Chris Blattman: War and Violence | Lex Fridman Podcast #273

00:00:00.000 | What are your thoughts on the ongoing war in Ukraine?

00:00:03.000 | How do you analyze it within your framework about war?

00:00:06.340 | - How far would they go to hang on to power

00:00:08.680 | when push came to shove is I think the thing

00:00:12.980 | that worries me the most and is plainly

00:00:16.520 | what worries most people about the risk of nuclear war.

00:00:19.120 | Like at what point does that unchecked leadership

00:00:21.720 | decide that this is worth it?

00:00:24.860 | Especially if they can emerge from the rubble still on top.

00:00:29.900 | (air whooshing)

00:00:31.940 | - The following is a conversation with Chris Blattman,

00:00:34.380 | professor at the University of Chicago,

00:00:36.380 | studying the causes and consequences of violence and war.

00:00:41.080 | This he explores in his new book called,

00:00:44.240 | "Why We Fight, The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace."

00:00:48.900 | The book comes out on April 19th,

00:00:51.220 | so you should pre-order it to support Chris and his work.

00:00:54.820 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:00:56.820 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:00:58.860 | in the description.

00:00:59.940 | And now, dear friends, here's Chris Blattman.

00:01:03.800 | In your new book titled, "Why We Fight, The Roots of War

00:01:08.540 | and the Paths for Peace," you write, quote,

00:01:12.200 | "Let me be clear what I mean when I say war.

00:01:15.740 | I don't just mean countries duking it out.

00:01:18.420 | I mean any kind of prolonged violence struggle

00:01:21.340 | between groups that includes villages, clans, gangs,

00:01:24.900 | ethnic groups, religious sects,

00:01:27.220 | political factions and nations.

00:01:29.620 | Wildly different as these may be,

00:01:31.840 | their origins have much in common.

00:01:34.780 | We'll see that the Northern Irish zealots,

00:01:37.540 | Colombian cartels, European tyrants,

00:01:40.380 | Liberian rebels, Greek oligarchs, Chicago gangs,

00:01:44.220 | Indian mobs, Rwandan genocide dares,"

00:01:48.100 | a new word I learned, thank you to you.

00:01:50.300 | Those are people who administer genocide.

00:01:55.220 | English soccer hooligans and American invaders.

00:01:59.940 | So first, let me ask, what is war?

00:02:02.860 | In saying that war is a prolonged violence struggle

00:02:07.540 | between groups, what do the words prolonged,

00:02:10.380 | groups and violent mean?

00:02:12.580 | - I sit at the sort of intersection of economics

00:02:14.500 | and political science and I also dwell a little bit

00:02:17.820 | in psychology, but that's partly because I'm married

00:02:20.720 | to a psychologist, sometimes do research with her.

00:02:23.660 | All these things are really different.

00:02:24.700 | So if you're a political scientist,

00:02:25.660 | you spend a lot of time just classifying

00:02:27.380 | a really narrow kind of conflict and studying that.

00:02:30.580 | And that's an important way to make progress

00:02:33.140 | as a social scientist.

00:02:34.180 | But I'm not trying to make progress,

00:02:35.460 | I'm trying to sort of help everybody step back

00:02:37.580 | and say, you know what, there's like some common things

00:02:39.860 | that we know from these disciplines

00:02:42.660 | that relate to a really wide range of phenomena.

00:02:46.300 | Basically, we can talk about them in a very similar way

00:02:48.700 | and we can get really similar insights.

00:02:49.900 | So I wanted to actually bring them together,

00:02:54.340 | but I still had to like say,

00:02:56.820 | let's hold out individual violence,

00:02:58.580 | which has a lot in common, but individuals choose

00:03:03.180 | to engage in violence for more

00:03:05.440 | and sometimes different reasons.

00:03:06.700 | So let's just put that aside so that we can focus a bit.

00:03:10.540 | And let's really put aside short incidents of violence

00:03:13.780 | because those might have the same kind

00:03:16.480 | of things explaining them, but actually there's a lot

00:03:18.860 | of other things that can explain short violence.

00:03:20.700 | Short violence can be really demonstrative.

00:03:25.020 | Like you can just, I can use it to communicate information.

00:03:27.980 | The thing that all of it has in common

00:03:29.580 | is that it doesn't generally make sense.

00:03:31.360 | It's not your best option most of the time.

00:03:34.020 | And so I wanted to say, let's take this thing

00:03:36.580 | that should be puzzling.

00:03:37.900 | We kind of think it's normal.

00:03:39.540 | We kind of think this is what all humans do,

00:03:42.260 | but let's point out that it's not normal

00:03:44.260 | and then figure out why and let's talk about why.

00:03:47.420 | And so that's, so I was trying to throw out

00:03:49.020 | the short violence, I was trying to throw out

00:03:52.180 | the individual violence.

00:03:53.180 | I was also trying to throw out all the competition

00:03:56.580 | that happens that's not violent.

00:03:58.060 | That's the normal, normal competition.

00:03:59.500 | I was trying to say, let's talk about violent competition

00:04:01.460 | 'cause that's kind of the puzzle.

00:04:03.900 | - So that's really interesting.

00:04:04.940 | So you said, usually people try to find

00:04:08.260 | a narrow definition and you said progress.

00:04:10.900 | So you make progress by finding a narrow definition,

00:04:13.780 | for example, of military conflict in a particular context

00:04:18.540 | and progress means, all right, well,

00:04:20.940 | how do we prevent this particular kind of military conflict

00:04:24.420 | or maybe if it's already happening,

00:04:26.260 | how do we deescalate it and how do we solve it?

00:04:29.900 | So from a geopolitics perspective,

00:04:31.700 | from an economics perspective,

00:04:33.580 | and you're looking for a definition of war

00:04:36.300 | that is as broad as possible, but not so broad

00:04:40.540 | that you cannot achieve a deep level of understanding

00:04:43.700 | of why it happens and how it can be avoided.

00:04:46.780 | - Right, and a common, basically like recognize

00:04:49.500 | that common principles govern some kinds of behavior

00:04:52.940 | that look pretty different.

00:04:54.500 | Like an Indian ethnic riot is obviously pretty different

00:04:59.340 | than invading a neighboring country, right?

00:05:01.580 | But, and that's pretty different than two villages

00:05:04.580 | or two gangs.

00:05:05.420 | A lot of what I work on is studying organized criminals

00:05:07.700 | and gangs, two gangs going to where you'd think

00:05:09.020 | is really different and of course it is,

00:05:10.900 | but there are some like common principles.

00:05:13.420 | You can just think about conflict and the use of violence

00:05:16.380 | and not learn everything, but just get a lot,

00:05:19.700 | just get really, really far by sort of seeing

00:05:21.700 | the commonalities rather than just focusing

00:05:23.460 | on the differences.

00:05:24.380 | - So again, those words are prolonged, groups, and violent.

00:05:28.700 | Can you maybe linger on each of those words?

00:05:31.020 | What does prolonged mean?

00:05:32.660 | Where's the line between short and long?

00:05:36.220 | What does groups mean and what does violent mean?

00:05:39.100 | - So let me, you know, I have a friend who,

00:05:41.640 | someone who's become a friend through the process

00:05:44.340 | of my work and writing this book also,

00:05:47.220 | who was 20, 30 years ago was a gang leader in Chicago.

00:05:52.220 | So this guy named Napoleon English or Nap.

00:05:55.580 | And I remember one time he was saying,

00:05:57.340 | well, you know, when I was young, I used to,

00:05:59.460 | I was 15, 16 and he'd go to the neighboring gangs territory.

00:06:03.980 | He says, I'd go gang banging.

00:06:05.140 | And I said, well, I didn't know what that meant.

00:06:06.580 | I said, what does that mean?

00:06:07.540 | And he said, oh, that just meant I'd shoot him up.

00:06:09.820 | Like I'd shoot at buildings, I might shoot at people.

00:06:13.420 | I wasn't trying to kill, he wasn't trying to kill them.

00:06:15.340 | He was just trying to sort of send a signal

00:06:18.020 | that he was a tough guy and he was fearless

00:06:20.780 | and he was someone who they should be careful with.

00:06:24.740 | And so I didn't want to call that war, right?

00:06:27.300 | That was, that was, that's something different.

00:06:30.780 | That was, it was short, it was kind of sporadic.

00:06:33.180 | And he wasn't, and he was basically trying

00:06:36.260 | to send them information.

00:06:37.540 | And this is what countries do all the time, right?

00:06:40.180 | We have military parades and we might have border skirmishes.

00:06:45.180 | And I wanted to sort of, so is it, what's short?

00:06:50.420 | Is it three month border skirmish, a war?

00:06:53.260 | I mean, I don't try to get into those things.

00:06:55.820 | I don't want to, but I want to point out that like

00:06:58.260 | these long grueling months and years of violence

00:07:02.020 | are like part of the problem and the puzzle.

00:07:04.780 | And I just, I didn't want to spend a lot of time

00:07:07.340 | talking about the international version of gangbanging.

00:07:12.300 | It's a different phenomenon.

00:07:13.500 | - So what is it about Napoleon that doesn't nap,

00:07:16.580 | let's call him, not to add confusion,

00:07:19.300 | that doesn't qualify for war?

00:07:21.860 | Is it the individual aspect?

00:07:23.920 | Is it that violence is not the thing that is sought

00:07:28.620 | but the communication of information is what is sought?

00:07:35.060 | Or is it the shortness of it?

00:07:36.740 | Is it all of those combined?

00:07:39.300 | - It's a little bit, I mean, he was the head of a group

00:07:41.860 | or he was becoming the head of a group at that point.

00:07:44.540 | And that group eventually did go to war

00:07:47.460 | with those neighboring gangs, which is to say

00:07:49.300 | it was just long drawn out conflict

00:07:52.020 | over months and months and months.

00:07:53.900 | But I think one of the big insights from my fields

00:07:58.460 | is that you're constantly negotiating over something, right?

00:08:02.940 | Whether you're officially negotiating

00:08:04.420 | or you're all posturing,

00:08:05.340 | like you're bargaining over something

00:08:07.820 | and you should be able to figure out a way

00:08:11.340 | to split that pie.

00:08:12.820 | And you could use violence,

00:08:14.580 | but violence is, everybody's miserable.

00:08:16.140 | Like if you're nap, like if you start a war,

00:08:18.260 | one, there's lots of risks.

00:08:20.000 | You could get killed, that's not good.

00:08:22.620 | You could kill somebody else and go to jail,

00:08:24.100 | which is what happened to him, that's not good.

00:08:26.600 | Your soldiers get killed.

00:08:27.620 | No one's buying your drugs in the middle of a gunfight

00:08:30.180 | so it interrupts your business.

00:08:31.180 | And so on and on, it's like, it's really miserable.

00:08:32.940 | This is what we're seeing right now.

00:08:34.900 | As we're recording, the Russian invasion of Ukraine

00:08:37.860 | is now in its fourth or fifth week.

00:08:40.060 | Everybody's, if it didn't dawn on them before,

00:08:42.940 | it's dawned on them now just how brutal and costly this is.

00:08:47.180 | - As you described, for everybody.

00:08:49.420 | So everybody is losing in this war.

00:08:51.700 | - Yeah, I mean, that's maybe the insight.

00:08:53.220 | Everybody loses something from war.

00:08:56.100 | And there was usually, not always,

00:08:58.940 | but the point is there was usually a way

00:09:01.280 | to get what you wanted or be better off

00:09:04.200 | without having to fight over it.

00:09:05.880 | So there's this, it's just,

00:09:07.140 | fighting is just politics by other means.

00:09:09.980 | And it's just inefficient, costly, brutal,

00:09:13.660 | devastating means.

00:09:14.540 | And so that's like the deep insight.

00:09:16.020 | And so I kind of wanted to say,

00:09:18.580 | so I guess, like, what's not war?

00:09:20.940 | I mean, I don't try to belabor the definitions

00:09:23.860 | 'cause some, you know, there's reams and reams

00:09:26.900 | of political science papers written on like,

00:09:29.060 | what's a war, what's not a war?

00:09:30.820 | People disagree.

00:09:31.780 | I just wanted to say,

00:09:36.340 | war is the thing that we shouldn't be doing.

00:09:38.100 | Or war is the violence that doesn't make sense.

00:09:41.000 | There's a whole bunch of other violence,

00:09:42.460 | including gangbanging and skirmishes

00:09:44.940 | and things that might make sense,

00:09:47.040 | precisely because they're cheap ways of communicating

00:09:49.680 | or they're not particularly costly.

00:09:53.760 | War is the thing that's just so costly

00:09:55.260 | we should be trying to avoid

00:09:56.140 | is maybe like the meta way I think about it.

00:09:59.240 | - Right, nevertheless, definitions are interesting.

00:10:02.720 | So outside of the academic bickering,

00:10:06.440 | every time you try to define something,

00:10:08.440 | I'm a big fan of it, the process illuminates.

00:10:13.440 | So the destination doesn't matter

00:10:15.120 | 'cause the moment you arrive at the definition,

00:10:17.560 | you lose the power.

00:10:19.720 | - Yeah, one of the interesting things,

00:10:21.800 | I mean, so people, you know, if you wanna do,

00:10:23.960 | you know, some of what I do

00:10:24.880 | is just quantitative analysis of conflict.

00:10:26.880 | And if you wanna do that,

00:10:29.080 | if you wanna sort of run statistics on war,

00:10:31.240 | then you have to code it all up.

00:10:32.640 | And then lots of people have done that.

00:10:34.320 | There's four or five major datasets

00:10:36.440 | where people or teams of people have over time said,

00:10:39.400 | we're gonna code years of war

00:10:40.880 | between these groups or within a country.

00:10:43.960 | And what's interesting is how difficult,

00:10:46.320 | these datasets don't often agree.

00:10:48.120 | You have to make all of these,

00:10:49.600 | the decision gets really complicated.

00:10:51.840 | Like when does the war begin, right?

00:10:53.680 | Does it begin when a certain number

00:10:56.440 | of people have been killed?

00:10:58.040 | Did it begin, what if there's like lots of skirmishing

00:11:01.960 | and sort of little terror attacks

00:11:03.800 | or a couple bombs lobbed,

00:11:05.840 | and then eventually turns into war,

00:11:08.120 | do we call that, do we backdate it

00:11:10.800 | to like when the first act of violence started?

00:11:13.480 | And then what do we do with all the times

00:11:15.300 | when there was like that low scale,

00:11:17.320 | low intensity violence or bombs lobbed?

00:11:19.840 | And do we call those wars,

00:11:22.160 | but only or maybe only if they eventually get worse?

00:11:24.280 | Like, so you get, it actually is really tricky.

00:11:26.840 | - And the defensive and the offensive aspect.

00:11:28.680 | So everybody, Hitler in World War II,

00:11:32.800 | it seems like he never attacked anybody.

00:11:34.920 | He's always defending against the unjust attack

00:11:38.600 | of everybody else as he's taken over the world.

00:11:41.240 | So that's like information propaganda

00:11:44.480 | that every side is trying to communicate to the world.

00:11:48.040 | So you can't listen to necessarily information

00:11:50.640 | like self-report data.

00:11:52.240 | You have to kind of look past that somehow,

00:11:55.040 | maybe look, especially in the modern world,

00:11:57.160 | as much as possible at the data.

00:11:58.880 | How many bombs dropped?

00:12:01.320 | How many people killed?

00:12:03.260 | How the number of, the estimates of the number of troops

00:12:06.200 | moved from one location to another and that kind of thing.

00:12:09.120 | And the other interesting thing

00:12:10.400 | is there's a quantitative analysis of war.

00:12:13.920 | So for example, I was looking at just war index

00:12:17.240 | or people trying to measure,

00:12:19.040 | trying to put a number on what wars are seen as just and not.

00:12:24.840 | - Oh really, I've never seen that.

00:12:26.360 | - It's, there's numbers behind it.

00:12:28.680 | It's great.

00:12:30.520 | So it's great because again,

00:12:32.800 | as you do an extensive quantification of justice,

00:12:37.800 | you start to think what actually contributes to our thought

00:12:43.680 | that for example, World War II is a just war

00:12:46.580 | and other wars are not.

00:12:47.980 | A lot of it is about intent

00:12:51.720 | and some of the other factors that you look at,

00:12:54.200 | which is prolonged, the degree of violence

00:12:56.800 | that is necessary versus not necessary,

00:13:00.160 | given the greater good,

00:13:02.160 | some measure of the greater good of people,

00:13:04.200 | all those kinds of things.

00:13:06.080 | Then there's reasons for war,

00:13:08.600 | looking to free people or to stop a genocide

00:13:13.600 | versus conquering land, all those kinds of things.

00:13:17.240 | And people try to put a number behind it.

00:13:19.320 | And a lot of-- - And it's based on,

00:13:20.600 | I mean, what I'm trying to imagine is,

00:13:23.040 | I mean, suppose I wake up and, or whatever,

00:13:26.160 | suppose I think my God tells me to do something

00:13:28.460 | or my God thinks that, or my moral sense thinks

00:13:33.960 | that something that another group is doing is repugnant.

00:13:36.760 | I'm curious, like are they evaluating

00:13:39.720 | like the validity of that claim

00:13:41.880 | or just the idea that like,

00:13:43.120 | well, you said it was repugnant,

00:13:44.320 | you deeply believe that, therefore it's just?

00:13:46.720 | - I think, now it could be corrected on a lot of this,

00:13:50.040 | but I think this is always looking at wars

00:13:52.520 | after they happened.

00:13:54.160 | So it's, and trying to take a global perspective

00:13:56.840 | from all sort of a general survey of how people perceive.

00:14:00.640 | So you're not weighing disproportionately

00:14:03.480 | the opinions of the people who waged the war.

00:14:05.680 | - Yeah, I mean, I kind of ended up dodging that

00:14:09.480 | because, I mean, one is to just point out that wars,

00:14:14.480 | actually most wars aren't necessary.

00:14:16.860 | And so in the sense that there's another way

00:14:19.560 | to get what you wanted.

00:14:22.400 | And so on one level, there's no just war.

00:14:25.560 | Now that's not true because take an example

00:14:28.720 | like the US invasion of Afghanistan,

00:14:30.960 | the United States has been attacked.

00:14:32.760 | There's a culpable agent, reliable evidence

00:14:37.240 | that this is Al-Qaeda, they're being sheltered

00:14:41.000 | in Afghanistan by the Taliban.

00:14:43.280 | And then the Taliban, this is a bit murky.

00:14:46.520 | It seems that there was an attempt to say,

00:14:49.440 | hand him over or else, and they said, no way.

00:14:53.160 | Now you can make an argument that invading

00:14:56.840 | and attacking is strategically the right thing to do

00:14:59.380 | in terms of sending signals to your future enemies.

00:15:02.660 | Or you just, if you think it's important

00:15:04.400 | to bring someone to justice, in this case, Al-Qaeda,

00:15:06.960 | then maybe that's just war or that's a just invasion.

00:15:11.040 | But it hinges on the fact that the other side

00:15:14.740 | just didn't do the seemingly sensible thing,

00:15:17.640 | which is say, okay, we'll give him up.

00:15:20.920 | And so it was completely avoidable in one sense.

00:15:25.920 | But if you believe, and I think it's probably true,

00:15:28.080 | if you believe that for their own ideological

00:15:31.480 | and other reasons, Mullah Omar in particular

00:15:36.080 | and Taliban in general decided we're not going to do this,

00:15:39.600 | then now you're not left with very many good choices.

00:15:45.680 | And now, I didn't want to talk about is that a just war,

00:15:49.480 | is that, what's justice or not?

00:15:51.160 | I just wanted to point out that like,

00:15:53.280 | one side's intransigence, if that's indeed what happened,

00:15:57.160 | one side's intransigence sort of maybe compels you

00:16:00.620 | to basically eliminates all of the reasonable bargains

00:16:04.080 | that you could be satisfied with.

00:16:05.440 | And now you're left with really no other strategic option

00:16:07.520 | but to invade.

00:16:08.600 | I think that's a slight oversimplification,

00:16:10.300 | but I think that's like one way to describe what happened.

00:16:14.520 | - So your book is fascinating,

00:16:15.720 | your perspective on this is fascinating.

00:16:18.360 | I'll try to sort of play devil's advocate at times

00:16:21.000 | to try to get a clarity.

00:16:22.880 | But the thesis is that war is costly,

00:16:27.760 | usually costly for everybody.

00:16:30.260 | So that's what you mean when you say nobody wants war,

00:16:33.860 | because you're going to,

00:16:35.480 | from a game theoretic perspective, nobody wins.

00:16:41.760 | And so war is essentially a breakdown of reason,

00:16:46.760 | a breakdown of negotiation, of healthy communication,

00:16:50.760 | or healthy operation of the world, some kind of breakdown.

00:16:54.600 | You list all kinds of ways in which it breaks down.

00:16:58.700 | But there's also human beings in this mix.

00:17:03.500 | And there is ideas of justice.

00:17:07.140 | So for example, I don't want to,

00:17:09.440 | my memory doesn't serve me well,

00:17:11.200 | on which wars were seen as justice,

00:17:13.160 | very, very few in the 20th century

00:17:15.600 | of the many that have been there.

00:17:17.820 | The wars that were seen as just,

00:17:19.560 | first of all, the most just war

00:17:20.920 | is seen as World War II by far.

00:17:23.240 | It's actually the only one that goes above a threshold

00:17:28.160 | as seen as just, everything is seen as unjust.

00:17:31.120 | It's less, it's like degrees of unjustness.

00:17:35.500 | And I think the ones that are seen as more just

00:17:39.320 | are the ones that are fast,

00:17:40.820 | that you have a very specific purpose,

00:17:44.100 | you communicate that purpose honestly

00:17:46.560 | with the global community,

00:17:48.280 | and you strike hard, fast, and you pull out.

00:17:51.560 | To do sort of, it's like rescue missions.

00:17:55.920 | It's almost like policing work.

00:17:57.600 | If there's somebody suffering,

00:17:58.980 | you go in and stop that suffering directly, and that's it.

00:18:02.800 | I think World War II is seen in that way,

00:18:05.960 | that there's an obvious aggressor

00:18:09.600 | that is causing a lot of suffering in the world

00:18:11.640 | and looking to expand the scale of that suffering,

00:18:14.960 | and so you strike, I mean, given the scale,

00:18:18.960 | you strike as hard and as fast as possible

00:18:22.480 | to stop the expansion of the suffering.

00:18:25.880 | And so that's kind of how they see.

00:18:28.160 | I don't know if you can kind of look

00:18:30.620 | with this framework that you've presented

00:18:33.520 | and look at Hitler and think,

00:18:36.240 | well, it's not in his interest to attack Czechoslovakia,

00:18:41.240 | Poland, Britain, France, Russia, the Soviet Union,

00:18:48.000 | America, the United States of America,

00:18:55.800 | same with Japan, is it in their long-term interest?

00:19:01.440 | I don't know.

00:19:03.280 | It's for me, who cares about alleviating

00:19:07.960 | human suffering in the world, yes, it's not.

00:19:11.840 | It seems like almost no war is just,

00:19:15.440 | but it also seems somehow deeply human to fight,

00:19:21.480 | and I think your book makes the case, no, it's not.

00:19:25.240 | Can you try to get at that?

00:19:28.080 | 'Cause it seems that war, there is some,

00:19:31.120 | that drum of war seems to beat in all human hearts.

00:19:36.000 | It's in there somewhere.

00:19:37.480 | Maybe it's, maybe there's a relic of the past

00:19:41.160 | and we need to get rid of it.

00:19:42.400 | It's deeply irrational.

00:19:44.640 | - Okay, so obviously we go to war,

00:19:46.080 | and obviously there's a lot of violence,

00:19:47.440 | and so we have to explain something,

00:19:49.760 | and some of that's going to be aspects of our humanness.

00:19:52.880 | So I guess what I wanted us to sort of start with,

00:19:56.800 | I think it was just useful to sort of start

00:19:58.800 | and point out, actually,

00:20:00.160 | there's really, really, really, really strong incentives

00:20:02.760 | not to go to war, because it's gonna be really costly.

00:20:04.840 | And so all of these other human or strategic things,

00:20:08.040 | all these things, the circumstantial things

00:20:10.520 | that will eventually lead us to go to war

00:20:13.040 | have to be pretty powerful before we go there,

00:20:16.680 | and most of the time--

00:20:18.360 | - Sorry to interrupt, and that's why you also describe,

00:20:21.760 | very importantly, that war throughout human history

00:20:24.240 | is actually rare.

00:20:25.600 | We usually avoid it.

00:20:27.760 | - You know, most people don't know about

00:20:30.240 | the US invasion of Haiti in 1994.

00:20:32.880 | I mean, a lot of people know about it,

00:20:34.080 | but people just don't pay attention to it.

00:20:35.680 | We don't, we're gonna, you know,

00:20:37.600 | the history books and school kids are gonna learn

00:20:39.520 | about the invasion of Afghanistan for decades and decades,

00:20:43.560 | and nobody's going to put this one in the history books,

00:20:47.480 | and it's because it didn't actually happen,

00:20:50.400 | because before the troops could land,

00:20:54.520 | the person who'd taken power in a coup

00:20:57.200 | basically said, "Fine."

00:20:58.920 | There's this famous story where Colin Powell goes to Haiti,

00:21:03.160 | to this new dictator who's refused

00:21:05.560 | to let a democratic president take power,

00:21:08.160 | and tries to convince him to step down or else,

00:21:11.800 | and he says, "No, no, no," and then he shows him a video,

00:21:14.720 | and it's basically troop planes

00:21:16.800 | and all these things taking off,

00:21:18.960 | and he's like, "This is not live.

00:21:20.160 | "This is two hours ago."

00:21:21.520 | So it's a, and basically, he basically gives up right there.

00:21:26.720 | So that was--

00:21:27.600 | - That's a powerful move.

00:21:29.080 | - Yeah. (laughs)

00:21:30.280 | I think Powell might've been one of his teachers

00:21:33.000 | in like a US military college,

00:21:34.440 | 'cause a lot of these military dictators

00:21:36.080 | were trained at some point,

00:21:37.480 | so they had some, there was some personal relationships,

00:21:39.440 | at least between people in the US government and this guy,

00:21:41.600 | that they were trying to use.

00:21:42.800 | The point is, and that's like what should've happened.

00:21:45.720 | Like, that makes sense, right?

00:21:46.800 | Like, yeah, maybe I can mount an insurgency,

00:21:51.000 | and yeah, I'm not gonna bear a lot of the costs of war

00:21:52.680 | 'cause I'm the dictator, and maybe he's human,

00:21:54.480 | and he just wants to fight or gets angry,

00:21:56.240 | or it's just in his mind whatever he's doing,

00:21:58.200 | but at the end of the day, he's like,

00:21:59.040 | "This does not make sense."

00:22:00.400 | And that's what happens most of the time,

00:22:04.600 | but we don't write so many books about it.

00:22:06.720 | And now some political scientists go,

00:22:10.680 | and they count up all of the nations that could fight

00:22:13.040 | 'cause they have some dispute,

00:22:14.040 | and they're right next to one another,

00:22:15.920 | or they look at the ethnic groups

00:22:17.480 | that could fight with one another

00:22:18.560 | 'cause they have, there's some tension,

00:22:19.800 | and they're right next to one another,

00:22:21.280 | and then whatever, some number,

00:22:23.680 | like 900, 900, 900, 1,000 don't fight

00:22:27.520 | because they just find some other way.

00:22:29.880 | They don't like each other, but they just loathe in peace

00:22:32.760 | because that's the sensible thing to do.

00:22:35.000 | And that's what we all do.

00:22:35.840 | We loathe in peace, and we loathed the Soviet Union

00:22:39.480 | in relative peace for decades,

00:22:41.000 | and India loathes Pakistan in peace.

00:22:44.320 | I mean, two weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine,

00:22:46.760 | again, it was in the newspapers,

00:22:48.800 | but most people didn't, I think, take note,

00:22:51.440 | India accidentally launched a cruise missile at Pakistan

00:22:55.680 | and calm ensued.

00:22:57.660 | So they were like, yeah, this is,

00:22:59.420 | we do not wanna go to war.

00:23:00.640 | This will be bad.

00:23:01.600 | We'll be angry, but we'll accept your explanation

00:23:05.920 | that this was an accident.

00:23:07.200 | And so these things finder the radar.

00:23:10.760 | And so we overestimate, I think,

00:23:12.440 | how likely it is sides are gonna fight.

00:23:15.680 | But then, of course, things do happen.

00:23:17.000 | Like Russia did invade the Ukraine

00:23:19.440 | and didn't find some negotiated deal.

00:23:22.640 | And so then the book is sort of about,

00:23:25.840 | half the book is just sort of laying out,

00:23:28.640 | actually, like, there's just different ways this breaks down

00:23:31.080 | and some of them are human.

00:23:32.600 | Some of them are this,

00:23:34.120 | I actually don't think war beats in our heart.

00:23:37.200 | It does a little bit, but we're actually very cooperative.

00:23:40.840 | As a species, we're deeply, deeply cooperative.

00:23:44.000 | We're really, really good.

00:23:45.120 | So the thing we're not, we're okay at violence,

00:23:47.800 | and we're okay at getting angry and vengeant.

00:23:50.080 | And we have principles that will sometimes lead us,

00:23:53.400 | but we're actually really, really,

00:23:55.080 | really good at cooperation.

00:23:57.040 | And so that's, again, I'm not trying to write

00:23:59.800 | some big optimistic book where everything's gonna be great

00:24:02.240 | and we're all happy and we don't really fight.

00:24:03.800 | It's more just to say, let's start,

00:24:06.360 | let's be like a doctor.

00:24:07.440 | As a doctor, we're gonna focus on the sick, right?

00:24:10.240 | I'm gonna try, I know there's sick people,

00:24:12.120 | but I'm gonna recognize that the normal state is health

00:24:14.720 | and that most people are healthy.

00:24:16.360 | And that's gonna make me a better doctor.

00:24:17.960 | And I'm kind of saying the same thing.

00:24:19.320 | Let's be better doctors of politics in the world

00:24:22.120 | by recognizing that the normal state is health,

00:24:25.160 | and then we're gonna identify what are the diseases

00:24:28.360 | that are causing this warfare.

00:24:30.360 | - So yeah, the natural state of the human body

00:24:33.160 | with the immune system and all the different parts

00:24:35.600 | wants to be healthy and is really damn good at being healthy,

00:24:40.520 | but sometimes it breaks down.

00:24:41.840 | Let's understand how it breaks down.

00:24:44.000 | So what are the five ways that you list

00:24:47.040 | that are the roots of war?

00:24:48.840 | - Yeah, so I mean, they're kind of like buckets.

00:24:50.520 | They're sort of things that rhyme, right?

00:24:53.520 | 'Cause it's not all the same.

00:24:54.360 | There's like lots of reasons to go to war.

00:24:55.480 | There's this great line,

00:24:57.120 | "There's a reason for every war and a war for every reason."

00:24:59.560 | And that's true.

00:25:00.720 | And it's kind of overwhelming, right?

00:25:02.680 | And it's overwhelming for a lot of people.

00:25:04.440 | It was overwhelming for me for a lot of time.

00:25:05.840 | And I think one of the gifts of social science

00:25:09.120 | is actually people have started to organize this for us.

00:25:11.400 | And I just tried to organize it like a tiny bit better.

00:25:14.240 | - Buckets that rhyme.

00:25:15.280 | - Buckets, yeah, the terrible metaphor, right?

00:25:18.040 | (laughing)

00:25:18.880 | I got it, metaphors.

00:25:19.920 | So the idea was that like that basic incentive,

00:25:22.440 | like something overrides these incentives.

00:25:24.040 | And I guess I was saying there's five ways

00:25:26.040 | that they get overrided.

00:25:27.960 | And three are I'd call strategic.

00:25:30.120 | Like they're kind of logical.

00:25:31.320 | They're circumstances that,

00:25:34.520 | and this is, they're sort of,

00:25:36.120 | where strategic is, strategy is like the game theory.

00:25:40.000 | You could use those two things interchangeably,

00:25:41.800 | but game theory is sort of making it sound

00:25:43.640 | more complicated, I think, than it is.

00:25:45.040 | It's basically saying that there's times

00:25:46.880 | when this is like the optimal choice

00:25:49.720 | because of circumstances.

00:25:51.120 | And one of them is when the people

00:25:54.320 | who are deciding don't bear those costs.

00:25:57.040 | Or maybe even have a private incentive that's gonna,

00:26:00.720 | that's, if they're ignoring the cost,

00:26:03.600 | then maybe the costs of war are not so material.

00:26:06.680 | That's a contributing factor.

00:26:07.920 | Another is just there's uncertainty.

00:26:10.080 | And we could talk about that,

00:26:11.040 | but there's just the absence of information

00:26:13.480 | means that it actually,

00:26:14.480 | there's circumstances where it's your best choice to attack.

00:26:17.720 | There's this thing that political economists

00:26:19.440 | call commitment problems,

00:26:20.600 | which are basically saying there's some big power shift

00:26:23.000 | that you can avoid by attacking now.

00:26:24.440 | So it's like a dynamic incentive.

00:26:25.840 | It's sort of saying, well,

00:26:26.920 | in order to keep something from happening in the future,

00:26:29.840 | I can attack now.

00:26:30.720 | And because of the structure of incentives,

00:26:32.960 | it actually makes sense for me.

00:26:34.080 | Even though war is in theory really costly,

00:26:38.440 | or it is really costly nonetheless.

00:26:40.680 | And then there's these sort of human things.

00:26:42.840 | One's a little bit like just war.

00:26:44.200 | One sort of thing, there's like ideologies or principles

00:26:46.440 | or things we value that weigh against those costs.

00:26:50.920 | Like exterminating the heretical idea

00:26:54.080 | or standing up for a principle

00:26:56.440 | might be so valuable to me that I'm willing to use violence,

00:27:00.480 | even if it's costly.

00:27:02.760 | And there's nothing irrational about that.

00:27:05.000 | And then the fifth bucket is all of the irrationalities,

00:27:08.960 | all the passions and all of the most importantly,

00:27:11.240 | I think, like misperceptions, the way we get.

00:27:13.200 | Like we basically make wrong calculations

00:27:15.840 | about whether or not war is the right decision we get.

00:27:18.480 | We misunderstand or misjudge our enemy

00:27:21.800 | or misjudge ourselves.

00:27:23.120 | - So if you put all those things into buckets,

00:27:25.520 | how much can it be modeled in a simple game theoretic way

00:27:29.880 | and how much of it is a giant human mess?

00:27:32.040 | - So four of those five are really, on some level,

00:27:36.120 | easy to think strategically and model in a simple way

00:27:39.800 | in the sense that any of us can do it.

00:27:43.040 | We do this all the time.

00:27:44.400 | Think of like bargaining in a market

00:27:48.880 | for a carpet or something or whatever you bargained for.

00:27:52.700 | You're thinking a few steps ahead

00:27:56.080 | about what your opponent's going to do

00:27:58.920 | and you stake out a high, like a low price

00:28:01.680 | and the seller stakes out a high price.

00:28:04.560 | And you might both say, oh, I refuse to,

00:28:06.760 | I could never accept that.

00:28:07.880 | And there's all this sort of cheap talk,

00:28:09.880 | but you kind of understand where you're going

00:28:13.360 | and it's efficient to like find a deal

00:28:15.920 | and buy the market, buy the carpet eventually.

00:28:18.660 | So we all understand this like game theory

00:28:21.720 | and the strategy, I think intuitively.

00:28:23.800 | Or maybe even a closer example is like,

00:28:25.880 | suppose, I don't know, you have a tenant you need to evict

00:28:30.160 | or any normal like kind of legal,

00:28:33.000 | it's not yet a legal dispute, right?

00:28:34.440 | Like we just have a dispute with a neighbor

00:28:36.040 | or somebody else.

00:28:37.240 | Most of us don't end up going to court.

00:28:39.720 | Going to court is like the war option.

00:28:42.000 | That's the costly thing that we just ought to be able to,

00:28:44.520 | we ought to be able to find something between ourselves

00:28:47.360 | that doesn't require this hiring lawyers

00:28:51.120 | and a long drawn out trial.

00:28:53.320 | And most of the time we do, right?

00:28:55.360 | And so we all understand that incentive.

00:28:58.000 | And then for those five buckets,

00:29:00.960 | so everything except all the irrational

00:29:02.880 | and the misperceptions are really easy to model.

00:29:05.380 | Then from a technical standpoint,

00:29:06.680 | it's actually pretty tricky to model the misperceptions.

00:29:10.000 | And I'm not a game theorist.

00:29:11.520 | And so I'm more channeling my colleagues who do this

00:29:13.920 | and what I know.

00:29:15.000 | But it's not rocket science.

00:29:18.080 | I mean, I think that's what I try to lay out in the book

00:29:22.000 | is like there's all these ideas out there

00:29:24.480 | that can actually help us just make sense of all these wars

00:29:27.520 | and just bring some order to the morass of reasons.

00:29:33.240 | - Well, to push back a lot of things in one sentence.

00:29:37.120 | So first of all, rocket science is actually pretty simple.

00:29:39.840 | (Dave laughing)

00:29:40.840 | People like they--

00:29:41.760 | - I'll defer to you actually.

00:29:43.480 | - Well, I think it's 'cause unfortunately,

00:29:45.380 | it's very like engineering.

00:29:47.520 | It's very well defined.

00:29:48.960 | The problem is well defined.

00:29:50.120 | The problem with humanity is it's actually complicated.

00:29:53.640 | So it is true it's not rocket science,

00:29:55.520 | but it is not true it's easy

00:29:56.960 | because it's not rocket science.

00:29:58.560 | But the problem, the downside of game theory

00:30:03.560 | is not that it helps us make sense of the world.

00:30:08.360 | It projects a simple model of the world

00:30:11.160 | that brings us comfort in thinking we understand.

00:30:15.200 | And sometimes that simplification

00:30:17.920 | is actually getting at the core first principles

00:30:21.640 | on understanding of something.

00:30:23.440 | And sometimes it fools us into thinking we understand.

00:30:27.000 | So for example, I mean, mutually assured destruction

00:30:30.640 | is a very simple model and people argue all the time

00:30:33.720 | whether that's actually a good model or not.

00:30:35.860 | But there's empirical fact

00:30:37.880 | that we're still alive as a human civilization.

00:30:40.240 | And also in the game theoretic sense,

00:30:43.080 | do we model individual leaders and their relationships?

00:30:47.160 | Do we, the staff, the generals,

00:30:51.160 | or do we also have to model the culture, the people,

00:30:56.160 | the suffering of the people, the economic frustration

00:31:00.440 | or the anger, the distrust?

00:31:02.600 | Do you have to model all those things?

00:31:04.160 | Do they come into play?

00:31:05.760 | And sometimes, I mean, again,

00:31:07.840 | we could be romanticizing those things

00:31:10.720 | from a historical perspective.

00:31:12.080 | But when you look at history

00:31:13.280 | and you look at the way wars start,

00:31:15.800 | it sometimes feels like a little bit of a misunderstanding

00:31:20.240 | escalates, escalates, escalates,

00:31:23.960 | and just builds on top of itself.

00:31:28.240 | And all of a sudden it's an all out war.

00:31:30.320 | It's the escalation with nobody hitting the brakes.

00:31:35.200 | - So, I mean, you're absolutely right

00:31:38.280 | like in the sense that it's totally possible

00:31:40.680 | to oversimplify these things

00:31:42.040 | and take the game theory too seriously.

00:31:44.160 | And some, and people who study those things

00:31:49.240 | and write those models and people like me who use them

00:31:52.320 | can sometimes make that mistake.

00:31:54.200 | I think that's not the mistake

00:31:55.440 | that most people make most often.

00:31:58.360 | And what's actually true is I think most people,

00:32:00.480 | we're actually really quick,

00:32:01.680 | whether it's the US invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq,

00:32:05.040 | we're really quick to blame that on the humanness

00:32:09.360 | and the culture.

00:32:10.280 | So we're really quick to say, oh, this was George W. Bush's

00:32:14.840 | either desire for revenge and vengeance

00:32:17.160 | or some private agenda or blood for oil.

00:32:20.760 | So we're really quick to blame it on these things.

00:32:23.560 | And then we're really,

00:32:25.560 | we tend to overlook the strategic incentives to attack,

00:32:30.280 | which I think we're probably dominant.

00:32:31.600 | I think those things might've been true to a degree,

00:32:33.860 | but I don't think they were enough to ever

00:32:36.400 | bring those wars about.

00:32:37.520 | Just like, I think people are very quick to sort of

00:32:40.240 | in this current invasion to sort of talk about Putin's

00:32:46.480 | grand visions of being the next Catherine the Great

00:32:50.320 | or nationalist ideals and the mistakes

00:32:55.320 | and the miscalculations are really quick to sort of say,

00:32:57.440 | oh, that must be, and then kind of pause or not pause,

00:33:00.000 | but maybe even stop there

00:33:01.440 | and not see some of the strategic incentives.

00:33:05.080 | And so I guess we have to do both,

00:33:08.960 | but the strategic, I guess I would say like the war

00:33:12.120 | is just such a big problem.

00:33:13.680 | It's just so costly that the strategic incentives

00:33:18.560 | and the things that game theory has given us

00:33:21.160 | are like really important in understanding

00:33:23.680 | why there was so little room for negotiation in a bargain

00:33:27.440 | that things like a leader's mistakes start to matter

00:33:31.240 | or a leader's nationalist ideals or delusions

00:33:35.320 | or vengeance actually matters.

00:33:37.080 | 'Cause those do matter,

00:33:38.320 | but they only matter when the capacity to find a deal

00:33:42.040 | is so narrow because of the circumstances.

00:33:45.160 | And so let's not, it's sort of like saying

00:33:48.640 | like an elderly person who dies of pneumonia, right?

00:33:52.880 | Pneumonia killed them, obviously,

00:33:55.600 | but that's not the reason pneumonia was able to kill them.

00:33:58.720 | All of the fundamentals and the circumstances

00:34:01.280 | were like made them very fragile.

00:34:02.800 | And that's how I think all the strategic forces

00:34:05.320 | make that situation fragile.

00:34:07.960 | And then the miscalculations and all of these things

00:34:11.160 | you just said, which are so important

00:34:12.320 | are kind of like the pneumonia.

00:34:13.720 | And let's pay attention to both.

00:34:16.400 | - And you're saying that people don't disproportionately

00:34:18.960 | pay attention to the--

00:34:20.440 | - It's hard.

00:34:21.280 | I mean, it wasn't-- - To the leaders.

00:34:22.600 | - It took me a long time to learn to recognize them.

00:34:26.760 | And it takes many people.

00:34:29.200 | And it took generations of social scientists

00:34:31.600 | years and years to figure some of this out

00:34:35.760 | and to sort of help people understand it

00:34:37.600 | and clarify concepts.

00:34:38.960 | So it's not, it's just not that easy.

00:34:41.240 | No, it's not hard.

00:34:42.080 | I think it's possible to,

00:34:43.320 | just as I was taught a lot of the stuff I write in the book

00:34:45.600 | in graduate school or from reading,

00:34:47.280 | and it's possible to communicate and learn this stuff,

00:34:49.800 | but it's still really hard.

00:34:51.000 | And so that's kind of what I was trying to do

00:34:55.200 | is like close that gap and just make it,

00:34:57.520 | help people recognize these things in the wild.

00:35:02.080 | - Before we zoom back out, let me,

00:35:04.120 | at a high level first ask,

00:35:06.560 | what are your thoughts on the ongoing war in Ukraine?

00:35:09.520 | How do you analyze it within your framework about war?

00:35:12.640 | - A Russian colleague of mine, Konstantin Sonin,

00:35:14.960 | tells this story about a visiting Ukrainian professor

00:35:18.280 | who's at the university.

00:35:19.120 | And one night he's walking down the street

00:35:21.320 | and he's talking on two cell phones at once for some reason.

00:35:25.080 | And a mugger stops him and demands the phones.

00:35:29.320 | And it's sort of like deadpan way, Konstantin says,

00:35:32.240 | and because he was Ukrainian, he decided to fight.

00:35:35.880 | And I think that's a little bit like what happened.

00:35:39.840 | Most of us in that situation would hand over our cell phones.

00:35:43.240 | And so in this situation, Putin's like the mugger

00:35:47.240 | and the Ukrainian people are being asked

00:35:49.680 | to hand over this thing.

00:35:50.720 | And they're saying, no, we're not gonna hand this over.

00:35:54.120 | And the fact is, most people do.

00:35:59.120 | Most people faced with a superpower or a tyrant

00:36:02.720 | or an autocrat or a murderous warlord who says,

00:36:07.520 | hand this over, they hand it over.

00:36:09.360 | And that's why there are so many unequal

00:36:14.320 | imperial relationships in the world.

00:36:16.120 | That's what empire is.

00:36:17.040 | Empire is successive people saying, fine,

00:36:20.520 | we'll give up some degree of freedom or sovereignty

00:36:22.960 | 'cause you're too powerful.

00:36:24.360 | And the Ukrainian said, no way, this is just too precious.

00:36:27.880 | And so I said, one of those buckets

00:36:30.080 | where that there's a set of values.

00:36:32.240 | There's sometimes there's something that we value

00:36:35.240 | that is so valuable to us and important.

00:36:37.280 | Sometimes it's terrible.

00:36:38.960 | Sometimes it's the extermination of another people,

00:36:41.960 | but sometimes it's something noble like liberty

00:36:44.400 | or refusal to part with sovereignty.

00:36:46.840 | And in those circumstances, people will decide,

00:36:49.960 | I will endure the costs.

00:36:52.280 | They probably, I mean, I think they knew

00:36:55.400 | what they were probably risking.

00:36:57.000 | And so to me, that's not to blame the Ukrainians

00:37:00.740 | any more than I would blame Americans

00:37:03.240 | for the American Revolution.

00:37:04.240 | It's actually a very similar story.

00:37:05.920 | You had a tyrannical, militarily superior,

00:37:09.300 | pretty non-democratic entity come and say,

00:37:15.560 | you're gonna have partial sovereignty.

00:37:17.460 | And Americans for ideological reasons said, no way.

00:37:23.120 | And that, people like Bernard Bailin and other historians,

00:37:25.500 | that's like the dominant story of the American Revolution.

00:37:27.520 | It was in the ideological origins,

00:37:29.160 | this attachment, this idea of liberty.

00:37:30.600 | And so I start, now there's lots of other reasons,

00:37:33.160 | I think, why this happened.

00:37:35.360 | But I think for me, it starts with Ukrainians

00:37:38.720 | failing to make that sensible, quote unquote,

00:37:42.520 | rational deal that says we should relinquish

00:37:46.100 | some of our sovereignty because Russia

00:37:47.720 | is more powerful than we are.

00:37:49.160 | - So that's a very clinical look at the war.

00:37:56.840 | Meaning there is a man and a country, Vladimir Putin,

00:38:01.840 | that makes a claim on a land, builds up troops, and invades.

00:38:08.000 | The way to avoid suffering there,

00:38:15.440 | and the way to avoid death, and the way to avoid war

00:38:19.360 | is to back down and basically let,

00:38:26.360 | there's a list of interests he provides,

00:38:28.280 | and you go along with that.

00:38:30.100 | That's when the goal is to avoid war.

00:38:35.800 | Let's do some other calculus.

00:38:40.360 | Let's think about Britain.

00:38:43.120 | So France fought Hitler, but did not fight very hard.

00:38:48.120 | Portugal, there's a lot of stories of countries like this.

00:38:52.280 | And there is Winston motherfucking Churchill.

00:38:57.280 | He's one of the rare humans in history

00:39:00.760 | who had that we shall fight on the beaches.

00:39:03.920 | It made no sense.

00:39:05.840 | Hitler did not say he's going to destroy Britain.

00:39:08.720 | He seemed to show respect for Britain.

00:39:10.800 | He wanted to keep the British Empire.

00:39:13.460 | It made total sense.

00:39:16.560 | It was obvious that Britain was going to lose

00:39:18.580 | if Hitler goes all in on Britain

00:39:20.160 | as he seemed like he was going to.

00:39:22.080 | And yet Winston Churchill said a big F you.

00:39:26.100 | Similar thing, Zelensky and the Ukrainian people

00:39:31.120 | said F you in that same kind of way.

00:39:33.640 | - So I think we're saying the same things.

00:39:35.960 | I'm being more clinical about it.

00:39:38.600 | - Well, I'm trying to understand, and we won't know this,

00:39:42.940 | but which path minimizes human suffering in the long term?

00:39:49.800 | - Well, on the eve of the war, Ukraine was poor

00:39:52.800 | in a per person terms than it was in 1990.

00:39:55.440 | The economy's just completely stagnated.

00:39:58.280 | And Russia, meanwhile, like many other parts of the region,

00:40:00.920 | sort of has boomed to a degree.

00:40:03.200 | I mean, certainly because of oil and gas,

00:40:04.680 | but also for a variety of other reasons.

00:40:07.440 | And Putin's consolidated political control.

00:40:09.840 | And from a very cold-blooded and calculated point of view,

00:40:14.640 | I think one way Putin and Russia could look at this

00:40:17.680 | is as, look, we were temporarily weak

00:40:19.440 | after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

00:40:22.520 | And the rest, and the West basically took advantage of that.

00:40:25.720 | Like, bravo, you pulled it off.

00:40:27.560 | You basically crept democracy and capitalism,

00:40:30.080 | all these things right up to our border.

00:40:32.520 | And now we have regained some of our strength.

00:40:35.440 | We've consolidated political control.

00:40:37.200 | We've killed our people.

00:40:38.700 | We have a stronger economy.

00:40:40.860 | And we somehow got Germany and other European nations

00:40:44.420 | to give up energy independence.

00:40:46.260 | And actually just, we've got an enormous amount

00:40:48.120 | of leverage over you.

00:40:49.040 | And now we wanna roll back some of your success

00:40:52.600 | because we're powerful enough to demand it.

00:40:55.800 | And you've been taking advantage of the situation,

00:40:59.400 | which is maybe a fair, impartial analysis.

00:41:04.120 | And the West, but more specifically Ukraine,

00:41:08.080 | said, but that's a price too high, which I totally respect.

00:41:11.760 | Maybe I'd like to think I'd make that same decision.

00:41:15.360 | But that's the answer.

00:41:17.600 | If the answer is why would they fight if it's so costly,

00:41:20.200 | why not find a deal?

00:41:21.400 | It's because they weren't willing to give Russia

00:41:24.320 | the thing that their power said they quote unquote deserve.

00:41:28.320 | Just like Americans said to the Britain,

00:41:30.440 | yeah, of course, we ought to accept semi-sovereignty.

00:41:34.180 | But we refuse.

00:41:38.540 | And we'd rather endure a bloody fight that we might lose

00:41:43.540 | than take this.

00:41:45.080 | And so you need some of these other five buckets,

00:41:49.080 | you need them to understand the situation.

00:41:50.840 | You need to sort of, there are other things going on,

00:41:54.080 | but I do think it's fundamental that there's just,

00:41:56.560 | that this noble intransigence is a big part of it.

00:42:01.560 | - Well, let me just say a few things if it's okay.

00:42:06.320 | So your analysis is clear and objective.

00:42:12.840 | - My analysis is neither clear nor objective.

00:42:16.940 | First, I've been going through a lot.

00:42:22.600 | I'm a different man over the past four or five weeks

00:42:25.740 | than I was before.

00:42:26.840 | I, in general, have come to,

00:42:30.740 | there's anger, I've come to despise leaders in general.

00:42:37.240 | Because leaders wage war

00:42:40.580 | and the people pay the price for that war.

00:42:42.680 | Let me just say on this point of standing up to an invader,

00:42:48.600 | that I am half Ukrainian, half Russian,

00:42:52.800 | that I'm proud of the Ukrainian people.

00:42:55.320 | Whatever the sacrifices, whatever the scale of pain,

00:43:00.320 | standing up, there's something in me that's proud.

00:43:03.680 | Maybe that's, maybe that's, whatever the fuck that is,

00:43:08.840 | maybe that blood runs in me.

00:43:10.660 | I love the Ukrainian people, I love the Russian people.

00:43:15.620 | And whatever that fight is, whatever that suffering is,

00:43:18.760 | the millions of refugees, whatever this war is,

00:43:22.140 | the dictators come to power and their power falls,

00:43:26.160 | I just love that that spirit burns bright still.

00:43:31.740 | And I do, maybe I'm wrong in this,

00:43:34.140 | do see Ukrainian and Russian people as one people

00:43:37.820 | in a way that's not just cultural, geopolitical,

00:43:41.340 | but just given the history.

00:43:43.220 | I think about the same kind of fighting

00:43:46.760 | when Hitler, with all of his forces,

00:43:50.140 | chose to invade the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa.

00:43:53.800 | When he went in that Russian winter,

00:43:58.500 | and a lot of people, and that pisses me off,

00:44:02.200 | because if you know your history,

00:44:05.060 | it's not the winter that stopped Hitler.

00:44:08.080 | It's the Red Army, it's the people

00:44:10.520 | that refused to back down, they fought proudly.

00:44:14.800 | That pride, that's something.

00:44:18.060 | That's the human spirit.

00:44:20.120 | That's in war, you know, war is hell,

00:44:23.600 | but it really pushes people to stand

00:44:28.400 | for the things they believe in.

00:44:30.240 | It's the William Wallace speech from Braveheart,

00:44:33.240 | I think about this a lot.

00:44:35.000 | That does not fit into your framework.

00:44:37.000 | - No, no, no, I'm gonna disagree.

00:44:38.520 | I think it totally fits in, and it's this,

00:44:41.640 | there's nothing irrational about what we believe,

00:44:45.120 | especially those principles which we hold the most dear.

00:44:50.120 | I'm merely trying to say that there's a calculus,

00:44:53.500 | there's one calculus over here that says

00:44:56.720 | Russia's more powerful than it was 20 years ago,

00:45:00.020 | and even 10 years ago, and Ukraine is not,

00:45:02.920 | and it's asking for something,

00:45:05.200 | and there's an incentive to give that up.

00:45:08.040 | That's obvious, like there's an incentive to comply.

00:45:10.680 | But my understanding is many of these

00:45:12.600 | post-Soviet republics have appeased, right,

00:45:16.400 | which is what we call compromise when we disagree with it.

00:45:19.100 | They've, all of these other peoples

00:45:21.840 | in the Russian sphere of influence have not stood up.

00:45:25.720 | And Russians, many Russians have tried to stand up,

00:45:29.760 | and they've been beaten down.

00:45:32.120 | And now people have, we'll see,

00:45:35.360 | but people have not been standing up very much.

00:45:38.000 | And so lots of people are cowed,

00:45:40.480 | and lots of people have appeased,

00:45:41.840 | and lots of people hear that speech

00:45:43.920 | and think I would like to do that, but don't.

00:45:47.240 | And so, and my point is that sadly,

00:45:50.940 | we live in a world where a lot of people

00:45:52.880 | get stepped on by tyrants and empire and whatnot,

00:45:58.280 | and don't rise up.

00:45:59.240 | And so I think we could admire, especially

00:46:02.720 | when they stand up for these reasons.

00:46:04.760 | And I think we can admire Churchill for that reason.

00:46:06.680 | I think we could, that's why we admire

00:46:08.720 | the leaders of the American revolution and so on.

00:46:11.000 | But it doesn't always happen,

00:46:12.120 | and I don't actually know why.

00:46:13.840 | But I don't think it's irrational.

00:46:15.080 | I think it's just, it's something,

00:46:16.840 | it's about a set of values, and it's hard to predict.

00:46:20.080 | And it was hard for, Putin might not have been

00:46:24.200 | out of line in thinking just like everybody else

00:46:27.320 | in my sphere of influence, they're gonna roll over too.

00:46:30.080 | - And I should mention, because we haven't,

00:46:34.640 | that a lot of this calculation,

00:46:37.520 | from an objective point of view,

00:46:39.520 | you have to include United States and NATO

00:46:42.920 | into the pressure they apply into the region.

00:46:45.240 | - Yeah.

00:46:46.360 | - That said, I care little about leaders

00:46:50.480 | that do cruel things onto the world.

00:46:54.040 | They lead to a lot of suffering.

00:46:55.600 | But I still believe that the Russian people

00:46:57.800 | and the Ukrainian people are great people that stand up,

00:47:00.720 | and I admire people that stand up

00:47:03.160 | and are willing to give their life.

00:47:05.400 | And I think Russian people are very much that too,

00:47:08.400 | especially when the enemy is coming

00:47:15.520 | for your home over the hill.

00:47:17.680 | Sometimes standing up to an authoritarian regime

00:47:21.440 | is difficult because you don't know,

00:47:25.440 | it's not a monster that's attacking your home directly.

00:47:30.440 | It's kind of like the boiling of a lobster

00:47:33.160 | or something like that.

00:47:34.520 | It's a slow control of your mind and the population.

00:47:39.280 | And our minds get controlled even in the West

00:47:42.200 | by the media, by the narratives.

00:47:44.520 | It's very difficult to wake up one day

00:47:47.200 | and to realize sort of what people call red-pilled,

00:47:53.200 | is to see that they're,

00:47:55.240 | maybe the thing I've been told all my life is not true.

00:47:57.800 | And at every level, that's a thing very difficult

00:48:00.200 | to do in North Korea.

00:48:01.320 | The more authoritarian the regime,

00:48:04.080 | the more difficult it is to see.

00:48:06.460 | Maybe this idea that I believe

00:48:09.480 | that I was willing to die for is actually evil.

00:48:11.560 | It's very difficult to do for Americans,

00:48:14.260 | for Russians, for Ukrainians, for Chinese,

00:48:17.000 | for Indians, for Pakistanis, for everybody.

00:48:20.560 | I think thinking about this Ukrainian,

00:48:23.280 | whether you want to call it nobility or intransigence

00:48:25.200 | or whatever is key.

00:48:27.440 | I think the authoritarianness of Russia

00:48:32.280 | and Putin's control or the control of his cabal

00:48:34.480 | is the other thing I would really point to

00:48:37.300 | is what's going on here.

00:48:38.440 | And if you ask me like big picture,

00:48:41.240 | what do I think is the fundamental cause

00:48:42.720 | of most violence in the world?

00:48:43.840 | I think it's unaccountable power.

00:48:45.560 | I think, in fact, for me, an unaccountable power

00:48:47.920 | is the source of underdevelopment.

00:48:49.280 | It's the source of pain and suffering.

00:48:51.840 | It's the source of warfare.

00:48:53.960 | It's basically the root source of most of our problems.

00:48:57.200 | And in this particular case,

00:48:59.600 | it's also one of our buckets in the sense that,

00:49:02.280 | like why, what is it that,

00:49:04.560 | why did Russia ask these things?

00:49:07.160 | Like, well, was democracy in Ukraine

00:49:11.800 | a threat to an average Russian?

00:49:13.640 | No.

00:49:14.480 | Was capitalism, is NATO, is whatever,

00:49:17.880 | is this a threat to average Russians?

00:49:19.600 | No, it's a threat to the apparatus of political control

00:49:24.600 | and economic control that Putin and cronies

00:49:27.560 | and the sort of group of people that rule,

00:49:30.280 | this elite in Russia, it was a threat to them.

00:49:34.640 | And so they had to ask the Ukraine to be neutral

00:49:38.300 | or to give up NATO or to have a puppet government

00:49:41.560 | or whatever they were seeking to achieve

00:49:43.800 | and have been trying to achieve through other means

00:49:45.680 | for decades, right?

00:49:47.280 | They've been trying to undermine these things

00:49:49.640 | without invasion.

00:49:52.600 | And they've been doing that

00:49:53.880 | because it threatens their interests.

00:49:55.480 | And that's like one of these other logics of war.

00:49:57.280 | It's not just that there's something that I value so much

00:49:59.240 | that I'm willing to endure the cost.

00:50:00.560 | It's that there are people,

00:50:02.800 | not only does this oligarchy or whatever elite group

00:50:06.040 | that you wanna talk about in Russia,

00:50:07.840 | not, first of all, they're not bearing,

00:50:10.040 | they're bearing some costs of war, right?

00:50:11.400 | They're very, and they're certainly

00:50:12.760 | bearing costs of sanctions.

00:50:15.200 | But they don't bear all the costs of war, obviously.

00:50:18.560 | And so they're quick to use it.

00:50:20.280 | But more importantly, in some sense,

00:50:24.000 | I think there's a strong argument

00:50:25.600 | that they had a political incentive to invade

00:50:28.640 | or at least to ask Ukraine this sort of

00:50:30.800 | impossible to give up thing,

00:50:32.500 | and then invade despite Ukrainian nobility and transigence

00:50:37.500 | because they were threatened.

00:50:39.780 | And so that's extremely important, I think.

00:50:45.120 | And so that's, those two things in concert

00:50:48.960 | make this a very fragile situation.

00:50:50.760 | That's I think why we ended up,

00:50:52.440 | is go not all the way, but a long way to understanding.

00:50:57.040 | Now you could layer onto that,

00:50:58.960 | these intangible incentives,

00:51:00.320 | these other things that are valued,

00:51:01.760 | that are valued on Putin's side.

00:51:03.280 | Maybe there's a nationalist ideal.

00:51:04.800 | Maybe he seeks status and glory.

00:51:08.200 | Like maybe those things are all true,

00:51:09.280 | and I'm sure they're true to an extent.

00:51:11.880 | And that'll weigh against his costs of war as well.

00:51:14.560 | But fundamentally, I think he just saw

00:51:16.680 | his regime as threatened.

00:51:18.560 | That's what he cares about.

00:51:20.160 | And so he asked, he made this cruelest of demands.

00:51:25.160 | - I mean, I would say I'm just one human,

00:51:27.440 | who the hell am I?

00:51:28.640 | But I just have a lot of anger

00:51:30.920 | towards the elites in general,

00:51:34.520 | towards leaders in general that fail the people.

00:51:38.800 | I would love to hear and to celebrate

00:51:44.080 | the beautiful Russian people, the Ukrainian people,

00:51:47.800 | and anyone who silences that beautiful voice of the people,

00:51:52.440 | anywhere in the world,

00:51:54.040 | is destroying the thing that I value most about humanity.

00:51:59.000 | Leaders don't matter.

00:52:00.080 | They're supposed to serve the people.

00:52:02.480 | This nationalist idea of a people, of a country,

00:52:07.080 | is only makes any sense when you celebrate,

00:52:10.280 | when you give people the freedom to show themselves,

00:52:15.280 | to celebrate themselves.

00:52:18.360 | The thing I care most about is science

00:52:21.760 | and the silencing of voices in the scientific community,

00:52:26.760 | the silencing of voices, period.

00:52:28.840 | Fuck any leader that silences that human spirit.

00:52:34.860 | There's something about this.

00:52:40.240 | Whenever I look at World War II,

00:52:42.160 | whenever I look at wars,

00:52:44.280 | it does seem very irrational to fight.

00:52:46.540 | But man, does it seem somehow deeply human

00:52:52.400 | when the people stand up and fight.

00:52:54.920 | There's something that if,

00:52:58.400 | you know, we talked about progress.

00:53:00.800 | That feels like how progress is made,

00:53:03.880 | the people that stand and fight.

00:53:05.320 | So, but let me read the Churchill speech.

00:53:08.600 | It's such, I'm so proud that we humans

00:53:12.320 | can stand up to evil when the time is right.

00:53:14.880 | - I guess here's the thing, though.

00:53:16.680 | Think of what's happening in Xinjiang in China.

00:53:18.480 | We have appeased China.

00:53:21.520 | We've basically said, you can just do

00:53:25.080 | really, really, really horrible things in this region

00:53:27.880 | and you're too powerful for us to do anything about it

00:53:30.480 | and it's not worth it.

00:53:32.040 | And there's nobody standing up and making a Churchill speech

00:53:35.760 | or the Braveheart speech about standing up

00:53:38.200 | for people of Xinjiang when what's happening is,

00:53:41.480 | on, you know, in that realm of what was happening in Europe.

00:53:47.520 | And that's happening in a lot of places.

00:53:50.240 | And then when we, when there is a willingness to stand up,

00:53:53.660 | people, there's a lot of opposition to those.

00:53:58.000 | You know, so there were a lot of reasons

00:54:00.040 | for the invasion of Iraq.

00:54:01.280 | For some, it was humanitarian.

00:54:04.160 | I think like, Saddam Hussein was one of the worst tyrants

00:54:08.480 | of the 20th century.

00:54:10.600 | He was just doing some really horrible things.

00:54:14.240 | You know, he'd invaded Kuwait.

00:54:15.880 | He'd, you know, committed domestic,

00:54:18.680 | attempted domestic genocide and all sorts of repression.

00:54:21.880 | And it was probably a mistake to invade in spite.

00:54:25.000 | So it's important not just to select on the cases

00:54:27.360 | where we stood up and to select on the cases

00:54:29.640 | where that ended up working out in the sense of victory.

00:54:34.380 | Right, it's important to sort of try to judge,

00:54:38.480 | not judge, but just try to understand these things

00:54:40.680 | in the context of all the times we didn't give that speech

00:54:45.160 | or when we did and then it just went sideways.

00:54:48.080 | - Well, that's why it's powerful

00:54:50.520 | when you're willing to give your life for your principles

00:54:52.880 | 'cause most of the time you get neither the principles

00:54:57.460 | nor the life, you die.

00:54:59.720 | That's what, but that's why it's powerful.

00:55:02.280 | We shall go on to the end.

00:55:04.560 | We shall fight in France.

00:55:06.340 | We shall fight on the seas and the oceans.

00:55:08.840 | We shall fight with growing confidence

00:55:10.800 | and growing strength in the air.

00:55:12.600 | We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.

00:55:16.160 | We shall fight on the beaches.

00:55:18.000 | We shall fight on the landing grounds.

00:55:20.320 | We shall fight in the field and in the streets.

00:55:23.480 | We shall fight in the hills.

00:55:25.320 | We shall never surrender.

00:55:27.200 | This is before Hitler had any major loss to anybody.

00:55:32.200 | That was a terrifying armada coming your way.

00:55:36.220 | We shall never surrender.

00:55:37.840 | I just wanna give props.

00:55:40.280 | I wanna give my respect as a human being to Churchill,

00:55:44.640 | to the British people for standing up,

00:55:46.660 | to the Ukrainian people for standing up

00:55:50.200 | and to the Russian people.

00:55:53.880 | These are great people that throughout history

00:55:57.640 | have stood up to evil.

00:55:59.680 | Let me ask you this because you quote Sun Tzu

00:56:03.600 | in "The Art of War."

00:56:05.360 | "There's no instance of a country having benefited

00:56:07.800 | from prolonged warfare."

00:56:09.480 | This is the main thesis.

00:56:11.800 | Can we just linger on this?

00:56:14.840 | Since leaders wage war and people pay the price,

00:56:18.320 | when we say that there's no reason to do prolonged war,

00:56:22.720 | is it possible to have a reason for the leaders

00:56:25.040 | if they disregard the price?

00:56:27.640 | Sort of like if they have a different objective function

00:56:32.040 | or utility function that measures the price

00:56:34.000 | that's paid for war.

00:56:35.360 | Is that one explanation of why war happens?

00:56:39.500 | Is the leaders just have a different calculus

00:56:41.480 | than other humans?

00:56:43.040 | - I mean, I think this links us back

00:56:44.280 | to what we were talking about earlier about just war.

00:56:46.320 | Is in some sense just war is saying

00:56:49.600 | that in spite of the costs,

00:56:51.600 | that our enemy has done something,

00:56:54.720 | our opponent has refused to compromise

00:56:58.060 | on something that we find essential

00:57:00.560 | and is demanding that we compromise

00:57:03.560 | in a way that's completely repugnant.

00:57:05.440 | And therefore we're going to go to war

00:57:09.240 | despite these material costs and these human costs.

00:57:13.200 | And then that principle that you go to war on

00:57:17.760 | is in the eye of the beholder.

00:57:18.840 | And I mean, I think liberty and sovereignty,

00:57:22.000 | I think we can understand and sympathize with.

00:57:23.760 | And maybe that's just a universal,

00:57:25.520 | maybe that's the greatest cause of just war,

00:57:27.520 | but other people make that,

00:57:29.000 | could go to war for something considerably less,

00:57:32.120 | a principle that's considerably less noble, right?

00:57:34.600 | Which is what Hitler was doing.

00:57:36.160 | That's an explanation.

00:57:39.360 | So that's a whole class of explanations

00:57:41.720 | that helps us understand that the compromise

00:57:43.960 | that was on the table,

00:57:44.880 | given the relative balance of power

00:57:46.280 | was just repugnant at least to one side,

00:57:48.480 | if not the other.

00:57:49.320 | There's something they're unwilling to part with.

00:57:51.120 | And then you get to the leaders.

00:57:53.200 | Well, what happens when what the leaders want,

00:57:56.240 | what happens when the leaders are detached

00:57:58.960 | from the interests of their groups,

00:58:00.160 | which has been true for basically most of human history.

00:58:02.280 | There's a narrow slice of societies

00:58:04.600 | in the big scheme of things

00:58:06.520 | that have been accountable to their people.

00:58:07.920 | A lot of them exist today.

00:58:09.380 | Where to some degree they're channeling

00:58:13.160 | the interests of their group, right?

00:58:15.480 | So the Ukrainian politicians didn't concede

00:58:18.840 | to these cool Russian demands,

00:58:20.960 | because even if they had,

00:58:22.040 | it would have been political suicide.

00:58:23.360 | Because it seemed, or I think,

00:58:25.240 | it seems that the Ukrainians would have just rejected this.

00:58:28.120 | So they were in some sense channeling

00:58:30.280 | the values of the broader population.

00:58:33.080 | Even if they, I don't know what was going,

00:58:35.120 | even if they didn't share those principles,

00:58:37.280 | they self-interestedly followed them.

00:58:40.840 | Probably they shared them,

00:58:41.800 | but I'm just saying that even if they didn't,

00:58:44.040 | they wouldn't compromise.

00:58:46.280 | Occasionally you get the reverse,

00:58:47.760 | which is where the leaders are not accountable.

00:58:50.360 | And now they have some value, which could be glory.

00:58:54.220 | I mean, this is the story of the kings,

00:58:56.720 | and to some lesser extent, the queens of Europe.

00:58:59.260 | For hundreds of years, it was basically a contest,

00:59:02.260 | and it was, war was the sport of kings.

00:59:04.240 | And to some extent, they were just seeking status

00:59:06.520 | through violent competition.

00:59:08.640 | And they paid a lot, a big price out of the royal purse,

00:59:11.560 | but they didn't bear most of the suffering.

00:59:15.400 | And so they were too quick to go to war.

00:59:19.800 | And so that's, I think that detachment of leaders

00:59:24.800 | combined with, you mingle it with this,

00:59:29.200 | that one bucket, that uncheckedness,

00:59:32.240 | and you mingle that with the fact

00:59:33.760 | that leaders might have one of these values,

00:59:36.120 | noble or otherwise, that carry them to war,

00:59:39.180 | combined to explain a good number of conflicts as well.

00:59:43.560 | And that's a good illustration of why I think,

00:59:46.120 | like autocracy and unaccountable power is,

00:59:50.400 | I could make that story for all of the things,

00:59:53.360 | all five buckets, they're all,

00:59:54.840 | we're all more susceptible to these things,

00:59:56.960 | to all five of these things,

00:59:58.080 | when leaders are not accountable to the people

01:00:01.640 | and their group.

01:00:02.680 | And that's what makes it like the meta,

01:00:05.920 | for me, the meta cause of conflict in all of human history,

01:00:10.120 | and sadly today.

01:00:11.180 | - Does the will to power play into this,

01:00:14.700 | the desire for power?

01:00:16.280 | Like that's a human thing again, in the calculation that,

01:00:21.500 | shall we put that in the misperceptions bucket?

01:00:24.740 | Or is it, is misperceptions essentially

01:00:27.780 | about interaction between humans and power

01:00:31.620 | is more about the thing you feel in your heart

01:00:35.260 | when you're alone as a leader?

01:00:37.880 | - You know, I said there were three strategic reasons,

01:00:40.480 | like the unchecked leaders,

01:00:41.600 | the commitment problems, uncertainty.

01:00:43.200 | There are two sort of more psychological,

01:00:45.320 | and I call them intangible incentives and misperceptions.

01:00:47.440 | The way that like a game theorist,

01:00:48.720 | or the way that a behavioral economist

01:00:50.520 | would think about those two is just to say preferences,

01:00:53.880 | and then erroneous beliefs and mistakes.

01:00:57.120 | It's like, so the preferences are our preferences, right?

01:01:00.260 | And so utility functions, whatever we wanna call it,

01:01:02.980 | like there's not, that's why I wouldn't call them

01:01:05.720 | a misperception or rationality.

01:01:07.640 | We want, we like what we like.

01:01:09.720 | If we like power, if we like relative status,

01:01:12.800 | if we like our racial purity, if we like our liberty,

01:01:17.800 | if we like whatever it is that we

01:01:21.040 | have convinced ourselves we value.

01:01:23.000 | - Maybe you fell in love with a rival queen or king.

01:01:25.560 | - Exactly.

01:01:26.400 | When I said it was a big bucket full of stuff that rhymes,

01:01:29.300 | like that's a pretty messy bucket.

01:01:31.440 | Like there's a lot of different stuff in there.

01:01:33.120 | And I'm just trying to say like,

01:01:34.400 | let's be clear that just about the shared logic

01:01:39.400 | of these things is maybe just, you know,

01:01:40.960 | they're really dissimilar,

01:01:41.840 | but let's be clear about the shared logic.

01:01:44.160 | And if it were true that deep down we were aggressive people

01:01:47.840 | who just liked violence and enjoyed the blood,

01:01:51.520 | or some percentage of us do, that would be there too.

01:01:54.120 | And so I just wanna say that's,

01:01:59.520 | but you know, we're really quick to recognize those, right?

01:02:02.440 | When we diagnose a war as an armchair analyst

01:02:05.520 | or as a journalist or something, we really jump to those.

01:02:09.600 | We don't need a lot of help to like see those happening.

01:02:13.100 | So we probably put a little bit too much emphasis on them,

01:02:17.040 | is maybe the only thing that I would caution.

01:02:19.340 | Because the others are more subtle,

01:02:21.080 | and they're often there, and they contribute.

01:02:24.920 | - So just to look at something you said before,

01:02:27.800 | would it be accurate to say when the leaders become detached

01:02:31.680 | from the opinion of the people,

01:02:36.080 | that's more likely to lead to war?

01:02:38.720 | So--

01:02:40.080 | - In mechanically, it's just,

01:02:41.720 | they're gonna bear fewer costs.

01:02:43.320 | So it's gonna basically narrow the set of deals

01:02:47.400 | that they're gonna be willing to accept instead of violence.

01:02:50.320 | At the same time, most of the time, it's not enough

01:02:53.880 | because the leaders still bear a lot of costs of war.

01:02:56.360 | You could be deposed, you could be killed,

01:02:59.000 | you could be tried, and the public purse

01:03:01.720 | is going to be empty.

01:03:02.800 | That's like the one story throughout history,

01:03:04.560 | is at the end of the day, your regime is broke

01:03:07.640 | as a result of war.

01:03:08.680 | And so you still internalize that a little bit.

01:03:11.320 | If I had to say like, in my three buckets,

01:03:16.480 | or through my buckets so far,

01:03:17.560 | I sort of started with like Ukrainian intransigence,

01:03:20.900 | and then I jumped, and then I said the essential,

01:03:22.800 | then you really have to understand Russian autocracy

01:03:25.000 | for just to understand why they would ask

01:03:27.240 | something so cruel.

01:03:29.320 | But I mean, I think the uncertainty

01:03:31.400 | is really important here as well.

01:03:34.120 | Like if you think of it, like think of all the things,

01:03:36.800 | the way this has played out, and just in some ways,

01:03:39.240 | how many, in how many ways we've been surprised.

01:03:41.840 | We've been surprised by the unity and the coherence

01:03:45.000 | of the West and the sanctions.

01:03:46.600 | That sort of, what's happened is it was in the realm

01:03:49.080 | of possibility, but it was sort of like

01:03:50.640 | the best case scenario from the perspective of the West

01:03:53.840 | and the worst case scenario for the Russians.

01:03:56.160 | The second thing is just the pluckiness

01:03:58.200 | and the effectiveness and the intransigence

01:04:01.640 | and the nobility of this Ukrainian resistance.

01:04:03.960 | That's, again, was within the realm of possibility,

01:04:06.960 | but wasn't necessarily the likely thing, right?

01:04:09.080 | It was again, maybe the worst realization for Russia,

01:04:11.520 | the best realization in some sense for,

01:04:14.440 | in terms of revealed strength and resolve.

01:04:16.880 | And then the other thing that's been revealed

01:04:20.280 | is just how, like the corruption and ineptitude

01:04:24.160 | and problems on the Russian military side.

01:04:26.720 | Again, within the realm of possibility,

01:04:28.880 | maybe people who really knew the Russian military

01:04:30.720 | are less surprised than the rest of us,

01:04:32.560 | but also one of the worst possible draws for Russia.

01:04:36.480 | And so Putin asking this terrible price

01:04:41.400 | and expecting Ukraine to roll over,

01:04:45.040 | or the West to roll over at least to a degree,

01:04:48.840 | was based on like a different set of probability.

01:04:52.800 | It was based on just expecting something

01:04:54.960 | in the middle of the probability distribution

01:04:56.760 | and not one of all these different tail events.

01:04:59.200 | And so the fact that the world's so uncertain

01:05:00.880 | and the fact that Putin can come with

01:05:02.600 | a different set of expectations

01:05:04.160 | than the Ukrainians and the West,

01:05:05.680 | and all these players can just have a hard time agreeing

01:05:09.960 | on just what the facts are,

01:05:11.680 | because we live in an uncertain world.

01:05:12.940 | Everyone's quick to say, "Oh, he miscalculated."

01:05:14.720 | Well, I'm not, I don't know if he miscalculated.

01:05:17.040 | I think he just, he got a really bad draw

01:05:19.040 | in terms of what the realized outcomes are here.

01:05:23.240 | And so, I mean, good for everybody else in some sense,

01:05:27.220 | except the fact that it's involving

01:05:28.920 | a lot of violence as the tragedy.

01:05:30.240 | - Well, there's also economic pain,

01:05:32.640 | not just for the Russian people and the Ukrainian people,

01:05:35.140 | but the whole world.

01:05:37.240 | So, you could talk about things

01:05:44.260 | that we are surprised from an analysis perspective

01:05:47.060 | of small victories here or there,

01:05:49.740 | but I think it's universally true

01:05:51.660 | that everybody loses once again in this war.

01:05:55.580 | - Right, and so the question is just like,

01:05:57.740 | when does it, you know, why did Russia choose to invade

01:06:01.080 | when Ukraine didn't give this up?

01:06:02.780 | Well, Russia anticipated that it would be able to seize

01:06:05.740 | what it wanted.

01:06:08.540 | The available bargain that it deserved, quote unquote,

01:06:11.220 | based on its power in the world,

01:06:13.580 | it wasn't getting, and so it thought it could take that.

01:06:16.700 | And the uncertainty around that made it

01:06:19.500 | potentially more likely that he would choose to do this.

01:06:22.020 | But in particular, one of the other things

01:06:24.380 | that I think is probably less important in this context,

01:06:27.140 | but still plays a role, but less important than many wars,

01:06:30.620 | is the fact that it's really hard

01:06:32.180 | to resolve that uncertainty, right?

01:06:34.460 | In theory, Ukraine should be able to say,

01:06:37.060 | "Look, this is exactly how resolved we are.

01:06:40.580 | "We're super resolved.

01:06:42.560 | "And your military is not as strong as you think it is."

01:06:45.820 | - You mean before the conflict even begins?

01:06:47.940 | - Everybody should be like, you know what?

01:06:48.780 | - You lay on the table, here's my cards.

01:06:50.620 | - No one wants, yeah.

01:06:51.460 | - Here's your cards.

01:06:52.280 | - Exactly, like that's, as a competitor in this,

01:06:55.100 | you can use that uncertainty to your advantage.

01:06:56.980 | I can try to convince you, I can bluff, right?

01:07:00.300 | And so anyone who's ever played poker

01:07:02.160 | and bluffed or called a bluff, that's the inefficient,

01:07:04.980 | that's the analogy in some ways to war.

01:07:06.740 | It's not the perfect analogy,

01:07:08.140 | but the uncertainty and the circumstances,

01:07:10.460 | you don't have to miscalculate.

01:07:11.460 | The fact that if you bluff and lose,

01:07:14.300 | it doesn't mean that you miscalculated.

01:07:16.200 | You made an optimal choice,

01:07:17.840 | given the uncertainty of the situation, to take a gamble.

01:07:20.180 | And that was a wiser thing for you to do than to not bluff

01:07:23.440 | and just to fold or to just not pay in that round.

01:07:28.440 | And so the uncertainty of the situation

01:07:30.640 | gives both sides incentives to bluff,

01:07:32.400 | gives neither side an incentive to try to reveal the truth.

01:07:35.200 | And then at some point, the other side says,

01:07:36.920 | "You know what?

01:07:37.760 | "You say you're resolved.

01:07:39.380 | "You say you're going to mount an uncertainty.

01:07:41.380 | "Well, guess what?

01:07:42.280 | "Every other people on my border has folded,

01:07:48.580 | "and you're going to fold too,

01:07:50.060 | "the minute the tanks roll in

01:07:51.980 | "and the minute the Air Force comes in.

01:07:53.460 | "I'm gambling that you're bluffing."

01:07:55.320 | And so that inherent uncertainty of the situation

01:08:01.180 | just causes a lot of short wars actually,

01:08:05.760 | because it's the sort of bluff and call dynamic

01:08:10.460 | that goes on.

01:08:11.460 | And the thing that's worth reckoning is we might end up

01:08:14.980 | at a place in a few months where the thing

01:08:18.860 | that Ukraine concedes is not so far

01:08:22.440 | from what Russia demanded in the first place.

01:08:25.300 | Russia's on it, I want a neutral,

01:08:28.660 | I mean, who knows how,

01:08:29.780 | it's not the ambitious thing the Russians wanted,

01:08:32.420 | but if we end up in a place where Ukraine

01:08:35.780 | is effectively neutral, never joins NATO,

01:08:39.580 | is not being militarily supplied by the West,

01:08:43.780 | and where Russia has de facto control over the East

01:08:48.660 | and Crimea, if not fully recognized,

01:08:50.980 | who knows if they'll get ever internationally

01:08:53.140 | and Ukrainian recognized, but effectively controls,

01:08:56.520 | Russia will have accomplished what it asked

01:09:03.060 | for in the first place,

01:09:04.620 | and both parties had to get there through violence

01:09:08.600 | rather than through negotiation.

01:09:10.460 | And you wouldn't need misperceptions and mistakes,

01:09:13.660 | and you wouldn't need Putin's delusions of glory

01:09:18.660 | or whatever to get there,

01:09:20.000 | you would just need the ingredients I've given so far,

01:09:22.900 | which is like an unwillingness to do that without fighting

01:09:26.520 | on the part of the Ukrainians,

01:09:28.020 | an autocratic leadership in Russia

01:09:31.300 | who would make those demands

01:09:33.020 | because it's in their self-interest

01:09:34.420 | and then uncertainty leading them to fight.

01:09:38.260 | And that sadly is like the best case,

01:09:42.540 | it feels like the best case scenario right now,

01:09:45.000 | which is the war is just five months and not five years.

01:09:48.980 | - Given the current situation.

01:09:52.980 | - Given the current situation.

01:09:55.200 | - Because the suffering has already happened,

01:09:58.500 | and lost homes, people moving,

01:10:03.860 | having to see their home in rubble

01:10:08.860 | and millions of people, refugees,

01:10:11.900 | having to escape the country,

01:10:13.720 | and hate flourishes versus the common humanity

01:10:21.780 | as it does with war.

01:10:23.740 | And on top of all of that,

01:10:26.060 | if we talk from a geopolitical perspective,

01:10:29.540 | the warmongers all over the world are sort of drooling.

01:10:34.540 | They now have got narratives

01:10:39.100 | and they got that whatever narratives,

01:10:41.240 | you can go shopping for the narratives.

01:10:43.420 | The United States has its narratives

01:10:45.340 | for whatever geopolitical thing it wants to do

01:10:47.540 | in that part of the world.

01:10:48.860 | - That's another little malevolent interaction

01:10:53.500 | between two of these buckets,

01:10:54.620 | like those unchecked leaders

01:10:55.800 | and those intangible incentives, those preferences,

01:10:58.540 | is that unchecked leaders spent, autocrats, whatever,

01:11:03.380 | spend enormous amounts of time

01:11:05.940 | trying to manipulate the values and beliefs

01:11:08.820 | of their population, of their group.

01:11:11.140 | Now, sometimes they do it nobly,

01:11:14.380 | but that's what Winston Churchill there was trying to,

01:11:17.060 | it's not clear that Britons were like ready to stand up.

01:11:19.500 | There were a lot of Americans and a lot of Britons

01:11:20.900 | who were like, you know what?

01:11:22.840 | Hitler, not such a bad guy, his ideas, not so terrible.

01:11:25.820 | I never liked those Jews anyways.

01:11:27.380 | Many were thinking, right?

01:11:28.980 | We had political leaders in the US

01:11:30.420 | who were basically not pro-Nazi,

01:11:33.240 | but were just not anti-Nazi.

01:11:36.660 | And Churchill was just trying to instill a different resolve.

01:11:40.740 | He was trying to create that thing.

01:11:42.660 | He was trying to create that value.

01:11:44.180 | And in the American Revolution, it was as well.

01:11:46.100 | The founding fathers, the leaders of the revolution,

01:11:48.860 | it's not that everybody just woke up one morning

01:11:51.100 | in the United States

01:11:52.060 | and had this ideology of liberty and freedom.

01:11:54.180 | Some of that was true, it was out there in the ether,

01:11:55.660 | but they had to manufacture and create it

01:11:57.860 | in a way that I think they believed and was noble.

01:12:02.140 | But there's a lot of manufacturing and creation

01:12:04.860 | of these values and principles that is not noble.

01:12:07.660 | And that is exactly what Hitler did so well.

01:12:10.020 | - Yeah.

01:12:11.060 | The anti-Semitism was present throughout the world,

01:12:14.260 | but the more subtle thing that I feel like

01:12:17.980 | may be more generally applicable

01:12:23.900 | is this kind of pacifism

01:12:25.980 | that I think people in the United States felt like,

01:12:30.260 | "It's not my conflict.

01:12:31.260 | "Why do I need to get involved with it?"

01:12:33.300 | And I think Churchill was fighting that, the general-

01:12:38.300 | - Apathy.

01:12:39.860 | - It's the apathy of rational calculus.

01:12:46.100 | It's like, "What are we going to gain if we fight back?"

01:12:51.060 | Like, Hitler seems to be pretty reasonable.

01:12:54.780 | He's saying he's going to stop the bombing,

01:12:57.660 | that you're still going to maintain your sovereignty

01:13:01.960 | as the great people of Britain.

01:13:04.460 | Like, "Why are we fighting again?"

01:13:06.780 | And that's the thing that's hard to break

01:13:08.900 | because you have to say,

01:13:10.060 | "Well, you have to speak to principle.

01:13:13.420 | "You have to speak at some greater

01:13:15.980 | "sort of long-term vision of history."

01:13:19.580 | So like, yes, now it may seem like

01:13:23.980 | it's a way to avoid the fight,

01:13:26.100 | but you're actually just sort of putting shackles

01:13:28.660 | on yourself.

01:13:29.500 | You're destroying the very greatness of our people

01:13:33.960 | if we don't fight back.

01:13:35.380 | - And to think about this with the current case with Russia,

01:13:37.900 | I mean, some people look at Putin's speeches

01:13:41.620 | and papers he's written on Ukraine

01:13:45.380 | historically being a part of Russia

01:13:46.780 | and trying to deny the,

01:13:48.320 | basically create all these nationalist narratives.

01:13:51.540 | And they think, "Well, Putin really believes,"

01:13:53.380 | and he might, "Putin really believes this,

01:13:55.180 | "and that's why he's invading."

01:13:56.580 | And that might also be true,

01:13:58.380 | and that would contribute to just make a peaceful bargain

01:14:02.940 | even harder to find.

01:14:04.140 | But I suspect what's at least a minimum true

01:14:07.140 | is Putin's trying to manufacture support for an invasion

01:14:11.660 | in the population through propaganda.

01:14:14.660 | And so he's doing on some level the same thing

01:14:19.660 | that Winston Churchill was doing in mechanical terms,

01:14:23.380 | which is to try to manipulate people's references,

01:14:26.380 | but doing it in a sinister, malevolent, evil,

01:14:31.460 | self-serving way because it's really in his interest,

01:14:33.780 | whereas this was anything but, right,

01:14:37.380 | in the Churchill example.

01:14:38.780 | - The dark human thing is like,

01:14:40.740 | there's moments in World War II

01:14:44.420 | where Hitler's propaganda,

01:14:46.580 | he began to believe his own propaganda.

01:14:49.420 | - I think he probably always believed,

01:14:51.900 | I think he was a sincere believer.

01:14:54.020 | - Well, no, no, no, but there's a lot of places

01:14:57.540 | where there was uncertainty,

01:15:01.620 | and they decided to do propaganda,

01:15:04.180 | and that propaganda resolved the uncertainty

01:15:06.220 | in his own mind.

01:15:07.220 | So for example, he believed until very late

01:15:11.540 | that America is a weakling militarily

01:15:15.340 | and as an economic power and just the spirit of the people.

01:15:18.900 | And that was part of the propaganda they're producing,

01:15:21.580 | and because of that propaganda,

01:15:23.100 | when he became the head of the army,

01:15:25.540 | he was making military actions,

01:15:27.540 | he nonchalantly started war with America,

01:15:30.860 | with the United States of America,

01:15:32.540 | where he didn't need to at all.

01:15:34.180 | He could've avoided that completely,

01:15:35.700 | but he thought, eh, whatever, they're easy.

01:15:39.100 | So that's, I think that propaganda first, belief second.

01:15:42.540 | And I think as a human being, as a dictator,

01:15:46.700 | when you start to believe the lies

01:15:49.180 | with which you're controlling the populace,

01:15:51.260 | you're not able to, you become detached

01:15:53.700 | from this person that's able to resolve

01:15:56.020 | in a very human way the conflict in the world.

01:16:00.540 | - I mean, when I said the meta,

01:16:02.500 | the big common factor that causes war

01:16:04.780 | and over and over and over again is unaccountable power,

01:16:06.780 | it's not just because it's mechanically,

01:16:08.620 | like one of my five explanations to saying,

01:16:10.380 | well, if you're unaccountable, you don't bear the cost

01:16:11.980 | of war, you might have private incentives.

01:16:13.860 | So yes, bargains are harder to find,

01:16:15.860 | but it leads to all these nasty interactions.

01:16:18.180 | So earlier I said there's this interaction

01:16:19.740 | between the values and the unchecked leaders,

01:16:22.820 | because those idiosyncratic values of your leader

01:16:25.700 | become more important when they're unchecked.

01:16:27.940 | But the uncertainty point you just made

01:16:30.180 | is like a deep point.

01:16:31.140 | It's to say actually that like the fundamental problem

01:16:34.940 | that all autocrats have is an information problem,

01:16:38.300 | because nobody wants to give them the right information.

01:16:41.300 | And they have very few ways to aggregate information

01:16:44.780 | if they're not popular, right?

01:16:46.460 | And so there's a whole cottage industry

01:16:49.340 | of political science sort of talking about

01:16:51.380 | why autocrats love fixed elections

01:16:55.460 | and why they love Twitter and why they actually like it

01:16:57.900 | in a controlled way, it solves an information problem.

01:17:00.380 | Like that's your crucial, if you're like Xi Jinping

01:17:03.020 | or Vladimir Putin, you need to solve an information problem

01:17:06.900 | just to avoid having a rebellion on your hands

01:17:08.820 | in your own country every day.

01:17:10.340 | Because uncertainty kind of gets magnified

01:17:13.500 | and you get all this distorted information

01:17:15.260 | in this apparatus of control.

01:17:16.620 | And so that's like another nasty interaction

01:17:19.340 | between uncertainty and unchecked leaders

01:17:22.700 | is you end up in this situation

01:17:25.700 | where you're getting bad information.

01:17:27.420 | And it's not that you believe your own lies,

01:17:31.020 | it's just that you never, you sort of believe,

01:17:33.100 | you're sort of averaging what you believe

01:17:35.300 | over the available information

01:17:36.780 | and you don't realize that it's such a distorted

01:17:40.060 | and biased information source.

01:17:41.600 | - One of the other things about this time

01:17:46.100 | that was a surprise to me in the fog of uncertainty,

01:17:49.820 | how sort of seemingly likely nuclear war became,

01:17:55.900 | not likely, but how it--

01:18:02.700 | - Less unlikely than before.

01:18:03.980 | - Exactly, that's a better way to say it.

01:18:05.620 | It started to take a random stroll

01:18:09.500 | away from 0% probability into this kind of land

01:18:13.380 | of maybe like, it's hard to know,

01:18:15.740 | but it's like, oh wow, we're actually normally

01:18:18.580 | talking about this as if this is part of the calculus,

01:18:21.940 | part of the options.

01:18:23.220 | But before we talk about nuclear war,

01:18:25.180 | 'cause I'm gonna need a drink,

01:18:26.700 | do you need to go to the bathroom?

01:18:28.660 | - Sure, I'll take a break.

01:18:29.960 | - So back to nuclear war.

01:18:33.540 | What do you think about this,

01:18:34.740 | that people were nonchalantly speaking about nuclear wars

01:18:38.940 | if it doesn't lead to the potential annihilation

01:18:42.300 | of the human species?

01:18:43.960 | What are the chances that our world

01:18:47.220 | ascends into nuclear war?

01:18:49.020 | Within your framework, you wear many hats.

01:18:52.740 | One is sort of the analyst, right?

01:18:57.740 | And then one is a human.

01:19:01.460 | What do you think are the chances

01:19:02.740 | we get to see nuclear war in the century?

01:19:05.260 | - Well, you know, the official doomsday clock

01:19:08.140 | for nuclear warfare sits in the lobby of my building.

01:19:11.460 | The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

01:19:12.980 | sort of shares a building with us.

01:19:14.580 | So it's always there every day.

01:19:16.300 | - Can you describe what the doomsday clock is?

01:19:18.060 | - The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,

01:19:19.580 | it's something that this group of physicists

01:19:21.900 | sort of said to sort of mark just how close we are

01:19:24.000 | to nuclear catastrophe, and they started it decades ago.

01:19:27.220 | And it's a clock, and it's sort of how close

01:19:29.180 | are we to midnight, where midnight is nuclear Armageddon

01:19:31.900 | or the destruction of humanity?

01:19:33.140 | And it's been sitting, I mean, it's actually,

01:19:35.860 | it hasn't moved as close to midnight

01:19:38.860 | in the last few weeks as it probably should have

01:19:44.060 | only because it was already so close.

01:19:47.260 | There's actually limited room for it to move

01:19:49.200 | for a bunch of other reasons.

01:19:50.340 | I think it's, there's a whole political thing

01:19:52.260 | that it's really hard, it's really easy to move it closer.

01:19:55.760 | And it's really hard if you're the person

01:19:57.300 | in charge of that clock to move it away, right?

01:19:59.380 | Because that's always very controversial.

01:20:00.860 | So it always sits there, but it forces you

01:20:03.420 | to think about it a little bit every day.

01:20:05.460 | And I admit I was nonchalant about it until recently

01:20:12.620 | in a way that many, many other people were.

01:20:16.760 | I still think the risk is very low,

01:20:20.640 | but kind of for the reasons we've talked,

01:20:24.860 | it's just so unimaginably costly

01:20:27.580 | that nobody wants to go that route.

01:20:29.460 | So it's like the extreme version of my whole argument

01:20:33.740 | was why we most of the time don't fight

01:20:35.700 | is because it's just so damn costly.

01:20:37.940 | And so this is, that's the incentive not to use this.

01:20:41.060 | And if they do use it, that's the incentive

01:20:43.300 | to use it in a very restrained way.

01:20:45.200 | But that's not a lot of, but because we know

01:20:50.020 | we do go to war and there's all these things

01:20:51.420 | that interfere with it, including miscalculation

01:20:53.900 | and all of these human foibles,

01:20:55.900 | and several of those nuclear powers

01:20:58.340 | are not accountable leaders,

01:21:00.540 | I think we have to be a lot more worried

01:21:02.620 | than many of us were very recently.

01:21:04.380 | I pointed out earlier, like the whole reason

01:21:06.340 | we're in this mess is because the only people

01:21:08.340 | who have this private interest in like having Ukraine

01:21:10.660 | give up its freedom is this Russian cabal and elite

01:21:14.960 | that gets their power and is preserved only

01:21:19.500 | and is threatened by Ukrainian democracy.

01:21:22.820 | What would, how far would they go to hang on to power

01:21:26.700 | when push came to shove is I think the thing

01:21:30.020 | that worries me the most and is plainly

01:21:33.560 | what worries most people about the risk of nuclear war.

01:21:36.140 | Like at what point does that unchecked leadership

01:21:38.780 | decide that this is worth it?

01:21:41.900 | Especially if they can emerge from the rubble still on top.

01:21:46.620 | I don't know.

01:21:47.460 | So, and I don't know that any of us

01:21:51.380 | have really fully thought through all of that calculus

01:21:54.740 | and what's going on.

01:21:56.100 | Very recently around the anniversary of January 6th,

01:21:58.620 | there were a lot of questions about

01:21:59.700 | was the United States gonna have another civil war?

01:22:02.860 | On the one hand, I think it's almost unimaginable.

01:22:06.040 | Sort of like in the same way I think that a nuclear war

01:22:08.780 | and a complete Armageddon is unimaginable.

01:22:11.300 | But I remember something that,

01:22:13.800 | when both of those questions get asked,

01:22:18.020 | I remember something, I was in the audience

01:22:20.780 | of listening to some great economists speak about

01:22:23.340 | the 20 years ago, but the risk of an Argentina style

01:22:26.500 | financial meltdown of the United States.

01:22:28.040 | Like what's the total financial collapse?

01:22:30.940 | And they said, you know what?

01:22:32.100 | The risk is vanishingly small,

01:22:34.200 | but that's terrifying because until recently

01:22:38.460 | the answer was zero.

01:22:40.360 | And so the fact that it's not zero

01:22:42.180 | should deeply, deeply scare us all.

01:22:44.540 | And we should devote a lot of energy

01:22:47.100 | to making it zero again.

01:22:48.700 | And that's how I feel about the risk

01:22:49.940 | of a civil war in the US.

01:22:50.940 | And that's how I feel about the risk of nuclear war.

01:22:53.500 | It's higher than it used to be

01:22:55.500 | and that should terrify us all.

01:22:57.420 | - To me what terrifies me is that all this kind of stuff

01:22:59.780 | seems to happen like overnight, like super quick

01:23:03.700 | and it escalates super quick when it happens.

01:23:06.420 | So it's not like, I don't know.

01:23:10.060 | I don't know what I imagine, but it just happens.

01:23:13.340 | Like if a nuclear war happened,

01:23:15.740 | it would be something like a plane,

01:23:19.580 | like in this case with Ukraine,

01:23:21.540 | a NATO plane shut down over some piece of land

01:23:26.340 | by the Russian forces or so the narrative would go,

01:23:32.060 | but it doesn't even matter what's true or not

01:23:33.900 | in order to spark the first moment of escalation.

01:23:38.900 | And then it just goes, goes, goes.

01:23:40.620 | - Well, I think that happens sometimes.

01:23:42.100 | I mean, again, it's this thing that,

01:23:44.020 | what social scientists call it,

01:23:46.700 | selection on the dependent variable.

01:23:48.060 | Like there's all these times when that didn't happen,

01:23:50.340 | when it stopped, when it escalated one step

01:23:53.180 | and then people paused or escalated two steps

01:23:55.340 | and people said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

01:23:58.140 | And so we remember the times when it went boom, boom, boom,

01:24:01.660 | boom, boom, boom, boom.

01:24:02.500 | And then the really terrible thing happened.

01:24:03.900 | But that, fortunately that's not,

01:24:05.980 | I start off the book with an example of a gang war

01:24:08.420 | that didn't happen in Medellin, Colombia,

01:24:10.740 | which is sort of, that's my day job

01:24:12.180 | is actually studying conflict and gangs and violence

01:24:15.180 | and of these other kinds of groups.

01:24:17.740 | Also very sinister.

01:24:19.140 | And most of the time they don't fight

01:24:23.460 | and that escalation doesn't happen.

01:24:24.980 | So the escalation does happen quickly sometimes,

01:24:27.740 | except when it doesn't, which--

01:24:29.340 | - So we remember the ones when it does.

01:24:31.100 | It's really important to think about all that.

01:24:33.380 | I remember talking to, I think Elon Musk on his podcast,

01:24:39.700 | I was sort of like talking about the horrors of war

01:24:42.940 | and so on.

01:24:44.340 | And then he said, well, you know,

01:24:46.060 | like most of human history,

01:24:49.220 | 'cause I think I said like most of human history

01:24:52.500 | had been defined by these horrible wars.

01:24:59.180 | He's like, no, most of human history

01:25:01.140 | is just peaceful, like farming life.

01:25:03.340 | We kind of remember the wars,

01:25:06.700 | but most of human history is just, you know, is life.

01:25:09.820 | - Yeah, most of the competition between nations

01:25:12.460 | was like blood, I would say blood thirsty

01:25:16.900 | without drinking that blood

01:25:18.980 | in the sense that it was intense, it would loathe some.

01:25:22.700 | And so a lot of the rivalry and a lot of the competition,

01:25:26.100 | which is also can be problematic in its own ways

01:25:29.740 | is not violent.

01:25:30.860 | And most of human history is about the oppression

01:25:33.940 | of the majority by a few.

01:25:36.620 | And there are moments when they rise up and revolt

01:25:40.300 | and there's a revolution, we remember those,

01:25:42.060 | but most of the time they don't.

01:25:43.660 | And the story of political change and transformation

01:25:48.380 | and freedom is there's a few revolutions that are violent,

01:25:52.060 | but most of it is actually revolutions

01:25:54.940 | without that kind of violent revolt.

01:25:57.420 | Most of it is just the peaceful concession of power

01:26:00.540 | by elites to a wider and wider group of people

01:26:03.540 | in response to their increased economic bargaining power,

01:26:06.380 | their threat that they're gonna march.

01:26:08.420 | So even if we wanna understand something like

01:26:11.580 | the march of freedom over human history,

01:26:14.580 | I think we can draw the same insight

01:26:16.660 | that actually we don't, most of the time we don't fight,

01:26:20.380 | we actually concede power.

01:26:23.020 | Now you don't, the elite doesn't sort of give power

01:26:25.860 | to the masses right away, they just co-opt the few merchants

01:26:29.020 | who could threaten the whole thing

01:26:31.220 | and bring them into the circle.

01:26:33.380 | And then the circle gets a little bit wider

01:26:35.100 | and a little bit wider until the circle is ever widened,

01:26:37.940 | maybe not ever, but encompasses most, if not all.

01:26:41.340 | And that's like a hopeful and optimistic trend.

01:26:45.540 | - Yeah, if you look at the plot,

01:26:47.700 | if you guys could pull it up of the wars throughout history,

01:26:50.660 | this is the rate of wars throughout history

01:26:52.740 | just seem to be decreasing significantly

01:26:55.340 | with a few spikes and the sort of the expansion.

01:26:59.500 | It's like half the world is under authoritarian regimes,

01:27:04.540 | but that's been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.

01:27:07.380 | - Steven Pinker's one person,

01:27:09.260 | one famous scholar who brings up this hypothesis.

01:27:12.100 | I mean, there's sort of two ways,

01:27:13.420 | there's actually two separate kinds of violence,

01:27:15.500 | that one where I think he's completely right

01:27:17.700 | and one where I think we're not sure, maybe not.

01:27:21.300 | Where he's completely right,

01:27:22.220 | sort of interpersonal violence, homicides,

01:27:24.580 | everyday violence has been going down, down,

01:27:26.980 | down, down, down, down, down.

01:27:27.980 | That's just unambiguously.

01:27:29.140 | And it's mostly because we've created cultures

01:27:32.140 | and states and rules and things that control that violence.

01:27:35.700 | Now the warfare between groups,

01:27:39.340 | is that less frequent?

01:27:40.740 | Well, it's not clear that he's right,

01:27:43.100 | that there's fewer wars.

01:27:44.940 | You might say that wars are more rare

01:27:49.180 | because they're more costly

01:27:50.900 | because our weapons are so brutal.

01:27:53.100 | The costs of war go up, as the costs of war go up,

01:27:55.660 | not entirely, but for the most part,

01:27:57.420 | that gives us an understanding of not to have them.

01:28:00.460 | But then when they do happen, they're doozies.

01:28:02.700 | So is Pinker right?

01:28:05.260 | I hope he's right,

01:28:06.100 | but I don't think that officially that trend is there.

01:28:08.860 | I think that we might have the same kind of levels

01:28:13.860 | of intergroup violence because maybe those five fundamentals

01:28:19.980 | that lead to war have not fundamentally changed

01:28:23.180 | and thus made us, given us a more peaceful world now

01:28:26.540 | than a couple hundred years ago.

01:28:28.060 | - That's something to think about.

01:28:29.220 | So obviously looking at his hypothesis,

01:28:31.060 | looking at his data and others like him.

01:28:33.260 | But I have noticed one thing,

01:28:34.900 | which is the amount of pushback he gets.

01:28:38.220 | That there is this,

01:28:39.220 | this is speaking to the general point that you made,

01:28:42.080 | which is like we overemphasize the anecdotal,

01:28:45.500 | and don't look objectively at the aggregate data as much.

01:28:51.460 | There's a general cynicism about the world.

01:28:53.940 | And not, I don't even mean cynicism.

01:28:56.260 | It's almost like cynicism porn or something like that,

01:28:58.740 | where people just get, for some reason,

01:29:01.820 | they get a little bit excited to talk about the destruction

01:29:05.660 | of human civilization in a weird way.

01:29:09.660 | Like they don't really mean it, I think.

01:29:12.180 | If I were to like psychoanalyze their geopolitical analysis,

01:29:17.180 | is I don't, I think it's a kind of, I don't know,

01:29:20.980 | maybe it relieves the mind to think about death

01:29:24.700 | at a global scale somehow.

01:29:26.300 | And then you can go have lunch with your kids afterwards

01:29:29.300 | and feel a little better about the world.

01:29:30.800 | I don't know what it is.

01:29:31.980 | But that, it's not very scientific.

01:29:33.680 | It's very kind of personal, emotional.

01:29:36.220 | And so we should be careful to look at the world

01:29:39.460 | in that way, 'cause if you look broadly,

01:29:43.460 | there is just like you highlight,

01:29:45.560 | there's a will for peace among people, yeah.

01:29:50.560 | You mentioned Medellin.

01:29:52.780 | By the way, how do you pronounce it, Medellin or Medellin?

01:29:55.140 | - Both are fine.

01:29:55.980 | I think the, there they say Medellin,

01:29:58.020 | because that's kind of the accent,

01:29:59.380 | is the zh on the double L.

01:30:01.620 | But Medellin would be totally fine as well.

01:30:05.660 | - What lessons do you draw from the Medellin cartel,

01:30:08.580 | from the different gang wars in Colombia, Medellin?

01:30:12.460 | What's the economics of peace and war

01:30:15.180 | between drug cartels?

01:30:17.180 | - Here's what was really insightful for me.

01:30:18.680 | So I live in Chicago, and people are aware

01:30:22.500 | that there's a violence problem in Chicago.

01:30:24.300 | It's actually not the worst American city

01:30:25.660 | by any stretch of the imagination for shootings,

01:30:27.720 | but it's pretty bad.

01:30:29.560 | And Medellin has these better, many more,

01:30:33.560 | and probably many better organized gangs than Chicago.

01:30:38.560 | And yet the homicide rate is maybe half.

01:30:42.160 | And now, I mean, there have been moments

01:30:48.080 | when these gangs go to war in the last 30 years

01:30:50.960 | when Medellin has become the most violent place

01:30:52.960 | on the planet.

01:30:53.800 | But for the most part right now, they're peaceful.

01:30:55.340 | And so what's going on there?

01:30:58.560 | I mean, one thing that is,

01:30:59.600 | there's a hierarchy of organizations.

01:31:02.880 | So that above these reasonably well-organized

01:31:05.080 | neighborhood gangs, there's a set of more shadowy

01:31:07.200 | organizations that have different names.

01:31:09.500 | Some people call them "rezones."

01:31:10.800 | Some people would call them "bandas criminales,"

01:31:12.960 | criminal bands.

01:31:13.800 | You might just call them "mafias."

01:31:15.520 | And they, there's about 17 of them,

01:31:19.000 | depending on how you want to count.

01:31:20.560 | And they themselves have a little operating board

01:31:25.280 | called, sometimes they call it the "oficina."

01:31:27.720 | Sometimes they call it "la mesa," the table.

01:31:30.920 | - Well, each individual one, or as a group?

01:31:33.080 | - As a group, as a group.

01:31:34.440 | So they meet, and they don't meet personally all the time.

01:31:37.560 | Sometimes they meet, but they consult.

01:31:39.920 | A lot of the leaders of these groups are actually in prison.

01:31:42.960 | And so, and they're in the same wings in prison.

01:31:44.800 | - They have representatives, oh, they meet in prison.

01:31:46.960 | - Well, they're, whatever, if I'm on a cell block with you,

01:31:49.760 | I'm meeting you anyways, right?

01:31:51.320 | So actually, imprisoning leaders and putting them

01:31:54.520 | in the same cell block, but not putting them in,

01:31:57.400 | if you get arrested here in the United States

01:31:58.840 | and you're a criminal leader,

01:31:59.960 | and you get put in a supermax prison,

01:32:01.360 | you cannot run your criminal empire.

01:32:02.800 | It's just too difficult, it's impossible.

01:32:04.560 | There, it's possible.

01:32:06.040 | And you might think, and they do,

01:32:07.760 | they still run their empire.

01:32:08.960 | And you might think that's a bad idea,

01:32:11.240 | but actually, cutting off the head

01:32:13.560 | of a criminal organization, leading it to a bunch,

01:32:15.480 | leaving it to a bunch of like hotheaded young guys

01:32:17.200 | who are disorganized is not always the path to peace.

01:32:19.800 | So having these guys all in the same prison patios

01:32:23.320 | is actually, it reduces imperfect information

01:32:28.320 | and uncertainty, right?

01:32:29.880 | It provides a place for them to bargain, they can talk.

01:32:32.400 | And so La Oficina is like a lot of these informal meetings.

01:32:35.280 | And so, you know, and they have these tools

01:32:39.820 | that they use to control the street gangs.

01:32:41.440 | So instead of there being like 400 gangs,

01:32:44.000 | all sort of in this anarchic situation

01:32:45.880 | of competing for territory and constantly at war,

01:32:48.640 | the Rezones are keeping them in line.

01:32:52.680 | And they will use sanctions.

01:32:54.800 | They will, where the sanction might be,

01:32:57.400 | I will put a bullet in your head if you don't--

01:33:00.840 | - It's a little more honest

01:33:01.680 | than the sanctions between nations.

01:33:03.720 | - Exactly, but they will sit them down.

01:33:06.320 | They'll provide, they'll help them negotiate.

01:33:08.920 | They will provide, I said there are these things

01:33:10.840 | called commitment problems where like there's some,

01:33:12.880 | I have some incentive to like exterminate you,

01:33:15.560 | but that's gonna be costly for everybody.

01:33:17.060 | So I'm gonna, what's the solution?

01:33:18.520 | I'm gonna provide commitment.

01:33:19.500 | I'm gonna like enforce this deal.

01:33:21.600 | And yeah, you don't like this deal now

01:33:23.240 | because you could take advantage of your situation

01:33:25.840 | and wage war, but I'm gonna give you a counter-incentives.

01:33:28.840 | And so they keep the peace.

01:33:31.360 | And so, and it's a little bit,

01:33:33.280 | so they're a little bit like the UN Security Council

01:33:35.680 | and peacekeeping forces and sanctions regimes.

01:33:38.080 | It's like the same kinds of tools, the same parallels.

01:33:41.360 | And they're imperfect.

01:33:43.160 | They don't always work that well.

01:33:44.520 | And they're unequal, right?

01:33:45.480 | 'Cause it's not like they're pursuing this

01:33:47.000 | in the interests of like democratic, blah, blah, blah.

01:33:51.300 | But it kind of works until it doesn't.

01:33:55.380 | And 10 years ago in the mid 1990s,

01:33:58.580 | there were wars and this breaks down.

01:34:00.700 | And it kind of gave me this perspective

01:34:02.640 | on the international institutions

01:34:04.280 | and all the tools we've built,

01:34:05.800 | that we do the same things, right?

01:34:07.420 | Sanctions are designed to make unchecked leaders

01:34:12.420 | face the cost of war.

01:34:15.060 | It's a solution to one of the five problems, right?

01:34:18.500 | And mediators are a solution to uncertainty.

01:34:22.640 | And international institutions

01:34:24.260 | that can enforce a peace and agreement

01:34:25.780 | are a solution to commitment problems.

01:34:27.540 | And all of these things can be solutions

01:34:29.220 | to these intangible incentives,

01:34:31.300 | like these preferences for whatever you value

01:34:33.980 | and miscalculations,

01:34:35.560 | because they will punish you for your miscalculation

01:34:38.100 | or they will get a mediator to sort of help you realize

01:34:40.660 | why you're miscalculating.

01:34:41.740 | So they're doing all these things.

01:34:43.260 | And it made me realize that the comparison

01:34:45.820 | to the UN Security Council and all our tools

01:34:48.940 | is actually a pretty good one

01:34:49.780 | 'cause those are pretty unequal too.

01:34:52.140 | And those are pretty imperfect.

01:34:53.860 | Like there's these,

01:34:55.940 | we have five nations with a veto on the Security Council

01:34:58.940 | and a lot of unequal power

01:35:00.820 | and they're manipulating this in their own self-interest

01:35:04.220 | or their group's interests.

01:35:05.800 | So anyway, so it's actually the,

01:35:09.380 | some of the things that work in Medellin

01:35:12.500 | and why they work help give me a lot of perspective

01:35:15.180 | on what works in the international arena

01:35:17.300 | and why we have some of the problems we have.

01:35:19.340 | - So there's not,

01:35:20.180 | in some deep way there's not a fundamental difference

01:35:23.780 | between those 17 mafia groups and--

01:35:26.820 | - The UN Security Council.

01:35:27.660 | - The UN Security Council.

01:35:28.500 | (laughing)

01:35:31.380 | We're such funny descendant of apes.

01:35:33.700 | We put on suits.

01:35:35.180 | I'm sure they're wearing different,

01:35:36.580 | they have different cultural garbs that they wear.

01:35:39.580 | What are your thoughts?

01:35:40.420 | I mean, that's the sense I got from Pablo Escobar

01:35:42.220 | and Jorge Ochoa who founded the Medellin cartel

01:35:46.260 | is like having spoken with people on this podcast,

01:35:50.580 | talked to Roger Reeves who was a drug transporter.

01:35:53.940 | It seems like there, it seems like it was,

01:35:56.440 | I don't know the right term,

01:36:00.460 | but it was very kind of professional and calm.

01:36:04.220 | It didn't have a sense of danger to it,

01:36:06.060 | like it's negotiating.

01:36:07.460 | So like the danger is always on the table as a threat

01:36:09.940 | as part of the calculation,

01:36:11.240 | but you're using that threat in order to deescalate,

01:36:14.140 | in order to have peace.

01:36:15.060 | Everybody is interested in peace.

01:36:17.980 | - So something that happened last year,

01:36:19.460 | we were a little bit able to watch in real time

01:36:21.380 | 'cause we had a few contacts.

01:36:22.420 | We've been meeting and talking to a lot of these leaders

01:36:25.220 | in prison and a bit outside of prison.

01:36:27.180 | Many of them will talk to us.

01:36:29.540 | And so, the homicide, I mentioned homicide rate

01:36:35.380 | in Medellin's maybe 2/3 or half of the Chicago level.

01:36:39.620 | It had been climbing.

01:36:41.320 | Some of these street level gangs were starting to fight.

01:36:44.640 | Maybe at sort of the, on some level,

01:36:49.340 | it seems that like maybe some of those

01:36:51.800 | Razon leaders were like saying,

01:36:53.240 | "Well, you know, we're actually not sure

01:36:54.640 | "how strong these guys are.

01:36:55.600 | "Let's let them fight just to test it out.

01:36:57.320 | "Let's have these skirmishes."

01:36:58.400 | Right, it wasn't prolonged warfare.

01:37:00.040 | It was like, "Let's just sort of feel out

01:37:01.480 | "how strong everybody is 'cause then we'll be able

01:37:03.260 | "to reapportion the drug corners and stuff accordingly."

01:37:06.920 | So they were kind of feeling each other out

01:37:08.280 | through fighting.

01:37:09.680 | And the homicide rate doubled and then it increased

01:37:13.280 | by the same amount again.

01:37:14.320 | And so it was approaching something

01:37:15.920 | that might get out of control,

01:37:18.060 | which wasn't in anybody's interest.

01:37:19.440 | It wasn't in the government's interest,

01:37:20.440 | it wasn't in their interest.

01:37:21.360 | And so then magically,

01:37:23.460 | all these leaders in these patios, right,

01:37:27.880 | different prisons, they're spread out

01:37:29.680 | around a bunch of prisons.

01:37:31.860 | Everybody gets transferred to a new prison on the same day,

01:37:34.680 | which means they all get to be in the same holding area

01:37:37.800 | for three days before they're all moved elsewhere.

01:37:40.240 | So the government had a role in this.

01:37:42.720 | And then somebody who's like a trusted mediator

01:37:46.040 | on the criminal side gets himself arrested,

01:37:49.160 | happens to be put in the same spot.

01:37:51.100 | And a week later, the homicide rate is 30% of what it was.

01:37:57.560 | It's back to its normal, moderate,

01:38:01.600 | unfortunately not zero, right?

01:38:03.660 | But it's back to where it was

01:38:06.840 | because it didn't make sense to have a war.

01:38:09.480 | And everybody, government, mafia leaders,

01:38:12.480 | everybody's sort of like,

01:38:13.880 | they figured out a way to sort of

01:38:16.440 | bargain their way to peace.

01:38:17.740 | - Can I ask you something almost like a tangent,

01:38:20.600 | but you mentioned you got a chance potentially

01:38:23.420 | to talk to a few folks,

01:38:24.800 | some were in prison, some were not.

01:38:26.720 | Is it productive?

01:38:30.480 | Is it interesting?

01:38:32.720 | Maybe by way of advice,

01:38:34.320 | do you have ideas about talking to people

01:38:36.240 | who are actively criminals?

01:38:38.320 | - Yeah.

01:38:39.920 | It really depends on the situation.

01:38:41.520 | So like the first time I worked in a conflicted place

01:38:44.440 | was in Northern Uganda,

01:38:46.600 | in maybe the last couple of years of a long running war.

01:38:49.120 | So this would have been 2004, 2005.

01:38:51.520 | This is a small East African country.

01:38:53.880 | And the north of the country had been engulfed in,

01:38:57.360 | think of it as like a 20 year low level insurgency

01:39:02.240 | run by a self-proclaimed Messiah

01:39:06.120 | who wasn't that popular and no one joined his movement.

01:39:09.720 | So he would kidnap kids.

01:39:11.220 | And so I never,

01:39:16.360 | I could talk to people who'd come back from being there.

01:39:18.880 | I never once, if I'd wanted to,

01:39:21.040 | and I was writing about that armed group.

01:39:23.320 | I never talked to anybody who was an active member

01:39:25.280 | of that armed group, it was quite rare.

01:39:26.680 | It wouldn't have been easy or safe.

01:39:31.040 | And that's sometimes true.

01:39:32.280 | I'm starting to do some work in Mexico probably,

01:39:34.560 | and I'm not gonna be talking to any criminal.

01:39:37.000 | They'll kill people.

01:39:37.840 | - When you say you're not going to talk to them

01:39:40.320 | and they'll kill people, which people?

01:39:44.920 | - So, I mean, journalists are routinely killed

01:39:47.920 | for knowing too much in Mexico.

01:39:49.880 | There's no compunctions about killing them

01:39:53.280 | and there's no consequences.

01:39:55.240 | - Who kills a journalist?

01:39:56.560 | It's not the main people that you spoke with, it's their,

01:40:01.560 | is it their lackeys or is it rival gangs?

01:40:07.160 | - This is true of a Chicago gang

01:40:09.240 | and this is true of a Medellin gang.

01:40:11.440 | It's probably true of a Mexico gang.

01:40:12.920 | It's like, you might have your group of 30 people.

01:40:16.000 | One or two of them might be shooters.

01:40:18.160 | Most people don't shoot.

01:40:19.040 | Most people don't like to do that.

01:40:21.560 | Or you don't even have any of those people in your group

01:40:23.880 | because you're trying to run a business.

01:40:25.280 | You don't need any shooters.

01:40:26.240 | You can just hire a killer when you need them on contract.

01:40:30.560 | And so if somebody's asking questions

01:40:33.480 | and you don't want them to ask questions

01:40:36.480 | or you think they know too much in a way that threatens you

01:40:40.000 | and it's cheap for you

01:40:42.160 | and you have no personal compunctions,

01:40:44.600 | then you can put a contract out on them

01:40:47.640 | and they'll be killed.

01:40:48.760 | That doesn't happen in Colombia.

01:40:51.920 | It doesn't happen in Chicago.

01:40:56.720 | I don't know, there's lots of reasons for that.

01:41:00.280 | I can't say exactly why.

01:41:01.320 | I think one reason is like, they know what'll happen,

01:41:04.360 | is that there'll be consequences,

01:41:06.400 | that the government will crack down and make them pay

01:41:09.840 | and so they don't do it.

01:41:11.040 | That's not what happened in Mexico.

01:41:15.360 | They won't kill a DA agent.

01:41:16.720 | They know that, the US has made it clear,

01:41:18.640 | you kill one of our agents, we will make you pay.

01:41:21.600 | And so they're very careful to minimize

01:41:24.400 | death of American, but you kill journalists

01:41:27.160 | and nobody comes after them or is able to come after them.

01:41:29.560 | And so they've realized they can get away with this

01:41:31.760 | and that seems to be the equilibrium there.

01:41:33.120 | That's my initial sense from,

01:41:36.680 | but we spent a lot of time

01:41:38.520 | before we started talking to criminals.

01:41:41.160 | We spent a year trying to figure out what was safe

01:41:43.600 | before we actually, and failing.

01:41:45.440 | We kept, there are lots of safe things to do.

01:41:46.960 | It was also really hard to figure out

01:41:48.160 | how to talk to people in these organizations

01:41:50.160 | and we failed 40 times before we figured out a way

01:41:53.480 | to actually access people.

01:41:55.800 | - Is it worth it talking to them if you figure out,

01:41:58.560 | 'cause it's not never gonna be safe.

01:42:00.080 | It's going to be when you estimate

01:42:02.840 | that there's some low level of risk.

01:42:04.840 | Like what's the benefit as a researcher,

01:42:07.360 | as a scholar of humans?

01:42:10.920 | - Yeah, so I actually don't think,

01:42:13.920 | let's compare it to something,

01:42:15.240 | okay, I'm in Austin for the first time

01:42:17.680 | and I'm walking around and there's all these people

01:42:19.920 | buzzing around on these scooters without helmets.

01:42:23.160 | - We need to definitely interview them

01:42:25.240 | and say what the hell is wrong with you?

01:42:26.800 | - So nothing I have ever done in my entire career

01:42:29.520 | is as risky as that.

01:42:31.480 | - That's a nice way to compare journalism in a war zone.

01:42:36.160 | - Not well, yeah, there's some war zones.

01:42:39.520 | I worked in Northern Uganda and I worked in Liberia

01:42:42.040 | and I work now in Medellin

01:42:43.520 | and I'm starting to work in Mexico

01:42:45.560 | and both those particular places

01:42:48.080 | and then the things I did in those places

01:42:49.800 | where I spent a lot of time making sure

01:42:52.360 | that what I was doing was not unduly risky.

01:42:55.480 | - Todd, could you pull up a picture

01:42:57.080 | of a person on a scooter in Austin

01:42:59.680 | so we can just compare this absurd situation

01:43:02.880 | where I doubt it's the riskiest thing

01:43:05.040 | 'cause now we have to look at the data.

01:43:06.400 | I understand the point you're making, but wow.

01:43:09.760 | - So I'm not trying to say there's zero risk.

01:43:11.400 | I think there's like a calculated risk

01:43:13.440 | and I think you become good at,

01:43:16.120 | you work at becoming good at being able to assess

01:43:20.000 | these risks and know who can help you assess these risks.

01:43:22.640 | - Yeah, I think there's another aspect to it too.

01:43:27.320 | When you're riding a scooter,

01:43:28.920 | once you're done with the scooter,

01:43:33.080 | the risk has disappeared.

01:43:35.280 | There's something, the lingering

01:43:37.160 | where you have to look over your shoulder,

01:43:38.960 | potentially for the rest of your life

01:43:40.400 | as you accumulate all of these conversations.

01:43:42.760 | - Yeah, I've chosen, but I've also advised my students

01:43:45.800 | and I wouldn't go and do this with an armed group

01:43:48.160 | that would think I knew too much

01:43:52.080 | and therefore, some people do that.

01:43:53.360 | Some journalists I think are very brave

01:43:55.120 | and take risks and do that and good for them

01:43:57.440 | and I'm happy they do that.

01:43:58.720 | I don't personally do that.

01:44:02.800 | So these guys are very, I mean,

01:44:05.200 | a medicinian is a business.

01:44:06.240 | They're just, they're selling local drugs

01:44:09.440 | and they are laundering money for the big cartels

01:44:12.840 | and they are shaking down businesses for money

01:44:17.680 | or selling services in some cases

01:44:19.680 | and they make a lot of money, it's a business

01:44:22.240 | and they're in prison so they can talk about

01:44:27.240 | most of what they wanna talk about

01:44:29.120 | because there's no double jeopardy.

01:44:30.560 | They've been incarcerated for it

01:44:32.920 | and you're just talking shop

01:44:36.800 | and they're just, you know,

01:44:38.240 | so it's worth it I think because the risk is very low

01:44:41.520 | but if you actually wanna weaken these organizations

01:44:44.160 | and they're extremely powerful,

01:44:45.600 | they're extremely big facet of life in a lot of cities

01:44:48.800 | in the Americas in particular,

01:44:50.320 | including in some of the United, some American cities,

01:44:53.080 | if you wanna understand how to weaken these groups over time

01:44:58.320 | you have to understand how their business works

01:45:00.880 | and we're like, imagine you were made like the,

01:45:03.720 | whatever the oil czars of the United States

01:45:08.120 | or maybe you're in charge of the finance industry, right?

01:45:11.880 | You're the regulator for oil and energy

01:45:14.520 | or for finance and then you get in the job

01:45:16.560 | and someone says, and then you're like,

01:45:18.960 | well, how many firms are there and what do they sell

01:45:21.280 | and what are the prices?

01:45:22.160 | And everyone's like, well, you know, we don't really know.

01:45:25.040 | You would not be a very good regulator, right?

01:45:27.560 | And if you're a policeman or you're someone

01:45:30.120 | who's in charge of counter organized crime,

01:45:31.680 | you're just a regulator.

01:45:32.520 | You're trying to regulate an illicit industry.

01:45:34.360 | You're regulating an industry that happens to be illicit

01:45:37.200 | and you have no information.

01:45:38.600 | And so that's kind of what we do.

01:45:42.120 | We figure out how the system works

01:45:44.400 | and like what are the economic incentives

01:45:46.160 | and what are the political incentives?

01:45:47.520 | - Any interviews and conversations help with that?

01:45:50.320 | - They help a lot, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:45:51.360 | We do that, so we have, I mean, I don't do,

01:45:52.880 | I do some of those, but I'm on the side,

01:45:55.400 | my Spanish is okay, it's not great and--

01:45:59.600 | - Do you have a translator usually if you ever go directly?

01:46:01.920 | - Well, if only because I can't understand

01:46:04.200 | the street vernacular, like I'm just totally hopeless.

01:46:06.480 | Nor could many people who speak Spanish

01:46:08.840 | as a second language.

01:46:09.960 | It's totally, you go to prison, you talk to these guys

01:46:11.920 | and they're speaking in the local dialect and it's tough.

01:46:16.920 | But more importantly, like I just don't need to be there.

01:46:19.280 | And that's not my, I'm a quantitative scholar.

01:46:21.680 | I'm the guy who collects the data.

01:46:23.560 | So we have people, we have people on our team

01:46:26.640 | and colleagues and employees

01:46:28.600 | who are doing full-time interviews.

01:46:30.120 | So, and then I just sometimes go with them, so.

01:46:33.080 | - What about if we, you mentioned Uganda.

01:46:35.440 | - Yeah.

01:46:36.880 | - Joseph Kony, the Ugandan warlord.

01:46:38.720 | I'm seeing here he kidnapped 591 children

01:46:42.920 | in three years between 2000.

01:46:45.120 | - They must have kidnapped.

01:46:46.920 | I had, they probably kidnapped for at least a short time,

01:46:50.480 | like a few hours to a day, more than 50,000 kids.

01:46:54.240 | - As a terror tactic?

01:46:56.280 | - A little bit, I mean, you know, most of those people,

01:46:59.160 | they just let go after they carried goods.

01:47:00.760 | They held on to, they tried to hold on to thousands.

01:47:03.120 | The short story, listen, if you're not popular,

01:47:06.360 | if you're running in our movement and you need troops,

01:47:09.120 | you can, and nobody wants to fight for you,

01:47:13.240 | you can either give up

01:47:15.200 | or you can have a small clandestine terror organization

01:47:18.360 | that tries to, a different set of tactics.

01:47:20.280 | But if you want a conventional army

01:47:21.880 | and you don't want to give up, then you have to conscript.

01:47:25.000 | And if you want to conscript and you don't,

01:47:27.640 | you know, here we conscript and then we say,

01:47:29.400 | if you run away, we'll shoot you.

01:47:31.000 | And we control the whole territory.

01:47:32.440 | So we'll, that's a credible promise.

01:47:35.640 | If you're a small insurgency organization,

01:47:39.000 | people can run away and then you can't promise

01:47:41.080 | to shoot them very easily

01:47:42.000 | because you don't control all the territory.

01:47:43.880 | And so what these movements do is they try to brainwash you.

01:47:47.400 | And I think what they figured out

01:47:48.720 | after years of abducting children, you know,

01:47:50.400 | you talk about evil, they figured out that, you know,

01:47:54.360 | we have to maybe like, I don't know what the,

01:47:57.080 | but say like maybe one in a hundred

01:47:59.200 | will like buy the rhetoric.

01:48:00.280 | So we just have to conscript or abduct

01:48:02.680 | large number of kids.

01:48:04.000 | And then some small number of them will not run away.

01:48:06.720 | And those will be our committed cadres.

01:48:08.960 | And those people can become commanders.

01:48:11.200 | And because they'll buy the propaganda

01:48:12.920 | and they'll buy the messianic messages.

01:48:15.760 | But because most people wise up,

01:48:18.120 | we have to, especially as they get older,

01:48:19.800 | we just have to abduct vast numbers of kids

01:48:22.480 | in order to have a committed cadre.

01:48:23.720 | And so it has the other benefit of sort of being terrifying

01:48:27.840 | for the population and being a weapon in itself.

01:48:30.560 | But I think it was for them was just primarily

01:48:33.280 | a way to solve a recruitment problem

01:48:36.840 | when you're a totally like hopeless

01:48:41.840 | and ideologically empty rebel movement.

01:48:46.800 | So in some sense it's, yeah,

01:48:49.520 | so that's maybe the short story.

01:48:51.520 | It was a real tragedy.

01:48:52.440 | - I heard one interview of a dictator

01:48:57.320 | where the journalist was basically telling them,

01:49:00.560 | like, how could you be doing this?

01:49:02.600 | Basically calling out all the atrocities

01:49:07.240 | the person is committing.

01:49:09.000 | And the dictator was kind of laughing it off

01:49:11.120 | and walked away.

01:49:12.480 | And like he cut off the interview.

01:49:13.960 | That feel like a very unproductive thing to be doing.

01:49:17.200 | You're basically stating the thing

01:49:18.560 | that everyone knows to his face.

01:49:21.040 | Maybe that's pleasant to somebody,

01:49:22.760 | but that feels unproductive.

01:49:25.960 | It feels like the goal should be

01:49:28.040 | some level of understanding.

01:49:29.680 | - Yeah.

01:49:30.520 | He's been super elusive.

01:49:33.680 | - Is it Kony?

01:49:35.440 | - It's Kony, yeah.

01:49:36.760 | I mean, why he's fought this, I don't even know.

01:49:39.640 | It's not a great example of,

01:49:42.400 | that's an, you know what,

01:49:45.280 | the way I look at that situation is,

01:49:48.240 | it's a little bit particular to the way Uganda works,

01:49:52.240 | but most of the political leadership

01:49:55.800 | for most of its post-independence history

01:49:58.000 | came from the north of the country.

01:50:00.200 | That was like the power base.

01:50:02.800 | And that was dictatorial.

01:50:04.640 | And they were,

01:50:05.480 | so you've heard of like people like Idi Amin,

01:50:07.120 | but people have heard of like Milton Abote,

01:50:08.920 | and all these people were all from the north.

01:50:11.120 | And then you get the current president

01:50:14.200 | who came to power in 1986.

01:50:15.880 | So he's been around a long time,

01:50:17.160 | this guy in the 70s.

01:50:18.000 | He was from the south.

01:50:21.680 | And he was fighting against these dictators,

01:50:25.160 | and he was fighting for a freer and better Uganda.

01:50:27.320 | And in many ways, I mean, he's still a dictator himself,

01:50:30.080 | but he did create a freer and better Uganda.

01:50:33.040 | So he's better than these,

01:50:34.920 | he's a thug, but he was better than thugs before him.

01:50:38.160 | And he came to power, and he was like,

01:50:41.000 | and these, some of the northerners were like,

01:50:44.240 | we wanna keep up the fight.

01:50:46.160 | And he was like, you know what, you guys,

01:50:48.000 | I'm strong enough to contain you to the north.

01:50:49.880 | You guys go, you wanna have a crazy insurgency up there,

01:50:53.480 | and some kook believes he's like speaking,

01:50:58.480 | you know, through the Holy Spirit,

01:51:00.960 | you know, speaking through him,

01:51:02.760 | and he's gonna totally disrupt the north.

01:51:05.400 | I don't care, that's great.

01:51:07.000 | You guys just fester and fight,

01:51:10.360 | and that's gonna totally destabilize this power,

01:51:13.560 | this traditional power base,

01:51:15.240 | and then that's just gonna help me consolidate control.

01:51:17.440 | So he was an autocrat, he was an unchecked leader

01:51:20.040 | who allowed a lunatic to run around and cause mayhem

01:51:25.040 | because it was in his political interest to do so.

01:51:30.320 | And there's no puzzle.

01:51:34.280 | In some ways, it's that simple and kind of tragic.

01:51:40.080 | - There's little to understand.

01:51:42.120 | - Yeah, it took me a lot, well, you know what,

01:51:43.560 | it's not so easy.

01:51:44.440 | In the middle of it, I didn't understand that.

01:51:47.080 | I don't think a lot of people did,

01:51:48.680 | and I'm not, I think I could persuade most people

01:51:51.520 | who study or work there now to like see it that way.

01:51:54.600 | I think people, that would make sense to people,

01:51:56.200 | but it didn't make sense in the moment.

01:51:58.680 | And you know, in the moment, this is happening,

01:52:00.160 | it's terrible, and you kind of, you know,

01:52:02.280 | you don't realize how avoidable it was.

01:52:04.840 | That basically, it was the absence

01:52:06.920 | of effective police actions

01:52:08.400 | that kept the lunatic from being contained.

01:52:10.960 | And that lunatic would never, you know,

01:52:14.760 | he's not, it's not that skillful of our movement, right?

01:52:17.520 | They could have, it could have been shut down,

01:52:19.520 | and there was just never any political will

01:52:21.760 | to shut it down.

01:52:23.160 | The opposite, that's what I meant,

01:52:24.360 | like that unchecked leader,

01:52:25.320 | not only do you not pay the cost,

01:52:26.600 | but you might have a private incentive as an autocrat

01:52:28.880 | to like see that violence happen.

01:52:30.400 | And in this case, it was just keeping

01:52:32.800 | a troublesome part of the country busy.

01:52:35.440 | - If it's okay to look at a few other wars,

01:52:38.160 | so we talked about drug wars and Medellin.

01:52:41.040 | Are there other wars that stand out to you

01:52:44.240 | as full of lessons?

01:52:45.200 | We can jump around a little bit.

01:52:46.440 | Maybe if we can return briefly at World War II,

01:52:49.600 | from your framework, could World War II have been avoided?

01:52:55.160 | This, this one of the most traumatic wars, global wars.

01:53:00.160 | - I mean, one obvious driver of that war was these,

01:53:05.680 | the things that Hitler valued,

01:53:12.960 | and then was able to use his autocratic power

01:53:15.040 | to either convince other people or to suppress them.

01:53:20.000 | And so some people stop there and say that,

01:53:25.080 | and then in the West, basically,

01:53:27.560 | and then of course they were able,

01:53:29.680 | because they were such an economic and political powerhouse,

01:53:32.560 | they were able to sort of make demands

01:53:34.040 | of the rest of Europe that you can kind of see the full,

01:53:39.040 | letting Nazis march into Denmark without a fight,

01:53:42.080 | or France folding very quickly,

01:53:43.480 | you can kind of see as like an appeasement

01:53:45.520 | or an acknowledgement of their superiority

01:53:49.280 | and their ability to bargain without much of a fight.

01:53:52.960 | And then you can see the Western response

01:53:55.520 | as a principled stand.

01:53:56.400 | I think that's, and there's a lot of truth to that.

01:53:59.320 | In terms of the strategic forces,

01:54:01.440 | a lot of political scientists see a version

01:54:04.120 | of a commitment problem, basically where Germany says,

01:54:08.000 | you know what, we're strong now, we're temporarily strong,

01:54:11.680 | we're not gonna be this strong forever.

01:54:13.640 | If we can get this terrible bargain

01:54:17.760 | and get everyone to capitulate through violence,

01:54:22.040 | if we strike now and then solidify our power

01:54:25.680 | and keep these, in World War I,

01:54:28.480 | it was prevent the rise of Russia

01:54:30.120 | and prevent the strengthening of Russian alliances as well.

01:54:39.760 | And so we have an incentive to strike now,

01:54:42.560 | and there's a window of opportunity that's closing

01:54:44.680 | and that they thought was closing

01:54:46.240 | as soon as 1917 in World War I.

01:54:48.480 | And I don't know that that story

01:54:50.280 | is as persuasive in World War II.

01:54:51.920 | I think there was an element of a closing window.

01:54:54.080 | - They kept talking about a closing window.

01:54:56.400 | They really thought there was a closing window.

01:54:58.600 | I think it was a nature of that window is different

01:55:01.800 | in that there was a kind of pacifism.

01:55:05.960 | And it seems like if war broke out,

01:55:10.360 | most nations in the vicinity would not be ready.

01:55:13.960 | You could buy the people, the leaders that are in power,

01:55:17.800 | they weren't ready, so the timing is really right now.

01:55:20.680 | But I wonder how often that is the case

01:55:22.240 | with leaders in war, it feels like the timing is now.

01:55:25.760 | - The other commitment problem,

01:55:27.160 | the other shift that was happening that he wanted to avert

01:55:30.160 | that is kind of wrapped up with his ideology

01:55:32.280 | is this idea of a cultural

01:55:35.000 | and a demographic window of opportunity.

01:55:37.720 | That if he wanted, conditional on having these views

01:55:42.240 | of a Germanic people and a pure race,

01:55:46.560 | and that now is, he had to strike now

01:55:50.040 | before any opportunity to sort of establish

01:55:53.920 | that was possible.

01:55:54.920 | I think that's one, it's an incentive

01:55:57.200 | that requires his ideology as well.

01:55:59.720 | - How do, so to avoid it within this framework,

01:56:03.960 | would you say, is there,

01:56:05.400 | that you kind of provide an explanation,

01:56:11.600 | but is there a way to avoid it?

01:56:13.160 | Is violence the way to avoid it?

01:56:15.200 | Because people kind of tried rational,

01:56:17.320 | peaceful kind of usual negotiation,

01:56:22.160 | and that led to this war.

01:56:23.720 | Is that unique to this particular,

01:56:26.480 | let's say World War I or World War II?

01:56:28.640 | So there's an extra pressure from Germany

01:56:31.320 | on both wars to act, okay?

01:56:33.640 | So we've highlighted that.

01:56:34.560 | Is there a way to alleviate that extra pressure to act?

01:56:37.720 | - Let me use World War I as an example.

01:56:39.960 | Suppose as many German generals said at that time,

01:56:44.320 | we have a window of opportunity before Russia

01:56:46.520 | where we might not win a war with Russia.

01:56:49.600 | Like, so the probability that we can win a war

01:56:52.000 | is gonna change a lot in the next decade or two,

01:56:55.440 | maybe even in the next few years.

01:56:56.800 | And so if we are in a much better bargaining position now,

01:57:00.840 | both to not use violence, but to,

01:57:02.640 | if necessarily use violence.

01:57:04.160 | Because otherwise,

01:57:06.000 | Russia's going to be extremely powerful in the future,

01:57:08.240 | and they'll be able to use that power

01:57:09.720 | to change the bargaining with us,

01:57:12.160 | and to like hold, keep us down.

01:57:13.960 | And the thing is, is in principle,

01:57:17.840 | Russia could say, look,

01:57:19.920 | we don't wanna get invaded right now.

01:57:21.760 | We know you could invade us.

01:57:24.240 | We know we're weak.

01:57:25.080 | We know we'll be strong in the future.

01:57:26.640 | We promise to like not wield our and abuse our,

01:57:31.640 | or just merely just sort of take what we can get

01:57:35.800 | in the future when we're strong.

01:57:37.120 | We're gonna restrain ourselves in future.

01:57:39.280 | Or we're gonna hand over something that makes us powerful

01:57:41.640 | because that's the bargain

01:57:43.080 | that would make us all better off.

01:57:44.720 | And the reason political economists

01:57:46.920 | call it a commitment problem

01:57:48.080 | is because that's a commitment that would solve the problem.

01:57:51.280 | And they can't make that commitment

01:57:52.680 | 'cause there's nobody who will hold them accountable.

01:57:55.040 | So anything, any international legal architecture,

01:57:59.240 | any set of enforceable agreements,

01:58:02.160 | any UN Security Council, any world government,

01:58:04.480 | anything that would help you make that commitment

01:58:08.080 | is a solution, all right, if that's the core problem.

01:58:11.840 | And so that's why in Medellin,

01:58:14.400 | La Oficina can do that.

01:58:20.040 | They can say, listen, yes,

01:58:21.920 | combo that's strong today is gonna be weak tomorrow.

01:58:24.800 | You have an incentive to eliminate this combo over here,

01:58:27.080 | but because they're gonna be strong, but guess what?

01:58:29.600 | You're not gonna do that.

01:58:30.680 | And we're gonna make sure,

01:58:31.840 | we're gonna promise that when these guys do get strong,

01:58:34.680 | we're gonna restrain what they can do.

01:58:36.800 | I mean, most of our constitutions in most stable countries

01:58:39.920 | have done precisely that, right?

01:58:42.000 | There's a lot of complaining right now in the United States

01:58:44.120 | about the way that the constitution

01:58:46.080 | is a portion power between states.

01:58:48.080 | That was a deal, that was a commitment.

01:58:52.240 | The constitution in the United States was a deal

01:58:55.280 | made to a bunch of states

01:58:56.840 | that knew they were going to be weak in future

01:58:59.040 | because of economic and demographic trends,

01:59:01.400 | or guess they might be.

01:59:02.400 | And it said, listen, you cooperate

01:59:04.520 | and we'll commit not to basically ignore your interests

01:59:09.520 | over the long run.

01:59:10.600 | And now, 250 years later,

01:59:14.880 | we're still honoring those commitments.

01:59:17.560 | It was part of the deal that meant

01:59:21.720 | that there actually would be a union.

01:59:23.960 | And so we do this all the time.

01:59:25.200 | So constitution is a good example of how

01:59:27.600 | every country's constitution,

01:59:31.240 | especially a country who's writing a constitution

01:59:33.120 | after a war, that constitution

01:59:35.840 | and all of the other institutions they're building

01:59:37.440 | are an attempt to like provide commitment

01:59:40.280 | to groups who are worried about future shifts in power.

01:59:42.640 | - And then does that help with avoid civil war?

01:59:45.800 | So could you speak to lessons you learned from civil wars,

01:59:50.880 | the American civil war and the others?

01:59:53.160 | - So Lebanon, one of the ways Lebanon had tried

01:59:58.160 | for a long time to preserve the interests

02:00:02.640 | of minority groups, powerful minority groups

02:00:05.680 | who were powerful at the time

02:00:08.040 | and knew that the demographics were working against them

02:00:10.680 | were to guarantee, you know,

02:00:12.680 | this ethnic religious group gets the presidency

02:00:15.920 | and this ethnic religious group

02:00:17.000 | gets the prime ministership and this ethnic,

02:00:19.640 | and a lot of countries will apportion seats

02:00:23.360 | in the parliament to ethnic religious groups.

02:00:26.840 | And that's an attempt to like give a group

02:00:31.680 | that's temporarily powerful some assurances

02:00:35.920 | that when they're weak in the future,

02:00:38.160 | that they'll still have a say, right?

02:00:40.200 | Just like we portioned seats in the Senate

02:00:42.680 | in a way that's not demographically representative

02:00:45.480 | but is like unequal, quote unquote, in a sense

02:00:47.820 | to help people be confident

02:00:49.440 | that there won't be a tyranny of the majority.

02:00:52.120 | And now that just happens to have been

02:00:53.800 | like a really unstable arrangement in Lebanon

02:00:56.040 | because eventually like the de facto power on the ground

02:00:59.680 | just gets so out of line with this really rigid system

02:01:04.200 | of the presidency goes to this ethnic religious group

02:01:06.960 | and this prime ministership goes,

02:01:08.640 | that it didn't last, right?

02:01:10.040 | So, but you can think of every post-conflict agreement

02:01:14.360 | and every constitution is like a little bit of,

02:01:17.700 | humans best effort to find an agreement

02:01:22.700 | that's going to protect the interests of a group

02:01:27.620 | that's temporarily has an interest in violence

02:01:31.200 | in order to not be violent.

02:01:35.220 | - Yeah.

02:01:36.180 | - And so there's a lot of ingenuity

02:01:38.340 | and it doesn't always work, right?

02:01:40.900 | - Which actually from a perspective of the group,

02:01:43.860 | threatening violence or actually doing violence

02:01:46.540 | is one way to make progress for your group.

02:01:48.620 | - We're talking about groups bargaining over stuff, right?

02:01:51.540 | We're talking about Russians versus Ukraine

02:01:53.780 | or Russians versus the West,

02:01:54.980 | or maybe it's managing gangs versus one another.

02:01:57.820 | Like a lot of their bargaining power

02:02:01.020 | comes from their ability to burn the house down, right?

02:02:03.840 | And so if I wanna have more bargaining power,

02:02:06.060 | I can just arm a lot and I can threaten violence.

02:02:09.020 | And so the strategically wise thing to do,

02:02:13.260 | I mean, it's terrible.

02:02:14.100 | It's a terrible equilibrium for us to be forced into,

02:02:16.540 | but the strategically wise thing to do

02:02:17.980 | is to build up lots of arms, to threaten to use them,

02:02:20.860 | to credibly threaten to use them,

02:02:22.060 | but then trust or hope that like your enemy

02:02:25.020 | is gonna see reason and avoid this really terrible,

02:02:30.020 | inefficient thing, which is fighting.

02:02:33.620 | But the thing that's going on the whole time

02:02:35.340 | is both of you arming and spending like 20% of GDP

02:02:37.980 | or whatever on arms, that's pretty inefficient.

02:02:40.820 | - Yes.

02:02:41.740 | - That's the tragedy.

02:02:43.620 | We don't have war and that's good,

02:02:46.420 | but we have really limited abilities

02:02:48.140 | to like incentivize our enemies not to arm

02:02:51.060 | and to keep ourselves from arming.

02:02:52.420 | We'd love to agree to just like both disarm, but we can't.

02:02:56.300 | And so the mess is that we have to arm

02:02:59.540 | and then we have to threaten all the time.

02:03:01.180 | - Yeah, so the threat of violence is costly nevertheless.

02:03:04.780 | You've actually pulled up that now disappeared,

02:03:07.340 | a paper that said the big title called "Civil War"

02:03:11.500 | and your name is on it.

02:03:13.980 | What's that about?

02:03:15.140 | - Well, that was, I mean, when I was finishing

02:03:17.100 | graduate school and this is a paper with my advisor

02:03:19.620 | at Ted Miguel at Berkeley.

02:03:22.260 | - Most nations, the paper opens,

02:03:24.980 | have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960.

02:03:29.260 | Yet while, were you still in grad school on this or no?

02:03:32.540 | - Maybe last year or just graduated, I think.

02:03:35.380 | - I wish I was in a discipline that wrote papers like this.

02:03:38.580 | This is pretty badass.

02:03:40.060 | Yet while civil war is central to many nations

02:03:42.920 | development, it has stood at the periphery

02:03:47.920 | of economic research and teaching, so on and so forth.

02:03:50.980 | And this is looking at civil war broadly throughout history

02:03:53.740 | or is it just particular civil wars?

02:03:55.540 | - We were mostly looking at like the late 20th century.

02:03:57.780 | I mean, I was trained as a, what's called

02:04:00.220 | development economist, which is somebody who studies

02:04:02.300 | why some places are poor and why some countries are rich.

02:04:05.100 | And I, like a number of people around that time,

02:04:10.140 | stumbled into violence.

02:04:11.740 | I mean, people have been studying the wealth

02:04:14.000 | and poverty of nations basically since the invention

02:04:15.980 | of economics, but there was a big blind spot for violence.

02:04:20.980 | Now there isn't any more, it's like a flourishing area

02:04:26.320 | of study, but in economics, but at the time it wasn't.

02:04:29.920 | And so there were people like me and Ted

02:04:32.080 | who were sort of part political scientists,

02:04:35.480 | 'cause political scientists obviously had been

02:04:37.120 | studying this for a long time, who started bringing

02:04:39.480 | economic tools and expertise and like partnerships

02:04:42.920 | with political scientists and adding to it.

02:04:45.000 | And so we wrote this, so after like people had been doing

02:04:48.220 | this for five or 10 years in our field, we wrote

02:04:50.760 | like a review article telling economists

02:04:53.440 | like what was going on.

02:04:54.360 | And so this was like a summary for economists.

02:04:56.080 | So the book in some ways is a lot in the same spirit

02:04:58.640 | of this article.

02:04:59.920 | This article, I mean, it's designed to be not written

02:05:03.600 | as like a boring laundry list of studies,

02:05:05.400 | which is what, that's the purpose this article was for.

02:05:08.000 | It was for graduate students and professors

02:05:09.680 | who wanted to think about what to work on

02:05:11.560 | and what we knew.

02:05:13.200 | This book is like now trying to like, not just say

02:05:15.640 | what economists are doing, but sort of say

02:05:17.640 | what economists, political scientists, psychologists,

02:05:20.520 | sociologists, anthropologists, like how do we bring

02:05:23.440 | some sense to this big project and policy makers?

02:05:25.680 | Like, what do we know?

02:05:27.520 | And what do we know about building peace?

02:05:30.060 | Given, you know, because if you don't know what the reason

02:05:33.280 | for wars are, you're probably not gonna design

02:05:35.280 | the right cure.

02:05:37.220 | And so anyway, so that was the, but I started off

02:05:40.580 | studying civil wars and I, because I stumbled into

02:05:43.940 | this place in Northern Uganda basically by accident.

02:05:46.020 | It was a never, no intention of working in civil wars.

02:05:48.860 | I'd never thought about it.

02:05:49.940 | And then, you know, basically I followed a woman there.

02:05:54.940 | - And we'll talk about that.

02:05:59.580 | I gotta ask you first.

02:06:00.660 | And for people who are just watching,

02:06:02.380 | we have an amazing team of folks helping out

02:06:05.460 | pulling pictures and articles and so on,

02:06:08.420 | mostly so that I can pull up pictures on Instagram

02:06:11.100 | of animals fighting, which is what I do on my own time.

02:06:13.580 | And then we could discuss, analyze,

02:06:15.340 | maybe with George St. Pierre.

02:06:16.540 | That's what all he sends me for people who are curious.

02:06:20.020 | But let me ask you, one of the most difficult things

02:06:21.900 | going on in the world today, Israel-Palestine.

02:06:24.520 | Will we ever see peace in this part of the world?

02:06:28.620 | And sort of your book title is "The Roots of War

02:06:34.780 | and the Paths for Peace" or the subtitle, "Why We Fight."

02:06:37.860 | What's the path for peace?

02:06:41.460 | Will we ever see peace?

02:06:42.820 | - Yeah, if we think about this conflict in the sense

02:06:47.820 | of like this dispute, this sort of contest,

02:06:51.060 | this contest that's been going on between Israelis

02:06:52.940 | and Palestinians, it's been going on for a century.

02:06:56.020 | And there were really just 10 or 15 years

02:07:01.740 | of pretty serious violence in that span of time.

02:07:05.580 | Most of it from 2000 to 2009 and stretching up to 2014.

02:07:10.060 | There are sporadic incidents which are really terrible.

02:07:12.660 | I'm not trying to diminish the human cost of these,

02:07:14.460 | by the way, I'm just trying to point out

02:07:16.020 | that whatever's happening, as unpleasant and challenging

02:07:19.860 | and difficult as it is, it's actually not war.

02:07:21.940 | And so it is at peace.

02:07:22.980 | There's sort of an uneasy stalemate.

02:07:24.420 | Israelis and Palestinians are actually pretty good

02:07:26.260 | at just sort of keeping this at a relatively low scale

02:07:28.340 | of violence.

02:07:29.320 | There's a whole bunch of like low scale sporadic violence

02:07:33.340 | that can be repression of civilians.

02:07:36.720 | It can be terror bombings and terror actions.

02:07:40.540 | It can be counter-terror violence.

02:07:42.940 | It can be mass arrests.

02:07:44.900 | It can be repression.

02:07:45.740 | It can be denying people the vote.

02:07:47.140 | It can be rattling sabers, all these things

02:07:51.020 | that are happening, right?

02:07:52.940 | And it can be sporadic three-week wars

02:07:56.100 | or sporadic, very brief episodes of intense violence

02:08:00.920 | before everybody sees sense and then settles down

02:08:03.740 | to this uneasy, that's not like,

02:08:07.060 | we're right not to think of that as like a peace

02:08:08.500 | and there's certainly no stable agreement, right?

02:08:11.620 | So a stable agreement and amity and any ability

02:08:15.180 | to move on from this extreme hostility,

02:08:18.680 | we're not there yet and that's maybe very far away.

02:08:22.640 | But this is a good example of two rivals

02:08:26.760 | who most of the time have avoided really intense violence.

02:08:29.760 | - So you talked about this, like most of the time,

02:08:34.760 | rivals just like avoiding violence

02:08:38.080 | and hating each other in peace.

02:08:39.840 | So is this what peace, so to answer my question--

02:08:44.320 | - Yeah, sometimes.

02:08:45.160 | - Is this what peace looks like?

02:08:46.520 | - Not always, but I mean, it's kind of my worry

02:08:51.480 | to go back to like the Russia-Ukraine example,

02:08:53.720 | like I kind of, it's gonna be really hard

02:08:55.960 | to find an agreement that both sides can feel

02:09:00.560 | they can honor, that they can be explicit about,

02:09:03.000 | that they'll hold to, that will enable them to move on.

02:09:06.120 | - Yeah, feels like a first step in a long journey

02:09:09.120 | towards a greatness for both nations

02:09:11.520 | and a peaceful time, flourishing, that kind of thing.

02:09:15.320 | - I mean, you can think of like what's going on

02:09:18.040 | in Israel-Palestine, there's a stalemate.

02:09:21.620 | Both of them are exhausted from the violence

02:09:24.980 | that has occurred, neither one of them is quite willing to,

02:09:28.220 | for various reasons, to create this sort of stable agreement.

02:09:31.380 | There's a lot of really difficult issues to resolve.

02:09:34.340 | And maybe the sad thing, maybe we'll end up

02:09:39.180 | in the same situation with Russia-Ukraine.

02:09:41.020 | This is where, you know, if they stop fighting one another,

02:09:44.180 | but Russia holds the east of the country and Crimea

02:09:47.260 | and nobody really acknowledges their right to that,

02:09:50.660 | that might, and there's just gonna be a lot of tension

02:09:53.580 | and skirmishing and violence, but that never really

02:09:56.100 | progresses to war for 30 years, that would be a sad,

02:09:59.260 | but maybe possible outcome.

02:10:02.180 | So that's kind of where Israel-Palestine looks to me.

02:10:06.140 | And so someone, if we're gonna talk about why we fight,

02:10:08.960 | then the question we have to ask is like, why,

02:10:11.260 | you know, like the second Intifada,

02:10:14.140 | like that was the most violent episode.

02:10:15.520 | Like, why did that happen and why did that last

02:10:18.740 | several years?

02:10:19.820 | That would be like, we could analyze that

02:10:21.940 | and we could say, what was it about these periods

02:10:23.980 | of violence that led there to be prolonged intense violence?

02:10:27.060 | Because that was in nobody's interest,

02:10:28.380 | that didn't need to happen.

02:10:29.620 | And partly I don't talk about that in the book.

02:10:32.340 | I wanted to avoid really contemporary conflicts

02:10:35.260 | for two reasons.

02:10:36.780 | One is things could change really quickly.

02:10:40.220 | I didn't want the book to be dated.

02:10:41.260 | I wanted this to be a book that had like longevity

02:10:43.220 | and that would be relevant still in 10 years

02:10:47.040 | or 20 years maybe before someone writes a better one.

02:10:50.260 | - Or before the human civilization ends.

02:10:52.380 | - Exactly.

02:10:53.420 | And circumstances can change really quickly.

02:10:55.100 | So I wanted it to be enduring and meant partly

02:10:57.580 | just avoiding changing things and changing these

02:10:59.980 | and avoiding these controversial ones.

02:11:01.460 | But of course I think about them.

02:11:02.900 | And so like a lot of my time, I decided actually

02:11:05.500 | last year to teach a class where I'd take all

02:11:07.820 | these contemporary conflicts that wasn't working

02:11:10.960 | on the book and where I wasn't really an expert,

02:11:12.540 | whether it's India, Pakistan, China, Taiwan,

02:11:15.700 | Israel, Palestine, Mexican cartel state drug wars,

02:11:19.620 | and a few others, and then teach a class on them

02:11:23.940 | with students and we'd work through it.

02:11:25.180 | We'd read the book and then we'd say,

02:11:26.940 | all right, none of us are experts.

02:11:28.140 | How do we make sense of these places?

02:11:30.180 | And we focused in the Israel-Palestine case

02:11:32.100 | of mostly trying to understand why it got so violent

02:11:34.980 | and then spend a little bit of time on what the prospects

02:11:38.420 | are for something that's more enduring.

02:11:41.340 | - It's hard to know that stuff now.

02:11:42.660 | I mean, it's easier to do the full analysis

02:11:45.140 | when looking back when it's over.

02:11:48.380 | - Well, Israel is in like a tough place.

02:11:50.360 | They have this attachment to being part of the West.

02:11:52.620 | They have this attachment to liberal ideals.

02:11:54.460 | They have an attachment to democracy

02:11:56.660 | and they have an attachment to a Jewish state.

02:11:58.960 | And those things are not so easily compatible

02:12:03.420 | because to recognize the rights of non-Jewish citizens

02:12:10.700 | or to have a one state solution to the current conflict

02:12:15.700 | undermines the long-term ability to have a Jewish state.

02:12:21.580 | And to do anything else and to deny that

02:12:26.740 | denies their liberal democratic ideals.

02:12:32.740 | And that's a really hard contest of freedom

02:12:39.300 | of priorities to sort out.

02:12:42.580 | - Yeah, it's complicated.

02:12:43.420 | Of course, everything you just said

02:12:44.400 | probably has multiple perspectives on it from other

02:12:47.700 | that would phrase all the same things

02:12:49.700 | but using different words.

02:12:51.540 | - Well, I try to analyze these things

02:12:53.540 | in like a dispassionate way.

02:12:54.940 | - But unfortunately, just having made enough conversations,

02:12:57.820 | even your dispassionate description would be seen

02:13:02.340 | as one that's already picked aside.

02:13:06.300 | And I'll say this because there's holding these ideals.

02:13:10.780 | I'll give you another example.

02:13:12.060 | United States also has ideals of freedom

02:13:15.940 | and other like human rights.

02:13:19.060 | So it has those ideals and it also sees itself

02:13:23.540 | as a superpower and as a deployer of those,

02:13:27.420 | enforcer of those ideas in the world.

02:13:30.220 | And so the kind of actions from a perspective

02:13:32.580 | of a lot of people in that world,

02:13:34.420 | from children, they get to see drones drop bombs

02:13:37.700 | on their house where their father is now, mother are dead.

02:13:42.660 | They have a very different view of this.

02:13:45.340 | - Well, you're beginning to see why I didn't,

02:13:47.140 | I decided I wanted to write about those things

02:13:49.780 | and think about those things,

02:13:50.780 | but I wanted this book to do something different.

02:13:54.300 | And I didn't want it to fall on one of these polarizations.

02:13:57.380 | On a personal level, because I think I'm kind

02:13:59.220 | of a liberal democratic person at heart,

02:14:02.820 | my sympathies in that sense lie in many ways

02:14:05.260 | with the Palestinians, despite the way I,

02:14:07.460 | I mean, I'm just the fact that people are,

02:14:10.620 | they're not representative and they, you know,

02:14:12.860 | and they got a very raw, real politic kind of deal.

02:14:17.500 | Like most people in history have gotten like this raw,

02:14:19.900 | real politic kind of deal in their past, right?

02:14:21.820 | Where somebody took something from.

02:14:22.660 | - It's a good summer of history, by the way.

02:14:24.900 | - That's it, history is just full of raw deals.

02:14:27.780 | - For regular people.

02:14:28.820 | - Right, and both sides are in a principled way

02:14:33.820 | refusing to make the compromise.

02:14:37.820 | And that's not like a both sides are right kind of argument.

02:14:40.420 | I'm just sort of saying, I just think it's a factual

02:14:43.100 | statement that like, neither one wants to compromise

02:14:46.540 | on certain principles and they're both,

02:14:50.580 | they both can construct and in some ways have very reasonable

02:14:54.140 | but I don't want to have self-justifications

02:14:56.140 | for those principles.

02:14:56.980 | And that's why I'm not very hopeful as I'm,

02:14:59.020 | I don't see a way and to, for them to resolve those things.

02:15:04.020 | - Speaking of compromise and war,

02:15:06.660 | let me ask you about one last one,

02:15:09.220 | which may be in the future, China and the United States.

02:15:13.060 | - Yeah.

02:15:14.340 | - How do we avoid an all out hot war

02:15:18.380 | with this other superpower in the next decade,

02:15:22.300 | 50 years, a hundred years?

02:15:24.140 | Because sometimes when it's quiet at night,

02:15:27.780 | I can hear in the long distance, the drums of war beating.

02:15:31.420 | - Yeah.

02:15:32.260 | You know, in the second part of the book,

02:15:34.100 | I talk about what I think have been like these persistent,

02:15:36.220 | like paths to peace.

02:15:37.060 | And one of them is increasing interdependence

02:15:39.020 | and interrelationships.

02:15:40.260 | And another one is more checks and balances on power.

02:15:43.660 | I think there's more, but those are two

02:15:46.620 | that are really fundamental here,

02:15:47.860 | because I think those two things reduce the incentives

02:15:51.220 | for war in two ways.

02:15:52.060 | One is like, remember when we were talking

02:15:54.100 | about this really simple strategic game

02:15:55.700 | where I, whether I'm Russia and Ukraine or whatever,

02:15:59.460 | any two rivals, I want more of the pie than you get.

02:16:03.780 | And the costs of war are deterrence,

02:16:08.340 | but only the costs of war that I feel, right?

02:16:11.900 | I don't care.

02:16:12.740 | I do not care about the costs of war to your side,

02:16:15.740 | my rival's side.

02:16:16.580 | I'm not even thinking of that.

02:16:17.420 | That's just worth zero to me.

02:16:18.420 | I just don't care in that simple game.

02:16:20.620 | Now, in reality, many groups do care

02:16:24.620 | about the wellbeing of the other group,

02:16:25.940 | at least a little bit, right?

02:16:27.300 | We are in some sense to the degree we,

02:16:29.620 | first of all, if our interests are intertwined,

02:16:31.940 | like our economies are intertwined,

02:16:33.700 | that's not a surefire way for peace.

02:16:39.580 | And we shouldn't get complacent

02:16:40.900 | 'cause we have a globally integrated world,

02:16:42.420 | but that's gonna be a disincentive.

02:16:44.260 | And if we're socially entwined

02:16:45.500 | because we have great social relationships

02:16:47.180 | and linkages and family, or we're intermarriage

02:16:49.980 | or whatever, all these things will help.

02:16:53.860 | And then if we're ideologically intertwined,

02:16:56.020 | maybe we share notions of liberty,

02:16:58.460 | or maybe we just share a common notion of humanity.

02:17:00.700 | So I think the fact that we're more integrated

02:17:02.660 | than we've ever been on all three fronts in the world,

02:17:05.500 | but with China is providing some insulation, which is good.

02:17:10.180 | So I would be more worried if we started to shed

02:17:13.300 | some of that insulation,

02:17:14.660 | which I think has been happening a little bit.

02:17:17.580 | US economic nationalism,

02:17:19.660 | whatever could be the fallout of these sanctions

02:17:24.300 | or a closer Chinese alliance with Russia,

02:17:26.780 | all those things could happen.

02:17:28.140 | Those would make me more worried

02:17:29.820 | because I think we've got a lot of cushion

02:17:31.460 | that comes from all of this economic, social,

02:17:34.860 | cultural interdependence.

02:17:36.380 | - Yeah, the social one with the internet is a big one.

02:17:39.060 | So basically make friends

02:17:41.140 | with the people from different nations,

02:17:43.780 | fall in love, or you don't have to fall in love,

02:17:46.820 | you can just have lots of sex with people from different

02:17:49.540 | nations, but also fall in love.

02:17:51.460 | - The thing that also comforts me about China

02:17:53.700 | is that China's not as centralized

02:17:57.060 | or as personalized a regime as Russia, for example,

02:18:00.660 | and neither one of them is as centralized or personalized

02:18:02.980 | as some tin pot, purely personalized dictatorship,

02:18:07.380 | like you get in some countries.

02:18:09.220 | The fact that China, the power is much more widely shared

02:18:14.220 | is a big insulation, I think, against this war,

02:18:17.380 | well, future war.

02:18:18.760 | The attempts by Xi Jinping to personalize power over time

02:18:26.700 | and to make China a more centralized

02:18:29.020 | and personal ruled place,

02:18:30.740 | which he's successfully moved in that direction,

02:18:34.380 | also worries me.

02:18:35.740 | So anything that moves China in the other direction,

02:18:38.980 | not necessarily being democratic,

02:18:40.580 | but just like a wider and wider group of people

02:18:43.260 | holding power, like all of the business leaders

02:18:46.540 | and all the things that have been happening

02:18:47.500 | over the last few centuries have actually widened power.

02:18:50.100 | But anything that's moving in the other direction

02:18:52.060 | does worry me, because it's gonna accentuate

02:18:54.820 | all these five risks.

02:18:56.060 | - I am worried about a little bit of the demonization.

02:18:58.860 | So one of the things I see with China

02:19:03.340 | as a problem for Americans, maybe I'm projecting,

02:19:07.320 | maybe it's just my own problem,

02:19:08.420 | but there seems to be a bigger cultural gap

02:19:11.100 | than there is with other superpowers throughout history,

02:19:13.620 | where it's almost like this own world happening in China,

02:19:17.900 | its own world in the United States,

02:19:19.300 | and there's this gap of total cultural understanding.

02:19:22.260 | It's not that, we're not competing superpowers,

02:19:27.260 | they're almost like doing their own thing.

02:19:30.580 | There's that feeling, and I think that means

02:19:33.180 | there's a lack of understanding of culture of people,

02:19:35.460 | and we need to kind of bridge that understanding.

02:19:38.060 | I mean, the language barrier,

02:19:39.900 | but also cultural understanding, making movies

02:19:42.620 | that use both and explore both cultures

02:19:47.100 | and all that kind of stuff.

02:19:48.420 | Like it's okay to compete, like Rocky,

02:19:52.020 | where Rocky Balboa fought the Russian.

02:19:57.020 | Fact, historically inaccurate,

02:19:58.700 | 'cause obviously the Russian would win,

02:20:00.300 | but we have to, I'm just kidding.

02:20:02.500 | As a Philly person, I was of course rooting for Rocky.

02:20:04.900 | But the thing is, those two superpowers are in the movies.

02:20:07.980 | China's like its own out there thing.

02:20:11.540 | We need more Rocky Seven.

02:20:14.100 | - I do think there's a certain inscrutability

02:20:16.060 | to the politics there, and an insularity to the politics,

02:20:18.960 | such that it's harder for Westerners,

02:20:20.880 | even if they know, even just to learn about it

02:20:23.340 | and understand what's going on,

02:20:24.660 | I think that's a problem, and vice versa.

02:20:27.100 | So I think that's true.

02:20:29.740 | But at the same time, we could point to all sorts of things

02:20:32.900 | on the other side of the ledger,

02:20:33.820 | like the massive amounts of Chinese immigration

02:20:36.980 | into the United States, and the massive number of people

02:20:39.700 | who are now, like how many, so many more Americans,

02:20:42.980 | business people, politicians,

02:20:44.620 | understand so much more about China now

02:20:47.420 | than they did 30, 40 years ago,

02:20:48.500 | because we're so intertwined.

02:20:50.020 | So I don't know where it balances out.

02:20:52.580 | I think it balances out on better understanding

02:20:54.780 | than ever before.

02:20:56.220 | But you're right, there was like a big gulf there

02:20:59.540 | that we haven't totally bridged.

02:21:02.140 | - Yeah, and like I said,

02:21:04.260 | lots of inter-Chinese in the United States,

02:21:08.740 | sexual intercourse, no, and love and marriage

02:21:11.140 | and all that kind of social cohesion.

02:21:13.740 | So once again, returning to love,

02:21:16.700 | I read in your acknowledgement,

02:21:19.020 | and as you mentioned earlier,

02:21:21.140 | the acknowledgement reads, quote,

02:21:23.340 | "I dedicate this book to a slow

02:21:25.820 | "and now defunct internet cafe in Nairobi,

02:21:29.180 | "because it set me on the path to meet,

02:21:31.820 | "work with, and most importantly,

02:21:34.940 | "marry Jenny Anan."

02:21:38.260 | - Jeanne Anan.

02:21:39.100 | - Jeanne Anan.

02:21:40.340 | There's a lot of beautiful letters in this beautiful name.

02:21:43.940 | "This book have been impossible without her

02:21:47.120 | "and that chance encounter."

02:21:49.060 | What's, okay, tell me,

02:21:51.120 | tell me, Chris, how you fell in love

02:21:53.940 | and how that changed the direction of your life.

02:21:56.580 | - I was in that internet cafe, I think it was 2004.

02:21:59.420 | I didn't know what I wanted to do.

02:22:03.140 | I thought I might, I thought,

02:22:05.100 | I was a good development economist

02:22:06.500 | and I cared about growth, economic growth,

02:22:09.300 | and I thought firm, like industrialization

02:22:11.940 | is like the solution to poverty in Africa,

02:22:14.480 | which is, I think, still true.

02:22:17.140 | And therefore, I need to go study firms

02:22:19.260 | and industry in Africa.

02:22:21.180 | And so I went and I ended up,

02:22:22.340 | one of the most dynamic place for firms

02:22:24.040 | and industry at the time, still to some extent now,

02:22:26.660 | was Kenya and all these firms around Nairobi.

02:22:29.860 | And so I went and I got a job with the World Bank

02:22:32.780 | who was running a, they were running a firm survey

02:22:34.620 | and I convinced them to let me help run the firm survey.

02:22:38.340 | And so now I'm in Nairobi and I'm wearing my suit

02:22:40.740 | and with the World Bank for the summer

02:22:43.860 | and my laptop gets stolen by two enterprising con artists,

02:22:48.700 | very charming.

02:22:50.180 | And so I find myself in an internet cafe.

02:22:52.260 | - With no laptop.

02:22:54.380 | - No laptop and just like, you know.

02:22:56.460 | - In a suit.

02:22:57.300 | - Kenya didn't, exactly, Kenya didn't get connected

02:22:59.420 | to the sort of the big internet cables

02:23:03.940 | until maybe 10 years later.

02:23:05.600 | And so it was just glacially slow.

02:23:06.740 | So it would take 10 minutes for every email to load.

02:23:08.820 | And so there's this whole customer norm

02:23:10.740 | of you just chat to the next person beside you all the time.

02:23:14.940 | It was true all over,

02:23:16.780 | anywhere I'd worked on the continent.

02:23:18.940 | And so I strategically sat next to the attractive looking

02:23:22.820 | woman that, when I came in,

02:23:24.380 | and it turned out she was a psychologist

02:23:28.220 | and a PhD student, but she was a humanitarian worker.

02:23:30.940 | And she'd been working in South Sudan and Northern Uganda

02:23:33.700 | and this kids affected by this war.

02:23:36.340 | All these kids who were being conscripted were coming back

02:23:39.260 | 'cause they're all running away after a day or 10 years

02:23:42.740 | and needed help or to get back into school.

02:23:45.260 | She was working on things like that.

02:23:47.060 | And I think she talked to me in spite of the fact

02:23:50.540 | that I was wearing a suit,

02:23:51.620 | maybe 'cause I knew a little bit about the war,

02:23:53.140 | which most people didn't.

02:23:53.980 | Most people were totally ignorant.

02:23:55.020 | And then we had a fling for that week.

02:23:57.660 | And then we didn't really,

02:24:00.260 | actually then we met up a little short while later

02:24:02.700 | and then it was kind of,

02:24:03.660 | then we kind of drifted apart.

02:24:04.900 | She was studying in Indiana

02:24:06.100 | and spending a lot of time in Uganda.

02:24:09.220 | And then one day I was chatting with someone I knew

02:24:14.540 | who worked on this,

02:24:15.740 | a young professor who was a friend of mine.

02:24:17.900 | And I said, "Oh, you work on similar issues.

02:24:20.500 | "You should meet this woman."

02:24:22.460 | I talked to her 'cause you guys would have

02:24:24.860 | professional research interests overlap.

02:24:26.460 | There's so few sort of people looking at armed groups

02:24:29.700 | in African civil wars, at least at the time.

02:24:32.180 | And he said, "Wow, that's a fascinating research question."

02:24:35.660 | And I thought to my,

02:24:36.500 | and I walked out of the building and I thought,

02:24:38.660 | "That is a fascinating research question."

02:24:40.740 | And I phoned Jeannie and I said,

02:24:43.620 | "Remember me and tell me more."

02:24:45.700 | I was just talking to someone about this.

02:24:46.740 | "Tell me more."

02:24:48.300 | I started asking her more questions

02:24:49.540 | but we ended up talking for two or three hours.

02:24:52.380 | And over the course of those three hours,

02:24:54.460 | we hatched a very ambitious kind of crazy plan.

02:24:59.460 | Basically what it was,

02:25:03.140 | we were gonna find the names and all the kids

02:25:06.780 | who were born 20 or 30 years ago in the region,

02:25:10.380 | and we were gonna track a thousand of them down.

02:25:12.700 | We were gonna randomly sample them

02:25:13.900 | and then we were gonna find them today

02:25:15.700 | and we were gonna track them.

02:25:16.620 | And then we were gonna use some variation

02:25:19.140 | and exposure to violence and where the rebel group was

02:25:21.220 | to actually show what happens to people

02:25:23.620 | when they're exposed to violence and conscription.

02:25:25.340 | We were gonna tell, psychologically, economically,

02:25:28.020 | we were gonna answer questions

02:25:29.820 | and that which would help you design better programs.

02:25:31.860 | And so we hatched this plan, which is totally cockamamie.

02:25:35.220 | So cockamamie that when I pulled

02:25:38.220 | my previous dissertation proposal from my committee

02:25:41.780 | like the next week and gave them a new one,

02:25:44.060 | they unanimously met without me

02:25:47.980 | to decide that this was totally bonkers.

02:25:51.420 | And to advise me not to go.

02:25:53.300 | And they coordinated to read my old proposal

02:25:55.180 | so that when I showed up for my defense,

02:25:56.500 | they said, "You actually think you're defending,

02:25:57.940 | "but we want you to only talk about this other thing

02:26:00.700 | "that you were gonna do because this is like,

02:26:02.540 | "you should not go."

02:26:04.100 | - Oh wow.

02:26:05.380 | I mean, it is incredibly ambitious,

02:26:07.140 | super interesting though.

02:26:08.260 | - It actually worked exactly according to plan.

02:26:10.220 | It's the first and last time in my entire career.

02:26:12.380 | - You actually pulled off an ambitious,

02:26:13.940 | like a gigantically crazy ambitious idea.

02:26:15.780 | - Well, all of my work, that's my shtick.

02:26:17.900 | My day-to-day research job is not writing books

02:26:19.980 | about why we fight.

02:26:20.820 | My thing is like, I go, I collect data on things

02:26:24.300 | that nobody else thought you could collect data on.

02:26:26.500 | And so I always do pull it off,

02:26:28.100 | but it never turns out like I thought it was going to.

02:26:31.260 | Like it's always, there's so many twists and turns

02:26:33.220 | and it always goes sideways in an interesting way

02:26:35.980 | and it works, but it's all,

02:26:37.140 | but this one actually we pulled off in spite of ourselves

02:26:40.260 | and as planned.

02:26:42.100 | And so Ted Miguel, who I wrote that paper with

02:26:45.060 | was actually the one person of my advisors

02:26:47.740 | who was like, "Well, you know what?

02:26:49.500 | He was sympathetic to this."

02:26:50.820 | He was like, "Eh, why don't you just go for a couple months

02:26:53.460 | and like check it out and then come back

02:26:55.060 | and work on the other thing."

02:26:56.300 | And that's, and so I followed Jeannie there and went there

02:26:58.700 | and then, but, and I don't know, what's this?

02:27:02.060 | I always remember, you know, this movie "Speed,"

02:27:04.780 | the Ken Reeves and Sandra, whatever these people are.

02:27:08.940 | And they have this relationship

02:27:10.460 | in these intense circumstances and they like, well,

02:27:12.700 | and I think at the end of the movie,

02:27:13.820 | they're sort of like, "This will never work

02:27:15.380 | because these relationships

02:27:16.460 | and intense circumstances never matter,"

02:27:17.940 | which is what we assumed.

02:27:19.460 | And that turned out not to be true.

02:27:21.700 | So we've been married 15 years and we have two kids and--

02:27:25.580 | - Yeah, and that's when you fell in love with psychology

02:27:28.020 | and learned to appreciate the power of psychology.

02:27:30.220 | - Exactly, so that's the psychology in the book as well

02:27:32.820 | because I, and so we ended up, for most of our work

02:27:35.460 | for the first five or 10 years was together actually.

02:27:38.020 | - What's the hardest piece of data

02:27:40.820 | that you've been chasing, that you've chased?

02:27:44.820 | And you're like, what are some interesting things?

02:27:47.060 | 'Cause you mentioned like one of the things

02:27:48.620 | you kind of wanna go somewhere in the world

02:27:51.700 | and find evidence and data for things

02:27:54.580 | that people just haven't really looked

02:27:56.380 | to gain an understanding of human nature,

02:27:58.900 | maybe from an economics perspective.

02:28:00.900 | What kind of stuff, either in your past

02:28:03.900 | or in your future, you've been thinking about?

02:28:06.660 | - Well, I mean, the hardest, there's heart and two cents.

02:28:09.180 | The hardest emotionally was interviewing all those kids

02:28:12.500 | in Northern Uganda.

02:28:13.340 | That was just like a gut punch every day.

02:28:16.940 | And just hearing the stories like that was the hardest,

02:28:21.100 | but it wasn't hard because it was,

02:28:22.580 | you could, the kids were everywhere

02:28:23.820 | and everybody would talk to you about it

02:28:25.180 | and they could talk about it.

02:28:26.020 | You could, no one had gone and interviewed kids

02:28:30.460 | that had gone through war in the middle

02:28:31.660 | of an active war zone.

02:28:32.500 | Nobody was going to displace, all the things we did,

02:28:34.260 | no one had done that before.

02:28:35.400 | So now lots of people do it.

02:28:37.540 | - Could you actually speak to their stories?

02:28:42.540 | What's like the shape of their suffering?

02:28:45.740 | What were common themes?

02:28:49.620 | What, how did those stories change you?

02:28:53.540 | - I remember I said you could,

02:28:54.380 | you have like your dispassionate self

02:28:56.220 | and your passionate self.

02:28:58.780 | I think I had to learn to create the dispassionate self.

02:29:01.500 | I mean, we all have that capacity

02:29:02.820 | when we analyze something that's far away

02:29:04.340 | and happens to people different than us,

02:29:05.900 | but you have to, I think I discovered

02:29:10.340 | and developed an ability to like put those aside

02:29:14.300 | in order to be able to study this.

02:29:15.500 | So you get maybe harder in a way

02:29:18.980 | that you have to be guard against.

02:29:20.780 | So you have to try to remember to put your human head on.

02:29:24.180 | It's really horrible.

02:29:25.020 | Like if I want to conscript you

02:29:26.460 | and I don't want you to run away,

02:29:29.620 | then I want to make you think you can never go back

02:29:31.900 | to your village.

02:29:32.740 | And the best way for me to do that is for,

02:29:35.740 | to make you, force you to do something really, really,

02:29:38.500 | really, really horrible that you could,

02:29:41.020 | you almost incredibly believe you can never really go back.

02:29:44.100 | And it might be like killing a loved one.

02:29:46.780 | And so, and just having, hearing people tell you that story

02:29:51.340 | in all of the different shapes and forms to a point,

02:29:55.180 | what was horrible about it is they did this so routinely

02:29:57.900 | that you'd be sitting there in an interview with somebody

02:30:00.660 | and they'd be telling you the story.

02:30:02.180 | And it's like the most horrible thing

02:30:03.700 | that could happen to you or anyone else.

02:30:06.180 | And, but there's some voice in the back of your mind

02:30:08.500 | saying, okay, we really need to get to the other thing.

02:30:13.420 | You know, we know that, I know how this goes.

02:30:15.300 | Like I've heard, you know, there's this thing like,

02:30:16.900 | okay, okay, I'm not learning anything new here.

02:30:19.460 | Like there's some part, you know, deep, evil,

02:30:22.060 | terrible part of you that's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:30:24.300 | Like, but let's get onto the other thing.

02:30:26.100 | But I know I have to go through this.

02:30:27.380 | But every day you have to go through that to get to the,

02:30:29.660 | 'cause you're trying to actually understand

02:30:30.940 | how to help people.

02:30:31.780 | You're trying to understand how that trauma has manifested,

02:30:34.020 | how they either, some people get stronger

02:30:35.420 | as a result of that.

02:30:36.260 | Some people get weaker.

02:30:37.580 | And if you want to know how to help people,

02:30:39.380 | then you need to get to that.

02:30:41.020 | I wasn't trying to get to something

02:30:42.140 | for my selfish purposes really.

02:30:43.340 | I was trying to figure out, okay,

02:30:44.740 | we need to know what your symptoms are now.

02:30:46.580 | - That's such a dark thing about us.

02:30:49.500 | So if you're surrounded by trauma,

02:30:51.760 | God, that voice in the back of your head

02:30:55.540 | that you just go, yeah, I know exactly

02:30:57.460 | how this conversation goes.

02:30:58.660 | Let's skip ahead to the solutions, to the next.

02:31:02.540 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:31:03.380 | So that was, yeah, so that was,

02:31:05.300 | because you then have to deal with yourself.

02:31:06.660 | So it's very helpful if you like come home every night

02:31:09.100 | to someone who's A, gone through the same thing,

02:31:10.940 | and B, is a professional and very, very, very,

02:31:13.460 | very good counseling psychologist.

02:31:15.500 | The hardest thing, I mean, the organized crime stuff

02:31:22.060 | has been the hardest.

02:31:23.340 | Just figuring out how to get that information

02:31:25.060 | took us years of just trial and error,

02:31:27.660 | of mostly error, of like just how to get people

02:31:30.860 | to talk to us or how to collect data

02:31:33.180 | in a way that's safe for me and safe for my team

02:31:36.900 | and safe for people to answer a survey.

02:31:38.700 | Like how do you get the information

02:31:42.100 | on what gangs are doing in the community

02:31:46.180 | or how it's hurting or helping people?

02:31:48.020 | Like you've got to run surveys

02:31:49.180 | and you've got to talk to gang members,

02:31:50.460 | all these things that nobody knows how to do that.

02:31:53.580 | And so we had to sort of really slowly,

02:31:55.900 | not nobody, there's a few other,

02:31:56.740 | I think there's other academics like me

02:31:58.460 | who are doing this, but it's a pretty small group

02:32:01.300 | that's trying to like collect systematic data.

02:32:04.780 | And then there's a slightly bigger

02:32:06.700 | and much more experienced group

02:32:08.140 | that's been talking to different armed groups.

02:32:10.620 | But every time you go to a new city,

02:32:12.420 | and there weren't that many people working on this

02:32:14.060 | in Medellin, there were a few,

02:32:15.700 | you have to like discover a new.

02:32:17.100 | Like it's really unique to that city and place.

02:32:20.500 | - So there's not like a website

02:32:23.180 | for each of the 17 mafia groups.

02:32:25.500 | There's no Facebook group you can DM them.

02:32:26.340 | - Well there is now.

02:32:27.180 | We've created like our own, we have a private wiki

02:32:30.580 | where we document everything

02:32:32.100 | and it's a collaborative enterprise

02:32:33.380 | between lots of researchers and journalists and things.

02:32:35.700 | So they now have, they can't see,

02:32:36.900 | you can't go online and see this.

02:32:38.980 | - That's individual researchers,

02:32:40.260 | so it's not, I mean they're hiding by design.

02:32:42.940 | - Some of them have Facebook pages

02:32:44.820 | and things of this nature.

02:32:45.940 | So they do have public profiles a little bit,

02:32:47.860 | but not so explicitly.

02:32:50.340 | No, so they're clandestine.

02:32:51.620 | Here's an example.

02:32:52.460 | So one of the things that's really endemic in Medellin,

02:32:54.380 | it's true in a lot of cities,

02:32:55.940 | it's true in American prisons,

02:32:57.300 | is gangs govern everybody's everyday life.

02:33:00.180 | So if you have a, in an American prison,

02:33:03.180 | particularly in Illinois or California,

02:33:04.940 | Texas is another big one,

02:33:07.020 | but also in a city in Medellin,

02:33:09.580 | if you have a problem,

02:33:11.020 | a debt to collect or dispute with a neighbor or something,

02:33:15.060 | you could go to the government and they do

02:33:17.100 | and they can help you solve it,

02:33:18.220 | or you go to the police or you can go to the gang.

02:33:21.140 | And so, and that's like a really everyday phenomenon.

02:33:23.740 | But then there's a question of like,

02:33:24.820 | how do you actually figure out

02:33:27.700 | what services they're offering

02:33:29.500 | and how much they pay for them

02:33:30.860 | and do you actually like those services

02:33:32.380 | and how do you comparison shop

02:33:34.380 | between the police and the gang?

02:33:37.060 | And what would get you to go from the gang to the police?

02:33:40.540 | And then how's the gang strategically

02:33:42.100 | gonna respond to that?

02:33:43.540 | And what was the impact of previous policies

02:33:46.060 | to like make state governing better?

02:33:48.620 | And how did the gangs react?

02:33:49.820 | And so that's, we had to sort of figure that out.

02:33:51.740 | And that was, so that was just hard in a different way,

02:33:54.780 | but I don't do the most,

02:33:55.700 | the emotionally punishing stuff I couldn't do any longer.

02:33:58.220 | So that's much easier in that sense.

02:34:00.860 | - By the way, on Jorge Ochoa,

02:34:04.740 | some of these folks are out of prison.

02:34:06.740 | Have you gotten a chance to talk to anybody?

02:34:09.060 | - One of my collaborators on this,

02:34:11.020 | a guy named Gustavo Duncan,

02:34:12.180 | who spent a lot of time interviewing paramilitaries,

02:34:16.380 | has written a book.

02:34:17.220 | He's talked to more of these people than I have.

02:34:20.300 | I haven't talked to those.

02:34:22.740 | We haven't been talking to them about this stuff.

02:34:25.500 | But also, they were there in a different era.

02:34:27.860 | - Yeah, so it doesn't--

02:34:28.940 | - The system was totally different.

02:34:29.940 | - That's super interesting.

02:34:30.940 | Maybe one day we'll do that.

02:34:31.780 | - Almost like history.

02:34:32.900 | - Yeah, that was 30 years ago.

02:34:35.940 | And the system of, I mean, La Oficina,

02:34:38.780 | Pablo Escobar created La Oficina.

02:34:40.300 | He integrated what's, all these 17 Jorazones

02:34:43.940 | and all these street gangs are the fragmented

02:34:46.020 | former remnants of his more unified empire,

02:34:48.740 | which he gave the name La Oficina.

02:34:50.500 | I mean, I think, you know, it's a little bit apocryphal,

02:34:53.380 | but the idea is, you know, I think he said,

02:34:55.540 | every doctor has an office, so should we.

02:34:59.540 | (laughing)

02:35:00.500 | - I still can't imagine, I still love that there's parallels

02:35:03.700 | between these mafia groups and the United Nations

02:35:08.420 | Security Council.

02:35:09.540 | This is just wonderful.

02:35:10.580 | It's so, so, so deeply human.

02:35:13.340 | Let me ask you about yourself.

02:35:15.060 | So you've been thinking about war here,

02:35:17.700 | in part dispassionately, just analyze war

02:35:22.420 | and try to understand the path for peace.

02:35:24.180 | But you as a single individual

02:35:27.740 | that's going to die one day,

02:35:30.140 | maybe talking to the people that have gone through suffering,

02:35:35.140 | do you think about your own mortality?

02:35:37.820 | How has your view of your own finiteness changed

02:35:42.980 | having thought about war?

02:35:45.220 | - Maybe the reason I can do this work

02:35:46.700 | is 'cause I don't think about it a lot.

02:35:48.940 | - Your own mortality or even like mortality?

02:35:52.020 | - Yeah, I mean, well, I have to think about death a lot.

02:35:55.340 | So.

02:35:57.140 | - But there's a way to think about death,

02:35:58.700 | like numbers in a calculation

02:36:01.380 | when you're doing geopolitical negotiations.

02:36:04.020 | And then there's like a dying child or a dying mother.

02:36:09.020 | - Yeah, I guess I know I'm in a place where there's risk.

02:36:12.500 | And so I think a lot about minimizing any risks,

02:36:17.500 | such that I think about mortality enough that I just,

02:36:22.980 | 'cause I'm kind of an anxious person.

02:36:25.740 | So like I'm kind of a worry ward, like in a way.

02:36:28.380 | And so I'm really obsessive about making sure

02:36:33.980 | anything that I do is low risk.

02:36:36.140 | You know?

02:36:36.980 | - That gives you something to focus on,

02:36:39.180 | a number is the risk and you're trying to minimize it.

02:36:42.180 | And yet there's still the existential dread.

02:36:45.940 | Your risk minimization doesn't matter.

02:36:49.340 | - Yeah, I've never been in a life-threatening situation.

02:36:54.620 | - Yeah, that's somebody who,

02:36:56.260 | you know what you sound like?

02:36:57.460 | That's Alex Honnold that does the free climbing.

02:37:00.580 | He doesn't see that as like.

02:37:02.140 | - Well, that's, but no, but I, well, that's.

02:37:04.060 | - He sounds exactly the same.

02:37:05.340 | 'Cause you just said,

02:37:06.180 | "I've never done anything as dangerous

02:37:08.100 | "as those people riding a scooter."

02:37:10.220 | - I've actually been a rock climber for like 25 years

02:37:13.180 | with a long break in between.

02:37:15.380 | But I'm the same way.

02:37:16.980 | Actually, rock climbing is an extremely safe sport

02:37:19.420 | if you're very careful.

02:37:21.060 | But free climbing is the opposite of that.

02:37:23.460 | But I mean, if you've got a rope that's attached to you

02:37:26.940 | that goes up, is attached to 18 trees and comes back down,

02:37:31.300 | you're fine.

02:37:32.700 | Like this, and you wear a helmet, you're good.

02:37:35.740 | You're totally fine.

02:37:36.780 | - Yeah, but this is super safe too 'cause.

02:37:39.460 | - There's free climbing, no, no, no.

02:37:40.900 | - We're watching free climbing.

02:37:42.940 | I mean, because you're only gonna put your hands

02:37:45.260 | and feet on sturdy rock and then you know the path.

02:37:49.340 | - No, no, no, no, no.

02:37:50.900 | Totally, I know, I have some friends in college,

02:37:55.180 | I've known people who do some of these totally wacky,

02:37:58.020 | extreme sports and have paid the price.

02:38:00.020 | So I think it's totally, totally different.

02:38:03.860 | I think.

02:38:04.700 | - So even in that, by the way, this is still.

02:38:07.820 | - I can't even watch those movies

02:38:09.180 | 'cause those freak me out too much

02:38:10.380 | 'cause it's just too risky.

02:38:11.540 | Like I can't, I don't even, yeah.

02:38:13.660 | So those things, I've never watched like Free Solo

02:38:16.540 | or anything, there's just too much.

02:38:18.860 | - It's still not as dangerous as riding a scooter

02:38:20.620 | in Austin.

02:38:21.460 | - Yeah, totally not.

02:38:22.280 | - I'm not gonna let that go.

02:38:23.120 | But even in that, it's just risk minimization

02:38:27.700 | in the work that you do versus the sort of philosophical,

02:38:31.660 | existentialist view of your mortality.

02:38:34.980 | You know, this thing just ends.

02:38:37.820 | Like what the hell is that about?

02:38:39.180 | - Yeah, I have this amazing capacity not to think about it

02:38:42.380 | which might just be a self-defense mechanism.

02:38:44.260 | You know, my father-in-law, Jeannie's father

02:38:46.140 | is an evangelical pastor actually.

02:38:48.340 | He's now retired.

02:38:49.180 | But, and this he would, we would talk about

02:38:53.260 | when we were getting married,

02:38:54.300 | they weren't terribly thrilled

02:38:55.740 | that she was marrying a agnostic or atheist or something.

02:39:00.740 | We could love each other very much, it's fine now.

02:39:02.740 | But I only started discussing this and some of the,

02:39:05.980 | 'cause that was one of his questions for me.

02:39:07.620 | Like, well, how can you possibly believe

02:39:09.700 | that there's nothing afterwards?

02:39:11.580 | Because that's just like too horrible to imagine.

02:39:14.740 | And we really never saw eye to eye on this.

02:39:17.020 | And my view was like, listen, like,

02:39:19.420 | I can't convince myself, I believe what I,

02:39:21.060 | like I can't convince myself otherwise.

02:39:22.660 | Anything else seems completely implausible to me.

02:39:25.300 | And for some reason I can't understand,

02:39:27.420 | I'm at peace with that.

02:39:28.420 | Like it's never bothered me that one day it's over.

02:39:31.660 | And I understand, the fact that people have angst about that

02:39:35.700 | and that they would seek answers makes total sense to me.

02:39:39.500 | And I can't explain why that doesn't consume me

02:39:43.260 | or doesn't bother me.

02:39:46.700 | - And yet you are at peace.

02:39:49.340 | - Yep, maybe if I was worried,

02:39:50.860 | but if I was more worried about it,

02:39:51.980 | maybe I wouldn't be able to do, I don't know.

02:39:53.980 | I don't know, but then again, I don't take the risk.

02:39:55.740 | I'm still like, I don't know.

02:39:57.100 | But I minimize all sorts of risks.

02:39:58.660 | I'm like, yeah, I minimize,

02:40:03.020 | I try to optimize like groceries in the fridge too.

02:40:06.420 | Like, I mean, I put--

02:40:07.780 | - That's a very economist way to live, I would say.

02:40:11.260 | That's probably why you're good at--

02:40:12.700 | - That might be true.

02:40:13.540 | That might be there's some selection in economics

02:40:15.700 | of these cold calculators.

02:40:17.540 | - Chicken or the egg, we'll never know.

02:40:19.180 | Do you have advice for young people

02:40:21.300 | that want to do as ambitious, as crazy,

02:40:24.700 | as amazing of work as you have done in life?

02:40:28.420 | So somebody who's in high school, in college,

02:40:31.620 | either career advice on what to choose,

02:40:34.660 | how to execute on it, or just life advice.

02:40:38.180 | How to meet some random stranger,

02:40:40.780 | or maybe a dating advice.

02:40:41.980 | (laughing)

02:40:43.700 | - That part's easier.

02:40:44.540 | You have to fly coach and go to the internet cafes.

02:40:47.780 | You can't like, yeah, all the development workers

02:40:49.860 | that I know that fly business class,

02:40:51.180 | I'm like, you'll never meet somebody.

02:40:53.220 | No, I actually spent a lot of time writing advice

02:40:57.140 | on my blog, and I've got like pages and pages of advice.

02:40:59.900 | And one of the reasons is 'cause I never got that.

02:41:02.100 | Like when I grew up, I went to like a really good

02:41:03.980 | state school in Canada called Waterloo.

02:41:07.060 | I loved it, but people didn't go on the trajectory

02:41:09.460 | that I went on from there.

02:41:10.780 | And I had some good advisors there,

02:41:12.820 | but I never got the kind of advice I needed

02:41:15.260 | to like pursue this career.

02:41:16.300 | So it's very concentrated in elite colleges,

02:41:20.860 | I think sometimes, in elite high schools.

02:41:22.620 | So I tried to democratize that.

02:41:24.420 | That was one reason I started the blog.

02:41:27.180 | But a lot of that's really particular,

02:41:28.380 | 'cause every week I have students coming in my office

02:41:30.900 | wanting to know how to do international development work,

02:41:32.700 | and I just spend a lot of time giving them advice,

02:41:34.380 | and that's what a lot of the posts are about.

02:41:36.260 | - Do you have very specific questions?

02:41:37.780 | Like what, is it like country by country

02:41:39.700 | kind of specific questions, or what?

02:41:41.340 | - The thing that they're all trying to do

02:41:42.460 | that I think is the right, I don't have to give them

02:41:43.900 | a really basic piece of advice,

02:41:45.220 | 'cause they're already doing it.

02:41:46.460 | Like they're trying to find a vocation.

02:41:48.500 | They're really interested, and what I mean by that

02:41:51.300 | is it's like a career where they find meaning,

02:41:53.620 | where the work is almost like superfluous,

02:41:56.820 | because they would do it for free.

02:41:59.380 | And they're passionate about it,

02:42:00.460 | and they really find meaning in the work.

02:42:02.860 | And then it becomes a little bit all-consuming.

02:42:05.100 | So scientists do that in their own way,

02:42:07.260 | I think international development, humanitarian workers,

02:42:09.180 | people who are doctors and nurses.

02:42:11.180 | Like we all do our careers for other reasons, right?

02:42:13.100 | But they find meaning in their career.

02:42:16.980 | And so the thing, so I don't have to tell them

02:42:19.740 | whatever you do, find meaning.

02:42:21.340 | And try to make it a vocation,

02:42:24.380 | something that you would do for free

02:42:25.700 | amongst all of these many, many, many options.

02:42:28.000 | That's what I would tell,

02:42:30.780 | but that's what I would tell high school students

02:42:32.780 | and young people in college.

02:42:35.340 | - Sometimes it's hard to find a thing and hold onto it.

02:42:39.940 | - Well, that's the other thing, it took me a long time.

02:42:41.980 | So I actually started off as an accountant.

02:42:43.900 | I was an accountant with Deloitte and Touche for a few years.

02:42:46.580 | So I did not--

02:42:47.900 | - But that, did you wake up in the morning

02:42:50.460 | excited to be alive?

02:42:52.540 | - I was miserable.

02:42:53.380 | I found it by accident, which is another different story.

02:42:56.760 | But I landed in this job and a degree

02:42:59.460 | where I studied accounting, and I was miserable.

02:43:01.540 | I was totally miserable.

02:43:03.460 | And I hated it, and I was becoming a miserable person.

02:43:07.220 | And so I eventually just quit, and I did something new.

02:43:10.620 | But that still, you know,

02:43:11.940 | but then I was working in the private sector.

02:43:13.980 | And I actually just needed trial and error.

02:43:15.740 | I actually had to try on three or four or five careers

02:43:18.200 | before I found this mixture of academia and activism

02:43:21.200 | and research and international development.

02:43:23.540 | - And what did you know that this was love

02:43:26.580 | when you found this kind of international development?

02:43:29.460 | The academic context, too?

02:43:32.500 | - The key lesson was just trial and error,

02:43:34.140 | which we all have to engage in until it feels right.

02:43:36.900 | - So okay, all right, step one is trial and error,

02:43:38.620 | but until it feels right, 'cause like,

02:43:41.660 | it often feels right but not perfect.

02:43:44.260 | - Yeah, well, and if it's true, right enough.

02:43:46.740 | I mean, I was really intellectually engaged.

02:43:48.780 | Like, I just loved learning about it.

02:43:50.100 | I wanted to read more, like, in some sense, like,

02:43:53.260 | like I was doing, I was an accountant,

02:43:54.860 | but I was reading about, like, world history

02:43:57.540 | and international development

02:43:58.380 | in poor countries in my spare time, right?

02:44:00.700 | And so it was like this hobby, and I was like,

02:44:02.500 | wait a second, I could actually do that.

02:44:04.300 | Like, just, I could, like, research this

02:44:06.820 | and even write the neck of those books,

02:44:08.260 | and that's kind of what I did, like, 25 years later.

02:44:11.500 | That didn't occur to me right away.

02:44:12.620 | I didn't even know it was possible.

02:44:14.180 | This is the other thing people do.

02:44:15.380 | People do their nine to five job,

02:44:17.260 | and then they find meaning in everything else they do.

02:44:19.180 | They're volunteering, and they're family,

02:44:20.780 | and they're hobbies and things,

02:44:21.860 | and that was my social milieu,

02:44:23.260 | and that's a great path, too.

02:44:25.740 | Like, I mean, that's, 'cause not all of us

02:44:27.300 | can just have a vocation or we don't find it, I think,

02:44:29.380 | and then you just circumscribe what you do in your work,

02:44:31.540 | and then you go find,

02:44:33.980 | and that's not entirely true,

02:44:35.020 | 'cause everyone in my family does like their job

02:44:37.460 | and get a lot of fulfillment out of it,

02:44:39.300 | but I think it's not.

02:44:41.500 | That's a different path in some ways.

02:44:44.820 | - So it's good to take the leap and keep trying stuff,

02:44:47.100 | even when you've found, like, a little local minima.

02:44:51.020 | - Yeah, the hardest part was,

02:44:53.580 | it got easy after a while, it was quitting,

02:44:57.180 | but now I take this to a lot of,

02:44:58.700 | you know, and one of the people,

02:45:00.020 | I think one of the reasons I discovered your podcast

02:45:02.780 | or maybe Tyler Cowen.

02:45:04.220 | - Yeah, he's amazing.

02:45:05.220 | - Tyler takes this approach to everything.

02:45:07.300 | He takes this approach to movie.

02:45:09.460 | He's like, "Walk into the movie theater

02:45:11.580 | "after half an hour if you don't like the movie."

02:45:14.020 | - You know what kind of person he probably is?

02:45:17.220 | I don't know, but now that you say this,

02:45:18.900 | he's probably somebody that goes to a restaurant,

02:45:21.180 | if the meals is not good,

02:45:23.260 | I could see him just walking away,

02:45:24.780 | like, paying for it and just walking away.

02:45:26.500 | - Yeah, and to go eat something better.

02:45:28.700 | That's exactly right, and I thought that was kind of crazy,

02:45:31.460 | and I'd never, I was the person,

02:45:32.740 | I would never just put a book down halfway,

02:45:34.900 | and I would never stop watching a movie,

02:45:38.380 | but then I, and I convinced my wife,

02:45:39.900 | we lived in New York when we were single initially,

02:45:43.220 | sorry, when we were childless,

02:45:45.260 | and we lived in New York,

02:45:47.740 | there's all this culture and theater and stuff,

02:45:49.940 | and I just said, "Let's go to more plays,

02:45:51.660 | "but let's just walk out after the first act

02:45:54.020 | "if we don't like it,"

02:45:54.940 | and she thought that was a bit crazy,

02:45:56.300 | and I was like, "No, no, no, here's the logic,

02:45:57.580 | "here's what Tyler says,"

02:45:58.980 | and then we started doing it,

02:45:59.860 | and it was so freeing and glorious.

02:46:01.260 | We'd just go, we'd take so many more chances on things,

02:46:04.220 | and we would, and if we didn't like it,

02:46:05.940 | and we were walking out of stuff all the time,

02:46:08.660 | and so I think I did that,

02:46:11.180 | without realizing it, that's how I took,

02:46:13.020 | I just kept quitting my jobs

02:46:15.300 | and trying to find something else at some risk.

02:46:17.900 | - 'Cause that's how wars start, without the commitment.

02:46:20.100 | (laughing)

02:46:21.100 | I go to time back to, you need the commitment,

02:46:24.460 | otherwise, no.

02:46:26.300 | - That's a different kind of commitment problem.

02:46:27.820 | That's a different commitment problem.

02:46:29.780 | - But some of it, I'm sure there's a balance,

02:46:31.740 | 'cause I mean, the same thing is happening

02:46:33.100 | with dating and marriage and all those kinds of things,

02:46:35.220 | and there's some value to sticking it out,

02:46:38.420 | 'cause some of the, like, maybe, you know,

02:46:41.820 | don't leave after the first act,

02:46:43.300 | 'cause the good stuff might be coming later.

02:46:45.580 | - Yeah, that's a good point.

02:46:46.620 | I mean, that's, yeah. - The balance.

02:46:47.860 | - Well, I don't know.

02:46:50.100 | So when I met Jeannie,

02:46:51.780 | she was very wary of a relationship with me,

02:46:53.580 | because I explained to her,

02:46:55.260 | I hadn't had a relationship longer

02:46:57.700 | than two or three months and 11 years.

02:47:00.100 | And so she thought this person's not serious.

02:47:01.860 | And what I said to her, and she tells the story,

02:47:03.940 | this is how she tells the story,

02:47:04.820 | she says, "I didn't believe him when he said

02:47:06.180 | "that I just, after two or three months,

02:47:07.700 | "you kind of have a good sense

02:47:09.420 | "of whether this is going somewhere,

02:47:10.700 | "and I would just decide if it was over."

02:47:12.940 | And I walk away.

02:47:13.780 | So I took this approach to dating,

02:47:14.620 | like, as soon as I thought it wasn't gonna go somewhere.

02:47:17.140 | And then I decided with her that this was it,

02:47:20.420 | this was gonna work, and then I like,

02:47:21.860 | and then never, and she didn't believe,

02:47:24.020 | now she believes me.

02:47:25.260 | (laughing)

02:47:26.620 | - You finally got to be right.

02:47:29.100 | Okay, so this is an incredible conversation.

02:47:31.020 | Your work is so fascinating,

02:47:32.580 | just in this big picture way,

02:47:35.860 | looking at human conflict and how we can achieve peace,

02:47:39.020 | especially in this time of the Ukraine war.

02:47:42.420 | I really, really, really appreciate

02:47:44.020 | that you would calmly speak to me

02:47:46.420 | about some of these difficult ideas,

02:47:47.980 | and explain them, and that you would sit down with me,

02:47:50.380 | and have this amazing conversation.

02:47:51.740 | Thank you so much. - It was an amazing

02:47:52.580 | conversation, thank you.

02:47:54.620 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:47:56.140 | with Chris Blattman.

02:47:57.340 | To support this podcast,

02:47:58.580 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:48:00.980 | And now, let me leave you with some well-known,

02:48:03.420 | simple words from Albert Einstein.

02:48:06.220 | I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,

02:48:10.700 | but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

02:48:14.500 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:48:18.380 | (upbeat music)

02:48:20.980 | (upbeat music)

02:48:23.580 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Chris Blattman: War and Violence | Lex Fridman Podcast #273

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