back to indexChris Blattman: War and Violence | Lex Fridman Podcast #273
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What are your thoughts on the ongoing war in Ukraine?
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How do you analyze it within your framework about war?
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How far would they go to hang onto power
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when push came to shove?
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Is I think the thing that worries me the most
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and is plainly what worries most people
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about the risk of nuclear war?
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Like at what point does that unchecked leadership
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decide that this is worth it?
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Especially if they can emerge from the rubble still on top.
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The following is a conversation with Chris Blatman,
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professor at the University of Chicago
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studying the causes and consequences of violence and war.
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This he explores in his new book called Why We Fight,
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The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace.
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The book comes out on April 19th,
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so you should preorder it to support Chris and his work.
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This is the Lux Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Chris Blatman.
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In your new book titled Why We Fight,
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The Roots of War and the Paths for Peace,
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you write, quote, let me be clear
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what I mean when I say war.
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I don't just mean countries duking it out.
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I mean any kind of prolonged violence
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struggle between groups.
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That includes villages, clans, gangs, ethnic groups,
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religious sects, political factions, and nations.
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Wildly different as these may be,
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their origins have much in common.
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We'll see that the Northern Irish zealots,
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Colombian cartels, European tyrants,
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Liberian rebels, Greek oligarchs,
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Chicago gangs, Indian mobs, Rwandan jenna,
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Sydares, and you word I learned, thank you to you.
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Those are people who administer genocide.
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English soccer hooligans and American invaders.
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So first, let me ask, what is war?
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In saying that war is a prolonged violence struggle
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between groups, what do the words prolonged
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groups and violent mean?
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I sit at the sort of intersection of economics
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and political science.
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And I also dwell a little bit in psychology,
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but that's partly because I'm married to a psychologist,
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sometimes do research with her.
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All these things are really different.
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So if you're a political scientist,
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you spend a lot of time just classifying
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a really narrow kind of conflict and studying that.
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And that's an important way to make progress
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as a social scientist, but I'm not trying to make progress.
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I'm trying to sort of help everybody step back and say,
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you know what, there's like some common things
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that we know from these disciplines
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that relate to a really wide range of phenomenon.
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Basically, we can talk about them in a very similar way
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and we can get really similar insights.
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So I wanted to actually bring them together,
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but I still had to like say,
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let's hold out individual violence,
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which has a lot in common,
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but individuals choose to engage in violence
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for more and sometimes different reasons.
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So let's just put that aside so that we can focus a bit.
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And let's really put aside short incidents of violence
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because those might have the same kind
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of things explaining them,
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but actually there's a lot of other things
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that can explain short violence.
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Short violence can be really demonstrative.
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Like you can just,
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I can use it to communicate information.
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The thing that all of it has in common
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is that it doesn't generally make sense.
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It's not your best option most of the time.
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And so I wanted to say,
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let's take this thing that should be puzzling.
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We kind of think it's normal.
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We kind of think this is what all humans do,
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but let's point out that it's not normal
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and then figure out why and let's talk about why.
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And so that's, so I was trying to throw out the short violence.
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I was trying to throw out the individual violence.
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I was also trying to throw out all the competition
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that happens that's not violent.
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That's the normal competition.
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I was trying to say, let's talk about violent competition
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because that's kind of the puzzle.
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So that's really interesting.
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So you said usually people try to find a narrow definition
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and you said progress.
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So you make progress by finding a narrow definition,
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for example, of military conflict in a particular context.
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And progress means, all right,
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well, how do we prevent this particular kind
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of military conflict?
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Or maybe if it's already happening,
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how do we deescalate it and how do we solve it?
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So from a geopolitics perspective,
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from an economics perspective,
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and you're looking for a definition of war
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that is as broad as possible,
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but not so broad that you cannot achieve a deep level
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of understanding of why it happens
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and how it can be avoided.
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Right, and a comment, basically like recognize
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that common principles govern some kinds of behavior
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that look pretty different.
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Like an Indian ethnic riot is obviously pretty different
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than invading a neighboring country, right?
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But, and that's pretty different than two villages
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A lot of what I work on is studying organized criminals
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You know, where you think is really different.
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And of course it is, but there are some common principles.
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You can just think about conflict and the use of violence
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and not learn everything, but just get a lot.
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Just get really, really far by sort of seeing
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the commonalities rather than just focusing
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on the differences.
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So again, those words are prolonged groups and violent.
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Can you maybe linger in each of those words?
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What does prolonged mean?
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Where's the line between short and long?
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What does groups mean and what does violent mean?
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So let me, you know, I have a friend who,
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someone who's become a friend through the process
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of my work and writing this book also,
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who was 20, 30 years ago was a, was gang leader in Chicago.
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So this guy named Napoleon English or Knapp.
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And I remember one time he was saying,
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well, you know, when I was young, I used to,
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I was just 15, 16 and he'd go to the neighboring
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He says, I'd go gang banging.
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And I said, well, I didn't know what that meant.
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I said, what does that mean?
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And he said, oh, that's just meant I'd shoot him up.
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Like I'd shoot at buildings, I might shoot at people.
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I wasn't trying to kill the, he wasn't trying to kill them.
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He was just trying to sort of send a signal
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that he was a tough guy and he was fearless
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and he was someone who they should be careful with.
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And so I didn't want to call that war, right?
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That was, that was, that's something different.
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That was, it was short, it was kind of sporadic
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and he wasn't, and he was, he was basically
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trying to send them information.
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And this is what countries do all the time, right?
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We have military parades and we,
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we might have border skirmishes and,
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and I wanted to sort of, so is it,
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what's short is a three month border skirmish, a war?
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I mean, I don't, I don't try to get into those things.
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I don't want to, but I want to point out that like,
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these long grueling months and years of violence
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are like, are the problem in the puzzle.
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And I just, I didn't want to spend a lot of time talking
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about the international version of gang banging.
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It's a different phenomenon.
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So what is it about Napoleon that doesn't nap,
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let's call him, not to add confusion,
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that doesn't qualify for war?
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Is it the individual aspect?
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Is it that violence is not the thing that is sought,
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but the communication of information is what is sought?
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Or is it the shortness of it?
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Is it all of those?
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It's a little bit, I mean, he was the head of a group
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where he's becoming the head of a group at that point.
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And that group eventually did go to war
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with those neighboring gangs,
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which is to say it was just long drawn out conflict
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over months and months and months.
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But I think one of the big insights from my fields
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is that you're constantly negotiating over something, right?
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Whether you're officially negotiating
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or you're all posturing, like you're bargaining over something
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and you should be able to figure out a way to split that pie
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and you could use violence,
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but violence is everybody's miserable.
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Like if you're napped, like if you start a war,
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one, there's lots of risks, you can get killed,
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You could kill somebody else and go to jail,
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which is what happened to him, that's not good.
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Your soldiers get killed,
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no one's buying your drugs in the middle of the confight,
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so it interrupts your business.
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And so on and on, it's like, it's really miserable.
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This is what we're seeing right now,
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as we're recording, the Russian invasion of Ukraine
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is now at fourth or fifth week.
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Everybody's, if it didn't dawn on them before,
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it's dawned on them now just how brutal and costly this is.
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As you described for everybody,
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so everybody is losing in this war.
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Yeah, I mean, that's maybe the insight.
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Everybody loses something from war
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and there was usually, not always,
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but the point is there was usually a way
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to get what you wanted or be better off
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without having to fight over it.
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So there's this, it's just,
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fighting is just politics by other means
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and it's just inefficient, costly, brutal, devastating means.
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And so that's like the deep insight.
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And so I kind of wanted to say,
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so I guess like what's not war?
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And I mean, I don't try to belabor the definitions
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because some, you know, there's reams and reams
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of political science papers written on like,
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what's a war, what's not a war, people disagree.
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The, I just wanted to say,
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where's the thing that we shouldn't be doing?
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Or where's the violence that doesn't make sense?
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There's a whole bunch of other violence,
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including gang banging and skirmishes
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and things that might make sense,
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precisely because they're cheap ways of communicating
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or they're not particularly costly.
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Where's the thing that's just so costly
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we should be trying to avoid?
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It's maybe like the meta way I think about it.
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Nevertheless, definitions are interesting.
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So outside of the academic bickering,
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every time you try to define something,
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I'm a big fan of it, the process illuminates.
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So the destination doesn't matter
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because the moment you arrive at the definition,
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you lose the power.
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Yeah, one of the interesting things,
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I mean, so people, if you wanna do,
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some of what I do is just quantitative analysis
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of conflict and if you wanna do that,
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if you wanna sort of run statistics on war,
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then you have to code it all up.
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And then lots of people have done that.
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There's four or five major data sets
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where people or teams of people have over time said,
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we're gonna code years of war between these groups
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or within a country.
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And what's interesting is how difficult
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these data sets don't often agree.
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You have to make all of these,
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the decision gets really complicated.
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Like when does the war begin, right?
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Does it begin when a certain number of people
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Did it, what if there's like lots of skirmishing
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and sort of little terror attacks
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or a couple bombs lobbed
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and then eventually turns into war?
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Do we call that, do we backdate it
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to like when the first act of violence started?
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And then what do we do with all the times
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when there was like that low scale,
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low intensity violence or bombs lobbed?
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And do we call those wars or maybe only
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if they eventually get worse?
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Like so it actually is really tricky.
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And the defensive and the offensive aspect.
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So everybody, Hitler in World War II,
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it seems like he never attacked anybody.
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He's always defending against the unjust attack
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of everybody else as he's taken over the world.
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So that's like information propaganda that every side
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is trying to communicate to the world.
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So you can't listen to necessarily information
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like self report data.
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You have to kind of look past that somehow.
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Maybe look, especially in the modern world
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as much as possible at the data.
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How many bombs dropped?
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How many people killed?
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How the number of, the estimates of the number of troops
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moved from one location to another and that kind of thing.
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And the other interesting thing is there's
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quantitative analysis of war.
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So for example, I was looking at just war index
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or people trying to measure, trying to put a number
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on what wars are seen as just and not.
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Oh really, I've never seen that.
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It's, there's numbers behind it.
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So it's great because again,
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as you do an extensive quantification of justice,
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you start to think what actually contributes to our thought
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that for example, World War II is a just war
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and other wars are not.
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A lot of it is about intent.
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And some of the other factors like that you look at
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which is prolonged, the degree of violence
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that is necessary versus not necessary
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given the greater good, some measure of the greater good
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of people, all those kinds of things.
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And then there's reasons for war, looking to free people
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or to stop a genocide versus conquering land,
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all those kinds of things.
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And people try to put a number behind it.
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And it's based on, I mean, what I'm trying to imagine is,
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I mean, suppose I wake up and, or whatever my,
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suppose I think my God tells me to do something
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or my God thinks that, or my moral sense thinks
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that something that another group is doing is repugnant.
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I'm curious, are they evaluating like the validity
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of that claim or just the idea that like,
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while you said it was repugnant,
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you deeply believe that, therefore it's just.
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I think not to be corrected on a lot of this,
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but I think this is always looking at wars
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after they happened.
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So it's, and trying to take a global perspective
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from all sort of a general survey of how people perceive.
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So you're not weighing disproportionately the opinions
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of the people who waged the war.
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I mean, I kind of ended up dodging that because,
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I mean, one is to just point out that wars,
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actually most wars aren't necessary.
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And so in the sense that there's another way
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to get what you wanted.
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And so on one level, there's no just war.
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Now that's not true because take an example
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like the US invasion of Afghanistan.
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The United States has been attacked.
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There's a couple bull agent, reliable evidence
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that this is al Qaeda.
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They're being sheltered in Afghanistan by the Taliban.
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And then the Taliban, this is a bit murky.
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It seems that there was an attempt to say hand him over
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or else and they said, no way.
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Now you can make an argument that invading
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and attacking is strategically the right thing to do
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in terms of sending signals to your future enemies.
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Or you just, if you think it's important
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to bring someone to justice, in this case al Qaeda,
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then maybe that's just war or that's a just invasion.
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But it hinges on the fact that the other side
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just didn't do the seemingly sensible thing,
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which is say, okay, we'll give them up.
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And so it was completely avoidable in one sense.
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But if you believe, and I think it's probably true,
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if you believe that for their own ideological
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and other reasons, you know,
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Mullah Omar in particular and Taliban in general
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decided we're not going to do this,
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then now you're not left with very many good choices.
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And now I didn't want to talk about is that a just war
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or is that what's justice or not?
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I just wanted to point out that like one side's
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intransigence, if that's indeed what happened,
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one side's intransigence sort of maybe compels you
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to basically eliminates all of the reasonable bargains
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that you could be satisfied with.
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And now you're left with really no other strategic option
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I think that's a slight oversimplification,
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but I think that's like one way to describe what happened.
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So your book is fascinating,
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and your perspective on this is fascinating.
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I'll try to sort of play devil's advocate at times
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to try to get a clarity.
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But the thesis is that war is costly,
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usually costly for everybody.
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So that's what you mean when you say nobody wants war
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because you're going to,
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from a game theoretical perspective, nobody wins.
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And so war is essentially a breakdown of reason,
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a breakdown of negotiation, of healthy communication
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or healthy operation of the world.
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Some kind of breakdown,
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you list all kinds of ways in which it breaks down.
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But there's also human beings in this mix.
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And there is ideas of justice.
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So for example, I don't want to,
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my memory doesn't serve me well
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on which wars were seen as justice
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very, very few in the 20th century
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of the many that have been there.
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The wars that were seen as just,
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first of all, the most just war is seen as World War II,
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It's actually the only one that goes above a threshold
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as seen as just, everything is seen as unjust.
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It's less, it's like degrees of unjustness.
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And I think the ones that are seen as more just
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are the ones that are fast.
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That you have a very specific purpose,
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you communicate that purpose honestly
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with the global community,
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and you strike hard, fast, and you pull out.
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To do sort of, it's like a rescue missions.
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It's almost like policing work.
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If there's somebody suffering,
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you go in and stop that suffering directly, that's it.
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I think World War II is seen in that way.
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That there's an obvious aggressor
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that is causing a lot of suffering in the world
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and looking to expand the scale of that suffering.
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And so you strike, I mean, given the scale,
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you strike hard as hard and as fast as possible
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to stop the expansion of the suffering.
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And so that's kind of how they see.
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I don't know if you can kind of look with this framework
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that you've presented and look at Hitler and think,
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well, it's not in his interest to attack Czechoslovakia,
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Czechoslovakia, Poland, Britain, France,
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Russia, the Soviet Union, America,
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the United States of America, same with Japan.
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Is it in their long term interest?
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So for me, who cares about alleviating human suffering
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in the world, yes, it seems like almost no war is just.
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But it also seems somehow deeply human to fight.
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And I think your book makes the case, no, it's not.
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Can you try to like get at that?
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Cause it seems that war, there is some,
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that like drum of war seems to beat in all human hearts.
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Like it's in there somewhere.
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Maybe it's, maybe there's like a relic of the past
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that we need to get rid of it.
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It's deeply irrational.
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Okay, so obviously we go to war
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and obviously there's a lot of violence.
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And so we have to explain something
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and some of that's going to be aspects of our humanness.
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So I guess what I wanted us to sort of start with,
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I think it was just useful to sort of start and point out,
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actually, there's really, really, really, really strong
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incentives not to go to war
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because it's going to be really costly.
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And so all of these other human or strategic things,
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all these things, the circumstantial things
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that will eventually lead us to go to war
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have to be pretty powerful before we go there.
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And most of the time.
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Sorry to interrupt.
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And that's why you also describe very importantly
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that war throughout human history is actually rare.
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We usually avoid it.
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You know, most people don't know about
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the US invasion of Haiti in 1994.
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I mean, a lot of people know about it,
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but people just don't pay attention to it.
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We're going to, you know, the history books
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and school kids are going to learn about
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the invasion of Afghanistan for decades and decades.
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And nobody is going to put this one in the history books.
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And it's because it didn't actually happen
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because before the troops could land,
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the person who'd taken power in a coup basically said, fine.
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There's this famous story where Colin Powell goes to Haiti
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to this new dictator who's refused to let a democratic
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president take power and tries to convince him
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to step down or else.
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And he says, no, no, no, and then he shows him a video
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and it's basically troop planes
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and all these things taking off.
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And he's like, this is not live.
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This is two hours ago.
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So it's a, and basically, he basically gives up right there.
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That's a powerful move.
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I think Powell might have been one of his teachers
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in like a US military college
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because a lot of these military dictator trained
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So they had some, there was some personal relationships
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at least between people in the US government
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and this guy that they were trying to use.
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The point is, and that's like what should have happened.
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Like that makes sense, right?
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Like, yeah, maybe I can mount an insurgency and yeah,
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I'm not going to bear a lot of the costs of work
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because I'm the dictator and maybe he's human
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and he just wants to fight or gets angry
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or it's just in his mind, whatever he's doing.
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But at the end of the day, he's like,
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this does not make sense.
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And that's what happens most of the time
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but we don't write so many books about it.
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And now some political scientists go
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and they count up all of the nations that could fight
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because they have some dispute
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and they're right next to one another, one another
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or they look at the ethnic groups
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that could fight with one another
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because they have, there's some tension
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and they're right next to one another
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and then whatever, some number like 999 out of 1000
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don't fight because they just find some other way.
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They don't like each other
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but they just loathe in peace
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because that's the sensible thing to do.
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And that's what we all do, we loathe in peace.
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And we loathe the Soviet Union in relative peace
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for decades and India loathes Pakistan in peace.
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I mean, two weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine,
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again, it was in the newspapers
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but most people didn't, I think, take note,
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India accidentally launched a cruise missile at Pakistan
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So they were like, yeah, this is,
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we do not wanna go to war.
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We'll be angry but we'll accept your explanation
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that this was an accident.
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And so these things find to the radar.
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And so we overestimate, I think,
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how likely it is the sides are gonna fight.
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But then of course, things do happen.
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Like Russia did invade the Ukraine
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and didn't find some negotiated deal.
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And so then the book is sort of about,
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half the book is just sort of laying out,
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actually, there's just different ways this breaks down.
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And some of them are human.
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Some of them are this.
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I actually don't think war beats in our heart.
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It does a little bit, but we're actually very cooperative.
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As a species, we're deeply, deeply cooperative.
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We're really, really good.
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So the thing we're not, we're okay at violence
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and we're okay at getting angry and vengeance
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and we have principles that will sometimes lead us.
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But we're actually really, really, really good at cooperation.
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And so that's again, I'm not trying to write
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some big optimistic book where everything's gonna be great
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and we're all happy and we don't really fight.
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It's more just to say, let's start, let's be like a doctor.
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As a doctor, we're gonna focus on the sick, right?
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I'm gonna try, I know there's sick people,
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but I'm gonna recognize that the normal state is health
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and that most people are healthy.
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And that's gonna make me a better doctor.
link |
And that's, I'm kind of saying the same thing.
link |
Let's be better doctors of politics in the world
link |
by recognizing that like the normal state is health.
link |
And then we're gonna identify like,
link |
what are the diseases that are causing this warfare?
link |
So yeah, the natural state of the human body
link |
with the immune system and all the different parts
link |
wants to be healthy and is really damn good at being healthy.
link |
But sometimes it breaks down.
link |
Let's understand how it breaks down.
link |
So what are the five ways that you list
link |
that are the roots of war?
link |
Yeah, so I mean, they're kind of like buckets.
link |
Like there's sort of things that rhyme, right?
link |
You know, because it's not all the same.
link |
There's like lots of reasons to go to where there's this
link |
great line, you know, there's a reason for every war
link |
and a war for every reason.
link |
And it's kind of overwhelming, right?
link |
And it's overwhelming for a lot of people.
link |
It was overwhelming for me for a lot of time.
link |
And I think, I think one of the gifts of this,
link |
of social science is actually people have started
link |
to organize this for us.
link |
And I just tried to organize it like a tiny bit better.
link |
Buckets that rhyme.
link |
Yeah, the terrible metaphor, right?
link |
I had it metaphors.
link |
So the idea was that like that basic instead of like
link |
something overrides these incentives.
link |
And I guess I was saying there's five ways
link |
that they get overrided.
link |
And three are, I'd call strategic.
link |
Like they're kind of logical.
link |
There's circumstances that, and this is,
link |
they're sort of where strategic is strategy
link |
is like the game theory is you could use those two things
link |
interchangeably, but game theory is sort of making it
link |
sound more complicated, I think than it is.
link |
It's basically saying that there's times when this is
link |
like the optimal choice because of circumstances.
link |
And one of them is when the people who are deciding
link |
don't bear those costs.
link |
So that's, or maybe even have a private incentive
link |
that's gonna, that's, if they don't,
link |
if they're ignoring the cost, then maybe the costs
link |
of war are not so material.
link |
That's a contributing factor.
link |
And others just, there's uncertainty and we can talk
link |
about that, but there's just the absence of information
link |
means that it actually, there's circumstances
link |
where it's your best choice to attack.
link |
There's this thing that political economists call
link |
commitment problems, which are basically saying
link |
there's some big power shift that you can avoid
link |
So it's like a dynamic incentive.
link |
It's sort of saying, well, in order to keep something
link |
from happening in the future, I can attack now.
link |
And because of the structure of incentives,
link |
it actually makes sense for me.
link |
Even the words in theory, really costly,
link |
or it is really costly nonetheless.
link |
And then there's these sort of human things.
link |
One's a little bit like just war.
link |
One's sort of saying there's like ideologies
link |
or principles or things we value that weigh against
link |
Like exterminating the heretical idea
link |
or standing up for a principle might be so valuable
link |
to me that I'm willing to use violence,
link |
even if it's costly.
link |
And there's nothing irrational about that.
link |
And then the fifth bucket is all of the irrationalities,
link |
all the passions and all of the most importantly,
link |
I think like misperceptions, the way we get,
link |
like we basically make wrong calculations
link |
about whether or not war is the right decision we get.
link |
Or we misunderstand or misjudge our enemy
link |
or misjudge ourselves.
link |
So if you put all those things into buckets,
link |
how much can it be modeled in a simple game theoretic way?
link |
And how much of it is a giant human mess?
link |
So four of those five are really,
link |
on some level, easy to think strategically
link |
and model in a simple way in the sense
link |
that any of us can do it.
link |
We do this all the time.
link |
You know, think of like bargaining in a market
link |
for a carpet or something or whatever you bargained for.
link |
You're thinking a few steps ahead
link |
about what your opponent's going to do.
link |
And you stake out a high, like a low price
link |
and the seller stakes out a high price.
link |
And you might both say, oh, I refuse to like,
link |
I could never accept that.
link |
And there's all this sort of cheap talk.
link |
But you kind of understand where you're going
link |
and it's efficient to like find a deal
link |
and by the market, by the carpet eventually.
link |
So we all understand this,
link |
like game theory and the strategy, I think intuitively.
link |
Or maybe even a closer example is like, suppose,
link |
I don't know, you have a tenant you need to evict
link |
or anyone normal like kind of legal,
link |
it's not yet a legal dispute, right?
link |
Like we just have a dispute with a neighbor
link |
Most of us don't end up going to court.
link |
Going to court is like the war option.
link |
It's the costly thing that just ought to be able to avoid.
link |
We ought to be able to find something between ourselves
link |
that doesn't require this hiring lawyers
link |
and a long drawn out trial.
link |
And most of the time we do, right?
link |
And so we all understand that incentive.
link |
And then for those five buckets,
link |
so everything except all the irrational
link |
and the misperceptions are really easy to model.
link |
Then from a technical standpoint,
link |
it's actually pretty tricky to model the misperceptions.
link |
And I'm not a game theorist.
link |
And so I'm more channeling my colleagues
link |
who do this and what I know.
link |
But it's not rocket science.
link |
I mean, I think that's what I try to lay out in the book
link |
is like there's all these ideas out there
link |
that can actually help us just make sense of all these wars
link |
and just bring some order to the more ass of reasons.
link |
Well, to push back a lot of things in one sentence.
link |
So first of all, rocket science is actually pretty simple.
link |
I'll defer to you actually.
link |
Well, I think it's cause unfortunately it's very,
link |
like engineering, it's very well defined.
link |
The problem is well defined.
link |
The problem with humanity is it's actually complicated.
link |
So it is true, it's not rocket science,
link |
but it is not true.
link |
It's easy because it's not rocket science.
link |
But the problem, the downside of game theory
link |
is not that it helps us make sense of the world.
link |
It projects a simple model of the world
link |
that brings this comfort in thinking we understand.
link |
And sometimes that simplification
link |
is actually getting it to core
link |
first principles on understanding of something.
link |
And sometimes it fools us into thinking we understand.
link |
So for example, I mean,
link |
mutually assured destruction is a very simple model.
link |
And people argue all the time,
link |
whether that's actually a good model or not.
link |
But there's empirical fact that we're still alive
link |
as a human civilization.
link |
And also in the game theoretic sense,
link |
do we model individual leaders and their relationships?
link |
Do we, the staff, the generals,
link |
or do we also have to model the culture, the people,
link |
the suffering of the people, the economic frustration,
link |
or the anger, the distrust?
link |
Do you have to model all those things?
link |
Do they come into play?
link |
And sometimes, I mean, again,
link |
we could be romanticizing those things
link |
from a historical perspective.
link |
But when you look at history
link |
and you look at the way wars start,
link |
it sometimes feels like a little bit of a misunderstanding
link |
escalates, escalates, escalates,
link |
and just builds on top of itself.
link |
And all of a sudden it's an all out war.
link |
It's the escalation with nobody hitting the brakes.
link |
So, I mean, you're absolutely right in the sense
link |
that it's totally possible to oversimplify these things
link |
and take the game theory too seriously.
link |
And some, and people who study those things
link |
and write those models and people like me who use them,
link |
because sometimes they make that mistake,
link |
I think that's not the mistake
link |
that most people make most often.
link |
And what's actually true is I think
link |
most people, we're actually really quick,
link |
whether it's the US invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq,
link |
we're really quick to blame that
link |
on the humanness and the culture and that.
link |
So we're really quick to say, oh, this was George W. Bush's
link |
either desire for revenge and vengeance
link |
or some private agenda or blood for oil.
link |
So we're really quick to blame it on these things.
link |
And then we're really, we tend to overlook
link |
the strategic incentives to attack,
link |
which I think were probably dominant.
link |
I think those things might have been true to a degree,
link |
but I don't think they were enough to ever bring
link |
Just like, I think people are very quick
link |
to sort of in this current invasion
link |
to sort of talk about Putin's grand visions
link |
of being the next Catherine the Great
link |
or nationalist ideals and the mistakes
link |
and the miscalculations were really quick
link |
to sort of say, oh, that must be,
link |
and then kind of pause or not pause,
link |
maybe even stop there and not see
link |
some of the strategic incentives.
link |
And so, I guess we have to do both.
link |
But the strategic, I guess I would say
link |
like the war is just such a big problem
link |
and it's just so costly that the strategic incentives
link |
and the things that game theory has given us
link |
are like really important in understanding
link |
why there was so little room for negotiation and a bargain
link |
that things like a leader's mistakes start to matter
link |
or a leader's nationalist ideals or delusions
link |
or vengeance actually matters,
link |
because those do matter,
link |
but they only matter when the capacity to find a deal
link |
is so narrow because of the circumstances.
link |
And so, it's sort of like saying,
link |
like an elderly person who dies of pneumonia, right?
link |
Pneumonia killed them, obviously,
link |
but that's not the reason pneumonia was able to kill them.
link |
All of the fundamentals and the circumstances
link |
were like made them very fragile.
link |
And that's how I think all the strategic forces
link |
make that situation fragile and then the miscalculations
link |
and all of these things you just said,
link |
which are so important are kind of like the pneumonia.
link |
And let's sort of, let's pay attention to both.
link |
And you're saying that people don't,
link |
disproportionately pay attention to the...
link |
I mean, it wasn't...
link |
It took me a long time to learn to recognize them.
link |
And it takes many people, you know,
link |
it took, and it took generations of social scientists
link |
years and years to figure some of this out
link |
and to sort of help people understand it
link |
and clarify concepts.
link |
So it's not, it's just not that easy.
link |
No, it's not hard.
link |
I think it's possible to,
link |
just as I was taught a lot of the stuff I write in the book
link |
in graduate school or from reading,
link |
and it's possible to communicate and learn this stuff,
link |
but it's still really hard.
link |
And so that's kind of what I was trying to do
link |
is like close that gap and just make it,
link |
help people recognize these things in the wild.
link |
Before we zoom back out,
link |
let me at a high level first ask,
link |
what are your thoughts on the ongoing war in Ukraine?
link |
How do you analyze it within your framework about war?
link |
A Russian colleague of mine,
link |
Konstantin Sonin tells this story
link |
about a visiting Ukrainian professor
link |
who's at the university
link |
and one night he's walking down the street
link |
and he's talking on two cell phones at once for some reason
link |
and a mugger stops him and demands the phones.
link |
And it's sort of like dead panway Konstantin says,
link |
and because he was Ukrainian, he decided to fight.
link |
And I think that's a little bit like what happened.
link |
Most of us in that situation
link |
would hand over our cell phones.
link |
And so in this situation, Putin's like the mugger
link |
and the Ukrainian people are being asked to hand over this thing
link |
and they're saying, no, we're not gonna hand this over.
link |
And the fact is, most people do.
link |
Most people faced with a superpower or a tyrant
link |
or an autocrat or a murderous warlord
link |
who says hand this over, they hand it over.
link |
And that's why there are so many unequal
link |
imperial relationships in the world.
link |
That's what empire is.
link |
Empire is successive people saying, fine,
link |
we'll give up some degree of freedom or sovereignty
link |
because you're too powerful.
link |
And the Ukrainians said, no way.
link |
This is just too precious.
link |
And so I said one of those buckets
link |
where there's a set of values.
link |
There's something that we value
link |
that is so valuable to us and important.
link |
Sometimes it's terrible.
link |
Sometimes it's the extermination of another people,
link |
but sometimes it's something noble,
link |
like liberty or refusal to part with sovereignty.
link |
And in those circumstances, people will decide,
link |
I will endure the costs.
link |
They probably, I mean, I think they knew
link |
what they were probably risking.
link |
And so to me, that's not to blame the Ukrainians
link |
any more than I would blame Americans
link |
for the American Revolution.
link |
It's actually a very similar story.
link |
You had a tyrannical, militarily superior,
link |
pretty non democratic entity come and say,
link |
you're gonna have partial sovereignty.
link |
And Americans for ideological reasons said, no way.
link |
And that, people like Bernard Bale and other historians,
link |
that's like the dominant story of the American Revolution.
link |
It wasn't the ideological origins
link |
just attachment to this idea of liberty.
link |
And so I start, now there's lots of other reasons
link |
I think why this happened.
link |
But I think for me, it starts with
link |
Ukrainians failing to make that sensible, quote unquote,
link |
rational deal that says we should relinquish
link |
some of our sovereignty because Russia
link |
is more powerful than we are.
link |
So there's a very clinical look at the war.
link |
Meaning there is a man in a country,
link |
Vladimir Putin, that makes a claim on a land,
link |
builds up troops and invades.
link |
The way to avoid suffering there
link |
and the way to avoid death and the way to avoid war
link |
is to back down and basically let,
link |
there's a list of interests he provides
link |
and you go along with that.
link |
That's when the goal is to avoid war.
link |
Now let's do some other calculus.
link |
Let's think about Britain.
link |
So France fought Hitler, but did not fight very hard.
link |
Portugal, there's a lot of stories of countries like this.
link |
And there is Winston motherfucking Churchill.
link |
He's one of the rare humans in history
link |
who had that we shall fight on the beaches.
link |
Hitler did not say he's going to destroy Britain.
link |
He seemed to show respect for Britain.
link |
He wanted to keep the British Empire.
link |
It made total sense, it was obvious
link |
that Britain was going to lose
link |
if Hitler goes all in on Britain
link |
as it seemed like he was going to.
link |
And yet Winston Churchill said a big FU.
link |
Similar thing, Zelensky and the Ukrainian people
link |
said FU in the same kind of way.
link |
So I think we're saying the same things.
link |
I'm being more clinical about it.
link |
Well, I'm trying to understand, and we won't know this,
link |
but which path minimizes human suffering in the long term?
link |
Well, on the eve of the war,
link |
Ukraine was poor in a per person term
link |
since it was in 1990.
link |
The economy is just completely stagnated.
link |
In Russia, meanwhile, like many other parts of the region,
link |
it sort of has boomed to a degree.
link |
I mean, certainly because of oil and gas,
link |
but also for a variety of other reasons,
link |
and Putin's consolidated political control.
link |
And from a very cold, blooded and calculated point of view,
link |
I think one way Putin and Russia could look at this,
link |
it says, look, we were temporarily weak
link |
after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
link |
And the rest in the West basically took advantage of that,
link |
like Bravo, you pulled it off,
link |
you basically crept democracy and capitalism,
link |
all these things right up to our border.
link |
And now we have regained some of our strength.
link |
We've consolidated political control,
link |
we've caled our people, we have a stronger economy,
link |
and we somehow got Germany and other European nations
link |
to give up energy independence,
link |
and actually just we've got an enormous amount
link |
of leverage over you.
link |
And now we wanna roll back some of your success
link |
because we were powerful enough to demand it.
link |
And you've been taking advantage of the situation,
link |
which is maybe a fair impartial analysis.
link |
And in the West, but more specifically Ukraine said,
link |
but that's a price too high, which I totally respect.
link |
I would maybe I'd like to think I'd make that same decision,
link |
but that's the answer.
link |
If the answer is why would they fight if it's so costly?
link |
Why not find a deal?
link |
It's because they weren't willing to give Russia
link |
the thing that their power said they quote unquote deserve.
link |
Just like Americans said to the Britain,
link |
yeah, of course we ought to accept semi sovereignty,
link |
but we refuse and we'd rather injure a bloody fight
link |
that we might lose than take this.
link |
And so you need some of these other five buckets.
link |
You need them to understand the situation.
link |
You need to sort of, there are other things going on,
link |
but I do think it's fundamental
link |
that this noble intransigence is a big part of it.
link |
Well, let me just say a few things if it's okay.
link |
So your analysis is clear and objective.
link |
My analysis isn't either clear nor objective.
link |
First, I've been going through a lot.
link |
I'm a different man over the past four or five weeks
link |
than I was before.
link |
I in general have come to,
link |
there's anger, I've come to despise leaders in general
link |
because leaders wage war
link |
and the people pay the price for that war.
link |
Let me just say on this point of standing up
link |
to an invader that I am half Ukrainian, half Russian,
link |
that I'm proud of the Ukrainian people.
link |
Whatever the sacrifices, whatever the scale of pain,
link |
standing up, there's something in me that's proud.
link |
Maybe that's, maybe that's whatever the fuck that is.
link |
Maybe that blood runs in me.
link |
I love the Ukrainian people, love the Russian people.
link |
And whatever that fight is,
link |
whatever that suffering is, the millions of refugees,
link |
whatever this war is, the dictators come to power
link |
and their power falls.
link |
I just love that that spirit burns bright still.
link |
And I do, maybe I'm wrong in this,
link |
do see Ukrainian and Russian people as one people
link |
in a way that's not just cultural, geopolitical,
link |
but just given the history.
link |
I think about the same kind of fighting
link |
when Hitler with all of his forces chose
link |
to invade the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa.
link |
When he went and that Russian winter,
link |
and a lot of people, and that pisses me off
link |
because if you know your history,
link |
it's not the winter that stopped Hitler,
link |
it's the Red Army, it's the people
link |
that refused to back down, they fought proudly.
link |
That pride, that's something.
link |
That's the human spirit.
link |
That's in war, war is hell,
link |
but it really pushes people to stand
link |
for the things they believe in.
link |
It's the William Wallace speech from Braveheart.
link |
I think about this a lot.
link |
That does not fit into your framework.
link |
No, no, no, I'm gonna disagree.
link |
I think it totally fits in and it's this,
link |
there's nothing irrational about what we believe,
link |
especially those principles which we hold the most dear.
link |
I'm merely trying to say that there's a calculus,
link |
there's one calculus over here that says,
link |
Russia's more powerful than it was 20 years ago
link |
and even 10 years ago and Ukraine is not,
link |
and it's asking for something,
link |
and there's an incentive to give that up.
link |
That's obvious, there's an incentive to comply.
link |
But my understanding is many of these post Soviet republics
link |
have appeased, which is what we call compromise
link |
when we disagree with it.
link |
They've, all of these other peoples
link |
in the Russian sphere of influence have not stood up.
link |
And Russians, many Russians have tried to stand up
link |
and they've been beaten down.
link |
And now people have, we'll see,
link |
but people have not been standing up very much.
link |
And so lots of people are cowed and lots of people
link |
have appeased and lots of people hear that speech
link |
and think I would like to do that, but don't.
link |
And so, and my point is that, sadly,
link |
we live in a world where a lot of people
link |
get stepped on by tyrants and empire and whatnot
link |
and don't rise up.
link |
And so, I think we could admire,
link |
especially when they stand up for these reasons.
link |
And I think we can admire Churchill for that reason.
link |
I think we could, that's why we admire
link |
the leaders of the American revolution and so on.
link |
But it doesn't always happen.
link |
And I don't actually know why,
link |
but I don't think it's irrational.
link |
I think it's just, it's something, it's about
link |
a set of values and it's hard to predict.
link |
And it was hard for,
link |
Putin might not have been out of line
link |
and thinking just like everybody else
link |
in my sphere of influence, they're gonna roll over too.
link |
And I should mention, because we haven't,
link |
that a lot of this calculation,
link |
from an objective point of view,
link |
you have to include United States and NATO
link |
into the pressure they apply into the region.
link |
That said, I care little about leaders
link |
that do cruel things onto the world.
link |
They lead to a lot of suffering,
link |
but I still believe that the Russian people
link |
and the Ukrainian people are great people that stand up
link |
and I admire people that stand up
link |
and are willing to give their life.
link |
And I think Russian people are very much that too,
link |
especially when the enemy is coming for your home
link |
Sometimes standing up to an authoritarian regime
link |
is difficult because you don't know,
link |
it's not a monster that's attacking your home directly.
link |
It's kind of like the boiling of a lobster
link |
or something like that.
link |
It's a slow control of your mind and the population.
link |
And our minds get controlled even in the West
link |
by the media, by the narratives.
link |
It's very difficult to wake up one day
link |
and to realize sort of what people call red pilled,
link |
is to see that they're,
link |
maybe the thing I've been told all my life is not true.
link |
And at every level,
link |
it's a thing very difficult to do in North Korea.
link |
The more authoritarian the regime,
link |
the more difficult it is to see.
link |
Maybe this idea that I believe
link |
that I was willing to die for is actually evil.
link |
It's very difficult to do for Americans,
link |
for Russians, for Ukrainians, for Chinese,
link |
for Indians, for Pakistanis, for everybody.
link |
I think thinking about this Ukrainian,
link |
whether you want to call it nobility
link |
or in transigence or whatever is key.
link |
I think the authoritarianness of Russia
link |
and Putin's control or the control of his cabal
link |
is the other thing I would really point to
link |
is what's going on here.
link |
And if you ask me like big picture,
link |
what do I think is the fundamental cause
link |
of most violence in the world?
link |
I think it's unaccountable power.
link |
I think, in fact, for me,
link |
an unaccountable power is the source of underdevelopment.
link |
It's the source of pain and suffering.
link |
It's the source of warfare.
link |
It's basically the root source of most of our problems.
link |
And in this particular case,
link |
it's also one of our buckets
link |
in the sense that like why, what is it
link |
that why did Russia ask these things?
link |
Like, well, it was democracy in Ukraine
link |
a threat to an average Russian?
link |
No, was capitalism, is NATO, is whatever,
link |
is this a threat to average Russians?
link |
No, it's a threat to the apparatus
link |
of political control and economic control
link |
that Putin and Kronys and this sort of group of people
link |
that rule this elite in Russia, it was a threat to them.
link |
And so they had to ask the Ukraine to be neutral
link |
or to give up NATO or to have a puppet government
link |
or whatever they were seeking to achieve
link |
and have been trying to achieve through other means
link |
for decades, right?
link |
They've been trying to undermine these things
link |
And they've been doing that
link |
because it threatens their interests.
link |
And that's like one of these other logics of war.
link |
It's not just that there's something
link |
that I value so much
link |
that I'm willing to injure the cost.
link |
It's that there are people,
link |
not only does this oligarchy
link |
or whatever elite group that you wanna talk about in Russia,
link |
not, first of all, they're not bearing some,
link |
they're bearing some costs of war, right?
link |
They're very, and they're certainly bearing costs
link |
of sanctions, but they are,
link |
they don't bear all the costs of war, obviously.
link |
And so they're more, they're quick to use it.
link |
But more importantly, like in some sense,
link |
I think there's a strong argument
link |
that they had a political incentive to invade
link |
or at least to ask Ukraine this sort of impossible
link |
And then invade despite Ukrainian
link |
nobility and transigence,
link |
because they were threatened.
link |
And so that's extremely important, I think.
link |
And so that's, those two things in concert
link |
make this a very fragile situation.
link |
That's, I think, why we ended up
link |
is go not all the way, but a long way to understanding.
link |
Now you could layer on to that
link |
these intangible incentives,
link |
these other things that are valued on Putin's side.
link |
Maybe there's a nationalist ideal.
link |
Maybe he seeks status and glory.
link |
Like maybe those things are all true,
link |
and I'm sure they're true to an extent.
link |
And that'll weigh against his costs of war as well.
link |
But fundamentally, I think he just saw his regime
link |
That's what he cares about.
link |
And so he asked, he made this cruel list of demands.
link |
I mean, I would say I'm just one human who the hell am I,
link |
but I just have a lot of anger
link |
towards the elites in general,
link |
towards leaders in general that fail the people.
link |
I would love to hear and to celebrate
link |
the beautiful Russian people, the Ukrainian people,
link |
and anyone who silences that beautiful voice of the people,
link |
anyone in the world,
link |
is destroying the thing that I value most about humanity.
link |
Leaders don't matter.
link |
They're supposed to serve the people.
link |
This nationalist idea of a people, of a country,
link |
is only makes any sense when you celebrate,
link |
when you give people the freedom to show themselves,
link |
to show themselves, to celebrate themselves.
link |
And the thing I care most about is science
link |
and the silencing of voices in the scientific community,
link |
the silencing of voices period.
link |
Fuck any leader that silences that human spirit.
link |
There's something about this.
link |
It's like, whenever I look at World War II,
link |
whenever I look at wars, it does seem very irrational
link |
to fight, but man, does it seem somehow deeply human
link |
when the people stand up and fight?
link |
There's something that, if, you know,
link |
we talked about progress,
link |
that feels like how progress is made,
link |
the people that stand and fight.
link |
So let me read the Churchill speech.
link |
It's such, it's so proud that we humans can stand up
link |
to evil when the time is right.
link |
I guess here's the thing though,
link |
think of what's happening in Xinjiang and China.
link |
We have appeased China.
link |
We've basically said you can just do really, really,
link |
really horrible things in this region.
link |
And we're, you're too powerful for us
link |
to do anything about it and it's not worth it.
link |
And there's nobody standing up and making a Churchill speech
link |
or the Braveheart speech about standing up for people
link |
of Xinjiang when what's happening is on, you know,
link |
in that realm of what was happening in Europe.
link |
And that's happening in a lot of places.
link |
And then when we, when there is a willingness to stand up,
link |
people, there's a lot of opposition to those, you know,
link |
so there were a lot of reasons for the invasion of Iraq.
link |
For some, it was humanitarian thing,
link |
like Saddam Hussein was one of the worst tyrants
link |
of the 20th century.
link |
He was just doing some really horrible things.
link |
You know, he'd invaded Kuwait.
link |
He'd, you know, committed domestic,
link |
attempted domestic genocide and all sorts of repression.
link |
And it was probably a mistake to invade in spite.
link |
So it's important not just to select on the cases
link |
where we stood up and to select on the cases
link |
where that ended up working out in the sense of victory, right?
link |
It's important to sort of try to judge, not judge,
link |
but just try to understand these things
link |
in the context of all the times we didn't give that speech
link |
or when we did and then it just went sideways.
link |
Well, that's why it's powerful
link |
when you're willing to give your life for your principles
link |
because most of the time you get neither the principles
link |
nor the life, you die, but that's why it's powerful.
link |
We shall go on to the end.
link |
We shall fight in France.
link |
We shall fight on the seas and the oceans.
link |
We shall fight with growing confidence
link |
and growing strength in the air.
link |
We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
link |
We shall fight on the beaches.
link |
We shall fight on the landing grounds.
link |
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
link |
We shall fight in the hills.
link |
We shall never surrender.
link |
This is before Hitler had any major loss to anybody.
link |
That was a terrifying armada coming your way.
link |
We shall never surrender.
link |
I just want to give props.
link |
I want to give my respect as a human being to Churchill,
link |
to the British people for standing up,
link |
to the Ukrainian people for standing up,
link |
and to the Russian people.
link |
These are great people that throughout history
link |
have stood up to evil.
link |
Let me ask you this, because you quote Sun Tzu
link |
in the art of war.
link |
There's no instance of a country having benefited
link |
from prolonged warfare.
link |
This is the main thesis.
link |
Can we just linger on this?
link |
Since leaders wage war and people pay the price,
link |
when we say that there's no reason to do prolonged war,
link |
is it possible to have a reason for the leaders
link |
if they disregard the price?
link |
If they have a different objective function
link |
or utility function that measures the price
link |
that's paid for war, is that one explanation
link |
of why war happens?
link |
Is the leaders just have a different calculus
link |
than other humans?
link |
I mean, I think this links us back
link |
to what we were talking about earlier about just war.
link |
Is in some sense, just war is saying
link |
that in spite of the costs, our enemy has done something.
link |
Our opponent has refused to compromise
link |
on something that we find essential,
link |
and is demanding that we compromise
link |
in a way that's completely repugnant.
link |
And therefore, we're going to go to war
link |
despite these material costs and these human costs.
link |
So that, and then that principle that you go to war on
link |
is in the eye of the holder.
link |
And I mean, I think liberty and sovereignty,
link |
I think we can understand and sympathize with,
link |
and maybe that's just a universe,
link |
maybe that's the greatest cause of just war,
link |
but other people make that could go to war
link |
for something considerably less,
link |
a principle that's considerably less noble, right?
link |
Which is what Hitler was doing.
link |
That's an explanation.
link |
So that's a whole class of explanations
link |
that helps us understand that the compromise
link |
that was on the table, given the relative balance of power,
link |
was just repugnant at least to one side,
link |
if not that there's something they're unwilling to part with.
link |
That's, and then you get to the leaders.
link |
Well, what happens when what the leaders want,
link |
what happens when the leaders are detached
link |
from the interests of their groups,
link |
which has been true for basically most of human history.
link |
There's a narrow slice of societies
link |
in the big scheme of things
link |
that have been accountable to their people.
link |
A lot of them exist today,
link |
where to some degree,
link |
they're channeling the interests of their group, right?
link |
So the Ukrainian politicians didn't concede
link |
to these cool Russian demands,
link |
because even if they had,
link |
it would have been political suicide,
link |
because it seemed, or I think I don't,
link |
it seems that the Ukrainians would have just rejected this.
link |
So they were in some sense channeling
link |
the values of the broader population,
link |
even if they, I don't know what was going on,
link |
even if they didn't share those principles,
link |
they self interestedly followed them.
link |
Probably they shared them,
link |
but I'm just saying that even if they didn't,
link |
they wouldn't compromise.
link |
Occasionally get the reverse,
link |
which is where the leaders are not accountable.
link |
And now they have some value, which could be glory.
link |
I mean, this is the story of the kings
link |
and to some lesser extent, the queens of Europe
link |
for hundreds of years,
link |
was it was basically a contest
link |
and it was the, more was the sport of kings.
link |
And to some extent,
link |
they were just seeking status through violent competition.
link |
And they paid a lot, a big price out of the royal purse,
link |
but they didn't pay most of the suffering.
link |
And so they were too quick to go to war.
link |
And so that's, I think that detachment of leaders,
link |
combined with, you know, you mingle it with this,
link |
that one bucket, that uncheckedness,
link |
and you mingle that with the fact
link |
that leaders might have one of these values,
link |
noble or otherwise, that carry them to war,
link |
combined to explain a good number of conflicts as well.
link |
And that's a good illustration
link |
of why I think like autocracy and unaccountable power
link |
is I could make that story for all of the things,
link |
all five buckets, they're all,
link |
we're all more susceptible to these things,
link |
to all five of these things
link |
when leaders are not accountable to the people
link |
And that's what makes it like the meta,
link |
for me, the meta cause of conflict in all of human history
link |
Does the will to power play into this, the desire for power?
link |
Like that's a human thing again in the calculation
link |
that shall we put that in the misperceptions bucket?
link |
Or is it, is misperceptions essentially
link |
about interaction between humans
link |
and power is more about the thing you feel in your heart
link |
when you're alone as a leader?
link |
You know, I said there were three strategic reasons
link |
like the unchecked leaders,
link |
the commitment problems, uncertainty.
link |
There are two sort of more psychological
link |
and I called them intangible incentives and misperceptions.
link |
The way that like a game theorist
link |
or the way that behavioral economists would think
link |
about those two was just to say preferences.
link |
And then erroneous beliefs and mistakes is like,
link |
so the preferences are our preferences, right?
link |
And so utility functions, whatever we want to call it,
link |
like there's not, that's why I wouldn't call them
link |
a misperception or rationality.
link |
We want, we like what we like.
link |
If we like power, if we like relative status,
link |
if we like, if we like our racial purity,
link |
if we like our liberty, if we like whatever it is
link |
that we have convinced ourselves we value.
link |
Maybe you fell in love with the rival queen, a king.
link |
When I said it was a big bucket full of stuff that rhymes,
link |
like that's a pretty messy bucket.
link |
Like there's a lot of different stuff in there.
link |
And I'm just trying to say like, let's be clear
link |
that just about the shared logic of these things
link |
is maybe just, you know, they're really dissimilar,
link |
but let's be clear about the shared logic.
link |
And if it were true that deep down
link |
we were aggressive people who just liked violence
link |
and enjoyed the blood or some percentage of us do,
link |
that would be there too.
link |
And so I just want to say that's,
link |
but you know, we're really quick to recognize those, right?
link |
When we diagnose a war as an armchair analyst
link |
or as a journalist or something, we really jump to those.
link |
We don't need a lot of help to like see those happening.
link |
So we probably put a little bit too much emphasis on them.
link |
It's maybe the only thing that I would caution
link |
because the others are more subtle
link |
and they're often there and they contribute.
link |
So just to link on something you said before,
link |
would it be accurate to say when the leaders become detached
link |
from the opinion of the people,
link |
is that's more likely to lead to war?
link |
And mechanically, it's just they're gonna bear fewer costs.
link |
So it's gonna basically narrow the set of deals
link |
that they're gonna be willing to accept instead of violence.
link |
At the same time, most of the time it's not enough
link |
because the leaders still bear a lot of costs of war.
link |
You could be deposed, you could be killed,
link |
you could be tried, and the public purse
link |
is going to be empty.
link |
I mean, that's like the one story throughout history
link |
is that at the end of the day,
link |
your regime is broke as a result of war.
link |
And so you still internalize that a little bit.
link |
If I had to say like, you know, in my three buckets
link |
or through my buckets so far,
link |
I sort of started with like Ukrainian and Transigence.
link |
And then I jumped and then I said the essential,
link |
then you really have to understand Russian autocracy
link |
just to understand why they would ask something so cool.
link |
But I mean, I think the uncertainty
link |
is really important here as well.
link |
Like if you think of it, like think of all of the things,
link |
the way this has played out,
link |
and just in some ways how many ways we've been surprised.
link |
We've been surprised by the unity
link |
and the coherence of the West and the sanctions.
link |
That sort of, what's happened is it was
link |
in the realm of possibility,
link |
but it was sort of like the best case scenario
link |
from the perspective of the West
link |
and the worst case scenario for the Russians.
link |
The second thing is just the pluckiness
link |
and the effectiveness and the intransigence
link |
and the nobility of this Ukrainian resistance.
link |
That's again, was within the realm of possibility,
link |
but wasn't necessarily the likely thing, right?
link |
It was again, maybe the worst realization for Russia,
link |
the best realization in some sense for,
link |
in terms of revealed strength and resolve.
link |
And then the other thing that's been revealed
link |
is just how, like the corruption and ineptitude
link |
and problems on the Russian military side.
link |
Again, within the realm of possibility,
link |
maybe people who really knew the Russian military
link |
are less surprised than the rest of us,
link |
but also one of the worst possible draws to Russia.
link |
And so, Putin asking this terrible price
link |
and expecting Ukraine to roll over,
link |
or the West to roll over at least to a degree,
link |
was based on like a different set of probability.
link |
It was based on just expecting something
link |
in the middle of the probability distribution
link |
and not all these different tail events.
link |
And so the fact that the world's so uncertain
link |
and the fact that Putin can come
link |
with a different set of expectations
link |
than the Ukrainians and the West
link |
and all these players can just have a hard time agreeing
link |
on just what the facts are,
link |
because we live in an uncertain world.
link |
Everyone's quick to say, oh, we miscalculated.
link |
Well, I'm not, I don't know if you miscalculated.
link |
I think he just, he got a really bad draw
link |
on in terms of what the realized outcomes are here.
link |
And so, I mean, good for everybody else in some sense,
link |
except the fact that it's involving a lot of violence
link |
Well, there's also economic pain,
link |
not just for the Russian people and the Ukrainian people,
link |
but for the whole world.
link |
So, you could talk about things that we are surprised
link |
from an analysis perspective of small victories here or there,
link |
but I think it's universally true
link |
that everybody loses once again in this war.
link |
Right, and so the question is just like, when does it,
link |
why did Russia choose to invade
link |
when Ukraine didn't give this up?
link |
Well, Russia anticipated that it would be able to seize
link |
what it wanted, the available bargain that it deserved
link |
quote unquote, based on its power.
link |
In the world, it wasn't getting.
link |
And so, it thought it could take that.
link |
And the uncertainty around that made it potentially
link |
more likely that he would choose to do this.
link |
But in particular, one of the other things that I think
link |
is probably less important in this context,
link |
but still plays a role, but less important than many wars,
link |
is the fact that it's really hard to resolve that uncertainty.
link |
Right, in theory, Ukraine should be able to say,
link |
look, this is exactly how resolved we are, we're super resolved.
link |
And your military is not as strong as you think it is.
link |
You mean before the conflict begins?
link |
Before the conflict begins.
link |
Everybody should be like, you know what?
link |
You lay on the table, here's my cards.
link |
No one wants, yeah.
link |
Here's your cards.
link |
Exactly, like that's, as a competitor in this,
link |
you can use that uncertainty or to your advantage.
link |
I can try to convince you, I can bluff.
link |
Right, and so anyone who's ever played poker
link |
and bluffed or called a bluff,
link |
that's the analogy in some ways toward,
link |
it's not the perfect analogy.
link |
But the uncertainty in the circumstance,
link |
you don't have to miscalculate.
link |
The fact that if you bluff and lose,
link |
it wasn't that you miscalculated,
link |
you made an optimal choice,
link |
given the uncertainty of the situation to take a gamble.
link |
And that was a wiser thing for you to do
link |
than to not bluff.
link |
And just to fold or to just not pay in that round.
link |
And so the uncertainty of the situation
link |
gives both sides incentives to bluff,
link |
gives neither side an incentive to try to reveal the truth.
link |
And then at some point, the other side says,
link |
you know what, you say you're resolved.
link |
You say you're not going to,
link |
you're going to mount an uncertainty.
link |
Every other, you know,
link |
people on my border has folded
link |
and you're going to fold too,
link |
the minute the tanks roll in
link |
and the minute the Air Force comes in,
link |
I'm gambling that you're bluffing.
link |
And so that inherent uncertainty of the situation
link |
just causes a lot of short wars, actually,
link |
because it's the sort of bluff and call dynamic that goes on.
link |
And, you know, the thing that's worth thinking
link |
is we might end up at a place in a few months
link |
where the thing that Ukraine concedes
link |
is not so far from what Russia demanded in the first place.
link |
Russia's on it, I want a neutral,
link |
I mean, who knows how,
link |
it's not the ambitious thing the Russians wanted,
link |
but if we end up in a place
link |
where Ukraine is effectively neutral,
link |
is not being militarily supplied by the West
link |
and where Russia has de facto control over the East
link |
in Crimea, if not fully recognized,
link |
probably, who knows if they'll get ever internationally
link |
if the Ukrainian recognized,
link |
but effectively controls,
link |
Russia will have accomplished
link |
what it asked for in the first place
link |
and both parties had to get there
link |
through violence rather than through negotiation.
link |
And you wouldn't need misperceptions and mistakes
link |
and you wouldn't need Putin's delusions of glory
link |
or whatever to get there,
link |
you would just need the ingredients I've given so far,
link |
which is like an unwillingness to do that without fighting
link |
on the part of the Ukrainians,
link |
an autocratic leadership in Russia
link |
who would make those demands
link |
because it's in their self interest
link |
and then uncertainty leading them to fight.
link |
And that, sadly, is like the best case,
link |
that feels like the best case scenario right now,
link |
which is the war's just five months and not five years.
link |
Given the current situation.
link |
Given the current situation.
link |
Because the suffering has already happened.
link |
It lost homes, people moving,
link |
you know, having to see their home
link |
and rubble and millions of people,
link |
refugees having to escape the country
link |
and hate flourishes versus the common humanity
link |
as it does with war.
link |
And on top of all of that,
link |
if we talk from a geopolitical perspective,
link |
the warmongers all over the world are sort of drooling.
link |
They now have got narratives
link |
and they got that whatever narratives,
link |
you can go shopping for the narratives.
link |
The United States has its narratives
link |
for whatever geopolitical thing you want to do
link |
in that part of the world.
link |
That's another little malevolent interaction
link |
between two of these buckets,
link |
like those unchecked leaders
link |
and those intangible incentives, those preferences,
link |
is that unchecked leaders spend,
link |
autocrats, whatever,
link |
spend enormous amounts of time
link |
trying to manipulate the values and beliefs
link |
of their population, of their group.
link |
And now, sometimes they do it nobly,
link |
but Winston Churchill there was trying to,
link |
it's not clear that Britons were ready to stand up.
link |
There were a lot of Americans and a lot of Britons
link |
who were like, you know what?
link |
Hitler, not such a bad guy.
link |
His idea is not so terrible.
link |
I never liked those Jews anyways.
link |
Many were thinking.
link |
We had political leaders in the US
link |
who were basically not pro Nazi,
link |
but were just not anti Nazi.
link |
And Churchill was just trying to instill
link |
a different resolve.
link |
He was trying to create that thing.
link |
He was trying to create that value.
link |
And in the American revolution it was as well.
link |
The founding fathers, the leaders of the revolution,
link |
it's not that everybody just woke up one morning
link |
in the United States
link |
and had this ideology of liberty and freedom.
link |
Some of that was true.
link |
It was out there in the ether,
link |
but they had to manufacture and create it.
link |
In a way that I think they believed and was noble,
link |
but there's a lot of manufacturing
link |
and creation of these values and principles
link |
that is not noble,
link |
and that is exactly what Hitler did so well.
link |
The anti extremism was present throughout the world,
link |
but the more subtle thing that I feel like
link |
maybe more generally applicable
link |
is this kind of pacifism.
link |
But I think people in the United States
link |
felt like it's not my conflict.
link |
Why do I need to get involved with it?
link |
And I think Churchill was fighting that.
link |
The general apathy.
link |
It's the apathy of rational calculus.
link |
What are we going to gain if we fight back?
link |
Hitler seems to be pretty reasonable.
link |
He's not going to stop the bombing.
link |
You're still going to maintain your sovereignty
link |
as the great people of Britain.
link |
Why are we fighting again?
link |
And that's the thing that's hard to break
link |
because you have to say,
link |
well, you have to speak the principle.
link |
You have to speak at some greater sort of
link |
long term vision of history.
link |
So it's like, yes, now it may seem like
link |
it's a way to avoid the fight,
link |
but you're actually just sort of putting shackles on yourself.
link |
You're destroying the very greatness of our people
link |
if we don't fight back.
link |
And to think about this with the current case with Russia,
link |
some people look at Putin's speeches
link |
and papers he's written on Ukraine
link |
historically being a part of Russia
link |
and trying to deny the,
link |
basically create all these nationalist narratives
link |
and they think, well, Putin really believes,
link |
and he might, Putin really believes this
link |
and that's why he's invading.
link |
And that might also be true
link |
and that would contribute to
link |
just make a peaceful bargain even harder to find.
link |
But I suspect what's at least a minimum true
link |
is Putin's trying to manufacture support
link |
for an invasion in the population through propaganda.
link |
And so he's doing on some level
link |
the same thing that Winston Churchill was doing
link |
in mechanical terms,
link |
which is to try to manipulate people's references
link |
but doing it in a sinister, malevolent, evil,
link |
self serving way because it's really in his interest,
link |
whereas this was anything but, right,
link |
in the Churchill example.
link |
The dark human thing is like,
link |
there's moments in World War II
link |
where Hitler's propaganda,
link |
he began to believe his own propaganda.
link |
I think he probably always believed,
link |
I think he was a sincere believer.
link |
Well, no, no, there's,
link |
but there's a lot of places
link |
where there was uncertainty
link |
and they decided to do propaganda
link |
and that propaganda resolved the uncertainty in his own mind.
link |
Like, so for example,
link |
he believed until very late
link |
that America is a weakling militarily
link |
as an economic power and just the spirit of the people.
link |
And like, that was part of the propaganda they're producing
link |
and because of that propaganda,
link |
when he became the head of the army,
link |
he was making military actions.
link |
He like, nonchalantly started war with America.
link |
Well, the United States of America,
link |
where he didn't need to at all.
link |
He could have avoided that completely,
link |
but he thought, eh, whatever,
link |
So that's, I think that propaganda first believes second
link |
and I think as a human being, as a dictator,
link |
when you start to believe the lies
link |
with which you're controlling the populace,
link |
you become detached from this person
link |
that's able to resolve in a very human way
link |
the conflict in the world.
link |
I mean, when I said the meta,
link |
the big common factor that causes war
link |
and over and over and over again is unaccountable power.
link |
It's not just because it's mechanically,
link |
like one of my five explanations is saying,
link |
well, if you're unaccountable, you don't bear the cost of war.
link |
You might have private incentives.
link |
So yes, bargains are harder to find,
link |
but it leads to all these nasty interactions.
link |
So earlier I said there's this interaction
link |
between the values and the unchecked leaders
link |
because those idiosyncratic values of your leader
link |
become more important when they're unchecked.
link |
But the uncertainty point you just made is like a deep point.
link |
It's to say actually that like the fundamental problem
link |
that all autocrats have is an information problem
link |
because nobody wants to give them the right information.
link |
And they have very few ways to aggregate information
link |
if they're not popular, right?
link |
And so there's a whole cottage industry of political science
link |
sort of talking about why autocrats love fixed elections
link |
and why they love Twitter and why they actually like it
link |
in the controlled ways.
link |
It solves an information problem.
link |
Like that's your cru...
link |
If you're like Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin,
link |
you need to solve an information problem
link |
just to avoid having a rebellion on your hands
link |
in your own country every day because uncertainty
link |
kind of gets magnified and you get all this distorted information
link |
in this apparatus of control.
link |
And so that's like another nasty interaction
link |
between uncertainty and unchecked leaders
link |
is you end up in this situation
link |
where you're getting bad information
link |
and it's not that you don't...
link |
You believe your own lies.
link |
It's just that you never...
link |
You sort of believe...
link |
You're sort of averaging what you believe
link |
over the available information
link |
and you don't realize that it's such a distorted
link |
and biased information source.
link |
One of the other things about this time,
link |
that was a surprise to me,
link |
in the fog of uncertainty,
link |
how sort of seemingly likely nuclear war became.
link |
Not likely, but how it...
link |
Less unlikely than before.
link |
That's a better way to say it.
link |
It started to take a random stroll away
link |
from zero percent probability
link |
into this kind of land of maybe like...
link |
It's hard to know, but it's like,
link |
oh, wow, we're actually normally talking about this
link |
as if this is part of the calculus,
link |
part of the options.
link |
But before we talk about nuclear war,
link |
because I'm going to need a drink,
link |
do you need to go to the bathroom?
link |
Sure, I'll take a break.
link |
So back to nuclear war.
link |
What do you think about this,
link |
that people were nonchalantly speaking about nuclear wars
link |
if it doesn't lead to the potential annihilation
link |
of the human species?
link |
What are the chances that our world
link |
sends it to nuclear war within your framework?
link |
You wore many hats.
link |
One is sort of the...
link |
And then one is a human.
link |
What do you think are the chances
link |
we get to see nuclear war in the century?
link |
Well, you know, the doomsday,
link |
the official doomsday clock for nuclear warfare
link |
sits in the lobby of my building.
link |
The bulletin of atomic scientists
link |
sort of shares a building with us.
link |
So it's always there every day.
link |
Can you describe what the doomsday clock is?
link |
The bulletin of atomic scientists.
link |
It's something that this group of physicists
link |
sort of said to sort of mark
link |
just how close we are to nuclear catastrophe,
link |
and they started it decades ago.
link |
and it's sort of how close are we to midnight,
link |
where midnight is nuclear armageddon
link |
or the destruction of humanity.
link |
And it's been sitting...
link |
I mean, it's actually...
link |
It hasn't moved as close to...
link |
It hasn't moved as close to midnight
link |
in the last few weeks as it probably should have,
link |
because it was already so close.
link |
There's actually limited room for it to move
link |
for a bunch of other reasons.
link |
There's a whole political thing that once...
link |
It's really easy to move it closer.
link |
And it's really hard if you're the person
link |
in charge of that clock to move it away,
link |
because that's always very controversial.
link |
So it always sits there,
link |
but it forces you to think about it
link |
a little bit every day.
link |
And I admit I was nonchalant about it
link |
until recently in a way that many other people were.
link |
I still think the risk is very low,
link |
but kind of for the reasons we've talked to,
link |
it's just so unimaginably costly
link |
that nobody wants to go that route.
link |
So it's like the extreme version of my whole argument
link |
was why we most of the time don't fight
link |
is because it's just so damn costly.
link |
That's the incentive not to use this.
link |
And if they do use it,
link |
that's the incentive to use it in a very restrained way.
link |
But that's not a lot of...
link |
But because we know we do go to war
link |
and there's all these things that interfere with it,
link |
including miscalculation and all of these human foibles.
link |
And several of those nuclear powers
link |
are not accountable leaders.
link |
I think we have to be a lot more worried
link |
than many of us were very recently.
link |
I pointed out earlier,
link |
the whole reason we're in this mess is
link |
because the only people who have this private interest
link |
in having Ukraine give up its freedom
link |
is this Russian cabal and elite that gets their power
link |
and is preserved and is threatened by Ukrainian democracy.
link |
How far would they go to hang onto power
link |
when push came to shove
link |
is I think the thing that worries me the most
link |
and is plainly what worries most people
link |
about the risk of nuclear war.
link |
I think at what point does that unchecked leadership
link |
decide that this is worth it,
link |
especially if they can emerge from the rubble still on top?
link |
And I don't know that any of us
link |
have really fully thought through all of that calculus
link |
and what's going on.
link |
Very recently, around the anniversary of January 6th,
link |
there were a lot of questions about,
link |
was the United States going to have another civil war?
link |
On the one hand, I think it's almost unimaginable.
link |
Sort of like in the same way I think that a nuclear war
link |
and complete Armageddon is unimaginable.
link |
But I remember something that...
link |
When both of those questions get asked,
link |
I remember something I was in the audience
link |
of listening to some great economists speak about
link |
20 years ago about the risk of an Argentina style
link |
financial meltdown of the United States.
link |
What's the total financial collapse?
link |
And they said, you know what, the risk is vanishingly small.
link |
But that's terrifying because until recently,
link |
the answer was zero.
link |
And so the fact that it's not zero
link |
should deeply, deeply scare us all.
link |
And we should devote a lot of energy to making it zero again.
link |
And that's how I feel about the risk of a civil war in the US.
link |
And that's how I feel about the risk of nuclear war.
link |
It's higher than it used to be,
link |
and that should terrify us all.
link |
To me what terrifies me is that all this kind of stuff
link |
seems to happen overnight, like super quick
link |
and it escalates super quick when it happens.
link |
So it's not like...
link |
I don't know what I imagined,
link |
but it just happens like if a nuclear war happened,
link |
it would be something like a plane,
link |
like in this case with Ukraine,
link |
a NATO plane shut down over some piece of land
link |
by the Russian forces,
link |
or so the narrative would go,
link |
but it doesn't even matter what's true or not
link |
in order to spark the first moment of escalation.
link |
And then it just goes, goes, goes.
link |
Well, I think that happens sometimes.
link |
I mean, again, it's this thing that, you know,
link |
social scientists call it selection on the dependent variable.
link |
There's all these times when that didn't happen,
link |
when it escalated one step and then people paused,
link |
or escalated two steps and people said,
link |
whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
link |
And so we remember the times when it went boom, boom, boom,
link |
boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,
link |
and then the really terrible thing happened.
link |
But that, fortunately, that's not, you know,
link |
I start off the book with an example of a gang war
link |
that didn't happen in Medellin, Colombia,
link |
which is my day job is actually studying conflict
link |
and gangs and violence of these other kinds of groups,
link |
also very sinister.
link |
And most of the time they don't fight
link |
and that escalation doesn't happen.
link |
So the escalation does happen quickly sometimes,
link |
except when it doesn't.
link |
So we remember the ones when it does.
link |
It's really important to think about all that.
link |
I remember talking to, I think Elon Musk on his podcast,
link |
I was sort of like talking about the horrors of war and so on.
link |
And then he said, well, you know, like most of human history,
link |
because I think I said like most of human history is,
link |
had been defined by these horrible wars.
link |
He's like, no, most of human history is just peaceful,
link |
like farming life.
link |
Like war, we kind of remember the wars,
link |
but most of human history is, you know, is life.
link |
Yeah, and most of the competition between nations was like blood,
link |
I would say blood thirsty without drinking that blood
link |
in the sense that it was intense, it would loathe some.
link |
And so a lot of the rivalry and a lot of the competition,
link |
which is also can be problematic in its own ways, is not violent.
link |
And most of human history is about the oppression of the majority by a few.
link |
And their moments when they rise up and revolt,
link |
and there's a revolution, we remember those,
link |
but most of the time they don't.
link |
And the story of political change and transformation and freedom
link |
is there's a few revolutions that are violent,
link |
but most of it is actually revolutions
link |
without that kind of violent revolt.
link |
Most of it is just the peaceful concession of power by elites
link |
to a wider and wider group of people
link |
in response to their increased economic bargaining power,
link |
their threat that they're going to march.
link |
So even if we want to understand something like the march of freedom
link |
over human history, I think we can draw this same insight
link |
that actually we don't, most of the time we don't fight,
link |
we actually concede power.
link |
No, you don't, the elite doesn't sort of give power to the masses right away.
link |
They just coopt the few merchants who could threaten the whole thing
link |
and bring them into the circle.
link |
And then the circle gets a little bit wider and a little bit wider
link |
until the circle is ever wide,
link |
and maybe not ever, but in clumpuses most, if not all.
link |
And that's like a hopeful and optimistic trend.
link |
Yeah, if you look at the plot, if you guys could pull it up of the war throughout history,
link |
so the rate of war throughout history does seem to be decreasing significantly
link |
with a few spikes, and the sort of the expansion,
link |
it's like half the world is under authoritarian regimes,
link |
but that's been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
link |
Stephen Pinker's one person, one famous scholar who brings up this hypothesis.
link |
I mean, there's sort of two ways, there's actually two separate kinds of violence
link |
that one where I think he's completely right,
link |
and one where I think we're not sure, probably maybe not.
link |
Where he's completely right, it's sort of interpersonal violence,
link |
homicides, everyday violence has been going down, down, down, down, down, down.
link |
That's just unambiguously, and it's mostly because we've created cultures and states
link |
and rules and things that control that violence.
link |
Now, the warfare between groups is that less frequent.
link |
Well, you know, it's not clear that he's right, that there's fewer wars.
link |
You might say that wars are more rare because they're more costly,
link |
because our weapons are so brutal.
link |
The cost of war go up, as the cost of war go up, not entirely,
link |
but for the most part, that gives us an incentive not to have them.
link |
But then when they do happen, they're doozies.
link |
So, is Pinker right?
link |
I hope he's right, but I don't think that officially that trend is there.
link |
I think that we might have the same kind of levels of intergroup violence
link |
because maybe those five fundamentals that lead to war have not fundamentally changed
link |
and thus made us, given us a more peaceful world now than a couple hundred years ago.
link |
That's something to think about.
link |
So, obviously, looking at his hypothesis, looking at his data, and others like him.
link |
But I have noticed one thing, which is the amount of pushback he gets.
link |
That this is speaking to the general point that you made,
link |
which is like we overemphasize the anecdotal and don't look objectively at the aggregate data as much.
link |
There's a general cynicism about the world, and I don't even mean cynicism.
link |
It's almost like cynicism porn or something like that,
link |
where people just get, for some reason, they get a little bit excited
link |
to talk about the destruction of human civilization in a weird way.
link |
They don't really mean it, I think.
link |
If I were to psychoanalyze their geopolitical analysis,
link |
I think it's a kind of, I don't know, maybe relieves the mind to think about death at a global scale somehow,
link |
and then you can go have lunch with your kids afterwards and feel a little better about the world.
link |
I don't know what it is, but it's not very scientific.
link |
It's very kind of personal, emotional.
link |
So we should be careful to look at the world in that way,
link |
because if you look broadly, there is just like you highlight,
link |
there's a will for peace among people.
link |
You mentioned Medellin.
link |
By the way, how do you pronounce it, Medellin or Medellin?
link |
I think there they say Medellin, because that's kind of the accent on the double L.
link |
But Medellin would be totally fine as well.
link |
What lessons do you draw from the Medellin cartel, from the different gang wars in Colombia, Medellin?
link |
What's the economics of peace and war between drug cartels?
link |
Here's what was really insightful for me.
link |
So I live in Chicago, and people are aware that there's a violence problem in Chicago.
link |
It's actually not the worst American city by any stretch of the imagination for shootings,
link |
but it's pretty bad.
link |
And Medellin has these better, much many more and probably many better organized gangs than Chicago.
link |
And yet the homicide rate is maybe half.
link |
And now, I mean, there have been moments when these gangs go to war in the last 30 years,
link |
when Medellin has become the most violent place on the planet.
link |
But for the most part, right now, they're peaceful.
link |
And so what's going on there?
link |
I mean, one thing that is there's a hierarchy of organizations, so that above these recently well organized neighborhood gangs,
link |
there's a set of more shadowy organizations that have different names.
link |
Some people call them razones.
link |
Some people would call them bandas, criminalis, criminal bands.
link |
You might just call them mafias.
link |
And there's about 17 of them, depending on how you want to count.
link |
And they themselves have a little operating board called,
link |
sometimes they call it the office, La Fesina, sometimes they call it La Mesa, the table.
link |
Well, each individual one or as a group?
link |
So they meet and they don't meet personally all the time.
link |
Sometimes they meet, but they consult.
link |
A lot of the leaders of these groups are actually in prison.
link |
And so, and they're in the same wings in prison.
link |
They have represented.
link |
Oh, they meet in prison.
link |
Well, whatever, if I'm on a cell block with you, I'd be to you anyways, right?
link |
So actually imprisoning leaders and putting them in the same cell block, but not putting them,
link |
you know, if you get arrested here in the United States and you're a criminal leader,
link |
and you get put in a super max prison, you cannot run your criminal empire.
link |
It's just too difficult.
link |
There, it's possible.
link |
And you might think, and they do, they still run their empire.
link |
And you might think that's a bad idea, but actually cutting off the head of a criminal organization,
link |
leading it to a bunch, leaving it to a bunch of like hotheaded young guys who are disorganized,
link |
is not always the path to peace.
link |
So having these guys all in the same prison patios is actually, it reduces imperfect information and uncertainty, right?
link |
It provides a place for them to bargain.
link |
And so Laofacina is like a lot of these informal meetings.
link |
And so, you know, and they have these tools that they use to control the street gangs.
link |
So instead of there being like 400 gangs, all sort of in this anarchic situation of competing for territory and constantly at war,
link |
the Risones are keeping them in line and they will use sanctions.
link |
They will, where the sanction might be, I will put a bullet in your head if you, if you don't.
link |
It's a little more honest than the sanctions between nations.
link |
But they will, but they, they will sit them down.
link |
They'll, they'll provide, they'll help them negotiate.
link |
They will provide commitment, I said there are these things called commitment problems where like there's some,
link |
I have some incentive to like exterminate you, but that's going to be costly for everybody.
link |
So I'm going to, what's the solution?
link |
Well, I'm going to provide commitment.
link |
I'm going to like enforce this deal.
link |
And yeah, you don't like this deal now because you could take advantage of your situation and wage war,
link |
but I'm going to give you a counter incentive.
link |
And, and, and so they keep the peace.
link |
And so, and it's a little bit, so they're a little bit like the UN Security Council and peacekeeping forces and sanctions regimes.
link |
It's like the same kinds of tools, the same parallels and, and they're imperfect.
link |
They don't always work that well and they're unequal, right?
link |
Cause it's not like they're pursuing this in the interests of like democratic blah, blah, blah.
link |
But it kind of works until it doesn't.
link |
And, and 10 years ago in, you know, in the mid 1990s, there were wars and this breaks down.
link |
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?
link |
Sanctions are designed to make unchecked leaders face the cost of war.
link |
It's a solution to one of the five problems, right?
link |
And mediators are a solution to uncertainty and international institutions that can enforce a peace and agreement are a solution to commitment problems.
link |
And all of these things can be solutions to these intangible incentives, like these preferences for whatever you value and miscalculations
link |
because they will punish you for your miscalculation or they will get a mediator to sort of help you realize why you're miscalculating.
link |
So, so they're doing all these things and it made me realize that the comparison to the UN Security Council and all our tools is actually a pretty good one
link |
because those are pretty unequal too.
link |
And those are pretty imperfect.
link |
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
link |
and they're manipulating this in their own self interest or their group's interests.
link |
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
link |
and why we have some of the problems we have is like.
link |
So there's not in some deep way, there's not a fundamental difference between those 17 mafia groups and the UN Security Council.
link |
The UN Security Council.
link |
We're such a funny descendant of apes.
link |
I'm sure there were different, they have different cultural garbs that they wear.
link |
What are your thoughts?
link |
I mean, that's the sense I got from Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa who founded the Medellin cartel is like having spoken with people.
link |
And as podcast, Dr. Roger Reeves, who was a drug transporter, it seems like there, it seems like it was, I don't know the right term, but it was very kind of professional and calm.
link |
It didn't have a sense of danger to it.
link |
Like it's negotiating.
link |
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 deescalate in order to have peace.
link |
Everybody is interested in peace.
link |
So something that happened last year, we were a little bit able to watch in real time because we had a few contacts.
link |
We've been meeting and talking to a lot of these leaders in prison and a bit outside of prison.
link |
Many of them will talk to us.
link |
And so they're the homicide rate.
link |
I mentioned homicide rate and medicines, maybe a two thirds or half of the Chicago level.
link |
It had been climbing.
link |
Some of these street level gangs were starting to fight.
link |
Maybe at sort of the, on some level, it seems that like maybe some of those prison leaders were like saying, well, you know, we're actually not sure how strong these guys are.
link |
Let's let them fight just to test it out.
link |
Let's have these skirmishes, right?
link |
It wasn't prolonged warfare.
link |
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.
link |
So they're kind of feeling each other out through fighting and the homicide rate doubled and then it increased by the same amount again.
link |
So it was approaching something that might get out of control, which wasn't in anybody's interest.
link |
It wasn't in the government's interest.
link |
It wasn't in their interest.
link |
And so then magically all of these leaders in these patios, right, different prisons, they're spread out around a bunch of prisons.
link |
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.
link |
So the government had a role in this.
link |
And then somebody who's like a trusted mediator on the criminal side gets himself arrested.
link |
It happens to be put in the same spot.
link |
And a week later, the homicide rate is 30% of what it was is back to its normal model.
link |
Unfortunately, not zero, right?
link |
But it's back to where it was because it didn't make sense to have a war.
link |
And everybody, government, mafia leaders, everybody sort of like, they figured out a way to sort of bargain their way to peace.
link |
Can I say this almost like a tangent, but you mentioned you got a chance potentially to talk to a few folks, someone in prison, someone or not.
link |
Is it interesting?
link |
Maybe by way of advice, do you have ideas about talking to people who are actively criminals?
link |
Yeah, it really depends on the situation.
link |
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.
link |
So this would have been 2004, 2005.
link |
This is a small East African country.
link |
And the north of the country had been engulfed in, think of it as like a 20 year low level insurgency run by a self proclaimed messiah
link |
who wasn't that popular and no one joined his movement.
link |
So he would kidnap kids.
link |
And so the, I never, I could talk to people who are, who'd come back from being there.
link |
I never once, if I'd wanted to, and I was writing about that armed group, I never talked to anybody who was an active member of that armed group was quite rare.
link |
It wouldn't have been easier safe.
link |
And that's sometimes true.
link |
I'm starting to do some work in Mexico, probably, and I'm not going to be talking to any criminal.
link |
They'll kill people.
link |
And you say you're not going to talk to them and they'll kill people?
link |
So, I mean, journalists are routinely killed for knowing too much in Mexico.
link |
There's no, there's no compunctions about killing them and there's no consequences.
link |
Who do you, who kills a journalist?
link |
It's not the main people that you spoke with.
link |
Is it their lackeys or is it rival?
link |
No, so, so, so, um, gangs.
link |
This is true of a Chicago gang and this is true of a Medellin gang.
link |
It's probably true of a Mexico gang is like, you might have your group of 30 people.
link |
One or two of them might be shooters.
link |
Most people don't shoot.
link |
Most people don't like to do that.
link |
Or you don't even have any of those people in your group because you're trying to run a business.
link |
You don't need any shooters.
link |
You can just hire a killer when you need them on contract.
link |
And so, if somebody's asking questions and you don't want them to ask questions
link |
or you think they know too much in a way that threatens you
link |
and it's cheap for you and you have no personal compunctions
link |
and you can, then you can put a contract out on them and they'll be killed.
link |
That doesn't happen in Colombia.
link |
It doesn't happen in Chicago.
link |
There's lots of reasons for that.
link |
I can't say exactly why.
link |
I think one reason is like, they know what'll happen is that there'll be consequences
link |
that the government will crack down and make them pay and so they don't do it.
link |
And that is not what happened in Mexico.
link |
They won't kill like a deagent.
link |
They know that the US has made it clear.
link |
You kill one of our agents, we will make you pay.
link |
And so, they're very careful to minimize death of an American,
link |
but you kill journalists and nobody comes after them or is able to come after them.
link |
And so, they've realized they can get away with this
link |
and that seems to be the equilibrium there.
link |
That's my initial sense from...
link |
But we spent a lot of time before we started talking to criminals.
link |
We spent a year trying to figure out what was safe before we actually...
link |
There were lots of safe things to do.
link |
It was also really hard to figure out how to talk to people in these organizations
link |
and we failed 40 times before we figured out a way to actually access people.
link |
Is it worth it talking to them if you figure out...
link |
Because it's not never going to be safe.
link |
It's going to be when you estimate that there's some low level of risk.
link |
What's the benefit as a researcher, as a scholar of humans?
link |
So, I actually don't think...
link |
Let's compare it to something...
link |
Okay, I'm in Austin for the first time and I'm walking around
link |
and there's all these people buzzing around on these scooters without helmets.
link |
We need to definitely interview them and say what the hell is wrong with you.
link |
So, nothing I have ever done in my entire career is as risky as that.
link |
That's a nice way to compare journalism in a war zone.
link |
Yeah, there are some war zones.
link |
I worked in Northern Uganda and I worked in Liberia and I work now in Medellin
link |
and I'm starting to work in Mexico.
link |
Both those particular places and then the things I did in those places
link |
where I spent a lot of time making sure that what I was doing was not unduly risky.
link |
Todd, could you pull up a picture of a person on a scooter in Austin
link |
so we can just compare this absurd situation where I doubt it's the riskiest thing
link |
because now we have to look at the data.
link |
I understand the point you're making, but...
link |
So, I'm not trying to say there's zero risk.
link |
I think there's like a calculated risk
link |
and I think you become good at...
link |
You work at becoming good at being able to assess these risks
link |
and know who can help you assess these risks.
link |
Yeah, I think there's another aspect to it too.
link |
When you're riding a scooter, once you're done with the scooter, the risk has disappeared.
link |
There's something lingering when you have to look over your shoulder,
link |
potential for the rest of your life as you accumulate all these conversations.
link |
Yeah, I've chosen, but I've also advised my students
link |
and I wouldn't go and do this with an armed group that would think I knew too much and therefore...
link |
Some people do that.
link |
Some journalists, I think, are very brave and take risks and do that
link |
and good for them and I'm happy they do that.
link |
I don't personally do that.
link |
So, these guys are very...
link |
I mean, in Medellin, it's a business.
link |
They're selling local drugs
link |
and they are laundering money for the big cartels
link |
and they are shaking down businesses for money or selling services in some cases
link |
and they make a lot of money.
link |
It's a business and they're in prison.
link |
So, they can talk about most of what they want to talk about
link |
because there's no double jeopardy.
link |
They've been incarcerated for it and you're just talking shop
link |
and they're just... So, it's worth it, I think, because the risk is very low
link |
but if you actually want to weaken these organizations
link |
and they're extremely powerful, they're extremely big facet of life in a lot of cities
link |
in the Americas in particular, including in some American cities,
link |
if you want to understand how to weaken these groups over time,
link |
you have to understand how their business works
link |
and imagine you were made like whatever the oils are of the United States
link |
or maybe you're in charge of the finance industry.
link |
You're the regulator for oil and energy or for finance
link |
and then you get in the job and someone says...
link |
and then you're like, well, how many firms are there
link |
and what do they sell and what are the prices?
link |
And then we're just like, well, we don't really know.
link |
You would not be a very good regulator.
link |
And if you're a policeman or you're someone who's in charge of counter organized crime,
link |
you're just a regulator.
link |
You're trying to regulate an illicit industry.
link |
You're regulating an industry that happens to be illicit
link |
and you have no information.
link |
And so that's kind of what we do.
link |
We figure out how the system works
link |
and what are the economic incentives and what are the political incentives?
link |
Any interviews and conversations help with that?
link |
They help a lot, yeah, yeah.
link |
I mean, I do some of those, but on the side, my Spanish is okay.
link |
Do you have a translator usually if you ever go directly?
link |
Well, if only because I can't understand the street vernacular.
link |
I'm just totally hopeless.
link |
Nor could many people who speak Spanish as a second language.
link |
You go to prison and you talk to these guys
link |
and they're speaking in the local dialect and it's tough.
link |
But more importantly, I just don't need to be there
link |
and that's not my...
link |
I'm a quantitative scholar.
link |
I'm the guy who collects the data.
link |
So we have people on our team and colleagues and employees
link |
who are doing full time interviews.
link |
And then I just sometimes go with them.
link |
What about if we...
link |
You mentioned Uganda.
link |
Yeah, Joseph Coney, the Ugandan warlord.
link |
I'm seeing here he kidnapped 591 children in three years between 2000.
link |
They must have kidnapped.
link |
They probably kidnapped for at least a short time,
link |
like a few hours to a day, more than 50,000 kids.
link |
As a terror tactic?
link |
I mean, you know, most of those people,
link |
they just let go after they carried goods.
link |
They tried to hold onto thousands.
link |
The short story, listen, if you're not popular,
link |
if you're running in our movement and you need troops,
link |
And nobody wants to fight for you.
link |
You can either give up
link |
or you can have a small clandestine terror organization
link |
A different set of tactics.
link |
But if you want a conventional army and you don't want to give up,
link |
then you have to conscript.
link |
And if you want to conscript and you don't...
link |
You know, here we conscript and then we say,
link |
if you run away, we'll shoot you.
link |
And we control the whole territory.
link |
That's a credible promise.
link |
If you're a small insurgency organization,
link |
people can run away and then you can't promise to shoot them very easily
link |
because you don't control all the territory.
link |
And what these movements do is they try to brainwash you.
link |
And I think what they figured out after years of abducting children,
link |
you know, you talk about evil,
link |
they figured out that, you know, we have to...
link |
Maybe like, I don't know,
link |
but say like maybe one in a hundred will like buy the rhetoric.
link |
So we just have to conscript or abduct a large number of kids
link |
and then some small number of them will not run away.
link |
And those will be our committed cadres.
link |
And those people can become commanders.
link |
And because they'll buy the propaganda and they'll buy the messianic messages.
link |
But because most people wise up, we have...
link |
Especially as they get older,
link |
we just have to abduct vast numbers of kids in order to have a committed cadre.
link |
And so it has the other benefit of sort of being terrifying for the population
link |
and being a weapon in itself.
link |
But I think for them it was just primarily a way to solve a recruitment problem
link |
when you're a totally like hopeless and ideologically empty rebel movement.
link |
So in some sense it's...
link |
Yeah, so that's maybe the short story. It was a real tragedy.
link |
I heard one interview of a dictator
link |
where the journalist was basically telling them like,
link |
how could you be doing this basically calling out all the atrocities
link |
the person's committing and the dictator was kind of laughing it off and walked away.
link |
And like he cut off the interview.
link |
That feel like a very unproductive thing to be doing.
link |
You're basically stating the thing that everyone knows to his face.
link |
Maybe that's pleasant to somebody, but that feels unproductive.
link |
It feels like the goal should be some level of understanding.
link |
He's been super lucive.
link |
I mean, why he's fought this... I don't even know.
link |
You know, it's not a great example of...
link |
The way I look at that situation is...
link |
It's a little bit particular the way Uganda works,
link |
but most of the political leadership for most of its post independence history
link |
came from the north of the country.
link |
That was like the power base.
link |
And that was dictatorial and they were...
link |
So you've heard of like people like Idi Amin,
link |
but people have heard of like Milton Abote,
link |
and all these people were all from the north.
link |
And then you get the current president who came power in 1986.
link |
So he's been around a long time.
link |
He was from the south.
link |
And he was fighting against these dictators,
link |
and he was fighting for a freer and better Uganda.
link |
And in many ways...
link |
I mean, he's still a dictator himself,
link |
but he did create a freer and better Uganda.
link |
So he's better than these...
link |
He's a thug, but he was better than thugs before him.
link |
And he came to power and he was like...
link |
Some of the northerners were like,
link |
we want to keep up the fight.
link |
And he was like, you know what, you guys,
link |
I'm strong enough to continue to the north.
link |
You guys go, you want to have a crazy insurgency up there
link |
and some kook believes he's like speaking,
link |
you know, through the Holy Spirit,
link |
you know, speaking through him
link |
and he's going to totally disrupt the north.
link |
You guys just fester and fight,
link |
and that's going to totally destabilize this power,
link |
this traditional power base,
link |
and then that's just going to help me consolidate control.
link |
So he was not a crowd.
link |
He was an unchecked leader who allowed a lunatic
link |
to run around and cause mayhem
link |
because it was in his political interest to do so.
link |
And there is no puzzle.
link |
It's in some ways, it's that simple and kind of tragic.
link |
There's little to understand.
link |
Yeah, it took me a lot.
link |
Well, you know what?
link |
In the middle of it, I didn't understand that.
link |
I don't think a lot of people did.
link |
I think I could persuade most people who study or work there now
link |
to like see it that way.
link |
I think people that would make sense to people,
link |
but it didn't make sense in the moment.
link |
You know, in the moment this is happening,
link |
it's terrible and you kind of, you know,
link |
you don't realize how avoidable it was.
link |
Basically, it was the absence of effective police actions
link |
that kept the lunatic from being contained.
link |
And that lunatic would never, you know,
link |
it's not that skillful of our movement, right?
link |
They could have been shut down
link |
and there was just never any political will to shut it down.
link |
That's what I meant.
link |
Like that unchecked leader,
link |
not only do you not bear the cost,
link |
but you might have a private incentive as an autocrat
link |
to like see that violence happen.
link |
And in this case, it was just keeping a troublesome part
link |
of the country busy.
link |
If it's okay to look at a few other wars.
link |
So we talked about drug wars and Medellin.
link |
Are there other wars to stand out to you as full of lessons?
link |
We can jump around a little bit.
link |
Maybe if we can return briefly at World War II
link |
from your framework,
link |
could World War II have been avoided?
link |
This is one of the most traumatic wars, global wars.
link |
I mean, one obvious driver of that war was these,
link |
the things that Hitler valued and then was able
link |
to use his autocratic power to either convince other people
link |
or to suppress them.
link |
And so some people stopped there and say that.
link |
And then in the West basically,
link |
and then of course they were able,
link |
because they were such an economic and political powerhouse,
link |
they were able to sort of make demands of the rest of Europe
link |
that you can kind of see the fold,
link |
letting Nazis march into Denmark without a fight
link |
or France folding very quickly.
link |
You can kind of see as like an appeasement
link |
or an acknowledgement of their superiority
link |
and their ability to bargain without much of a fight.
link |
And then you can see the Western response
link |
as a principled stand.
link |
I think that's, and there's a lot of truth to that.
link |
You know, in terms of the strategic forces,
link |
a lot of political scientists see a version
link |
of a commitment problem basically where Germany says,
link |
you know what, we're strong now, we're temporarily strong,
link |
we're not going to be this strong forever.
link |
If we can get this terrible bargain
link |
and get everyone to capitulate through violence,
link |
if we strike now and then solidify our power
link |
and keep these, in World War I,
link |
it was prevent the rise of Russia
link |
and prevent the strengthening of Russian alliance
link |
And so we have an incentive to strike now
link |
and there's a window of opportunity that's closing
link |
and that they thought was closing as soon as 1917
link |
And I don't know that that story is as persuasive
link |
I think there was an element of a closing window.
link |
They kept talking about a closing window.
link |
They really thought there's a closing window.
link |
I think it was a nature that windows different
link |
in that there was kind of pacifism
link |
and it seems like if war broke out,
link |
most nations in the vicinity would not be ready.
link |
By the people, the leaders that are in power,
link |
they weren't ready so the timing is really right now.
link |
But I wonder how often that is the case
link |
with leaders in war that feels like the timing is now.
link |
The other commitment problem,
link |
the other shift that was happening that he wanted to avert
link |
that is kind of wrapped up with his ideology
link |
is this idea of a cultural and a demographic window of opportunity
link |
that if conditional on having these views
link |
of a Germanic people and a pure race,
link |
he had to strike now before any opportunity
link |
to sort of establish that was possible.
link |
I think that's one...
link |
It's an incentive that requires his ideology as well.
link |
How do we avoid it within this framework?
link |
Would you say is there...
link |
You kind of provide an explanation,
link |
but is there a way to avoid it?
link |
Is violence the way to avoid it?
link |
Because people kind of tried rational,
link |
peaceful kind of usual negotiation
link |
and that led to this war.
link |
Is that unique to this particular war?
link |
Let's say World War I or World War II.
link |
So there's an extra pressure from Germany
link |
and both wars to act.
link |
So we've highlighted that.
link |
Is there a way to alleviate that extra pressure to act?
link |
Let me use World War I as an example.
link |
Suppose, as many German generals said at that time,
link |
we have a window of opportunity before Russia,
link |
where we might not win a war with Russia.
link |
So the probability that we can win a war
link |
is going to change a lot in the next decade or two,
link |
maybe even in the next few years.
link |
If we were in a much better bargaining position now,
link |
both to not use violence,
link |
but to if necessarily use violence.
link |
Because otherwise, Russia's going to be extremely powerful
link |
in the future and they'll be able to use that power
link |
to change the bargaining with us
link |
and to keep us down.
link |
And the thing is, in principle,
link |
Russia could say, look,
link |
we don't want to get invaded right now.
link |
We know you could invade us.
link |
We know we're weak.
link |
We know we'll be strong in the future.
link |
We promise to not wield our and abuse our
link |
or just merely just sort of take what we can get
link |
in the future when we're strong.
link |
We're going to restrain ourselves in the future.
link |
Or we're going to hand over something that makes us powerful
link |
because that's the bargain that would make us all better off.
link |
And the reason political economists call it a commitment problem
link |
is because that's a commitment that would solve the problem.
link |
And they can't make that commitment
link |
because there's nobody who will hold them accountable.
link |
So anything, any international legal architecture,
link |
any set of enforceable agreements,
link |
any UN Security Council, any world government,
link |
anything that would help you make that commitment
link |
is a solution, all right, if that's the core problem.
link |
And so that's why, you know, in Medellin,
link |
you know, the La Fousina can do that.
link |
They can say, listen, yes, combo that's strong today
link |
is going to be weak tomorrow.
link |
You have an incentive to eliminate this combo over here
link |
because they're going to be strong.
link |
But guess what? You're not going to do that.
link |
And we're going to make sure, we're going to promise
link |
that when these guys do get strong,
link |
we're going to restrain what they can do.
link |
Most of our constitutions in most stable countries
link |
have done precisely that, right?
link |
There's a lot of complaining right now in the United States
link |
about the way that the Constitution is a portion power
link |
That was a deal, that was a commitment.
link |
The Constitution was, in the United States,
link |
was a deal made to a bunch of states
link |
that knew they were going to be weak in future
link |
because of economic and demographic trends,
link |
or guess they might be, and it said, listen,
link |
you cooperate and will, and will commit
link |
not to basically ignore your interests over the long run.
link |
And now, you know, 250 years later,
link |
we're still honoring those commitments.
link |
It was part of the deal that meant
link |
that there actually would be a union.
link |
And so, we do this all the time.
link |
So, Constitution is a good example of how
link |
every country's Constitution,
link |
especially a country who's writing a Constitution after a war,
link |
that Constitution and all of the other institutions
link |
that are building are in an attempt to, like,
link |
provide commitment to groups who are worried
link |
about future shifts in power.
link |
And does that help with avoid civil war?
link |
Could you speak to lessons you learned from civil wars,
link |
perhaps the American Civil War and the others?
link |
So, Lebanon, one of the ways Lebanon had tried
link |
for a long time to preserve the interests
link |
of minority groups, powerful minority groups
link |
who were powerful at the time and knew
link |
that the demographics were working against them
link |
was to guarantee, you know, this ethnic religious group
link |
gets the presidency and this ethnic religious group
link |
gets the prime ministership and this ethnic,
link |
and a lot of countries will apportion seats
link |
in the parliament to ethnic religious groups.
link |
And that's an attempt to, like,
link |
give a group that's temporarily powerful
link |
some assurances that they're,
link |
when they're weak in the future,
link |
that they'll still have a say, right?
link |
Just like we portion seats in the Senate
link |
in a way that's not demographically representative
link |
but is like unequal, quote, unquote,
link |
in a sense to help people be confident
link |
that there won't be a tyranny of the majority.
link |
And now that just happens to have been,
link |
like, a really unstable arrangement in Lebanon
link |
because eventually, like, the de facto power on the ground
link |
just gets so out of line with this really rigid system
link |
of the presidency goes to this ethnic religious group
link |
and this prime ministership goes,
link |
that it didn't last, right?
link |
But you can think of every post conflict agreement
link |
and every constitution is like a little bit
link |
of humans best effort to find an agreement
link |
that's going to protect the interests of a group
link |
that's temporarily has an interest in violence
link |
in order to not be violent.
link |
And so there's a lot of ingenuity
link |
and it doesn't always work, right?
link |
Which, actually, from a perspective of the group,
link |
threatening violence or actually doing violence
link |
is one way to make progress for your group.
link |
We're talking about groups bargaining over stuff, right?
link |
We're talking about Russians versus Ukraine
link |
or Russians versus in the West
link |
or maybe it's Medizhin gains versus one another.
link |
Like, a lot of their bargaining power
link |
comes from their ability to burn the house down, right?
link |
And so if I want to have more bargaining power,
link |
I can just arm a lot and I can threaten violence.
link |
And so the strategically wise thing to do,
link |
I mean, it's terrible, it's a terrible equilibrium
link |
for us to be forced into,
link |
but the strategically wise thing to do
link |
is to build up lots of arms to threaten to use them,
link |
to credibly threaten to use them,
link |
but then trust or hope that, like,
link |
your enemy is going to see reason
link |
and avoid this really terrible inefficient thing
link |
which is fighting.
link |
But the thing that's going on the whole time
link |
is both of you arming and spending, like,
link |
20% of GDP or whatever on arms,
link |
that's pretty inefficient.
link |
That's the tragedy.
link |
We don't have war and that's good,
link |
but we have really limited abilities
link |
to incentivize our enemies not to arm
link |
and to keep ourselves from arming.
link |
We'd love to agree to just, like, both disarm,
link |
And so the masses that we have to arm
link |
and then we have to threaten all the time.
link |
Yeah, so the threat of violence
link |
is costing, nevertheless.
link |
You've actually pulled up
link |
that now disappeared a paper that said
link |
the big title called Civil War
link |
and your name is on it.
link |
What's that about?
link |
Well, that was, I mean,
link |
when I was finishing graduate school
link |
and this was a paper with my advisor at Ted Miguel,
link |
Most nations the paper opens
link |
have experienced an internal armed conflict
link |
yet while were you still in grad school on this or no?
link |
or just graduated, I think.
link |
I wish I was in a discipline
link |
that wrote papers like this. This is pretty badass.
link |
Yet while Civil War
link |
is central to many nations development,
link |
of economic research
link |
and teaching, so on and so forth.
link |
And this is looking at Civil War broadly
link |
throughout history or is it just particular Civil Wars?
link |
You were mostly looking at, like, the late 20th century.
link |
I mean, I was trained
link |
as a development economist,
link |
which is somebody who studies why some places are poor
link |
and why some countries are rich.
link |
I, like, a number of people
link |
around that time stumbled into
link |
violence. I mean, people have been studying
link |
the wealth and poverty of nations basically
link |
since the invention of economics.
link |
Now, there isn't any more.
link |
There's a flourishing area of study
link |
but in economics. But at the time
link |
it wasn't. And so there were people like
link |
were sort of part political scientists
link |
because political scientists obviously had been
link |
sitting this for a long time, who started bringing
link |
economic tools and expertise
link |
and, like, partnerships with
link |
political scientists and adding to it.
link |
And so we wrote this.
link |
So after, like, people had been doing this for 5 or 10 years
link |
in our field, we wrote, like, a review
link |
article telling economists, like,
link |
what was going on. And so this was, like, a summary
link |
for economists. So the book in some ways is
link |
a lot in the same spirit of this article.
link |
This article, I mean, it's
link |
designed to be not
link |
written as, like, a boring laundry list of studies,
link |
which is what, that's the purpose this article
link |
was. It was for graduate students and professors
link |
who wanted to think about what to work on
link |
This book is, like, now trying to, like, not
link |
just say what economists are doing, but sort of say
link |
what economists, political scientists,
link |
psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, like,
link |
once, how do we bring
link |
some sense to this big project? And policymakers,
link |
like, what do we know?
link |
And what do we know about building peace?
link |
Given, you know, because
link |
if you don't know what the reason for
link |
wars are, you're probably not going to design
link |
And so anyway, so that was
link |
the, but I started off studying Civil Wars
link |
and I, because I stumbled into
link |
this place in northern Uganda basically
link |
by accident. It was a, never, no
link |
intention of working in Civil Wars. I'd never
link |
thought about it. And then,
link |
followed a woman there.
link |
Oh, we'll talk about that.
link |
I had to ask you first. And for people who are
link |
just watching, where
link |
we have an amazing team of folks helping out
link |
pulling pictures and articles
link |
and so on, mostly so that I can
link |
pull up pictures on Instagram of animals fighting,
link |
which is what I do on my own time.
link |
And then we could discuss, analyze
link |
maybe with George St. Pierre. That's what all he
link |
sends me for people who are curious.
link |
But let me ask you, one of the most
link |
difficult things going on in the world today,
link |
will we ever see peace
link |
in this part of the world? And
link |
The Roots of War and the Paths for Peace,
link |
or the subtitle, Why We Fight.
link |
What's the path for peace?
link |
Will we ever see peace? Yeah.
link |
If we think about this
link |
in the sense of like this dispute,
link |
this sort of contest,
link |
this contest that's been going on between Israelis
link |
and Palestinians, it's been going on for a century.
link |
just 10 or 15 years
link |
violence in that span
link |
of time, most of it from 2000
link |
to 2009 and stretching up to like
link |
2014. They're like sporadic
link |
incidents which are really terrible. I'm not trying
link |
to diminish the human cost of these, by the way.
link |
Like I'm just trying to point out that whatever's
link |
unpleasant and challenging and difficult as it is,
link |
it's actually not war. And so it is that peace.
link |
There's sort of an uneasy stalemate. The Israelis
link |
and Palestinians are actually pretty good at just sort of
link |
keeping this at a relatively low scale of violence.
link |
There's a whole bunch of like low scale
link |
violence that can be
link |
repression of civilians.
link |
terror bombings and terror actions.
link |
violence. It can be mass
link |
arrests. It can be repression. It can be denying
link |
people the vote. It can be
link |
rattling sabers. All these
link |
things that are happening, right?
link |
And it can be sporadic
link |
three week wars or sporadic,
link |
you know, very brief
link |
episodes of intense violence before
link |
everybody sees sense and then
link |
settles down to this uneasy.
link |
That's not like, we're
link |
right now to think of that as like a peace and there's certainly
link |
a stable agreement, right?
link |
So a stable agreement
link |
ability to move on from
link |
this extreme hostility, we're not there yet
link |
But this is a good example
link |
of two rivals who most
link |
of the time have avoided really intense
link |
You talked about this, like most
link |
avoiding violence and hating each other
link |
So is this what peace
link |
does answer my question? Yeah, sometimes.
link |
Is this what peace looks like? Not always.
link |
to go back to like the Russia Ukraine
link |
example. Like I kind of, it's really hard.
link |
It's going to be really hard to find
link |
that both sides can feel they can
link |
honor, that they can be explicit about,
link |
that they'll hold to, that will enable them
link |
Feels like a first step in a long journey
link |
towards a greatness for both nations
link |
in a peaceful time,
link |
flourishing, that kind of thing.
link |
I mean, you can think of like
link |
what's going on in Israel,
link |
Palestine, there's a stalemate.
link |
both of them are exhausted from the violence
link |
that has occurred. Neither one of them
link |
is quite willing to, for various reasons
link |
to create this sort of stable agreement.
link |
There's a lot of really difficult issues
link |
maybe the sad thing, maybe we'll
link |
end up in the same situation with Russia Ukraine.
link |
This is where, you know, if every, if they
link |
stop fighting one another, but Russia
link |
holds the east of the country and
link |
Crimea and nobody really acknowledges
link |
their right to that,
link |
that might within there just going to be a
link |
lot of tension and skirmishing and violence.
link |
But that never really progresses to war
link |
for 30 years. That would be a sad
link |
but maybe possible
link |
So that's kind of where Israel Palestine
link |
looks to me. And so someone,
link |
if we're going to talk about why we fight, then
link |
the question we have to ask is like why
link |
you know, like the second
link |
Intifada, like that was the most violent episode.
link |
Like why did that happen? And why did that
link |
and why did that last several years?
link |
That would be like, we could analyze
link |
that and we could say, what was it about
link |
these periods of violence that led
link |
there to be prolonged intense violence, because
link |
there was nobody's interest that didn't need to happen.
link |
And partly don't talk about that in the book.
link |
really contemporary conflicts
link |
for two reasons. One is
link |
I, things could change really
link |
quickly. I didn't want the book to be dated.
link |
I wanted this to be a book that had like longevity
link |
and that that would
link |
be relevant still in 10 years or 20 years
link |
maybe before someone writes a better one
link |
or an update. Before the human civilization ends.
link |
And circumstances can change really quickly. So I
link |
wanted it to be enduring and meant
link |
partly just avoiding changing things
link |
and changing these and avoiding these controversial
link |
ones. But of course I think about them and so
link |
like a lot of my time, I decided
link |
actually last year to teach a class where I
link |
take all these contemporary conflicts that
link |
wasn't working on the
link |
book and where I wasn't really an expert, whether it's
link |
India Pakistan, China Taiwan,
link |
Mexican cartel state drug wars
link |
a few others and then teach a class
link |
on them with students and we'd work through it.
link |
We'd read the book and then we'd say, all right,
link |
none of us are experts. How do we make sense of these places?
link |
And we focus in the
link |
Israel Palestine case of mostly trying to understand
link |
why it got so violent and then
link |
spend a little bit of time on
link |
what the prospects are for
link |
something that's more enduring.
link |
It's hard to know that stuff now. I mean
link |
it's easier to do the full analysis
link |
when it's over when it's over.
link |
is in like a tough place. They have this
link |
attachment to being part of the West. They have these
link |
attachment to liberal ideals. They have an attachment
link |
to democracy and they have
link |
an attachment to a Jewish state
link |
and that those things
link |
are not so easily compatible
link |
non Jewish citizens
link |
or to create or to have a one state
link |
solution to the current conflict
link |
long term ability to have a Jewish state.
link |
And to do anything else
link |
and that's a really hard
link |
to sort out. Yeah, it's complicated. Of course
link |
everything you just said probably has multiple
link |
perspectives on it from other
link |
that would phrase all the same
link |
things but using different words.
link |
Well, I try to analyze these things
link |
in like a dispassionate way.
link |
But unfortunately just having enough conversations
link |
even your dispassionate
link |
one that's already picked a side.
link |
because there's holding these ideals.
link |
I'll give you another example.
link |
also has ideals of freedom
link |
and other like human rights.
link |
So it has those ideals
link |
and it also sees itself as a
link |
superpower and as a
link |
enforcer of those ideas in the world.
link |
And so the kind of actions
link |
from a perspective of a lot of people
link |
in that world from children
link |
they get to see drones draw bombs
link |
on their house where
link |
their father is now mother
link |
or dead. They have a very different
link |
You're beginning to see why I didn't.
link |
I wanted to write about those things
link |
and think about those things
link |
but I wanted this book
link |
to do something different.
link |
I didn't want it to fall along one of these polarizations.
link |
On a personal level because I think
link |
I'm kind of a liberal democratic
link |
my sympathies in that sense lie
link |
in many ways with the Palestinians
link |
just the fact that people
link |
presented and they
link |
a very raw, real politic kind
link |
of feel like most people in history have gotten
link |
like this raw, real politic kind of deal
link |
in their past, right? Where somebody took some
link |
history by the way.
link |
History is just full of raw deals
link |
for regular people.
link |
are in a principled way
link |
refusing to make a compromise
link |
and that's not like a both
link |
sides a right kind of argument.
link |
I'm just sort of saying
link |
it's a factual statement
link |
that like neither one wants to compromise
link |
on certain principles
link |
they both can construct and in some ways
link |
have very reasonable
link |
have self justifications for those principles
link |
and that's why I'm not very hopeful
link |
as I don't see a way
link |
for them to resolve those things.
link |
Speaking of compromise and war
link |
maybe about one last one
link |
which may be in the future
link |
China and the United States
link |
an all out hot war
link |
with this other superpower
link |
in the next decade
link |
50 years, 100 years
link |
sometimes when it's quiet at night
link |
I can hear in the long distance
link |
the drums of war beating.
link |
You know in the second part of the book I talk about
link |
there's been like these persistent like paths to peace
link |
and one of them is increasing interdependence
link |
and interrelationships and another one
link |
is more checks and balances on power.
link |
there's more but those are two that are really fundamental
link |
here because I think those two things
link |
reduce the incentives
link |
of war in two ways. One is like
link |
remember when we were talking about this really simple
link |
strategic game where
link |
whether Russia and Ukraine or whatever
link |
I want more of the pie than
link |
the costs of war are deterrents
link |
of war that I feel
link |
right? I don't care. I do not
link |
care about the cost of war to your side
link |
my rival side. I'm not even thinking of that
link |
that's just worth zero to me. I just don't care
link |
in that simple game. Now in reality
link |
groups do care about the well being of the other group
link |
at least a little bit right?
link |
We're in some sense to the degree we
link |
first of all if our interests are intertwined
link |
like our economies are intertwined
link |
that's not a surefire
link |
and we shouldn't get complacent because we have
link |
a globally integrated world but that's going to be a disincentive
link |
and if we're socially entwined
link |
because we have great social relationships
link |
and linkages and family or
link |
we're intermarriage or whatever this is all these
link |
help and then if we're ideologically
link |
intertwined maybe we share a
link |
notions of liberty or maybe we just share
link |
a common notion of humanity so I think
link |
the fact that we're more integrated than we've ever
link |
been on all three fronts in the world
link |
providing some insulation which is good
link |
so I would be more
link |
worried if we started to shed
link |
some of that insulation which I think
link |
has been happening a little bit
link |
US economic nationalism
link |
whatever could be the fallout
link |
of these sanctions or a closer Chinese
link |
alliance with Russia all those things
link |
could happen those would make me more
link |
worried because I think we've got a lot of cushion
link |
that comes from all of this
link |
economics, social, cultural
link |
Social one with the internet is a big one so
link |
basically make friends
link |
with the people from different nations
link |
or you don't have to fall in love you can just
link |
have lots of sex with people from different
link |
nations but also fall in love
link |
the thing that also should comforts me about
link |
China is that they
link |
China is not as centralized
link |
or as personalized
link |
regime as Russia for example
link |
and neither one of them is as centralized
link |
as like a some tin pot
link |
purely personalized dictatorship
link |
like you get in some countries
link |
the fact that China
link |
the power is much more widely shared
link |
a big insulation I think against this war
link |
by Xi Jinping to personalize
link |
power over time and to make
link |
China a more centralized and
link |
personal ruled place which
link |
is he's successfully
link |
moved in that direction also worries me
link |
moves China in the other direction not
link |
necessarily being democratic but just like a
link |
wider and wider group of people
link |
holding power like all of
link |
the business leaders and all the things that
link |
happened in the last few centuries have actually
link |
widened power but anything that's moving
link |
in the other direction does worry me
link |
because it's going to accentuate all these
link |
five risks. I am worried about the
link |
little bit of the demonization so
link |
as a problem for Americans
link |
maybe I'm projecting
link |
maybe it's just my own problem but you know
link |
there seems to be a bigger cultural gap
link |
than there is with other superpowers throughout history
link |
it's almost like this own world
link |
happening in China it's own world in the United States
link |
and there's this gap of total cultural understanding
link |
like it's not that
link |
competing superpowers they're almost like doing
link |
their own thing there's that
link |
feeling and I think that means there's
link |
a lack of understanding of culture of people
link |
and we need to kind of bridge that understanding
link |
I mean you know the language barrier
link |
but also cultural understanding making
link |
both and explore both cultures and
link |
all that kind of stuff to where like it's
link |
okay to compete you know like Rocky
link |
Rocky Balboa fought the Russian
link |
historically inaccurate because obviously the Russian
link |
win but you know we have to
link |
I'm just getting as an affiliate person
link |
I was of course reading for Rocky but the thing is
link |
those two superpowers are in the movies
link |
China is like its own
link |
we need more Rocky 7
link |
I do think there's a certain
link |
inscrutability to the politics there and an
link |
insularity to the politics such that it's
link |
harder for Westerners even if they
link |
know even just to learn about it and
link |
understand what's going on that I think that's a problem
link |
true but I at the same time
link |
we could point to all sorts of things on the other side of the ledger
link |
like the massive amounts of
link |
Chinese immigration into the
link |
United States and the massive number of
link |
people who are now like how many
link |
so many more Americans business
link |
people politicians understand
link |
so much more about China now
link |
than they did 30 40 years ago because
link |
we're so intertwined so so I don't know
link |
where where it balances out I think it balances
link |
out on better understanding than ever before
link |
there was like a big gulf there
link |
that we haven't totally bridged
link |
like I said lots of
link |
inter Chinese and United
link |
States sexual intercourse
link |
no and love and marriage and all
link |
that kind of social social cohesion
link |
so once again returning
link |
in your acknowledgement and as
link |
you mentioned earlier the acknowledgement
link |
I dedicate this book to a
link |
slow and all defunct internet
link |
because it set me on the path to meet
link |
most importantly Mary
link |
a lot of beautiful letters in this beautiful
link |
name this book have been
link |
impossible without her
link |
and that chance encounter
link |
what's okay tell me
link |
tell me Chris how you
link |
fell in love and how that changed the
link |
direction of your life I was in that
link |
internet cafe I think it was 2004
link |
I was I didn't know what I wanted to do
link |
I thought I might I thought you know
link |
I was a good development economist I cared
link |
about growth economic growth
link |
and I thought firm like industrialization
link |
is like the solution to
link |
poverty in Africa which is I think
link |
and therefore I need to go study firms
link |
and industry in Africa
link |
and so I went and I ended one of the most dynamic
link |
place for firms and industry at the time
link |
still to some extent now is was Kenya
link |
and the all these firms around Nairobi
link |
and so I went and I got a
link |
job with the World Bank who's running a
link |
they're running a firm survey and I convinced
link |
them to like let me help run the firm
link |
survey because and so now I'm in Nairobi
link |
and I'm wearing my like suit and with the
link |
World Bank for the summer
link |
gets stolen by two enterprising
link |
con artists very charming
link |
and so I find myself in
link |
no laptop with no laptop and
link |
just like you know this can you
link |
didn't exactly can you didn't get connected
link |
the sort of the big internet
link |
cables until maybe 10 years later
link |
and so it was just glacially slow so it would take
link |
10 minutes for every email to load and so
link |
there's this whole customer norm if you just chat
link |
to the next person
link |
in beside you all the time it was
link |
it was true all over anywhere
link |
I'd worked on the continent and
link |
and I so I strategically
link |
sat next to the attractive looking woman that
link |
when I came in and
link |
and it turned out she was a
link |
psychologist I've been a PhD student
link |
but she was a humanitarian worker and
link |
she'd been working in South Sudan and northern
link |
kids affected by this war all these kids who are
link |
being conscripted we're coming back
link |
because they're all running away after
link |
a day or 10 years and
link |
needed help or to get back into school
link |
she was working on things like that
link |
she talked to me in spite of the fact that I was wearing a suit
link |
maybe because I knew a little bit about the war
link |
which most people didn't most people were totally ignorant
link |
and we we had a fling for that
link |
didn't really we actually then we met up
link |
a little short while later and then it was
link |
kind of then we kind of drifted apart she was
link |
studying in Indiana and spending a lot of time
link |
with someone I knew who worked on this
link |
young professor who was friend
link |
of mine but and I said oh you know
link |
you work on similar issues you should meet this
link |
woman I talked to the
link |
she like you guys would have like you know professional
link |
research interests overlap there's so few
link |
sort of people looking at armed groups
link |
in African civil wars at least at the time
link |
and he said wow that's a fascinating
link |
question and I thought and I walked out of the
link |
building and I thought
link |
is a fascinating research question and I
link |
phoned Jeannie and I
link |
and I said remember me and you know tell me
link |
more I was just talking to someone with this tell me more
link |
like I started asking her more questions
link |
but we ended up talking for two or three hours
link |
the course of those three hours we hatched
link |
ambitious kind of crazy
link |
plan we basically what it was
link |
we were going to like find
link |
the names and all the kids were born
link |
like 20 or 30 years ago
link |
in the region and we were going to
link |
track a thousand of them that we're going to
link |
randomly sample them and then we're going to find them today
link |
and we're going to track them and then we were going
link |
to use like some variation
link |
exposure to violence and where the rebel group was
link |
to actually like show what happens
link |
to people when they're exposed to violence and conscription
link |
we were going to like tell you know psychologically
link |
economically we're going to like answer questions
link |
and that which would help you design better
link |
programs right and so we hatched this plan
link |
which is totally cockamamie
link |
so cockamamie that when
link |
I pulled my previous
link |
dissertation proposal from
link |
my committee like the next week and gave them
link |
they unanimously met without
link |
me to decide that this was totally
link |
and to advise me not to go
link |
and they coordinated to read my old proposal so that
link |
when I showed up for my defense they said you actually
link |
think you're defending but we were actually we want
link |
you to only talk about this other thing you were going to do
link |
because this is like you should not go
link |
and I mean it is incredibly ambitious super
link |
interesting though it actually worked exactly
link |
according to plants the first and last time
link |
in my entire career you actually pulled off
link |
an ambition like a gigantically crazy
link |
well all of my work that's my
link |
stick like my day to day research job is not
link |
writing books but why we fight my thing
link |
is like I go I collect
link |
data on things that nobody else thought you could
link |
collect data on and so I always
link |
do pull it off but it never turns out
link |
like I thought it was going to like
link |
it's always there's so many twists and turns and always
link |
goes sideways in an interesting
link |
way and it works but it's all but this one
link |
actually we pulled off in spite of
link |
and so Ted Miguel who I wrote that paper with was actually
link |
the one person of my
link |
advisor who was like well
link |
you know what he's he was sympathetic to this he was like
link |
yeah why don't you just go for a couple
link |
months and like check it out and then come back
link |
and work on the other thing and that's and so
link |
I followed Jeannie there and went there and then
link |
I don't know what's this I always remember
link |
you know this movie Speed the
link |
and Sandra whatever these people are and
link |
they have this relationship in these intense
link |
circumstances and they're like well and I think
link |
at the end of the movie they're sort of like this will never
link |
work because these relationships in intense
link |
circumstances never matter which is what we assumed
link |
does not be true so we've been married
link |
15 years and with two kids
link |
and yeah and that's when you fell in love
link |
with psychology and don't appreciate
link |
the power of psychology exactly
link |
that's the psychology in the book as well because
link |
I and so we ended up we were for most of
link |
our work for the first five or ten years was together
link |
actually what's the hardest
link |
chasing that you've chased in your life
link |
like what are some interesting things because
link |
you mentioned like one of the things you
link |
kind of want to go somewhere in the world
link |
and data for things that people just
link |
haven't really looked to get
link |
gain an understanding of human nature maybe from
link |
an economics perspective what's
link |
what what kind of stuff either
link |
in your past or in your future you've
link |
been thinking about well I mean the hardest
link |
the hardest emotionally was
link |
interviewing all those kids in northern Uganda
link |
that was just like a gut punch
link |
and just hearing the stories like that
link |
was the hardest but it
link |
wasn't hard because it was you could the kids
link |
were everywhere and everybody would talk to you about it
link |
and they could talk about it you could
link |
no one had gone and interviewed
link |
kids that had gone through war
link |
in the middle of an active war zone nobody was going to
link |
displace all the things we did no one had done that before
link |
so now lots of people do it
link |
could you actually speak to their
link |
their stories what what's
link |
like the shape of their suffering
link |
what were common themes
link |
what how did that those
link |
stories change you
link |
I remember I said you can give you like your
link |
dispassion itself and your
link |
passion itself I think
link |
I had to learn to create the dispassion itself
link |
I mean we all have that capacity when we analyze
link |
something that's far away and happens to people
link |
different than us but you have to
link |
discovered and developed
link |
an ability to like
link |
put those aside in order to be able to study this
link |
maybe harder in a way that you have to
link |
be guard against so you have to
link |
try to remember to put your human head on
link |
it's really horrible like if I
link |
want to conscript you
link |
and I don't want you to run away
link |
then I want to make you think you can never go
link |
back to your village
link |
and the best way for me to do that
link |
is for to make you force you to do something
link |
really really really
link |
really horrible that you could you almost
link |
incredibly believe you can never really go
link |
back and it might be like killing
link |
a loved one and so
link |
and just having hearing people
link |
tell you that story
link |
in all the different shapes
link |
and forms to point what was
link |
horrible about it is they did this so routinely
link |
that you'd be sitting there in an interview
link |
with somebody and they'd be telling
link |
you the story and it's like the most horrible
link |
thing that could happen to you or anyone else
link |
and but there's some
link |
voice in the back of your mind saying okay
link |
really need to get to the other thing
link |
you know we know that I know how this goes
link |
like I've heard you know there's this thing like okay okay
link |
I'm not learning anything new here
link |
like there's some part you know
link |
deep evil terrible part of you that's like yeah yeah
link |
yeah like but let's get
link |
on to the other thing but I know I have to go through this
link |
but every day you have to go through that to get to the
link |
because you're trying to actually understand how to help
link |
people you're trying to understand how that trauma
link |
has manifested how they either some people get stronger
link |
as a result of that some people get weaker
link |
and if you want to know how to help people
link |
then you need to get to that I wasn't trying
link |
to get to something for my selfish purposes really
link |
I was trying to figure out okay we need to know
link |
what your symptoms are now it's a dark
link |
so if you're surrounded by trauma
link |
God that voice in the back of your
link |
head that you just go yeah I know exactly
link |
how this conversation goes let's skip ahead
link |
to the to the solutions
link |
and that was that was yeah so that was
link |
because you then have to deal with yourself so it's very
link |
helpful if you like come home every night to
link |
someone who's a gone through the same thing and be
link |
as a professional and very very very
link |
very good counseling psychologist
link |
the hardest thing I mean this the
link |
organized crime stuff has been the hardest
link |
just figuring out how to get that information
link |
took us years of just trial
link |
and error mostly error of like just how
link |
to get people to talk to us
link |
or how to collect data in a
link |
way that's safe for me and safe
link |
for my team and safe
link |
for people to answer a survey like how do you
link |
get how do you get
link |
the information on
link |
what gangs are doing in the
link |
community or how it's hurting or
link |
helping people like you've got to run surveys
link |
and you've got to talk to gang members all these things
link |
that nobody knows how to do that
link |
and so we had to sort of really slowly
link |
not nobody there's a few other think there's
link |
other academics like me who are doing this
link |
but there's a pretty small group
link |
that's trying to like collect
link |
systematic data and then there's
link |
a slightly bigger and much
link |
more experienced group that's been talking to
link |
different armed groups but every
link |
time you go to a new city and there weren't that many
link |
people working on this in Medellin there were a few
link |
you have to like discover a new
link |
like it's really going to unique to that city
link |
in place so there's not
link |
there's not like a website for
link |
each of the 17 mafia groups
link |
there's no Facebook group in Indiana
link |
well there is now we have a we've created like our own
link |
we have a private wiki where
link |
we document everything and it's a collaborative enterprise
link |
between lots of researchers and journalists
link |
and things so they now they can't see you can't go
link |
online and see this and that's that's individual
link |
researchers it's not I mean they're
link |
yeah hiding by design some of them
link |
have Facebook pages and things of this nature
link |
so they do have public profiles a little bit but not
link |
not not so explicitly
link |
no so they're clandestine here's an example
link |
so one of the things that's really endemic in
link |
Medellin it's true in a lot of cities
link |
it's true in American prisons is gangs
link |
govern everybody's everyday life
link |
in an American prison particularly
link |
Illinois or California Texas is another big one
link |
in a city in Medellin if you have
link |
a debt to collect or dispute with a neighbor
link |
or something you could go to the government
link |
and they do and they can help you
link |
solve it or you go to the police or you can go to the gang
link |
and that's like a really everyday phenomenon
link |
but then then there's a question like how do you actually
link |
how do you actually
link |
figure out how what services they're offering
link |
and how much they pay for them and do you actually
link |
like those services and how do they how do you
link |
comparison shop between
link |
the police and the gang
link |
and what would get you to go from
link |
the gang to the police and then how's the gang
link |
strategically going to respond to that
link |
and what was the impact of previous policies
link |
state governing better and how did the gangs react
link |
and so that's we had to sort of figure that out
link |
so that was just hard in a different way but I don't do the
link |
most they're mostly punishing stuff I couldn't do any longer
link |
so that's much easier
link |
you know Jorge Cho as some of these
link |
folks are out of prison yeah have you got a chance
link |
one of my collaborators on this guy named
link |
Gustavo Duncan who's
link |
spent a lot of time interviewing
link |
pair militaries has written a book he's
link |
talked to more of these people than I
link |
have I haven't talked to
link |
we haven't been talking to them about this
link |
but also they were they were there in a different
link |
era yeah so it doesn't the system
link |
was totally different that's super interesting maybe one
link |
day we'll do that we're trying to industry yeah
link |
if that was 30 years ago
link |
yeah and the system over
link |
I mean La Oficina Pablo Escobar
link |
created La Oficina he integrated
link |
what's what the all these 17
link |
the Rosones and all these street gangs are the
link |
fragmented former remnants of his more
link |
unified empire which he gave
link |
the name La Oficina I mean the
link |
I think you know it's a little bit apocryphal
link |
but it the idea is you know I think he said
link |
every doctor has an office
link |
I still love that there's parallels
link |
mafia groups and the United Nations
link |
yeah Security Council
link |
this is just wonderful so so
link |
let me ask you about yourself so
link |
you've been thinking about war
link |
here in part dispassionately
link |
war and try to understand
link |
the path for peace but you as a single individual
link |
that's going to die one day
link |
the people that have gone through suffering what
link |
do you think about your own mortality
link |
how has your view of
link |
your own finiteness changed
link |
haven't thought about war
link |
maybe the reason I can do this work is because
link |
I don't think about it a lot
link |
your own mortality or even like
link |
yeah I mean well I have to think about death a lot
link |
but there's a way to think about death like
link |
numbers in a calculation
link |
when you're doing geopolitical negotiations
link |
and then there's like
link |
yeah I guess I know
link |
I'm in a place where there's risk and so I
link |
any risk such that I
link |
I think I think about mortality enough that I
link |
because I'm kind of an anxious person
link |
and so like I'm kind of a worry ward
link |
making sure anything that I do is low
link |
that gives you something to focus on
link |
a number is the risk and you're trying
link |
and yet there's still the existential dread
link |
minimization doesn't matter
link |
yeah I've never been in a life
link |
threatening situation
link |
that's somebody who you know what you sound like
link |
that's Alex Honnold that does the
link |
he doesn't see that as like
link |
sounds exactly the same
link |
because you just said I've never done anything
link |
as dangerous as those people right
link |
right so I've actually been
link |
a rock climber for like 25 years with
link |
a long break in the between
link |
but I'm the same way you know actually
link |
rock climbing is an extremely safe sport
link |
if you're very careful
link |
but he's free climbing is the opposite of that
link |
but I mean like if you're like you've got a
link |
rope that's attached to you that goes
link |
up is like attached to 18 trees
link |
and comes back down
link |
you're you're fine like this you know
link |
anywhere helmet you're good
link |
you're totally fine yeah but
link |
this is super safe too because
link |
don't free climbing no no no we're watching
link |
free climbing I mean
link |
because you're only going to put your hands
link |
and feet on sturdy rock and
link |
and then you know the path and
link |
I know I know some
link |
I have some friends in college
link |
known people who do some of these
link |
totally wacky extreme sports and have paid
link |
I think it's totally
link |
totally different I think
link |
by the way this I can't even watch those movies
link |
because those freak me out too much because it's just too risky
link |
like I can't I don't even
link |
yeah so those things I've never
link |
watched like free solo or anything there's just
link |
too much still not as
link |
dangerous as riding a scooter and all
link |
I'm not gonna let that go
link |
so but even in that
link |
it's just a risk minimization
link |
in the work that you do versus
link |
the sort of philosophical
link |
view of your mortality you know this
link |
like this thing just ends
link |
like what the hell is that about
link |
yeah I have this amazing capacity
link |
not to think about it which might just be a self defense mechanism
link |
you know my father in law
link |
Genie's father is an evangelical
link |
pastor actually he's now retired but
link |
this he would we would talk about
link |
when we're getting married they weren't terribly thrilled
link |
uh marrying a agnostic
link |
atheist or something we love each other
link |
very much it's fine now but
link |
I only started discussing this and some of the
link |
because that was one of his questions for me
link |
like well how can you possibly believe
link |
that there's nothing afterwards
link |
because that's just like too horrible
link |
we really never saw eye to eye on this and my
link |
view was like listen like
link |
I can't convince myself I believe what I'd like
link |
I can't convince myself otherwise anything else seems
link |
completely implausal to me
link |
and for some reason I can't understand
link |
I'm at peace with that like it's never bothered
link |
me that one day it's over
link |
and and I understood the fact
link |
that people have angst about
link |
that and that they would seek answers
link |
makes total sense to me
link |
and and I can't explain why
link |
that doesn't consume me
link |
or doesn't bother me
link |
yep maybe if I was worried
link |
but if I was more worried about it maybe I wouldn't be able to do
link |
I don't know I don't know but I then again
link |
I don't take the risk I'm still like I don't know
link |
but I minimize all sorts of risks I'm like
link |
you know I try to optimize
link |
like groceries in the fridge too like I mean
link |
way to live I would say
link |
that's probably why you're good at that might be true
link |
that might be there's some selection and economics
link |
of these cold calculators
link |
chicken or the egg we'll never know
link |
do you have advice for young people
link |
that want to do as ambitious
link |
amazing of work as you have done
link |
in life so somebody who's in
link |
high school and college
link |
either career advice
link |
on what to choose how to
link |
execute on it or just life advice
link |
some random stranger or maybe a dating advice
link |
that part's easy you have to fly coach
link |
and go to the internet cafes
link |
you can't like yeah all the development
link |
workers that I know that fly business class
link |
and like you'll never meet somebody
link |
actually spent a lot of time writing advice on my
link |
blog and I've got like pages and pages of
link |
advice and one of the reasons is because I
link |
never got that like when I grew up I went to
link |
like a really good state school in
link |
Canada called Waterloo I loved
link |
it but people didn't go on the trajectory
link |
that I went on from there and
link |
I had some good advisors there but
link |
but I never got the kind of advice I needed
link |
to like pursue this career so I
link |
concentrated in elite colleges I think
link |
sometimes in elite high schools so I
link |
tried to democratize that that's like a that
link |
was one reason I started the blog
link |
but a lot of that's really particular because I every week
link |
like I have students coming in my office wanting to
link |
know how to do international development work and I just spent a lot of time
link |
giving them advice and I think that's what a
link |
lot of the posts are about they have every specific
link |
questions like what is it that country by
link |
country kind of specific questions or what
link |
the thing that they're all trying to do that I think is the right I don't
link |
have to give them a really basic piece of advice because
link |
they're already doing it like they're trying to
link |
find a vocation they they they're
link |
really interested and what I mean by that
link |
is it's like a career where they find meaning
link |
where the work is almost
link |
like superfluous because that they just
link |
and they would do it for free
link |
and they're passionate about and they really find meaning
link |
in the work and and
link |
and then it becomes a little bit all consuming so
link |
scientists do that in their own way I think
link |
international development humanitarian workers people
link |
who are doctors and nurses like we all
link |
do our careers for other reasons right but
link |
but they they find like
link |
meaning in their career and so the thing
link |
so I don't have to tell them
link |
whatever you do find meaning
link |
and try to make it a vocation
link |
something that you would do for free
link |
amongst all of these many many many options
link |
what I would tell but that's what I would tell
link |
high school students and young
link |
sometimes it's hard to find
link |
a thing and hold on to it
link |
well that's the other thing it took me a
link |
long time so I actually started off as
link |
an accountant I was an accountant with Deloitte and Touche
link |
for a few years so I
link |
did you wake up in the morning excited
link |
to be alive I was miserable
link |
I got I found it by accident
link |
which is another different story but I
link |
landed in this job and a degree
link |
where I study accounting and I was miserable
link |
I was totally miserable
link |
and I hated it and it was becoming a miserable
link |
and so I eventually just quit
link |
and I did something new but I was
link |
still you know but then I was working in
link |
the private sector and I actually just need
link |
trial and error I actually had to try on like three
link |
or four or five careers before I found like
link |
this mixture of academia and activism
link |
and research and international development
link |
and so did you know that this
link |
when you found this kind of international development
link |
that this was the academic
link |
context too the key lesson
link |
was just trial and error which we all have to engage in
link |
until it feels right it's okay
link |
all right step one is trial and error but until it
link |
feels right because like
link |
it often feels right but not
link |
perfect yeah it's true
link |
right enough I mean I was really
link |
intellectually engaged like I just loved
link |
learning about it I wanted to read more like it
link |
in some sense like
link |
like I was doing I was an accountant but I was reading
link |
history and international development and poor countries in my spare time
link |
right and so it was
link |
like this hobby and I was like wait a second I could
link |
actually do that like just
link |
I could like research just didn't even write
link |
the neck those books and that's kind of what I did
link |
like 25 years later
link |
that didn't occur to me right away I didn't even know it was
link |
possible this is the other thing people do
link |
people do their 9 to 5 job
link |
and then they find meeting and everything else they do
link |
they're volunteering and their family and their hobbies
link |
and things and that was my social media
link |
and and and that's a great
link |
path to like I mean that's because not all of us
link |
can just have a vocation or you don't find it I think
link |
and then you just circumscribe what you do in your
link |
work and then you go find
link |
um and that's not entirely true because
link |
everyone in my family does like their job
link |
and get a lot of fulfillment out of it but
link |
um but I think it's not
link |
it's that's that's a
link |
different path in some ways so it's good to
link |
take the leap and keep trying stuff even
link |
when you found like a little local
link |
the hardest part was
link |
it got easy after a while
link |
it was was quitting
link |
but but now I take this to a lot of you know and
link |
one of the people I think
link |
one of the reasons I discovered your podcast or maybe
link |
Tyler Cowan yeah he's amazing
link |
Tyler takes this approach to everything
link |
he takes this approach to movie
link |
he's like walk to the movie theater
link |
after half an hour if you don't like the movie
link |
you know what kind of person he probably is
link |
I don't know but now that you say this
link |
he's probably somebody that goes to a restaurant
link |
if the if the meals is not good
link |
I could see him just walking yeah like
link |
paying for and just walking away yeah meal
link |
and go eat something better that's exactly
link |
right and I thought that was kind of crazy
link |
and I'd never I was the person I would never
link |
just put a book down halfway and I would
link |
stop watching a movie but then I and I
link |
convinced my wife we lived in New York when we were
link |
when we when we're single initially
link |
sorry number when we were childless
link |
uh and we lived in New York
link |
there's all this culture and
link |
theater and stuff and I just said let's go to
link |
more plays but let's just walk out
link |
after the first act if we don't like it and she
link |
thought that was a bit crazy and I was like no no no here's
link |
the logic here's what Tyler says and then
link |
we started doing it and it was so freeing and glorious
link |
we just go we take so many more chances on things
link |
yeah and we would and if we
link |
didn't like it we and we were walking out of stuff all the
link |
I I think I did that we're
link |
realizing that that's how I like took I just
link |
kept quitting my jobs yeah
link |
and trying to find something else that like some risk
link |
because that's how war start without the commitment
link |
time back you need
link |
the commitment otherwise
link |
uh no that's a different kind of commitment
link |
problem that's a different different commitment
link |
problem so some of it that I'm sure there's a
link |
balance because I mean the same thing is happening
link |
with dating and marriage and all those kinds of things
link |
and there's some value to sticking
link |
it out because some of
link |
you know don't leave after the first act
link |
because the good stuff might be coming
link |
yeah that's a good point I mean that's
link |
I don't know so when I met
link |
she was very wary of a relationship
link |
with me because I explained to her
link |
um I hadn't had a relationship
link |
longer than two or three months and 11 years
link |
and so she thought this person
link |
thought serious and what I said to her
link |
she tells the story this is how she tells the story she says I
link |
didn't believe him when he said that I just after
link |
two or three months you kind of have a good sense
link |
but whether this is going somewhere and I would
link |
just decide if it was over so and I walk
link |
away so I took this approach to dating like as soon as I
link |
thought it wasn't going to go somewhere
link |
and and then I have and then I decided
link |
with her that this was it this was going to work
link |
and then I like and then never and
link |
she didn't believe now she believes me
link |
finally got to be right
link |
okay so this is an incredible conversation
link |
your work is so fascinating just in this
link |
big picture way looking at human conflict
link |
and how we can achieve peace
link |
especially in this time
link |
of the Ukraine war I really
link |
really appreciate that you
link |
calmly speak to me about some of these difficult
link |
ideas and explain them and
link |
you sit down with me and have this amazing
link |
conversation thank you so much
link |
thanks for listening to this conversation with Chris Blackman
link |
to support this podcast please check out our
link |
sponsors in the description
link |
and now let me leave you some well known
link |
simple words from Albert Einstein
link |
with what weapons world war three will be fought
link |
war four will be fought with sticks
link |
thank you for listening and hope to see you