Hello and welcome to the Double Pippin, the world's most agreeable soccer analyst podcast. I am Michael Kailey. Welcome back. We are continuing our tour of talking to people who have written good and interesting books, but I think this time in a number of ways there are a few more soccer and analytics connections than the fantasy mystery novel.
So I am joined by Mike Goodman and yeah, you ready to do this? It the music from the win as well as. Please down subscribe at Sapphire's podcast or patreon.com doublepivot Come hang out on Discord where we have a books channel and we talk about books. As Kenneth said, we previously had on Robert Dyson Bennett to talk about his book that was just released, A Drop of Corruption.
And as I say that out loud, it does occur to me there may perhaps be some thematic consistency here. To today's guest who I will let you introduce. All right, so we are joined by the author of the not that new but US release new book, the Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davis and Rickler's book, Nate Darker Football. Dan, thank you for joining us and welcome to the podcast.
Well, thank you very much for inviting me. Fabulous. So, yeah, so I think the first thing I would want to talk about is just the book itself. I love this book, the, the Double Pivot Discord.
I cannot overstate how much it loves this book. And it's been a book that has like I find myself thinking through problems in a different way because of some of the stuff you introduced in this book. And I know this is a good summary of it. The way I sort of look at it is it is a book that introduces one idea, the accountability sink, uses that to introduce another sort of larger system of ideas, cybernetics, and then tells a history of like how modern capitalism came to be sort of around the idea of cybernetics.
Very good summary. I mean, yeah, basically in the background of this book is my long falling out of love with economics because I made my career as an economist and economics was very good to me in many ways. But over the course of two decades looking at the economy, I just got more and more frustrated with the way that modern economics leaves out all the important stuff. It leaves out information, it leaves out uncertainty, and it's always talking about systems that are in equilibrium with perfect information and everything you see around you in small balls or everything else is just a constant state of disequilibrium and a constant state of either imperfect information, no information, or in many cases, actively misleading information.
It's interesting that you put it that way, about how you came to these ideas that are falling out of love with economics. And one thing Kelly likes to say about us as we do this podcast a lot is that a lot of what we do, our mission statement, as when we get into off the field stuff, is if you want a sport that gives you a window into the guts and the workings and inner wheels of capitalism, football is your sport. And I think that one of the reasons that your book is so well read in our discourse is that the lens that you bring to the world is very easy to identify for a lot of people that look at the sport the way we look at the sport. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me.
Absolutely. Yeah. So I wanted to sort of ask you a couple of these ideas. I'd love to hear you talk them through a bit.
And you bring up the open with the idea of the accountability sink and this great example of all of these squirrels that were slaughtered at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. Oh gosh, those poor squirrels. You write a book and you write something and you think, oh, that's kind of a bit grissome and sick, but it's funny. And then you don't realize that you're then going to do production for the book, going to be talking about these poor little squirrels over and over again.
So for people who haven't read it, the Chinese ground squirrel was a. It had them as craze for keeping them as pets in Europe in the 1990s. And then towards the end of the 90s, 400 of these things, actually about 440 of them, arrived at Shipo airports from a breeder in Beijing en route to a chain of pet stores based in Athens. But they didn't have the right paperwork.
And the European Union is quite tight on biosecurity, so there was no way that they could send them onto Athens without the kind of paperwork to show that they were disease free squirrels. But there wasn't paperwork to send them back either. And the breeder wasn't answering the phone and these squirrels were gradually escaping from the airport storage facility. So something had to be done.
And you know, we think, well, what do you do in a situation like this? It's hard to think that there couldn't have been a better answer than what the KLM ground staff actually did, which was that they took 400 of them, picked them up and threw them into an industrial shredder. And you know, it was later found out that there is a squirrel sanctuary in the Netherlands. They didn't even get A call news got out and questions were asked in the Dutch parliament.
This was a massive scandal. I actually found out about this when I was at business school because they still study the press release that KLM put out apologising for this disaster as a masterpiece of crisis pr. But the interesting thing here, and where this actually kind of ties into the finger book, is that the KLM apology was basically saying, look, nobody goes into the airline business because they want to shrift squirrels. We didn't intend this happening.
And he could believe that it's intuitively. But nonetheless it seemed like they'd created a system whereby the European Union had passed a law, the Netherlands Department of Agricultural Protection had passed regulations implementing that law. KLM had made a policy. And the policy was kind of sensible looking in that it defined what paperwork you have to have and then warned you that if you didn't do this there was a chance that your animals would be destroyed.
But no one had anticipated that you'd get 400 squirrels that you'd have to deal with in this way. And the only safeguard there was, it's some airport worker just refused to do it. And when you've got like a company policy based on legal requirements, if your job is working in shed, then you're not usually encouraged to make decisions to contradict the law. And so everyone had created a system where there was this decision that nobody owned.
It was. And thus when you start looking around the world thinking, oh, you know, when you pass these systems, you create decisions with no human owner, you start seeing quite a lot of them. Particularly a lot of my background was in. My previous book was in the economics of financial fraud.
And you see it all the time there. All throughout the great financial crisis of the last decade, there were just these systems where you started out thinking someone's got to go to jail for this. And you ended up concluding, actually all that happened is that nobody thought to organise their bank in such a way that it wouldn't create a conspiracy. It's kind of puzzling and troubling and well, I had a contract to write a book and I had an agreement with the publishers to write a book about how this meant that nobody was accountable for everyone, anything.
Everyone was setting up systems to avoid the blame for things. Aren't managers terrible people? Always passing the book and always avoiding responsibility. This was gonna be great.
I've just seen myself getting lectures about it. I've never taken accountability for anything in my life, but it makes me perfectly placed to lecture other people. But halfway through it, I Just got this attack of intellectual honesty and just had to tell the publisher the whole book was being delayed by a year because the more you look at it, the more you start saying, well, actually these people are setting up policies partly to shield themselves from accountability. And when they do that, that's bad.
But most of the time they're doing it because they need to have the rules there, they need to have systems to make these decisions for them, because you just can't make all those decisions one by one yourself anymore in an industrial society. And then actually, these are decisions that really literally do have no owner. And it's kind of weird to start thinking about society like that. But to my mind, once you start thinking about organizations as basically information processing systems that generate systems and techniques to manage their information flow, a lot of things to me start getting a lot more comprehensible and a lot easier to talk about.
And it's also easier to spot cases where these systems have broken down. And so this is like the turn that the book makes into this very sort of philosophically rich thinking about the way that information works, the way that organizations function. And one of my favorite things I learned from this book is that the word cybernetics, cyber is not a part of this word. It is the Greek kubernetes, or helmsman.
The idea of how is it that decisions are made? The person on the ship who is steering the ship is the helmsman. And we've taken the word cyber from this, which has nothing to do with it, but this philosophical. And also it's both philosophical systems and mathematical systems, and it's a lot of things.
And this idea of cybernetics as a system, a way of thinking, that helps us understand how accountability things come to be and why they function that way. Yeah, absolutely. Mathematically, cybernetics is just the same thing as information theory, but applied in a context where you're interested in control rather than communication. I'd be really interested to hear, like, what is your sort of quick, potted version of what cybernetics is?
I know it's like thousands of pages of books, but I'd be interested here. There's lots and lots of books and it can get really technical diagrams or whatever, but when I'm doing consultancy, I just. Basically, the kind of 0th law, the equivalent of like the laws of thermodynamics or the laws of Newton's laws of motion, is something just called the principle of sufficient variety, which is to say that if you are trying to control or manage a situation, then you have A kind of an environment, a system, and you have a regulator, the kind of management system. The management system has to have as much information processing capacity as the thing it's trying to control.
And when you talk to professional managers of any sort, you just say, it's like a drinking truck, try to get a drink from a fire hose. Your number one problem as a manager is to reconcile the flood of information coming from the outside world with your ability to process it and to literally make it manageable. And that's kind of intuitively obvious. But if you start thinking, I'm going to analyze this system and make sure that that principle is respected at every node where something has to control something else, you start kind of.
You start seeing a lot of places where broken down systems have broken down. The other kind of two big principles are that there are two ways to deal with a situation where you need to manage something and it looks really complicated. One of them is amplification, which is just simply where you start delegating your control to subsystems and making them do some of the work for you. And the other one is attenuation.
And that's kind of interesting to me in a sort of football context because one of the things I kind of using talks to describe this is the difference between a kind of National League player and a Premiership player is rarely that much physical skill. The difference between a National League player and someone in the park or me is almost all physical skill. But at the higher levels of the game, what sets apart the really great players is their ability to take in more information about what's happening on the field. And one of the ways in which they do that, sky sports psychologists call it chunking, they have a representation which is not taking into account.
Every single player is recognizing patterns and boiling that information down to something that they can process in their mind. And when you talk to a really good player. I was once on a bankers freebie watching some, I forget which teams were playing, but presumably one of them was unde because they had Dent Irwin in the there to tell us what was going on. And he just kept on saying what was going to happen next on the pitch.
And all of the bankers go, that's incredible. But it was clear that he was seeing things developing and he was just seeing a very different representation of the game happening from what we did. Because he developed that ability to recognize patterns and to kind of process just much more information about what was happening on the field than we could as normal spectators. And you know, the top levels of the game this isn't just across sport.
You see this a lot. And I think it's often as a reason why the greatest players don't necessarily meet the greatest coaches and managers, which is that they see things that your average run of the mill player does not see even at the top levels. And they have oftentimes an inability to translate what they are seeing into actionable instruction coaching for your average, even professional level player. There's a very fun baseball out there right where Manny Ramirez, who's like one of the best hitters of all time, also Gian Cheer, what are you going to do?
Says to a teammate who comes back to the, you know, the dugout, hey, why did you swing at that slider? And he just like swung into my mind and the guy goes well Manny, if I knew it was a slider I wouldn't have swamp. And it's just a very like. And these are two like extremely high level players.
And so I do think that you get echoes of this across sporty and entitlement. So it's my mind absolutely exact example of someone who just, you know, just wants to tell everyone, see where it's going, play the right pass, do these things, but not isn't kind of talking to people who can understand things on his level and what comes with what you get when ruining career in management. Yeah, that is very true. Oh, I will also say it has all sorts of implications for you know, like talent development and stuff.
For a long time in England, physical technique of passing was taught fairly rigorously. Pass selection was not. And the understanding being like, well, you can figure out who you're supposed to pass the ball to when. And as long as we give you the tools to do it, you will succeed.
And obviously this creates a talent development system that selects in very specific ways, perhaps unintentionally for certain innate skills and other innate skills. Yeah, no, I can see that. Yeah. So a lot of stuff that we do with soccer song for this.
Yeah, we do elements and XG and all that kind of stuff. But we also are very interested in the sort of business of the game and the way that the game fits into larger political and economic structures. And one thing that I thought was really interesting from your book within that sort of history of how, how cybernetics does not become the way that people think about systems and the economy and instead neoclassic, neoclass economics and various other forms of it become that way that the way that debt gets used, the way that through private equity revolution that companies learned that they could hold more debt on their books and become more profitable. And some of that was true.
At the same time, if you have lots of debt to service, that's like your only problem and everything you do. And what I think about is like, that's like all of football, all of football loses money. It's almost like the entire system of European football is built around that debt problem, that we have to find more money coming in somewhere. And that's what disciplines us as like an entire system.
Absolutely. And it was football clubs, particularly football clubs with stadiums owned by the club, piece of land that looks like it would make an excellent supermarket, or these days some excellent Stephen Flats. The whole story of private equity investments is very easy to tell by thinking about the football league in the days of kind of work sides and then ownership of clubs by deep pocketed chairpersons and then gradually to sports investment groups. Just gradually as people realized these things produce really quite reliable cash flow.
And if you've got something that produces really reliable cash flow, you can turn it into a really spicy high risk investment simply by loading it up with lots of debt. And the weird thing is that the debt investors really don't care about the business they're buying that's in. If they cared about it, they would buy equities. Because this is an information technology kind of going back to my concession with these things and I was talking to Australian portfolio managers a couple of weeks ago and it was noticeable if you are investing in equity, you're interested in huge amounts of things and huge amounts of detail about the company because your main kind of interest is in the upside.
You want to know what happens in the very unusual, very high return cases because that's what's going to drive your performance. The whole point of being a DAX portfolio manager is that you've only got one question to add answer, which is, is this guy going to pay me back? Yes or no. And those yes or no decisions, you can make a lot more of them.
So you have lots more investments but pretty much zero involvement in any given one of them. And so someone has played around with that information set and they can, you know, they're effectively selling the product, they're selling a lower risk, lower involvement investment to their debt investors. And then they're saying, well, you know, all of the spare cash flow will carve that up. And the trouble is then that as you keep on pushing that and pushing that, you reach a point at which bankruptcy looms.
And you know, like, you know, everyone who supports surfers knows that when bankruptcy looms really bad Decisions start getting made or decisions that are incredibly destructive in the long term start getting made. Because everyone realizes if you go bankrupt in the short term, there isn't going to be any kind of Glockstone. Yeah. We have a sacrifice that we create on a podcast we call the Sunderland Vortex.
Yeah. The other thing, the other story you tell about the development of capitalism through football is, you know, there's no way of doing this without naming names, but I've got enough experience to do so while staying well within what's public and what's legal. The Glazer family takeover of Manchester United, just the perfect example of buying a company with its own money. You know, and this is the whole story of private equity.
And when you explain it to an average non financial consenter, they immediately say, ah, you can't do that. That's definitely against the law. Absolutely not against the law. It's probably more legal risk to do it any other way than.
And the reason it struck people as probably illegal is that you literal financial anti gravity. So I start out here today with a balance sheet of assets and liabilities, zero on either side. I've got no assets, no liabilities. I talk a friendly banker into lending me some money because I say, here is what I consider to be an undervalued asset in the centre of Manchester with really reliable cash flow built on really valuable land.
And I think I can pick it up for less than it's worth. So we now have a position where I borrow the money, do the takeover. So my balance sheet now looks at liabilities, a hell of a lot of debt, assets, a business, in this case, any single business. So my balance sheet still dances, but now I do a really weird thing, which is that because I now own this company or this club and control it, I can control whether it borrows money or not.
So using my control of the company, I cause it to borrow a load of money, legal to pay a dividend. To me, dividend's also legal. And then I pay back my own debt. So having gone from 00 to debt and a company, I now have zero debt and an indebted company.
And this, when you talk it through that way, your case have created something out of nothing here and you haven't. You've just basically spotted that the company had more capacity to take on debt than the debt it currently had. And you've seen that lying on the ground and picked it up. And then the great thing is that you have limited liability.
So if everything goes great and, you know, we win the league and get into Europe and money comes through. That's fantastic. I pay myself up another big dividend, and, you know, pretty soon I could pay down the debt, and then I own the entire asset free and clear. And then if everything goes wrong, then, you know, I have limited liability.
My indebted company is now worth nothing. But that just puts me back where I started, with zero assets and zero liabilities. Other people who kind of depended on that business or that football club for their livelihoods or for their kind of weekend recreation, you know, they might feel that I had treated them badly, but there's nothing they can do because every single one of these operations was legal. You know, I'm not one of the kind of legal buts.
I've just done this, seeing opportunities and taking it. There is no way the egoing system is going to do anything other than reward me for doing that. And as I write in the book, when too much of the economy is given over to creating structures like that, things do seem to get a little bit screwed up. And European football, particularly British football, would be a great example of how you can push a good thing too far.
Yeah. As you were talking to the story, the question that it really did bring to my mind is when we look at it in the context of football, are we telling a story in which football is in some way uniquely vulnerable and it is uniquely a bad idea to use sort of leverage by our structures in the sport? Or what we're really saying is this is a reflection of this greater idea and this greater challenge of this kind of financial engineering, as this podcast wants to do, I will immediately question my own premise and say, I thought obviously probably a little bit of both, But I think sort of dividing the question like that gets interesting things about sort of what we're talking about here. One thing that football clubs used to have, and there's been enough financial engineering, I'm not necessarily sure that this is so true anymore, is big real estate assets.
The original kind of invasion of debt into football was very much premised on the development value of the land on the grounds. Because if you've got land to use as collateral, then the bank is not even going to look at your business plan. You know, they're going to go, well, you know, you might get promoted, you might get relegated. I don't know what the cash flow is going to be like on this thing, but I do know that I'm being asked to lend £10 million, and I can see a development site here that's worth at least 50.
So there's no way I'm not getting paid back. All I'll have to do is destroy the football club to do it. So there was that vulnerability there very early on. There's also the real strangeness of television rights, which completely transformed the economics of the game in all sorts of dimensions, followed by the Bosman ruling, which suddenly meant that all of that money got slipped out into players and their agents.
So you've got what I would say is a surprisingly dysfunctional sector with a lot of debt and with a lot of management practices which were kind of learned in a simpler era. So you've got lots of kind of sharks and people outside who are able to take advantage of those management practices. And then you've got a lot of people who are just, you know, fans and who make weird, unpredictable decisions because they're doing things that don't make any business sense because they're fans. You've then got the whole money laundering side of things, which I've written a few things about that in journalism over time.
But supply clubs are great money laundering vehicles and always have been. And it's true at every level of the game is the free thing. You can see our wheel spinning, by the way, as we sort of try to weigh which things that we know that we can say and which things that we know that we can't say as we're having this discussion about this. But absolutely.
Well, no, I mean, at the lower levels of the game, if you want something that will give you a weekly excuse for having £10,000 in cash checkings, then a small Sophie club is a great kind of vehicle to give you that excuse. At the very highest level of games, football players and player contracts are hard to value assets which are traded on an international market in a market in which the payment of large commissions to unregulated agents is very common. And this kind of assets were used to be art and then the art markets got a really bad kicking from the OECD Financial Action Task Force. And so it is by no means clean and is by no means impossible to launder money through the art world, but it's a lot more difficult than it used to be.
Football players share a lot of those hard to value international markets. Opaque commission arrangements with art and football has now gone on the OECD list of high risk industries, which means that at some point fit and proper regulation in the financial markets sense, which is considerably more stricter than the fit and proper person concept for a football club, the day is going to come. There are many Big clubs which are basically in my mind living on borrowed time. For someone coming in who starts saying this is not a kind of coined cuse and old fashioned business practice, this is a crime.
Now the horrible thing about money laundry is that there are lots and lots of strict liability offences because it's very difficult to prove because it's one of those things where the crime is created by the inception and the way that the financial will dealt with those is just by saying this is a strict liability offence. If you did it, you are guilty whether or not you had any criminal intent in doing it. And these are proper jail time, grown up fair offences. You can get seven years for a variety of money laundering offences.
And it's. Yeah, it is going to be interesting to see which is the first shoe that's going to drop. I don't even want to speculate about that because I've got no particular view except that the clubs which were formerly owned by Russian oligarchs have probably had someone go over them a lot more closely than the clubs which weren't. What about the clubs that were informally owned by Russian oligarchs?
I would never seek to say anyone specifically except the one in the Netherlands that has been almost officially destroyed by being unofficially by one. Rubbish. But yeah, no, I mean these are our discord had a fun day one day when Malcolm was sold from Russia to Saudi Arabia. Calculating exactly what a percentage of trade that transfer fee was between those two countries.
One thing as you were talking about sort of thing about is why it is European football that is the place you go to talk about this and how many of the things we're talking about don't apply or apply in a much more attenuated way to American sports, which are all walled gardens. You know, you keep out there are not private equity owners. They try to prevent the ownership of clubs by people who willow debt onto them. And then because it's a walled garden that says this much money goes to labor if they don't, there's at least a lot of transparency.
Everyone knows what the contracts are. The contracts are public. There's a database, you can do it. When someone signs a contract, everyone learns what that contract is.
And all of those systems American force put in place and like they put them in place to make sure that the person who owns the Cleveland Indians doesn't lose money. Cleveland Guardians doesn't lose money. But they end up protecting the clubs in an interesting way that doesn't occur in Europe. Even though the like relationship, even though there's other Ways, you know, the ability of owners to move clubs that don't protect the fans.
It's interesting the ways in which that does end up protecting fandom. It's a cutout, basically. And the US sports have specific kind of cutouts from antitrust laws, whereas in Europe it has always been decided that basically the law on cartels applies to sports teams. And that's.
You're seeing capitalism Red in 6th and Col. Post the Bosman ruling, post everything. You're seeing what a completely unregulated market in sports looks like. And the trouble is, I would say from a kind of semester point of view, is that you've got this framework of commercial regulation which just doesn't have any way to represent what you would think is the trivially obvious fact that football clubs have loads of stakeholders who have an important stake in the existence of a football team, which doesn't correspond to any documented financial claim.
And that's just one of the most banal observations you could possibly make about this sort of structure. But there's just no way to represent that in economics. You've got a control system. Kind of coming back to my 04, you've got a control system that is only capable of representing some things, and there's important information that just exists outside of that financial and legal control system.
And you're just relying on managers and owners and local members of parliament stepping in to make sure that the logic of that kind of financial and economic control system doesn't tear the whole kind of club apart too badly or too often. And so you rely on a really kind of ad hoc sort of system of regulation, and you're relying on having a benign owner at the top who basically wants to see the club do well because they're filming the Disney series about it in this context. The definition of a benign owner is really interesting too, because, right, we're talking about the owner's relationship to the sporting success of the club, and that you're hoping you just sort of walk into somebody who might be owning it for whatever reasons they want to own it, who also happens to want the club to duo. And those two things are not necessarily always the same.
Like especially Roman Ravich owning Chelsea. He owned Chelsea for a lot of reasons. He also happened to like seeing Chelsea do well. And so those two things worked okay for Chelsea fans for a long time, until all of a sudden they didn't.
Yeah, well, yeah, this kind of intangible asset of fan loyalty is hard to represent in a balance sheet, but that doesn't mean that someone like Roman Abramovich didn't recognise that it was there and didn't recognise that it was potentially very valuable to it. I used to have this kind of joke. I kind of sold that if Robert McGarvey had bought West Ham, then within a week British newspapers would be calling him a controversial figure but beloved in East London. Welcome to Newcastle.
I mean, you know, we all saw what happened when Pierre purchased the castle and it was exactly that kind of thing. Yeah. But particularly, I think, for Roman. And I think the comparison is perfect because Roman, as an individual who bore real risks in Russia of, you know, losing all of his wealth, losing possibly his freedom, who knows, becoming someone who has a.
Like a deep connection to London establishment, to a group like Mass Support, that changed how he worked in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was pretty much explicitly and intentionally. He had seen what happened to various other people he'd kind of commercially grown up with.
And it was very valuable to him to be someone who, if they got shot or fell out of a window or ingested weird radioactive isotopes that people would notice and it would cause more trouble for people back in Russia who appeared to be willing to commit cracks like that on the streets of London. And it's an intelligible benefits, it's intellectual assets. The trouble is then that because you've got these valuable things, people smell money on them and people are prepared to run at big losses, which means that you end up with the classic old kind of rich guy who is a fan. If you go back to the first days of the Premier League and Blackburn and the amount of money that Jack Walker revolutionised the game by, the amount of money he was prepared to put into Blackburn United success.
If you look at the actual amount of money, it's tiny. It's like the sort of money that modern owners would spend on a weekend away night. And so it's very difficult to coexist with sovereign wealth, dynastic wealth, kind of financial wealth, with. To take an example of Brandon, a chairman who's a boycott fan in the club and made his money by writing Blood Brothers, the musical producing Blood Brothers.
And I guess we can talk about Everton now. I will say that it is sort of a unique confluence of these circumstances. Right. Because for a long time what happened at Everton was you had a recognition that Kenwright was a good face for ownership, even when increasingly the money behind Everton was not.
Kenright. Yes. Yeah. You know, because we've moved on from the days in which single rich Kelly, Elton John had Wafford Wafford.
I mean, I should say in historical terms, it's not that new. You know, if you look back at the history of the UEFA book forward Champions League oligarch owned clubs have won that for decades. Except that the oligarchs in question were General Franco and Antonio Salazar. You know, Real Madrid and Benfica were oligarch clubs.
You also had Eastern European teams that were also basically Soviets oligarch clubs rather than post Soviet oligarch clubs. So there's always been that tendency there, but then it just got completely deregulated kind of competing oligarchs is the completely new thing. Yeah, well, I don't want to take up too much more of your time. This has been so much fun.
Dan, thank you so much for joining us. Do you want to tell everyone to buy your book? Do you want to tell the people about how to get that book? Well, yeah, I mean it is now available in most of the world except weirdly, New Zealand for publishing rights reasons I do not fully understand.
So like if you're in New Zealand, then send me a help get you a copy. But yeah, no, it's a local bookseller, University of Chicago Press in North America. It's called the Unaccountability Machine. It's on paperback in the UK now, so it's not quite so absurdly expensive and heavy.
And I have a substack which is called Back of Mind, which does not usually deal with sports things, but which usually does deal with general. I would not always call it kind of turning management science back into the branch of philosophy it was always meant to be. That's right. And I said we wouldn't keep taking more of your time.
And I realized I do want to take one more bit of your time. Thank you. Because we did ask from our Discord, one of the readers who has been the most, the most effusive in seeing the praises of this book is Discord member Jek and a couple questions I want to ask you one of these here, which is something really interesting, that one of the ways that this book could be read or misread is to absolve even very powerful people of personal and moral responsibility for things that have gone wrong. And is that something that you've heard from people?
And how do you sort of like how would you want to frame your thinking in response to that? It is tricky. It's what my friend Henry Farrell called the doctrine of immaculate corruption. If you're always saying these things happen and it's not what anyone intended, you do have to look out for situations where bad things happen because someone specifically does intend it.
I always got this weak of trying to look for systematic things. But yeah, no, I will just go hands up to that one there. JKM political scientist called Margaret Levi, who you would be very impressed with if you knew a lot of political scientists also asked the same question seminar about a year ago. And I still haven't got a satisfactory answer.
And it just gets more embarrassing for me every month. He's going to be very thrilled with that answer. I can tell you right now. He will be thrilled all right out of that.
Perfect, though. I think we can get out of here. We will be back with more podcasts. And Davis, thank you for joining us.
Cheers, y'. All. So much fun. Thank you.
Cheers.