There’s a gnawing feeling in America and the West that a self-serving elite has corrupted society’s rules in its favor. The Epstein files have finally pulled back the curtain on hidden ways that powerful people network together to advance their own interests and evade accountability. 

Transcript

Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors

JON BATEMAN: Right now, millions of people are trawling through the Epstein files looking for evidence of sex crimes. But they're also finding something even rarer, a peek into the hidden world of the super elites, billionaires, royals, Hollywood heavyweights, Nobel Prize winners. Through private communications we were never meant to see, the files reveal how powerful people operate together in networks for mutual gain. They trade favors, swap secrets, make introductions, and they turn a blind eye to wrongdoing among their allies. This is the face of modern corruption, and my guest today has spent her life fighting it. Sarah Chase is the author of several books, including On Corruption in America. She's lived in and studied deeply corrupt nations like Afghanistan and Nigeria. Sarah argues that real-life corruption is very different from how we've pictured it. That corrupt actors have learned to exploit our political divisions, our tribal identities, even our hatred of corruption itself. We talk about the rising tide of corruption in America, from Hunter Biden's business deals to Donald Trump's crypto coin. I'm John Bateman, and this is The World Unpacked. Sarah Chayes, welcome to The World Unpacked.

SARAH CHAYES: It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

JON BATEMAN: So let me just start with what might be a kind of puzzling question or an obvious question, but what is corruption?

SARAH CHAYES: Yeah, no such thing as an obvious question, right? You know, the sort of dictionary definition is the misuse of public office for personal gain. But what I'd like to say at the outset here is we have such a tendency to think of corruption as an isolated kind of whodunit, right, as an isolation scandal with definable wrongdoing. A small set of characters and a story arc, a kind of narrative arc.

JON BATEMAN: You've got somebody getting cash in a brown paper bag in the hotel room and they say, because of this, I will do that. Done and done.

SARAH CHAYES: Exactly. It's better to understand corruption as the operating system of sophisticated networks. So that story that you just told me is only one little event in a tissue of such events that holds a network together. You'll find government officials and business leaders intertwined. In these networks often without and out criminals, right? Or in the case of Afghanistan with like violent extremists, they were all networked together. And that means that the second aspect of the example you gave, the very clear transactional, almost like you're buying something in a store is a little bit less relevant because these are people who are networked together so like I know you, let's say we're in the same network. I know, you've got a daughter, right. She wants a job in Paw Paw West Virginia. And I happen to know the mayor over here, and I might see to your daughter getting a job without there being immediately that quid pro quo. Yeah. Then you might do something for the mayor. Do you see what I mean? It's more like, I hate to put it this way, but it's more a gift economy where gifts kind of circulate within the network. And it's not so clear, you know, in time and place, the connection between a specific gift and a specific.

JON BATEMAN: It's hard for me not to immediately think of the Epstein files, and I don't know if this strikes you as an odd connection or not, but it's all over the news right now, and it's a perfect illustration of the elite networks that embody both government and business, US and foreign. There's a kind of intermingling that happens and a set of favor trading. And you don't have to go too far down a conspiratorial rabbit hole or conjure up the notion that all of these people were committing sex crimes. I just don't think that's clear at all. To know that minimally Epstein's emails show how eager he was to ingratiate himself into a kind favor economy of other rich, powerful intellectuals and, you know, world leaders. And how those people were eager to ingratiate themselves with Epstein because he was seen as either a provider of money or of further connections. I mean, what does this whole thing show to you about the modern networks that you're describing?

SARAH CHAYES: I mean, you say it may sound odd, but when I was researching on corruption in America, I decided this was at the end of the first Trump administration. Randomly as I could, I decided let me just do some very basic network analysis on the Trump administration, the cabinet. So randomly means alphabetical order. I start with Alex Acosta. And within, I don't know, a half an hour of trolling online, I'm running into Epstein and sex trafficking. And I'm like, oh, come on.

JON BATEMAN: Because Acosta previously was the U.S. Attorney who was meant to prosecute Epstein.

SARAH CHAYES: Exactly. I look at this stuff and I say, if I were to write this, people would immediately call me a conspiracy theorist. What was fascinating was doing the network analysis. From Acosta, I got so many members of Trump's cabinet. I got Mnuchin, who was the Treasury Secretary, from him I got Starr, I got it turns out that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, the two Supreme Court justices, have been buddies since they were in high school. They were both appointed by Justice Kennedy, who resigned in order to make it possible to appoint Kavanaagh. Justice Kennedy's son had provided loans to President Trump. You know, at Deutsche Bank. I mean, it was ridiculous, the density of the web that I got to. Now, that's even before you start looking into the web around Epstein. So if you see Epstein and Acosta, you know that's a connection, not that they really had anything to do with each other. Acosta's decision as US attorney had much more to do with the fact that he had been in the same firm with Epstein's defense attorneys, so they were old pals.

JON BATEMAN: So yeah, so Acosta was criticized for offering a kind of sweetheart plea deal or staying away from the state prosecution. I want to be careful here because one's appearance in the Epstein files or the fact that one has socialized with Epstein is not necessarily an indication of wrongdoing or corruption per se. How do you distinguish between, you know, true corruption and what has happened in any society? Which is the powerful and the elite socialized together and are essentially a distinct community.

SARAH CHAYES: It's that the instruments of state power are then bent and repurposed by these networks once they hold power in order to serve the interests of network members at the expense of the public. And so one upshot of that is that certainly before he came to office the second time It's become nearly impossible to prosecute public corruption in the United States. Why? Because a series of Supreme Court decisions, beginning in 1987 and continuing right through till, I think, last year, almost all of them unanimous, have basically legalized corruption, have minced and narrowed and straightened and tightened the specifics of what you have to do. For that behavior to be considered a crime and that's where the public, you know, where people do start to feel like the system is rigged and that what the ways that the elites can behave wrongfully have been pretty much deliberately and systematically legalized. So that leaves us in a bind as to what actually constitutes corruption, right? Because you can't use legal definitions anymore. They're way too narrow to really reach the degree and the density of the types of practices that are underway.

JON BATEMAN: So a key aspect here is that not only we have these elite networks, they're kind of incestuous or sort of self-perpetuating, but that they're able to turn state power toward their own advantage. Right now, we're living under the presidency of Donald Trump, the second presidency. Many, many observers have commented on how his behavior and the behavior of those around him in office would have widely been understood as or met. General definitions of corruption in previous eras. There was just a story a few days ago about how right before taking office, a prominent shake in the UAE, someone who is deeply embedded in their national security and investment infrastructure in the Emirates took a 49% stake in Donald Trump's crypto company. And then Donald Trump takes office days later and then engages in many... Dealings with the UAE that anyone could look at and say there's a perception there that there's connection between these two events. How much do you focus in on the behavior of one man in his administration today as a bellwether of where we are versus it's a longer story arc and both parties are involved. Do you think that this is an aberrational moment or are we at the? Crest of some wave that's been building for a long time.

SARAH CHAYES: I would say the latter. I think that's a really excellent question. I think this is a kind of apotheosis of a progression that's been underway for a long time. As I mentioned earlier, this series of Supreme Court decisions making corruption increasingly legal and difficult to prosecute to the point where I've sat down with a a public corruption prosecutor who was leaving the unit, and this was years ago. He said, only bad criminals can get caught anymore. And he said, I don't mean like really serious criminals. I mean, criminals who are terrible at being criminals. And for him, it was just not, it was not fulfilling as a job anymore, can you imagine?

JON BATEMAN: What's an example of something that most people would consider to be a criminal level of corruption that couldn't be prosecuted in the U.S.?

SARAH CHAYES: I mean, you can look at Bridgegate, which is one of these cases, which was in New York and New Jersey, and basically the governor of New Jersey was being punished.

JON BATEMAN: It was the governor of New Jersey that was punishing a mayor for not politically supporting him in some way. And so at least the governor's aides shut down some kind of...

SARAH CHAYES: Two lanes on the busiest bridge in the United States, causing utter chaos, you know, in that mayor's town. That was vacated by the Supreme Court. That was not considered corruption. I mean, the classic one, the one that really was the benchmark was the case of Bob McDonnell when he was governor of Virginia. And he took, I mean, this was $180,000 or something like that of. Loans and gifts of money and gifts and things and gifts, you know, loans of a jaguar and vacations and stuff like that, in return for the governor's efforts to get the benefactor's quack medicine based on tobacco, you know, I think the guy wanted DEA approval and so there had to be clinical trials and no one wanted to touch this thing with a 10-foot pole And so the governor was pressuring the University of Virginia system To conduct these trials. Mm-hmm. Oh, you know and a couple of other things and that was Unanimously considered not corruption because what he had done The Supreme Court decided was not a quote political act meaning he had to deliver an authorization or cast a vote, a very narrow understanding. Not only did it have to be a direct quid pro quo, and they had that by phone calls happening five minutes after another phone call had happened. I mean, it was very clear they had the quid quo, but what he did was not considered to be an official act. So this is what I mean about the narrowing and narrowing and tightening and. Of the legal definition of corruption. And so in this sense now, it's certainly true that the baldly transactional nature of this presidency would never have been dared before. So there's a way in which I would say, Trump is kind of like, you know those funhouse mirrors, you know, at country fairs that make you super fat that are super skinny with like an hourglass in the middle like that. It's kind of like that, like he's taken a situation that was a sort of genteel, detested by the American public, seen and detested by the America public, but broadly accepted in Washington. That type of a genteel corruption situation and just said, okay, bam, and just puts it in your face.

JON BATEMAN: Paradox here where MAGA, at least at the grassroots level, I think could be called an anti-corruption movement in part, that, you know, it's propelled by the notion that America is a deeply rigged and unfair society, that elections are stolen, that the economy is systematically distorted against the forgotten men and women of America, right? And that it's an anti system movement in the system itself. Is portrayed as a corrupt, decadent, villainous force. Then the result, though, is a presidency that, far from restoring checks and balances, has kind of unleashed a style of personal rule and transactionalism that is seemingly embracing out in the open practices that... In other actors' hands would have been described by the same movement as corrupt. How do you explain that?

SARAH CHAYES: You're so right, and it's one of the biting ironies of this whole phenomenon, I would say, which I started studying in Afghanistan around 2003-04. And that's when I really started looking at corruption. And ironically, what it led to was, again, not on the part of a majority, but on the of a minority, a turn toward the Taliban.

SARAH CHAYES: Which is clearly not a less corrupt, you know, entity than the Karzai government was, although their recollection of the Taliban from the first time around was that they were very severe, but not corrupt. So there was some of that. But what I discovered was the pattern of a turn toward militant religious extremism. As a reaction against corruption. And I found it all over the place, including, incidentally, in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. I went back and read the 95 Theses. And like, 87 of them are about corruption.

JON BATEMAN: Yeah, it's the selling of indulgences and so on. And so in these cases, when outrage at corruption leads to a militant religious extremism, it seems as though that militant religious extremist sometimes is corrupt as well. Why is that tolerated by the grassroots?

SARAH CHAYES: The new network then really astutely plays on identity issues.

SARAH CHAYES: We the good Muslims, we the Protestants, we the MAGA are inherently better because of our identity. The corrupt network, one of its most powerful instruments in disarming an opposition was identity cleavages. And I think the spoilers who too often capture the indignation. Anti-corruption indignation of people, are incredibly skillful at playing on identity politics.

JON BATEMAN: The contemporary US seems like an example where political polarization is becoming an enabler or excuse for corruption. I wonder if you'd agree with the following. So let's put on a hat of a Democratic voter for a moment, right? So this person is looking at Trump and Republicans and saying, oh, this is thoroughly corrupt, toxic, damaging to national interests. Let's beat them at the polls. And so then, let's say... A presidential candidate is nominated by the Democrats in 2028, and halfway through the general election, some meaningful corruption scandal comes to light. Is there any chance that person is going to pull the lever for JD Vance? I don't think so, because they would probably be saying to themselves, my side's sins are lesser than the other side's since that this is a necessary evil that I unfortunately must tolerate. In my side in order to win the greater war against the greater form of corruption that the opposing party represents. I mean, am I right about that, that there's a kind of excuse-making that people make on their own side and a desire not to unilaterally disarm, so to speak, if the—well, if the other side's not gonna police themselves, I'm not going to take my candidate off the table.

SARAH CHAYES: 100%. And in fact, this came up for me in the 2020 campaign, when at the time I was part of a long list serve of kind of do good or good governance, internally focused good governance groups, you know, and we were probably, I don't know, 15 organizations, probably two or 300 individuals on that list serve. And someone sent around something about Hunter Biden. And how scurrilous the accusations being leveled by, you know, Republicans in general and supporters of President Trump in particular against Hunter Biden. And I replied all saying, OK, fair enough, these accusations are without merit and are scurrulous. However, is defending the Hunter Biden business model. Something that this community wants to spend its political capital doing and how the then Vice President Joe Biden, wittingly or unwittingly, enabled his son's business model is unacceptable to us. This is how Washington should not be running. And we expect that when Mr. Biden is elected president, that he will deploy his moral and governmental authority curb it. That was the language that I use suggesting that we as a group come out saying something like that. Out of the two or three hundred people on this listserv, I got four answers, all of them pushback. It's devastating to the conduct of foreign policy that that kind of a discrepancy between the stated policy of the United States and the actions of members of government and we Kennegan. Split hairs and say, oh, but it was the son and the father doesn't control the son baloney as seen from the perspective of a corrupt country. Of course the father and the son are in cahoots together. You know, it just doesn't pass the sniff test in a country like Ukraine or like Afghanistan or like Azerbaijan or Nepal or Nigeria, you know. So. It's a long-winded way of saying, not only do I think you're right in your framing, that we tend to excuse corruption on our side in a polarized context like we're in, but to me, it's almost a fatal flaw in the situation as we're experiencing it. The Democratic Party, which is holding itself up as the party of truth and integrity, CANNOT. Cannot use the Trump administration's behavior as a standard.

JON BATEMAN: Yeah, so really, the psychological position of each party, I think, to some extent, is something like the following. There's some corruption on my side. There's worse corruption on the other side. If I were to acknowledge and police the lesser corruption on my side, that would be exploited politically by the more corrupt other side." What kind of counter-argument can you make? To somebody with that mindset? Because I have to say, there is a logic to it, right? A lot of people feel compelled by that. How do you break that?

SARAH CHAYES: There's no more patriotic act than holding our own communities up to their highest standards. And I just don't think we're getting anywhere as a country without starting to do that. And by communities, I mean our families, our workplaces, our genders, our political parties, you name it, right? And the fact is, who do we have most influence over? I'm never gonna persuade a diehard MAGA voter that President Trump is corrupt and that that matters. I might be able to influence the thinking and the stance, the posturing of communities to which I belong. Laws only function when they are expressions of a largely accepted and shared, you know, ethos.

JON BATEMAN: I'm really interested in this issue of why corruption is tolerated or excused by movements that maybe have some influence over the corrupt actor. We've talked about one rationale, which is I've gotta do it because I've got to beat this evil other side. I think another rationale that you sometimes hear is, well, let's not be naive here. Everyone is corrupt and everyone has always been corrupt. And so you're a fool if you think there's any difference between any of these politicians, any of this business people. There's a deep level of cynicism that I hear very frequently in this country That then It positions the person as anti-corruption, but it has the effect of kind of erasing any kind of distinction. Are we getting better? Are we going worse? Is one person better? Is one personal worse? And that level of cynicism, I think, can breed tolerance. Am I on the right track there? And is this something that you see around the world?

SARAH CHAYES: Absolutely. Not around the world as much. I see it here. So, for example, I was often accused of, you know, imposing Western culture when I was talking about corruption in Afghanistan. And I was getting told by Westerners, and only Westerners that Corruption is part of the culture in Afghanistan. And then I went around, you know, or Nigeria. I mean, I was told by a Nigeria expert, oh, don't talk about corruption if you go to Nigeria, et cetera, you now. So I go there and I start asking questions based on my experience in Afghanistan. And it's like, I got a geyser of indignation out of people, you, you. So I just like to say I've never met a Nigerian or an Uzbek or an Afghan who says, Sarah, would you get off your corruption high horse? This is part of our culture. We like being robbed by our government officials.

JON BATEMAN: That would be the narrative of a corrupt actor, really, to say, oh, this is just the way things go.

SARAH CHAYES: Exactly.

JON BATEMAN: And it's naive to suggest otherwise. But that strain does seem to be, you know, I hear that among Americans.

SARAH CHAYES: In the states. That's right. And so my answer, I have got a couple of answers. One is you just made a really crucial distinction is between the members of the corrupt networks and I would say they're these kind of donuts of enablers around them, which can go from sort of facilitator, like banks, law firms. Registered agents, individuals and organizations who provide services for pay. Those are facilitators. Around that, you have enablers, which might be places like the Sackler Museum that is willing to whitewash the Sacker name by putting it on a very fancy downtown national mall museum.

JON BATEMAN: The Sacklers were the family that were involved in selling opioids to millions of Americans and also were made.

SARAH CHAYES: Yeah, and basically bribing doctors to prescribe them and things like that, dissembling how addictive the company already knew that opioids were, et cetera, et cetera. I would say places like Carnegie and Brookings and universities and things like that, we might consider them to be soft enablers, you know, who? Check the box by having a nice podcast with Sarah Chase about corruption, but, you know, don't really want to take actions that might royal the waters because salaries are comfortable and work is interesting and things like that. So I actually found quite a bit of defense, active defense of the system on the part of this ecosystem that actually... Is quite comfortable living within it.

JON BATEMAN: I want to pick up, if I could, on your critique about think tanks. You brought up the Carnegie Endowment, the Brookings Institution, organizations that are in the business of influencing ideas and policy, and as a part of that, will engage with a variety of actors around the world. There's different levels of engagement, right? Whether somebody sits on your board versus is invited to a meeting. But I think what you're raising here is if you aspire to change the world in some in a positive way. And you find yourself embedded within a system of corruption, maybe your country is corrupt or maybe you're trying to reach out to a country that is corrupt, how do you navigate that? Just how do navigate that, what is the right answer, right? Because of course, you could lean into it so much that you're actually whitewashing or endorsing or platforming a corrupt actor. You could also lean out of it so that you're just refusing to engage and contribute. What, in your experience, is helpful? And maybe there's no general answer.

SARAH CHAYES: A way I started thinking about this in Afghanistan, so excuse the detour here, is do we want to conduct operations or do we wanna win the war? And the context for that opposition was how do we deal with Pakistan? It was obvious to me that the Taliban were a brainchild and a functional arm of the Pakistani military intelligence agencies. If we wanted to win the war, we had to take on Pakistan. But we really wanted to conduct operations, and that meant we needed to move supply trains through Pakistan and all that. And that meant that we had be really nice to Pakistan. And so I would say that in some ways, think tanks are in a similar situation. Do they want to conduct operation, meaning perpetuate themselves, in order to continue sort of nudging. The government to solve the problems in the future, but also keep everyone who works there comfortably alive? Or do they want to win the war? And so I'm struck by how easily we tend to, I want to say, come up with rationales for not defending our stated principles. I want come back to your original question, though, and just about the willingness of. People to say corruption is a constant, it's always existed and things like that. That was another fascinating element of the research for on corruption in America. We've all heard of the Gilded Age. So I start diving into the period from 1870 to about 1935 and I was blown away. I was blowing, it ends up being about a third of the book. I could not believe the degree to which the structural components of how the political economy functioned at that time resembled, number one, the countries I had been looking at overseas and, number two, the situation today. However, it was not a constant. It was an extreme. And it's a period that lasted about 60 or 70 years.

JON BATEMAN: If there were times when corruption has been particularly acute, that seems to imply that there are also times where corruption has been substantially lessened. What are the times and places where we've done a particularly good job with corruption? And does that refute the intense nihilism of someone saying, what are you guys even talking about? It's always been this way.

SARAH CHAYES: 1930S until 1980s. I'm not saying there was no corruption. I'm saying that the political economy of the industrialized world was not governed by corrupt operating system.

SARAH CHAYES: I'm saying that the opportunity that struggles for reforms struggles to expand rights, both types of rights for groups that already had some rights and right to groups that had been deprived of rights. So, I'm talking basically New Deal type reforms for essentially working white men. And then the expansion of rights to non-whites and women and the land and consumers and things like that. Those struggles were able to make progress. I'm not saying they were automatic. I'm saying it was possible to launch those struggles and to achieve noticeable success.

JON BATEMAN: And that shows a lack of corruption because there was like a democratic accountability for the major grievances of the population at the time.

SARAH CHAYES: I want to say that those types of reforms required a type of egalitarianism that is the opposite of corruption, which is the capture of power and resources for a few at the detriment of others. But just to give a more specific example, there was this hearing in the 1950s where Omar Bradley, who was the most decorated U.S. General from World War II, was asked bell, you know. Potentially what was his view on retired generals working in the military industrial complex, which had been named by that time, and he was absolutely horrified by the very idea.

SARAH CHAYES: None, none of the top generals who won World War II took a job in military contracting because to them it was even that would have amounted to corruption and would have been seen as a dishonor. So the whole ethos was quite different.

JON BATEMAN: I will say, Sarah, if I could, on the Omar Bradley story, that does sound tremendously appealing. The idea that people aren't out for themselves, they're out to serve the national interest, and then also when they leave the scene, their primary goal is to uphold the propriety of their military service. There is a flip side to that, which you sometimes hear around Washington, which I take very seriously, which is the critique about the revolving door. Can also create a situation where people with actual expertise running the government are not able to take key roles in private sector companies who exist to serve the government, and vice versa, people who have deep knowledge of the financial system or some other complex industry, like the AI sector. If we go too far against the revolving door, we would disallow ourselves from bringing in people who actually know how these systems work into the governance of them? What do you make of that?

SARAH CHAYES: We're not close to going too far.

SARAH CHAYES: I mean, that's like, do you see what I mean? We're not, that doesn't mean there should be no controls on it. Yeah. I think, again, it's a difference between individuals with expertise and a systemic transfer of personnel. Even the word, I think revolving door is deceptive in the same way that at the beginning of this conversation, we talked about corruption as an individual scandal. Yeah. How often we hear about it that way? Revolving door. How many people can get into a revolving door at a time? One basically or two

SARAH CHAYES: So the implication is that it's one individual pushing a revolving door, whereas this exchange of personnel is a systemic feature, and it's how networks keep themselves, number one, intertwined, number two, redundant enough to survive the occasional loss of individuals, and number three, it's, how people get their payoff, right? They've spent time in government fixing the rules on behalf of the industry, Then they go back to the industry and they and they receive payout, and I just think those arguments are so far from the situation that we're in that they're spurious. Go ahead. Well, I just want to say, so you're trying to get us into a good mood, and now I'm going to put us right back into a bad mood, right?

JON BATEMAN: Oh no, that's fine.

SARAH CHAYES: Then was, how did we get to that period of relative, you know, reduction in kleptocracy as a ruling system in that remarkable what the French call the 30 glorious years between approximately, it's a little more about 45 years, generation or two? I have to tell Not through reform. What did it take? Two world wars, two genocides, use of the nuclear bomb, an economic meltdown that makes 2008 look like practice and a global pandemic on the level of COVID or worse.

JON BATEMAN: So are you saying, Sarah, that calamities, like a global war or a global pandemic, can somehow help us fight corruption? How does that work? Is it like it just shakes up the rules of society and creates the chance for like a reboot? It's more specific than that.

SARAH CHAYES: The egalitarian tendency that tends to rise to the surface in times of, you know, mass hardship. I would even argue that Scandinavia, which is famously egalitarian, could be partly influenced in that by the just general hardship of living in that, in such punishing weather. And so, you get, you go back to what I just said, Who gets punished by the band? The person who takes more than their share of the meat. Well, what is a corrupt ruler than someone who is taking more than his or her share of the collectively hunted meat? And those people were policed and they tend to be policed in situations of mass hardship, of shared hardship. It is not okay for people to go and raid the, you know, soup kitchen, right? It's just not tolerated. Okay, okay. Whereas when, you see what I'm getting at?

JON BATEMAN: Yeah, so as deep-seated as corruption can be, as the operating system of a society and elite networks, if the level of suffering of the people reaches a breaking point, which can be catalyzed by a major disaster, war, and so on, that can be the moment where there's a strong enough pushback to break this operating system. So what can we do up until then?

SARAH CHAYES: Let me add one feature to that. It's not just the people suffering. In the war, elites suffer too. Do you know what I mean? I actually think, so take the figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Very interestingly, if I remember correctly, he found a way to serve in World War I. Joe Kennedy did not. Joe Kennedy, in fact, meaning John F. And Robert and Edward Kennedy's father.

JON BATEMAN: To senior.

SARAH CHAYES: He profited from World War I. He was working at a shipyard and he actually figured out ways of cornering the market and stuff like that. He also profited. He set himself up on Wall Street and short traded during the Depression. So he was a guy who profited off of the calamities and he never gained any kind of egalitarian ethos, whereas FDR did and Bobby Kennedy and. Jack Kennedy, to a certain extent, having actually lived through World War II and suffered the reality of that war, they had a slightly different ethos. I think you need some elites to come around.

JON BATEMAN: So Sarah, you've been gloomy throughout this conversation. You've owned that. I'm not gonna try to put a smile on your face. But before we go, I am gonna at least ask you for practical wisdom for an American or someone else living in a society that is trending toward corruption. And they may be an elite, they may not be an delete. But what else can they do besides just sitting back and waiting for cataclysm? What would be, you know, a realistic pathway for somebody watching this video to somehow contribute to the lessening of corruption?

SARAH CHAYES: I really think it has to start with the ethos and it has to start withholding your own community as small as it may be up to its own highest standards. So just the and I have to say mea culpa. I've been in a couple of situations in corrupt countries Afghanistan and Nigeria in particular where I was confronted with corruption. I did not commit. I did not pay the bride, let's say, but I failed to make those moments teaching moments where I could have, like I was hit up, I was in the palace of an emir of Kano, Nigeria, and a policeman asked me for a bribe on my way out. I left, I could have stopped and said, excuse me, are you asking me for a bribe within the sacred sanctuary of the Amir's palace? Are you sure you really wanna do that? I failed to do that. And so here was Miss Corruption who, you know, didn't have the presence of mind. To expand a particular, a specific personal interaction into something that could have a broader significance. I would just put that out there and ask all of you in your daily lives, do better than I did. Hold communities in every way in every situation as it arises up to their highest standards of integrity.

JON BATEMAN: And I think what I'm hearing there, Sarah, is we will be called upon to take risks, social risks, relationship risks, financial risks, professional risks, in order to take the small actions that can help define a culture of integrity from the bottom up, and hope that has some impact. Sarah, it's been an absolutely fascinating, bracing conversation. I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us.

SARAH CHAYES: Your questions were fantastic, John. I enjoyed it twice as much as you did.

JON BATEMAN: Great. Thanks so much, Sarah.