Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is a Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. As regular listeners know, this year's central theme on Deep Background is power, and we've been approaching the question of power from numerous different angles. This week, I want to feature a conversation with one of my contemporaries, a college classmate actually, who has had an intimate understanding of the structure of power long before chronologically most of us even had a whiff of getting anywhere near any of it in the real world. That person is Matthew Barzen, who served as US Ambassador to Sweden from two thousand and nine to two and eleven, and was then the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom, traditionally considered the jewel in the crown of US ambassadorships, for another five years thereafter. What's remarkable about his career is that he had the opportunity to do these jobs starting off when he was still in his thirties, rather than as the capstone to a long and distinguished diplomatic career the way many many ambassador positions operate. Since doing that, Matthew has decided to share some of his ideas around power, and he did so in a new book called The Power of Giving Away Power, a book that offers a different philosophical account of power, viewing the question very much more from how elites can broaden the base of power than from the countervailing perspective of how elites can constrain and control power. And in an era where populism is seen by many powerful people as a fundamental threat, Matthew instead sees the engagement of broad publics into the possibilities of deploying power as a necessary and positive development, even as he too worries about the kind of populism that comes with bad values or bad beliefs. Having read his book, I thought it would provide a wonderful springboard for a different kind of conversation about power from somebody who knows how to deploy it, but who fundamentally believes that it needs to be reshaped. Matthew, thank you so much for joining me to talk about many things, among which is your terrific new book, The Power of Giving Away Power, with the subtitle how the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go, And as a lead in I want to ask you about your very unusual path to leadership experience at an extremely young age. You came out of the business world, and then when you were still in your thirties, you became an ambassador, first to Sweden and then to the UK. So big ambassadorships. How did all that happen? Well, first of all, thanks for having me, Noah, I mean, I didn't plan it. I was, as you mentioned, right out of college. I got involved in what was then the very unglamorous world of internet companies. We didn't call them dot com companies, it was just the Internet. I did that for a while and then a distant cousin of mine announced that he was running for president, John Kerry. This is two thousand and three, and so I had interned for him when I was in college when he was a senator, and I said, how can I help? And what you and the listeners know is in our system. If you ask how you can help, ninety nine times out of one hundred, the answers help us raise money. And my heart sank. Because I was raised in New England. We have that in common, and I was raised to never talk about money, politics or religion, and I knew that fundraising would require at least two of those and probably three and I sucked at it, which is a longer story. Then I got better at it, and then Senator Obama asked me if I would help out on his campaign, and so that's how I got into his world. And then when he won, he asked me if I would serve as ambassador, and candidly I thought, oh, that's what like old people do. It's just like a giant cocktail party, like, no thanks. But then I learned more about it. There's a great Republican friend of mine who knew a lot about it, and I talked to him and he described what the role of diplomacy was all about, and then I got intrigued and said an enthusiastic yes. So power is one of our central themes on Deep Background, especially this year, and your book is about power. But as you tell that story, it strikes me that you got into a position of genuine power to the extent ambassadorships are that. And we can talk a little more at some point about what kinds of power it's possible to wield in those jobs, because I think you did that quite interestingly and innovatively. But the way you got there was through a different form of power. Which, as you said, is the power of fundraising in our system. Yeah. So if you started off, as you said, not so good at it, not a naturally talented fundraiser, what was the trick that is one way of deploying a certain kind of power in our system. Yeah. The reason I was so bad at it for quite a long time was I sort of thought it was about me. So I would have these awkward usually emails in my case, of like, hey, sorry to bother you, I've set a goal of trying to raise X amount of money and would you help me? And anyway, that is not a very effective way of doing it because it puts yourself at the center of the discussion. And I was fortunate enough to be seated next to this amazing woman named Lynn Twist, and she had just written a book back in two thousand and three called The Soul of Money, and she's a professional fundraiser. And I had raised hundreds of millions of dollars. So in desperation, I said, can you please, I mean, I will buy your book, I will read it, but I need help right now. And she said, sure, do you have a pen? And I did, so I picked up a pen and I wrote it down on a napkin, and it was just three things. Number One, money is like water. When it flows, it heals, and when it's stagnant, it kills. Number two, Only ask people for money who want to use their money for something greater than themselves. Number three ask everyone. And of course the trick there which I fell for, was, wait a minute, how can I ask everyone and only ask people who want to use money? And she basically said, look, everybody wants to use money for something greater than themselves. It may not be politics, or it may not be your political party or your candidate, but it's something. And so if you ask them to do that, you are helping them help their money flow. And so when they say no to you, they might say yes to something else, and so you're doing them a service. And that, for me, really clicked, and I thought, okay, because I got plenty of notes, but they didn't hurt, they weren't personally wounding. They were just I felt like I was helping the money and the energy flow, and that for me, did it Does that make any sense? Yeah? It makes a lot of sense. It leaves out the sales pitch part, and it makes me interested to hear whether in her viewer in your own experience, it doesn't matter so much whether you're selling John Kerry or selling in Barack Obama. As an outsider to fundraising, I would think it would make a big difference that one was more effective and inspiring than the other, but maybe that's just naive totally. And fast forwarding when I started to work on the Obama's first campaign, and I was doing well, and we sort of pioneered the first low dollar fundraiser, and then that caught on and we took that out across the country as a model. I was asked with a bunch of other volunteers like me to teach fundraising training, which we pretentiously called Obama University. Subsequent presidents have given presidential name and university a strange name, so this had none of that go on. But anyway, so we'd gather I think one hundred at a time volunteers from all around the country and if you ask them, which we did, what do you want to get out of today? Is it was an all day session what do you want to get out of today? And everyone wanted the exact same thing, which is, please arm me with talking points to go back to Austin or Boston or wherever and win the argument. And the realization that I'd come to learn from Lynd Twist and from Obama himself is And we did it as a gimmick. We'd say, okay, a quick show of hands, how many people here like to lose an argument? And nobody ever raises their hand. So I don't think we're in the argument winning business. It's just sort of bad math. So you don't need to win an argument. You don't even have to really make a pitch if you just ask people what their hopes and fears are, really listen and connect it back to, in this case, what Obama also is fearful of and hopeful for. That's pretty much just the job that's already I think a powerful takeaway to something that is not immediately available to the ordinary person who reads the news and reads about fundraising. I don't think we think about what the back room looks like where people are trying to figure out the right way to do it. That's fascinating. So Lynch Twist gave you her book in three bullet points to put on a napkin. I'm curious to see what your napkin worthy. Three bullet points are for your own book, the power of giving away power, because it's a quirky and fascinating book, and I use quirky in the most positive sense at the time. Thank you. What would you say if someone said what you know, I'm saying next you at a dinner party and I promise to buy your book? But what are the bullet points that I can write down right here? All right? This is fun putting me on the spot. Noah, okay, I would This is inspired by another amazing woman who I didn't get to meet because she died in nineteen thirty three, and she is the matron saint of my book. And her name is Mary Parker Follet eighteen sixty eight to nineteen thirty three. I encourage listeners to look her up on Wikipedia, which is how I found her. I had a rule about I'm going to answer your question. I'm stalling for time now. You also have a terrific account about Wikipedia in the book, so you're read it's all the amanicy consistent. Well, but I had a rule in the book as I was writing it and rewriting it and rewriting it, and I had this little informal rule up on my white board of only that could only quote three dead white guys per chapter. I loved them. I mean, one day I'll be one. But I just figured there ought to be a limit. So I had hit the limit in this particular chapter, and I wanted to quote Peter Drucker, who is I don't know the twentieth centuries probably pre eminent sort of the guru's guru as it relates to for profit, nonprofit government leadership and management. So he had the perfect thing and I wanted to quote, but I couldn't. So I start digging around in Wikipedia about Peter Drucker, and I learned that lo and behold, he had a guru, the guru's guru's guru, if you will, And her name was Mary Parker fall It, and she's this amazing story and she studied power and she studied leadership, and I read everything she wrote and she rocked my world, and so inspired by her, I will try to sum it up. And she basically said, all of our democracy and all of our business, some of our most intractable problems can actually are going to be dealt with one way or another. With a bunch of people sitting around a table with each other, and she said, there are four possible outcomes of a meeting, but only one of them is worthwhile. Now, Outcome number one is you go in the meeting and you try to win. She's like, well, that's no good because someone else is going to lose. Option number two is you go in and you just acquiesce, like Joe is sort of a blowhard, just let him have his way. It's easier that way. That's no good because you haven't brought your contribution to the meeting. Outcome number three also bad, but very tempting, and we're usually told it's good is compromise, but her point was, no, look, if you compromise, that's just little mini victories and mini defeats. It's not something to be sought out. The only reason she thought you should get together for a meeting at all is if you could do the fourth thing, which was the only good outcome, which was creating something with your fellow meeting members. And it's a pretty high standard, but we all been in those meetings where it really works. And she said, the magic that happens if you make something together in a meeting, you are fully all of you is in that thing. You've made it's in you. You're not diminished for it, you're enriched by it, and you haven't lost yourself in it. And so if we take Mary follows I think very wise points. I would if I had to sum up the whole book in a napkin worthy three bullet points, it would be expect to be needed, expect to need others, and expect to be changed. And that final one's important because in today's lingo we say, and I think appropriately and I think Mary Follot would love that we say it, bring your truth to the meeting, absolutely, because no one else can bring your truth. So you have a deep obligation to bring your truth. But if that's all you do, that's not enough. You need to through this process of co creation. You ought to leave that meeting a different person than you came in. That's the reciprocal obligation. If we take Mary follow at her word, that's the expect to be changed. Part. That leads me to a question that I myself have been struggling with, and I think is in the backdrop to a lot of the debates about power that we've been having on deep background and also in our society and more broadly, it's very appealing to say with Mary Parker followed and with you, we should exercise what you quote her is calling power with, not power over. And we shouldn't go into the meeting, whether it's a fundraising meeting or a business meeting or any kind of meeting, trying to win, because, as you said, if you win, then somebody else loses. Those are very powerful insights. They seem right. Then you look at a country like the United States today, which is so found lyad divided and polarized, and you don't have to claim that it's unpresent. I actually don't think it is unprecedented, but it's bad in relative terms to the research past. And you say, well, you know, leaders of the United States Democratic Party don't just try to win by having fifty votes in the Senate plus the vice president to break the tie. Work with right, let's exercise power with to which miss McConnell says, yeah, no, no, thank you. I don't want to exercise power with you. I mean Barack Obama tried to do this on occasion. Sometimes he got away with it, more often he didn't. I mean, I love the idea, and I do think that under other circumstances. You know, Joe Biden would have been a politician who loved that idea and would have said yeah. You know, when he was in the Senate, he had a reputation for trying to be a centrist, for be friends with people on both sides of the aisle. It all sounds almost hopelessly romantic and naive seen from a distance of twenty or twenty five years, but that is how he operated through much of career. But it's just not doesn't seem to be doable now. So I guess I'm well in a place of saying philosophically, I totally agree with you. I mean, I love this idea. I love the idea that you know the key to power is to not think that you have all the power. I just don't know in practical terms how one can I suderstand that. Look, I do think you've picked. I mean, our two party system in Washington right now looks pretty tough if you come at it through some of the other wonderful topics you've covered on this podcast. Take NC DOUBLEA athletics. Right We're almost no one involved thinks the current system is all that great. Right in Louisville, where we live. We don't have a pro team, so we're obsessed with University of Kentucky, University of Louisville. We take it really seriously. If you've got all the fans in a room, they may split red blue cards, cats, but not on political terms. They love the games that are played and they don't think the current thing is working all that well. So you can imagine that group systematically trying to work through together finding a better way to do that. I mean, would you agree that seems we aren't hopelessly in partisan trench warfare as it relates to college athletics. Yeah, I think that it's it's definitely plausible that reasonable people, without getting super angry at each other, could try to work out a better way to do NCAA sports. Yeah, I'm willing to accept that. I'll accept the preface, thank you well, so then and so the act of working through it, I don't think anyone. Very many people don't think they have the right answer coming into that meeting or series of meetings. They are open to and they'll learn about the trade offs and like, oh, I didn't realize if you just paid everyone, maybe women's athletics would lose all their money in three weeks, and oh gosh, no, I didn't. That undetended consequence isn't one I'm willing to live with. Right, and you start doing that kind of work, I think we're get tricky. And where I think the point of this book could be misunderstood is and I'll stay with sports for a second. There's a bathroom somewhere on ninety five between New York and Boston where in the bathroom someone had scribbled Yankees suck, and then someone scribbled it out and wrote Red Sox suck, and then someone wrote Yankee suck. Right, So there's like almost like eighteen inches worth of this scribbling back and forth. And then sust have been new Avan, Connecticut based on many factors, don't you think exactly. So then someone comes into the bathroom and circles the whole back and forth, and then a big green sharpie writes and we all love baseball. Now you're kind of like, oh, like that feels good for like a second. But if if the people trying to find a way through these intractable problems sound like mister green sharpie, and I didn't go back by the way but you know there's continued commentary on where mister Greensharpie could put his pen. Oh yes, it's just annoying. It's this sort of group hug, feel good crap that people will just be like, well, that's not a real life thing. So what I would say is somewhere between Red Sox sock Yankee sock sort of trench warfare going nowhere and hey, big group hug, we all love baseball, there exists and in between space where I think we should put a lot of time and effort, and you are on this podcast, which is to stick with baseball. Hey, should we eliminate the designated hitter in the American League? Now you can imagine Red Sox and Yankees fans being super shortsighted and being like, well, we have a really good DH now, so that sucks. But you could also imagine them being like, I am willing to have this discussion about a game we love, but bring all your differences in disagreements and argue and haggle about a game you love and the habits of doing that. I think we've lost and we need to get better at and we could get better at them outside of high stakes Washington politics, because there's so many other things we could get to work at, and if we got good at doing those, maybe we could or our children maybe could get better at solving some of these other ones. I want to ask you partly about how we lost that capacity, and I want to use as a concrete example something you're in a position to know a huge amount about, which is the years where you were US Ambassador to the United Kingdom were years that the Brexit specter gradually went from being a pie in the sky idea to something actually plausible, and then, ultimately, to a lot of people's shock, it actually happened. And you had the front row seat to all of that. So I wonder what you would reflect on in observing that whole process and in the course of your pretty significant amount of time there. I would argue that they that's what happened to them. They lost the ability to have the green sharpie, and they collapsed into our red Sox versus Yankees or remain versus Leave. What do you think happened there at a deep cultural level. I think the honest and short answer is I don't know what I did learn, As you said, being right there in the middle of all that, I remember why. I was at some fancy black tie dinner in the city of London. I was seated next to a gentleman. He was quick to tell me early that he had written something like a five hundred thousand pound check to the Remain campaign, right, so this is the group against Brexit, and I thought, okay, you know, good to know. And then we chatted about other things, and then I'm looking up at the in this big vaulted ceiling room. There was some flag I didn't really recognize. It may have been like the City of London flag or something. Then there was the English cross, the English flag, and then there was the Union jack and I just said to him offhandedly, I was like, hey, you know, twenty years from now, could you picture the European flag as a fourth flag up there? And you would think I said something incredibly insulting to him. And he turned to me and he's like, over my dead body, you know, gripping his butter knife. And so here's a guy funding Remain and he hates the idea of the European Union flag ever showing up in this place that he loves. And I thought, oh, okay, that's weird. So there wasn't a whole lot of love for the European Union by the people who were That's not true of everybody. Some people really got into it, but I thought that was a window into Hey, that's a tough thing to prevail. So in that interpretation, which is a fascinating one, and I like stories about how you say something in England and then people look at you like you've insulted him, because that seemed to be every conversation I had an entire time that I lived in English, although to be fair, half the time they were also insulting me and they didn't know they were doing it. But so I love the story. It sounds like in your interpretation, you're suggesting that the deep national sentiment that people feel in England and maybe in Britain as well more broadly, is just so powerful that even people who rationally had an argument for remaining in the European Union at some deep level didn't care about it as much as the people who really wanted out. Well that that still begs the question, yeah, could go ahead. So the rough runt of the way it was worded was just sort of thumbs up, thumbs down in out it was a binary choice. If you gave people, you know, when you do HR surveys, it's like strongly agree, somewhat agree, neutral, There's a five check marks you could do across the spectrum. My sense is if you had asked, I have nothing to back this up. This is a hunch. Hey, do you want to be totally fully in the EU like France and Germany are? That's one out of five? Do you want totally out? I'd never want anything to do with this thing is a five. I think you would have ended up with people sort of I don't know in the two and a half to three kind of like I want to be in, but I don't want to be in their currency, and I don't want to have the same customs union. Oh, which by the way, is where the UK was as it relates to the European Union beforehand. But a lot of that subtlety gets lost in out. Yes, no kind of world, which this mindset, which I call the pyramid mindset, which I think is really I mean, the obvious way is sort of a top down view of the world, but by the way, a bottom up view of the world is the exact same shape, and I would argue no, better. It's the same pyramid shape where we get trapped into thinking it's wind lose up, down in out, which is how that referend of battle played out. And there's an alternative way of looking at ourselves in the world around us that isn't a pyramid. And these amazing leaders we talked about some of them, there are lots of others, many of whom we've never heard of, who've built these unbelievably consequential organizations and innovations that we benefit from every day. They chose to not look at the world like a pyramid, and they didn't think, oh, everyone on their own. They chose to look at the world in what I call a constellation, which is, yes, be yourself. You're a star, and you see other people as stars, and you try to form new and interesting connections between them to make something useful and something you could never do on your own. Too often are default setting is looking at the world like a pyramid, and we keep getting into those binary traps. One of the things I really liked about the book is that you didn't fall into the trap that sometimes people do in leadership books, where they just give you a series of case studies of quote unquote great leaders and say do it like this person, And so it was a relief that you didn't write it that way. That said, I did finish the book wondering who are your models of people who you think of as having governed either businesses or countries or other kinds of nonprofit entities through this model of giving away power or doing the power with thing. I mean, it would be great to say Barack Obama, whom we both admire tremendously, but I sort of think his biggest wins came when he didn't do that. You know, Obamacare being a great example of not open without complexity. But you know, the real transformative piece of legislation, to my mind of his presidency not was saying what this or being word did to it subsequently and it really was not ultimately a compromise. It's a great point. I mean, Anne Marie Slaughter wrote this great essay I think in Foreign Policy or Foreign Affairs, and I'm paraphrasing here, but she basically starts off because I would add the Paris Climate Accord, despite what happened to it afterwards, I think it's wonderful she said. As an internationally trained lawyer, and this and this. I ought to hate the deal, and I ought to hate it because it isn't binding. It isn't And she does the whole litany of what were the criticisms of it leading up to it and after it, and she said, but for all those reasons, of all those things, it isn't. I think it is wonderful and really helpful because it is not binding, it is open ended. It allows people blah blah blah. And I think that is an interesting test case. And I am no expert on climate or the Climate Deal, but that we could get out then get back in. Other people could step up for us when the previous administration didn't want to. All of that is a kind of weird in a good sense and flexible way of dealing with something that is voluntary. People set their own targets and it may go off the rails, but it could lead to something really beautiful. I like that. So Anne Marie Slaughter, she's someone I admired tremendously. You know, she's done things in academia where she was a professor in a dean. She's been in government as director of Policy Penny in the State Department. Now she runs a think tank. I mean, there's sort of no cool thing in the world of public life that she hasn't done. And she's argued, really in a series of books over the course of almost twenty years about the value in the international community of networks of people who are often like minded, who come from different countries, and cooperation among those people. Now, one of the criticisms of her work that's come both from the left and from the right, and she is nothing if not the mainstream of American foreign policy thinking. I think I always think it's good if people are criticizing you on both sides. But one of the criticisms that her work has encountered is that the people who are doing the dance are actually an elite, and that they're an elite, they exercises a lot of power that because it's not centered in one person, most people don't really notice, and which is therefore in some sense less responsive to big majorities of people. Yeah, that made me want to ask you about the sort of overall picture you have of the power of giving away power. It's very consistent with Anrie's idea of shared power. As you said, a lot of decisions are made by the people in the room, and I wonder, how do you think about that? I mean, it could be very down to the grassroots. But you know, fifty million or three hundred and thirty million people will have trouble all sitting in a room together. They're always representatives of that group. We're sitting in a room. Yeah. You said two phrases that I think often come up in this context that are important to clarify and redefine maybe. And one is I had this discussion with Anne Marie. She came to London and she said, oh, we need more bottoms up. And I made the point to her I made earlier, like bottoms up is no better. If you think of yourself or you think of other people, is at the bottom, you are doomed. Nothing good is going to come from thinking of people at the bottom. You'll be condescending or you'll feel condescended too, depending on where you've put yourself in that equation. It's an awful equation, and you do not have to look at yourself or others. Is at the bottom of a pyramid. You could think of yourself as stars in a constellation, for example. The other is the word sharing power, which is what you said sounds right. It is an exercise in dividing, implicit and sharing powers. There's only so much and so we'll divvy it up. And it's like no, no, no, you're done once you're in that limited mindset. The great leaders, these constellation leaders. Power is not something to be obviously lorded over others. Okay, we all got that mumbo. It's not something to be hoarded to yourself as an isolated individual. It is not something to be divvied up and shared. It is something to be made with and through other people, made and multiplied over and over again. And that's where the magic lives. And it's where the phrase grassroots is a real problem because it's just kind of code for bottom up. Two. We'll be right back. So I like that, and I buy it, and I also take it that what you're saying is that power needs to be conceptualized as not zero sum. It has to be positive sum. You can construct power in ways that are inclusive because you're not starting with a pie and then dividing up the pie. Yeah, and I think that's very very powerful. Do you think there are no zones of power though that would genuinely truly qualify as zero sum aren't there some situations, Yeah, you know. I mean if you think about the amassing of troops and resources and the logistics of D Day, I bet that was very pyramid like and top down and work backwards from a set date, all these sorts of things I warn against in the book, like it was helpful for that. But what I love is Churchill made the point at the time like that is to win this victory and then a different kind of hard work begins where that mindset isn't at all helpful. And that's what he called for the forming of special relationships, which sounds really touchy feely except at Winston Churchill saying it, and he's like, no, no, millions of them right between farmers and farmers, and like that's where the energy and this new kind of power can be created and multiplied. I don't know if we're allowed to if can I ask you a question because this is I didn't write this in the book, but I want to. It's what I've been struggling with. In the book, I talk about the fact that win win is a losing formula because it sounds good at first. It's like win win, but you can't sort of talk about winning without implying losing. And it comes with all these it comes with that pyramid mindset that isn't helpful, I think, to a whole bunch of intractable problems we're trying to work through together. So I went back to that famous Adam Smith quote, we do not rely on the benevolence of the butcher, the baker, the brewer for our dinner, right, And I think, and then you read on a little bit, and he is understandably, I think, skeptical of sort of the do good or instinct that it is particularly important for progressives to listen to that critique of he had seen so many things not happen or happen badly relying on benevolence alone. My question you, it's like, okay, so it seems like we've run with it over since seventeen seventy six till now we've sort of run with that. Okay, you don't rely on the benevolence, So then you do sort of some version of enlightened self interest or whatever. That's what is going on between the butcher, the baker, the brewer and you, who's an implied other stick figure in Adam Smith's rendition, which doesn't seem right either. And I guess my questions like, what would you describe as the relationship? What does the butcher think of the baker? What does the baker think of the brewer? How does the brewer think of you? What is going on between all those people that begin with B. One of the answers that emilily comes into my mind is inspired by the historian M. A. Rothschild's writing about Adam Smith and what she I'm going to grossly oversimplify this, but one thing that she shows is that you know some of this famous for Wealth of Nations, which is where the quote you're introducing comes from. But he also wrote this incredibly influential at the time book called a Theory of Moral Sentiments, and he was actually really deeply interested in exactly the question that you're asking. What are the we call them affects or sentiments that shape the moral life. And now this is me riffing on Emma, but I think it's sort of interesting that in Smith's world people still believed that being in commerce with other people made you like them more, made you feel more connected to them, because relative too, I live in my little hamlet, I never leave I grow all my own food, I make everything that I make for myself, and I therefore never meet the people on the other side of the hill. And when I meet them, I don't like them, because if I meet them, it's probably because they're trying to steal something from me. Relative to that world, a world where I go over the hill with my goods and the people on the other side of the hill come up to the top of the hill with their goods and we trade, is a world where we have more human contact, more engagement. And I think in the seventeen hundreds of people believed with Smith that the way I would think about those other people with whom I was trading on a daily basis is that I liked them because I got to know them a little. Yeah, there we go. Then we got, you know, fifty years later by the time Marx is looking at the same economic situation. By then, big time capitalism has come into existence, and we've had the Industrial Revolution much beyond what Smith could just glimpse the beginnings of. And then at that point Marx is starting to say, look, economic relationships are alienated. It's no longer the case that I like you, and so now we sort of imagine that in the small town everyone knew each other and liked each other. But once you go to the big city and you have to buy and sell in a big store, or you work in a factory, you become alienated from the other people, alienated from your labor. And I guess my own view is that in the perfect world, all of our interactions would enable us to feel a little more human connection, a little more human contact. And you know, the Internet shows you how complicated this is. Right, The Internet both had a promise of nanimity and a danger of alienation, and especially with the rise of social media, it produces at least the perception of intimacy, and you can actually get to know people on the Internet whom you wouldn't know otherwise. I look at my kids world. They have a much broader acquaintanceship than I did at their age, because I basically knew people whom I had met. Yeah, and they know a lot of people well whom they've never they've met them, but they haven't met them in person. So I guess, to me, this is the sort of thing that's it's always both elements are going to be there. We're going to have to interact with you with one another, knowing that we have something to gain, that there's something kind of quote unquote purely economic about it. But we also need to have some sense of human connection and if we don't, we are screwed. Well, thank you, and that is very helpful. As you were saying that, I was thinking often I think our debate is the individual or like big groups of people, and what I think Mary fall it and what we're talking about is small groups of people sitting around a table together, something as mundane as your staff meeting on Monday. That is certainly where Mary Follett said, that's where a lot of this work can happen, because in a crowd you can be lost. You're not lost in a group. You are more you in a group. You can only really know yourself by bumping into working through with other people around you and figuring out ways to get people around a table, and not to say things that like what unites us is greater than what divides us, which is another one of these things that everyone nodds their head. I certainly do when people say it, because you're supposed to nod your head to it. But I don't think it's true. And I think all the energy lies indifference. That's where the magic, That's where all the energy lives. So let's not be afraid of it or sweep it under the carpet. Let's deal with it. We'll be right back, Matthew. I want to thank you for your service to the country, for a fascinating and challenging book, and for a really great conversation about power and how we can rethink it in more productive ways going forward. Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for this podcast. And you're hitting on crypto we didn't talk about, but all the topics you're going through on this podcast are the things I'm eager to learn much more about. So I'm a big listener and fan too. Thank you. Thanks him. Speaking to Matthew about the power of giving away power, I was really struck by the paradox that lies at the heart of it. On one hand, Matthew is a strong advocate of the idea that we need to recognize our diversity and our difference in order for power to mean anything, and that instinct lies at the heart of his idea that we need to diffuse power and spread it out to many different people in order for it to function, and indeed that doing so will enhance the power and authority of the legitimate democratic institutions that do so. That insight seems to be correct, and it is, after all, the basic insight on which all democracy is built. Democracy is, after all, the very idea that collective rules should take place collectively rather than from the dominant center. Yet, at the same time, as Matthew acknowledges and indeed points out, in a world where we are tremendously diverse, and where power is sent out to many, many different people, there is a real risk that our divisions will become so significant that we will no longer be able to make collective decisions, and a glance at the US political system over the last five or six years suggests that we may actually be in such a period. Indeed, in other historical moments, political division might have given way to common feeling when we face something like the COVID pandemic, But in our profoundly politicized era, it seems as though even existential threat to our lives is not enough to pull us together. As we've come to understand and construe the pandemic in politicized terms and in polarized terms, making it harder and harder for polarization to go away. In this conversation, I don't think that either Matthew or I solved this paradox, and perhaps it's a paradox that can't be perfectly solved. Like Matthew, I have a lot of faith in our capacities to pull together as a country eventually. Yet that said, I don't have a simple solution to how we get there, other than living through the realities of our divisions and trying to slowly and gently make our way back towards the middle. I think that's the kind of aspiration that Matthew has, and to me, it makes his political vision immensely attractive and interesting, and it makes him a person who's worth watching going forward, not just for the ways he's deployed power in the PAS, but for the takeaways and lessons that it's led him to reach. Until the next time I speak to you here on Deep Background, breathe deep, think deep thoughts, and have some fun. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is ben Toalliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane. Mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin, thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column from Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com Slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original st later podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you like what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is a Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. As regular listeners know, this year's central theme on Deep Background is power, and we've been approaching the question of power from numerous different angles. This week, I want to feature a conversation with one of my contemporaries, a college classmate actually, who has had an intimate understanding of the structure of power long before chronologically most of us even had a whiff of getting anywhere near any of it in the real world. That person is Matthew Barzen, who served as US Ambassador to Sweden from two thousand and nine to two and eleven, and was then the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom, traditionally considered the jewel in the crown of US ambassadorships, for another five years thereafter. What's remarkable about his career is that he had the opportunity to do these jobs starting off when he was still in his thirties, rather than as the capstone to a long and distinguished diplomatic career the way many many ambassador positions operate. Since doing that, Matthew has decided to share some of his ideas around power, and he did so in a new book called The Power of Giving Away Power, a book that offers a different philosophical account of power, viewing the question very much more from how elites can broaden the base of power than from the countervailing perspective of how elites can constrain and control power. And in an era where populism is seen by many powerful people as a fundamental threat, Matthew instead sees the engagement of broad publics into the possibilities of deploying power as a necessary and positive development, even as he too worries about the kind of populism that comes with bad values or bad beliefs. Having read his book, I thought it would provide a wonderful springboard for a different kind of conversation about power from somebody who knows how to deploy it, but who fundamentally believes that it needs to be reshaped. Matthew, thank you so much for joining me to talk about many things, among which is your terrific new book, The Power of Giving Away Power, with the subtitle how the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go, And as a lead in I want to ask you about your very unusual path to leadership experience at an extremely young age. You came out of the business world, and then when you were still in your thirties, you became an ambassador, first to Sweden and then to the UK. So big ambassadorships. How did all that happen? Well, first of all, thanks for having me, Noah, I mean, I didn't plan it. I was, as you mentioned, right out of college. I got involved in what was then the very unglamorous world of internet companies. We didn't call them dot com companies, it was just the Internet. I did that for a while and then a distant cousin of mine announced that he was running for president, John Kerry. This is two thousand and three, and so I had interned for him when I was in college when he was a senator, and I said, how can I help? And what you and the listeners know is in our system. If you ask how you can help, ninety nine times out of one hundred, the answers help us raise money. And my heart sank. Because I was raised in New England. We have that in common, and I was raised to never talk about money, politics or religion, and I knew that fundraising would require at least two of those and probably three and I sucked at it, which is a longer story. Then I got better at it, and then Senator Obama asked me if I would help out on his campaign, and so that's how I got into his world. And then when he won, he asked me if I would serve as ambassador, and candidly I thought, oh, that's what like old people do. It's just like a giant cocktail party, like, no thanks. But then I learned more about it. There's a great Republican friend of mine who knew a lot about it, and I talked to him and he described what the role of diplomacy was all about, and then I got intrigued and said an enthusiastic yes. So power is one of our central themes on Deep Background, especially this year, and your book is about power. But as you tell that story, it strikes me that you got into a position of genuine power to the extent ambassadorships are that. And we can talk a little more at some point about what kinds of power it's possible to wield in those jobs, because I think you did that quite interestingly and innovatively. But the way you got there was through a different form of power. Which, as you said, is the power of fundraising in our system. Yeah. So if you started off, as you said, not so good at it, not a naturally talented fundraiser, what was the trick that is one way of deploying a certain kind of power in our system. Yeah. The reason I was so bad at it for quite a long time was I sort of thought it was about me. So I would have these awkward usually emails in my case, of like, hey, sorry to bother you, I've set a goal of trying to raise X amount of money and would you help me? And anyway, that is not a very effective way of doing it because it puts yourself at the center of the discussion. And I was fortunate enough to be seated next to this amazing woman named Lynn Twist, and she had just written a book back in two thousand and three called The Soul of Money, and she's a professional fundraiser. And I had raised hundreds of millions of dollars. So in desperation, I said, can you please, I mean, I will buy your book, I will read it, but I need help right now. And she said, sure, do you have a pen? And I did, so I picked up a pen and I wrote it down on a napkin, and it was just three things. Number One, money is like water. When it flows, it heals, and when it's stagnant, it kills. Number two, Only ask people for money who want to use their money for something greater than themselves. Number three ask everyone. And of course the trick there which I fell for, was, wait a minute, how can I ask everyone and only ask people who want to use money? And she basically said, look, everybody wants to use money for something greater than themselves. It may not be politics, or it may not be your political party or your candidate, but it's something. And so if you ask them to do that, you are helping them help their money flow. And so when they say no to you, they might say yes to something else, and so you're doing them a service. And that, for me, really clicked, and I thought, okay, because I got plenty of notes, but they didn't hurt, they weren't personally wounding. They were just I felt like I was helping the money and the energy flow, and that for me, did it Does that make any sense? Yeah? It makes a lot of sense. It leaves out the sales pitch part, and it makes me interested to hear whether in her viewer in your own experience, it doesn't matter so much whether you're selling John Kerry or selling in Barack Obama. As an outsider to fundraising, I would think it would make a big difference that one was more effective and inspiring than the other, but maybe that's just naive totally. And fast forwarding when I started to work on the Obama's first campaign, and I was doing well, and we sort of pioneered the first low dollar fundraiser, and then that caught on and we took that out across the country as a model. I was asked with a bunch of other volunteers like me to teach fundraising training, which we pretentiously called Obama University. Subsequent presidents have given presidential name and university a strange name, so this had none of that go on. But anyway, so we'd gather I think one hundred at a time volunteers from all around the country and if you ask them, which we did, what do you want to get out of today? Is it was an all day session what do you want to get out of today? And everyone wanted the exact same thing, which is, please arm me with talking points to go back to Austin or Boston or wherever and win the argument. And the realization that I'd come to learn from Lynd Twist and from Obama himself is And we did it as a gimmick. We'd say, okay, a quick show of hands, how many people here like to lose an argument? And nobody ever raises their hand. So I don't think we're in the argument winning business. It's just sort of bad math. So you don't need to win an argument. You don't even have to really make a pitch if you just ask people what their hopes and fears are, really listen and connect it back to, in this case, what Obama also is fearful of and hopeful for. That's pretty much just the job that's already I think a powerful takeaway to something that is not immediately available to the ordinary person who reads the news and reads about fundraising. I don't think we think about what the back room looks like where people are trying to figure out the right way to do it. That's fascinating. So Lynch Twist gave you her book in three bullet points to put on a napkin. I'm curious to see what your napkin worthy. Three bullet points are for your own book, the power of giving away power, because it's a quirky and fascinating book, and I use quirky in the most positive sense at the time. Thank you. What would you say if someone said what you know, I'm saying next you at a dinner party and I promise to buy your book? But what are the bullet points that I can write down right here? All right? This is fun putting me on the spot. Noah, okay, I would This is inspired by another amazing woman who I didn't get to meet because she died in nineteen thirty three, and she is the matron saint of my book. And her name is Mary Parker Follet eighteen sixty eight to nineteen thirty three. I encourage listeners to look her up on Wikipedia, which is how I found her. I had a rule about I'm going to answer your question. I'm stalling for time now. You also have a terrific account about Wikipedia in the book, so you're read it's all the amanicy consistent. Well, but I had a rule in the book as I was writing it and rewriting it and rewriting it, and I had this little informal rule up on my white board of only that could only quote three dead white guys per chapter. I loved them. I mean, one day I'll be one. But I just figured there ought to be a limit. So I had hit the limit in this particular chapter, and I wanted to quote Peter Drucker, who is I don't know the twentieth centuries probably pre eminent sort of the guru's guru as it relates to for profit, nonprofit government leadership and management. So he had the perfect thing and I wanted to quote, but I couldn't. So I start digging around in Wikipedia about Peter Drucker, and I learned that lo and behold, he had a guru, the guru's guru's guru, if you will, And her name was Mary Parker fall It, and she's this amazing story and she studied power and she studied leadership, and I read everything she wrote and she rocked my world, and so inspired by her, I will try to sum it up. And she basically said, all of our democracy and all of our business, some of our most intractable problems can actually are going to be dealt with one way or another. With a bunch of people sitting around a table with each other, and she said, there are four possible outcomes of a meeting, but only one of them is worthwhile. Now, Outcome number one is you go in the meeting and you try to win. She's like, well, that's no good because someone else is going to lose. Option number two is you go in and you just acquiesce, like Joe is sort of a blowhard, just let him have his way. It's easier that way. That's no good because you haven't brought your contribution to the meeting. Outcome number three also bad, but very tempting, and we're usually told it's good is compromise, but her point was, no, look, if you compromise, that's just little mini victories and mini defeats. It's not something to be sought out. The only reason she thought you should get together for a meeting at all is if you could do the fourth thing, which was the only good outcome, which was creating something with your fellow meeting members. And it's a pretty high standard, but we all been in those meetings where it really works. And she said, the magic that happens if you make something together in a meeting, you are fully all of you is in that thing. You've made it's in you. You're not diminished for it, you're enriched by it, and you haven't lost yourself in it. And so if we take Mary follows I think very wise points. I would if I had to sum up the whole book in a napkin worthy three bullet points, it would be expect to be needed, expect to need others, and expect to be changed. And that final one's important because in today's lingo we say, and I think appropriately and I think Mary Follot would love that we say it, bring your truth to the meeting, absolutely, because no one else can bring your truth. So you have a deep obligation to bring your truth. But if that's all you do, that's not enough. You need to through this process of co creation. You ought to leave that meeting a different person than you came in. That's the reciprocal obligation. If we take Mary follow at her word, that's the expect to be changed. Part. That leads me to a question that I myself have been struggling with, and I think is in the backdrop to a lot of the debates about power that we've been having on deep background and also in our society and more broadly, it's very appealing to say with Mary Parker followed and with you, we should exercise what you quote her is calling power with, not power over. And we shouldn't go into the meeting, whether it's a fundraising meeting or a business meeting or any kind of meeting, trying to win, because, as you said, if you win, then somebody else loses. Those are very powerful insights. They seem right. Then you look at a country like the United States today, which is so found lyad divided and polarized, and you don't have to claim that it's unpresent. I actually don't think it is unprecedented, but it's bad in relative terms to the research past. And you say, well, you know, leaders of the United States Democratic Party don't just try to win by having fifty votes in the Senate plus the vice president to break the tie. Work with right, let's exercise power with to which miss McConnell says, yeah, no, no, thank you. I don't want to exercise power with you. I mean Barack Obama tried to do this on occasion. Sometimes he got away with it, more often he didn't. I mean, I love the idea, and I do think that under other circumstances. You know, Joe Biden would have been a politician who loved that idea and would have said yeah. You know, when he was in the Senate, he had a reputation for trying to be a centrist, for be friends with people on both sides of the aisle. It all sounds almost hopelessly romantic and naive seen from a distance of twenty or twenty five years, but that is how he operated through much of career. But it's just not doesn't seem to be doable now. So I guess I'm well in a place of saying philosophically, I totally agree with you. I mean, I love this idea. I love the idea that you know the key to power is to not think that you have all the power. I just don't know in practical terms how one can I suderstand that. Look, I do think you've picked. I mean, our two party system in Washington right now looks pretty tough if you come at it through some of the other wonderful topics you've covered on this podcast. Take NC DOUBLEA athletics. Right We're almost no one involved thinks the current system is all that great. Right in Louisville, where we live. We don't have a pro team, so we're obsessed with University of Kentucky, University of Louisville. We take it really seriously. If you've got all the fans in a room, they may split red blue cards, cats, but not on political terms. They love the games that are played and they don't think the current thing is working all that well. So you can imagine that group systematically trying to work through together finding a better way to do that. I mean, would you agree that seems we aren't hopelessly in partisan trench warfare as it relates to college athletics. Yeah, I think that it's it's definitely plausible that reasonable people, without getting super angry at each other, could try to work out a better way to do NCAA sports. Yeah, I'm willing to accept that. I'll accept the preface, thank you well, so then and so the act of working through it, I don't think anyone. Very many people don't think they have the right answer coming into that meeting or series of meetings. They are open to and they'll learn about the trade offs and like, oh, I didn't realize if you just paid everyone, maybe women's athletics would lose all their money in three weeks, and oh gosh, no, I didn't. That undetended consequence isn't one I'm willing to live with. Right, and you start doing that kind of work, I think we're get tricky. And where I think the point of this book could be misunderstood is and I'll stay with sports for a second. There's a bathroom somewhere on ninety five between New York and Boston where in the bathroom someone had scribbled Yankees suck, and then someone scribbled it out and wrote Red Sox suck, and then someone wrote Yankee suck. Right, So there's like almost like eighteen inches worth of this scribbling back and forth. And then sust have been new Avan, Connecticut based on many factors, don't you think exactly. So then someone comes into the bathroom and circles the whole back and forth, and then a big green sharpie writes and we all love baseball. Now you're kind of like, oh, like that feels good for like a second. But if if the people trying to find a way through these intractable problems sound like mister green sharpie, and I didn't go back by the way but you know there's continued commentary on where mister Greensharpie could put his pen. Oh yes, it's just annoying. It's this sort of group hug, feel good crap that people will just be like, well, that's not a real life thing. So what I would say is somewhere between Red Sox sock Yankee sock sort of trench warfare going nowhere and hey, big group hug, we all love baseball, there exists and in between space where I think we should put a lot of time and effort, and you are on this podcast, which is to stick with baseball. Hey, should we eliminate the designated hitter in the American League? Now you can imagine Red Sox and Yankees fans being super shortsighted and being like, well, we have a really good DH now, so that sucks. But you could also imagine them being like, I am willing to have this discussion about a game we love, but bring all your differences in disagreements and argue and haggle about a game you love and the habits of doing that. I think we've lost and we need to get better at and we could get better at them outside of high stakes Washington politics, because there's so many other things we could get to work at, and if we got good at doing those, maybe we could or our children maybe could get better at solving some of these other ones. I want to ask you partly about how we lost that capacity, and I want to use as a concrete example something you're in a position to know a huge amount about, which is the years where you were US Ambassador to the United Kingdom were years that the Brexit specter gradually went from being a pie in the sky idea to something actually plausible, and then, ultimately, to a lot of people's shock, it actually happened. And you had the front row seat to all of that. So I wonder what you would reflect on in observing that whole process and in the course of your pretty significant amount of time there. I would argue that they that's what happened to them. They lost the ability to have the green sharpie, and they collapsed into our red Sox versus Yankees or remain versus Leave. What do you think happened there at a deep cultural level. I think the honest and short answer is I don't know what I did learn, As you said, being right there in the middle of all that, I remember why. I was at some fancy black tie dinner in the city of London. I was seated next to a gentleman. He was quick to tell me early that he had written something like a five hundred thousand pound check to the Remain campaign, right, so this is the group against Brexit, and I thought, okay, you know, good to know. And then we chatted about other things, and then I'm looking up at the in this big vaulted ceiling room. There was some flag I didn't really recognize. It may have been like the City of London flag or something. Then there was the English cross, the English flag, and then there was the Union jack and I just said to him offhandedly, I was like, hey, you know, twenty years from now, could you picture the European flag as a fourth flag up there? And you would think I said something incredibly insulting to him. And he turned to me and he's like, over my dead body, you know, gripping his butter knife. And so here's a guy funding Remain and he hates the idea of the European Union flag ever showing up in this place that he loves. And I thought, oh, okay, that's weird. So there wasn't a whole lot of love for the European Union by the people who were That's not true of everybody. Some people really got into it, but I thought that was a window into Hey, that's a tough thing to prevail. So in that interpretation, which is a fascinating one, and I like stories about how you say something in England and then people look at you like you've insulted him, because that seemed to be every conversation I had an entire time that I lived in English, although to be fair, half the time they were also insulting me and they didn't know they were doing it. But so I love the story. It sounds like in your interpretation, you're suggesting that the deep national sentiment that people feel in England and maybe in Britain as well more broadly, is just so powerful that even people who rationally had an argument for remaining in the European Union at some deep level didn't care about it as much as the people who really wanted out. Well that that still begs the question, yeah, could go ahead. So the rough runt of the way it was worded was just sort of thumbs up, thumbs down in out it was a binary choice. If you gave people, you know, when you do HR surveys, it's like strongly agree, somewhat agree, neutral, There's a five check marks you could do across the spectrum. My sense is if you had asked, I have nothing to back this up. This is a hunch. Hey, do you want to be totally fully in the EU like France and Germany are? That's one out of five? Do you want totally out? I'd never want anything to do with this thing is a five. I think you would have ended up with people sort of I don't know in the two and a half to three kind of like I want to be in, but I don't want to be in their currency, and I don't want to have the same customs union. Oh, which by the way, is where the UK was as it relates to the European Union beforehand. But a lot of that subtlety gets lost in out. Yes, no kind of world, which this mindset, which I call the pyramid mindset, which I think is really I mean, the obvious way is sort of a top down view of the world, but by the way, a bottom up view of the world is the exact same shape, and I would argue no, better. It's the same pyramid shape where we get trapped into thinking it's wind lose up, down in out, which is how that referend of battle played out. And there's an alternative way of looking at ourselves in the world around us that isn't a pyramid. And these amazing leaders we talked about some of them, there are lots of others, many of whom we've never heard of, who've built these unbelievably consequential organizations and innovations that we benefit from every day. They chose to not look at the world like a pyramid, and they didn't think, oh, everyone on their own. They chose to look at the world in what I call a constellation, which is, yes, be yourself. You're a star, and you see other people as stars, and you try to form new and interesting connections between them to make something useful and something you could never do on your own. Too often are default setting is looking at the world like a pyramid, and we keep getting into those binary traps. One of the things I really liked about the book is that you didn't fall into the trap that sometimes people do in leadership books, where they just give you a series of case studies of quote unquote great leaders and say do it like this person, And so it was a relief that you didn't write it that way. That said, I did finish the book wondering who are your models of people who you think of as having governed either businesses or countries or other kinds of nonprofit entities through this model of giving away power or doing the power with thing. I mean, it would be great to say Barack Obama, whom we both admire tremendously, but I sort of think his biggest wins came when he didn't do that. You know, Obamacare being a great example of not open without complexity. But you know, the real transformative piece of legislation, to my mind of his presidency not was saying what this or being word did to it subsequently and it really was not ultimately a compromise. It's a great point. I mean, Anne Marie Slaughter wrote this great essay I think in Foreign Policy or Foreign Affairs, and I'm paraphrasing here, but she basically starts off because I would add the Paris Climate Accord, despite what happened to it afterwards, I think it's wonderful she said. As an internationally trained lawyer, and this and this. I ought to hate the deal, and I ought to hate it because it isn't binding. It isn't And she does the whole litany of what were the criticisms of it leading up to it and after it, and she said, but for all those reasons, of all those things, it isn't. I think it is wonderful and really helpful because it is not binding, it is open ended. It allows people blah blah blah. And I think that is an interesting test case. And I am no expert on climate or the Climate Deal, but that we could get out then get back in. Other people could step up for us when the previous administration didn't want to. All of that is a kind of weird in a good sense and flexible way of dealing with something that is voluntary. People set their own targets and it may go off the rails, but it could lead to something really beautiful. I like that. So Anne Marie Slaughter, she's someone I admired tremendously. You know, she's done things in academia where she was a professor in a dean. She's been in government as director of Policy Penny in the State Department. Now she runs a think tank. I mean, there's sort of no cool thing in the world of public life that she hasn't done. And she's argued, really in a series of books over the course of almost twenty years about the value in the international community of networks of people who are often like minded, who come from different countries, and cooperation among those people. Now, one of the criticisms of her work that's come both from the left and from the right, and she is nothing if not the mainstream of American foreign policy thinking. I think I always think it's good if people are criticizing you on both sides. But one of the criticisms that her work has encountered is that the people who are doing the dance are actually an elite, and that they're an elite, they exercises a lot of power that because it's not centered in one person, most people don't really notice, and which is therefore in some sense less responsive to big majorities of people. Yeah, that made me want to ask you about the sort of overall picture you have of the power of giving away power. It's very consistent with Anrie's idea of shared power. As you said, a lot of decisions are made by the people in the room, and I wonder, how do you think about that? I mean, it could be very down to the grassroots. But you know, fifty million or three hundred and thirty million people will have trouble all sitting in a room together. They're always representatives of that group. We're sitting in a room. Yeah. You said two phrases that I think often come up in this context that are important to clarify and redefine maybe. And one is I had this discussion with Anne Marie. She came to London and she said, oh, we need more bottoms up. And I made the point to her I made earlier, like bottoms up is no better. If you think of yourself or you think of other people, is at the bottom, you are doomed. Nothing good is going to come from thinking of people at the bottom. You'll be condescending or you'll feel condescended too, depending on where you've put yourself in that equation. It's an awful equation, and you do not have to look at yourself or others. Is at the bottom of a pyramid. You could think of yourself as stars in a constellation, for example. The other is the word sharing power, which is what you said sounds right. It is an exercise in dividing, implicit and sharing powers. There's only so much and so we'll divvy it up. And it's like no, no, no, you're done once you're in that limited mindset. The great leaders, these constellation leaders. Power is not something to be obviously lorded over others. Okay, we all got that mumbo. It's not something to be hoarded to yourself as an isolated individual. It is not something to be divvied up and shared. It is something to be made with and through other people, made and multiplied over and over again. And that's where the magic lives. And it's where the phrase grassroots is a real problem because it's just kind of code for bottom up. Two. We'll be right back. So I like that, and I buy it, and I also take it that what you're saying is that power needs to be conceptualized as not zero sum. It has to be positive sum. You can construct power in ways that are inclusive because you're not starting with a pie and then dividing up the pie. Yeah, and I think that's very very powerful. Do you think there are no zones of power though that would genuinely truly qualify as zero sum aren't there some situations, Yeah, you know. I mean if you think about the amassing of troops and resources and the logistics of D Day, I bet that was very pyramid like and top down and work backwards from a set date, all these sorts of things I warn against in the book, like it was helpful for that. But what I love is Churchill made the point at the time like that is to win this victory and then a different kind of hard work begins where that mindset isn't at all helpful. And that's what he called for the forming of special relationships, which sounds really touchy feely except at Winston Churchill saying it, and he's like, no, no, millions of them right between farmers and farmers, and like that's where the energy and this new kind of power can be created and multiplied. I don't know if we're allowed to if can I ask you a question because this is I didn't write this in the book, but I want to. It's what I've been struggling with. In the book, I talk about the fact that win win is a losing formula because it sounds good at first. It's like win win, but you can't sort of talk about winning without implying losing. And it comes with all these it comes with that pyramid mindset that isn't helpful, I think, to a whole bunch of intractable problems we're trying to work through together. So I went back to that famous Adam Smith quote, we do not rely on the benevolence of the butcher, the baker, the brewer for our dinner, right, And I think, and then you read on a little bit, and he is understandably, I think, skeptical of sort of the do good or instinct that it is particularly important for progressives to listen to that critique of he had seen so many things not happen or happen badly relying on benevolence alone. My question you, it's like, okay, so it seems like we've run with it over since seventeen seventy six till now we've sort of run with that. Okay, you don't rely on the benevolence, So then you do sort of some version of enlightened self interest or whatever. That's what is going on between the butcher, the baker, the brewer and you, who's an implied other stick figure in Adam Smith's rendition, which doesn't seem right either. And I guess my questions like, what would you describe as the relationship? What does the butcher think of the baker? What does the baker think of the brewer? How does the brewer think of you? What is going on between all those people that begin with B. One of the answers that emilily comes into my mind is inspired by the historian M. A. Rothschild's writing about Adam Smith and what she I'm going to grossly oversimplify this, but one thing that she shows is that you know some of this famous for Wealth of Nations, which is where the quote you're introducing comes from. But he also wrote this incredibly influential at the time book called a Theory of Moral Sentiments, and he was actually really deeply interested in exactly the question that you're asking. What are the we call them affects or sentiments that shape the moral life. And now this is me riffing on Emma, but I think it's sort of interesting that in Smith's world people still believed that being in commerce with other people made you like them more, made you feel more connected to them, because relative too, I live in my little hamlet, I never leave I grow all my own food, I make everything that I make for myself, and I therefore never meet the people on the other side of the hill. And when I meet them, I don't like them, because if I meet them, it's probably because they're trying to steal something from me. Relative to that world, a world where I go over the hill with my goods and the people on the other side of the hill come up to the top of the hill with their goods and we trade, is a world where we have more human contact, more engagement. And I think in the seventeen hundreds of people believed with Smith that the way I would think about those other people with whom I was trading on a daily basis is that I liked them because I got to know them a little. Yeah, there we go. Then we got, you know, fifty years later by the time Marx is looking at the same economic situation. By then, big time capitalism has come into existence, and we've had the Industrial Revolution much beyond what Smith could just glimpse the beginnings of. And then at that point Marx is starting to say, look, economic relationships are alienated. It's no longer the case that I like you, and so now we sort of imagine that in the small town everyone knew each other and liked each other. But once you go to the big city and you have to buy and sell in a big store, or you work in a factory, you become alienated from the other people, alienated from your labor. And I guess my own view is that in the perfect world, all of our interactions would enable us to feel a little more human connection, a little more human contact. And you know, the Internet shows you how complicated this is. Right, The Internet both had a promise of nanimity and a danger of alienation, and especially with the rise of social media, it produces at least the perception of intimacy, and you can actually get to know people on the Internet whom you wouldn't know otherwise. I look at my kids world. They have a much broader acquaintanceship than I did at their age, because I basically knew people whom I had met. Yeah, and they know a lot of people well whom they've never they've met them, but they haven't met them in person. So I guess, to me, this is the sort of thing that's it's always both elements are going to be there. We're going to have to interact with you with one another, knowing that we have something to gain, that there's something kind of quote unquote purely economic about it. But we also need to have some sense of human connection and if we don't, we are screwed. Well, thank you, and that is very helpful. As you were saying that, I was thinking often I think our debate is the individual or like big groups of people, and what I think Mary fall it and what we're talking about is small groups of people sitting around a table together, something as mundane as your staff meeting on Monday. That is certainly where Mary Follett said, that's where a lot of this work can happen, because in a crowd you can be lost. You're not lost in a group. You are more you in a group. You can only really know yourself by bumping into working through with other people around you and figuring out ways to get people around a table, and not to say things that like what unites us is greater than what divides us, which is another one of these things that everyone nodds their head. I certainly do when people say it, because you're supposed to nod your head to it. But I don't think it's true. And I think all the energy lies indifference. That's where the magic, That's where all the energy lives. So let's not be afraid of it or sweep it under the carpet. Let's deal with it. We'll be right back, Matthew. I want to thank you for your service to the country, for a fascinating and challenging book, and for a really great conversation about power and how we can rethink it in more productive ways going forward. Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for this podcast. And you're hitting on crypto we didn't talk about, but all the topics you're going through on this podcast are the things I'm eager to learn much more about. So I'm a big listener and fan too. Thank you. Thanks him. Speaking to Matthew about the power of giving away power, I was really struck by the paradox that lies at the heart of it. On one hand, Matthew is a strong advocate of the idea that we need to recognize our diversity and our difference in order for power to mean anything, and that instinct lies at the heart of his idea that we need to diffuse power and spread it out to many different people in order for it to function, and indeed that doing so will enhance the power and authority of the legitimate democratic institutions that do so. That insight seems to be correct, and it is, after all, the basic insight on which all democracy is built. Democracy is, after all, the very idea that collective rules should take place collectively rather than from the dominant center. Yet, at the same time, as Matthew acknowledges and indeed points out, in a world where we are tremendously diverse, and where power is sent out to many, many different people, there is a real risk that our divisions will become so significant that we will no longer be able to make collective decisions, and a glance at the US political system over the last five or six years suggests that we may actually be in such a period. Indeed, in other historical moments, political division might have given way to common feeling when we face something like the COVID pandemic, But in our profoundly politicized era, it seems as though even existential threat to our lives is not enough to pull us together. As we've come to understand and construe the pandemic in politicized terms and in polarized terms, making it harder and harder for polarization to go away. In this conversation, I don't think that either Matthew or I solved this paradox, and perhaps it's a paradox that can't be perfectly solved. Like Matthew, I have a lot of faith in our capacities to pull together as a country eventually. Yet that said, I don't have a simple solution to how we get there, other than living through the realities of our divisions and trying to slowly and gently make our way back towards the middle. I think that's the kind of aspiration that Matthew has, and to me, it makes his political vision immensely attractive and interesting, and it makes him a person who's worth watching going forward, not just for the ways he's deployed power in the PAS, but for the takeaways and lessons that it's led him to reach. Until the next time I speak to you here on Deep Background, breathe deep, think deep thoughts, and have some fun. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is ben Toalliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane. Mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin, thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column from Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com Slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original st later podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you like what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background