268] Yeah, I thought that could be the case.

[1269] Okay, thank you.

[1270] What's funny is in the movie I play basically one of the dads who's kind of a fuck -up.

[1271] That's how you start off in the show a little bit.

[1272] Yeah, but this guy's more of a fuck -up.

[1273] Yeah, he's like he's got a gambling problem.

[1274] He leaves his kid behind.

[1275] So I'm playing that role.

[1276] But really, in my heart, I'm playing Keanu Reeves.

[1277] Keanu Reeves in Parenthood is -Kahner -Reeves is in Parent -Hood?

[1278] Yes, phenomenally so.

[1279] I did my hair like his.

[1280] Do you remember?

[1281] I shaved my side and did a swoop.

[1282] That was the Keanu Reeves look from parenthood.

[1283] Wow.

[1284] Wait, I thought you had long hair in Parenthood.

[1285] I did, but do you remember last year to match Lincoln, I shaved the sides of my hair?

[1286] Yes.

[1287] And then some friend of mine, and I'm embarrassed, I can't remember, kind enough to do a side by side for me because I don't know anything about technology.

[1288] And then I posted it.

[1289] So that was him in parenthood.

[1290] I see.

[1291] Okay.

[1292] So in my mind that I was channeling the spirit of Keanu Reeves who wanted to be a drag strip racer.

[1293] Wow.

[1294] And does he, is he represented in the show?

[1295] No, no. Okay.

[1296] He's the boyfriend of one of the lead character's daughters.

[1297] Oh, okay.

[1298] Yeah, yeah.

[1299] Cool.

[1300] Yeah.

[1301] BTS behind the scenes.

[1302] Anyways, the whole point of me saying that about as we see it was what I love about it is you generally get this portrayal of folks on the spectrum that's either saccharine or basically by my estimation it's basically just like you should pity them which I fucking hate and this is like no we're every fucking thing we're mean we're funny we're inappropriate we're fun we're you know we are everything and so what occurred to me is that they do a great job in the show of putting Ricky in these situations it's in the trailer it's hysterical he's playing a game that clearly is very similar to spades oh and he wins the hand and he's playing with his father and two elderly folks women and the woman says good hand to rickie and he said i didn't play it very well you just played it very poorly i think maybe because you're old and his dad sorry sorry that's the asperger's and then he goes no no she dad she tanked that hand and then the old ladies are really kind of gracious about it and they're like what a pleasure it is to have your boy at these things right and the three of them share a laugh and what is very clear is that Ricky doesn't know what just happened yeah like that's a part that he can't really grasp and I thought wow if you're some point on the spectrum where you're immersed enough in normal society where you have a job yet you're missing these things to me I finally got it in this way which was like it must feel like you're moving to a foreign country every year in some versions of autism where you're watching people speak in a language that just completely confusing?

[1303] Yeah.

[1304] So in that way, like, he did exactly what I wanted, like, as we see.

[1305] It's like, oh, right.

[1306] You're going to very often see, like, some people share this weird thing, and they're all going to laugh all of a sudden.

[1307] And you're going to be left out of that.

[1308] Yeah.

[1309] Oh, man. Yeah.

[1310] But it's great.

[1311] He's so, I'm so proud of him.

[1312] Good.

[1313] I'm so fucking proud of him.

[1314] Yeah, he did a great, great job.

[1315] He's so talented.

[1316] Ricky Glassman, good job, buddy.

[1317] You're so talented, Ricky.

[1318] You know how I hate saying I'm proud of people?

[1319] Because it feels like there's a...

[1320] Condescending, even though I do not think that.

[1321] Yeah, you don't have that.

[1322] So I always say it to you, which is lovely.

[1323] I kind of have had it.

[1324] And I know a lot of people that have it.

[1325] Yeah.

[1326] I don't have that with Ricky.

[1327] Like, because I've been so engaged in his all ride.

[1328] Yeah, he's given me a very special spot in this life where he asks advice from me. And I think it's hard for him.

[1329] It's hard for me. And I relish it.

[1330] Yeah.

[1331] So when he does something, I am actually proud, like, yeah.

[1332] I feel involved in it.

[1333] A hundred percent.

[1334] You should.

[1335] It's lovely, lovely, lovely.

[1336] Oh, the whole thing made me think of one of the gals on the show who's on the spectrum and one of the lead characters.

[1337] She goes on a Bumble date.

[1338] Oh.

[1339] And I guess I'm as the viewer quite nervous the whole time, as is the older brother and the other people and she's not supposed to be on Bumble because your mind goes to, oh, no, I hope someone doesn't take advantage of her.

[1340] Sure.

[1341] You know, not the case at all.

[1342] He shows up and he's so good looking and nice.

[1343] And then it's just too much for him as it would be, you know.

[1344] It's just the reality of, you know, yeah.

[1345] You know, but it is, again, I just did the self -pity thing of like, oh, it's too much.

[1346] Sometimes it's just too much for people and that sucks for them.

[1347] And it's like sometimes people who are not on the spectrum are too much for other people not on the spectrum.

[1348] So it's just...

[1349] But, you know, that's, but again, that's why I love Ketams is like he's not taking this bullshit lifetime movie approach no shade on lifetime they do great content but that scene would have normally like her own older brother who's kind of her guardian at this point because the parents are dead his girlfriend is really upset he won't introduce them he's like look there can't be in us if i bring her into the situation because she'll get your number and she'll text you 45 times a day and she'll do so it doesn't ignore the reality of the whole thing which i appreciate Do you think it's offensive or true to say that everyone's on the spectrum?

[1350] Do you think maybe people who are on the spectrum might be like, no, you're not?

[1351] Yes, I agree.

[1352] That to me is like everyone's on the dyslexia spectrum or everyone's on the addiction spectrum.

[1353] It's like, mm, addiction's a pathology, you know, and some things are, for me, at least the ones I'll say.

[1354] So you'll hear people say that all the time.

[1355] I'm like, oh, I'm a little dyslexic when I blank, blank, blank.

[1356] It doesn't offend me at all, but also you're not a little dyslexic.

[1357] Right.

[1358] Yeah, I get that.

[1359] So we talk about age.

[1360] He's 35, and it was a little dicey at first because he was almost younger than me. Oh, we don't like that.

[1361] We don't like that.

[1362] He was 35, and then it reminded me to say, I'll be 35 this year.

[1363] So I put in, like, an email or whatever to get my ex -froes.

[1364] Oh, wonderful.

[1365] Yes.

[1366] And you're allowing us to pay for it?

[1367] No. Why not?

[1368] No, I'd rather not.

[1369] Oh, okay, okay.

[1370] I just want to be like Netflix.

[1371] I know, I understand.

[1372] I want to have a good policy.

[1373] And fuck it, Rob, if you want to freeze some sperm, you let me know, brother.

[1374] Thanks.

[1375] Yeah.

[1376] Because you do it, they urge you to freeze it when you get a vasectomy.

[1377] Oh.

[1378] I didn't do that.

[1379] I wanted to make it a, no. My good friend just had his, like, botched.

[1380] His vasectomy?

[1381] Get a vasectomy, and then they got infected.

[1382] Ooh.

[1383] And he had, like, swollen testicles for three months.

[1384] I would love that.

[1385] It was like he felt like if someone was clenching them, he said.

[1386] Wow.

[1387] Well, I wouldn't like that.

[1388] But if my testicles got, like, 2x size for three months, I think I would enjoy that visually.

[1389] Yeah, pain with the visuals.

[1390] Hmm.

[1391] I can handle the pain, I think.

[1392] I would be willing to have the visual.

[1393] Yeah, if you just have, like, it looks like you have a hot dog sticking out of a top of a pumpkin.

[1394] That's cool.

[1395] That's a cool look, isn't it?

[1396] Very.

[1397] Very novel.

[1398] Very, very.

[1399] Let's add that to the application.

[1400] Yes, pumpkin balls.

[1401] Check yes or no. Diameter of your balls.

[1402] Okay, the most impacted major in Russia, you said, was government operations.

[1403] The most common college major in Russia is pedagogical faculties.

[1404] Pedagogical faculties.

[1405] I don't know if I'm saying that.

[1406] Pedagogy, yeah.

[1407] Yeah, I think that's thinking.

[1408] So what does that mean philosophy?

[1409] Yeah, probably.

[1410] Let's see.

[1411] The method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept.

[1412] Okay, teaching.

[1413] Frontline disagrees, but that's fine.

[1414] Okay.

[1415] Also, there's another article, what are the most popular college majors in the world?

[1416] Oh.

[1417] Which is...

[1418] Economics.

[1419] Well, what do you think U .S. is?

[1420] I think the most popular is probably...

[1421] Oh, it's always impacted when I was in school.

[1422] Like everyone was trying to be a thing they go like what's your major and they literally everyone's like fingers crossed God what was it It was like marketing or something Business and management Okay okay okay Are the most popular subjects in the US Health related programs such as nursing are next in line Psychology and biological and biomedical sciences went almost neck and neck Fifth place belongs to engineering Oh that's reassuring We need lots of engineering.

[1423] That is reassuring.

[1424] I'm surprised by that, actually.

[1425] A little bit surprisingly, anthropology and sociology beat computer science and have moved into the top ten.

[1426] Anthropology has.

[1427] Do you think that's because of you?

[1428] Might be.

[1429] I hope so.

[1430] You never know.

[1431] I wonder if there's been an uptick in dudes that study.

[1432] You know, when I did that commencement speech for the anthropology department, I was looking out and I realized there was virtually no male students graduating.

[1433] And I mentioned that to one of the professors, and they're like, yeah.

[1434] And there's like the heaviest female.

[1435] Then I then like snapshoted in my mind.

[1436] I was like, oh, right.

[1437] My classes were nearly all young females.

[1438] Oh my God, did I, let me just tell you how proud I felt.

[1439] Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding pride.

[1440] Ding, ding, ding, ding.

[1441] Pink, ding, ding, power.

[1442] Lincoln's studying the Chumash Native Americans.

[1443] They were native to California.

[1444] Uh -huh.

[1445] That's what we had here in coastal California, the Chumash.

[1446] And I guess she's been spending six weeks on it.

[1447] You know what I got to say to her?

[1448] You know, Lincoln, I've been on an archaeological dig where I found Chumash Arrowheads.

[1449] You've been waiting eight years for that.

[1450] Oh, I didn't even, that wasn't one I ever thought I'd even be able to say.

[1451] Like, that's never, that's not going to come up.

[1452] And then also I got to tell her something they're not learning in that third grade elementary school that the Chumash had their own, as all people have had, historically, their drug was man root.

[1453] There's a native root here in California, and when you pull it up, it kind of looks like a man, and it's white.

[1454] Right.

[1455] And they would shave it and grind it all.

[1456] up and then they would toss it in these tiny little ponds and stupefy the fish.

[1457] The fish would get high and just come to the surface and they would grab them.

[1458] Yeah, didn't you say you guys like spent the whole time looking for it?

[1459] Yeah, that's all we dug for it.

[1460] But we accidentally found an arrowhead, I think, while we were searching for Manroot.

[1461] You accidentally do what you were supposed to do.

[1462] Okay, this is fun.

[1463] I wonder if we've done this already on here.

[1464] I don't know.

[1465] So we talk a lot about psychopathy on here.

[1466] And there's a riddle.

[1467] Oh, I remember.

[1468] Remember this.

[1469] Did we've done it already, right?

[1470] Well, just...

[1471] Oh, go ahead.

[1472] Okay, I was just going to read it because it's...

[1473] It's fun.

[1474] It's technically a psychopath test.

[1475] But it's an internet psychopath.

[1476] Yeah.

[1477] Okay, this is a riddle.

[1478] If you know the answer, you're a psychopath.

[1479] Okay.

[1480] A woman is at her mother's funeral.

[1481] When suddenly she sees a man so handsome, she instantly falls in love with him.

[1482] Unfortunately, she never got a chance to talk to the man. The next day, the woman kills her sister.

[1483] What was the motive?

[1484] Well, she obviously got rid of her sister To get her brother -in -law Rob I wasn't really following Sure, hit him again Okay, I'll read you one more time A woman is at her mom's funeral And she sees a man who she falls in love with She fell in love with him She didn't talk to him Love at first sight, Rob That's right The next day the woman kills her sister Why?

[1485] By the way, this test Is horse pocky because that would suggest all homicide detectives are psychomass.

[1486] I feel like it's a brother -in -law thing or uncle or...

[1487] No. Wait, so her sister was married to her uncle?

[1488] The whole family is fucked up.

[1489] No, the woman wanted to see the man again.

[1490] So if he was at the mom's funeral, he would be at the sister's funeral.

[1491] That's a great idea.

[1492] Yeah, see, yeah.

[1493] Shit, I thought I was a psychopath.

[1494] Turns out you're not.

[1495] Oh, just to get him back into that.

[1496] just to get back in that scenario so she could see him again.

[1497] Okay, I found another one.

[1498] Are you a serial killer riddle?

[1499] Okay.

[1500] I hope I get this one right.

[1501] Let's see, let's just try it.

[1502] Here is a serial killer who kidnaps people and asks them to take one of two pills.

[1503] One pill is harmless and the other one is poisonous.

[1504] The mystery is, whichever pill a victim takes, the serial killer takes the other one.

[1505] But every time the killer survives and the victim is dead, how is this possible?

[1506] Well, because the victim would rather die the painless death of the pill That's assured than get killed by the serial killer So that's going to leave the safe pill Everyone would self cyanide if they knew they were about to get brutally hammered to death Instead of you follow that There's two pills one's poisonous one's not You present it to the person you're about to kill They'll definitely take the poison No, no, no, they don't know what it is He asked him to take one or two pills One pill is harmless the other one is poisonous They don't know Oh.

[1507] Which one is which?

[1508] The mystery is, even though they don't know, they always die.

[1509] Whichever pill a victim takes a serial killer takes the other one.

[1510] But every time the killer survives and the victim is dead, how is this possible?

[1511] Okay, then he's built up an immunity to the poison and then he kills them anyways.

[1512] He's a serial killer.

[1513] So anyone he meets comes in contact with is going down.

[1514] That's inevitable.

[1515] I think I've heard a similar one about like an ice cube thing where the ice cube melts and that's where the poison is.

[1516] Oh.

[1517] Wow, he's introducing a whole new store.

[1518] I don't know.

[1519] That is, okay, that's kind of right, but not, not, it's not.

[1520] One pill's in the other pill?

[1521] No, I'm confused by the answer.

[1522] The poison was in the glass of water.

[1523] Oh, okay, this is dumb because they didn't write it out well.

[1524] No, he said pills, not glass of water.

[1525] Yeah, it says the poison was in the glass of water the victim drank, therefore every time he would survive.

[1526] But they needed to say, he's a serial killer who kidnaps people and ask him to take one and two.

[1527] pills with a glass of water.

[1528] And then wash it down with a glass of water.

[1529] Damn it.

[1530] Yeah.

[1531] That's ridiculous.

[1532] Because then you could just say the answer was.

[1533] It was upsetting.

[1534] Because I could say glass of water and says, nope, says here, because the poison was in the bottle of beer, he offered him.

[1535] Yeah.

[1536] Also, if they're like me, I just swallow pills.

[1537] I don't need no water.

[1538] I'm 0 for two.

[1539] This, okay.

[1540] This comes from an official questionnaire used in several studies involves a battle between individual rescue and the greater good, an assessment of utilitarianism.

[1541] as follows.

[1542] Oh, God, it's the trolley.

[1543] Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not even a riddle.

[1544] Okay.

[1545] All right, well.

[1546] I have to send you something right now that is going to, for me personally, this might be the biggest fucking sim moment I've ever had.

[1547] Okay, I'm sitting on the couch in the morning yesterday with Linking.

[1548] By God, a fucking murder of crows was out the window.

[1549] No way.

[1550] Yeah, and we were watching them playing the trees, and I was getting like, just so excited.

[1551] And then I said, I wonder can you become friends with them?

[1552] And I literally Google, can you become friends with the crow?

[1553] Do you know they're the only bird you can become friends with?

[1554] No. Yes.

[1555] They're not just the smartest bird.

[1556] They're among the smartest animals.

[1557] Period.

[1558] I'm planning.

[1559] They're the only other animal that uses tools to get things.

[1560] Yeah, that's crazy.

[1561] So we find this really cool BBC documentary, and it shows this little girl up in Seattle who has been feeding these crows, and then they start bringing you gifts.

[1562] So she has this amazing collection of all these gifts that the crows give.

[1563] And there is a fucking point where we're watching this little five -minute clip of the documentary and check your phone.

[1564] Wow.

[1565] Dax's tattoo.

[1566] I mean...

[1567] To a T. You got to take a picture of that, Rob.

[1568] And it happened fast.

[1569] It was a video, so I had to like freeze frame and go back and get the perfect.

[1570] And thank God, because it was a really quick, That little sucker turned his head quickly.

[1571] And, but there was one sharp image of it.

[1572] That's so cool.

[1573] So this is a late resolution for 2022.

[1574] Okay.

[1575] I'm fucking serious about it too.

[1576] I'm going to become friends with crows.

[1577] I like that.

[1578] Yeah, I'm going to do the whole thing to invite them to the house.

[1579] And I want to develop a relationship with a crow, like where we hang, like where it's on my shoulder and stuff.

[1580] That's cool.

[1581] Oh, my God.

[1582] I think you should.

[1583] I can't wait.

[1584] Should we do another riddle?

[1585] or no?

[1586] I think timing -wise we're getting slim on time.

[1587] Yeah, we've got 10 minutes.

[1588] Oh, okay.

[1589] So no more riddles.

[1590] Oh, yeah, hit us, hit us.

[1591] Well, how long's a riddle take?

[1592] Okay, we'll do one more real quick.

[1593] Okay, I haven't read this, so let's hope it's good.

[1594] A man's body is found at the footpath near a four -storied building.

[1595] Looking at the body, it is clear that he jumped from one of the floors.

[1596] Detective Watson arrives to take a look and questions the staff who tell him they haven't touched, visited any of the rooms facing the footpath since morning.

[1597] Watson goes to the first floor.

[1598] You can't.

[1599] It's too long.

[1600] Okay.

[1601] It's like a whole short story about.

[1602] Yeah, it's long.

[1603] I'll do a shorter one.

[1604] Okay.

[1605] A woman invited her friend to her house.

[1606] She made a dinner and mashed potatoes and chicken nuggets.

[1607] For dessert, she cut an apple into two and offered the friend one half, along with whipped cream.

[1608] She then proceeded to eat her piece of the same.

[1609] Just wait too many fucking items in this story.

[1610] With the same bowl of whipped cream, the friend died of poisoning, but the host survived despite eating from the same apple.

[1611] How did it happen?

[1612] Actually, you should get this one because it's similar to the serial killer one from earlier with the water.

[1613] But they're not mentioning the water.

[1614] But it's not water, but...

[1615] Champagne.

[1616] Mimosa.

[1617] No. It's orange juice.

[1618] No. I'm married it again.

[1619] A woman invited her friend to her house.

[1620] She made a dinner of mashed potatoes and chicken nuggets.

[1621] For dessert.

[1622] I mean, what?

[1623] For dessert.

[1624] She cut an apple.

[1625] Okay, it was in the mashed potatoes or the chicken nuggets.

[1626] And she skipped one of those two items.

[1627] That's a great guess.

[1628] For a dessert, she got an apple into two and offer the friend one half, along with whipped cream.

[1629] She then proceeded to eat her piece of the same apple with the same bowl of whipped cream to friend died of poisoning, but the host survived.

[1630] Okay.

[1631] These are like my lion riddle a little bit.

[1632] We're just like I decided the proper way to be in a cage with a lion, yeah.

[1633] You just made it up.

[1634] Okay, she had poisoned one edge of the knife with which she cut the apple.

[1635] I thought maybe you guys would get it because it's similar to the water.

[1636] But no. One edge of the knife.

[1637] I don't understand how you could do that and not get on the other side of the apple.

[1638] And then like right before you're about to cut, you're like, fuck, is driver's side or passenger side I put that poison on?

[1639] Like you would get, this is insane.

[1640] If you're a fucking serial killer, how about this?

[1641] Ether across the nose.

[1642] Get them out.

[1643] Now have some fun.

[1644] Roll play.

[1645] But they like to have like tricks and riddles.

[1646] Apparently these people are like more concerned about being clever.

[1647] Yeah.

[1648] Well, all right, that's a great way to point that out.

[1649] You're right.

[1650] They are artists.

[1651] They're not trying to just kill to kill.

[1652] They want it to be like.

[1653] Novel proprietary and unique.

[1654] That's right.

[1655] Okay.

[1656] That makes more sense.

[1657] We're out of time.

[1658] Toddlers do kill adults two to three times a week.

[1659] That's a sad but true story.

[1660] Two to three times a week.

[1661] That's it.

[1662] And I was going to end on a clip of Obama.

[1663] I still will.

[1664] Yeah.

[1665] Obama talking about aging.

[1666] Okay.

[1667] And it is no wonder that people keep pointing out how the presidency has aged me. I look so old.

[1668] John Boehner's already invited Netanyahu to speak at my funeral.

[1669] And that's all.

[1670] All right.

[1671] So I love everyone and love you.

[1672] Follow armchair expert on the Wondry app, Amazon music, or wherever you get your podcast.

[1673] You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[1674] Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry .com slash survey.