The Jordan Harbinger Show - 519: Dacher Keltner | The Power Paradox

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at University of California in Berkeley, one of the world’s foremost scientists specializing in the study of power, and author of The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence. [Note: this is a rebroadcast from the vault.] What We Discuss with Dacher Keltner: You don’t have to be Machiavellian to appreciate that Niccolo Machiavelli was the OG power scientist. What is The Power Paradox, and how does it affect us and society at large? The imbalance of power is the greatest threat to society (just after climate change). Powerlessness can literally be lethal. Learn how we can increase our power relative to others in a healthy way. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/519 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. We kind of demonize the leaders. We think about madmen, you know, ruining the world. And that in part is true. You know, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, we're no doubt crazy individuals. But we also have to think carefully about social systems and the social context. And you will have really strong forms of power that are good for broad collectives if you have ways, forms of accountability. Welcome to the show.

Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional four-star general rocket scientist or former jihadi. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show, or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we've got episode starter packs. These are collections of your favorite episodes, organized by popular topics to help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the

show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started, which of course I always appreciate. That's always nice. A little bit of validation here that it's good enough to share. Today we're talking with Dacker Keltner. He's a professor at Berkeley, one of the world's foremost scientists who specialize in the study of power. He's also wrote a book, called the Power Paradox, which I can recommend if you're into this subject matter. Today we'll discuss why the imbalance of power in society is actually one of the greatest threats to society. We'll discuss how we can increase our power relative to others in a healthy way. We'll outline something called the Power Paradox and how this affects us and of course

affects our society at large. And powerlessness, how this can literally be lethal. This is one from The Vault. There's a lot of concepts here that I wasn't expecting. So enjoy this one with Dacker Keltner. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week. It's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free, business, personal, just for fun, whatever it is. Over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course, you'll find a free course. I don't need your credit card. I just want to teach you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company

where you belong. Now, here's Dacker Keltner. Thanks for coming in today. I appreciate it. That's great to be with you, Jordan. You're the author of The Power Paradox. I I've read that. It was fantastic. It was kind of something a little unexpected in that it's not, I don't want to say an academic look at power, but it's certainly, you've taken more of a careful look at power than most people who even write about power. It's not just look people in the eye when you shake hands and you'll get power. And it's not these little techniques and tricks, but it's a real study. Well, first of all, tell us what you do in one sentence. And we'll dive into the rest. Yeah, I'm a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and run a big lab that studies power and the evolution of human goodness. In the book, The Power Paradox, what is the Power Paradox? The Power Paradox is what I think is one of the most important laws of human behavior, and it's this really interesting irony, which is that people get power by advancing the interests of other people, be it in a school or at work, and then the paradox begins, which is once you feel powerful,

you lose all the skills that advance the interests of others and got you power in the first place. But people don't necessarily advance the interests of others to gain power on purpose, most of the time, right? It's not purely altruistic, but also it's not like, hmm, if I help enough people, I can eventually screw all those people over. Well, there's a little bit of that going on, and there's this funny literature called competitive altruism where that may be at play. But no, you know, what scientists have discovered who have studied how we get power in different kinds of social groups, is really aligning with what you're saying, Jordan,

which is that we have a lot of different kinds of social behaviors that advance other people's welfare and their interests, right? We give them resources, we share, we cooperate, we collaborate. And as a result of those tendencies, groups will elevate your social status, right? Because you're good for the group. So it's a consequence of these pro-social tendencies.

So power is given to you. It's not taken because you're so altruistic that you decide to grab it with an iron fist. It's not Machiavelli. Yeah. There are so many myths of power out in our culture. And one of them, in fact, I think one of the most pernicious is the one you just outlined, which is the idea that you just go grab power.

And yeah, that happens in Mexican drug cartels and in little areas of hot spots in Africa and the like. But most of the time, you don't go grab power if you join a workforce or, you know, you enter into a community. It's given to you by the collectives that you join. So is it the same thing as influence? Because I'm thinking of power, for example, online or influence online, kind of translates to power. Maybe it's not the same thing. Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. In fact, I think that's one of the most important statements that I try to make in the power paradox,

which is that, you know, when you ask the average American or average industrialized individual, what's power? They're going to tell you powers money, power is military might, powers how big you are, power is force. But in point of fact, when you look at history, right, and you think about all the ways in which we influence the world, be it through a blog or a podcast or scientific discovery or a great book or rock and roll song, power is your influence on others. And often it's independent of money, it's independent of military might. It's really what we're doing day to day in influencing

others. So how does Machiavelli fit in it? He's kind of the OG power scientist, right? He probably wouldn't have been at Berkeley, but... Yeah, he would have had a short career at Berkeley. Or, you know, we've had our Machiavellians. Well, Machiavelli figures profoundly in our thinking about power. In fact, most analyses, if you look at, like, how influential books are, and books are profoundly influential. The Bible, the analytics are Confucius.

Machiavelli's in the top 20, right? His is the book, The Prince. And people know what Machiavellianism is. Even if they haven't read the book, they know what it is, most likely. Yeah. So power is, in Machiavelli's view, force, manipulation, deception, strategic ruthlessness. And a lot of people think that that's what power is. But the new social science really kind of disconfirms that idea.

And it makes us remember Machiavelli wrote in a period in human history, which was probably as violent as any time in human history, when politics were really brothers, killing brothers. Right. And very little rule of law. There was torture was commonplace. So it was a philosophy of power that fit that time and certain subcultures today. But, you know, when you look outside, it doesn't work as well as we think. Right. We don't stand for it as a society or as a civilization in general, Western civilization anyways.

Yeah. Do you think that's changed? Do you think power is constantly evolving and what it actually means given maybe the context, the society, the type of civilization, it just changes? Yeah. Yeah. What a terrific observation. And the human mind and as social scientists, we like things to.

to be stable and fixed. But there's no more dynamic property of human relations than power, right? And we ebb and flow. There are studies showing from the past 40 to 50 years that power has really shown this dramatic shift from being hierarchical and more top down to what's right outside here in New Silicon Valley,

which is it's more horizontal and it's bidirectional and it's distributed. Power is shifting all the time. We're worried today in world politics, about a little soft rise of fascism. Wow, you know, look what happened in France and Austria and maybe Donald Trump is this reappearance of one kind of power we thought we were done with.

So power's always shifting, as you say. We get power now in this current incarnation of society or civilization for now, depending on when you're watching this, right? We get power by improving the lives of others in our network. How did you discover this, first of all? Because when you write it, it's like, well, yeah, okay, that makes sense. But you weren't probably just sitting around one day and decided I'm writing about this. You had to test that somehow.

We did. So, you know, I'm a scientist and I always test hypotheses with empirical data. And so, you know, that's why I feel confident saying that in most contexts that your listeners live in, Machiavellianism, force, manipulation, it may get you attention, but it doesn't get you lasting influence. How we tested it is as follows. I'll give you a couple of examples from our lab. and this illustrates a broader literature, we would track groups as they formed and found and would try to ascertain who kind of gets power,

how fast does it happen, who has influence, who keeps power over time. You know, we studied fraternities on college campuses, we studied dormitories, sororities, kids in summer camps, we've studied the U.S. Senate, which I'll tell you about. And what you find is within a week of a group forming,

we have a pretty shared sense of who we trust and who has power and who's on the margins of power. Really? In that short of a period of time. Yeah. And in fact, there are other studies from business school labs like Cameron Anderson showing, you know, within an hour or two of a group, leaders are starting to emerge. I believe that for sure. Even within conversations of multiple people, you start to say, okay, this is like the dominant guy. Yeah. And then this is the other guy who wants to be dominant, which is really just kind of irritating or annoying. That's right. And we have like these radars for those kinds of people. And so when we study these individuals and we sort of then find out like, who are these people who have that? And they tend to be dynamic. They have a lot of juice. They connect other people. But really interestingly and most importantly, they're very engaged in the interests of other people. They're going around pat at people on the back. They know where they're coming from. They encourage others. They throw out great ideas. So they're just engaged in others. And you hear about that as a kind of a

of the CEO that everyone loved, who was always asking about people. And he remembered things about people, and he was involved in other people's lives in surprising ways that were somehow scalable, right? Like on your birthday, it's probably his secretary, but he calls you and says, hey, I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday.

Thanks for working here for 20 years. Those types of things. And then also looking out for people on your team, making sure that they're not taking advantage of or getting worn down. You hear about that in the military. You hear about that in Silicon Valley companies that are successful.

And when people don't do that, when they rule by an iron fist, you see their ranking in, I can't remember who tracks this, but like worst companies to work for. Oh, is that right? It's always, you know, oh, the CEO made his employees by their own hotels on this business trip, number two, right? And then other places that you expect to be there, like Radio Shack all the way at the bottom, right? Yeah. But you hear about that. And so if this is constructed by society, constructed by civilization, how do the changes evolve? Because it seems like they're kind of innately human, but maybe all of the software is built in or all the hardware is built into us, but the software activates depending on our surroundings or something like, like a Tesla.

Autopilot's built in, but unless you pay for it, you can't use it. Right. For example, humans, have we changed very much physiologically since Machiavelli? Probably not. No, you know, what really strikes me is when I was writing the power paradox, it's like, you know, we made these discoveries. And like you nicely alluded to, Jordan, the same kind of ideas, like engaging, advanced the interests of others also works in the military.

structured context, and it's those individuals who really engage with others who rise in the military ranks. It works in school playgrounds, works in finance firms. So it is this general principle. I think that the way that it evolves and changes is really depending on the particulars of the social context, right? That, you know, I do a lot of consulting down at Facebook, and they're engaging in the interests of others has to do with writing good code and building good. complex teams that do good work, but you're still at the core, at a general level, advancing the interests of others as a way to get power. Facebook is probably a really good example of that. And you probably can't talk about your

work there, but I would imagine it has to do with, okay, we want to make this as useful as possible to humanity because the more useful it is, the more people use it. Yeah. Dot, dot, dot profit, right? That should not come as a surprise to anybody. They should not. Their mission is to suck us in by giving us valuable things to use, do, and see. Yeah. But in societal groups, what tools do we have that maintain or regulate power? In the book, you mentioned reputation and gossip and things like that. Yeah. So, you know, it's so striking. And very often when we think about problematic forms of power, we kind of demonize the leaders. We think about madmen, you know, ruining the world. And that in part is true. You know, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, we're no doubt crazy individuals.

But we also have to think carefully about social systems and the social context. And you will have really strong forms of power that are good for broad collectives if you have ways, forms of accountability, right? So the economic collapse 2008 that Michael Lewis sort of charted, critical to that was all systems of accountability were out the window, right? And then they sold whatever they sold. You have to have systems of scrutiny. And this is why journalism is so important. And it's so fascinating. You know, we think about the bias of journalism and the like, but U.S. journalism is pretty robust. It does provide critiques of power. And that form of scrutiny, social psychological studies find, if I know I'm being scrutinized, right, by shareholders or

journalism, I won't abuse my power, Israeli. Just as important, it's so fascinating, is art and satire. Just forms of public representation that call into question the status quo, right? Sure. That rock and roll, protest music. John Stewart, right? John Stewart is one of the most important political analysts. People are begging for him to come back today. Even though he's tongue in cheek and he's carrying on the great tradition of satire,

you know, dates back to Jonathan Swift and before. But because it's a way of making people very aware of the abuses of power, so when you have those systems in place and concerns over your reputation, forms of accountability, satire and scrutiny, will have good forms of power. But when those start to be regulated or taken away, then all hill can break with it. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dacre Keltner. We'll be right back.

Now back to Dacker Keltner on the Jordan Harbinger Show. We see this with totalitarian societies and regimes and things like that. I've been to countries like North Korea a few times. Really? Yeah. It may interest you slash terrify you or probably both. But what you see there is information strictly limited. What people are allowed to say strictly limited.

Even comedy, speaking of, it's never about politics. It's governed by, there's a body that says, this is funny and you, you know, this is stuff you can use or, and things like that. And people are instructed to constantly be on the lookout for things that are not accordance with what they want broadcasted. And so this is an, oh, it evolved in this weird way. Right. This was Stalin's idea was, no freedom of the press. Those guys can only cause us trouble. We want one narrative.

Yeah. And what happened was that one narrative was supposed to advance the brotherly communist, whatever. Instead, it went, well, crap, if there's only one voice and we control it, why are we obeying any rules? And then that went to heck for the next 50 plus years. That's fascinating. And derailed everything. And now we have North Korea slash what happened at the Soviet Union. People are probably saying, what the heck does this have to do with social science?

How can I use this? But if we look at things like our own reputation and as gossiped, as instruments used to regulate or to give us or take away power, you start to be more careful with, one, who you gossip about and two, your own reputation. Yeah. Quite a bit. I love your riff, by the way, on sort of totalitarian regimes, and I'll get to gossip in a second. You know, it was striking.

I read a bunch of histories of dictators in thinking about this book and the abuses of power in particular. And Jordan, you so nicely illustrated it, but I was astonished like Hitler was obsessed with art. And he was sort of an artist, but he had to control all the art and the shows, just like Stalin, because he didn't want the critiques of his political status quo. But, you know, most important in our day-to-day lives in terms of how social systems give power to the right people who advance the interests of the group is, as you said, through sort of distributing information about a person's reputation. And in particular, through gossip.

And, you know, I got into a little bit of trouble with this research. We started to do these studies. You know, we studied, for example, a sorority and sort of privately served. Speaking of gossip, right? You always want to go to the experts. the source. You know, so we study and we're like, who do they gossip about? And it really kind of surprised us, which is that, you know, we interviewed them privately,

hey, who do you kind of tell funny stories about, kind of gave it a friendly spin on it? And it wasn't what you might stereotypically think. They weren't gossiping about women who drank too much or had, you know, open sexual lives. They were really gossiping about women who are Machiavellian and who are going to take down other people on the group. I thought it would be moral. Yeah, sure. You know, sex and drugs, but it was really about ethics. Like, is this person kind to others?

Do they speak in a civil way? Are they nasty and backstab? Fake. All the gossip, yeah. All the gossip just zeroed in on those couple of individuals, right? Wow. It constrained their power and influence. It tagged them in saying, like, watch out for this person.

Yeah. And then we started to do these studies and that showed, like, if you take a social group and you allow them to give money to, you know, a public good, which is a standard thing that we do when we're part of a community, like contribute to the public good, people start to cheat on that. But if you allow the group members to gossip about each other, they are very good citizens and give a lot. So reputation really helps us avoid the abuses. So gossip and reputation are kind of the plus minus of keeping our behavior in line with the group, the interest of the group. Yeah, exactly. And it can go too far. You know,

seventh grade girls gossip too much. And, you know, we have to be worried about that. But in general, it's a very good counterbalance to the abuses of power. Right. So this isn't just a vice because a lot of people, myself included, would think gossip and talking about other people. Purely a vice. Never anything good coming from it. Stop doing it.

Bad habit. Get over it. But actually, it's something that we've probably evolved over however many thousands of thousands of years. It's as human. It's as universal part to our human behavior as eating food and having sex. Excellent. We all gossip.

People who are worried about it can take hard in the fact Thomas Jefferson. was a collected acts of political gossip and tracked it during his day because he knew it had important social information in it. So on the flip side of power, we've got powerlessness. Tell me about powerlessness. Help us understand why this is a bad thing because for people who have power,

powerlessness is not something you think about ever. Yeah, you know, it begins when I was writing the power paradox. You know, when you write a book, you search for like, why am I writing this book? It begins when I was a kid. And my mom and dad moved. My mom got her Ph.D. at UCLA. We were in Laurel Canyon, which is kind of trendy and cool place.

And then we moved to the foothills of the Sierras. And I was 10 years old. And we moved to the poorest town in the poorest county at the time in California. You know, it's something no parent in their right mind would do. What was the idea behind that? Because it was like 1970 and it was the rural experiment. We had an old Victorian and five acres of you couldn't grow anything on that. And, you know, so interesting.

Yeah, I was a 10-year-old kid and it was great. My brother and I ran around like Huck Finn and, you know, Tom Sawyer. And we had a pond. We fished. And we live on this rural road. When I was riding the power paradox, I was thinking about that neighborhood. And these people, the men often were out of work. Women didn't work.

They're very poor. Schools suck. You know, were just terrible. Some of my friends ended up in prison. No one went to call it. And as I walked down the street, I just started thinking about like each house had somebody in this context of powerlessness who was dying young, you know, literally like next door neighbor at the top of the road was some guy died pretty early, his son. You know, when he just fell in

our backyard, he broke his arm. And when we saw him break, now we know from science that's called child frailty syndrome, which is your bones start decaying prematurely. Go down a couple of couple streets, my best friend's sister had leukemia, his dad got cancer, heart attacks early. People are dying young, and I didn't really think about it until the science of powerlessness started getting off the ground. And the first discovery was tooful. If you don't feel powerful, if you don't have voice at work, if you feel muted in your family, if you feel powerless in marriage, if you feel powerless or stigmatized in society, you are chronically stressed out. biologically, your fighter flight system with cortisol,

revving up your body as if it's taken on a predator, it's supercharged. That's finding one. And then we now know if I have 20 or 30 years, 40 years of just feeling like I'm being defending myself. Like drowning? Yeah, drowning. Your body starts to prematurely die, right?

And your cells wither, you have cardiovascular problems, your veins clog up, your stomach lining is damaged, your brain cells start to die. So this science that not a lot of people know about, a very relevant today was telling us, you know, the central health problem in the United States is the people who feel disenfranchised in our society, that they don't have a voice. There's this new finding, very relevant to today's political world.

One of the only groups in the industrialized world to die younger than their parents are poor white people in the United States. Really? Yeah. They are dying younger than their parents. everybody else lives longer because they feel powerless. They feel like this political establishment doesn't hear me. I'm making less money than my dad made.

My kids are screwing up. You know, in some sense, it was the real deep reason why I wrote the book. Yikes. I mean, that's surprising data, especially because you don't think powerlessness can kill you. You just think, oh, you know, you live a lower standard of living than other people, but you can be fine. You don't need to have a free story house with a pool. You'll survive, right?

Yeah. But actually, you won't. Yeah, not because of the pool, but because of the feelings of powerlessness. That's actually really, really terrible. All jokes aside, that's really awful because the fact that powerlessness can cause chronic disease is a new discovery. Yeah, it is. And it's so stunning, Jordan. You know, Nancy Adler at UC San Francisco, one of the first papers on this found, you know, if you rank people on a 10-point scale, this finding that being lower rank hurts your physical health applies at all tiers of the scale.

So if I'm a seven and I'm doing pretty well, but my friends in eight, we go to the same doctor, we eat the same food, we exercise in the same way. He lives longer than I do. Unbelievable. Because he's feeling a little bit more agentic and powerful. So is this just subjective then? Yeah. If it is, well, since it is, how do we start to feel more powerful because your life literally

depends on it? It's not just your self-esteem or meeting someone of the opposite sex or the same sex to start a family with, it's not attraction-based. This is, hey, you should do this because you'll die early if you don't. It's a good reason. Yeah. Well, you know, we're just starting to learn. And one thing we do know, let's take the management context where we know this.

We have more better data on this, which is if you're running an organization and some of the people, you're in a position of power and you're going to benefit health-wise, and then there are people who are potentially at risk because of feeling disengaged or disempowered, We now know that those leaders who have the style that you described earlier of like they check in on people, they listen carefully, they send the notes, they express gratitude. Their colleagues that they're managing have better health profiles, right? So I think these older ethics of like respect, dignity, as well as letting people have voice and speaking up are some of the pathways to agency and power independent of are you a CEO or not? Are you famous or not?

It's these psychological empowerments that really matter. What if we find ourselves disempowered? What can we do about it ourselves? Is it about finding a new environment? Hey, look, my job's not only stressing me out, it's literally killing me as I've learned from this video or this show. How do I fix that? I mean, is it about unplugging from what's causing the stress?

It's so interesting. I've taught leaders at Berkeley for 20 years, you know, leaders in science and technology, Facebook and government and the like, people have experienced this dynamic of powerlessness and viscerally. We all have. I've had periods where I feel like I'm being dominated by somebody and it keeps me up. My heart feels like it's racing and that's bad for the body. And I think that there are things you can do to take steps towards bullies or dominators. You know, you can call them out. You can make them aware of their reputation.

You can gossip about them. You can be formal in saying you can't do this behavior, right? If the guy, most typically guys, is incorrigible, you pull out, like you said. But we can use reputation and gossip like medicine. Definitely. Like, all right, well, if you're going to be that way, I'm going to make sure everybody knows about it. Here's the email I'm sending out. Social media. It's like Yelp for people.

This guy, just so you know. And those are happening. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And rightfully so, some of the time anyway. Totally makes sense. It's so funny how you can use these as tools now. Yeah.

Now we see the need for it anyway. Yeah. Absolutely. What's the relationship between power and status and control and social class and all those things? Because I feel like you can kind of lump all those together, but you might not be totally right. Yeah. Thanks for asking that.

And, you know, this is why we do science. When people use language, we would say, hey, that guy's powerful, she's really powerful. And we might be meaning many different things. We might call the new Pope powerful, right? Sure. And call somebody on a baseball field or celebrity powerful. And I think what science is really useful for doing is, pulling apart concept.

Class is your wealth education and the prestige of your work. But it explains about 20% of your power, right? 30%. But that's not that much. So you can be very wealthy and not do anything in the world. They're playing people doing that right around here.

Definitely. And we can all think of examples like, that guy's got a ton of money and he hasn't done anything. Never worked a day in his life. Yeah. And by the way, you cannot have money and change the world profoundly.

Right. have a lot of power, and it's all around us. Then you pull apart control, and control very often goes with power, but you can have a lot of control over your life and have no power or influence whatsoever. So I always think like a hermit, right, who lives in a cave in North Africa. Right. Has total control and has no power, right? They're not doing anything.

And then most trickily is status. And how we think about status is status is the esteem. that you enjoy in other people's eyes. Right. Oh, that's so close to power, though, right? It is, but you can separate them, right? So, you know, it's interesting. Like, there are financiers, and you can even think about Donald Trump

as having a certain amount of power, but very low status. People think he's... Right. Oh, that's a good point. They have a very negative opinion of it. And you can think about a lot of examples of people who have a lot of power but aren't respected, and you can think about people who are respected but don't have a lot of power. So we've got to pull them apart. This is like an equalizer on a stereo. There's a lot of little

sliders here, but they all do different things. And equalizer is the great metaphor because I think it's so interesting how we do a lot of things in our social behavior in our social communities that give status to people. We give them awards. We act deferentially around them. We treat them with respect. We call them out in a public meeting. And those are all ways in which we give status to people for pro-social things that are the basis of power. Right. So we're thereby regulating, again, the behavior geared towards the interest of the group by conferring status, conferring power on people that behave the way that the collective we want them to do. Yeah, exactly. It's stunning how powerful this motive for status and

esteem is, you know, when you think about the world of philanthropy, a lot of people give away a lot of money, right? Right, yeah. To, like, be respected. And that's a good thing in many ways. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Dacker Keltner. We'll be right back. Thanks so much for listening to this show. It means the world to me. I love hearing from you online. I love it when you write to me, even when you have suggestions that might not always agree

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I don't know you're jogging, drive, and bench pressing. We put them all on the Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals page. So please do consider supporting those who support this show. And don't forget, we've got worksheets for many episodes of the show. If you want some of the drills, exercises, and main takeaways talked about during these podcasts, those are all in one easy place. The link to the worksheets is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of our episode with Dacker Keltner.

I wondered why people do that for so long. I'm like, why are rich people then suddenly turning around and organizing all these events and charities and things like that? And I realized, especially if you earn your money in a way that is either not that respectful, and this is not a general statement, but I've noticed that some of the people that I know who are wealthy, but have earned their money doing things like online gambling, they often turn around and they're like, all right, this is an animal charity. We got the veteran charity, and then we got this other kids charity.

And I'm thinking, why are you so obsessed with this? And the reason is they probably feel like crap because everyone goes, that's the guy who, yeah, he's got a nice car, but don't respect him. He made all his money ripping people off with porn sites or online gambling and stuff like that. So they go, but look at all these other nice things I'm doing. And it's okay, all right, here's a little bit of respect. It is. And again, it's this, a lot of people feel cynical about that. But I'm all four forms of altruism and philanthropy that advance the welfare of others, no matter what the motivation. Sure. No, it was just something that I'd noticed now that I, float around in some of those circles. I was wondered, why would you want to give it all away? Or if you want to give it all the way, do it quietly. I mean, what's the difference? No, no, no, no. This has to be a friggin production, okay? We need this to make up for 20 years of investment banking, you know, or whatever it was. And speaking of altruism, what was competitive altruism? You brought that up earlier. Yeah. That was an interesting. Competitive altruism is exactly this dynamic we've

been talking about, Jordan, which is economists started to notice how, you know, from a pure self-interested perspective, you shouldn't really share that much. You shouldn't give away your own resources. And people do it prolifically. You know, you think about all the billionaires who are giving away 50 to 95 percent of their wealth. That doesn't make sense from a rational economic perspective. And so they came up with this idea of competitive altruism, which, as they say, there is this motive of being esteemed by others. And neuroscience studies show like, the people close to me, if they respect me, that's as powerful activating reward circuits in my brain as anything. And so that motive of being respected drives a lot of selfless behavior.

You know, over at UC Berkeley, you look at, you know, there's a philanthropy wall and all the names, and this happens everywhere. Sure. And they love seeing their names being on a little brick just seven feet above where the eye can see without a ladder. That's you up there. Yeah. And this traces back to hunter-gatherer societies where, you know, they're,

actually in most hunter-gatherer cultures, this is before money, before the written words, this is thousands of years ago, they would save food for a long time and they'd have these big festivals. Whoever gave away the most food was kind of the highest status woman or man, had respect from the peers,

a few more sexual opportunities, you know. So status is this powerful equalizer of power. That makes sense, just biologically speaking, right? Look, we want to incentivize saving. Exactly. So how do we do that? We give you status for doing. in it. Yeah. And then what it tells us, you know, and it's a part of what we've been talking about,

which is that if you want power to work well in your society, you really have to esteem the right things, right? You know, and once you start esteeming other things, people stop being generous and you get more rampant. You end up with disincent or poor incentives, misaligned incentives. Right. Yeah, that's right. What about empathy? What does that fall into this whole melting pot? Well, I think it's in a way, you're so right to zero in on it, you know, I think it's the magic ingredient of good power. I was blown away. I was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin team of rivals. And it's about Abraham Lincoln. And Lincoln is rated by most historians as our best president, right? Really? Yeah. I didn't know that. Top three or four, usually top one or two with FDR. First of all, he was a very unlikely president in some sense. He was poor, tall, awkward, funny clothes. So he was,

not supposed to win the Republican nomination. And then he navigated through slavery and the most serious moral issue of our history. And a lot of people have sort of thought about, what was it about Lincoln? It was so, how did he do that? And it really was empathy. And I'll just quote to you, Thurlow Weed, who was this journalist who was actually a strategist for an opponent of Lincoln was like, what is it about this awkward looking tall, poor guy? Why is he doing so well politically? And he said, Lincoln sees all who come to him. He hears all they have to say, and he reads everything that's written to.

And he was a genius. He didn't have email, that's why. Yeah, what would the digital link would have been like? I read almost everything that comes to me. Or you would have had a different kind of email. Right, yeah, yeah. But the point being is,

it's back to what we talked about earlier. Like, he just was engaged and knew where people were coming from. And what we find in our studies is, you know, if you're empathetic, if you know where people are coming from, if you keep track of their emotions, you're going to rise in power wherever you go. But regrettably, feeling powerful kind of diminishes your empathic ability. So that's the paradox of power. So this power paradox that diminishes our ability to have empathy by whatever mechanism, which is detailed in the book, by the way. So not that we don't know it, but it seems less how it happens, more important that it happens in general. Why do we need to transcend that as a society or as a civilization in order to succeed?

Yeah, you know, thanks for asking that question. So the studies of the power paradox, the second part to the equation of like, wow, power leads to these abuses, find that if you give any human being a little bit of power, they eat more of the food in a social group, they are more likely to shoplift. I mean, our research finds people who drive really fancy cars, drive through, you know, pedestrian zones, you know. Guilty. I don't even have a fancy car. I know I've still caught myself doing that. Like, well, if you're going to cross slow, I'm just going to go. Now I'm aware of you, man. Right. And I'll be tracking you. Gossip, man. No need. Reputation already tanked. Yeah. But it gets worse. You know, they are more likely to have sexual affairs, sexual harassment. I don't think it takes a leap of the imagination to say, if you look at a lot of the spectacularly, greedy behavior you see of Enron and people paying themselves tens of millions of dollars or their workers are making nine bucks an hour. And now we know the health costs of that.

I do feel the abuses of power are the central challenge of civilizations. And that's why we have to transcend them. It's so much more severe when you see the data and when you see people dying because of feelings of powerlessness, things that should be maybe not easily corrected, but are definitely solvable with our current level of technology. I agree. in advances. One thing I saw that I couldn't believe in the book was that the group most likely to shoplift was wealthy white people. And I was just like, that's wrong. Come on. You know, there's so many funny stereotypes about the wealthy and the poor. And so we published this paper in 2012 and got a lot of buzz of like high power wealthy people are more likely to behave unethically.

They lie in gambling games. They cheat on, you know, in games. They take stuff. They're was meant for kids. Literally candy that was meant for kids. That's so, it's bad. So then we did this study where we positioned a pedestrian at a California crosswalk. And we just tracked like who obeyed the law. I'd stop. And then who blazed through.

And for anybody who was driving a poor car, Plymouth satellite, they stop. All of them. And then 46% of the people driving the range rovers and the like cut through. And it started getting out there. And people were like, whoa, the wealthy are kind of violating the law. And this is replicated in a lot of places. We started getting all these emails of people, and one came from this guy who's like,

you're not going to believe this. There's a team of medical doctors, and they were interested in shoplifting. Shoplifting costs the U.S. economy $10 to $15 billion. Wow, that's so much. It's a lot. That's crazy.

It's ridiculous. They did a nationally representative sample. So it is like a very... Exhaustive, right? This isn't just like, people in San Francisco are wealthy and white, still more. Yeah.

This is the real thing. And you look at the tables, and they're just, it is, man, like wealthy white people are more likely to shoplift. That's blown away. That is mind-blown. And then you add that to like, but if you're an African-American young guy going into a store, you are going to get checked out. Everyone will assume you are going to. I mean, not that you are going to, but the whole of society would more likely assume that you would be a thief versus Winona Ryder who actually was a thief. Right. A good looking. That's, yes, right. That's crazy.

It is. It is crazy. That is unbelievable. But it makes sense in the context of what we've learned today for sure. Yeah, and you know, I think that's part of the, I think the encouraging message of the power paradox, you know, and you're getting in it by transcending these problematic tendencies, which is we're all vulnerable to this, you know, and I think all of your listeners, they will have a lot of times in their life where they feel like, yeah, I'm on the top of my game, look at me, I'm with my friends, or I've just done well at work. And that's when we're most vulnerable, right, to offending somebody or treating somebody with disrespect or acting unethically is just an important reminder. Is there anything that I have to,

haven't asked you that you want to make sure you bring home for us. You've nailed it. You've covered the entire 20 years of my career. Oh, well, good. In approximately 40 minutes, I haven't checked the clock. But thank you so much. It's been a pleasure, George. What a great conversation.

As usual, I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, here's a preview with a former undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the Gambino crime family in New York for nearly three years, resulting in the arrest and conviction of 35 mobsters. And get this, he's not even Italian. Here's a bite. Jordan, I've done everything. I mean, I have posed as a money launderer.

I've worked as a drug dealer. I have worked as a transporter for drug dealers. I have worked as a warehouse guy. The whole gamut. My career was 24 out of 26 years. It was solely dedicated working undercover. If I wasn't working for the FBI, I would have been investigated by the FBI.

Exactly, yeah. I walk in. I'm in the bar. Now, there's a barmate there. Good looking young lady. She's serving me a chocolate. What would you like? I used to leave my drink for us.

Give me a kettle, one martini, three olives, a glass of water on the side. I finished the drink. The guys come in. I'm going to go. Go in my pocket. Take out the big water money. That knot with the rubber band on it.

Bam, I give her a hundred dollars. You're not a guy who takes out a little leather wallet and he's going through the change or he's doing it. Yeah, can you imagine four guys? gangsters sitting around going, let's split it up. I had the soup. He had to sandwich and french fries. What about the tech? Sometimes we get into bidding work. That goes, hey, your money's no good here. What are you doing? You're embarrassing me over here. What do you mean? You pay the land. Let me get to. Forget about it. You pay for it. If I were to gone in there

and became a guy who had never a penny, never went into his wallet, never picked up a tab, never had a dime, never kicked up money, never gave tribute payments. That'd be on my ass. they throw me out. If you're with the mob, I say, hey, Jordan, you're on record with us. That means we protect you. Nobody could shake you down. We can shake you down. So you're on record with us. For more, including tricks wise guys used to know who's legit and who's not, mob culture and the rules that govern the always upward flow of money, and how Jack became so trusted by the highest levels of the organization that they offered him the chance to become a made man. Check out episode 392 of the Jordan Harbinger show with Jack Garcia.

Interesting stuff, as usual. I've really enjoyed my conversation here with DACA. I've really had no idea that power was related to lifespan. I would never have seen that coming. A lot of surprises in this one. And I do think that, yes, of course, we've all heard absolute power, corrupts absolutely, but it's not really a problem that you think about affecting the entire society. We think about infecting or affecting certain individuals who kind of go unchecked.

but you never really think about it affecting society at whole. Certainly never think about it infecting your psyche in a way that's unhealthy for everyone around you. So certainly a lot to think about here and to apply. I always find these little gems of social psychology. Really, this is kind of like the next frontier of engineering a country that we all want to live in. It really is. Although I do think things can go too far, but now we're diving into politics.

Big thank you to Dacker Keltner, his book The Power Paradox, will be linked in the show notes, links to all that stuff. Always in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Please use our website links if you buy books from us. It does help support the show. Our book list, Jordanharbinger.com slash books is where you can find that. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes, transcripts for the episode in the show notes. We also have a brand new clips channel with cuts that don't make it to the show

or just highlights from the interviews that you can't see anywhere else. Jordan Harbinger.com slash clips is where you can find that channel. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same software systems and tiny habits that I use. That's our six-minute networking course. The course is free. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course.

Dig that well before you get thirsty, folks. Trust me on that one. I've learned that one the hard way, and I also saw it working in action and saving my bacon numerous times, so I can't recommend it enough. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millie O'Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's interested in power, social psychology, the economics of poverty, all that stuff has a place here. Please do share this episode with him. I hope you find something great in every episode of this show. Please do share the show with those you care about.

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