This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson.

I'm recording this on Monday, November 7, 2016, just one day before the U.S. presidential election. And I have to admit, I'm feeling

nervous. Tomorrow we're going to vote to give someone an enormous amount of power over our society.

So today's episode is all about power. What is it? What happens to our bodies and our behavior when we have power

and when we don't have it? And what can we learn about lasting social power from looking at

small-scale hunter-gatherer societies? Our talk today is the power paradox. It was recorded at the

Leaky Foundation's Bay Area Science Festival event on November 3, 2016.

Our speaker is Dacker Keltner. Dr. Keltner is Professor of Psychology at the University

of California at Berkeley. He's the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center,

and for more than 20 years, he's been studying human emotions from an evolutionary

perspective. His work is focused on awe, happiness, and today's subject, power. His most recent

book is The Power Paradox, How We Gain and Lose Influence. Here's Dacher Keltner, recorded live on

stage at Public Works in San Francisco.

Thank you so much. That's really, that's nice. And it's, thanks for coming out. In some sense,

probably the last thing in the world you want to do is talk about power in light of everything

that's going on, and you will be prevented from checking 538 during this talk.

But I think there's no more important time to talk about power than right now.

It's a very consequential time with respect to this principle of social organization.

It's great to be speaking on behalf of the Leakey organization.

I tend to take an evolutionary perspective on the

things that I study from compassion to awe to today's topic power, so it's very fitting that

...