Dan Snow's History Hit - Democratic Decline

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

The 6th of January marks one year since the United States Capitol attack of 2021, whereby a mob of supporters of Republican President Donald J. Trump stormed the Capitol Building. On today’s anniversary, what can we learn from prehistory to the present, about democratic decay, corruption and cronyism?Dr. Brian Klaas, UCL Associate Professor in Global Politics, Washington Post Columnist, and author of ‘Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us’ is today’s guest on the podcast. So, are tyrants made or born? If you were thrust into a position of power, would new temptations to line your pockets gnaw away at you until you gave in? As one of the world's leading and most effective commentators of democratic decline, Brian joins Dan to answer these questions.They discuss the rise of hierarchy in prehistoric times, how cognitive biases from our Stone Age minds continue to cause us to select the wrong leaders and what we can learn about King Leopold II of Belgium about whether power or systems, corrupt.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We are living, I think it's fair to say, we're living through an age of democratic decline. Democracy is under pressure in the US, in Eastern Europe we know, in places like Turkey, Brazil, the Philippines, all over the shop. We've got a total crazy guy running for power in France at the moment. I mean, it makes me feel slightly better about Brexit. I mean, that guy believes that parts of Northern Italy should be French. I mean, jeepers, creepers, I mean, that's proper 19th century revanchism, I believe

the word is. Anyway, so we're in an era of democratic decline. Why? What's going on? What is it? Is it us? Is it us? Are we drawn to idiotic, demagogic strongmen? It's too depressing for words. But anyway, Brian Class, who's been on the podcast many times, he's Class, is our Brian Class. He is a political scientist. He works at Washington Post, but he's also an associate professor in global politics at the University College of London. He's a great friend of the pod.

He's an absolute legend. Worth following him on Twitter for his insights. He's just written a book about our relationship with power. Does it corrupt us? Is it innate? Have we got no chance when we are imbued with ultimate power? Do we just go bonkers? Or are corrupt people drawn to power? It's not the power. Don't blame the game, blame the players. Well, Brian Class got all the answers in a new book and I really wanted to get into it with him. He had a great chat in this podcast talking about

it. He's met tyrants, he's met drug lords, he's met despots, and he has thoughts. I'm fascinated to learn, by the way, in this book, which is good news for me. You know, I've mostly, mostly given up on my dreams of holding high office, of taking the salute. But it's good to know that we still prefer, even in an era of democracy, even an era when you can't really tell how tall people are because they're on the TV or coming through the radio, whatever, we still prefer, we still tend to elect taller leaders. Isn't that crazy? As a tall man, I've got to say, that stirs me deep down. It's pleasing, but it's also deranged, completely deranged.

Don't vote for the tall guy, folks. The tall guy, and I'm projecting a bit here, almost definitely doesn't have the skills required to run a modern democratic society all right the tall guy you know he might be pretty good in the front line of the shield wall at ashen court um maybe but does he know how to run a complex system of social medicine no he doesn't does he know the difference between GDP and GMP? No, he doesn't. So don't elect him, all right? Go for some real expertise. Dig a little deeper. Don't just like tall guy. Anyway, Brian Class, absolute legend. Great to have him on the podcast. If you want to

go listen to previous episodes of Brian Class in which we commiserate about the state of US politics under Donald Trump, if you want to take that trip down memory lane, you can be my guest. You've been my guest at History Hit TV. We have a Netflix for history at History Hit. A Netflix history. We have hundreds of documentaries, hundreds of documentaries about everything from the Stone Age to the Nuclear Age. We've got thousands of podcasts without the ads. It's all there at a place called History Hit TV. It's Elysium for history lovers. If you find yourself riding through green fields with the sun on your face and a never-ending supply of historical content, then fear not, for you're already dead and you're in Elysium.

You're in History Hit TV. You can go to that Elysium without having to die if you follow the link in this podcast description, right there on your phone or your computer device that you're using to listen to this. Scroll down a little bit, hit that link. You get 14 days free if you sign up today. In the meantime, though, here's Brian Class being brilliant. Enjoy. Hey, Brian. Great to have you back on the podcast. Thanks for having me.

Listen, we're all talking about it. We had Trump. We got Orban, Putin, Xi, Bolsonaro, Duterte. Sometimes we don't have a choice because they're going to shoot us if we try and vote. But other times we actually voted for these dudes. What is going on? You know, I think we have this sort of conventional wisdom that power corrupts, which is true. And that corruptible people are drawn to power, also true, also outlined in the book. But I think there's also something else going on, which is that we're drawn to the wrong kind of leaders. And this happens partly because of a very long history of evolutionary psychology in which our brains have evolved for a world that no longer exists, a social world that no longer exists. In other words, in the past, it was very advantageous when you were potentially starving to follow a physically large male hunter. And nowadays that doesn't make so much sense. And yet what we have in study after

study is the idea that during times of crisis, when you prime people and tell them, oh, who do you want in charge during a war or a famine or a pandemic, we gravitate towards strong men, right? Strong man is not a misnomer. It's actually a reference to this idea that the physically imposing man is one that tends to build followers during times of crisis. And so this stone age mismatch between the way our brains evolved and the way we live now is one that's created a horrible aspect that's being exploited by the worst in our society. And this is tied, by the way, to height as well. One of the studies that I look into is a study showing that in times of crisis, taller leaders are very, very popular indeed. And unfortunately, it's only true when it's a male leader. The effect doesn't hold for women. And this detail was lost on an Australian politician, a woman named Hajnal

Ban, who had her legs broken and stretched three inches in an attempt to win her election. She won, but it probably wasn't because of her height in that instance. Listen, man, as a six foot six of her height in that instance. Listen, man, as a six foot six, athletic, square-jawed, superficially charming dude, I endorse this message completely. I would be a terrible leader. I sit there daydreaming about invading France. It's not a good, it's bad. Indeed, but it is something that would be very useful for you if you were to become, one of the questions I ask in the opening of the book is, how would you behave if you were thrust into becoming the dictator of Turkmenistan? It's a question designed to sort of say, are we the product of our systems or are we the product of individual leaders and their

personalities? And it's of course both. But if you were the dictator of Turkmenistan, Dan, you would be tailor-made for becoming the strongman figure who was able to consolidate power in a heartbeat the carnate would rise again i'll say that much dude it would be a good day anyway i'm reading your book thinking like we're all doomed like if this is if this is hard-coded into us and democracy has been this like frantically optimistic attempt to override these baser urges and we all want our Bolsonaros, and we all want our Trumps, we want our cheese, then are we screwed? You know, it's funny because I study and I encounter and interview some of the worst

people on the planet, right? I mean, the book involves me sitting down with the daughter of a cannibalistic dictator, with despots who have used live rounds on protesters, cult leaders, and bioterrorists. And yet the book's extremely optimistic, actually. And I think one of the reasons for that is because you're right, we have these cognitive biases. But if we acknowledge them, one of the unique things about humans is that we can actually counteract them with conscious thought. And there's ways that you can design systems. So I think, you know, you take this sort of elementary approach to power and understanding what it does to people, and you have two sides of the same coin,

power corrupts and corruptible people are drawn to power. What you're missing is that intermediary step, which is the system itself. And so I have a chapter in the book where I look at how systems mediate who seeks power and how power changes people. And one of the examples that I think is a really neat one from history and a very disturbing one is King Leopold II of Belgium, because he ran a reform program when he was King of Belgium. And yet when he was ruling over the Belgian Congo, which he treated like, as he said, his own slice of African cake, he was one of the worst monsters in human history. And the system, I think, shaped how he behaved. His beliefs also shaped how he behaved in terms of whether he thought people were actually people

in the Congo. But in one system, he's the builder king, he's the reformer, he institutes all sorts of educational reforms and so on, and he's revered. And then in the other system, he just disposes of and kills and slaughters up to a couple million people. And so it's this horrible natural experiment of history that the same person in two different systems can behave very, very differently. And I go through this a couple different ways in the book. But I think that's what's missing is that we have this historical conventional wisdom. conventional wisdom. Okay, power turns people bad and bad people are drawn to power, but you can counteract that if you design the system in an appropriate way. So rotten systems attract rotten people and turn them worse. Good systems attract good people and turn them better. I agree. That's what's great about your book. I find the older I get, the more I think that the pinnacle of human achievement is laws and institutions that force us, whether we like it or not, to be good, to like do good things, to be honest, to be compassionate. That's the

genius. That's the genius of our species. Screw jet engines and wheels. I mean, that is what it's all about. There's one chapter in the book called Watched. It was an area that was new to me, but I found it totally fascinating. It talks about in the grand sweep of human history, how the feeling of being watched can moderate our behavior, can make us feel better. And so in the past, anthropologists will refer to this as the period of the big gods, when most people on the planet believed in an all-powerful omniscient deity, who regardless of the structures of human society, whether there are police or sheriffs or politicians that could watch you, that you would actually have to pay for your sins in this life or the next. And one of the things that's changed over time is that as the number of people who have believed in those omniscient figures has declined, we have replaced them in a way with secular big gods,

which is to say institutions and legal systems and authority figures that actually do create oversight and impose consequences. Now, of course, if that's going to be the case, you have to have effective oversight. If the society you live in doesn't work, if there's corruption, if there's bribes being paid to people, then it breaks down. And one of the great illustrations of this is a psychology study I talk about in the book, which is they give people the opportunity to roll a dice 42 times. And they say, the number of sixes you receive will give you money for each one, but you get to self-report them so you can lie. Now, one particularly brazen guy in India reported that he rolled 42 sixes in a row, but most of the time, people that lied only did it a bit, but still statistically,

they could figure out when they were actually not telling the truth. When they ran the study in India, where the civil service is very corrupt and has a lot of bribe taking, all of the people who lied on the dice rolls, they were drawn towards becoming civil servants. When they reran the exact same study in Denmark, where the system is much cleaner, it was exactly inverted. The people who cheated on the exam, they wanted to go into business, and all the civil servants reported honestly. So there's this lesson here, I think, that we can rebuild societies in a much more virtuous way, so long as the oversight and the system itself works effectively. And that was, it's the dream behind every instrument of government, every written constitution, this highly unusual and very recent innovation that we've come up with, which is you can

write down how we should behave on a bit of paper, and people have to obey that and act within that spirit. And in doing so, we can promote good governments. I mean, that's what's so inspiring about the deeply flawed generation that came up with the US Constitution, for example, at the end of the 18th century, is that there was this belief that this was a new thing and we could make this work. Yeah. And, you know, I think we can't just stop there. I mean, I think what's striking to me and one of the reasons why I wrote this book is because whenever I tell people I'm a political scientist and I study bad people who do bad things in power, you know, they say, isn't that everybody? I mean, the sort of standard approach that people tend to say to me is, why is it that all the people I know,

the friends and family members in my life are good and decent people? And yet when I look at leadership figures throughout history, we have so many awful rotten leaders who didn't rise to the challenge, right? I mean, part of the reason why we revere certain people is because they're the outliers. They're the ones who did the right thing when the moment demanded it. And so one of the things that I talk about is you can't just have the sort of basic rules and expect to have everything go perfectly. There's also other innovations you need to add. So one of the examples I talk about is this power of rotation. And one of the things weirdly about humans is that when we're comfortable with somebody, we're much more likely to collude with them, to act in a corrupt way. So when you build trust between another person and yourself, maybe

that's a presidential or prime ministerial advisor, maybe it's somebody in the police force, the odds that you're going to try to get away with something you shouldn't go up. And so various structures around the world, including the metropolitan police, have started to do rotation among partners. They should do this more often in politics. And when they do psychology studies where they have multiple ways that somebody can obtain money, and one of them is by cheating, when they rotate partners, the number of people who cheat goes down because they don't feel as confident or as comfortable with that person. And this is true whether you do the study in China or Germany, anywhere around the world. And so I think one of the things that is so important is that you have to think carefully about how you

tweak the systems, even within constitutions and legal frameworks, because most of us don't think they're working particularly well. I mean, you look at the headlines, there's sleaze scandals, there's corruption, there's autocrats rising around the world and i think there are fixes to that but you have to engineer society in ways that actually promote and attract the right people to power and then make them behave well once they get there yeah i mean brian geeks like you and i freak out about this on twitter all the time like there seems to be this great antipathy towards politicians and absolutely no interest in reform movements i'm'm like, you're correct, everyone. There's great energy around about being concerned about the quality of leadership we've got. So here's several things we can do. It's quite straightforward. We can tweak this. We can do that. Oh, no,

don't be such a geek. That's such cephalogical nonsense. It's like, what? There's a weird disconnect there. Yeah. And one of the big takeaways that I gleaned from reading the research, interviewing people for this book, interviewing leaders, all sorts of people, is that I think we're also focused on some of the wrong things. Anyone who studies history knows that there's this sort of problem of what actually gets written, right? The idea that the victors write history and so on. I came across a reasonably well-known story from World War II about a statistician named Abraham Vauld, who was consulted by the US government in an attempt to try to figure out how to reinforce some of the fighter planes and bombers

that were going over Germany early on in World War II. And what he looked at were all these planes that had bullet holes in the wings and the nose or in the tail. And the general said to him, statistician, help us out. Where should we reinforce? Where should we put the armor? And he took one look at it, a question that had baffled a lot of the generals, and said, none of those places. If you put it over those places, you're going to have a lot more dead pilots in Germany because what you should be paying attention to are the invisible planes, the planes that are in Germany that didn't make it back.

The bullet holes in the wings, the nose, and the tail, those are survivable. You can come back. You can fly and land. And so he illustrates this concept of what's called survivorship bias, the idea that we tend to see the things that make it, while the things that don't make it, they're the flaming wrecks in Germany. This has lessons for power because when we think about why we have bad leaders, we tend to look at the leaders we've got and we say, gosh, why are they so awful?

Instead, what we should be thinking about is why aren't the good people making it there? One of the points that I think is really important to keep in mind here is that the good, decent people who don't want power are the ones who often don't seek it and they often don't get it. So there's multiple levels in getting to be somebody at the top of a hierarchy. And I think what we have are systems that tend to attract magnet-like some of the worst of our society. Now, there are always exceptions, right? I mean, one of the great things about studying history or listening to your podcast is you have these masterful people who do the right thing when the moment demands it. But do we really want to rely on us finding that person at the right moment of time? I think

we need to think more carefully about how we can actually engineer a society that regularly produces them rather than sort of waiting for the great figure of history to come and save us. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking to Brian Class about democracy, power, corruption, tyranny. Let's hope it's got a happy ending find out coming up soon How can you tell if your neighbour is a witch? If you're obsessed by witches then maybe there's something wrong How would you go about painting Henry VIII?

I think Henry's a monster and so I see a sort of puffed up balloon faced impotent guy Would you invite Oliver Cromwell to dinner? There's no point in having Cromwell to dinner other than to be entertained with his heavily skewed version of events.

I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everything, from ballads to banqueting, sex to spying, ghosts to gunpowder plots. In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions.

And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. I've gone full crazy recently, Brian. I've gone full Athenian democracy after wrestling with this for years. The corruption of money and social media, its relationship with politics now, that nexus is so devastating. I've gone full lottery. True democracy requires entirely arbitrary selection of our representatives via a lottery. Tell me I'm

wrong. Yeah, so we slightly disagree on this. In the book, I do talk about this with the Claritarian from ancient Greece, the sort of jury system effectively for the assembly. Yeah, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that bit. One of the things that I think is worthy of that is it does, it eliminates a lot of the problems in terms of who actually seeks power. I think that there is something valuable about developing some level of political expertise. I mean, if you've got somebody who's going to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty, you probably need someone who understands statecraft and the implications of diplomacy and so on. But, and this is the big but, I argue- Like Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab. I see what you're saying. Well, okay. So here's where I think though, you're absolutely right. I think that we

should have a modern day claritarian for citizens assemblies that provide oversight. Yeah. The legislative branch. Yeah. So for the legislative branch, what they should do, I think this is true for business as well, by the way, I argue this in the book, is I think they should have randomly selected people, you know, 650 randomly selected people to provide oversight to parliament, for example. And what they do is they have, let's say, 10 big questions a year, the same 10 big questions that parliament's going to deal with. Should we impose a mask mandate? Should we leave the European Union? All these sort of things. And they would have access to the same experts, the same testimony as the politicians

would, and they would produce an independent report. And that report would be publicly available and it would provide massive amounts of oversight because the differences between the politicians and the citizens assembly would often be driven by lobbyists, by greed, by corruption, etc. Right. So when you're trying to think about where to award a contract, well, the citizens assembly that's randomly selected is not going to give it to the friend of somebody who's in elected office. And when they do do that, it will be glaringly obvious.

It will provide massive amounts of ammunition for journalists to sort of skewer politicians with. And so I think that level of oversight is important. You could have this in business, by the way, with shadow boards of governors. So you have boards that provide some level of oversight now, but they're often people who don't necessarily have the same interests as the average employee. So you could have a randomly selected shadow board that deals with the same sort of problems as the board and provides independent reports and oversight. And I think that could be very, very useful without going full bore and completely eliminating politicians. Yeah, I think the executive branch is a trickier one. Although as far as I can see, obviously in the UK, it's complicated by the fact

our executive branch is drawn from within that list. It's just a tricky one. So I can see obviously in the uk it's complicated by the fact our executive branch is drawn from within that list so it's a tricky one so i can see that you know randomly selecting your chief of the executive branch your prime minister as it were here is kind of risky my risk appetite has gone up given some of the uh more recent heads of the executive branch we've seen around the world anyway um the other thing i find fascinating is like our attachment to the idea of like the gifted amateur like why don't we elect people and then like intensively train them for six months? Why is it acceptable that Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab haven't read the Anglo-Irish agreement? They should read it. Go away, do your homework. And I find some of these historical traditions we just mindlessly absorb. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah. I mean, I think this idea of politics as a vocation is important

and that means that training is certainly part of it the same way you'd have training for anything else. I mean, I think one of the dilemmas that we have to deal with is that the systems we've set up don't just attract people who are unfit for office to power, but I immersed myself in psychology research around psychopaths and the dark triad, the sort of Machiavellian narcissistic psychopath, which those are the three tripods of the triad. And so this is one of those things where when you think about these people, people who are overwhelmingly narcissistic, Machiavellian and psychopathic, they are the people who are disproportionately good at wiggling their way into power. psychopathic. They are the people who are disproportionately good at wiggling their way into power. This isn't, by the way, just with politics. Of course, an election is tailor-made for somebody who has superficial charm and is very good at making people like them for a small amount of time, which is basically what a narcissistic Machiavellian psychopath is built

for. And we do have evidence, by the way, that they're overrepresented in the highest echelons of business and politics. but also the job interview, the standard job interview in modern society, 30 to 45 minutes trying to make somebody like you. I mean, superficial charm are the two words that are always associated with psychopaths. They're Machiavellian. The ends justifies the means. They reinvent themselves. They're chameleon-like. We have a lot of ways to counteract that. And one of the things that I think would be good, this wouldn't work very well for the chief executive, but does work well for some promotions in the business world, is anonymity

when you have assessments. When I grade papers at University College London, I don't know who I'm grading. It's double blind. And that reduces my ability to be biased towards a student because I simply don't know who it is. And I think for job applications, for example, that would be a really, really good idea because we have lots of evidence with CVs. For example, there was a study that was done where CVs were basically duplicated and they just changed the name on top. In one study, it was women versus men. In the other study,

it was white sounding names versus black sounding names in the US. And exactly what you would expect happened, that the males got both higher levels of offers and higher starting salaries offered to them. The same was true for white people. And so I think some of this we can't do in politics. You can't have a prime minister that's running blind, but you can have it for some levels of local government, some levels of business. And I think the point here is we haven't thought creatively about this. There's not rocket science involved in reforming these systems. It's just that we've sort of been on autopilot for the better part of a couple hundred years in how we select and promote people who are

going to lead our societies. And I think it's time for a fundamental rethink. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And now, Brian, why is it time for a fundamental rethink now? And that brings us to the present moment, right?

We've all spent all of our time working this out, but is it this nexus between unbelievable economic inequality, gigantically rich people who are politically adventurous, who want to start, support, promote, amplify, often very, very minority views, and then this transformation in technology and how we broadcast? Those are two things that you think it's worth identifying? Yeah. And I think the information aspect of this, the changes in media technology are central to it. I mean, if you think about the broad sweep of human history and all the sort of technological

innovations around media, they've basically been, up until now, expanding the circle of people who can communicate, a small group of people to many communication, right? You have the radio, all of a sudden, you can talk to a lot more people, but you still have a small number of people who are actually broadcasting. The same is true for newspapers, the same is true for television and so on. What's revolutionary about the internet and social media is it's many to many communication. For the first time in history, anybody can quickly spread disinformation and lies and then have those reach a very broad audience in an instant. And I think that has broken the information flow of democracy. And,

you know, one definition of democracy is informed consent of the governed, that people know what's going on and then can either accept it or reject it. If they don't know what's going on, the value of that acceptance or rejection is diminished. And I think that's partly what's really broken our democratic societies in the modern era. And I think, you know, again, my point here is that some of these aspects are timeless. I think we've always had a problem with the wrong sort of people being attracted to power. I think we've had a problem with the wrong sort of people being good at getting power. But we haven't thought fundamentally about how that fits in with modern society. And I think most people are generally pretty upset with how things are going.

So if that's the case, you know, we can complain or we can try to think carefully about that intermediary step of the system, right? And I think that's really a core aspect of what my book argues is that your system will both determine who seeks power and gets it, but it will also determine how it changes the person once they obtain it. And that's very, very important. And yet, Brian, you and I have both read the data around electoral reform and where it rates in a list of voters' concerns. Like, this inchoate concern does not translate into raising electoral form up the list of priorities

for voters when they're in the ballot box. How do we make that connection? Yeah, you know, it's a great point and a great question because I think this is one of the dilemmas of modern politics is that nobody gets excited about systemic reform, but you need politicians to run on it in order to actually make it happen because otherwise it doesn't have visibility. You know, if people don't know this is a problem, then there's not going to be much of an appetite to fix it. So you do need some politicians to take this on as a serious challenge of the 21st century. And I think it does have cross-party

appeal. I mean, I think regardless of their political stripes, I think most people agree with the idea that things could be going better than they are now. I also think it's something where we have to create standards for our leaders. I mean, you know, one of the things I argue in the book is why not have psychopath tests for the people who are at the highest echelons of power? I mean, I think it's something where, okay, you don't want to have this be a part of normal society, but we are giving a huge amount of authority, nuclear weapons to one individual. And at that point, it's time to actually get out the barrage of psychological tests, figure out whether they're actually a psychopath, figure out how we can constrain them in certain ways, and also do some diligence in terms of

ensuring that we actually recruit better. That's the other point that I talk about at length in the book is how you can find people who would see power as a burden. I mean, what you ultimately want are the sort of Cincinnatus-like figures in society who think, you know, I really don't want to do this. This would be annoying. I wouldn't like it. And I'd like to get out of power as soon as possible. What's actually happening now is I think actually worse than it was before because the burdens of leadership are getting worse in a toxic social media environment. I mean, I think when people think about the idea of running for office in 2021, they have to weigh up their desire

either for social good or for power against the fact that they're going to face harassment, death threats, potential financial ruin, all sorts of things that are really, really bad. Now, what that ultimately does is it means that good, decent, normal people weigh up those two things and they say, yeah, I'd rather do something else with my time. So what you're actually doing with the cost of leadership being so high these days and the sort of personal cost that comes with your family being harassed and so on, you end up rolling out the red carpet to the people who are so power hungry that it's worth it to them. And I think that's creating an even worse effect in modern society than we already had to contend with in the past. Okay. Bring me some of the good news. Bring me some of the innovations around the world that

are promoting the right kind of people and the right kind of public policy. Yeah, you know, the book is actually very hopeful, I think, in the end. I have 10 basic lessons that I think we need to use in order to fix our systems and improve the types of people that we get into power. And one of the aspects, a very simple fix, is simply recruiting more good, decent people. I know this sounds insane, but there is a police department in Alaska for which every single officer in the department is a convicted felon. Every single department officer has committed domestic abuse, some more serious crimes.

And the reason for that is because there's just not a recruitment effort. So they have 100% acceptance when somebody applies to be an officer. They say yes, because they need somebody in uniform. So they're all crooks, right? They went from the orange jumpsuit into the blue police officer's uniform. And I think that lesson that that teaches us is the more people you have seeking power, the more that you can sort of get rid and weed out the bad apples and then be left with good people in power. So you have to be really proactive about this. And I don't think this

happens enough. I think that we rely on people to throw their hat into the ring. I think the other thing that we need to do more of is random scrutiny of people at the top. Now, what I mean by this is right now, a lot of systems of surveillance are aimed and pointed at the people who don't actually do that much harm, right? In the Zoom economy, there are these crazy dystopian innovations, particularly in the United States, where there's actually companies that have put sensors in people's chairs to determine whether or not they're actually physically sitting in them. I mean, I guess you could get a bowling ball or something like that to trick it. But basically, you know, there's a lot of monitoring of ordinary employees. Enron didn't happen because somebody took a five

minute too long lunch break. Enron scandal and a lot of these embezzlement scandals and a lot of the corruption in politics are happening at the top. So you need to have much more scrutiny pointed upwards, not downwards. And the New York Police Department gives us a really good example of how you can do this effectively. What they did was they started doing randomized stings of their officers. They would say to an officer, you know, we've got a drug bust over in the Bronx. Could you please guard it until the DEA arrives, the Drug Enforcement Agency arrives, and go inside and take a look. And they go inside and there's a whole bag of cocaine and $30,000 in cash sitting on the table and no one's been there. So the officer is tempted to take the money, take the coke, whatever it is, not knowing that the whole

place is wired up like Fort Knox and they're being surveilled the whole time. And if they take the drugs or the money, or they pocket a few thousand dollars here or there, and they go home, they either get arrested or fired right away. Now, what's interesting about this is that they did something like 500 of these in the first year that they instituted it. But when they surveyed police officers, the number that they thought had happened was around 12,000, because some of these cops actually encountered drugs and money on tables that weren't because of any sort of sting. They were just, they'd gone to a crime scene, but they thought they were being tested. So what it did to these officers, these people in a position to abuse their power was it made them think twice every time they thought about it. I think

politicians should think twice before they abuse their power, whether they're being ensnared in a corruption trap, you know, when they're sort of giving out a contract that maybe it's a journalist posing as this. And I think that would be a much healthier way of our society producing oversight and scrutiny, as opposed to trying to ensure that the person in the open plan office in the cubicle isn't taking a lunch break for three minutes too long, because that's not what's going to take down a company or take down a country. Yes, the guy with the nuclear codes is the one we need to be really focusing in on

here. I agree. And so things are negative, particularly in the States at the moment, where they're off greatly amended at local level, state election supervisors are being purged and all sorts of crazy stuff happening over there. but you remain confident essentially, do you? Why do you still feel that democracy is the rule of law can prevail, can endure? Well, I think confident would be putting it quite strongly. I'm very pessimistic about the prospects for a democracy in the United States right now. Things are going very, very badly and I'm optimistic over the long run. I'm optimistic that there are fixes to these problems. I'm not optimistic that they'll actually happen in the short term. And I think that's the sort of paradox with writing this book is that I'm facing that sort of maddening moment of reconciliation between the idea that actually we could build a better society

and the pessimism that nobody seems to actually be doing it. And the prospects for that are pretty dim for the moment. When you mentioned the changes in the US, I think it does illustrate a point that I bring up in the book, although I don't talk about this specifically because it's a broader sweep. I mean, I'm trying to write about why we get bad people in power, not about contemporary American politics. But something is happening in the United States where election officials used to just be volunteers, often retirees who wanted to do their bit in making sure the democracy functions correctly. There have been multiple stories recently in which people who stormed the US Capitol, actual people who took over the Capitol violently,

have been recently elected as election judges. And what's happening is you have a shift from a position that had authority but no real power to change the result into one that actually has power to change the result. What I mean by that is the person who used to volunteer as a retiree to tabulate the votes, they weren't trying to put their finger on the scale. They were just trying to do their job and say, this person got 700 votes in the precinct. This person got 500. Now that the power invested in that post is actually consequential to decide things, what's happening? Well, the worst of our society are gravitating towards those positions, trying to rig the system. And it provides a broader lesson, right? That when

you create a politicized role in which a previously nonpartisan, nonpolitical, you know, sort of bureaucratic job existed, and you replace it with one in which a bad person can actually game the system, well, the bad people feel like the red carpet has been rolled out and they try to waltz into power. And so, you know, I think that's one of the things that we have to be very careful about is understanding that at every stage, we are going to have a disproportionate number of bad, understanding that at every stage, we are going to have a disproportionate number of bad, nefarious people who are going to seek, obtain, and retain power. And we have to counteract that by reverse engineering the systems by thinking, okay, let's imagine that we have this bad person

trying to get power, being very good at it and pretty good at holding onto it once they get it. What should we do to stop that? And I don't think that conversation has been held at a societal level. And history teaches us that we often fail to think this way with predictable consequences. I think right now we don't have to repeat history because we can actually be enlightened enough to understand that these are changeable dynamics within our own societies. I hope you're right, bud. I hope that's what we all come to realize. Everyone go and get your book. What's it called?

It's called Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us. It's great stuff. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all work gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate

listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial to that project. If you did feel like doing me a favour, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.