# Dina Powell: What a Human Super(emotional)intelligence Looks Like in the Wild

While reading *Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House* by Michael Wolff, I came across the name of someone I'd never heard of, Dina Powell. Wolff intriguingly describes her as a "supreme networker among the world's supreme networkers." So I looked her up on Wikipedia. After I scanned her page for a bit, something strangely irked me about what it left unsaid; I couldn't put my finger on what bothered me. Then I realized what it was. The following is a crude timeline of Powell's career (most of the following is taken directly from Powell's Wiki, [which](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dina_Powell) you should also read):

> Learns English and Arabic as a child;
> 
> Prep school for girls, Ursuline Academy of Dallas (an "unremarkable" high-school career \[by definition, since her high-school exploits aren't described in any detail\]);
> 
> Attends the University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts where she enrolled in the Plan II Honors program;
> 
> Honors thesis "on the value of mentoring juvenile delinquents";
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> Drops out of law school;
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> Interns for Republican U.S. Senator partly due to Arabic fluency;
> 
> More political jobs for Republicans, including the G. W. Bush campaign;
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> Marries a public relations professional (he became a managing director of the Washington-based Quinn Gillespie & Associates and later became employed by Teneo as the president of Teneo Strategy);
> 
> Hired by G. W. Bush administration;
> 
> Becomes Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel, a senior staff position at the White House (the youngest person to ever hold the job, at 29 years old);
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> Closely befriends Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice;
> 
> Nominated as Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, an assignment that included becoming an ambassador to the Arabic-speaking world;
> 
> Designated by Secretary Rice to the office of Deputy Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, and leads the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, in whose responsibility fell the Fulbright Program and similar foreign endeavors;
> 
> Establishes several public-private partnerships between American corporations and foreign entities, including a U.S.-Lebanon partnership in the wake of the 2006 war that sought to help rebuild the local economy;
> 
> Establishes the "Fortune"/U.S. State Department Global Women's the Mentoring Partnership, which connected up-and-coming female leaders with the community of Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit, a joint venture between the State Department and "Fortune" magazine;
> 
> Joins the Advisory Council of the George W. Bush Presidential Center;
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> Joins Goldman Sachs in 2007 as a managing director;
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> Joins Goldman Sachs "despite having no background in the subject of finance, but has said that her entire career has been guided by the notion of not planning a lot but rather 'just taking that leap of faith' " (!);
> 
> Oversees the firm's impact investing business and serves as the president of the Goldman Sachs Foundation beginning in 2010;
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> "As the leader of Goldman Sachs Impact Investing, Powell was responsible for a business with more than $4 billion in housing and community development investments across the United States";
> 
> Also leads Goldman Sachs Gives, a fund established in 2007 and structured as a vehicle to consolidate Goldman Sachs partners' charitable giving;
> 
> Joins the boards of directors or trustees of Harvard Kennedy School's Social Enterprise Initiative, the American University in Cairo, the Center for Global Development, Vital Voices, and the Nightingale-Bamford School. Powell is listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Trilateral Commission. Powell has worked with Democrats such as Obama administration advisors Valerie Jarrett and Gene Sperling;
> 
> Starting January 20, 2017, Powell begins serving as Senior Advisor to the President for Entrepreneurship, Economic Growth and the Empowerment of Women;
> 
> Another Powell endeavor involves a listening session on the related topics of domestic and international human trafficking;
> 
> Subsequently shares responsibility for overseeing a $200 billion amount of U.S.-Saudi arms deals (arms deals!);
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> Appointed deputy national security advisor in March 2017;
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> Key advisor on a trip to Canada to improve economic issues with the nation (!);
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> On the short list for White House Chief of Staff to replace Reince Priebus;
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> Named to the post of Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy, all the while retaining her economic position as well (the former was a new post created *specifically* for her);
> 
> Secures the release of Egyptian aid worker Aya Hijazi;
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> Helps complete the administration's National Security Strategy document (!);
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> Is considered to become the first female president of the World Bank (!!);
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> Joins the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs;
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> Returns to Goldman Sachs, on the firm's management committee;
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> Made Goldman’s global head of sustainability and inclusive growth, and head of the firm's Sovereign Fund;
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> Joins BDT & MSD Partners, a merchant bank, and becomes partner there;
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> Named the new chair of the Robin Hood Foundation;
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> Elected in 2023 to ExxonMobil's board of directors;
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> Writes with her second husband an "INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER," *Who Believed in You?*, on the value of mentorship.

Now, if like me you have Asperger's syndrome and are somewhat socially retarded, your first thought will be, "Holy shit! . . . Wait, what? What the fuck kind of career trajectory is that? How the hell is that possible? . . . It makes little logical sense, strictly speaking." Does the great majority of that post-college trajectory have anything to do with Powell's formal education — a humanities degree capped off by a mushy honors thesis on "the value of mentoring juvenile delinquents"? Why is someone with that expertise participating in global arms deals, or writing U.S. strategic documents, or, in practically the next breath, being considered for the presidency of the World Bank?

Dina Powell is one of the greatest examples I've ever come across of how non-stem degrees are status markers little relevant intellectually for a successful and powerful non-stem career. As is well known, what actually matters is high emotional intelligence and the social networking that results from that EQ and exposure to the right people; lastly, work ethic is the cherry on top. If you find someone like Powell with extremely high emotional intelligence and give them opportunities to network with important people, and they're a hard worker, an incredibly impressive career will be the end product. I consider Powell a kind of genuine human super(emotional)intelligence. She's a bit frightening in that regard.

In all of the videos I've watched of Powell, she comes across as self-possessed, lucidly present, but unexceptional — blandly likable in the standard palatable corporate sense. You could mistake her for the successful, type-A, always positive mommy manager of your local Target. Yet the truth must be that she is, behind the scenes, a world-class master of cynical realpolitik, and could not have gotten where she has without being so:

> Regarding the May 2017 report of a Donald Trump revelation of classified information to Russia, during which Powell was present in the room, she stated: "This story is false." However, this soon-to-be infamous, unannounced meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was where Trump was later revealed to have disclosed Israeli intelligence. While she dissembled to cover up the president's error, he later admitted to having revealed these secrets.

> In 2022 Dave McCormick \[her second husband\] became a top contender for the Republican nomination in the 2022 United States Senate election in Pennsylvania. Powell became strongly involved, accompanying him to Mar-a-Lago in an attempt to secure an endorsement for him from her former boss, the former president. Powell's ties to the former president were considered crucial in potentially counteracting some negative remarks that McCormick had made about the former president in the past. There were reports in the press, denied by some, that Powell hinted that McCormick's rival Dr. Oz would be unelectable due to his Muslim background. Some of those close to Powell expressed dismay that she would make such an argument, given her own background. The couple also emphasized the fact of Oz's dual citizenship. The efforts did not have success, as the endorsement went to Oz.

The full description by Wolff of her start in the Trump White House describes essentially her attempt, along with others, at a soft coup:

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/e56ebb4f7a4fc93570e036ecb8cc5b7d6e3e696f21ece9da.png)

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/0e74d87867bfe6b487d0432e428ff1e092a19fa96eb40456.png)

In 2018 a TV show with two truly great seasons, *Killing Eve*, came out on Netflix; it features a bisexual female master-assassin named Villanelle, who was carefully mentored into her job from childhood. She pitilessly kills her targets. Multi-lingual and highly intelligent, she is a psychopath, great at putting on all kinds of shoggoth-like masks. In one of the most intriguing moments in the show (spoiler alert), she blows the brains out of a crying man pleading to her for his life, and then seems caught off guard by her own indifference to the suffering she's just wrought, as if she is thinking, "What the fuck am I doing? What is this life I'm leading?" She has a look in her eyes of profound depletion (the first 30 seconds of the following video):

But the self-awareness, the tiny flicker of emotion, is fleeting.

Villanelle reminds me of what a person like Powell might be like with reversed emotional intelligence: a demonic and awe-inspiring force for gleefully wrought suffering. And that is only a good example of what's possible in the human realm. When I extend the idea to AI, what comes to mind, of course, is something like Roko's basilisk.