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[upbeat jazz music]
JOHN WALKER: A female colleague posed the question recently,
It got me thinking.
Trusting to serendipity, I stepped into my favourite
bookstore where the muses often guide me.
After scanning the shelves, destiny did reward me.
Assholes: A Theory.
I immediately took it to the checkout counter.
Within days I met with the author Aaron James,
philosophy professor and life-long Californian surfer.
I wanted to know what inspired his book.
AARON JAMES: So while I was surfing here I saw a guy surfing who was
blatantly dropping in on some of the other surfers,
violating the rules of right of way, and this person,
when people would complain, would get really angry and
yell at them as a way of getting waves.
Surfers are definitely used to having paradise spoiled
by crowds and the asshole spoils it in
a particularly pronounced way.
When I'm thinking this guy is an asshole,
I'm not just venting feelings, I'm classifying him as of
a certain type of moral personality.
When you use that word, you're thinking of a type
and Philosophers get interested in this kind of thing.
But, then when I started thinking it through the,
about the asshole concept, I thought,
"Oh, well, can't you define the term?
Isn't that a definable term?"
At that point, I started thinking ok,
this really a general type, you know,
it's not just a surfer asshole concept.
[saxophone music]
MAN: There seems to be a lot more assholes this year than any
other year, especially in the public eye.
I'm not sure what's going on,
but we're overwhelmed this year anyways.
JOHN WALKER: We're doing a film based on the book, Assholes: A Theory
and the author's saying, you know-
MAN: It's just not a theory, it's a reality.
It's a reality?
Oh come on now, it's out there. It's reality.
The asshole as I define it is the guy who allows himself
special advantages in cooperative life out of an
entrenched sense of entitlement
that immunizes him against the
complaints of other people.
AIMEÉE MORRISON: It's a great word to say, "What an asshole."
He's the guy who cuts in line at the post office,
taking a special advantage, in cooperative life.
You know, people are waiting in line and they'll allow someone
in for if they have an emergency
or if it's a pregnant woman, right?
But this guy does it, takes a special advantage
for a different reason.
You know, out of a sense of entitlement.
"Asshole," you can really lean into it right?
"That guy is such an asshole."
And it could be any sense of entitlement.
He thinks he's rich and his time is more important than other
people, or he thinks he's especially smart or beautiful.
The euphony of the word, right?
It just feels good to say, it sounds good to say.
And the upshot of his being entrenched in that sense
of entitlement is that he won't listen to others
when they complain.
ROBERT HOCKETT: It was especially nice when he added the word "entrenched."
An entrenched sense of self entitlement,
that this is an abiding problem.
That it is a sort of deeply, it's very,
it sort of goes down into the bones almost of the person
who has the problem.
PAUL PURCELL: It's generally somebody who says,
"Let's talk about my favourite thing, me," generally, right.
"Me, me, me, me."
SHERRY BENSON-PODOLCHUK: The entitlement that, "I'm more important than you.
What I do is more important than you. Your feelings don't count.
You don't count. Your work doesn't count."
Assholes also like to take all the credit.
There's a teaming asshole ecosystem and in it there are
many different species, many different varieties.
For example, the boorish asshole,
the smug asshole, the self-aggrandizing asshole.
There's drunk assholes, arrogant assholes,
smug assholes, narcissistic assholes.
Well you gotta kind of be a narcissist
to be an asshole anyways.
The sexist asshole, the reckless asshole.
At work, there's the asshole boss.
There's mumbling assholes.
They'll do it behind the curtains or they won't be
an asshole to your face, but they'll have no problem doing
it to everybody else when they're around.
We have the cable news asshole.
With social media, we have the Facebook asshole and you know,
on the road of course, there's the old guy driving a Porsche,
swerving through three lanes of traffic asshole as well.
There's no shortage. Out of any kind of person in the world,
there's more descriptive kinds for an asshole
to a normal person, really.
So, we're blessed I guess with many kinds. [laughs]
KEVIN: You are a fucking asshole, Frank.
FRANK: That I am, never denied it.
But at least I'm an honest asshole.
DARTH HELMET: I knew it, I'm surrounded by assholes!
Sometimes in comedy behaving a bit like an asshole can be
funny, we can laugh at that, because it's not really serious.
[paper tears loudly]
MICHAEL PALIN: Dad, what are you doing?
MAD DOG: You gutless yellow pie slinger!
MARTY MCFLY: He's an asshole!
LARRY DAVID: Well, I'm going to call the Police.
JOHN WALKER: Assholes in Aaron's book and in the movies, yes,
but I needed to investigate their impact in the real world.
So I hit the streets of LA.
JOHN WALKER: Where are you from?
WOMAN: Mexico. I'm from Mexico.
And do you have assholes in Mexico?
Yeah, of course we do.
I believe that all countries have assholes.
I mean there's not one country that you can say
that there are not assholes at all.
WOMAN: Privileged behaviour is on the rise
and people seem to think
that it's ok to say and do almost anything.
They treat folks like they're invisible
and I think it's so unfortunate.
JOHN WALKER: Have you had to deal with assholes?
MAN: All the time. Everywhere you go you have to.
You have no choice.
MAN: There is assholes everywhere like I told you.
Yeah, every place.
JOHN WALKER: You ever come across any?
Uhhh...Not today.
MAN: I work in construction so everybody is a fucking asshole.
WOMAN: I had an asshole fiancé. Yes.
He didn't appreciate me, so.
JOHN WALKER: What did you do?
I flushed him down the toilet.
WOMAN: Goodbye!
JOHN WALKER: You have to deal with this behaviour yourself?
Like have you come across it?I'm a big black guy.
Most people don't bother me, you know what I mean?
If I look just without smiling.
WOMAN: Well I think that starts at home.
It starts in the beginning.
Today's people think it's ok
that they don't have to listen to nobody.
If they don't respect their parents,
they not gonna respect anyone else.
That's the way I look at it.
JOHN WALKER: I met psychotherapist, Suji Gelerman at home
on a break from her LA office.
I asked her if LA was a fertile ground for assholery.
SUJI GELERMAN: Where are the assholes?
Well, Hollywood has a large percentage of assholes.
MIRANDA: You're an asshole!
JIM: I'm the asshole? She's the asshole!
She never called me once after we broke up.
CARRIE: That's because you're an asshole!
I think there's a higher percentage of narcissists
feeling like assholes because they just don't consider you.
And in the way that Aaron would be talking about
that you have a certain kind of moral high ground
that you're better than other people.
Narcissists don't even know there are other people.
Okay, so If they don't know, there's other people how can
they even really process the fact that they're being mean
to you or unforgiving, or unkind, or negating.
You don't really exist.
JOEY: Bitter self-righteous hag who has no friends.
KAT: I guess in this society being male and an asshole
makes you worthy of our time.
The tyranny of assholdom, one of the places that people don't
talk that much about it is body image for women.
The tyranny of what it's like to be a young woman in our society,
an older woman an invisible old women and how you're treated,
how you're treated and people treat you really poorly.
Or young girls who aren't the perfect body type,
how that goes.
You know, how you're talked to, how you're bullied,
how you're bullied by other kids,
that to me is real asshole behaviour.
WOMAN: Harvey Weinstein? I think he's a perv.
I think he's a perv and an asshole, you know?
I think he's been, you know, again,
it's when you got more money than you think God has and you
think you can treat people just any way that you want to, yeah,
I think that's sad.
JOHN WALKER: What kind of therapy do you think Weinstein's
going through right now?
The pretense that I read was, you know,
he's got sexual addiction problems.
That's the least of his problems is sexual addiction.
I think he's just probably licking his wounds
and probably having people around him who are willing to
do what they always did, which is suck up.
I have worked with people and the only reason the abuser's
changed, was they truly saw how it was created in them,
what their behaviour was and how destructive it was
and wanting to change.
Part of the asshole being entrenched in entitlement is
the idea that if they're a proper asshole and not sort of
borderline case, then that means that I think it's extremely
difficult for them to see that there's a different, you know,
maybe what they're doing works for them,
their deeply invested in it, they're really are convinced.
They really believe that they're, you know,
entitled and special in these ways
and that's very tough to shake.
ROBERT I. SUTTON: I think that the reasons, at least that assholes I think of,
make us so angry, is that they disrespect us as human beings.
They take away our dignity from us, at least for me.
I mean sometimes they will do objectively bad things from us
like take away money but, it's this notion that when people get
upset, it's they don't feel dignified and respected
as a human being.
[doorbell rings]
[footsteps stomp]
[door creaks]
[animal growl]
MAN: Being an asshole has a sort of
like an edginess to it, you know?
Like when people say "Oh this person is an asshole," it gets
people thinking, it's like "Oh, what's this person all about?
Why is this person identified as an asshole,"
and it opens the door to let other people
get to know you, you know?
It really puts the attention on you, you know?
I'm an attention whore. I love seeking attention.
MAN: What wants to make me want to be an asshole is just seeing
everybody else, seeing what they're getting in life
and then seeing what I've gotten in my life not being one,
it's a big difference.
So, I've definitely learned from my mistakes in that category
and I've you know, altered that, so.
Yeah, I think that's why I'm choosing to be an asshole.
MAN: I, I feel like anyone who legitimately considers himself
an asshole isn't really an asshole.
I think it's like a person who got hurt in high school so they,
you know, "Now I'm a dick in traffic" or whatever.
I think real assholes don't realize they're assholes.
An asshole is somebody who ought to know better than to be
as arrogant as he is and is in some sense repressing,
the information he has.
In that sense, an asshole is different from a prick who can
know perfectly well what's he's doing.
The asshole tells himself it's ok for one or another reason.
That's one reason why for example a five-year-old we might
call a "little shit," but we wouldn't call
a five-year-old a little asshole.
You can't be an asshole 'til
you're old enough to know better.
Maybe about 14 you become eligible for assholism.
JOHN WALKER: Can women be assholes?
WOMAN: Absolutely. Oh, anyone can be an asshole.
I guess in a way my mother was an asshole...
and if you'd said what mistakes do you think you've made,
I think she would have said, "I really can't think of any."
WOMAN: But I prefer to be called a dick,
because it sounds cooler, it's got more gusto.
It seems that among the assholes they are,
they tend to all group, pile up on the male side
of the gender divide.
Oh yes, there's no question it's mainly men.
Assholes were by definition men, but then I thought of certain
examples, like Ann Coulter for example.
I'm sure there's others, but I think
it's 99 percent of them are men.
JOHN WALKER: Do you have any favorite assholes?
Favorite assholes?
I am the number one most impactful artist
of our generation.
Kanye, Kanye West is a pretty big one.
I am Shakespeare in the flesh, Walt Disney,
Nike, Google.
MAN: Kanye West, he's a huge idol of mine honestly.
He just, he doesn't work for anyone.
MAN: I really love the way Kanye's outlook on the world.
He's very well spoken and does what he wants
and doesn't care what people say about him.
Assholes are almost by definition unhappy.
There are people who say, "Oh I'm an asshole and I have no
"qualms about it and I, this is how I get ahead
and so on and so forth."
When you hear somebody say unapologetically
"I'm an asshole," he's almost never an asshole, he's a dick.
BRUCE: Well, I can be an asshole.
JACK: No, Bruce you can't.
You gonna pick that up?
Yeah, I'm sorry!
JOHN WALKER: If someone admits to being an asshole,
they're not necessarily an asshole,
they're maybe a temporary asshole.
MAN: Oh, I've been there.
JOHN WALKER We've all been there.
I think I was there like yesterday, or the week before.
If you regret it later, or you feel sorry, you know,
then that's a sign that you're not really entrenched in that.
And now, but that's a different thing than someone
being an asshole to you first and then you trying to answer
and kind of now, if you think, that guy's an asshole now
I have permission to just sort of let my inner asshole out,
you know, then that's an asshole move, right?
The nice guy doesn't get the girl and the asshole does.
That asshole never keeps the girl,
it's always the nice guy who keeps the girl,
but definitely for a one-night stand or hooking up,
the asshole definitely gets it.
Our confidence is just, it extrudes more than the average
person because we're so confident in our self
and girls love that.
MAN: Me and my buddies have competitions where we go
downtown LA and just see who can pick up the most girls' numbers
and at the end of the night, I mean it's up to you if you want
to text them, but, I personally only text about 75 percent,
or 25 percent of those because, I mean,
I don't even find most of them attractive.
Girls don't want a little 12-year-old kid, you know?
They want someone who's like a douche bag,
who you know, dresses like he doesn't even care,
but he looks good.
Someone that, you know just, is cool, is an asshole.
Girls dig that.
OTTO: You pompous, stuck up, snot nosed,
English, giant, twerp, scumbag, fuck face, dickhead, asshole!
How very interesting.
I always thought what I loved about Canada is they
never thought that they were exceptional.
You always get it in old America,
you hear about American exceptionalism.
It's four-year-olds believe in exceptionalism, you know?
They stand on the edge of the pool and shout "Hey,
daddy watch," and fall in the pool and then come up as though
they've invented a cure for cancer,
saying "Ahh look at me, I fell in the pool."
[organ music]
I think Canadians in general make terrible assholes because,
you know, we're always very nice,
were always very agreeable.
We always try and kinda go along with the flow,
you know, and not really impose our presence onto situations
and I think that's whack, that's terrible.
We don't think of Canada as producing assholes
and it's because you're not as insanely mindlessly competitive
as the Americans are.
You actually understand how to keep things in balance.
JOHN WALKER: Pesky, mean, asshole is what you call a player
like Brad Marchand when he plays against your team.
And a valuable player when he's on your team.
COMMENTATOR: The penalty here by Brad Marchand.
MAN: In hockey being an asshole is kinda part of the game.
Not everyone on the ice is an asshole, but most people are.
COMMENTATOR: Just a little cross check and then a turnaround spear.
Right to the mid-section.
COMMENTATOR 2: Marchand's being escorted out now.
BRAD MARCHAND: You know what, things happen in hockey and I'm not really
concerned how anyone really feels outside of the room, so.
I honestly could not give you an answer on why you love assholes,
it's just they're appealing I guess. They're exciting.
They're like, they give you, it's almost like entertaining.
There has been a serious accusation from
the Toronto Star, that I use crack cocaine.
I do not use crack cocaine nor am I an addict of crack cocaine.
Assholes are people who do things and
say things that we might want to say or like to
imagine ourselves saying, but would feel inhibited,
or guilty about saying and, in that sense,
there's a vicarious, I don't want to say satisfaction,
but interest in watching them behave the way they do,
which is why so many of the characters
who win our attention are assholes.
Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine.
REPORTER: When sir?But no, do I?
Am I an addict? No.
Have I tried it?
Probably in one of my drunken stupors.
JIMMY KIMMEL: But I've realized is Canadians are much,
much weirder than any of us had any idea they were.
[audience applauds]
JOHN WALKER: Generally, Americans call Canadians nice...
and ignore them.
But elect an asshole to run their largest city and late
night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, empower them with stardom.
The Canadian Prairies, known for cooperative farming,
was the last place I thought I'd find entitled assholes.
Yet Sherry Lee Benson-Podolchu, found a particular breed,
when she joined The Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
SHERRY BENSON-PODOLCHUK: It was very much inducted right from the very start to go along
to get along and it was a group thing;
everybody has to think the same.
We always support each other.
The law is sacrosanct.
Never lie.
You follow your, the detachment commander,
whoever is your boss, whoever is the senior officer without
question and it's a systemic problem of the going along
to get along, protect your own.
If you don't follow this, then you'll be considered "the other"
and then you are a target for bullying and harassment.
JOHN WALKER: So what, what do you call this kind of behavior that ensued?
SHERRY BENSON-PODOLCHUK: This is called asshole behaviour and I know my Grandma
would say that nice girls don't say asshole,
but guess what Grandma?
You didn't work for the RCMP because
there's a lot of assholes who are wearing the Red Serge,
who are pretending to be leaders,
when in fact they are complete assholes.
If way back in Tisdale when a couple of officers thought
it was funny to call me beaver and raisin tits in the office
and in front of everybody and on the radio,
if one other person would have said "Hey man, shut the fuck up,
don't talk to her like that, you're just being an asshole,"
it would have ended it, but no,
by not saying anything, they allowed
and condoned the behavior.
What I needed from them,
to trust them to protect to help me,
was saying, "Hey man, don't call her those names."
If you have a leader who is an asshole,
the message is clear, this is an asshole organization
and it just ripples down into everybody and their behavior
towards each other or anyone considered the "other,"
is that type of behavior and if nobody says anything,
and for all these years nobody has been saying anything,
it just continues.
JOHN WALKER: Sherry's trouble started when she refused to lie
in support of a fellow officer.
In a false statement, he claimed his foot had slipped
on the gas when he rammed a citizen's car.
She knew he had been drinking on the job.
SHERRY: The retaliation was quick.
I went to get my gun out of my gun belt and someone had gone in
there and I had a blue gym bag and in the blue gym bag
were my personal things and there was a dead prairie chicken
with blood dripping all over my personal things.
When you know that there's people in the organization that
are willing to cross that line, it's very scary.
I decided that, you know, just trying to handle this
in-house isn't working.
I have a leader who is a complete asshole,
totally ineffective and would rather side with the bullies,
the assholes, than stand up for what is right,
which was one woman and several male officers.
That was one of the pivotal moments that I decided
that I have to say something and make a formal complaint.
Yeah, it was life changing.
JOHN WALKER: Sherry's sexual harassment complaint enraged the RCMP.
And it completely disrupted her life.
SHERRY: I thought if I work one more day,
and I didn't know how it was going to happen,
but I just thought, if I go into that building one more time,
I just wouldn't, I would die.
They are actually willing to commit criminal behaviour.
They're willing to turn a blind eye to violence against their
coworkers just to protect that workplace culture,
and I left and I went on medical leave
for quite a while after that.
Not everybody has that sober second thought.
I was lucky I did, but there's many officers I know that don't,
and they kill themselves with their own gun
because they are bullied, they're working with assholes,
the assholes don't care about them and it's all about
protecting the image and protecting the way,
'well, we've always done it this way,
this is the way we're going to keep doing it.'
JOHN WALKER: With no one listening and aware she might not be the only one,
Sherry went public with her cause, the first to do so.
SHERRY: After my book came out, I was out having lunch with another
RCMP officer and he said, "Well, you know Sherry,
"the RCMP hate you.
"You know, your book didn't make much of a scream in the press
"and they were waiting to see if anything happened,
"and nothing did so now they want to destroy you,
"either ruin you financially or drive you to suicide."
And I took that as a legitimate threat.
SHERRY BENSON-PODOLCHUK: Would they have done something?
I didn't know, but at the time I felt that
it was always a possibility.
They don't obey the law.
The two things I was told to do.
Never lie and always follow the law.
Well, they had violated that all the time.
Why wouldn't I think they could do something to harm me?
Force me off the road?
So it was a legitimate feeling.
JOHN WALKER: After 20 years of no response from government,
media or fellow officers, the flood gates finally open.
A class action suit with over 3000 women's signatures
is filed against the RCMP.
Two years later the Federal Government appoints
the first female head of the force.
[baby coos]
[drink gulps]
[man belches]
[baby belches]
I think human beings, while very kind,
many of them have a tendency always
to see how much they can get in the world.
I mean you see this with toddlers who are like,
you have to teach a toddler to share
because toddlers don't want to share.
They, "it's me, it's me, it's me, it's the thing that I want"
and we train our young humans out of this behaviour
as they age and then there's this, another stage when people
are teenagers when they become assholes again and it's
developmentally appropriate just the way it was for toddlers,
where everyone wants what they want and they want to have it
and they don't much care for other people's feelings.
FILM NARRATOR: Teenagers themselves are in a natural state of change.
Adults are astonished and bewildered by
the more outlandish of today's teen fads.
Almost categorically teenagers are assholes.
They're discovering assholism, as it were.
JOHN WALKER: And we try to train them out of it.
Yeah, we do, we do try to train them out of it or to teach them
to repress it, more to the point and some manage to
do that or manage to repress those impulses.
Others never quite make it.
Most teenagers flirt with kind of an asshole phase.
They're not really an asshole in a sense of a
stable trait of character.
Some teenagers are going, they're gonna graduate
to being a proper asshole as it were and others are,
it's just a passing phase and they're gonna grow out of it and
ok, you know, the spell breaks, you know, they,
I don't know, go to college and they're,
have a sense of sort of peer camaraderie and equality
and there's some accountability there and
"Ok, maybe my parents weren't so bad."
JOHN WALKER: As Aaron says, some teenagers get over their sense
of entitlement, others graduate into the workforce with it.
At Cornell, an Ivy League University,
I met Jonathan Gilmore, a student and ex-marine
with a keen sense of empathy for others.
Did you run into any asshole behavior in the Military?
JONATHAN GILMORE: Yeah, oh yeah.
HARTMAN: Are you about to call me an asshole?
JOKER: Sir, no sir!
I mean day one, like you get, so boot camp's like,
you know, three months of dealing with the biggest
assholes you've ever met in your life.
I don't like the name Lawrence!
Only faggots and sailors are called Lawrence!
I mean these guys are screaming at you,
calling you faggots, calling you, you know,
every name in the book that's derogatory,
and you know, physically hurting you.
The Marine Corps is a brotherhood, right?
It's like a lot of people would say it's arguably
like the largest frat in the United States.
And so I figured, ok, if I go to Cornell then what would be
like the best decision? It would to be join a fraternity.
I could have a brotherhood again and I could
connect with other people.
So I was just like kind of mingling around and figuring out
which fraternity I would vibe with the best,
and it was just like this, you know that like,
that just like super over macho man masculine kind of like
ugh, like you gotta poke your chest out and like you gotta
talk like this and like, "What's up, bro."
It was just this like the film Animal House.
[glass smashes]
[rock music]
When I'm your older brother, when I'm your big brother,
I'm gonna belittle you, at least for that first semester,
you're gonna be my little bitch and that to me just,
that seems like huge asshole behavior especially because
they're like 18, 19-year-old kids and they get just a little
bit of power and of course they're gonna run off with it,
you know? Women are objectified they're sexualized.
It's the focus of the attention is for all of the guys
in the fraternities to get as much sex as possible.
Women are never main characters, they're always pushed off
to the side and that's fraternity life now.
We were driving down the road, it was a pretty dark night,
there was a girl puking on the side of the road
and some guy was like holding her hair back.
As we went by, the guy in the front seat, one of the
fraternity members, he said, you know, "Don't let me around her."
Bad, like something like "Don't let me around her,
bad things will happen to her."
And I just thought in my head,
it kind of like set me back a little bit and I just thought
"Wait, is this guy saying that he's gonna rape her
or like have sex with her?" and so I asked him that,
I was like, "Did you mean that you're gonna sleep
with the girl that's literally puking on the side of the road?"
And then he said something like, "Well I would do
what any other guy would do in that circumstance."
And I was just like "No fucking way",
and I asked them to pull over and I got out.
That's what really set me back about fraternities
in general cause I just felt like, how is this so ok?
How are people so ok with this behavior?
I mean you can't report that, like what am I gonna do,
call the cops and say "Hey, this person said he might rape
someone," but like what's worse is that everybody around him was
totally ok with it and that to me I think what even,
cause you can have one asshole, but then you've people
supporting them and I think those are almost like,
that's like worse. Like you know it's there.
You know that guy's gonna do that and you guys
won't do anything about it and it's just like boosting his ego
once again and that guy's gonna get out
and think that that's ok and he'll find friends.
They'll find plenty of people who are totally accepting
and willing to have discussions like that.
SHERRY F. COLB They have, you know, lists of the women they've slept with,
that they write on the wall and things like that and so
I think a fraternity is definitely a place where
that sort of behavior can be spread and made worse
and maybe the thing to do about it is for schools
not to be affiliated with fraternities.
I think of those students at Yale University,
who, from a fraternity who marched to the woman's dorm,
Chanting, "no means yes, yes means anal."
And after the, uh, the university disciplined them
and so on, people were writing this was an attack
on free speech and so on and so forth
and an astonishing way to approach this.
If it had happened 30 years earlier,
nobody would have of countenance it.
They just would have been out on their ear,
not because of the anti-feminism,
just because of the vulgarity of it.
[water crashes]
JONATHAN GILMORE: These kids are gonna graduate and they're gonna go out into
the world and they're gonna take what they learned from
this fraternity and they're gonna, put it wherever
they have, or wherever they, you know, work at.
These are like people who have been attending these
fraternities since, you know, like early, like late 1800's and
the money within them, like especially at the top frats.
I mean it's millions and millions and millions
of dollars that these people are kind of like coming into.
And I think because of that power, that it's nearly
impossible to change, not even just change,
but to like obviously get rid of the system in general.
These are rich white dudes that have been running these things
for years and years and years and years
and I don't think that's gonna change anytime soon.
I had a student and he was very disrespectful,
disruptive and so I just stopped calling on him.
So he came to my office hours which I knew he would do
and he said, "I'm really upset because you don't call on me,"
so I said "I don't call on you because I don't appreciate
your interventions in the classroom." And he said,
"I think you're just put off because I'm a very manly man."
So I said "No, that's not it."
So I said, "What I'd like you to do is when you have something
"useful to say, raise your hand and say it.
If you have something petty and annoying to say, don't,"
and, you know we sort, I sort of went through it kind of,
and I had no hopes that this would have any effect.
Starting the next day, he became a model student
and he ended up getting an A+ on the exam.
It was just amazing and he came to my office after the course
was over and he said, "I just want to thank you because no one
had ever told me that what I was doing was a problem."
I think many of us figure what's the point.
Like why bother, but if we bother then this person
is likely to hear it more than once, right?
If they, if they're abusive.
If someone tells them and someone else might
tell them too, maybe they start thinking,
"you know, maybe, you know, maybe they've got a point."
He was well on his way to being that CEO who was abusive to
everybody and thought that anyone who objected was just,
you know, didn't like his manliness or whatever it was.
[clock tower rings]
JOHN WALKER: Cornell Law professors like Sherry,
are concerned about asshole behavior.
They monitor their students and have adopted
a 'no asshole rule' when hiring in their department.
PROFESSOR: I assume everybody doesn't like assholes.
JOHN WALKER: Today's conference is on how the law can play a role
in governing assholery, from Washington to Wall Street.
SAULE OMAROVA: The financial services industry in my view and I don't think
I'm alone here is a quintessential asshole industry.
Well, when you think about that pervasiveness of systematically
asshole type behavior in a particular social venue.
For example, the financial services industry, right?
Then the problem of managing assholes becomes a structural
problem in which law can potentially have a lot of say.
So if we make certain types of asshole behavior systemically,
unprofitable for example, irrational,
something that is not rewarding, then that behavior
will naturally kind of fall away and overall the system
will become less prone to being overtaken by a bunch of assholes
that continue to pursue their own private goals,
their own insatiable appetites for private gain
at the expense of the rest of us, the rest of the society.
You know the people who were over-speculating on Wall Street
in the 1920's, just as those before 2008 were acting in
individually rational manners, but that individual rationality
kinda morphs into a kind of assholery.
The only way to deal with a collective action problem
of this sort, is through an exercise of collective agency,
right? You need a collective agent.
I think of this as a sort of orchestra conductor, right?
Somebody who sort of oversees and takes measures that makes it
no longer individually rational to do the asshole thing.
The Central Bank is that collective agent.
JOHN WALKER: Colleagues, Robert and Aaron share a concern
about asshole capitalism.
After the 2008 financial crisi, Robert was an organizer
of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Sleeping at night under a blanket at headquarters
in Zuccotti Park.
In the morning, he walked across the street
to his day job at the New York Federal Reserve.
After the crash in 2008, they admirably started to worry
about group think inside the Fed
as regulators and so they decided that they wanted to
bring in somebody who would sort of be a contrarian voice and
help them identify, you know, mistakes they were making
or new things they can do and so they brought in Bob.
There was a consensus, a regulatory consensus
here in the States in the lead up to the crisis,
that you can't really spot a bubble developing when
it's developing and some people were saying
there isn't a bubble. They just can't exist, right?
That seems to me was dead wrong. Dead wrong that they
can't exist, to say that. Of course they occur, right?
The next thing I thought is you can
actually spot them in develpment.
This is not a very controversial position now, but at the time,
of course, it was very much against the consensus view.
Like all these recursive collective actions problems,
they're sort of self-augmenting,
there's a snowball like character to them.
They make themselves worse until the credit runs out.
That's what was going on in the lead up to 2008.
That was going on in the lead up to 1929, as well.
It's nonsense I think to say you can't spot that sort of thing
happening in advance.
Unfortunately, many American regulators in the lead up to
2008 did think that you couldn't spot them in advance.
The Feds failure to understand its role as a collective agent
meant to sort of orchestrate doings on Wall Street.
To act as a kind of a conductor of Wall Street.
In the 1920's, almost directly brought us the calamity that was
the Second World War, the calamity that was the Nazi
rise to power in Germany.
The calamity that was the Holocaust and the like.
It's a very tight direct link.
I actually think if there hadn't been the bubble and bust
in this country in the 20's, I don't think that
the Nazi party ever would have become anything more
than a fringe party in Germany, in that time.
There's certainly no reason to think that it would have been
because, or would have done, because it,
there was never any sign of its getting out of the fringes until
the crash and until the German economy plummeted too because
it was so completely dependent on the American economy,
in the 1920's.
AARON JAMES: I don't know what it is, but something about this
place makes me think of assholes.
ROBERT HOCKETT: Yeah, I know what you mean.
There's a distinct air of it here.
Yeah, a very poignant sort of pungency to it.
The most foul mouthed people are the investment bankers
and I'm sure that when you go see things like Wolf,
what is it, the Wolf of Wall Street,
you know, that language is typical of the language
they actually use all the time.
Very vulgar. Very harsh.
Very assertive.
JORDAN: It was like mainlining adrenaline.
STOCKBROKER: Yeah fuck face, look at where the stocks at today, huh?
STOCKBROKER: Pick up the cock sucking phone!
JORDAN: Sorry.
I would describe that a Hedge Fund as the,
as an asshole factory.
You know, just churning them out in large numbers because
once you've got a horrible group of people together,
then all they want to do is choose other horrible people
to join them. You see what I mean?
So that when you get an asshole culture they're in trouble
because inevitably they're gonna flourish more and people are
gonna become asses because they think it's the right to do.
I think there are some people who almost make the choice
and over a long period of time become assholes
when they probably didn't start out as them.
They play a shell game with money and lawyers and all the
strange stuff and, you know, it's like the mortgage crisis.
They were just packaging stuff and selling little pieces of
crap and smashing them together and calling them Triple A.
It's like, and I'm not saying that
there aren't assholes everywhere,
they're just a special kind of asshole.
MARK: We don't create shit. We don't build anything.
No.
He thinks he's getting shit rich, which he is, on paper.
But you and me, the brokers, we're taking home cold hard cash
via commission motherfucker!
Right.
It is completely legitimate and normal
and not a sign of weakness to really worry and care about
those amongst us who are less fortunate and who need help
and if you remove that kind of notion from
the collective consciousness, then you would encourage people
to adopt this other extreme where, 'you know what,
I'm only going to care about myself' and frequently the
rationalization that comes with it is that well that's because,
you know, I'm owed more than anybody else
or at the very least,
I don't care what other people get in the bargain.
It's their own problem.
We don't give two shits about how technology works
because all we care about is getting fucking rich.
And so if all we care about
is just individual self-interested success,
if we assume that if everybody pursues their self-interest,
without any restraints, somehow automatically then
our society will always be better off,
then we will have a society in which that notion will morph
into this monstrous idea of, you know,
"We don't care what happens, we're rich,
"we're entitled to a better life and we don't care
about anybody else."
DONNIE: 22 million dollars in three fucking hours!
Can you believe this shit?
[timer ticks]
[thunder crashes]
BILL EMMOTT: I think that when you elect an asshole to run your country,
what you get is someone who frames everything around their
own needs, around their own desires
and their maintenance in power.
You basically elected someone whose there
to preserve themselves, to protect themselves,
to enrich themselves and thinks of the world as being one that
operates according to the degree to which you can enrich others
who will support your power, not the public,
but your supporters and by all of its instruments that give
rise to equality, particularly the Rule of Law that might
otherwise impinge on that selfish person's instincts,
get undermined, bit by bit, steadily, steadily, steady.
And that's what happened with Silvio Berlusconi,
in particularly his second and third times in Government.
[Silvio Berlusconi speaks Italian]
JOHN WALKER: Despite scandals of widespread corruption,
use of underage prostitutes,
and a prison conviction for tax fraud,
Silvio Berlusconi, media tycoon, football team owner
and former Prime Minister has dominated
the Italian imagination for over 30 years.
Would Berlusconi be a good example of an asshole?
EDOARDO ALBINATI: Ah, yeah, sure, yes.
A very, good example and an exceptional one,
so, a real great, nice asshole for many reasons.
Assholes are so often admired by others and they are leaders,
they are the funniest people in your class and I had,
I remember the funniest people in school were the assholes.
The good people usually are flat,
I'm sorry to say that, but it's also like this in cinema,
or movies, or in life, to the example of Berlusconi
is again a perfect one.
JOHN WALKER: Berlusconi burst onto the public stage,
as the owner of the first private network of TV stations
throughout Italy.
Filmmaker and activist Lorella Zanardo considers
Berlusconi's seductive television and media empire
the source of his rise to power.
LORELLA ZANARDO: At the beginning of the '80's,
Berlusconi's TV started to broadcast,
[Lorealla speaks Italian]
and TV changed completely because
they started to offer programs where the focus
was on beautiful and very feminine girls,
nearly naked, but never naked,
which is very Italian and men, older,
much older than these girls, telling the stupid stories,
laughing with the camera always on part of the bodies
of these girls and these girls were many, many girls
with the idea was that with these girls, you at home,
had, could, have no problems in life because it was fun,
they were so erotic, so nice, so ready
to accept man with no problems.
[Italian music]
LORELLA ZANARDO: Statistics say that Italians, have two to three
TV sets in every house in the Northern part
and in the Southern part they have never a job,
three to four TV set in every apartment,
so these programs were entering not every house, every room.
So, it was quite powerful and that period we didn't have,
computer or smart phone, internet,
so every room had this TV set with Berlusconi entering
and telling the story, telling all these wonderful world,
made of wonderful, nice girls ready to love Italian men.
Nine years ago we had the horrible scandal of Berlusconi
and his dinner party with girls and Ruby
and everybody was saying "Oh, it's horrible!"
Why it's horrible?
It's exactly what we watch every day since 30 years.
Like a Fellini dream, ah?
LORELLA ZANARDO: Berlusconi, he made it real.
You will remember Anita Ekberg,
when she enters the fountain Trevi.
It's the Italian dream.
Big breasts, blonde, there for you, smiling,
LORELLA ZANARDO: "Marcello", she says, "come here."
Life is easy. It's a dream.
Berlusconi made it real and he understood in a way
that Italians wanted this dream.
TIM PARKS: Italy's immensely open to assholery.
There is a desire for a protective figure.
There's a desire for what the Italian's call a "Baroni",
a person in charge, the person who decides everything,
a Godfather, head of the family.
There's a desire for a figure who will,
you know, find you a job, keep you in a job, make things ok.
TIM PARKS: Make it so that you don't have to worry
and Berlusconi has very ably presented himself as that
and I'm sure he actually feels the emotions
of the person in that role.
BILL EMMOTT: I think Berlusconi was the original populist
at least in a European context.
He got to power and built up
his support by essentially promising to feed the
inner-selfishness of all sorts of groups in Italian society
showing his own entrepreneurial business success,
his wealth, his girlfriends, his parties and so forth as proof of
what you can achieve if only you let your selfishness fly free.
So he promised all sorts of goodies
to those people who supported him and under that cover,
having put himself in power, managed to enrich himself.
We will remember this horrible period of life
not for the bad people, but people who are considered good
but they were silent.
So, Berlusconi's an asshole? Yes. We too.
It's a country of assholes.
Why people haven't stopped him.
Why people haven't, why politician haven't,
done a law in order to stop him?
What has happened to us, witchcraft?
I mean 60 million people.
JOHN WALKER: At least one person tried to stop him.
Supreme Court judge Piercamillo Davigo,
who famously said "The politicians haven't stopped
stealing, they have stopped being ashamed."
I think that the big effect of having assholes in charge is to
kind of numb, anesthetize,
the sensitivity of the body politic to behaviour,
to bad behaviour such that, criminality,
theft, simple selfishness becomes norm,
normal and indeed I think the great terrible thing
that happened in Italy was a shrugging of our shoulders
and saying, "Cusci van tutti."
"Everyone is doing this and therefore,
well, it can't be that bad."
JOHN WALKER: Nostalgia for the past seems to be the script Populist leaders
like Berlusconi follow.
Setting back the clock, ignorig shifting social values,
selling asshole behavior as the triumphant way forward.
But we don't all act like sheep for example, Vladimir Luxuria.
VLADIMIR LUXURIA: I remember when I was at school once, the teacher asked me,
"Do you like men or do you like, or do you prefer women?"
And since I was sincere I said I like men and he said come here
and I went next to him, in front of all the other students
and he had a stick and he beat the stick on my hand
as a punishment so that anyone could see.
Now it would be considered illegal, but,
when I was a child it was considered so normal, so normal.
To be a man at least in the time in which I was educated,
was to show that you are not a woman,
to show that you are not a girl. Don't be a girl.
Don't be girlish, in sport, in whatever.
Also, don't cry, you're not a girl.
EDOARDO ALBINATI: Football is not a sport for girls...
but the problem is that the male identity,
this kind of identity, traditional one has not been
substituted by anything else
and so the old model is collapsed,
but there is not a new model of a man.
Especially at school, all the time I had people insulting me,
writing bad words about me on the books,
pissing on my shoes in the gym hour, but at that time,
they led me to think that they were right and I was wrong.
So many act of violence, of aggressiveness,
including rape I think I tend to interpret them as a sort of
trying to restore the old order, the old regime.
Only when I was 16-years-old and for the first time I went to
a big city, a big town in Milan and I went to a gay discotheque
and I saw people like me having fun, drinking, dancing.
I realized that no, there is another opportunity.
You can be what you are and be happy at the same time;
have fun.
So I began to think, so, these people were not the right people
they were assholes.
Because they were trying to ruin my life
and so from that time I decided not to obey to
what they were saying but to fight them.
[parliament applauds]
VLADIMIR LUXURIA: I was elected in the Italian Parliament in 2006 until 2008.
I remember Berlusconi.
Berlusconi, he was closing all his reunions,
you know, in the squares, saying this as the last words,
"Do you want that in Italy people like Vladimir Luxuria
would be elected into Parliament?"
And all his fans were shouting "No!" but I was elected.
JOHN WALKER: Well into Berlusconi's regime the Economist magazine decided
to challenge his outrageous governance.
Bill Emmott was the chief editor at the time.
Yes, it was worth that attention because of the potential of
the same behavior moving into other countries,
into France, into Britain, into the United States into
all over the Western world.
So it became a kind of case study, in what could happen
in a new mediatic world where assholedom could be amplified
and sadly we have seen it spread into other countries.
Had he come to political maturity at the time of Twitter,
of social media.
I think he would have used Twitter and social media
because again, as subsequent characters have shown us,
it provides a way to give a direct communication
to the people unfiltered by the rest of the media.
JOHN WALKER: The free flow of information has always been the US mantra.
It's given American tech companies an unregulated
freedom to profit from addictive software,
abuse of our privacy and corporate monopolies
with unprecedented power.
Silicon Valley is really interesting.
It's breeding a so to speak a new variety of asshole.
People who believe that in virtue of having accumulated
enormous amounts of money or in virtue of being on the cusp
of accumulating enormous amounts of money,
they're entitled to ignore the ordinary sanctions that attach
to behaving in certain ways.
MARK ZUCKERBERG: We're all here because we're optimistic about the future.
We have real challenges to address,
but we need to keep that sense of optimism too.
AARON JAMES: Zuckerberg is, you know, another case in which,
you know, 'move fast and break things,' was a slogan for
a while and he explains it as, well he doesn't want his
creative people to be tied up with perfectionism,
you know, they should be free to fail
and sort of move on to other things.
Not following the herd or being, you know,
completely opposed to everything that came before
and you can see how that would lead to assholery, right?
It really does, It sort of says,
"Dude, you don't care what other people think.
"You don't care about the way that it's always been done.
"You know, you're charging forward towards the future and
the future is going to break everything from the past."
I mean it sounds like a rampaging toddler.
If a consequence of Facebook, 'moving fast
and breaking things,' is that it breaks democracy or democracy
becomes a shell and the historic march of democracy
is ended and we have a resurgence of authoritarianism
and sort of papered over formality democracy.
That's not something that can be undone.
That's not something that further technological change
is going to repair or fix, you know?
It's not something that would ever justify,
you know, Zuckerberg's, you know,
aggressive growth policy and, you know, lack of care.
MARK ZUCKERBERG: It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these
tools for being used for harm as well.
And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference
in elections and hate speech as well as developers
and data privacy.
Each apology seems very sincere, right?
He really means it. I mean he knows how to apologize.
That's not something assholes usually know how to do, right.
But, you know, it's the same really good apology over and
over again without, you know, sort of the action you would
think if the previous ones really were sincere.
We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility and
that was a big mistake and it was my mistake and I'm sorry.
You know, if things really do go for the worse,
as bad as they can go now for the U.S.
and for other countries then Zuckerberg what?
"Oops," You know?
It's like "oops", you know, it's not excusable, right?
It's not just an innocent mistake.
LESLIE MILEY: The fact of the matter is, we've been putting assholes
in charge of companies for the last 25 years
and very young assholes.
20-something-year-old, privileged, for the most part,
white men who don't know their behavior is
the behavior of an asshole.
BETHANYE MCKINNEY BLOUNT: If you work in Silicon Valley and you have never dealt with
an asshole, you've probably never done anything that's
that hard and you're probably a white guy.
Like those two things are probably true at the same time.
Nothing against being a white guy, that's,
but I think you need to have both those things be true
for you to be like "Oh no, I've never dealt with an asshole
in Silicon Valley." Really? You haven't?
Mmhmmhmm, I don't believe you.
Tech is, from a cultural standpoint,
is still stuck in the brogramming,
you know, me, me, me, me culture.
JOHN WALKER: You said brogramming?
Brogramming is this concept of guys,
you know, particularly men, males,
young males getting together to create the next big thing.
I would explain to people that I was a woman,
but I had, also if you were going to compare me to
the various types of nerds you wanted to overlay,
I was like "no, I'm basically like the bare-footed,
"neck beard guy in the corner with five monitors who doesn't
"talk to anybody and works all night. Like, that's me
That's who I am. I just don't look like that guy."
So there's always been some like,
"you're not enough" exclusivity that's been cultivated.
I've always been fascinated,
that the great inventors in IT are nerds.
Because why would you want to spend all your life,
you know what I mean, fiddling around with little bits of,
and see what's happening on the screen,
probably 'cause you don't terribly much enjoy
other people's company.
So, I, it's terribly great that we have these people,
and that they make these great discoveries,
but I think the great mistake is to listen to them
when they start telling us how we should live.
And let's be honest, If you give a 24-year-old 10 million,
20 million, 50 million, a hundred million dollars
in funding, do you really expect them to have good behavior
all the time? Do you not expect to change
who and what they are and how they approach things?
You've just given somebody who's really done nothing
in their life, like their entire life, they've done nothing,
now they have a hundred million dollars,
that's just going to enable bad behavior.
I think that the effect of the platforms,
Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms on us is
to basically give vent to the worst aspects of our nature.
It gives us a platform to be bigoted.
It gives us a platform to be prejudiced.
It gives us a platform to sound off on people.
It gives us a platform to abuse people.
Now, we had those already,
they were called bars and we said what we thought about
people in bars, but the point about social media is that it
gives the potential to amplify those voices on a huge scale.
And that's a new phenomenon.
The New Yorker had a cartoon in the '90's you may remember.
LESLIE MILEY: It was two dogs at a computer and it said,
"On the internet, no one knows you're a dog."
[Leslie laughs]
So, it is so appropriate to today
and I do think that the ability to launch an attack,
an anonymous attack against people
has kind of like really lowered the expectations of behavior.
Probably the strongest assholes in contemporary world
are the social haters.
JOHN WALKER: Trolls.
Haters, I think I prefer haters, yeah.
So, it's a way of, it's the easiest way of hate.
I had the opportunity with an Italian TV program, Le lene,
to meet one of my assholes.
JOHN WALKER: Mary Sarnartaro is a renowned stand-up comedian
and host of Le Iene,one of Italy's most popular TV shows.
MARY SARNARTARO: Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!
JOHN WALKER: Her job, is chasing after assholes.
For the program Le lene, I try to...assholes.
JOHN WALKER: Squish?
Squish assholes, yes.
JOHN WALKER: You're hunting assholes?
Yes, si, si.
If you have a camera for them, it's as you have a gun.
A man who was writing to me all the time,
"I want you to hang, I will give you the rope.
"Why don't you kill yourself?
"I will give you the gun.
"You are a fag.
You're not a man, or you're not a woman."
All the time, all the time.
I was in the car, they cheated him.
VLADIMIR LUXURIA: The TV program say that it was going to meet another person
of the TV even though it was me.
[Mary speaks Italian]
[both speak Italian]
MAN: Vladimir Luxuria?
He became pale, he began to tremble,
he didn't know what to say and I said, "You know who I am?"
And he said, "Oh, yes, I know, you're Vladimir Luxuria."
"No, I am the person who should hang.
I am the person who should kill himself."
VLADIMIR LUXURIA: At the end of the story, I understood that this,
this boy was just, in Italian we say "sfigato",
he's just a poor guy, miserable and not,
he doesn't, he does not have a girlfriend,
he, problems in the family, problems at school.
I had pity on him, you know, I would say,
so, I'm sure that all the people who are asshole,
actually they have their own problems,
you know, they have their own problems.
JOHN WALKER: Once you've exposed a troll, are they finished?
Continue to be a troll?
Uh, no, they continued.
JOHN WALKER: Ah.Yes.
Sometimes they finish, sometimes,
but, more times they continue.
It's almost impossible to stop terrible behavior online because
as soon as you block a troll, right,
another one springs up and as soon as you try to enact
a structural means of blocking trolls,
where you say like some kinds of speech are acceptable and
some are unacceptable, there are whole mobs will rise up yelling
"Free speech, free speech, liberty!"
Now imagine if all you are doing is talking to
your Alt-right friends, or your white supremacist friends
and you're only sharing articles and you're only sharing
information and you're only sharing the things that
you believe in and that inflame your passions,
and you do this for days and weeks and months at a time.
You're going to feel very emboldened.
You know, you, you know, we talk about the radicalization,
it was like "How was this person radicalized?"
I mean it's not just Islam where people get radicalized, right?
It's white supremacists get radicalized.
It's, you know, anti-abortion people get,
you know, become radicalized.
Radicalized? Yeah, radicalized.
You know, even Black Lives Matter people get radicalized.
They all do if they stay in that echo-chamber.
Well, I think we do need to do a lot of work on that right now,
yeah...
because all the media we have invites us to feel
extremely righteous and to be utterly sure of our own position
and not to pay too much attention to the other guys
and to allow ourselves to be led towards showdowns
which are clearly not in anybody's interest.
It's frightening that we had an entire group of people
think that, a population of people that think that Obama
was born in Kenya based upon social media.
I mean it's like, I hate to give, you know, anybody credit,
but alternative facts are real, right,
and wow, there's a statement,
alternative facts are real, they're real for some people
and how do you combat that? I don't know.
I mean, I really hope that Reddit and Facebook and
Twitter get a handle on it and Google gets a handle on it
because if people don't know what's real they're only gonna
evoke their emotions and they're never gonna vote and
they're never going to engage in a conversation that can be moved
forward because it's not based on fact and that's where,
that's the world we're living in right now
which is a world increasingly not based upon fact
and that should concern us all.
MAN: Modern assholeness is a failure of communication.
It's very making communication one sided
so there's not like a dialogue going on.
It's very top down kind of like,
you are speaking down to everyone,
like it's sort of like...
I was about to say being an asshole is sort of like
bullying, but I mean I guess it is bullying,
like it's the same thing.
Like I said, I have a lot of followers and I live my life
by "If you don't have anything to benefit me,
then I most likely won't talk to you."
I have a lot of people reach out to me to either like be my
friend or like work with me and stuff and I always look at their
following or just who they're surrounded with and if I don't
think that they can benefit me, I 100 percent won't talk to you.
It's about eyeballs, right and if you keep people engaged in
your platform, you're not gonna do something to stop them.
I can, I am going to make a very bold statement
backed up with no facts whatsoever.
Facebook could eliminate 90% of their fake news tomorrow.
It would hit their revenue in such a way
that it would send their stock price crashing.
What do you do?
That's the dilemma.
The same thing with Twitter. Same thing with Google.
I think those organizations have a responsibility
that they have abrogated.
JOHN WALKER: Silicon Valley's freedom to break things without regard
to its' social impact, may come to an end.
When Washington calls on CEO's like Zuckerberg
to face inquiries, it's clear they are concerned.
Google's CEO on the other hand, refused to attend
his government's inquiry, sending lawyers instead.
The European Union took action, suing Google 5 billion dollars,
for anti-trust violations.
It remains to be seen, if US regulators
will follow the European lead.
Why is it happening in Europe and not in Washington?
Well, of course these are American companies
and therefore, European regulators are a bit more
inclined to push back against them,
but also they are not subject to the same political donation
influence that the Washington authorities are.
Google has become the biggest campaign finance donor
in congressional elections in the latest couple of cycles.
Facebook is also a big donor.
The European commission is immune to such
direct financial influence.
JOHN WALKER: Regulating this corporate entitlement
with Silicon Valley or Wall Street companies is a challeng.
Here at Baird, a multinational wealth management
and equity firm with client investments
of 77 billion dollars.
Their philosophy is carved into the woodwork:
trust, teamwork, respect, and a 'no asshole rule.'
Literally the day I got here
I put into place the 'no asshole theory.'
One: not going to hire 'em,
or tolerate anybody who puts himself ahead of the firm,
or the clients and we're going to only do business
with people who are high integrity.
When I'm recruiting people, I tell everybody this,
I say "If you're an asshole, don't come. You'll be fired."
JOHN WALKER: So where did you come up, like the use of the word.
Can we talk about the use of the word?
I don't know, I just did because I kept calling all these bad
people at Kidder, Peabody assholes and I'm not
gonna work with those people anymore and one of the reasons
that I came to Baird, with a smaller firm, was to get away
from that to be perfectly honest.
LESLIE DIXON: It was controversial.
There was some conservatives in the firm who were like
"Oh my gosh you can't say that out loud",
and then there was others that you can tell just loved it.
It is what it is and, and we talk about it openly and some
people will temper it to the "no jerk rule," but a lot of people
have gotten use to just saying "the no asshole rule."
It begins with the respect of every individual
and that is the core value is every person, what they do,
what they accomplish, what they add to the enterprise is core to
our success and every individual is important and when you have
that basic respect, then you can build trust
and our business is all about trust and if you build trust,
you'll get, and you do that long enough then you've built
a certain pride that creates an energy
and dynamic of its own but the foundation is the respect for
the every single individual in the firm.
When we interview people, we ask our receptionist who meets them
all, what they thought of that person as they were waiting for
five minutes and we'll hear the stories of "Wow, they were rude,
they were condescending," and we have said no to people.
Yeah, look I can't tell you the number of conversations
where I said "You're right Joe, you're really special.
You're so special, you need to work someplace else."
And you mean that and when you do, people cheer you
because the greater good prevails
and it's a winning strategy for us.
JOHN WALKER: The strategy is working so well, they are number four
on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For,
and the top financial firm on the list.
The firms that are in the top 100 great places to work,
outperform their peers two and half, to three, to one,
in terms of returns.
PAUL PURCELL: This difficult behavior by Wall Street oriented,
larger firms is a huge plus for us
because we're very different.
Here at Baird, two out of three people are shareholders.
So, what, what we say to people is, "It's your firm,
behave accordingly, protect your firm."
It is a very powerful message.
You're an owner, protect your franchise
and you make people accountable.
It's that long-term orientation that is,
that's missing from most of Wall Street.
[office chatter]
You know, in 2008 and 2009, one of the beautiful things that
we were able to do, was not lay anybody off.
And they were throwing thousands, tens of thousands
of people out between September of '08 and March of '09 and
that we kept our trust with all of our associates
and then we came out of the downturn just roaring.
But it goes back to how you were raised
when it was all said and done.
You know, were you raised in a family
and with really good core values?
People go, "Oh, it can't be that simple." It is.
You either have it or you don't and you can't drift.
You can't drift.
In the asset management business,
we call it style drift. We cannot drift.
We need to stay back and every time there's a big issue
we need to, we go but does this, is this consistent
with our core values and if it is you do it.
If it's not, you don't.
It's really pretty simple, but it takes a lot of discipline
and a lot of focus because, you know, like
"Well, just this one time," right and you're like "No!"
You can't do that, and then, 'cause if you do
then people won't trust you.
JOHN WALKER: After grasping the destructive impact of asshole behavior,
and the courage it takes to push back, I asked Aaron
if he felt anything had changed since he wrote his book.
The asshole explosion was something I never would have
guessed would ever happen when I started thinking about,
I mean, I sort of described it in abstract terms,
but if you'd have told me that our country was headed
towards something like that, I would have been shocked.
I mean at the time I thought we were on the precipice,
right and then what happened was,
we just you know, went all in
and, you know and now it's really sort of our fate's,
you know, unclear.
JOHN WALKER: Are you worried?
Yeah, yeah, I'm worried, yeah. I am worried.
[soft piano music]
JOHN WALKER: I have Aaron to thank for his warning of the rising tide
of assholery and for a journey that leaves me hopeful about
the resilience of human decency.
You know, if you walk and you see somebody being an asshole
with someone, with a woman, with a girl, with a dog,
with a gay, with a transgender,
with an old people, with a foreigner, whoever,
and you decide just, you pretend you haven't seen,
then you are the same asshole like him.
If you decide to react,
then you are doing something really big.
Like a little stone, you know, in a pool of indifference.
Little rings that go wider and wider and wider
can reach longer distances.
[soft piano music]