Kind: captions
Language: en
what are your thoughts on the ongoing
war in ukraine how do you analyze it
within your framework about war
how far would they go to hang on to
power
when push came to shove
is i think the thing that worries me
the most and is plainly what worries
most people about the risk of nuclear
war like at what point does that uncheck
leadership
decide that this is worth it
especially if they can
emerge
from the rebels still on top
the following is a conversation with
chris blattman professor at the
university of chicago studying the
causes and consequences of violence and
war
this he explores in his new book called
why we fight the roots of war and the
paths to peace
the book comes out on april 19th so you
should pre-order it to support chris and
his work
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now dear friends
here's chris
blattman
in your new book titled why we fight the
roots of war and the paths for peace
you're right quote let me be clear what
i mean when i say war
i don't just mean countries duking it
out i mean any kind of prolonged violent
struggle between groups that includes
villages clans gangs ethnic groups
religious sects political factions and
nations
wildly different as these may be their
origins have much in common
we'll see that the northern irish
zealots colombian cartels european
tyrants liberian rebels greek oligarchs
chicago gangs indian mobs rwandan jenna
said dares a new word i learned thank
you to you
those are people who administer genocide
english soccer hooligans and american
invaders
so first let me ask what is war
in saying that war is a prolonged
violent struggle between groups what do
the words prolonged groups and violent
mean
i sit at the sort of intersection of
economics and political science and i
i also dwell a little bit in psychology
but that's partly because i'm married to
psychologists sometimes do research with
her
all these things are really different so
if you're a political scientist you
spend a lot of time just classifying a
really narrow kind of conflict
and studying that and that's that's an
important way to make progress uh as a
social scientist but i'm not trying to
make progress i'm trying to sort of help
everybody step back and say you know
what there's like some common things
that we know
from these disciplines
that uh relate to a really wide range
phenomenon basically we we can talk
about them in a very similar way and we
get really similar insights so i wanted
to
actually
bring them together but i still had to
like
say let's hold out individual violence
which has a lot in common but but
individuals
choose to engage in violence for
more and sometimes different reasons so
let's just put that aside
so that we can focus a bit and let's
really put aside short incidents of
violence because those might have the
same kind of things explaining them but
actually there's a lot of other things
that can explain short violence short
violence can be really
uh
demonstrative like you can just i can
use it to communicate information
the thing that all of it has in common
is that it doesn't generally make sense
it's not your best option most of the
time
and so i wanted to say let's take this
thing that should be puzzling we kind of
think it's normal we kind of think this
is what all humans do
but let's point out that it's not normal
and then figure out why and let's talk
about why and so that's so i was trying
to throw out the the short violence i
was trying to throw out the individual
violence i was also trying to throw out
all the
competition that happens that's not
violent that's that's the normal normal
competition i was trying to say let's
talk about violent competition because
that's kind of the puzzle
so that's really interesting you said
usually
people try to find a narrow definition
and you said progress so you make
progress by finding a narrow definition
for example of military conflict
in a particular context yeah and
progress means
all right well how do we prevent this
particular kind of military conflict or
maybe if it's already happening how do
we de-escalate it and how do we solve it
so from a geopolitics perspective from
an economics perspective and you're
looking for a definition of war that is
as broad as possible
but
not so broad that you cannot achieve a
deep level of understanding of why it
happens and how it can be avoided
right and a comment basically like
recognize that common principles govern
some kinds of behavior that look
pretty different like an indian ethnic
riot
is obviously pretty different than
invading a neighboring country right but
uh and that's pretty different than two
villages or two gangs a lot of what i
work on is studying organized criminals
and gangs two gangs going to where you
think is really different and and of
course it is but
but there are some like common
principles you can just think about
conflict and the use of violence
and um
and not learn everything but just get a
lot just get really really far by sort
of seeing the commonalities rather than
just focusing on the differences so
again those words are prolonged groups
and violent can you maybe linger on each
of those words what is prolonged mean
what's where's the line between short
and long what does groups mean
and what does violet mean so let me you
know i have a friend who um
someone has become a friend through the
process of my work and and writing this
book also uh who was
20 30 years ago was a was gang leader in
chicago
so this guy named napoleon english or
nap
and i remember one time he was saying
well you know when i was young i used to
i was 15 16 and he'd go to the
neighboring gangs territory says i'd go
gangbanging and i said well i didn't
know what that meant i said what does
that mean and he said oh that just meant
i'd shoot him up like i'd shoot at
buildings
i might shoot at people
i wasn't trying to kill he wasn't trying
to kill them he was just trying to sort
of
send a signal that he was a tough guy
and he was fearless and he was someone
who they should be careful with
and so i didn't want to call that war
right that was
that was
that's something different that was it
was short it was kind of sporadic
and and he wasn't
and he was he was basically trying to
send them information and this is what
countries do all the time right we have
military parades
uh and we uh we might have border
skirmishes
and uh and and i wanted to sort of so is
it what's short is is it three-month
border skirmish a war i mean i don't i
don't try to get into those things i
don't want to but i want to point out
that like
these long grueling months and years of
violence are like or the problem in the
puzzle and i just i didn't want to spend
a lot of time talking about um
the
international version of gang banging
it's a different phenomenon so what is
it about napoleon that doesn't nap let's
call him
not to add confusion yeah that doesn't
qualify for war is it the individual
aspect is it that violence is not
the
thing that is sought but the um
communication of information is what is
sought
or is it the shortness of it
is it all of those com
it's a little bit i mean he was the head
of a group where he was becoming the
head of a group at that point um
and that group eventually did go to war
with those neighboring gangs which is to
say it was just long drawn out conflict
over months and months and months
but
i think one of the big insights from my
fields is that
you know you're constantly negotiating
over something
right whether you're officially
negotiating or you're all posturing like
you're kind of you're bargaining over
something
and uh you should be able to
figure out a way to split that pie and
you could use violence
but violence is everybody's miserable
like if you're nap like if you start a
war one you know there's lots of risks
you could get killed that's not good
uh you could kill somebody else and go
to jail which is what happened to him
that's not good uh your soldiers get
killed no one's buying your drugs in the
middle of a gunfight so it interrupts
your business and so on and on like it's
really miserable this is what we're
seeing right now you know as we're
recording you know the
russian invasion of ukraine is now its
fourth or fifth week everybody's
if it didn't dawn on them before it's
dawned on them now just how brutal and
costly this is
as you describe for everybody so
everybody is losing in this war yeah i
mean that's maybe the inside everybody
loses something from war
and
there was usually not always but this
the point is there was usually a way to
get
what you wanted or be better off without
having to fight over it so there's this
it's just fighting is just
politics by other means and it's just
inefficient
costly brutal
devastating means and so that's like the
deep insight and so i kind of wanted to
say um so so i guess like what's not war
and i mean i don't i don't want i don't
try to belabor the definitions because
some some you know there's
reams and reams of political science
prof papers written on like what's a war
what's not award
people disagree
uh
the
i just wanted to say war is the thing
that we shouldn't be doing or where's
the violence that doesn't make sense
there's a whole bunch of other violence
including
gang banging and skirmishes and things
that might make sense
uh precisely because they're cheap ways
of communicating or their their way
they're
they're not particularly costly where's
the thing that's just so costly we
should be trying to avoid is maybe like
the meta way i think about it
right uh nevertheless definitions are
interesting so outside of the academic
bickering yeah every time you try to
define something i'm a big fan of it
the process illuminates
so the destination doesn't matter
because the moment you arrive at the
definition um you lose the power
yeah one of the interesting things i
mean so people you know if you want to
do you know some of what i do is just
quantitative analysis of conflict and
and if you want to do that if you want
to sort of run statistics on war then
you have to code it all up and and then
lots of people have done that there's
four or five major data sets where
people or teams of people have over time
said we're going to code years of war
between these
groups or within a country and what's
interesting is how difficult these these
data sets don't often agree you have to
make all of these the decision gets
really complicated like when does the
war begin right does it does it begin
when a certain number of people have
been killed did it begin
did it what if there's like lots of
skirmishing and sort of like little
terror attacks or a couple bombs lobbed
and then eventually turns into war do we
do we call that did do we back date it
to like when the first act of violence
started and then what do we do with all
the one the times when there was like
that low scale low intensity violence or
lob bombs lobbed and
do we do we call those wars but or maybe
only if they eventually get worse like
so you get it actually is really tricky
and the defense on the offensive aspect
so everybody
uh hitler in world war ii
it seems like he never attacked anybody
he's always defending against the unjust
attack of everybody else as he's taking
over the world so that's like
information propaganda
that every side is trying to communicate
to the world so you can't listen to
necessarily information like self-report
data you have to kind of look past that
somehow maybe look especially in the
modern world as much as possible at the
data how many
bombs dropped
how many people killed
how the number of the estimates of the
number of troops moved from one location
to another and that kind of thing and
then the other interesting thing is
there's um
quantitative analysis of war so for
example i was looking at just war index
or people trying to measure
trying to put a number
on what wars are seen as just and not oh
really i've never seen that
it's
there there's numbers behind it it's
great
so it's great because again as you do an
extensive
quantification of justice
you start to think
what actually contributes to our
thought that for example world war ii is
a just war and other wars are not
um a lot of it is about intent and some
of the other factors like that you look
at which is prolonged the degree of
violence that is necessary
versus not necessary given
the greater good some measure of the
greater good of people all those kinds
of things the then there's reasons for
war
you know looking
to free people or to
stop a genocide versus
uh conquering land all those kinds of
things and people tried to put a number
behind it and a lot based on i mean what
i'm trying to imagine is
i mean suppose i wake up and or is
whatever my suppose i think my god tells
me to do something
or or my my god thinks that uh or my
moral sense thinks that something that
another group is doing is repugnant
i'm curious like are they evaluating
like the
validity of that claim or just the idea
that like well you said it was repugnant
you deeply believe that therefore it's
just i think uh now it could be
corrected on a lot of this but i think
this is always looking at wars after
they happened
so it's and trying to take a global
perspective from all
sort of a general survey of how people
perceive so you're not weighing
disproportionately the opinions of the
people who waged the war yeah
i mean i i kind of ended up dodging that
because
i mean
one is to just point out that wars
actually most wars aren't necessary and
so
in the sense that there's there's
another way to
get what you wanted
um
and so on on one level there's no just
war now that that's not true because
take an example like the u.s invasion
afghanistan
the united states has been attacked
uh there's a
culpable agent reliable evidence that
this is al-qaeda
they're being sheltered
by in afghanistan by the taliban
and then the taliban this is this is a
bit murky it seems that there was an
attempt to
say hand him over or else and and they
said no way
now you can make an argument that
invading and attacking is strategically
the right thing to do in terms of
sending signals to your future enemies
or you just if you think it's important
to bring someone to justice
in this case al-qaeda then then you
maybe that's just war or that's a just
invasion
but it hinges on the fact that
the the other side just didn't do the
seemingly sensible thing which is say
okay we'll give them up
and uh and so so it was completely
avoidable
in one sense but if you believe and i
think it's probably true if you believe
that for their own
ideological and other reasons
um
you know mulomar in particular and
taliban in general decided we're not
going to do this
uh then then now you're not left with
very many good choices
uh and now i
you know i didn't want to talk about is
that a just war is that what's justice
or not i just wanted to point out that
like it one side's intransigence if
that's indeed what happened one side's
intransigent sort of maybe compels you
to
basically eliminates all of the
reasonable bargains that you could be
satisfied with and now you're left with
really no other strategic option but to
invade i think that's a slight
oversimplification but i think that
that's like
that's like one way to describe what
happened so your book is fascinating
your perspective on this is fascinating
i'll try to sort of play devil's
advocate at times to try to get a
clarity but the thesis is that
war is costly
usually costly for everybody so
that's what you mean when you say nobody
wants war because you're going to
from a game theoretical perspective
uh nobody wins
and so
war
is essentially a breakdown of reason a
breakdown of negotiation of healthy
communication or healthy operation of
the world some kind of breakdown you
list all kinds of ways in which it
it breaks down but there's also
there's also human beings in this mix
and there is ideas of justice so for
example i don't want to my memory
doesn't serve me well on which wars were
seen as justice very very few in the
20th century of the many that have been
there
the the wars that were seen as just
first of all the most just war seen as
world war ii by far
um it's actually the only one
uh that goes above a threshold as seen
as just everything is seen as unjust
it's it's uh less
it's like degrees of unjustness
and i i think the ones that are seen as
more just are the ones that are fast
that you have a very specific purpose
you communicate that purpose honestly
with the global community and you strike
hard fast and you pull out
uh to do sort of it's like rescue
missions it's almost like policing work
if there's somebody suffering you go in
and stop that suffering directly that's
it
i think world war ii is seen in that way
that
there's an obvious aggressor
that is causing a lot of suffering in
the world and looking to expand the
scale of that suffering
and so you strike
i mean given the scale you strike car as
hard and as fast as possible to stop the
expansion of the suffering and so that's
kind of how they see i don't know if you
can kind of
look with this
framework that you presented and look at
hitler and think
well
it's not in his interest
to attack
czechoslovakia poland
britain
france
russia
the soviet union
america the united states of america uh
same same with japan
what is it in their interest long-term
interest i don't know i i it uh
so for me
who cares about alleviating human
suffering in the world
yes it's not it seems like almost
no war is just
but it also seems somehow deeply human
to fight
and i think your book makes the case no
it's not can you can you try to like get
at that because it seems that war there
is some that
like drama of war seems to beat in all
human hearts like it's in there
somewhere maybe it's
maybe there's like a relic of the past
and we need to get rid of it it's deeply
irrational
okay so obviously we go to war and
obviously there's a lot of violence and
so
we have to explain something and and
some of that's going to be aspects of
our humanness so so i guess what i
wanted us to sort of start with
i think it was just useful to sort of
start and point out actually you know
there's really really really really
strong incentives not to go to war
because it's going to be really costly
and so all of these other human or
strategic things all these things the
circumstantial things that will
eventually lead us go to war have to be
pretty
powerful before we go there and and most
of the time sorry to interrupt uh and
that's you why you also describe very
importantly that war throughout human
history is actually rare
we usually avoid it
you know most people don't know about
the us invasion of haiti in 1994. i mean
a lot of people know about it but people
just don't pay attention to it we don't
we we're going to you know the history
books and school kids are going to learn
about the invasion afghanistan for
decades and decades and nobody is going
to put this one in the
in the history books and it's because it
it
didn't actually happen because
uh before the troops could land
the person who'd taken power in a coup
basically said fine
there's a famous story where where colin
powell goes to haiti to this new
dictator who's refused to let a
democratic president take power
and um
and tries to convince him to step down
or else and he says no no and and then
he shows him a video and it's basically
troop planes and all these things taking
off
and he's like this is not live this is
two hours ago so
it's a and and basically he basically
gives up right there
so that was that's a powerful move yeah
i think powell might have been one of
his teachers in like a u.s military
college because a lot of these military
dictators are trained at some point so
they had some there was some personal
relationships at least between people in
the us government and this guy that they
were trying to use the the point is and
that that's that's like what should have
happened like that makes sense right
like yeah i'm
maybe i can mount an insurgency
and yeah i'm not going to bear a lot of
the cost of work because i'm the
dictator and maybe he's human and he
just wants to fight or gets angry or
it's just in his mind whatever he's
doing but at the end of the day he's
like this does not make sense
um
and that's what happens most of the time
but we don't write so many books about
it
and uh
and and and now some political
scientists go and they count up all of
the nations that could fight because
they have some dispute and they're right
next to another one another or they look
at the ethnic groups that could fight
with one another because they have
there's some tension and they're right
next to one another and
and then whatever some number like 999
out of a thousand don't
don't fight
um because they just find some other way
they don't like each other but they they
just loathe in peace because that's the
sensible thing to do
and that's what we all do we loathe in
peace uh and we loathe the soviet union
in relative peace for decades and india
uh loathes pakistan in peace i mean two
weeks into the russian invasion of
ukraine again
it was in the newspapers but most people
didn't i think take note india
accidentally launched a cruise missile
at pakistan
and
common suit so they were like yeah this
is
we do not want to go to war this will be
bad
uh
we'll ex will be angry but we'll accept
your explanation that this was an
accident and so um so these things find
to the radar
until we overestimate i think how
likely it is sides are going to fight
but then of course things do happen like
russia did invade the ukraine and didn't
find some
negotiated deal and so
uh and so then the book is sort of about
past the book it's just sort of laying
out
actually like there's just different
ways this breaks down and some of them
are human
some of them are this
i i actually don't think war beats in
our heart
it does a little bit but
we're actually very cooperative we're as
a species we're deeply deeply
cooperative we're really really good so
the thing we're not we're okay at
violence and we're okay and we're okay
getting angry and vengeance and
we have principles that will sometimes
lead us but we're actually really really
really good at cooperation
and and so that's again you know i i
don't i'm not trying to write some big
optimistic book where everything's going
to be great and we're all happy and we
don't really fight it's more just to say
let's start let's be like a doctor as a
doctor we're going to focus on the sick
right i'm going to try i know there's
sick people but i'm going to recognize
that the normal state is health and that
most people are healthy and and that's
going to make me a better doctor and
that's i'm kind of saying the same thing
let's be better doctors of politics in
the world by recognizing that like
normal state is health and then we're
going to
identify like what are the diseases that
are causing this warfare so yeah the
natural state of the human body with the
immune system and all the different
parts
uh wants to be healthy and is really
damn good at being healthy but sometimes
it breaks down let's understand how it
breaks down yeah exactly so what are the
five ways that you list
that are the roots of war
yeah so i mean they're kind of like
buckets like there's sort of things that
rhyme
right in the interval you know because
it's not all the same there's like lots
of reasons to go to where there's this
great line
you know there's a reason for every war
and a war for every reason
and that's true and it's kind of
overwhelming right and and it's
overwhelming for a lot of people it was
overwhelming for me for a lot of time
and i think i think one of the gifts of
this of social sciences actually people
have started to organize this for us and
i just tried to organize it like a tiny
bit better buckets that rhyme buckets
yeah some economics before right
metaphors so so the idea was that like
that basic instead of like something
overrides these incentives and and i
guess i was saying there's five ways
there that they get overrided and three
are i'd call strategic like they're kind
of logical there's circumstances
that um and and this is they're sort of
where strategic is the strategy is like
the
the game theory is you could use those
two things interchangeably but but game
theory is sort of making it sound more
complicated i think than it is it's
basically saying that there's times when
this is like
the optimal choice because of
circumstances and and and one of them is
when the people who are deciding don't
bear those costs so
that's or or maybe even have a private
incentive that's gonna that's that's uh
if they don't if they're ignoring the
cost then maybe the costs of war are not
so material uh that's a contributing
factor another is just there's
uncertainty and we could talk about that
but there's just the absence of
information means that actually there's
circumstances where it's your best
choice to
attack there's this thing that political
economists call commitment problems
which are basically saying there's some
big power shift that you can avoid by
attacking now so it's like a dynamic
incentive it's sort of saying well in
order to keep something from happening
in the future
i can attack now and because of the
structure of incentives it actually
makes sense for me even the awards in
theory
uh
really costly or it is really costly
nonetheless
and then there's these sort of human
things
one's a little bit like just war one
sort of thing there's like ideologies or
principles or things we value
that weigh against those costs
like
exterminating the heretical idea
or standing up for a principle
might be so valuable to me that i'm
willing to use violence even if it's
costly
and there's nothing irrational about
that
and then the fifth bucket is is all of
the irrationalities all the passions and
all of the most importantly i think like
misperceptions the way we get like we
basically make wrong calculations about
whether or not war is the right decision
we get our we miss we misunderstand or
misjudge our enemy
or misjudge ourselves so if you put all
those things into buckets so how much
can it be modeled
in in a in a simple game theoretic way
and how much of it is a giant human mess
so four of those five are really
on some level easy to
think strategically and model in a
simple way
um
in the sense that any of us can do it
right we do this all the time you know
think of like bargaining in a market for
a carpet or something or whatever you're
bargained for
um
you're thinking a few steps ahead about
what your opponent's going to do
and you stake out a high price like a
low price and the seller stakes out a
high price
and you might both say oh i refuse to
like i could never accept that and
there's all this sort of cheap talk
um but you kind of understand where
you're going and it's efficient to like
find a deal and buy the market by the
carpet eventually
um so we all understand this like game
theory and the strategy i think
intuitively or maybe even a closer
example is like suppose
i don't know you have a tenant you need
to evict or anyone normal like kind of
legal or not it's not yet a legal
dispute right like we just have a
dispute with a neighbor or somebody else
most of us don't end up going to court
going to court is like the war option
that's the costly thing that we just
ought to be able to avoid we ought to be
able to find something between ourselves
that doesn't you know require this
hiring lawyers and a long drawn out
trial and most of the time we do
right and so so we all understand that
incentives and then
for those five buckets
so everything except all the irrational
and the misperceptions are really easy
to model then from a technical
standpoint it's actually pretty tricky
to model
the misperceptions and i'm not a game
theorist uh and so i'm more channeling
my colleagues who do this and and what i
know
um but but it's not rocket science i
mean i think that's what i that's kind
of
what i try to lay out in the book is
like there's this all this all these
ideas out there that that can actually
help us just make sense of all these
wars
um and just some bring some order to the
more ass of real reasons well to push
back
a lot of things in one sentence so first
of all rocket science is actually pretty
simple
people i think i'll i'll defer to you
actually well i think it's because
unfortunately it's very like engineering
it's very well defined the problem is
well defined the problem with humanity
is it's actually complicated so it is
true it's not rocket science but it is
not true it's easy because it's not
rocket science but
the
the the problem the the downside of of
game theory
is not that it helps us make sense of
the world it projects a simple model of
the world that brings us comfort in
thinking we understand yeah and
sometimes that simplification
is actually getting at the core
first principles on understanding of
something and sometimes it fools us into
thinking we understand so for example i
mean
mutually assured destruction is a very
simple model and people argue all the
time whether that's actually a good
model or not but you know there's
empirical fact that we're still alive as
a human civilization and also
in the game theoretic sense do we model
individual leaders
and their relationships
do we
the staff the generals
uh or do we also
um have to model the culture the people
the
the the suffering of the people the
economic frustration or the anger the
distrust you have to model all those
things do they come into play uh and
sometimes i mean again we could be
romanticizing
those things from a historical
perspective but when you look at history
and you look at the way wars start
it sometimes feels
like a little bit of a misunderstanding
escalates
escalates escalates
and
just builds on top of itself and all of
a sudden it's an all-out war
it's the escalation with nobody hitting
the brakes
so
so i mean you're absolutely right and
like in the sense that it's totally
possible to oversimplify these things
and take the game theory too seriously
and and some and and people who
study those things and write those
models and
people like me who use them sometimes
make that mistake i think that's not the
mistake that most people make most often
and it's actually true is i think most
people we're actually really quick
whether it's the the u.s invasion of
afghanistan or iraq we're really quick
to blame that on
the humanness and the culture and that
so we're really quick to say oh this was
george w bush's either desire for
revenge and vengeance or some private
agenda or blood for oil
um so we're really quick to blame it on
these things and then we're really
we tend to overlook the strategic
incentives
to
to attack which i think were probably
dominant i think those things might have
been true to a degree but i don't think
they were enough to ever you know bring
those wars about just like i think
people are very quick to sort of in this
current invasion to sort of
talk about putin's
um grand
visions of being the next catherine the
great or
or or nationalist ideals or
and and the mistakes and the
miscalculations were really quick to
sort of say oh that that must be and
then kind of pause and start not
possible maybe even stop there and not
see some of the strategic
incentives and so
so i i guess we have to do both um but
the strategic i guess i would say like
the
war is just such a big problem it's just
so costly
that the strategic
incentives and and the things that game
theory has given us are like really
important in understanding why
there was so little room for negotiation
in a bargain that things like a leader's
mistakes start to matter or leaders
nationalist ideals or delusions or
vengeance actually matters because those
do matter but they only matter when the
capacity to find a deal is so
narrow because of the circumstances and
so let's not
let's it's sort of like saying um like
an elderly person who dies of pneumonia
right pneumonia killed them
obviously but that's not the reason
mnemonia was able to kill them all of
the fundamentals and the circumstances
were like made them very fragile and
that's how i think all the strategic
forces
make that situation fragile
and then the miscalculations and the all
these things you just said which are so
important are kind of like the pneumonia
and let's sort of let's pay attention to
both
and you're saying that people don't
disproportionately pay attention to the
it's hard i mean it wasn't to the
leaders it took me a long time to learn
to recognize them and it takes many
people you know it took and it took
generations of social scientists
um years and years to figure
figure some of this out and to sort of
help people understand it and clarify
concepts so it's not it's just not that
easy now it's not hard i think it's
possible to just as i was taught a lot
of the stuff i write in the book in
graduate school or from reading and i
it's possible to communicate and learn
this stuff but it's still really hard
and so so so
that's kind of what i was trying to do
is like close that gap and just make it
help people recognize
these things in the wild before we zoom
back out let me
at a high level first ask what are your
thoughts on the ongoing war in ukraine
how do you analyze it within your
framework about war
a russian colleague of mine constantine
tells this story about a visiting
ukrainian professor
who's at the university and one night
he's walking down the street and he's
talking on two cell phones at once for
some reason
and a mugger stops him
and demands the phones
and it's sort of like deadpan way
constantine says you know and because he
was ukrainian he decided to fight
and
and i think that's a little bit like
what happened most of us in that
situation would hand over our cell
phones
and um and and so in this situation
putin's like the mugger
and the ukrainian people are being asked
to hand over this thing and they're
saying no we're not going to hand this
over and and the fact is
um most people do
most people faced with a superpower or a
tyrant or an autocrat or a
murderous warlord who says
hand this over they hand it over
and uh and that's why
that's why there are so many unequal
imperial relationships in the world
that's what empire is empire is
success of people saying fine we'll give
up our some degree of freedom or
sovereignty because you're too powerful
and the ukrainian said no way uh this is
just too precious and so i said one of
those buckets where that there are
there's a set of values there's
sometimes there's something that we
value
that is so valuable to us and important
sometimes it's it's terrible sometimes
it's the extermination of a another
people but sometimes it's something
noble like liberty or refusal to part
with sovereignty
and and in those circumstances people
will decide i will endure the costs they
probably i mean i think i think i think
they knew what they were probably
risking
um and so to me that that's not to blame
the ukrainians any more than i would
blame
americans for the american revolution
it's actually a very similar story you
had a tyrannical
militarily superior
pretty non-democratic entity come and
say
you're going to have partial sovereignty
and americans for ideological reasons
said no way
and that you know people like bernard
bailey and other historians that's like
the dominant story of the american
revolution it was in the ideological
origins this attachment this idea of
liberty and so i start now there's lots
of other reasons i think why
this happened but i think for me it
starts with ukrainians failing to make
that
sensible quote-unquote
rational deal that says
we should we should relinquish some of
our sovereignty because russia is more
powerful than we are
so there's a very clinical look
at the war
meaning there is
a man and a country vladimir putin
that has
makes a claim on a land
builds up troops
and invades yep
the way to avoid
suffering there and the way to avoid
death and a way to avoid war
is to
uh back down and basically let
you know there's a list of interests he
provides and you go along with that
um that's when the goal is to avoid war
uh let's do some other calculus
let's think about britain so
france
fought hitler
but did not fight very hard portugal
there's a lot of stories of countries
like this
and there is
winston motherfucking churchill
he's one of the rare humans in history
who had that we shall fight on the
beaches
it made no sense
hitler did not say he's going to destroy
britain he seemed to show respect for
britain he wanted to
keep the british empire he it made total
sense but it was obvious that britain
was going to lose if hitler goes all in
on britain as he seemed like he was
going to and yet winston churchill
said a big fu yeah
similar thing
zelensky and the ukrainian people
said fu in that same kind of way
so i think i think we're saying the same
things i'm i'm being more clinical about
it well i'm trying to understand
and we won't know this
but which path minimizes human suffering
in the long term
well
on the eve of the war ukraine was poor
in a per person terms than it was in
1990 the economy is just completely
stagnated
in russia meanwhile like many other
parts of the region sort of boomed
to a degree i mean certainly because of
oil and gas but also for a variety of
other reasons and putin's consolidated
political control and
and from a very cold-blooded and
calculated point of view i think one way
putin and russia could look at this is
this look we were temporarily weak after
the ball
of the iron curtain
and the rest in the west basically took
advantage of that like bravo you pulled
it off you basically crept democracy and
capitalism all these things right up to
our border
and now we have regained some of our
strength we've consolidated political
control we've cowed our people
we have a stronger economy and we
somehow got germany and other european
nations to give up energy independence
and actually just we've got an enormous
amount of leverage over you and now
we want to roll back some of your
success because we
we're powerful enough to demand it
and and you've been taking advantage of
the situation
which is
maybe a fair
impartial analysis
and uh in the west but more specifically
ukraine said but that's a price too high
which i totally respect i would maybe
i'd like to think i'd make that same
decision but that is that's the answer
if the answer is why would they fight if
it's so costly why not find a deal it's
because they weren't willing to give
russia the thing that their power
said they quote unquote deserve just
like americans said to the briton yeah
of course you you we ought to accept
semi-sovereignty
um but we are just we refuse
and we'd rather endure
a bloody fight that we might lose
than than take this and so
um so you need some of these other five
buckets you need them to understand the
situation you need to sort of
there are other things going on but i
but i do think it's fundamental that
there's just that this
it this noble
intransigence is like a big is a big
part of it
well let me just say a few things if
it's okay yeah so your analysis is um
is clear and objective
my analysis
is neither clear nor objective
first
i've been going through a lot i'm a
different man over the past four or five
weeks than i was before
i
in general have come to
there's anger
i've come to despise leaders in general
because leaders wage war and the people
pay the price for that
war let me just say
on this point of standing up to an
invader
that i am half ukrainian half russian
that i'm proud of the ukrainian people
whatever the sacrifice is whatever the
scale of pain
standing up
there's something in me that's proud
maybe that's
maybe that's whatever the
fuck that is
maybe that blood runs in me
i love the ukrainian people love the
russian people
and whatever that fight is whatever that
suffering is the millions of refugees
whatever this war is the dictators
come to power and the their power falls
i just love that that spirit burns
bright still
and i do
maybe i'm wrong in this to see ukrainian
and russian people as one people
in a way
that's not just cultural geopolitical
but just given the history
i think about
the same kind of fighting
when hitler with all of his forces
chose to invade the soviet union
operation barbarossa
when he went and that russian winter
and you know a lot of people and that
pisses me off because if you if you know
your history
it's not the winter that stopped hitler
it's the red army it's the people that
refused to back down they fought proudly
that pride
that's something
that's the human spirit
that's in war you know war is hell
but it really pushes people to
to stand for the things they believe in
it's the the william wallace speech from
braveheart i think about this a lot
that does not fit into your framework no
no i'm gonna disagree i i think it
totally fits in and it's it's this
there's nothing irrational about what we
believe
especially those principles which we
hold the most dear right i'm i'm merely
trying to say that there's a there's a
calculus there's one calculus over here
that says
russia is more powerful than it was
20 years ago and even 10 years ago and
ukraine is not
and it's asking for something
and and there's an incentive to give
that up
that's obvious like there's an incentive
to comply but my understanding is many
of these post-soviet republics
have appeased
right which is what we call compromise
when we disagree with it
they've
all of these other peoples in the
russian sphere of influence have
have not stood up
uh and russians
many russians have tried to stand up and
they've been beaten down
and now
people have
we'll see but people have not been
standing up very much
and so
lots of people are cowed and lots of
people have a piece and lots of people
hear that speech and think i would like
to do that but but don't
and and so and my point is that
sadly we live in a world where a lot of
people
uh get stepped on by
tyrants and empire and whatnot and don't
rise up and so so i think we could
admire especially
when they stand up for these reasons and
i think we can admire churchill for that
reason i think we could that's why we
admire the leaders the american
revolution and so on but doesn't always
happen and i i don't actually know why
but i don't think it's irrational i
think it's just it's it's something it's
about a set of values and it's hard to
predict
and it was hard for
hard i i
putin might not have been out of line
and thinking just like everybody else
in my share of influence they're gonna
roll over to
and i should mention
because we haven't that a lot of this
calculation
from an objective point of view you have
to include united states and nato into
the pressure they apply into the region
that said
i care little about leaders
that do
cruel things onto the world
they lead to a lot of suffering but i
still believe that the russian people
and the ukrainian people are great
people that stand up and i admire people
that stand up
and are willing to give their life and i
think
russian people are very much
um that
too especially when the enemy is
coming for your home over the hill yeah
sometimes standing up
to an authoritarian regime is difficult
because you don't know
it's not
a monster that's attacking your home
directly it's kind of like the boiling
of a lobster or something like that it's
a slow
control of your mind and the population
and our minds get controlled even in the
west by the media by the narratives
it's very difficult to wake up one day
and to realize
uh sort of what people call
red pilled
is to see that they're
you know maybe the thing i've been told
all my life is not true and at every
level that's the thing very difficult to
do in north korea
very in the more authoritarian the
regime the more difficult it is to see
maybe this idea that i believe
that i was willing to die for is
actually evil it's very difficult to do
for americans for russians for
ukrainians for chinese for indians for
pakistanis
for everybody i think thinking about
this
ukrainian whether you want to call it
nobility or intransigence or whatever
is is key i think um
the authoritarian-ness of russia and
putin's control or the control of his
cabal is the other thing i would really
point to is what's going on here and if
i had to if you ask me like big picture
what do i think is the fundamental cause
of most violence in the world i think
it's unaccountable power i think in fact
for me an unaccountable power is the
source of underdevelopment it's the
source
of pain and suffering it's the source of
of warfare it's basically the root
source of most of our problems
and in this particular case
it's also one of our buckets in the
sense that like why what is it that why
did russia ask these things like well it
was democracy in the uk in ukraine a
threat to an average russian
no was capitalism is nato is whatever
is this a threat to average russians no
it's a threat to
the
bullet apparatus of political control
and economic control that putin and
cronies and this sort of
group of people that that rule this
elite in russia
um
it was a threat to them and so they had
to ask
the ukraine to be neutral or to give up
nato or to have a puppet government or
whatever they were seeking to achieve
and have been trying to achieve through
other means for
decades right they've been trying to
undermine these things without uh
invasion
and they've been doing that because it
threatens their interests and that's
like one of these other logics of war
it's not just that there's something
that i value so much that i'm willing to
injure the cost it's that there are
people
not only do does this oligarchy or
whatever elite group that you want to
talk about in russia not
first of all they're not bearing
something they're bearing some costs of
war right they're very and they're
certainly bearing cost of sanctions
um but they are
they don't bear all the costs of war
obviously and so they're more they're
quick to use it but more importantly
like
in some sense it i think there's a
strong argument that they had a
political incentive to invade and or at
least to ask ukraine this sort of
impossible to give up thing and then
invade despite ukrainian
nobility and transitions
because they were threatened
um and so
so that's extremely important i think
and so that's
those two things in concert make this a
very fragile situation that's i think
why we ended up
is go go not all the way but a long way
to understanding now you can layer on to
that
these intangible incentives these other
things that are valued that are valued
on putin's side maybe there's a
nationalist ideal maybe
he
seeks status and glory like maybe those
things are all true and i'm sure they're
true to an extent
and and and that'll weigh against his
costs of war as well but fundamentally i
think he just saw his regime as
threatened that's what he cares about
and
and and so he asked he made he made this
cruel list of demands
i mean i would say i'm just one human
who the hell am i but i'm i just have a
lot of anger
towards the elites in general
towards leaders in general
that failed the people
i would love
to hear and to celebrate
the beautiful russian people the
ukrainian people and anyone who silences
that beautiful voice of the people
anywhere in the world
is destroying the thing that
i value most about humanity leaders
don't matter they're supposed to serve
the people
this nationalist idea
of a people of a country
is only makes any sense when you
celebrate when you give people
um the freedom
to show themselves
to celebrate themselves and the the
thing i imagine i care most about is
science
and
the silencing of voices in the
scientific community the silencing of
voices period
fuck any leader that silences that
human spirit
um
there's something about this it's like
whenever i look at world war ii whenever
i look at wars
it does seem very irrational to fight
but man
does it
seem somehow deeply human when the
people stand up and fight and there's
something
uh
that if you know we talked about
progress
that feels like how progress is made
the people that stand and fight so let
me read the churchill speech
it's such
i so proud that we humans can stand up
to evil when the time is right i guess
here's the thing though think of what's
happening in xinjiang in china we have
we've appeased china
we've basically said you can just
do
really really really horrible things in
this region and we're you're too
powerful for us to do anything about it
and it's not worth it
and and there's nobody standing up and
making a churchill speech
or uh the braveheart speech about
standing up for people of of xinjiang
when when what's happening is um on you
know in that in that in that realm of
what was happening in europe
and and that's happening in a lot of
places
um and then when we when when there is a
willingness to stand up
people there's a lot of opposition to
those you know people you know so there
were a lot of reasons for the invasion
of iraq
um for some it was humanitarian things
like
saddam hussein was one of the worst
tyrants of
the 20th century
he was just doing some really horrible
things you know he'd invaded kuwait he'd
you know committed domestic
attempted domestic genocide and all
sorts of repression and it was probably
a mistake to invade in spite so it's
important not just to select on the
cases where we stood up and to select on
the cases where that ended up working
out
uh in the sense of victory
right it's important to sort of try to
judge not judge but just try to
understand these things in the context
of
all the times we didn't
give that speech or when we did and then
it just went sideways well that's why
it's powerful when you're willing to
give your life for your principles
because most of the time
you get neither the principles
nor the life you get you die that's what
but that's why it's powerful we shall go
on to the end we shall fight in france
we shall fight on the seas and the
oceans we shall fight with growing
confidence and growing strength in the
air we shall defend our island whatever
the cost may be we shall fight on the
beaches we shall fight on the landing
grounds we shall fight in the fields and
in the streets
we shall fight in the hills which shall
never surrender
this is
before hitler had any major loss to
anybody
that was a terrifying armada coming your
way we shall never surrender i just want
to give props
uh i want to give my respect as a human
being
uh to churchill to the british people
for standing
up to the ukrainian people for standing
up
and for um and to the russian people
these are great people
that throughout history have stood up to
evil
let me ask you this because you quote
sun tzu in the art of war
there's no instance of a country having
benefited from prolonged warfare this is
the
main thesis
can we just linger on this
since leaders wage war and people pay
the price when we say that there's no
reason to do prolonged war
is it possible to have a reason for the
leaders if they disregard the price
sort of like
uh if they have a different objective
function or utility function that
measures the price that's paid for war
is that one explanation
of why war happens is the leaders just
have a different calculus than other
humans
i mean i think this links us back to
what we were talking about earlier about
just war is in some sense just war
is saying
that in spite of the costs that there's
some
our enemy has done something our
opponent has refused to compromise on
something that we find essential
and is demanding that we compromise in a
way that's completely repugnant
and
therefore we're going to go to war
despite these
material costs and these human costs so
that and and and that's and then and
then that principle that you go to war
on is in the eye of the beholder and i
mean i think liberty and and and
sovereignty i think we can understand
and sympathize with and maybe that's
just a universe maybe that's the
greatest cause of just war but other
people make that
could go to war for something
considerably less a principle that's
considerably less noble right which is
what hitler was doing
um
that's an explanation so that's a whole
class of explanations
that helps us understand that the
compromise that was on the table given
the relative balance of power was just
repugnant at least to one side if not
there's something they're unwilling to
part with that's
and then
you get to the leaders well what happens
when what the leaders want
when what happens when the leaders are
detached from the interests of their
groups which has been true for basically
most of human history there's a narrow
slice of societies
in the big scheme of things that have
been accountable to their people a lot
of them exist today
where to some degree they're channeling
the interests of their group
right so the ukrainian politicians
didn't concede to these cool russian
demands
because even if they had it would have
been political suicide because it seemed
i think i don't it seems that the
ukrainians would have just rejected this
so they were in some sense channeling
the values of the broader population
even if they
i don't know what was going even and if
they didn't share those principles
they self-interestedly
followed them probably they shared them
but i'm just saying that even if they
didn't they wouldn't compromise
occasionally you get the reverse which
is where the leaders are not accountable
and now they have some value which could
be glory
i mean this is the story of the kings
and to some lesser extent the queens of
europe
for hundreds of years was it was
basically a contest and it was this war
was the sport of kings and to some
extent they were just seeking status
through violent competition and they
paid a lot a big price out of the royal
purse but but
uh but they didn't bear most of the
suffering
um and and so they were too quick to go
to war
and so that's
i think that
detachment of leaders
combined with you know you mingle it
with this that one bucket that
uncheckedness and you mingle that with
the fact that that leaders might have
one of these values noble or otherwise
that carry them to war combined to
explain
a good number of conflicts as well
and that's a good illustration of why i
think like autocracy and
unaccountable power
is
i could make that story for all of those
things all five buckets they're all
we're all more susceptible to these
things all five of these things when
leaders are not accountable to the
people and their group
and uh and that's what makes it like the
meta
for me the metacause of of conflict in
all of human history and sadly today
does the world to power play into this
the desire for power
like that's a human thing again in the
calculation
that
shall we put that in the misperceptions
bucket
or is it
those misperceptions essentially
about interaction between humans and
power is more about
the thing you feel in your heart when
you're alone as a as a leader
you know i said there were three
strategic reasons like the then check
leaders the commitment problems
uncertainty there are two sort of more
psychological and i call them intangible
incentives and misperceptions the way
that like a game theorist or the way
that a behavioral economist would think
about those two was just to say
preferences
and then
erroneous beliefs and mistakes it's like
so the pro our preferences are our
preferences yeah right and so utility
functions whatever we want to call it
like there's not
that's why i wouldn't call them a
misperception or rationality
we want we like what we like yeah if we
like power if we like relative status if
we like
uh
if we like our racial purity if we like
our liberty if we like whatever it is
that we have convinced ourselves we
value maybe you fell in love with the
rival queen a king exactly when i said
it was a big bucket full of stuff that
rhymes like that's a pretty messy bucket
like there's a lot of different stuff in
there and i'm just trying to say like
let's be clear
that
just about the law the shared logic of
these things is maybe just you know
they're really dissimilar but let's be
clear about the shared logic
uh and if it were true that deep down we
were aggressive people who just liked
violence and enjoyed the blood
or some percentage of us do that would
be there too
um
and so
i just want to say that's
but you know we're really quick to
recognize those right when we diagnose a
war as an armchair analyst or as a
journalist or something
we really jump to those we don't need a
lot of help
to like see those happening
we so we probably put a little bit too
much emphasis on them is maybe the only
thing that i would caution
because we're the others are more subtle
and they're often there and they
contribute
so i just to look at something you said
before
would it be accurate to say when the
leaders become detached
from um the opinion of the people
is that's more likely to lead to war
so
uh and mechanically it's just they're
gonna bear fewer costs so it's gonna
it's gonna basically narrow the set of
deals that they're going to be willing
to accept instead of violence at the
same time most of the time
it's not enough because the leaders
still bear a lot of costs of war you
could be deposed you could be killed you
could be tried
and the public purse is going to be
empty that's like the one story
throughout history is at the end of the
day your regime is broke as a result of
war and so you still internalize that a
little bit
um if i had to say like you know in my
three buckets or through my bucket so
far i sort of started with like
ukrainian intransigence
and then i jumped and then i said the
essentially then you really have to
understand russian autocracy for just to
understand why they would ask
something so cool but i mean i think the
uncertainty
is really
important here as well like if you think
about like think of all the things the
way this is played out and just in some
ways how many how in how many ways we've
been surprised we've been surprised by
the unity and the coherence of the west
and the sanctions that's sort of what's
happened is it was in the realm of
possibility but it was sort of like the
best case scenario from the
perspective of the west and the worst
case scenario for the russians
the second thing is just the pluckiness
and the effectiveness and the
intransigence and the nobility of this
ukrainian resistance that's again was
within the realm of possibility but
wasn't necessarily the likely thing
right it was again maybe the worst
realization for russia the best
realization in some sense for
in terms of revealed strength and
resolve
um
and then the other thing that's been
revealed is just how
like the from the corruption and
ineptitude and problems on the russian
military side them again
within the realm of possibility maybe
people who really knew the russian
military are less surprised than the
rest of us but but also
one of the worst possible draws for
russia and so
putin asking this
terrible price
and expecting
ukraine to roll over
or the west to roll over at least to a
degree
was
based on like a different set of
probably it was based on just expecting
something in the middle of the
probability distribution and not one of
all these different tail events and so
the fact that the world's so uncertain
and the fact that putin can come with a
different set of expectations than the
ukrainians in the west and all these
players can
just have a hard time agreeing on just
what the facts are because we live in an
uncertain world everyone's quick to say
oh we miscalculated well i'm not i don't
know if he miscalculated i think he just
he got a really bad draw
on in terms of the what the realized
outcomes are here and so that i mean
good for everybody else in some sense
except you know the fact that it's
involving a lot of violence is the
tragedy so uh well there's also economic
pain yeah just for the russian people
and the ukrainian people but the whole
world the whole world yeah so it
you know
uh you could talk about
things that you we are surprised from an
analysis perspective of
small victories here or there but i
think it's universally true that
everybody loses once again
in this war right and so the question is
is like
when does it you know why did why did
russia choose to invade when ukraine
didn't give this up well russia
anticipated that it would be able to
seize
what it wanted the the available bargain
that it deserved quote unquote based on
its power in the world it wasn't getting
and so it thought it could take that
and and the uncertainty around that made
it potentially more likely that he would
choose to do this but in particular one
of the other things that i think is
probably less important this context but
still plays a role but less important
than many wars is the is the fact that
it's really hard to resolve that
uncertainty
right in theory
ukraine should be able to say look
this is exactly how resolved we are
we're super resolved
and your military is not as strong as
you think it is you mean before the
conference before the conference
everybody should be like you know on the
table here
no one wants yeah here's your cards
exactly like that's as a competitor in
this you can use that uncertainty to
your advantage i can try to convince you
i can bluff yeah all right and so anyone
who's ever played poker and bluffed or
called a bluff
that's the inefficiency that's like
that's the analogy in some ways to war
it's not the perfect analogy but it the
the uncertainty in the circumstance you
don't have to miscalculate the fact that
you if you bluff and lose this wasn't
that you miscalculated you made an
optimal choice given the uncertainty of
the situation to take a gamble and that
was a wiser thing for you to do than to
not bluff
and just to fold or to just not
paying in that round and so the
uncertainty the situation gives both
sides incentives to bluff gives neither
side an incentive to try to reveal the
truth and then at some point the other
side says you know what you say you're
resolved
you say you're not you're going to mount
an insurgency well guess what
every other
you know people on my border has folded
and you're gonna fold two the minute the
tanks roll in and the minute the air
force comes in i'm gambling that you're
bluffing
and uh and so we that
that inherent uncertainty of the
situation just
causes a lot of
short wars actually
because
it's this sort of bluff and and call
dynamic that goes on and you know the
thing that's worth wrecking is we might
end up
at a place in a few months where
the thing that ukraine concedes
is not so far from what russia demanded
in the first place
russia wanted i want
a neutral
i mean who knows how it's not the
ambitious thing the russians wanted but
if we end up in a place where ukraine is
is
effectively neutral never joins nato
is not being militarily supplied by the
by the west
uh and where
russia has de facto control over the
east and crimea if not fully recognized
probably who knows if they'll get ever
internationally and ukrainian recognized
but effectively controls
russia will have
accomplished
what it asked for in the first place and
and both parties had to
get there through violence rather than
through negotiation and you wouldn't
need misperceptions and mistakes and you
wouldn't need
putin's
delusions of glory or whatever to get
there you would just need the
ingredients i've given so far which is
like a an unwillingness to do that
without fighting
on the part of the ukrainians
uh an autocratic leadership in russia
who would make those demands because
it's in their self-interest and then
uncertainty leading them to
to fight
and
and and and that sadly is like the best
case that feels like the best case
scenario right now
which is the war is just five months
and not five years
given the current situation given the
current situation
because
the the suffering has already happened
it lost homes people moving
you know
having to see
their um
their home in rubble and
millions of people refugees having to
escape the country
um
and
hate flourishes versus the common
humanity as as it does with war
and
on top of all of that if we talk from a
geopolitic geopolitical perspective
the war mongers
all over the world
are sort of uh drooling
they now got narratives
and they got the whatever narratives you
can go shopping for the narratives the
united states has its narratives for
whatever geopolitical thing he wants to
do in that part of the world
um
that's another that's another little
malevolent interaction between two of
these buckets like those unchecked
leaders and those intangible incentives
those preferences
is that
un unchecked leaders spent autocrats
whatever spend
enormous amounts of time trying to
manipulate the values and beliefs of
their population of their group yeah
right and they now sometimes they do it
nobly but that's what winston churchill
there was trying to it's not clear that
britons were like ready to stand up
there were a lot of americans and a lot
of britons who were like you know what
hitler not such a bad guy his ideas not
so terrible i never liked those jews
anyways they many were thinking right we
had political leaders in the u.s who
were basically
not pro-nazi but were just not
anti-nazi
and churchill was just trying to instill
a different
resolve he was trying to create that
thing he was trying to create that value
and in the american revolution it was as
well like the founding fathers the
leaders of the revolution weren't it's
not that everybody just woke up one
morning in the united states and had
this ideology of liberty and freedom
some of that was true it was out there
in ether but they had to manufacture and
create it
you know in a way that i think they
believed and was noble but
there's a lot of manufacturing and
creation of these values and principles
that is not noble and that is exactly
what hitler did so well
yeah
the anti-semitism was present throughout
the world
but the the more subtle thing that i
feel like may be
more generally applicable
is this kind of pacifism
that i think people in the united states
felt like it doesn't it's not my
conflict why do i need to get involved
with it and i think uh churchill was
fighting
um that the general
apathy um it's like
it's the apathy
of rational calculus like uh
it's like what are we going to gain if
we fight back
like
hitler seems to be pretty reasonable
he's saying he's not going he's going to
stop the bombing that you're still going
to uh maintain your sovereignty
as the great people of britain like why
why are we fighting again and that's the
thing that's hard to break because you
have to say well
you have to speak to principle you have
to speak at some greater sort of
long-term vision
of history so like
yes
now it may seem like it's a way to avoid
the fight
but you're actually just sort of putting
shackles on yourself you're destroying
the very greatness of
of our people if we don't fight back and
to think about this with like the
current case with russia i mean some
people look at
putin's speeches
and papers he's written on
ukraine
historically being a part of russia and
trying to deny the
basically create all these nationalist
narratives and they think well putin
really believes and he might putin
really believes this and that's why he's
invading and that might also be true and
that would
contribute to
just make a peaceful bargain even harder
to find but i i suspect what's at least
a minimum true is putin's trying to
manufacture
support for an invasion in the
population through propaganda
and um
and so he's doing
on some level the same thing that
winston churchill was doing in
mechanical terms which is to try to
manipulate people's
references and
but
doing it in a in a sinister malevolent
evil self-serving way because it's
really in his interest whereas
this was anything but right in the
churchill example the dark human thing
is like
uh there's moments in
world war ii where hitler's propaganda
he began he began to believe his own
propaganda
it's like i think he probably always
believed i think he was a sincere
believer
well no no there's but there's a lot of
places
in um where there was uncertainty yeah
and they decided to do propaganda
and that propaganda resolved the
uncertainty in his own mind
like so for example he believed until
very late that america is a weakling
militarily and as an economic power and
just the spirit of the people and like
that was part of the propaganda they're
producing and because of that propaganda
when he became the head of the army he
was making military actions he like
nonchalantly started war with america
with the united states of america where
did he didn't need to at all he could
have avoided that completely but he
thought ah whatever doesn't they're easy
so that that's has i think that
propaganda first belief second and i
think as a as a
as a human being as a dictator when you
start to believe the lies
with which you're controlling the
populace you're not able to you become
detached from this person that's able to
resolve
in a
uh very human way the conflict in the
world i mean when i said the meta the
the big common factor that causes warn
over and over and over again is
unaccountable power it's not just
because it's mechanically like one of my
five explanations to saying well if
you're unaccountable you don't bear the
cost of war you might have private
incentives so yes bargains are harder to
find but it leads to all these nasty
interactions so early i said there's
this interaction between the values
and the unchecked leaders because those
idiosyncratic values of your leader
become more important when they're
unchecked but the uncertainty point you
just made is like a deep point it's to
say actually that like the fundamental
problem that all autocrats have is an
information problem because nobody wants
to give them the right information and
they they have very few ways to
aggregate information if they're not
popular right and so so there's a whole
cottage industry of political science
sort of talking about why do
like why autocrats love
fixed elections and why they love
twitter and why they actually like it in
a controlled way is it it solves an
information problem like that's your
cruci if you're like xi jinping or or or
vladimir putin you need to solve an
information problem just to avoid having
rebellion on your hands in your own
country every day because
uncertainty kind of gets magnified and
you get all this distorted information
in this apparatus of control and so that
so that's like another nasty interaction
between uncertainty
and unchecked leaders is you end up
in this situation where you're getting
bad information and and you it's not
that you don't you believe your own lies
it's just that you never you sort of
believe you're sort of averaging what
you believe over the available
information and you don't realize that
it's such a distorted and biased
information source
one of the other things about this time
there was a surprise to me in in the fog
of uncertainty
how
sort of seemingly
likely nuclear war
became
not likely but
how it less unlikely than before exactly
that's a better way to say it it started
to
take a random
stroll away from zero percent
probability into this kind of land of
maybe like it's hard to know but it's
like oh wow we're actually normally
talking about this as if this is part of
the calculus part of the options but
before we talk about nuclear war because
i'm going to need a drink
do you need to go to the bathroom sure
i'll take a break
so back to nuclear war
what do you think about this that people
were nonchalantly speaking about
nuclear wars if it doesn't lead to the
potential annihilation of the human
species
um
what are the chances that our world
descends into nuclear war within your
framework with you you wear many hats
yeah one is uh sort of
the
and now uh analyst right and then one is
a human what do you think of the chances
we get to see nuclear war in this
century well you know the the doomsday
the official doomsday clock for nuclear
warfare sits in the lobby of my building
um the bulletin of atomic scientists
sort of shares a building with us so
it's it's always there every day can you
describe what the doomsday clock is the
bulletin of atomic scientists it's
something that this group of physicists
sort of said to sort of mark just how
close we are to nuclear catastrophe and
they started it decades ago and it's and
it's a clock and it's sort of how close
are we to midnight where midnight is
nuclear armageddon and or the
destruction of humanity and and it's
been sitting i mean it's actually it
hasn't moved as close to it hasn't moved
as close to
midnight in the last few weeks as it
probably should have only because
it was already so close there's actually
limited room for it to move for a bunch
of other reasons i think it's there's a
whole political thing that once it's
really hard it's really easy to move it
closer
and it's really hard if you're the
person in charge of that clock to move
it away right because that's always very
controversial so it always sits there
but it it forces you to think about it a
little bit every day
um
and i admit i was
nonchalant about it in till recently in
a way that many
many other people were
um i still think the risk is very low
but
um
kind of for the reasons we've talked
it's just so
you know unimaginably costly that nobody
wants to go that route so so it's like
the it's like the extreme version of my
whole argument with why we most of the
time don't fight is because it's just so
damn costly and so this is that's that's
the incentive not to use this and and if
they do use it that's the incentive to
use it in a very restrained way
um
but that's not a lot of but but because
we know we do go to war and there's all
these things that interfere with it
including miscalculation and all these
human foibles
and and
several of those nuclear powers are not
accountable leaders
i think we have to be a lot more worried
than many of us were very recently i
pointed out earlier like the whole
reason we're in this mess is because the
only people who have this private
interest in like having ukraine give up
its freedom is
this russian cabal an elite that
gets their
power and is preserved only and is
threatened by
ukrainian democracy
what would how far would they go to hang
on to power
when push came to shove
is i think the thing that worries me
the most and is plainly what worries
most people about the risk of nuclear
war like at what point does that uncheck
leadership
decide that this is worth it
especially if they can
emerge
from the rubble still on top i don't
know so
um and i don't know that any of us
have really fully thought through
all of that calculus and what's going on
very recently around the anniversary of
january 6 there were a lot of questions
about it was the united states going to
have another civil war
on the one hand i think it's almost
unimaginable sort of like in the same
way i think that a nuclear war and
complete armageddon is unimaginable but
i remember something that uh
i when both of those questions get asked
i remember something i
i was in the audience of listening to
some great economists speak about the 20
years ago about the risk of an
argentina-style financial meltdown of
the united states like what's the total
financial collapse
and they said you know what the risk is
vanishingly small
but that's terrifying because until
recently the answer was zero
and so the fact that it's not zero
should deeply deeply scare us all and we
should devote a lot of energy
to making it zero again and that's how i
feel about the risk of a civil war in
the u.s and that's how i feel about the
risk of nuclear war is it's higher than
it used to be and that should terrify us
all
to me what terrifies me is that all this
kind of stuff seems to happen
like overnight like super quick and it
escalates super quick when it happens so
it's not like
i don't know
i don't know what i imagined but it just
happens
like if a nuclear war happened
it would be
something like a plane
like in this case with ukraine a nato
plane shut down over some
piece of land
by the russian forces
or so the narrative would go but it
doesn't even matter what's true or not
in order to spark the first
um
moment of escalation and then it just
goes it goes well i think that happens
sometimes i mean again it's this thing
that you know
what social scientists call it selection
on the dependent variable like there's
all these times when that didn't happen
when it stopped when it escalated one
step and then people paused or it
escalated two steps and people said whoa
whoa whoa whoa
um
and and so we remember the times when it
went boom boom boom boom boom boom boom
and then the really terrible thing
happened but that fortunately that's not
you know i start off the book with an
example of a gang war that didn't happen
in in in medicine colombia which is
third that's my day job is actually
studying conflict and
gangs and violence and of these other
kinds of groups also very sinister
um and
and most of the time they don't fight
and that escalation doesn't happen so so
the escalation does happen quickly
sometimes except when it doesn't which
so we remember the ones when it does
it's really important to think about all
that like um
i remember talking to i think elon musk
on his podcast is i was sort of like
talking about the horrors of war and so
on and then he said well you know like
most of
human history
because i think i said like most of
human history is um
had
been defined by
these horrible wars he's like no most of
human history is just peaceful like
farming life
like war we kind of remember the wars
but most of human history is just you
know is life
yeah and most of the competition between
nations was like
blood
i would say blood thirsty without
drinking that blood in the sense that it
was intense it would loathe some
and so a lot of the rivalry and a lot of
the competition which is also can be
problematic in its own ways is not
violent and most of human history is
about the oppression
of the majority by a few
and
the their moments when they rise up and
revolt and there's a revolution we
remember those but most of the time they
don't
and um and the story of political change
and transformation and freedom is is
there's a few revolutions that are
violent but most of it is actually
revolutions without that kind of violent
revolt revolt most of it is just the
peaceful concession of power by elites
to a wider and wider group of people in
response to their increased economic
bargaining power their threat that
they're going to march so so even if we
want to understand something like
the march of freedom over human history
i think we can draw this same insight
that that actually we don't
most of the time we don't fight we
actually concede
power no you don't you don't
the elite doesn't sort of give power to
the masses right away they just co-opt
the few merchants who could threaten the
whole thing and bring them into the
circle and then the circle gets a little
bit wider a little bit wider until the
circle is ever wide and maybe not ever
but encompasses most if not all
and that's like a hopeful and optimistic
trend
yeah if you look at the plot if you guys
could pull it up of the the wars
throughout history this so the rate of
wars throughout history just seemed to
be decreasing significantly with a few
spikes
and the the sort of the expansion
it's like half the world is under
authoritarian regimes
but that's been shrinking and shrinking
and shrinking stephen pinker's one
person one a famous scholar who brings
out this hypothesis i mean there's sort
of two ways there's actually two
separate kinds of violence that one
where i think he's completely right and
one where i think we're not sure
probably maybe not the where he's
completely right sort of interpersonal
violence homicides everyday violence has
been going down down down down down down
down that's just unambiguously and it's
mostly because we've created
cultures and states and rules and things
that control that that violence now the
warfare between groups
is that less frequent well you know
it's not clear that he's right that
there's fewer wars
you might say that there's
there the wars are more rare because
they're more costly because their
weapons are so brutal
the costs of war go up as the costs of
war go up
not entirely but for the most part that
gives us an incentive not to have them
and um but then when they do happen
they're doozies
so is pinker right i hope he's right but
i don't think that officially that trend
is there i think
that we might have you know the same
kind of
levels of intergroup
violence because
maybe those five fundamentals that lead
to war have not fundamentally changed
and thus
made us given us a more peaceful world
now than a couple hundred years ago
that's something to think about so
obviously looking at his hypothesis
looking at his data and others like him
but i have noticed one thing which is
the amount of pushback he gets yeah that
there is this this is speaking to the
general point that you made which is
like we
over emphasize the anecdotal like the
and don't
look objectively at the aggregate data
as much there's a general cynicism about
the world and not i don't even mean
cynicism it's almost like cynicism porn
or something like that where people just
get
for some reason they get a little bit
excited to talk about the destruction of
human civilization you know in a weird
way like they don't really mean it i
think if i were to
like psychoanalyze their geopolitical
analysis is i don't i think it's a kind
of um
i don't know maybe it relieves
the mind to think about death at a
global scale somehow and then you can go
have
lunch with your kids afterwards and feel
a little better about the world i don't
know what it is but that it's not very
scientific it's very kind of personal
emotional
and so we shouldn't we should be careful
to look at the world in that way because
uh
the if you look broadly there is just
just like hey you highlight there's a
will for peace uh
among people yeah uh you mentioned
medellin by the way how do you pronounce
the medellin
both are fine i think the
there they say medellin because that's
kind of the accent is the
on the double l but that's but medellin
is would be totally
fine as well what lessons do you draw
from the medellin cartel from the
different gang wars in colombia medellin
uh what's the
economics of peace and war between dark
drug cartels here's what was really
insightful for me so i live in chicago
and the chicago people are aware that
there's a violent problem in chicago
it's actually not the worst american
city by any stretch of the imagination
for shootings but it's pretty bad
um and
medellin has these better much many more
and probably many better organized gangs
than
chicago
and yet the homicide rate is maybe half
and
now i mean there have been moments when
these gangs go to war in the last 30
years when medellin has become the most
violent place on the planet but for the
most part right now they're peaceful and
and so what's going on there
um
i mean one thing that is there's a
there's a hierarchy of organizations
so that above these reasonably well
organized neighborhood gangs there's a
set of sort of more shadowy
organizations that
have different names some people call
them resonates some people would call
them bandas corinales criminal bands you
might just call them mafias
and they there's about 17 of them
depending on how you want to count
and they themselves
have a little operating board
called sometimes they call it the office
la fiscina sometimes they call it
um la mesa at the table well each
individual one or as a group as a group
as a group so they meet and they don't
meet personally all the time sometimes
they meet but they consult
a lot of the leaders of these groups are
actually in prison and so and they're in
the same wings and prisons they have
represented oh they meet in prison well
they're whatever if if i'm on a cell
block with you i've beaten you anyways
right so actually imprisoning leaders
and putting them in the same cell block
but not putting them in you know if you
get arrested here in the united states
and your criminal leader and you get put
in a super max prison you cannot run
your criminal empire it's just too
difficult it's impossible there it's
possible and you might think and they do
they still run their empire and you
might think that's a bad idea but
actually
cutting off the head of a criminal
organization leading it to a bunch
leaving it to a bunch of like hot-headed
young guys who are disorganized is not
always the path to peace so
having these guys all in the same prison
patios
is actually
it they it it reduces imperfect
information and uncertainty right it
provides a place for them to bargain
they can talk and and so alphacena is
like a lot of these informal meetings
and so so you know and and they have
these tools that they use to control the
street gangs so instead of there being
like 400 gangs all sort of in this
anarchic situation of competing for
territory and constantly at war the
resonates are keeping them in line
and they will use sanctions
they will
where they'll sanction might be i will
put a bullet in your head if you
right if you don't a little more honest
there's no more sanctions between
nations exactly but they will but they
they will sit them down they'll they'll
provide they'll help them negotiate they
will provide commitment i said there are
these things called commitment problems
where like there's some dynamic i have
some incentive to like exterminate you
but that's going to be costly for
everybody so i'm going to have what's
the solution well i'm going to provide
commitment i'm going to like enforce
this deal
and yeah you don't like this deal now
because you could take advantage of your
situation
and wage war but i'm going to give you a
counter incentive
and and and so they keep the peace and
so
and it's a little bit so they're a
little bit like the u.n security council
and peacekeeping forces and sanctions
regimes it's like the same kinds of
tools the same parallels
and and they're imperfect they don't
always work that well and they're
unequal right because it's not like
they're pursuing this in the interests
of like
blah blah blah
um
but it kind of works
until it doesn't and and 10 years ago in
you know the mid-1990s there were wars
and this breaks down and i it kind of
gave me this perspective on the
international institutions and all the
tools we've built that we do the same
things right sanctions
are designed to
make unchecked leaders face the cost of
war
it's a solution to one of the five
problems
right and
mediators are a solution to uncertainty
and international institutions that can
enforce a piece and agreement are a
solution to commitment problems and all
of these things can be solutions to
these intangible incentives like these
preferences for whatever you value and
miss calculations because they will
punish you for your miscalculation or
they will get a mediator to help you
realize why you're misconceiting so so
they're doing all these things and it
made me realize that the comparison to
the u.n security council and our all our
tools is actually a pretty good one
because those are pretty unequal too
and those are pretty imperfect
like that's you know it's there's these
we have five nations with a veto on the
security council and
a lot of unequal power and they're
manipulating this in their own
self-interest or their group's interests
um
so so anyway so it's actually the some
of the
things that work in medellin and why
they work help give me a lot of
perspective on what works in the
international arena and why we have some
of the problems we have is like so
there's not
in some deep way there's not a
fundamental difference between those 17
mafia groups
and security councils
[Laughter]
oh we're like funny descendant of apes
put on suits i'm sure there were
different they have different cultural
garbs that they wear yeah uh what do you
thought i mean that's the sense i got
from pablo escobar and jorge ochoa who
founded the car the medellin cartel
is
like uh having spoken with people on
this podcast talked to roger reeves who
was a drug uh transporter it seems like
there it seems like it was
um i don't know the right
term but it was very kind of
professional and calm
it didn't have a sense of danger to it
like it's negotiating so like the danger
is always on the table as a threat as
part of the calculation but you're using
that threat in order to de-escalate in
order to fps everybody is interested in
peace
so something that happened last year we
were a little bit able to watch in real
time because we had a few contacts we've
been meeting and talking to a lot of
these leaders in prison and a bit
outside of prison
many of them will talk to us um
and so
uh their
the homicide i mentioned homicide rate
and medellin's
maybe a two-thirds or half of the
chicago level it had been climbing
some of these street level gangs
were starting to fight
um
maybe at sort of the on some level it it
seems that like maybe some of those
horizon leaders were like saying well
let you know we're actually not sure how
strong these guys are let's let them
fight just to test it out let's have
these skirmishes right it wasn't
prolonged warfare it was like let's just
sort of feel out how strong everybody is
because then we'll be able to
reapportion the drug corners and stuff
accordingly
so they're kind of feeling each other
out through fighting
and the homicide rate some doubled and
then it then it increased by the same
amount again and so is approaching
something that might get out of control
which wasn't in anybody's interest was
in the government's interest wasn't in
their interest and so then magically
um
all these leaders in these patios right
different prisons and they're spread out
around a bunch of prisons everybody gets
transferred to a new prison on the same
day
which means they all get to be in the
same holding area for three days before
they're all moved elsewhere so the
government had a role in this
and then somebody who's like a trusted
mediator on the criminal side gets
himself arrested
happens to be put in the same spot
and uh
and a week later the homicide rate has
is 30 of what it was
uh it's back to its normal mode
unfortunately not zero right but it's
back to where it was
uh because they
it didn't make sense to have a war and
everybody government
mafia leaders everybody sort of like
they figured out a way to sort of
bargain their way to peace
cancer is almost like a tangent but you
mentioned you got a chance potentially
to talk to a few folks someone in prison
somewhere or not
um is it productive
is it interesting
maybe by way of advice do you have ideas
about talking to people who are actively
criminals yeah
it really depends on the situation so
like the first time i worked in a
conflicted place was in northern uganda
in the maybe the last couple years of a
long-running war so this would have been
2004-2005 this is a small east african
country
and the north of the country had been
engulfed in
think of it as like a
a 20-year low level insurgency run by a
um self-proclaimed messiah
who wasn't that popular and no one
joined his movement so he would kidnap
kids
and um and so the
i never
i could talk to people who are who'd
come back from being there i never once
if i'd wanted to i and i was writing
about that armed group i never talked to
anybody who's an active member that
armed group was quite rare it wouldn't
have been easy or safe
um
and that's sometimes true i'm starting
to do some work in mexico probably and
i'm not going to be talking to any
criminal they'll kill people when you
say you're not going to talk to them and
they'll kill people
[Music]
which people
so i mean journalists are routinely
killed for knowing too much in mexico
there's no
there's no compunctions about killing
them and there's no consequences who do
you who kills a journalist it's not the
main
people
that though you spoke with it's their
lackeys or is it rival
no so so um gangs this is true of a
chicago gang and this is true of
a medellin gang it's probably true of a
mexico gang is like you might have your
group of 30 people one or two of them
might be shooters
most people don't you most people don't
like to do that
or you don't even have any of those
people in your group because you're
trying to run a business you don't need
any shooters you can just hire
a killer
when you need them on contract and so
if somebody's asking questions
and you don't want them to ask questions
or you think they know too much in a way
that threatens you
uh and it's cheap
for you
um and you have no personal compunctions
and you can
then you can put a contract out on them
and they'll be killed
uh that doesn't happen in colombia
um it doesn't happen in chicago
uh
pro there's no i don't know there's lots
of reasons for that i can't say exactly
why i think one reason is like
they know what will happen is that there
will be consequences that that the
government will crack down and make them
pay
and so they don't do it
um and
that's not what happened in mexico you
they don't they won't kill like a d
agent they know that the us has made it
clear you kill one of our agents we will
make you pay and so they they're very
careful to minimize death of american
but but you kill journalists and nobody
comes after them or is able to come
after them and so they realize they can
get away with this and that seems to be
the equilibrium there that's my my
that's my initial sense from
and but that's
we spent a lot of time before we started
talking to criminals
you know i we spent a year trying to
figure out what was safe before we
actually and failing we kept there lots
of safe things to do it was also really
hard to figure out how to talk to people
in these organizations and we failed 40
times before we figured out a way to
actually access people is it worth it
talking to them if you figure out
because it's not never going to be safe
it's going to be
when you estimate that there's some low
level of risk
like what's the benefit as a researcher
as a as a as a scholar of humans yeah
so i actually don't think let's compare
it to something okay you know i'm in
austin for the first time and i'm
walking around and there's all these
people buzzing around on these scooters
without helmets
we need to definitely interview them and
say what the hell is wrong with you so
nothing i have ever done in my entire
career is riskier is as risky as that
um that's a nice way to compare
journalism in a war zone and not well
scooters there are some yeah they're
journalists some war zones you know i
worked in northern uganda and i worked
in liberia and i work now in medellin
and i'm starting to work in mexico
and both the those particular places and
then the things i did in those places
where i spent a lot of time making sure
that what i was doing was not unduly
risky
todd could you pull up a picture of a
person on a scooter in austin so we can
just
compare this absurd situation where i i
doubt it's the riskiest thing because
now we have to look at the data i
understand the point you're making but
um
wow so i'm not trying to say there's
zero i think there's like a calculated
risk and i think you become good at
you work at becoming good at
being able to assess these risks and
know who can help you assess these risks
yeah i i think um
there's another aspect to it too when
you're riding a scooter
you're
once you're done with the scooter the
risk has disappeared yeah there's
something the lingering where you have
to look over your shoulder potentially
for the rest of your life as you
accumulate all these conversations yeah
i've chosen but i've also advised my
students and i wouldn't go and do this
with an armed group that would
would
think i knew too much and therefore some
people do that some journalists i think
are very brave and take risks and do
that and good for them and i'm happy
they do that i don't i don't personally
i don't personally do that so
these guys are very i mean medellin is
the business they're just
they're selling local drugs
and they are
laundering money for the big cartels and
they are
um
shaking down businesses for money or
selling services in some cases and
they make a lot of money it's a business
and um
and they're in prison
so they
they can talk about most of what they
want to talk about because there's no
double jeopardy they've been
incarcerated for it
uh and you're just they're just talking
you're just talking shop and they're
just you know you're so so it's worth it
i think because the risk is very low but
if you actually want to weaken these
organizations and they're extremely
powerful they're extremely big facet of
life in a lot of cities
in the americas in particular including
in some of the united some american
cities
uh if you want to understand how to
weaken these groups over time you have
to understand how their business works
and we're like imagine you were made
like the
whatever the oils are of of of of of the
united states you're entire or maybe
you're in charge of the finance industry
yeah right you you're the regulator for
oil and energy or for finance and then
you get in the job and someone says um
and then you're like well how many firms
are there and what do they sell and what
are the prices and everyone's like well
you know we don't really know
you would not be a very good regulator
right and if you're a policeman or
you're someone who's in charge of
counter-organized crime you're just a
regulator you're trying to regulate an
illicit industry you're regulating an
industry that happens to be illicit and
you have no information
and so that's kind of what we do we
figure out how the system works and like
what are the economic incentives and
what are the political incentives any
interviews and conversations help with
that they help a lot yeah yeah we do
that so we have i mean i don't do i do
some of those but i'm on the side my
spanish is okay
it's
not great and it's a translator usually
if you ever go directly well if only
because i can't understand the street
vernacular like i'm just totally
hopeless nor could many people who speak
spanish as a second language it's
totally you go to prison you talk to
these guys and they're speaking in the
local
dialect and
it's tough
uh but more importantly like i just
don't need to be there and that's not my
i'm a quantitative scholar i'm the guy
who collects the data so we have people
we have people on our team and
colleagues and employees who are doing
full-time interviews so and then i just
sometimes go with them so what about if
we you mentioned uganda yeah yeah joseph
coney the ugandan warlord um seeing here
he kidnapped
591 children in three years between two
totally they must have kidnapped
i i had they probably kidnapped for at
least a short time like a few hours to a
day
more than 50 000 kids as a terror tactic
a little bit i mean um you know most of
those people they just let go after they
carried goods they held on to they tried
to hold on to thousands the short story
listen if you're not popular if you're
running an arm movement and you need
troops
um
you can i and nobody wants to fight for
you you can either give up
or you can have a small clandestine
terror organization that tries to a
different set of tactics but if you want
a conventional army and you don't want
to give up then you have to conscript
and if you want to conscript and you
don't
you know here we can script and then we
say if you run away we'll shoot you and
we control the whole territory so we'll
that's a credible promise
if you're a small insurgency
organization people can run away and
then you can't promise to shoot them
very easily because you don't control
all the territory and so what these
movements do is they try to brainwash
you
and i think what they figured out after
years of abducting children you know you
talk about evil
um
they figured out that you know we have
to
maybe like i don't know but say like
maybe one in a hundred will like buy the
rhetoric so we just have to
conscript or abduct large number of kids
and then some small number of them will
not run away
and those will be our committed cadres
and those people can become commanders
and because they'll buy the propaganda
and they'll buy the messianic messages
but but because most people wise up we
have especially as they get older we
just have to abduct vast numbers of kids
in order to have a committed cadre and
so
so it has the other benefit of sort of
being terrifying for the population and
being a weapon in itself but i think for
them was just primarily a way to solve
a recruitment problem
uh when you're
a totally
uh like
hopeless and
uh ideologically empty rebel movement so
in some sense it's
it's yeah so it that that's maybe the
short story was a real tragedy i heard
one interview of a dictator
uh where the journalist was basically
telling them like how could you be doing
this
uh basically calling out all the
atrocities the person is committing
and the dictator was kind of laughing it
off and walked away yeah and like he cut
off the interview that feels like a very
unproductive thing to be doing
you're basically stating the thing that
everyone knows to his face maybe that's
pleasant to somebody
uh but that feels unproductive
it feels like the goal should be some
level of understanding yeah
he's been super elusive
i mean why
yeah i mean why he's fought this
i don't know
you know it's not a great example of
that's an you know what the way i look
at that situation
is
it's a little bit particular the way
uganda works but um
most of the political leadership
for most of its post-independence
history came from the north of the
country
that was like the power base
and and it was dictatorial and they were
so you've heard of like people like
eddie mean but people heard of like
milton a boat day and all these people
were all from the north
uh
and then you get the current president
who came to power in 1986 so he's been
around a long time he's coming 70 he um
he was from the south
and his he was fighting and he was
fighting against these dictators and he
was fighting for a freer and better
uganda and in many ways i mean he's he's
still a dictator himself but he did
create a freer and better uganda
so he's better than these
he's a thug but he's better than thugs
before him
um and he came to power and he was like
and and and these
some of the northerners were like we
want to keep up the fight
and he was like you know what you guys
i'm gonna i'm strong enough to continue
to the north you guys go you want have
you want to have a crazy insurgency up
there and some kook
believes he's like
uh speaking
you know through the holy spirit's
you know speaking through him and he's
going to totally disrupt the north i i
don't care that's great you guys just
fester and fight
and
that's going to totally destabilize this
power this traditional power base and
then that's just going to help me
consolidate control so he was an
autocrat he was an unchecked leader who
allowed a lunatic
to run around
and uh cause mayhem because it was in
his
political interest to do so
and
there's no puzzle
it's it's it's in some ways it's that
simple and kind of tragic
there's little to understand
yeah it took me a lot well you know what
it's not so easy in the middle of it
i didn't understand that i don't think a
lot of people did and and i'm not i
think i could persuade most people who
study or work there now to like see it
that way i think people that would make
sense to people but it didn't make sense
in the moment you know in the moment
this is happening it's terrible and you
kind of you know you don't realize how
avoidable it was that basically it was
the absence of effective police actions
that kept the lunatic from being
contained
um
and and that lunatic would never you
know he's not it's not that skillful of
our movement right they could have it
could have been shut down and that there
was just never any political will to
shut it down
the opposite that's what i meant like
that unchecked leader not only do you
not bear the cost but you might have a
private incentive as an autocrat to like
see that violence happen and in this
case it was it was just keeping a
troublesome part of the country busy
if it's okay to look at a few other wars
so we talked about drug wars and
medellin
um are there other wars that stand out
to you as full of lessons we can jump
around a little bit maybe if we can
return briefly at world war ii
from your framework could world war two
have been
avoided this this one of the most
traumatic wars
global wars i mean one obvious driver of
that war was
these
the things that hitler valued and
and and uh and then was able to use his
autocratic power to
either convince other people or
to suppress them
um and so some people stop there and say
that and then in the west basically
uh and then of course they were able you
know because they were such a economic
and political powerhouse they were able
to sort of make demands of the rest of
europe that that um
that you can kind of see the full you
know letting nazis march into denmark
without a fight or france folding very
quickly you can kind of see as like an
appeasement or an acknowledgement of
their superiority and their ability to
bargain
without much of a fight and then you can
see the
the western response as a principled
stand i think that's and there's a lot
of truth to that
you know in terms of the strategic
forces a lot of political scientists see
a version of a commitment problem
basically where germany says you know
what
we're strong now we're temporarily
strong we're not going to be the strong
forever
if we can
get this terrible bargain and get
everyone to capitulate
um
through violence if we strike now
and then solidify our power and keep
these
in world war one it was prevent the rise
of russia
um and prevent the strengthening of
of of of russian alliances as well
um
and
we so we have an incentive to strike now
and there's a window of opportunity
that's closing and that they thought was
closing as soon as 1917 in world war one
and i i don't know that that story is as
persuasive in world war ii i think there
was an element of a closing window they
kept talking about a closing window yeah
they really thought there was a closing
window i think the nature of that
window's different
uh in that
there was kind of pacifism
and it seems like if um
war broke out
most nations in the vicinity would not
be ready
by the
people the leaders that are in power
they weren't ready so the timing is
really right now but i wonder how often
that is the case with with leaders in
war it feels like the timing is now the
other commitment problem the other shift
that was happening that he wanted to
avert that has kind of wrapped up with
his ideology is this idea of a
like a cultural and a demographic
window of opportunity that if he wanted
if conditional on
having these views of uh
you know germanic people and and and a
pure race and that that now is that he
had to he had to strike now before any
opportunity to sort of
establish that was possible i think
that's one
it's an incentive that requires his
ideology as well how to uh so to avoid
it yeah within this framework would you
say is there
uh
that's
you kind of
provide an explanation but is is there a
way to avoid it is is violence the way
to avoid it because people kind of tried
rational
yeah
peace
peaceful kind of usual negotiation and
that led to this war is that unique to
this particular or let's say world war
one or world war ii so there's an extra
pressure from germany and both wars the
to act okay so we've highlighted that is
there a way to alleviate that extra
pressure to act let me use world war one
as an example suppose
as many german generals
said at that time we have a window of
opportunity before russia
where we might not win a war with russia
like so the the probability that we can
win a war is going to change a lot in
the next decade or two
maybe even the next few years and so if
we we are in a much better bargaining
position now
both to not use violence but to if
necessarily use violence
because otherwise russia is going to be
extremely powerful in the future and
they'll be able to use that power to to
change the bargaining with us and to
like hold keep us down
and
and the thing is is in principle russia
could say look
we don't want to get invaded right now
we know you could invade us we know
we're weak we know we'll be strong in
the future we promise to like not
wield our and abuse our or just merely
just sort of take what we can get
in the future when we're strong we're
going to restrain ourselves in future or
we're going to hand over something that
makes us powerful because that's the
bargain that would make us all better
off and the reason
political economists call it a
commitment problem is because that's a
commitment that would solve the problem
and they can't make that commitment
because there's nobody who will hold
them accountable
so anything any international legal
architecture
any
uh set of enforceable agreements any u.n
security council any world government
any anything that
would help you make that commitment is a
solution all right if that's the core
problem
um and so that's why you know in
medellin
you know the the the la fasina can do
that they can say listen yes
combo that's strong today is going to be
weak tomorrow
you have an incentive to eliminate this
combo over here but
because they're going to be strong but
guess what you're not going to do that
and we're going to make sure we're going
to promise that when these guys do get
strong we're going to restrain what they
can do
most of our constitutions in most stable
countries have done precisely that right
there's a lot of complaining right now
in the united states about the way that
the constitution is apportioned power
between states
that was a deal
that was a commitment the constitution
was in the united states was a deal made
to a bunch of states that knew they were
going to be weak in future
because of economic and demographic
trends or guests they might be and it
said listen you cooperate
and
will and and will commit not to
basically ignore your interests over the
long run and now you know 250
years later we're still honoring those
commitments
um
it was part of the deal that
that meant that there actually would be
a union and so we we do this all the
time so constitution is a good example
of how
um every country's constitution
especially country who's writing a
constitution after a war that
constitution
and all the other institutions are
building are an attempt to like provide
commitment to groups who are worried
about future shifts in power and does
that help with avoid civil war so could
you speak to
um lessons you learned from civil wars
yeah perhaps the american civil war any
others
so lebanon
one of the ways
had tried for a long time to
um preserve the interests of minority
groups
powerful minority groups who
were powerful at the time and knew that
the demographics were working against
them would guarantee
you know this
ethnic religious group gets the
presidency and this ethnic religious
group gets the prime ministership in
this ethno and will and a lot of a lot
of countries will apportion
seats in parliament to
ethno-religious groups
and that's an attempt to like
give
a group that's temporarily powerful
some assurances that they're when
they're weak in the future that they'll
still have a say right just like we
portion sheets in the senate in a way
that's not
demographically representative but is
like unequal quote unquote in a sense to
help people be confident that there
won't be a tyranny of the majority
and now that just happens to have been
like a really unstable arrangement in
lebanon because eventually like the de
facto power on the ground just gets so
out of line with this really rigid
system of the presidency goes to this
ethnic religious group and this prime
ministership was that that it didn't
last right so but you can think of every
post
conflict agreement and every
constitution is like a little bit of
humans
best effort to
find an agreement that's going to
protect the interests
of a group that's
temporarily has an interest in violence
in order to
to to not be violent
yeah and so there's a lot of ingenuity
and it doesn't always work right
which actually from a perspective of the
group
threatening violence or actually doing
violence is one way to make progress for
your group we're talking about groups
bargaining over stuff right we're
talking about russians versus ukraine or
russians versus the west or maybe it's
managing gangs versus one another like
they're a lot of their bargaining power
comes from their ability to burn the
house down
right and so if i want to have more
bargaining power i can just arm a lot
and i can threaten violence and so
the
strategically wise thing to do i mean
it's terrible it's a terrible
equilibrium for us to be forced into but
the strategically wise thing to do is to
build up lots of arms to threaten to use
them to credibly threaten to use them
but then
trust or hope that like your enemy is
going to see reason
and uh
and and avoid this really terrible
inefficient thing which is fighting
but the thing that's going on the whole
time is both of you arming and spending
like 20 of gdp or whatever on arms
that's pretty inefficient yes
that's the tragedy we don't have war and
that's good but we have really limited
abilities to like incentivize our
enemies not to arm and to keep ourselves
from arming we'd love to agree to just
like both disarm but we can't and so the
the masses that we have to arm and then
we have to threaten all the time yeah
yeah so the threat of violence is costly
nevertheless you've actually pulled up
uh that now disappeared a paper that
said
the big title called civil war and your
name is on it uh what's that about well
that was i mean when i was finishing
graduate school and this is a paper with
my advisor at ted miguel at berkeley um
most nations the paper opens have
experienced an internal armed conflict
since 1960
yet while that were you still in grad
school on this or no last post maybe
last year or just just graduated yeah i
wish i was in a discipline that wrote
papers like this this is pretty badass
yet while civil is central to many
nations development it has stood
at the
periphery of economic research and
teaching so on and so forth and this is
looking at civil war broadly throughout
history or is it just particular civil
wars we were mostly looking at like the
late 20th century i mean i was trained
as a what's called development economist
which is somebody who studies why some
places are poor and why some countries
are rich
um
and
i
like a number of people around that time
stumbled into violence i mean people
have been studying
the wealth and poverty nations basically
since the invention of economics
um
but there was a big blind spot
for
violence
now there isn't any more it's like a
flourishing area of study
but in economics but at the time it
wasn't and so there were people like me
and ted who
were sort of part political scientists
because political scientists obviously
been studying this for a long time who
started bringing economic tools and
expertise
and like partnerships with political
scientists and adding to it and so we
wrote this so after like people have
been doing this for five or ten years in
our field we wrote a review article
telling economists like what was going
on and so this was like a summary for
economist so the book in some ways is a
lot in the same spirit of this article
this article i mean it's it's designed
to be
not written as like a boring laundry
list of studies which is what that's
that's the purpose this article was
serviced it was for graduate students
and professors who wanted to think about
what to work on and what we knew
um this book is like now trying to like
not just say what economists are doing
but sort of say
what economist political scientists
psychologists sociologists
anthropologists like once what's how do
we bring some sense to this big project
and policymakers like what do we know
and what do we know about building peace
given you know because
if you don't know what the reason for
wars are you're probably not going to
design the right cure
um and so so anyway so that was the but
but i started off studying civil wars
and and i because i stumbled into this
place in northern uganda basically by
accident it was a never no intention of
working in civil wars i'd never thought
about it and
and then you know uh
basically basically i followed a woman
there
and oh we'll talk about that
and for people who are just watching
we're um we have an amazing team of
folks helping out pulling pulling
pictures and articles and so on mostly
so i can put pull up pictures on
instagram of animals fighting which is
what i do on my own time and then we
could discuss analyze maybe with george
st pierre that's what all he sends me
for people who are curious
uh but let me ask you one of the most
difficult things going on in the world
today israel palestine
will we ever see peace in this part of
the world and
sort of your book
title
is the roots of war and the path for
peace or the subtitle why we fight
um
what's the path for peace will we ever
see peace yeah if we think about this
uh
uh conflict in the sense of like this
dispute this sort of contest this
contest that's been going on between
israelis and palestinians it's going on
for a century
and
there there were
really just
10 or 15 years of
pretty serious violence in that
span of time most of it from 2000 to
2009 and stretching up to like 2014.
they're like sporadic incidents which
are really terrible i'm not trying to
diminish the human cost of these by the
way like i'm just trying to point out
that whatever is happening
as unpleasant and challenging and
difficult as it is is actually not war
and so it is at peace there's sort of an
uneasy stalemate the israelis and
palestinians are actually pretty good at
just sort of keeping this at a
relatively low scale of violence there's
a whole bunch of like low scale
sporadic violence that can be
repression of civilians
it can be
terror bombings and terror actions can
be counter terror
violence it can be
mass arrests it can be repression it can
be denying people the vote it can be
rattling sabres all these things that
are happening right
and it can be sporadic three-week wars
or sporadic you know
very brief
episodes of intense violence before
everybody sees sense and then settles
down to this uneasy that's not like we
we're right now to think of that as like
a piece and there's certainly no stable
agreement right
um so a stable agreement an amity and
any ability to move on from this
extreme hostility we're not there yet
and that's
maybe very far away
but
this is a good example of
two rivals who most of the time have
avoided really intense violence so
you talked about this like most of the
time yeah rivals just like
avoiding violence and hating each other
in peace
so this is this what peace
so to answer my questions yeah sometimes
i mean that's what peace looks like not
always but i mean it's it's what it's
kind of my worry
to go back to like the russia ukraine
example like i kind of it's really hard
it's gonna be really hard to find an
agreement
that both sides can feel they can honor
that they can be explicit about that
they'll hold to that will enable them to
move on yeah it feels like a first step
in a long journey towards greatness for
both nations and a peaceful time
flourishing
that kind of thing i mean you can think
of like what the the what's going on in
in israel palestine there's a stalemate
both
both of them are exhausted from the
violence that has occurred neither one
of them is quite willing to for various
reasons to create this sort of stable
agreement there's a lot of really
difficult issues to resolve
and um
and maybe the sad thing maybe we'll end
up in the same situation with russia
ukraine this this is where you know if
every if they stop fighting one another
but russia holds the east of the country
and kumaya and nobody really
acknowledges their right to that
that that might within their there's
going to be a lot of tension and
skirmishing and violence but that never
really progresses to war for 30 years
that would be a sad but maybe possible
outcome um
so that's kind of where israel-palestine
looks to me and so someone if we're
going to talk about why we fight then
the question we have to ask is like why
you know like the second intifada like
that was the most violent episode like
why did that happen and why did not and
and why did that last several years that
would be like we could uh analyze that
and we could say what was it about these
periods of violence that led there to be
prolonged intense violence because that
was nobody's interest that didn't need
to happen in part i don't talk about
that in the book
i wanted to avoid really contemporary
conflicts for two reasons
one is i
things could change really quickly i
didn't want the book to be dated i
wanted this to be a book that had like
longevity and
that that would be relevant still in 10
years or 20 years maybe before someone
writes a better one
uh or before the human civilization ends
exactly
and circumstances can change really
quickly so i wanted it to be enduring
and meant partly just avoiding changing
things and changing these and avoiding
these controversial ones but i of course
i think about them and so like a lot of
my time i decided actually last year to
teach a class where i'd take all these
contemporary conflicts i wasn't
working on the book and where i wasn't
really an expert whether it's india
pakistan china taiwan
israel-palestine mexican cartel state
drug wars
and a few others
and then teach a class on them with
students and we'd work through it we'd
read the book and then we'd say all
right none of us are experts how do we
make sense of these places
and we focus in the israel-palestine
case of mostly trying to understand why
it got so violent
and spent a little bit of time on
what the prospects are for
something that's more enduring
it's hard to know that stuff now i mean
yeah it's easier to do the full analysis
when when looking back when it's over
well israel is in like a tough place
they have this attachment to being part
of the west they have this attachment to
liberal ideals they have an attachment
to democracy
and they have an attachment to a jewish
state
and that those things are not so easily
compatible
because to recognize
the rights of non-jewish citizens
right or to
wrecking or to create or to have a
one-state solution to the current
conflict
undermines the long-term ability to have
a jewish state
um
and to do anything else and to deny that
denies
their
liberal
democratic
ideals and
and that's a really hard
contest of priorities for to sort out
yeah it's complicated of course
everything you just said probably has
multiple perspectives on it from other
yeah that would phrase all the same
things but using different words yeah
well i'm trying to i try to analyze
these things in like a dispassionate way
but unfortunately just having enough
conversations even
your dispassionate description
would be seen as a
as a as one that's already picked aside
and i'll say this because there's
holding these ideals i'll give you
another example united states
also has ideals of freedom and
and other like human rights
so it has those ideals
and yet it also sees itself as a
superpower and as a
deployer of those enforcer of those
ideas in the world and so the kind of
actions from a perspective of a lot of
people in that world from children they
get to see drones drop bombs on their
house whether
their father is not
mother or dead
they have a very different view of this
uh well you're beginning to see why i
didn't i decide i wanted to i wanted to
write about those things and think about
those things but i wanted this
but i wanted this book to do something
different and i didn't want it to follow
along one of these polarizations my you
know in on a personal level because i
think i'm kind of a liberal democratic
person at heart
my sympathies in that sense lie in many
ways with the palestinians despite the
way i i mean i i'm
i just the fact that people are they're
not represented and and they you know uh
and they got a very raw real politick
kind of deal like most people in history
have gotten like this raw real politic
kind of deal in their past right where
somebody took a summary of history by
the way
history is just full of raw deals
for regular people right and uh
and both sides
are in a principled way refusing to make
the compromise
and and i'm not that's not like a both
sides or right kind of argument i'm just
sort of saying on a i just think it's a
factual statement that like neither one
wants to compromise on certain
principles
and and they're both
they both can construct and in some ways
have very
reasonable i want to have have
self-justifications for those principles
and that's why i'm not very hopeful as i
don't see a way
and to
for them to resolve those things
speaking of compromise and war let me
ask you about one last one which may be
in the future
china and the united states yeah
how do we avoid an all-out hot war
with this other superpower
in the next decade 50 years a hundred
years because
sometimes when it's quiet at night i can
hear in the long distance the drums of
war beating yeah
you know in the second part of the book
i talk about what i think have been like
these persistent like paths to peace and
one of them is increasing
interdependence and into relationships
and another one is
more checks and balances on power
i think there's more but those are
things too that are really fundamental
here because i think those two things
reduce the incentives for war in two
ways one is like right now remember when
we were talking about this really simple
strategic game where
i whether russian ukraine or or whatever
any two rivals
i want more of the pie than you get and
and and uh
the costs of ward are deterrence
but only the cost of warf that i feel
right i don't care i do not care about
the costs of war to your side my rivals
i'm not even thinking of that that's
just worth zero to me i just don't care
in that simple game now in reality
uh
many groups do care about the well-being
of the other group at least a little bit
right we're in some sense to the degree
we first of all if our interests are
intertwined like our economies are
intertwined
um
that
that's not a surefire
way for peace and we shouldn't get
complacent because we have a globally
integrated world but that's going to be
a disincentive and if we're socially
entwined because we have great social
relationships and linkages and family or
we're intermarriage or whatever this is
all these things will
will will will help and then if we're
ideologically intertwined maybe we share
a
notions of liberty or maybe we just
share a common notion of humanity so i
think the fact that we're more
integrated than we've ever been on all
three fronts in the world but with china
is
is providing some installation which is
good so i would be more worried if we
started to shed some of that insulation
which i think has been happening a
little bit
us economic nationalism
um
whatever could be the fallout of these
sanctions or a closer chinese alliance
with russia all the things could happen
those would make me more worried because
i think we've got a lot of cushion that
comes from all of this
economic social cultural interdependence
that the social one with the internet is
a big one so basically make friends with
the people from different nations yeah
fall in love
or you don't have to fall in love you
can just have lots of sex with people
from nature but also fall in love the
thing that also should comforts me about
china is that they
china's not as centralized or as
personalized regime as russia for
example and neither one of them is as
centralized as personalized as like a as
some tin pot like purely personalized
dictatorship like you get in in some
countries the fact that china
the power is much more widely shared
is a big installation i think against
this war
will future war
um
the
the attempts by xi jinping to
personalize power over time and to make
china a more centralized and personal
ruled place which
is he's successfully moved in that
direction also worries me so anything
anything that moves china in the other
direction not necessarily being
democratic but just like a wider and
wider group of people holding power like
all of the business leaders and all the
things that have been happening the last
few centuries have actually like widened
power but anything that's moving in the
other direction does worry me because
it's going to accentuate all these five
risks i am worried about a little bit of
the demonization so one of the things
i
see with china as a problem for
americans for maybe i'm projecting maybe
it's just my own problem but you know
there seems to be a bigger cultural gap
than there is with other super powers
throughout history where
it's like it's almost like this own
world happening in china its own world
in the united states and there's this
gap of total cultural understanding like
we're it's not that
um
like we're not
competing superpowers they're almost
like doing their own thing
there's that that feeling and i think
that means there's a lack of
understanding of culture of people and
we need to kind of bridge that
understanding i mean you know the
language barrier but also cultural
understanding making movies
that's
uh that you
use both and explore both cultures and
all that kind of stuff to where like
it's okay to compete
you know like rocky where um
uh
rocky balboa fought the russian
uh fact you know historically inaccurate
because obviously the russians win but
you know we have to i'm just kidding as
a philly person i was of course rooting
for rocky but the the thing is those two
superpowers are in the movies china is
like its own
out their thing we need more rock rocky
seven
i do think there's a certain
inscrutability to the politics there and
an insularity to the politics such that
it's harder for westerners even if they
know even just to learn about it and
understand what's going on that i think
that's a problem and vice versa
um
so i think that's true but i at this
at the same time we could point to all
sorts of things on the other side of the
ledger like the massive amounts of
chinese immigration into the united
states and the massive number of people
who are now like how many so many more
americans business people politicians
understand so much more about china now
than they did 34 years ago because we're
so intertwined so so i don't know where
where it balances out i think it
balances out on better understanding
than ever before
but you're right there was like a big
gulf there
that we haven't totally bridged
yeah and uh like i said lots of
inter chinese in the united states
sexual intercourse no uh and love and
marriage and all that kind of social
social cohesion
so once again returning to love uh i
read in your acknowledgement and as you
mentioned earlier the acknowledgement
reads
quote i dedicate this book to a slow and
now defunct internet cafe in nairobi
because it set me on the path to meet
work with and most importantly
mary
jenny and on gigianon genie
there's a lot a lot of beautiful letters
in this beautiful name this book have
been
impossible without her and that chance
encounter what's uh okay tell me
tell me chris how you fell in love and
how that changed the direction of your
life
i was in that internet cafe i think it
was 2004 i'd uh
i was um i didn't know what i wanted to
do i i thought i might i thought you
know i was a good development economist
and i cared about
growth economic growth and i thought
firm like industrialization
is like the solution to poverty in
africa which is i think still still true
and therefore i need to go study firms
and industry
in africa and so i went and i and the
one of the most dynamic place for firms
in industry at the time still to some
extent now is was kenya and
all these firms are on nairobians and so
i went and i got a and i went i got a
job with the world bank who was running
up they were running a firm survey and i
convinced them to like let me help run
the firm survey because
and so now i'm in nairobi and i'm
wearing my like suit and with the world
bank
for the summer
and my laptop gets stolen by two
enterprising con artists very charming
and so i find myself in an internet cafe
um with no laptop with no laptop and
just like you know
kenya didn't exactly can you didn't get
connected to the
to the the sort of the big internet
cables until maybe 10 years later and so
it was just glacially slow so it would
take 10 minutes for every email to load
and so if there's this whole customer
norm if you just chat to the next person
in in beside you all the time it was it
was true all over anywhere i'd worked on
the continent
and um and i so i strategically sat next
to the attractive looking woman that
when i came in and um
and it turned out she was a psychologist
and a phd student but she was a
humanitarian worker and she'd been
working in south sudan and northern
uganda and this
kids affected by this war all these kids
who were being conscripted
were coming back because they're all
running away after a day or 10 years and
needed help or to get back into school
she was working on things like that
and uh and i think she talked to me in
spite of the fact that i was wearing a
suit maybe because i knew a little bit
about the war which most people didn't
most people were totally ignorant and
then we we had a fling for that week
and then we didn't really we actually
then we met up a little short while
later and then it was kind of then we
kind of drifted apart she was studying
in indiana and spending a lot of time in
um uganda and
and then one day uh
i was chatting with uh someone i knew
who worked on this
a young professor who was a friend of
mine but
and i said oh you know you work on
similar issues you should meet this
woman
i talked to because she like you guys
would have like you know professional
research interests overlap there's so
few sort of people looking at armed
groups yeah african civil wars at least
at the time
and he said wow that's a fascinating
research
question and i thought and i walked out
of the building and i thought
that is a fascinating research question
and i phoned genie and i uh and i said
remember me and you know tell me more i
was just talking to someone about this
tell me more like i i started asking her
more questions but we ended up talking
for two or three hours
and over the course of those three hours
we hatched a very
ambitious kind of crazy
and like plan we basically what it was
we were gonna like
find
the names and all the kids were born
like 20 or 30 years ago
in the region and we were going to track
a thousand of them down we're going to
randomly sample them and then we're
going to find them today and we're going
to track them and then we were going to
use like some variation and exposure to
violence and where the rebel group was
to actually like show what happens to
people when they're exposed to violence
and conscription we were gonna like tell
you know psychologically economically
we're gonna like answer questions
and that which would help you design
better programs right and so we hatched
this plan which is totally cockamamie
soccer made me that when i pulled my
previous dissertation proposal from my
committee like the next week and gave
them a new one
they unanimously met without me to
decide that this was totally bonkers
and to advise me not to go and they
coordinated to read my old proposal so
that when i showed up for my defense
they said you actually think you're
defending but we're actually we want you
to only talk about this other thing you
were going to do because this is like
you should not go
oh wow
i mean it is incredibly ambitious super
interesting though it actually worked
exactly according to plants the first
and last time in my entire career he
actually pulled off an ambition like a
gigantically crazy well all of my work
that's my shtick like my day-to-day
research job is not writing books about
why we fight my thing is like i go i
collect data on things that nobody else
thought you could collect data on and so
i always do pull it off but it never
turns out like i thought it was going to
like it's always there's so many twists
and turns and always goes sideways in an
interesting way and it works but it's
all but this one actually we pulled off
in spite of ourselves and um as planned
and uh
and so ted miguel who i wrote that paper
with was actually the one person
of my advisors was like well
you know what he's he was sympathetic to
this he was like yeah why didn't you
just go for a couple months and like
check it out and then come back and work
on the other thing and that's and so i
followed jeannie there and went there
and then
but and and i don't know what's this i
always remember
you know this movie speed the ken reeves
and
and sandra whatever these people are and
they they have this relationship in
these intense circumstances and they're
like well and i think at the end of the
movie they're sort of like this will
never work because these relationships
and intense circumstances never matter
which is what we assumed
and that turned out not to be true so
we've been married
15 years and we have two kids and yeah
and that's when you fell in love with
psychology and learned to appreciate the
power of psychology exactly so that's
the psychology in the book as well
because i and so we end up for most of
our work for the first five or ten years
was together actually
what's the hardest piece of data
that you've been chasing that you've
chased in your life like what are some
interesting things because you mentioned
like one of the things you you kind of
want to go somewhere in the world
and find evidence and data for things
that people just haven't really looked
to okay gain an understanding of human
nature maybe from an economics
perspective what's uh what what what
kind of stuff either in your past or in
your future you've been thinking about
well i mean the hardest
there's hard in two cents the hardest
emotionally was interviewing all those
kids
in northern uganda that was just like a
gut punch every day
um
and just hearing the stories like that
was
the hardest but it wasn't hard because
it was you could the kids were
everywhere and everybody would talk to
you about it and they could talk about
it you could no one had gone and
interviewed
kids that had gone through war in the
middle of an active war zone nobody was
going to displace all the things we did
no one had done that before so
now lots of people do it could you
actually speak to their
their stories what what's like the shape
of their suffering
what
what were common themes what
how did that those stories change you
i remember i said you could you like
your dispassion itself and your
passion itself i think i had to learn to
create the dispassion itself i mean we
all have that capacity when we analyze
something that's far away and happens to
people different than us but you have to
i think i discovered and developed an
ability to like put those aside in order
to be able to study this so
um you get maybe harder
in a way that you have to be guarded
against so you have to try to remember
to put your human head on
it's really horrible like if i want to
conscript you
and i don't want you to run away
then i want to make you think you can
never go back to your village
and the best way for me to do that is
for to make you force you to do
something really really really really
horrible that you could you almost
incredibly believe you can never really
go back and it might be like killing a
loved one and so and just having hearing
people tell you that story
in all of the different shapes and forms
to a point what was horrible about it is
they did this so routinely that you'd be
sitting there in an interview with
somebody
and they'd be telling you the story and
it's like the most horrible thing that
could happen to you or anyone else
and and but there's some voice in the
back your mind saying okay
we really need to get to the other thing
you know we know that i know how this
goes like i've heard you know there's
this thing like okay okay i'm not
learning anything new here like there's
some part
you know deep evil terrible part of you
that's like yeah yeah yeah
like but let's get on to the other thing
but i know i have to go through this but
every day you have to go through that to
get to the because you're trying to
actually understand how to help people
you're trying to understand how that
trauma has manifested how they either
some people get stronger as a result of
that some people get weaker and if you
want to know how to help people then you
need to get to that i wasn't trying to
get to something for my selfish purposes
really i was trying to figure out okay
we need to know what your symptoms are
now that's such a dark thing about us
so if you're surrounded by trauma
god that's voice in the back of your
head that you just go yeah i know
exactly how this conversation goes let's
skip ahead to the
to the solutions to the next yeah yeah
and so that was that was yeah so that
was because you then you have to deal
with yourself so it's very helpful if
you like come home every night to
someone who's a gone through the same
thing and b is a professional and very
very very very good counseling
psychologist
um
the
the hardest thing i mean this the the
organized crime stuff has been the
hardest just figuring out how to get
that information it took us years
of just trial and error mostly error of
like just how to
get people to talk to us or how to
collect data
in a way that's safe for me and safe for
my team and safe for people to answer a
survey like how do you get
how do you get
the information on
what
gangs are doing in the community or how
it's hurting or helping people like
you've got to run surveys and you've got
to talk to gang members all these things
and that nobody knows how to do that
yeah and so we had to sort of really
slowly not nobody there's a few other i
think there's other academics like me
who are doing this but there's a pretty
small group
that's trying to like collect
systematic data and then there's a
slightly bigger
and much more experienced group that's
been talking to different armed groups
but every time you go to a new city and
there weren't that many people working
on this in medellin there were a few
you have to like discover a new like
it's it's really going to be unique to
that city and place
so there's not there's not like a
website for each of the 17 mafia groups
there's no facebook group there is now
we have a we've created like our own we
have a private wiki
where we document everything and it's a
collaborative enterprise between lots of
researchers and journalists and things
so they now they can't see you can't go
online and see this that's that's
individual researchers it's not i mean
they're hiding by design some of them
have facebook pages and things of this
nature so they they do have public
profiles a little bit but not
not exp not so explicitly no so they're
clandestine here's an example so one of
the things that's really endemic in
medellin it's true in a lot of cities
it's true in american prisons is gangs
govern everybody's everyday life so if
you have a
in an american prison particularly
illinois or california texas is another
big one
but also
in a city in medellin if you have a
problem
um a debt to collect or dispute with a
neighbor or something
you could go to the government and and
they do and you they can help you solve
it you go to the police or you can go to
the gang
and so and that's like a really everyday
phenomenon but then there's a question
like how do you actually
how do you actually figure out how what
services they're offering and how much
they pay for them and do you actually
like those services and how do they how
do you comparison shop between the
police and the gang
um and what would get you to go from the
gang to the police and then how's the
gang strategically going to respond to
that
and what was the impact of previous
policies to like make state governing
better
and how did the gangs react and so
that's we had to sort of figure that out
and that that was um so that was just
hard in a different way but i don't do
the emotion emotionally punishing stuff
i couldn't do any longer
so that's much easier in that sense
by the way on um
uh you know jorge ochoas some of these
folks are out of prison yeah have you
got a chance to talk to anybody by any
chance one of my collaborators on this
guy named gustavo duncan who's
who spent a lot of time interviewing
paramilitaries has written a book he's
talked to more of these people than i i
have um i haven't talked to
those and i
we haven't been talking to them about
this stuff but also they were they were
there in a different era yeah so it
doesn't the system was totally different
that's super interesting maybe one day
we'll do that
yeah it's that was 30 years ago yeah and
the system over i mean la fascina pablo
escort created la fiscena he integrated
what's what the all these 17 resonates
and all these street gangs are the
fragmented former remnants of his more
unified empire which he gave the name la
fiscena i mean the
i think you know it's a little bit
apocryphal but the idea is you know i
think he said um
every doctor has an office so should we
i still can't ima i i still love that
there's parallels between these uh mafia
groups and uh united nations yeah
security council this is just wonderful
it's so so so deeply human
uh let me ask you about yourself so
you've been thinking about war here in
part dispassionately
just analyze war and try to understand
the path for peace but you as a single
individual
that's going to die one day
maybe talking to
um
the people that have gone through
suffering what
do you think about your immortality
do you
how has your view of your own finiteness
changed haven't thought about war
maybe the reason i can do this work is
because i don't think about it a lot
your own mortality or even like
mortality
yeah well i have to think about death a
lot so
but there's a way to think about death
like
numbers in a calculation when you're
doing geopolitical negotiations and then
there's like
a dying child or a dying
mother yes yeah
i guess i know i'm in a place where
there's risk and so i
think a lot about
minimizing any risk such that i i think
i think about mortality enough that i
just
because i'm kind of an anxious person
like i'm kind of a worrywart like in a
way uh
and so i'm really obsessive about
making sure anything that i do is low
risk you know so that gives you
something to focus on a number is the
the risk and you're trying to minimize
it
and yes there's still the existential
dread
your risk
minimization doesn't matter i yeah i've
never been in a life-threatening
situation
um yeah that's somebody who you know
what you sound like that's alex honnold
that that does the free climbing
he doesn't see that
well that's that's but no but i well
that sounds exactly the same because you
just said i've never done anything as
dangerous as those people right right
scooter so i've i've actually been a
rock climber for like 25 years with a
long break in the between um but i'm the
same way you know actually rock climbing
is an extremely safe sport if you're
very careful it but he's free climbing
is the opposite of that but i mean like
if you're like you've got a road if
you've got a rope that's attached to you
that goes up is like attached to 18
trees and comes back down you're you're
fine like this you know and you wear a
helmet
you're good you're totally fine yeah but
this is super safe too because
no free climbing no no no no no we're
watching freaking out
i mean because you're only gonna put
your hands and feet on sturdy rock and
and then you know the path and no no no
totally i i know i i know some p i
have some friends in college i've known
people who do some of these totally
wacky extreme sports and have paid the
price uh so i think it's totally
totally different i think um
so even in that by the way this i can't
even watch those movies because those
freak me out too much because it's just
too risky like i can't i don't even yeah
so those things i i've i've never
watched like free solo or anything
there's just too much
um still not as dangerous as riding a
scooter and awesome yeah absolutely not
gonna let that go
uh
so but even in that it's a risk
minimization in the work that you do
versus
the sort of philosophical existentialist
view of your immortality you know this
like this thing just ends
like what the hell is that about yeah i
have this amazing capacity not to think
about it which might just be a
self-defense mechanism you know my
father-in-law jeannie's father is a
evangelical pastor actually he's now
retired but um
and
this he would we would talk about when
we were getting married they were
terribly thrilled that she was
uh marrying a agnostic or atheist or
something like that
we could love each other very much it's
fine now but i i only started discussing
this and some of the because that was
one of his questions for me like well
how can you possibly believe that
there's nothing afterwards
because that's just like too horrible to
imagine
and we we really never saw eye to eye on
this and my view was like listen like
i can't convince myself i believe like i
can't convince myself otherwise anything
else seems completely impossible to me
and for some reason i can't understand
i'm at peace with that like it's never
bothered me that one day it's over
and and i unders the fact that people
have angst about that and that they
would seek answers
makes total sense to me
and and i can't explain why
that
doesn't consume me or doesn't bother me
um
but and yet you are at peace
yep maybe if i was worried but if i was
more worried about it maybe i wouldn't
be able to do
i don't know i don't know but then again
i don't take the risk i'm still like i
don't know but i minimize all sorts of
risks i'm like uh
i i i i
yeah i minimize
uh you know i try to optimize like
groceries in the fridge too like i mean
i put a very economistic way to live i
would say uh that's probably why you're
good that might be true that might be
there's some selection into economics of
of these cold calculations chicken or
the egg we'll never know do you have
advice for young people
that want to do as ambitious as crazy as
amazing of work as you have done
in life so somebody who's in high school
in college
either career advice on what to choose
how to execute on it or just life advice
how to meet some random stranger maybe a
dating advice
that part's easier you have to fly coach
and go to the internet cafes you can't
like uh all the development workers that
i know that fly business class and like
you'll never meet somebody and uh yeah
no the you know i i i actually spent a
lot of time writing advice on my blog
and i've got like pages and pages of
advice and one of the reasons is because
i never got that like when i grew up i
went to like a really good state school
in canada called waterloo i loved it but
people didn't go on the trajectory that
i went on from there and i had some good
advisors there but but i never got the
kind of advice i needed to like pursue
this career so i
it's very
uh concentrated in elite colleges i
think sometimes in elite high schools so
i tried to democratize that that's like
that was one reason i started the blog
but a lot of that's really particular
because i every week like i have
students coming in my office wanting to
know how to do international development
work and i just spent a lot of time
giving them advice and i think that's
what a lot of the posts are about
definitely very specific questions like
what is it the country by country kind
of specific questions or what the thing
that they're all trying to do that i
think is the right i don't have to give
them a really basic piece of advice
because they're already doing it like
they're trying to find a vocation they
they're really interested and what i
mean by that is it's like a career where
they find meaning where the work is
almost like superfluous because they
just they would do it for free
and they're passionate about and they
really find meaning in the work
and and and then it becomes a little bit
all-consuming so scientists do that in
their own way i think international
development humanitarian workers people
who are doctors and nurses like we all
do our careers for other reasons right
but but they
they find like meaning in their career
and so the thing so i don't have to tell
them whatever you do find meaning
um and try to make it a vocation
something that you would do for free
amongst all of these many many many
options
uh
that's what i would tell but that's what
i would tell high school students and
and young people in college
sometimes it's hard to find a thing and
hold on to it well that's the other it
took me a long time so i actually
started off as an accountant i was an
accountant with deloitte and touch for a
few years so i i did not that
did you wake up in the morning excited
to be alive i was miserable i got i
found it by accident which is another
different story but i landed in this job
and a degree where i study accounting
and i was miserable i was totally
miserable and i hated it and i was
becoming a miserable person
um and so i
eventually just quit and i did something
but i was that still you know but then i
was working the private sector and i i
actually just needed trial and error i
actually had to try on like three or
four or five careers before i found like
this mixture of academia and activism
and research and and international
development and how did you know that
this was love
when you when you found this kind of
international development like it's
decade academic context too the key
lesson was just trial and error which we
all have to engage until until it feels
right it's okay all right step one is
trial and error but until it feels right
because like it often feels right but
not perfect
yeah
that's true
right enough i mean i was really
intellectually engaged like i just loved
learning about it i wanted to read more
like it
in some sense like like i was doing i
was an account but i was reading about
like
world history and international
development in poor countries in my
spare time
right and so it was like this hobby and
i was like wait a second i could
actually do that like just
i could like research those things and
even write the neck those books and
that's kind of what i did like 25 years
later that didn't occur to me right away
i didn't even know it was possible this
is the other thing people do people do
their nine-to-five job and then they
find meeting and everything else they do
they're volunteering and their family
and their hobbies and things and that
was my social media and um and that's a
great path too like i mean that's
because not all of us can just have a
vocation or we don't find it i think and
then you just circumscribe what you do
in your work and then you go find
um and that's not entirely true because
everyone in my family does like their
job and get a lot of fulfillment out of
it but um but i think it's not
it's that's that's a different path in
some ways so it's good to take the leap
and keep trying stuff even when you
found like a little locum
local minima yeah the hardest part was
it got easy after a while it was was
quitting
but but now i take this to a lot of you
know and one of the people i think
one of the reasons i discovered your
podcast or maybe tyler cowan yeah he's
amazing tyler takes this approach to
everything he takes this approach to
movie yeah he's like walk into the movie
theater
after half an hour if you don't like the
movie and um you know what kind of
person he probably is i don't know but
now that you say this he's probably
somebody that goes to a restaurant if if
the meals is not good i could see him
just walking away like paying for it and
just walking away yeah meal and to go
eat something better that's exactly
right and i thought that was kind of
crazy and i never i was the person i
would never just put a book down halfway
and i would never um
stop watching a movie but then i and i
convinced my wife we lived in new york
when we were when we when we were single
initially and sorry not religion when we
were childless uh
and we lived in new york there's all
this culture and theater and stuff and i
just said let's go to more plays but
let's just walk out
after the first act if we don't like it
and she thought that was a bit crazy and
i was like no no here's the logic here's
what tyler says and then we started
doing it and it was so freeing and
glorious we just go we take so many more
chances on things yeah and we would and
if we didn't like it we were walking out
of stuff all the time
um and so i i think i did that without
realizing that that's how i like to i
just kept quitting my jobs
yeah and trying to find something else
at like some risk because that's how
wars start without the commitment
you need the commitment otherwise uh no
that's a different kind of commitment
problem that's a different different
commitment problem so some of it i'm
sure there's a balance because i mean
the same thing is happening with dating
and marriage and all those kinds of
things and there's some value just
sticking it out because some of the like
maybe
you know don't leave after the first act
because the good stuff might be coming
yeah yeah that's a good point i mean
that's yeah well
i i don't know so when i met jeannie
she was very wary of a relationship with
me because i explained to her um
i hadn't had a relationship longer than
two or three months and 11 years
and so she thought this person's on
serious and what i said to her she tells
the story this is how she tells her she
says i didn't believe him when he said
that i just after two or three months
you kind of have a good sense
whether this is going somewhere and i
would just decide if it was over so and
i walk away so i took this approach to
dayton like as soon as i thought it
wasn't going to go somewhere
and and then i ha and then i decided
with her that this was it this was going
to work and then i like and then
neverland she didn't believe now she
believes me
i
finally got to be right because this is
an incredible conversation your work is
so fascinating just in this um
big picture way looking at human
conflict and how we can achieve peace
especially in this time
of the ukraine war i really really
really appreciate that you would
calmly speak to me about some of these
difficult ideas and explain them and
that you sit down with me and have this
amazing conversation thank you it was an
amazing conversation thank you
thanks for listening to this
conversation with chris blattman to
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let me leave you some well known simple
words from albert einstein
i know not with what weapons world war
iii will be fought
but world war iv
will be fought with sticks and stones
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time