YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Klaas

lines on the record: 40
first: 2021-11-09
most recent: 2021-11-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think it is a seriously winning message, especially coming out of the pandemic, right? Where you sort of think that there's a two tiered system where nurses are struggling to get a pay rise after enduring some awful work and doing some really important things. And then they can't afford to live near their hospital because the property prices are all over a million pounds. So I think it's basically partly self-interest and partly just stupidity that nobody has picked up on this and realized it's a seriously smart political message.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that the politicians haven't figured out it's a winning message. And I think there are political movements that happen in waves like populism happened in a wave where politicians figured out this actually moved voters. I think there needs to be one high-profile Western politician who makes a lot of traction on this front and it will spread. And I think it's such an ingenious political argument because the argument in the U.S., for example, right now about raising taxes to pay for Biden's agenda, you don't necessarily need to just raise taxes. You need to close loopholes and you need to tackle tax fraud. Now, that's a winning message on two fronts. It's sticking it to people who are extremely rich at a time when a lot of people are struggling, but it's doing it in a way that isn't punitive. It's just saying you have to follow the same rules as the rest of us. And I think that, combined with what you talk about in London, where property prices are just prohibitive for most working class people.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, my take on this, and I think your work on this is super important because you're drawing attention to something that does cut across international boundaries and could actually unify, this could be the new ideology of Western politics, right? The anti-corruption agenda, I think, could be a really important unifying agenda for liberals in the sense of people who believe in democracy, freedom, and transparency and so on. I think the two reasons it hasn't happened, one is that a lot of politicians are in a situation where they're worried about the boomerang effect, which is to say, you know, when things like the Panama Papers come out, people who are embedded in these systems end up getting embarrassed. And so there's a fair number of people who are worried that the more that people dig, the more that they're going to see a donor base or their own tax haven involvement or their own sort of shady practices come to light, which probably stops some of it. And the second reason I think is more banalic.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're on their side. And I think this is also something that speaks to the onus being put on individuals. I mean, this is a much bigger question that I don't have a good answer to, unfortunately, of how do we get people to care?”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is why one of the things I have these 10 lessons in the book that are ideas for how we can sort of make the systems better and people behave better in power. And one of the things I say I think reasonably clearly in this section is that they all sort of have to work together because none of them are silver bullet, right? And you're completely right about this. We have lots of watchdogs in the US and a certain segment of the population just completely ignores them or actually views the watchdog as the problem and says we should purge the watchdogs. So I think it's different solutions for different situations. In some places where there's lots of corruption, it's just not public knowledge. And in those places, the watchdogs are going to play a bigger role. In the places where we have the watchdogs and they're being discounted, it builds on that other point I just made about things like gerrymandering and polarization. Because if you can systematically discount a significant chunk of your voter base or your citizenry, then you don't have to care if they think you're corrupt as long as your people, your supporters,”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scale anywhere in the world. And so I think we need to sort of take a step back and think this is a serious problem that's inherent to power. Now, what do we do to fix it? And the same is true for pretty much every system, right? So I say in the book that we should take as granted that bad people will disproportionately be drawn to seek power, be disproportionately good at getting power, and be disproportionately good at staying in power. Let's take that as granted, and now let's redesign the systems, assuming that that's the case. And I don't think that's happened right now.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happening much more now, right? You have politicians fly home for a rally, or they have a town hall where they screen people, and they're never exposed to alternative points of view, or they discount them. And it's also important to have systems where the views of people unlike you actually matter. So in the U.S. context, one of the things that I've talked about in other forms of my work is how we have created not just polarization, but also things like gerrymandering, where the only way to get elected is to make sure that people exactly like you vote for you, because there's nobody who's going to, there's not enough people from the other side. So you just systematically discount them. You don't care about them at all. And I think that the point I'm making in the book isn't that there's an easy fix for all these things. It's that we haven't tried to fix any of these things. We haven't even acknowledged that there are serious problems. There are a lot of creative ways that we could create more psychological distance for people in power. To my knowledge, none have been seriously tried at a national level.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to get to know every employee in this massive company. It's impossible. And then there's also this aspect that some level in some professions of not necessarily dehumanization, but psychological distance is helpful. I mean, imagine if a surgeon couldn't operate on an individual because they viewed them as completely human and they were thinking about them as somebody's grandma as they had to carve them open. So there are coping mechanisms in some positions of power that actually use this mild form of dehumanization as a benefit to save the person's life or to help them. So I think it's a classic, the social science way of phrasing this is it's a Goldilocks problem. It's basically we need some but not too much. We need a little bit not too much. So you need to make sure that CEOs have to interact with frontline workers. They don't have to know everybody, but they need to understand what's happening with their employees. Politicians need to be on front lines. They can't just be in a Westminster or a Washington bubble. And they can't just be with people who agree with them, which is what's”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a great question. It's one I grappled with when I started reading this research because when you read this research that shows this psychological effect in addition to sort of dehumanization that you've talked about in your work, your immediate impulse is, well, we just need to make sure that everybody is really close to the people who are being affected by their decisions and that the person isn't an abstraction because it's harder to dehumanize or to abuse someone who has this rich person in front of you. The way I put in the book is going after migrants is much easier for people when they don't have an individual who's part of that community. So if you have somebody named Jose on your company softball team who's a first generation migrant, you might actually moderate your views towards migrants, the group if you have an individual who you know and like. But the problem is that you can't actually do that practically, right? So this is where I sort of the pendulum swung back in my thinking where I was like, how would this actually work as a CEO?”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recently is how the potential for this to exist on Zoom, right? I mean, it's something where businesses, for example, are now like Uber, for example, fired, employees over a Zoom call basically early in the pandemic or over a phone call early in the pandemic. And we also have corporate downsizing consultants who basically exist to avoid the emotional strain being put on someone in power when they have to give somebody the axe and the pink slip. And so I think we have to think about how our society has functioned in a way and transformed in a way that makes it so much easier to view people as disposable. And I think that's going to have consequences for those in power in ways that might not even be conscious, but will end up leading to more abuses of authority.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Letters would ever be opened, and that his instructions would never matter. But I think that the underlying point here, which is where psychology comes in, is that the weight of responsibility actually does cause people to behave differently towards those affected by their decisions. And the more that people become”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Robin Butler, as the private secretary to the prime minister, would hand them these four letters basically and say, here's what you have to do. And before the modern era, we didn't know about this, right? This was a secret. So the prime minister has just finished their election campaign. They have no knowledge of this system, potentially. And then Robin Butler sort of wipes the smile off their face and says, here's the first thing you have to do. You have to think about if you've been a literal, if not just your government has been eliminated, but like basically all of London, what are you going to do in that situation? And it impresses upon the Prime Minister the sort of importance of their role, the weight of responsibility is the way that I put it. So I called up Tony Blair on Zoom and asked him about this. And it was interesting because he's sort of the exception that proves the rule in a way. He said he actually wasn't that affected by this because he took power in a time where the risk of nuclear war was so minuscule that he didn't think that the”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. Sorry, I should have said that. Yeah, yeah. London has been attacked by a nuclear weapon. The British government has ceased to exist, and the British Prime Minister from Beyond the Grave is providing these instructions to the submarine captain for what to do. Not knowing who's attacked, not knowing how the attack happened, et cetera. Just here's the general instructions of what to do. And on those instructions, you know, if they say retaliate, the captain is supposed to basically launch the nuclear weapon, which could lead to World War III or the annihilation of our species”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's related to this quirk of British politics called the Letters of Last Resort, which many people aren't aware of. But when the Prime Minister takes office, one of the first things they have to do is fill out these four handwritten letters with no real rules attached to them that provide instructions to each of the captains of the nuclear submarines, the Trident Deterrent System that the UK uses to sort of deter nuclear attacks on Britain. As I say, there's not really any rules. They can say they should retaliate. They can say that they should just do nothing. They can write whatever they want to.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pick the winner. And so that sort of raises this question of like, are campaigns really just this massive multi-billion dollar thing where people just decide based on face? I mean, that's a possible explanation. And so we have lots of cognitive biases when it comes to leadership, and these, of course, spill over into boardrooms, into managers and mid-level companies and so on. And we don't even think about it. And so my point is not to say that this is definitive proof that everything's broken. It's just to say we need to reflect a lot more on how we choose leaders and why people are more or less appealing to us. And it's not always based on policy or competence.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also providing the solution to it in a way that jives very, very well with these Stone Age biases in our minds. And I think acknowledging that, based on the science and the data, is the first step to fixing it. But I sort of also wanted to go further than that because there's something deeply wrong with the way that we evaluate leaders to begin with, even outside of strong men and these sort of crisis moments, which is one of the things that I opened the book with is this study that was published in a top scientific journal. It's been vetted. It's very robust, where they show children the faces of two different individuals, and they say, who do you want to be in charge of your ship? It's an imaginary boat that they're supposed to have picking the captain of. And they pick. And the children with astonishing accuracy.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that means that there's a template, a series of templates in our brains for what power is and what leaders look like that has serious biases. And one of the most important findings, I think, is that when you give people an option of picking some sort of individual, and they do this with computer simulations, right? So they sort of, there's no other information given. They say, who do you want to pick as your leader? And then they give you a prompt in the second scenario where it talks about some sort of crisis, right? There's an impending war or a famine or something like that. In those scenarios, people are much more drawn to big strong men. I don't know why. It's a very depressing finding, but it's just every time they run this study, the same thing happens, which is why that term strongman, I think, is not a misnomer. I think it's actually exactly what it's supposed to be, is that they're trying to present themselves as this person who is simultaneously manufacturing a crisis.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I found this question deeply immersive while I was researching it because there's so many different threads that try to explain why we are drawn to the wrong leaders. So the first thing to say”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To death threats and violence and harassment and so on. So it's just compounding an already difficult problem. And I think that's where Sartition can come in to sort of balance it out without radically replacing the idea that politicians should not exist anymore in the way that we consider them.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as you married to a well-known politician, this is something where it's unsustainable. It's also bled into other aspects of power in our societies, not just politicians, etc., also journalists. I mean, I haven't talked to you about this before, but I imagine that you get death threats. I mean, I've gotten death threats. It's something that has become a normal part of being involved in public discourse in so many countries around the world. And that is so toxic to finding and getting the best people in charge because most people who don't desire power, if you desire power, it's enough to offset it, right? So if you want power, you say, well, I'll deal with the death threats because I'll be powerful, at least I'll get the fame, the glory, the money. If you don't want power, you just want to make a difference. That's not as big of a desire or a demand on your sort of psychology as I don't want my children to be exposed.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could have this anywhere in Europe or anywhere that's a reasonably functional democracy, you have a sort of citizen assembly that is, say, 500, 1,000 randomly selected people, sort of like for jury duty, and they're paid for a year. And let's say we ask them 10 questions. We sort of decide on the 10 big issues confronting the country this year, what should we do? So should we mandate masks in a pandemic, right? How should we deal with climate change? Should we approach net zero? They would have a non-binding reports that they would basically produce. And they would say, here's what we think, you know, ordinary people who have been given access to all the science, all the experts, et cetera. Here's what we think you should do. Again, the politicians wouldn't be bound to follow this, but they would at least have to explain when they did diverge, and it would provide some level of accountability. And I think that is an important step is that we do have to recognize the self-selection problem is corrosive to our policy.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of people from the company who anytime there's a major decision that's being made has to produce its own report of what they think they would do. I think those people who are divorced from the sort of quarterly profit rat race might actually have some insights that are different from the board itself. And even if the board doesn't follow the advice of the shadow board in this context, they would still have to sort of explain why they didn't. And you could adopt this for politics too, right? So I think in the United States, for example,”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've heard that podcast, and I think it's a really interesting proposal, but in one part of the book, so the political sciencey term for this is sortition. And it's got roots back in ancient Greece where they did this for sort of public service, and they had this machine that selected people called the Claritarion. And one of the things that I say is I don't think that's actually the solution in terms of putting the actual people in charge. And the reason for that is because there is specialist knowledge associated with being a politician that I think is important. I think that politicians can become particularly effective over the span of their careers in ways that ordinary people who have a 12-month stint in power may not. But I do think that certition is crucial and should be rapidly and dramatically expanded as a form of oversight. So one of the things that I think should happen, for example, in business is I think that boards should have shadow boards, which is basically a randomly selected pool of”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can see the tip of the iceberg. That's all the people in power. But our real problem is actually below the surface, just the same way that icebergs often cause damage below the surface. Because our real problem is that good people are disproportionately unlikely to seek power in the first place. And I've written about this more recently. I've got a piece coming out in the LA Times this week, which basically makes the point in the US context, for example, that all these viral videos we see of school board members and local officials being screamed at by, frankly, unhinged zealots who are giving them death threats based on following public health guidance is really going to compound”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Power and some people to run away from it. But what I do think is that it makes intuitive sense that this is not a random distribution of people, right? Like when we look at a basketball team in high school, we don't expect those people to all be similar heights and we don't expect them to be broadly representative of the population. We also don't expect there to be a lot of short people on the basketball team. There is a self-selection process into that just as there is a self-selection process into power. Certain people desire power for very different reasons. They might want it for the glory. They might want it for the money. They might want it because they're abusive. And so there's lots of different strands that cause this self-selection. But I do think that this story is underrepresented in our discussion of people in power. I think that we are always fixated on the individuals who are there and not the individuals who never really threw their hat in the ring. To use a different analogy, what I always say is, you know, sort of like the tip of the iceberg.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I tried to tackle this question a few ways. I mean, one of them was I looked into research and I interviewed people who look at genetic explanations for that, right? It's a theme that often makes people uncomfortable, but there have been studies that look at, is there a power-seeking gene, right? And what they found was they found something that they called a leadership gene, which if you sort of look at people, sequence their genomes, and see who ends up in leadership positions, the gene that they identified actually accounted for about 30% of the variance, which is to say it actually explained quite a lot in a study of genetic outcomes, that's a very high number. The problem was, you know, there's a lot of reasons why that might be the case. It might not be because they thirsted for power. It might be they're just really affable people who are charismatic and good in job interviews and good at getting power and so on. So we're sort of back to square one, and I don't think we can draw any firm conclusions about whether there's a gene, so to speak, that causes some people to want.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Iraq, and also this signed photo of him with President Bush saying, you know, great job. Right next to a hat that says best rookie for the first year ski instructor on the brim. And it's this strange juxtaposition of this person who I only really knew from his press conferences and the disastrous unfolding of the situation in Iraq in 2003 and beyond. And I think that's an important message about power, that these are people, right? And they have good and bad, and they also are making decisions, not always because they're villains, but sometimes because they think it's the least bad option. We should still criticize them when they make those decisions, but we also have to recognize that sometimes people are trying their best, even if they look awful on paper.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shows that juxtaposition between our moral compass and the sort of impossible decisions that you're forced to make on a routine basis when you're inheriting these awful systems. Now, I liked going out to have a ski lesson with him because it shows the complexity of the individual. One of the things that I also try to convey in the book, and this has been something I've been grappling with for the last 10 years, is I've met a lot of awful people who have done some really horrible things. I mean, war criminals, people who have authorized torture, all sorts of things. And when I meet those people, there's a complexity to them that isn't as straightforward as you might expect. It's not to absolve them, right? It's just to say there's a human being here. And I think what was interesting with Paul Bremer is you know, he's cracking jokes about how he instructs children in ski lessons. And he's got on his, you know, in his house, he has this flag that's about his time.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How should we think about them for people in power who are making awful decisions? And I think the point that he was making was everything came back to order at the beginning of his time, right? If you didn't have order and if the system devolved into civil war, sectarian war, then all of the ambitions about democracy and freedom and freedom of the press and newspapers being able to print were pointless because none of them would be protected in that system. So early on he made this calculation that I think is morally abhorrent to even talk about, which is shooting looters. But from his point of view was the only way to sort of send a message that the US military will not tolerate unrest in Iraq. And I think it gets right to the core of the complexity, right? Because there are plenty of Iraqis who were on the record speaking to journalists saying basically they think that he was right. And a lot of the Americans were saying this is terrible. And I think it's”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I went out to sort of scratch under the surface a little bit more, but also because I thought he was an interesting case study where he's a pure example in a way of a person operating in two different systems and behaving in wildly different ways, right? So he's ambassador to Norway. He's ambassador to Malawi. He deals with counterterrorism before 9-11. In all of those, he did exemplary work by basically everybody's accounting, right? He was a good ambassador. He warned basically about 9-11 before it happened when he was working on counterterrorism. And then he went off to Iraq, and he didn't just inherit a bad system. He also inherited some bad decisions that had been made before his time there, which he's often blamed for, disbanding the Iraqi army and purging the Bath Party, which he told me was something that he actually pushed back against, but he had to be the figurehead for those policies. So what I wanted to understand was how does he end up making these calculations?”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I found him to be a deeply fascinating character, and he's one of these guys where a lot of Americans sort of have this very, very two-dimensional view of him as this cookie cutter villain from the time that the US invaded Iraq. And they basically know one thing about it.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once where that sort of saying that power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely, which people often trot out in normal conversation is actually far more complicated and interesting than it is at first glance. It's true, right? So the psychological data shows that it actually is true and it is corrupting and changing people's psychology. But there's a much more complex story happening under the surface.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People or being abusive, they're more likely to behave that way. So it looks like power has corrupted them, and perhaps it has, but it's for different reasons than just the straight-up psychological metric. And then the final thing is I have a chapter that says why it appears that power corrupts. And I've got a couple different aspects of that. But one of them that I wanted to talk about is just this idea that you could have someone who is corrupt to the core, who doesn't have any power to begin with, so they don't appear to be awful because they're not actually doing anything consequential. They get into power, they're awful to begin with. But as they're going through their time in office or their time and authority, they just get much better at being bad, right? They're just better at getting away with it. They're better at manipulating people. They're figuring out the sort of tricks of the trade. And so on paper, they look worse. When in fact, what's happened is their impulses have just become more effective. And so I think there's a whole bunch of things that are happening all at once.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's not just sort of a folktale, right? There's actually something happening to these people on a biological level. And the experts I interviewed who look at baboons find biological markers of the alpha male aging at a much more rapid rate, which interestingly leads to the conclusion actually that beta males in that hierarchy are often best off because they get the access to the resources and the spoils, but they don't have the biological stress that ends up killing them faster, which has some potentially interesting implications for human society. But I also think there's other things that are happening that make power appear to corrupt people. So one of those is how systems operate, right? I make the point in the book that if you're thrust into an awful system, you might end up more likely to make awful choices. And so people who are unfortunate enough to be born into a system where the only path to being dominant in the hierarchy or being close to political power is by torture.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think there's a couple things that manifest as us saying power corrupts and it actually being true. One of them is that power does increase risk taking, it increases selfish behavior, there's all sorts of psychological studies that I go through in the book that show how powerful people behave differently than less powerful people. So there is something that actually changes in your brain chemistry. It also causes you to age faster if you're in a position of power that's much more stressful than other positions in the hierarchy. We have lots of evidence both from CEOs and from primates that it's highly stressful positions of power cause more rapid biological aging. And there's some really clever techniques where they can actually show it beyond just sort of the gray hairs and things like that.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good for his yoga. Is that while that's true and that dynamic probably is an explanation for Ravalo Manana himself, there's a lot of other different things that are happening with power and the self-selection of people, rotten people into power is one of the more prominent, I think, conclusions that I draw in the rest of the research.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So President Ravalo Manano was one of these guys who, as you mentioned, he grew up really poor. He was selling yogurt off the back of his bicycle, and he built that into a dairy empire for Madagascar, who became one of the richest men on the island. And then he turned that into political power. And what you sort of look at is what is basically a linear trajectory of him becoming more corrupt, more willing to skirt the rules over his time in office, particularly in his second term, where his term ended when he was overthrown by a radio DJ in a coup d'etat in 2009, quite a colorful story. But the thing that's intriguing to me about him is that it shows the complexity of power. I mean, he's not a uniformly bad guy in any sense of the word. I mean, he presided over the largest growth period in Madagascar's history. It was one of the fastest growing economies in the world while he was in charge. Now, he did that partly by being corrupt because the things that”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And other forms of animals, wasps, which have corruption in their hives, so to speak. These things I think all teach us lessons. And then I started thinking about the people who are interested in case studies, which is why I ended up doing some very strange things for the book, like taking a ski lesson with Paul Bremer, the former viceroy of Iraq out in Vermont and meeting with children of dictators and so on. So it sort of draws in together some of my previous work in politics with a much more expansive view of what power is and how it changes people.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been in the back of my mind for basically 10 years. I've been thinking about why it is that we have this awful people in power so often. But at the same time, one of the things that I did when I started doing the book in earnest in 2019 was I started to reach out to people from other disciplines who were studying similar questions, but from totally different angles, right? So, I mean, for the first time in my career, I spoke to a neuroscientist about what it does to your brain to be in power. I spoke to evolutionary biologists about why certain strategies of attaining power might make sense for our survival as a species. I talked to psychologists about psychopaths. And what I started to realize was that there's a whole bunch of people in different disciplinary silos that are thinking about these questions. And political scientists and also, I think, journalists think about them from a very narrow perspective. So I tried to sort of draw in things, including stuff like research on baboons.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so basically, I mean, I spent most of my career studying bad people doing bad things in politics. And one of the paradoxes that occurred to me was whenever I talk to people, they always say, you know, my friends are good people. We were generally above board. We wouldn't steal if we were in positions of power. We wouldn't abuse people and so on. So why does this happen where all of us are surrounded by people who are generally good? And then we look at those in power and we think they're generally bad. And so I started to think in a broader sense, not just in politics, but in business, in sports, in all forms of leadership around the world, why does it seem that we have this mismatch between the generally good people that we seem to be surrounded by and then the constant corruption and scandals and abuse of those in power? And I had this podcast power corrupts, which I basically titled because I thought it sounded cool. But then I started to think, you know, is that actually true, right? Is it actually true that power turns people bad or is something else at play? And that's where the book's research was born.”
2021-11-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Power Changes Us, with Brian Klaas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source