Chris Blattman: War and Violence | Lex Fridman Podcast #273
what are your thoughts on the ongoing war in ukraine how do you analyze it within your framework about war how far would they go to hang on to power when push came to shove is i think the thing that worries me the most and is plainly what worries most people about the risk of nuclear war like at what point does that uncheck leadership decide that this is worth it especially if they can emerge from the rebels still on top the following is a conversation with chris blattman professor at the university of chicago studying the causes and consequences of violence and war this he explores in his new book called why we fight the roots of war and the paths to peace the book comes out on april 19th so you should pre-order it to support chris and his work this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's chris blattman in your new book titled why we fight the roots of war and the paths for peace you're right quote let me be clear what i mean when i say war i don't just mean countries duking it out i mean any kind of prolonged violent struggle between groups that includes villages clans gangs ethnic groups religious sects political factions and nations wildly different as these may be their origins have much in common we'll see that the northern irish zealots colombian cartels european tyrants liberian rebels greek oligarchs chicago gangs indian mobs rwandan jenna said dares a new word i learned thank you to you those are people who administer genocide english soccer hooligans and american invaders so first let me ask what is war in saying that war is a prolonged violent struggle between groups what do the words prolonged groups and violent mean i sit at the sort of intersection of economics and political science and i i also dwell a little bit in psychology but that's partly because i'm married to psychologists sometimes do research with her all these things are really different so if you're a political scientist you spend a lot of time just classifying a really narrow kind of conflict and studying that and that's that's an important way to make progress uh as a social scientist but i'm not trying to make progress i'm trying to sort of help everybody step back and say you know what there's like some common things that we know from these disciplines that uh relate to a really wide range phenomenon basically we we can talk about them in a very similar way and we get really similar insights so i wanted to actually bring them together but i still had to like say let's hold out individual violence which has a lot in common but but individuals choose to engage in violence for more and sometimes different reasons so let's just put that aside so that we can focus a bit and let's really put aside short incidents of violence because those might have the same kind of things explaining them but actually there's a lot of other things that can explain short violence short violence can be really uh demonstrative like you can just i can use it to communicate information the thing that all of it has in common is that it doesn't generally make sense it's not your best option most of the time and so i wanted to say let's take this thing that should be puzzling we kind of think it's normal we kind of think this is what all humans do but let's point out that it's not normal and then figure out why and let's talk about why and so that's so i was trying to throw out the the short violence i was trying to throw out the individual violence i was also trying to throw out all the competition that happens that's not violent that's that's the normal normal competition i was trying to say let's talk about violent competition because that's kind of the puzzle so that's really interesting you said usually people try to find a narrow definition and you said progress so you make progress by finding a narrow definition for example of military conflict in a particular context yeah and progress means all right well how do we prevent this particular kind of military conflict or maybe if it's already happening how do we de-escalate it and how do we solve it so from a geopolitics perspective from an economics perspective and you're looking for a definition of war that is as broad as possible but not so broad that you cannot achieve a deep level of understanding of why it happens and how it can be avoided right and a comment basically like recognize that common principles govern some kinds of behavior that look pretty different like an indian ethnic riot is obviously pretty different than invading a neighboring country right but uh and that's pretty different than two villages or two gangs a lot of what i work on is studying organized criminals and gangs two gangs going to where you think is really different and and of course it is but but there are some like common principles you can just think about conflict and the use of violence and um and not learn everything but just get a lot just get really really far by sort of seeing the commonalities rather than just focusing on the differences so again those words are prolonged groups and violent can you maybe linger on each of those words what is prolonged mean what's where's the line between short and long what does groups mean and what does violet mean so let me you know i have a friend who um someone has become a friend through the process of my work and and writing this book also uh who was 20 30 years ago was a was gang leader in chicago so this guy named napoleon english or nap and i remember one time he was saying well you know when i was young i used to i was 15 16 and he'd go to the neighboring gangs territory says i'd go gangbanging and i said well i didn't know what that meant i said what does that mean and he said oh that just meant i'd shoot him up like i'd shoot at buildings i might shoot at people i wasn't trying to kill he wasn't trying to kill them he was just trying to sort of send a signal that he was a tough guy and he was fearless and he was someone who they should be careful with and so i didn't want to call that war right that was that was that's something different that was it was short it was kind of sporadic and and he wasn't and he was he was basically trying to send them information and this is what countries do all the time right we have military parades uh and we uh we might have border skirmishes and uh and and i wanted to sort of so is it what's short is is it three-month border skirmish a war i mean i don't i don't try to get into those things i don't want to but i want to point out that like these long grueling months and years of violence are like or the problem in the puzzle and i just i didn't want to spend a lot of time talking about um the international version of gang banging it's a different phenomenon so what is it about napoleon that doesn't nap let's call him not to add confusion yeah that doesn't qualify for war is it the individual aspect is it that violence is not the thing that is sought but the um communication of information is what is sought or is it the shortness of it is it all of those com it's a little bit i mean he was the head of a group where he was becoming the head of a group at that point um and that group eventually did go to war with those neighboring gangs which is to say it was just long drawn out conflict over months and months and months but i think one of the big insights from my fields is that you know you're constantly negotiating over something right whether you're officially negotiating or you're all posturing like you're kind of you're bargaining over something and uh you should be able to figure out a way to split that pie and you could use violence but violence is everybody's miserable like if you're nap like if you start a war one you know there's lots of risks you could get killed that's not good uh you could kill somebody else and go to jail which is what happened to him that's not good uh your soldiers get killed no one's buying your drugs in the middle of a gunfight so it interrupts your business and so on and on like it's really miserable this is what we're seeing right now you know as we're recording you know the russian invasion of ukraine is now its fourth or fifth week everybody's if it didn't dawn on them before it's dawned on them now just how brutal and costly this is as you describe for everybody so everybody is losing in this war yeah i mean that's maybe the inside everybody loses something from war and there was usually not always but this the point is there was usually a way to get what you wanted or be better off without having to fight over it so there's this it's just fighting is just politics by other means and it's just inefficient costly brutal devastating means and so that's like the deep insight and so i kind of wanted to say um so so i guess like what's not war and i mean i don't i don't want i don't try to belabor the definitions because some some you know there's reams and reams of political science prof papers written on like what's a war what's not award people disagree uh the i just wanted to say war is the thing that we shouldn't be doing or where's the violence that doesn't make sense there's a whole bunch of other violence including gang banging and skirmishes and things that might make sense uh precisely because they're cheap ways of communicating or their their way they're they're not particularly costly where's the thing that's just so costly we should be trying to avoid is maybe like the meta way i think about it right uh nevertheless definitions are interesting so outside of the academic bickering yeah every time you try to define something i'm a big fan of it the process illuminates so the destination doesn't matter because the moment you arrive at the definition um you lose the power yeah one of the interesting things i mean so people you know if you want to do you know some of what i do is just quantitative analysis of conflict and and if you want to do that if you want to sort of run statistics on war then you have to code it all up and and then lots of people have done that there's four or five major data sets where people or teams of people have over time said we're going to code years of war between these groups or within a country and what's interesting is how difficult these these data sets don't often agree you have to make all of these the decision gets really complicated like when does the war begin right does it does it begin when a certain number of people have been killed did it begin did it what if there's like lots of skirmishing and sort of like little terror attacks or a couple bombs lobbed and then eventually turns into war do we do we call that did do we back date it to like when the first act of violence started and then what do we do with all the one the times when there was like that low scale low intensity violence or lob bombs lobbed and do we do we call those wars but or maybe only if they eventually get worse like so you get it actually is really tricky and the defense on the offensive aspect so everybody uh hitler in world war ii it seems like he never attacked anybody he's always defending against the unjust attack of everybody else as he's taking over the world so that's like information propaganda that every side is trying to communicate to the world so you can't listen to necessarily information like self-report data you have to kind of look past that somehow maybe look especially in the modern world as much as possible at the data how many bombs dropped how many people killed how the number of the estimates of the number of troops moved from one location to another and that kind of thing and then the other interesting thing is there's um quantitative analysis of war so for example i was looking at just war index or people trying to measure trying to put a number on what wars are seen as just and not oh really i've never seen that it's there there's numbers behind it it's great so it's great because again as you do an extensive quantification of justice you start to think what actually contributes to our thought that for example world war ii is a just war and other wars are not um a lot of it is about intent and some of the other factors like that you look at which is prolonged the degree of violence that is necessary versus not necessary given the greater good some measure of the greater good of people all those kinds of things the then there's reasons for war you know looking to free people or to stop a genocide versus uh conquering land all those kinds of things and people tried to put a number behind it and a lot based on i mean what i'm trying to imagine is i mean suppose i wake up and or is whatever my suppose i think my god tells me to do something or or my my god thinks that uh or my moral sense thinks that something that another group is doing is repugnant i'm curious like are they evaluating like the validity of that claim or just the idea that like well you said it was repugnant you deeply believe that therefore it's just i think uh now it could be corrected on a lot of this but i think this is always looking at wars after they happened so it's and trying to take a global perspective from all sort of a general survey of how people perceive so you're not weighing disproportionately the opinions of the people who waged the war yeah i mean i i kind of ended up dodging that because i mean one is to just point out that wars actually most wars aren't necessary and so in the sense that there's there's another way to get what you wanted um and so on on one level there's no just war now that that's not true because take an example like the u.s invasion afghanistan the united states has been attacked uh there's a culpable agent reliable evidence that this is al-qaeda they're being sheltered by in afghanistan by the taliban and then the taliban this is this is a bit murky it seems that there was an attempt to say hand him over or else and and they said no way now you can make an argument that invading and attacking is strategically the right thing to do in terms of sending signals to your future enemies or you just if you think it's important to bring someone to justice in this case al-qaeda then then you maybe that's just war or that's a just invasion but it hinges on the fact that the the other side just didn't do the seemingly sensible thing which is say okay we'll give them up and uh and so so it was completely avoidable in one sense but if you believe and i think it's probably true if you believe that for their own ideological and other reasons um you know mulomar in particular and taliban in general decided we're not going to do this uh then then now you're not left with very many good choices uh and now i you know i didn't want to talk about is that a just war is that what's justice or not i just wanted to point out that like it one side's intransigence if that's indeed what happened one side's intransigent sort of maybe compels you to basically eliminates all of the reasonable bargains that you could be satisfied with and now you're left with really no other strategic option but to invade i think that's a slight oversimplification but i think that that's like that's like one way to describe what happened so your book is fascinating your perspective on this is fascinating i'll try to sort of play devil's advocate at times to try to get a clarity but the thesis is that war is costly usually costly for everybody so that's what you mean when you say nobody wants war because you're going to from a game theoretical perspective uh nobody wins and so war is essentially a breakdown of reason a breakdown of negotiation of healthy communication or healthy operation of the world some kind of breakdown you list all kinds of ways in which it it breaks down but there's also there's also human beings in this mix and there is ideas of justice so for example i don't want to my memory doesn't serve me well on which wars were seen as justice very very few in the 20th century of the many that have been there the the wars that were seen as just first of all the most just war seen as world war ii by far um it's actually the only one uh that goes above a threshold as seen as just everything is seen as unjust it's it's uh less it's like degrees of unjustness and i i think the ones that are seen as more just are the ones that are fast that you have a very specific purpose you communicate that purpose honestly with the global community and you strike hard fast and you pull out uh to do sort of it's like rescue missions it's almost like policing work if there's somebody suffering you go in and stop that suffering directly that's it i think world war ii is seen in that way that there's an obvious aggressor that is causing a lot of suffering in the world and looking to expand the scale of that suffering and so you strike i mean given the scale you strike car as hard and as fast as possible to stop the expansion of the suffering and so that's kind of how they see i don't know if you can kind of look with this framework that you presented and look at hitler and think well it's not in his interest to attack czechoslovakia poland britain france russia the soviet union america the united states of america uh same same with japan what is it in their interest long-term interest i don't know i i it uh so for me who cares about alleviating human suffering in the world yes it's not it seems like almost no war is just but it also seems somehow deeply human to fight and i think your book makes the case no it's not can you can you try to like get at that because it seems that war there is some that like drama of war seems to beat in all human hearts like it's in there somewhere maybe it's maybe there's like a relic of the past and we need to get rid of it it's deeply irrational okay so obviously we go to war and obviously there's a lot of violence and so we have to explain something and and some of that's going to be aspects of our humanness so so i guess what i wanted us to sort of start with i think it was just useful to sort of start and point out actually you know there's really really really really strong incentives not to go to war because it's going to be really costly and so all of these other human or strategic things all these things the circumstantial things that will eventually lead us go to war have to be pretty powerful before we go there and and most of the time sorry to interrupt uh and that's you why you also describe very importantly that war throughout human history is actually rare we usually avoid it you know most people don't know about the us invasion of haiti in 1994. i mean a lot of people know about it but people just don't pay attention to it we don't we we're going to you know the history books and school kids are going to learn about the invasion afghanistan for decades and decades and nobody is going to put this one in the in the history books and it's because it it didn't actually happen because uh before the troops could land the person who'd taken power in a coup basically said fine there's a famous story where where colin powell goes to haiti to this new dictator who's refused to let a democratic president take power and um and tries to convince him to step down or else and he says no no and and then he shows him a video and it's basically troop planes and all these things taking off and he's like this is not live this is two hours ago so it's a and and basically he basically gives up right there so that was that's a powerful move yeah i think powell might have been one of his teachers in like a u.s military college because a lot of these military dictators are trained at some point so they had some there was some personal relationships at least between people in the us government and this guy that they were trying to use the the point is and that that's that's like what should have happened like that makes sense right like yeah i'm maybe i can mount an insurgency and yeah i'm not going to bear a lot of the cost of work because i'm the dictator and maybe he's human and he just wants to fight or gets angry or it's just in his mind whatever he's doing but at the end of the day he's like this does not make sense um and that's what happens most of the time but we don't write so many books about it and uh and and and now some political scientists go and they count up all of the nations that could fight because they have some dispute and they're right next to another one another or they look at the ethnic groups that could fight with one another because they have there's some tension and they're right next to one another and and then whatever some number like 999 out of a thousand don't don't fight um because they just find some other way they don't like each other but they they just loathe in peace because that's the sensible thing to do and that's what we all do we loathe in peace uh and we loathe the soviet union in relative peace for decades and india uh loathes pakistan in peace i mean two weeks into the russian invasion of ukraine again it was in the newspapers but most people didn't i think take note india accidentally launched a cruise missile at pakistan and common suit so they were like yeah this is we do not want to go to war this will be bad uh we'll ex will be angry but we'll accept your explanation that this was an accident and so um so these things find to the radar until we overestimate i think how likely it is sides are going to fight but then of course things do happen like russia did invade the ukraine and didn't find some negotiated deal and so uh and so then the book is sort of about past the book it's just sort of laying out actually like there's just different ways this breaks down and some of them are human some of them are this i i actually don't think war beats in our heart it does a little bit but we're actually very cooperative we're as a species we're deeply deeply cooperative we're really really good so the thing we're not we're okay at violence and we're okay and we're okay getting angry and vengeance and we have principles that will sometimes lead us but we're actually really really really good at cooperation and and so that's again you know i i don't i'm not trying to write some big optimistic book where everything's going to be great and we're all happy and we don't really fight it's more just to say let's start let's be like a doctor as a doctor we're going to focus on the sick right i'm going to try i know there's sick people but i'm going to recognize that the normal state is health and that most people are healthy and and that's going to make me a better doctor and that's i'm kind of saying the same thing let's be better doctors of politics in the world by recognizing that like normal state is health and then we're going to identify like what are the diseases that are causing this warfare so yeah the natural state of the human body with the immune system and all the different parts uh wants to be healthy and is really damn good at being healthy but sometimes it breaks down let's understand how it breaks down yeah exactly so what are the five ways that you list that are the roots of war yeah so i mean they're kind of like buckets like there's sort of things that rhyme right in the interval you know because it's not all the same there's like lots of reasons to go to where there's this great line you know there's a reason for every war and a war for every reason and that's true and it's kind of overwhelming right and and it's overwhelming for a lot of people it was overwhelming for me for a lot of time and i think i think one of the gifts of this of social sciences actually people have started to organize this for us and i just tried to organize it like a tiny bit better buckets that rhyme buckets yeah some economics before right metaphors so so the idea was that like that basic instead of like something overrides these incentives and and i guess i was saying there's five ways there that they get overrided and three are i'd call strategic like they're kind of logical there's circumstances that um and and this is they're sort of where strategic is the strategy is like the the game theory is you could use those two things interchangeably but but game theory is sort of making it sound more complicated i think than it is it's basically saying that there's times when this is like the optimal choice because of circumstances and and and one of them is when the people who are deciding don't bear those costs so that's or or maybe even have a private incentive that's gonna that's that's uh if they don't if they're ignoring the cost then maybe the costs of war are not so material uh that's a contributing factor another is just there's uncertainty and we could talk about that but there's just the absence of information means that actually there's circumstances where it's your best choice to attack there's this thing that political economists call commitment problems which are basically saying there's some big power shift that you can avoid by attacking now so it's like a dynamic incentive it's sort of saying well in order to keep something from happening in the future i can attack now and because of the structure of incentives it actually makes sense for me even the awards in theory uh really costly or it is really costly nonetheless and then there's these sort of human things one's a little bit like just war one sort of thing there's like ideologies or principles or things we value that weigh against those costs like exterminating the heretical idea or standing up for a principle might be so valuable to me that i'm willing to use violence even if it's costly and there's nothing irrational about that and then the fifth bucket is is all of the irrationalities all the passions and all of the most importantly i think like misperceptions the way we get like we basically make wrong calculations about whether or not war is the right decision we get our we miss we misunderstand or misjudge our enemy or misjudge ourselves so if you put all those things into buckets so how much can it be modeled in in a in a simple game theoretic way and how much of it is a giant human mess so four of those five are really on some level easy to think strategically and model in a simple way um in the sense that any of us can do it right we do this all the time you know think of like bargaining in a market for a carpet or something or whatever you're bargained for um you're thinking a few steps ahead about what your opponent's going to do and you stake out a high price like a low price and the seller stakes out a high price and you might both say oh i refuse to like i could never accept that and there's all this sort of cheap talk um but you kind of understand where you're going and it's efficient to like find a deal and buy the market by the carpet eventually um so we all understand this like game theory and the strategy i think intuitively or maybe even a closer example is like suppose i don't know you have a tenant you need to evict or anyone normal like kind of legal or not it's not yet a legal dispute right like we just have a dispute with a neighbor or somebody else most of us don't end up going to court going to court is like the war option that's the costly thing that we just ought to be able to avoid we ought to be able to find something between ourselves that doesn't you know require this hiring lawyers and a long drawn out trial and most of the time we do right and so so we all understand that incentives and then for those five buckets so everything except all the irrational and the misperceptions are really easy to model then from a technical standpoint it's actually pretty tricky to model the misperceptions and i'm not a game theorist uh and so i'm more channeling my colleagues who do this and and what i know um but but it's not rocket science i mean i think that's what i that's kind of what i try to lay out in the book is like there's this all this all these ideas out there that that can actually help us just make sense of all these wars um and just some bring some order to the more ass of real reasons well to push back a lot of things in one sentence so first of all rocket science is actually pretty simple people i think i'll i'll defer to you actually well i think it's because unfortunately it's very like engineering it's very well defined the problem is well defined the problem with humanity is it's actually complicated so it is true it's not rocket science but it is not true it's easy because it's not rocket science but the the the problem the the downside of of game theory is not that it helps us make sense of the world it projects a simple model of the world that brings us comfort in thinking we understand yeah and sometimes that simplification is actually getting at the core first principles on understanding of something and sometimes it fools us into thinking we understand so for example i mean mutually assured destruction is a very simple model and people argue all the time whether that's actually a good model or not but you know there's empirical fact that we're still alive as a human civilization and also in the game theoretic sense do we model individual leaders and their relationships do we the staff the generals uh or do we also um have to model the culture the people the the the suffering of the people the economic frustration or the anger the distrust you have to model all those things do they come into play uh and sometimes i mean again we could be romanticizing those things from a historical perspective but when you look at history and you look at the way wars start it sometimes feels like a little bit of a misunderstanding escalates escalates escalates and just builds on top of itself and all of a sudden it's an all-out war it's the escalation with nobody hitting the brakes so so i mean you're absolutely right and like in the sense that it's totally possible to oversimplify these things and take the game theory too seriously and and some and and people who study those things and write those models and people like me who use them sometimes make that mistake i think that's not the mistake that most people make most often and it's actually true is i think most people we're actually really quick whether it's the the u.s invasion of afghanistan or iraq we're really quick to blame that on the humanness and the culture and that so we're really quick to say oh this was george w bush's either desire for revenge and vengeance or some private agenda or blood for oil um so we're really quick to blame it on these things and then we're really we tend to overlook the strategic incentives to to attack which i think were probably dominant i think those things might have been true to a degree but i don't think they were enough to ever you know bring those wars about just like i think people are very quick to sort of in this current invasion to sort of talk about putin's um grand visions of being the next catherine the great or or or nationalist ideals or and and the mistakes and the miscalculations were really quick to sort of say oh that that must be and then kind of pause and start not possible maybe even stop there and not see some of the strategic incentives and so so i i guess we have to do both um but the strategic i guess i would say like the war is just such a big problem it's just so costly that the strategic incentives and and the things that game theory has given us are like really important in understanding why there was so little room for negotiation in a bargain that things like a leader's mistakes start to matter or leaders nationalist ideals or delusions or vengeance actually matters because those do matter but they only matter when the capacity to find a deal is so narrow because of the circumstances and so let's not let's it's sort of like saying um like an elderly person who dies of pneumonia right pneumonia killed them obviously but that's not the reason mnemonia was able to kill them all of the fundamentals and the circumstances were like made them very fragile and that's how i think all the strategic forces make that situation fragile and then the miscalculations and the all these things you just said which are so important are kind of like the pneumonia and let's sort of let's pay attention to both and you're saying that people don't disproportionately pay attention to the it's hard i mean it wasn't to the leaders it took me a long time to learn to recognize them and it takes many people you know it took and it took generations of social scientists um years and years to figure figure some of this out and to sort of help people understand it and clarify concepts so it's not it's just not that easy now it's not hard i think it's possible to just as i was taught a lot of the stuff i write in the book in graduate school or from reading and i it's possible to communicate and learn this stuff but it's still really hard and so so so that's kind of what i was trying to do is like close that gap and just make it help people recognize these things in the wild before we zoom back out let me at a high level first ask what are your thoughts on the ongoing war in ukraine how do you analyze it within your framework about war a russian colleague of mine constantine tells this story about a visiting ukrainian professor who's at the university and one night he's walking down the street and he's talking on two cell phones at once for some reason and a mugger stops him and demands the phones and it's sort of like deadpan way constantine says you know and because he was ukrainian he decided to fight and and i think that's a little bit like what happened most of us in that situation would hand over our cell phones and um and and so in this situation putin's like the mugger and the ukrainian people are being asked to hand over this thing and they're saying no we're not going to hand this over and and the fact is um most people do most people faced with a superpower or a tyrant or an autocrat or a murderous warlord who says hand this over they hand it over and uh and that's why that's why there are so many unequal imperial relationships in the world that's what empire is empire is success of people saying fine we'll give up our some degree of freedom or sovereignty because you're too powerful and the ukrainian said no way uh this is just too precious and so i said one of those buckets where that there are there's a set of values there's sometimes there's something that we value that is so valuable to us and important sometimes it's it's terrible sometimes it's the extermination of a another people but sometimes it's something noble like liberty or refusal to part with sovereignty and and in those circumstances people will decide i will endure the costs they probably i mean i think i think i think they knew what they were probably risking um and so to me that that's not to blame the ukrainians any more than i would blame americans for the american revolution it's actually a very similar story you had a tyrannical militarily superior pretty non-democratic entity come and say you're going to have partial sovereignty and americans for ideological reasons said no way and that you know people like bernard bailey and other historians that's like the dominant story of the american revolution it was in the ideological origins this attachment this idea of liberty and so i start now there's lots of other reasons i think why this happened but i think for me it starts with ukrainians failing to make that sensible quote-unquote rational deal that says we should we should relinquish some of our sovereignty because russia is more powerful than we are so there's a very clinical look at the war meaning there is a man and a country vladimir putin that has makes a claim on a land builds up troops and invades yep the way to avoid suffering there and the way to avoid death and a way to avoid war is to uh back down and basically let you know there's a list of interests he provides and you go along with that um that's when the goal is to avoid war uh let's do some other calculus let's think about britain so france fought hitler but did not fight very hard portugal there's a lot of stories of countries like this and there is winston motherfucking churchill he's one of the rare humans in history who had that we shall fight on the beaches it made no sense hitler did not say he's going to destroy britain he seemed to show respect for britain he wanted to keep the british empire he it made total sense but it was obvious that britain was going to lose if hitler goes all in on britain as he seemed like he was going to and yet winston churchill said a big fu yeah similar thing zelensky and the ukrainian people said fu in that same kind of way so i think i think we're saying the same things i'm i'm being more clinical about it well i'm trying to understand and we won't know this but which path minimizes human suffering in the long term well on the eve of the war ukraine was poor in a per person terms than it was in 1990 the economy is just completely stagnated in russia meanwhile like many other parts of the region sort of boomed to a degree i mean certainly because of oil and gas but also for a variety of other reasons and putin's consolidated political control and and from a very cold-blooded and calculated point of view i think one way putin and russia could look at this is this look we were temporarily weak after the ball of the iron curtain and the rest in the west basically took advantage of that like bravo you pulled it off you basically crept democracy and capitalism all these things right up to our border and now we have regained some of our strength we've consolidated political control we've cowed our people we have a stronger economy and we somehow got germany and other european nations to give up energy independence and actually just we've got an enormous amount of leverage over you and now we want to roll back some of your success because we we're powerful enough to demand it and and you've been taking advantage of the situation which is maybe a fair impartial analysis and uh in the west but more specifically ukraine said but that's a price too high which i totally respect i would maybe i'd like to think i'd make that same decision but that is that's the answer if the answer is why would they fight if it's so costly why not find a deal it's because they weren't willing to give russia the thing that their power said they quote unquote deserve just like americans said to the briton yeah of course you you we ought to accept semi-sovereignty um but we are just we refuse and we'd rather endure a bloody fight that we might lose than than take this and so um so you need some of these other five buckets you need them to understand the situation you need to sort of there are other things going on but i but i do think it's fundamental that there's just that this it this noble intransigence is like a big is a big part of it well let me just say a few things if it's okay yeah so your analysis is um is clear and objective my analysis is neither clear nor objective first i've been going through a lot i'm a different man over the past four or five weeks than i was before i in general have come to there's anger i've come to despise leaders in general because leaders wage war and the people pay the price for that war let me just say on this point of standing up to an invader that i am half ukrainian half russian that i'm proud of the ukrainian people whatever the sacrifice is whatever the scale of pain standing up there's something in me that's proud maybe that's maybe that's whatever the fuck that is maybe that blood runs in me i love the ukrainian people love the russian people and whatever that fight is whatever that suffering is the millions of refugees whatever this war is the dictators come to power and the their power falls i just love that that spirit burns bright still and i do maybe i'm wrong in this to see ukrainian and russian people as one people in a way that's not just cultural geopolitical but just given the history i think about the same kind of fighting when hitler with all of his forces chose to invade the soviet union operation barbarossa when he went and that russian winter and you know a lot of people and that pisses me off because if you if you know your history it's not the winter that stopped hitler it's the red army it's the people that refused to back down they fought proudly that pride that's something that's the human spirit that's in war you know war is hell but it really pushes people to to stand for the things they believe in it's the the william wallace speech from braveheart i think about this a lot that does not fit into your framework no no i'm gonna disagree i i think it totally fits in and it's it's this there's nothing irrational about what we believe especially those principles which we hold the most dear right i'm i'm merely trying to say that there's a there's a calculus there's one calculus over here that says russia is more powerful than it was 20 years ago and even 10 years ago and ukraine is not and it's asking for something and and there's an incentive to give that up that's obvious like there's an incentive to comply but my understanding is many of these post-soviet republics have appeased right which is what we call compromise when we disagree with it they've all of these other peoples in the russian sphere of influence have have not stood up uh and russians many russians have tried to stand up and they've been beaten down and now people have we'll see but people have not been standing up very much and so lots of people are cowed and lots of people have a piece and lots of people hear that speech and think i would like to do that but but don't and and so and my point is that sadly we live in a world where a lot of people uh get stepped on by tyrants and empire and whatnot and don't rise up and so so i think we could admire especially when they stand up for these reasons and i think we can admire churchill for that reason i think we could that's why we admire the leaders the american revolution and so on but doesn't always happen and i i don't actually know why but i don't think it's irrational i think it's just it's it's something it's about a set of values and it's hard to predict and it was hard for hard i i putin might not have been out of line and thinking just like everybody else in my share of influence they're gonna roll over to and i should mention because we haven't that a lot of this calculation from an objective point of view you have to include united states and nato into the pressure they apply into the region that said i care little about leaders that do cruel things onto the world they lead to a lot of suffering but i still believe that the russian people and the ukrainian people are great people that stand up and i admire people that stand up and are willing to give their life and i think russian people are very much um that too especially when the enemy is coming for your home over the hill yeah sometimes standing up to an authoritarian regime is difficult because you don't know it's not a monster that's attacking your home directly it's kind of like the boiling of a lobster or something like that it's a slow control of your mind and the population and our minds get controlled even in the west by the media by the narratives it's very difficult to wake up one day and to realize uh sort of what people call red pilled is to see that they're you know maybe the thing i've been told all my life is not true and at every level that's the thing very difficult to do in north korea very in the more authoritarian the regime the more difficult it is to see maybe this idea that i believe that i was willing to die for is actually evil it's very difficult to do for americans for russians for ukrainians for chinese for indians for pakistanis for everybody i think thinking about this ukrainian whether you want to call it nobility or intransigence or whatever is is key i think um the authoritarian-ness of russia and putin's control or the control of his cabal is the other thing i would really point to is what's going on here and if i had to if you ask me like big picture what do i think is the fundamental cause of most violence in the world i think it's unaccountable power i think in fact for me an unaccountable power is the source of underdevelopment it's the source of pain and suffering it's the source of of warfare it's basically the root source of most of our problems and in this particular case it's also one of our buckets in the sense that like why what is it that why did russia ask these things like well it was democracy in the uk in ukraine a threat to an average russian no was capitalism is nato is whatever is this a threat to average russians no it's a threat to the bullet apparatus of political control and economic control that putin and cronies and this sort of group of people that that rule this elite in russia um it was a threat to them and so they had to ask the ukraine to be neutral or to give up nato or to have a puppet government or whatever they were seeking to achieve and have been trying to achieve through other means for decades right they've been trying to undermine these things without uh invasion and they've been doing that because it threatens their interests and that's like one of these other logics of war it's not just that there's something that i value so much that i'm willing to injure the cost it's that there are people not only do does this oligarchy or whatever elite group that you want to talk about in russia not first of all they're not bearing something they're bearing some costs of war right they're very and they're certainly bearing cost of sanctions um but they are they don't bear all the costs of war obviously and so they're more they're quick to use it but more importantly like in some sense it i think there's a strong argument that they had a political incentive to invade and or at least to ask ukraine this sort of impossible to give up thing and then invade despite ukrainian nobility and transitions because they were threatened um and so so that's extremely important i think and so that's those two things in concert make this a very fragile situation that's i think why we ended up is go go not all the way but a long way to understanding now you can layer on to that these intangible incentives these other things that are valued that are valued on putin's side maybe there's a nationalist ideal maybe he seeks status and glory like maybe those things are all true and i'm sure they're true to an extent and and and that'll weigh against his costs of war as well but fundamentally i think he just saw his regime as threatened that's what he cares about and and and so he asked he made he made this cruel list of demands i mean i would say i'm just one human who the hell am i but i'm i just have a lot of anger towards the elites in general towards leaders in general that failed the people i would love to hear and to celebrate the beautiful russian people the ukrainian people and anyone who silences that beautiful voice of the people anywhere in the world is destroying the thing that i value most about humanity leaders don't matter they're supposed to serve the people this nationalist idea of a people of a country is only makes any sense when you celebrate when you give people um the freedom to show themselves to celebrate themselves and the the thing i imagine i care most about is science and the silencing of voices in the scientific community the silencing of voices period fuck any leader that silences that human spirit um there's something about this it's like whenever i look at world war ii whenever i look at wars it does seem very irrational to fight but man does it seem somehow deeply human when the people stand up and fight and there's something uh that if you know we talked about progress that feels like how progress is made the people that stand and fight so let me read the churchill speech it's such i so proud that we humans can stand up to evil when the time is right i guess here's the thing though think of what's happening in xinjiang in china we have we've appeased china we've basically said you can just do really really really horrible things in this region and we're you're too powerful for us to do anything about it and it's not worth it and and there's nobody standing up and making a churchill speech or uh the braveheart speech about standing up for people of of xinjiang when when what's happening is um on you know in that in that in that realm of what was happening in europe and and that's happening in a lot of places um and then when we when when there is a willingness to stand up people there's a lot of opposition to those you know people you know so there were a lot of reasons for the invasion of iraq um for some it was humanitarian things like saddam hussein was one of the worst tyrants of the 20th century he was just doing some really horrible things you know he'd invaded kuwait he'd you know committed domestic attempted domestic genocide and all sorts of repression and it was probably a mistake to invade in spite so it's important not just to select on the cases where we stood up and to select on the cases where that ended up working out uh in the sense of victory right it's important to sort of try to judge not judge but just try to understand these things in the context of all the times we didn't give that speech or when we did and then it just went sideways well that's why it's powerful when you're willing to give your life for your principles because most of the time you get neither the principles nor the life you get you die that's what but that's why it's powerful we shall go on to the end we shall fight in france we shall fight on the seas and the oceans we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be we shall fight on the beaches we shall fight on the landing grounds we shall fight in the fields and in the streets we shall fight in the hills which shall never surrender this is before hitler had any major loss to anybody that was a terrifying armada coming your way we shall never surrender i just want to give props uh i want to give my respect as a human being uh to churchill to the british people for standing up to the ukrainian people for standing up and for um and to the russian people these are great people that throughout history have stood up to evil let me ask you this because you quote sun tzu in the art of war there's no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare this is the main thesis can we just linger on this since leaders wage war and people pay the price when we say that there's no reason to do prolonged war is it possible to have a reason for the leaders if they disregard the price sort of like uh if they have a different objective function or utility function that measures the price that's paid for war is that one explanation of why war happens is the leaders just have a different calculus than other humans i mean i think this links us back to what we were talking about earlier about just war is in some sense just war is saying that in spite of the costs that there's some our enemy has done something our opponent has refused to compromise on something that we find essential and is demanding that we compromise in a way that's completely repugnant and therefore we're going to go to war despite these material costs and these human costs so that and and and that's and then and then that principle that you go to war on is in the eye of the beholder and i mean i think liberty and and and sovereignty i think we can understand and sympathize with and maybe that's just a universe maybe that's the greatest cause of just war but other people make that could go to war for something considerably less a principle that's considerably less noble right which is what hitler was doing um that's an explanation so that's a whole class of explanations that helps us understand that the compromise that was on the table given the relative balance of power was just repugnant at least to one side if not there's something they're unwilling to part with that's and then you get to the leaders well what happens when what the leaders want when what happens when the leaders are detached from the interests of their groups which has been true for basically most of human history there's a narrow slice of societies in the big scheme of things that have been accountable to their people a lot of them exist today where to some degree they're channeling the interests of their group right so the ukrainian politicians didn't concede to these cool russian demands because even if they had it would have been political suicide because it seemed i think i don't it seems that the ukrainians would have just rejected this so they were in some sense channeling the values of the broader population even if they i don't know what was going even and if they didn't share those principles they self-interestedly followed them probably they shared them but i'm just saying that even if they didn't they wouldn't compromise occasionally you get the reverse which is where the leaders are not accountable and now they have some value which could be glory i mean this is the story of the kings and to some lesser extent the queens of europe for hundreds of years was it was basically a contest and it was this war was the sport of kings and to some extent they were just seeking status through violent competition and they paid a lot a big price out of the royal purse but but uh but they didn't bear most of the suffering um and and so they were too quick to go to war and so that's i think that detachment of leaders combined with you know you mingle it with this that one bucket that uncheckedness and you mingle that with the fact that that leaders might have one of these values noble or otherwise that carry them to war combined to explain a good number of conflicts as well and that's a good illustration of why i think like autocracy and unaccountable power is i could make that story for all of those things all five buckets they're all we're all more susceptible to these things all five of these things when leaders are not accountable to the people and their group and uh and that's what makes it like the meta for me the metacause of of conflict in all of human history and sadly today does the world to power play into this the desire for power like that's a human thing again in the calculation that shall we put that in the misperceptions bucket or is it those misperceptions essentially about interaction between humans and power is more about the thing you feel in your heart when you're alone as a as a leader you know i said there were three strategic reasons like the then check leaders the commitment problems uncertainty there are two sort of more psychological and i call them intangible incentives and misperceptions the way that like a game theorist or the way that a behavioral economist would think about those two was just to say preferences and then erroneous beliefs and mistakes it's like so the pro our preferences are our preferences yeah right and so utility functions whatever we want to call it like there's not that's why i wouldn't call them a misperception or rationality we want we like what we like yeah if we like power if we like relative status if we like uh if we like our racial purity if we like our liberty if we like whatever it is that we have convinced ourselves we value maybe you fell in love with the rival queen a king exactly when i said it was a big bucket full of stuff that rhymes like that's a pretty messy bucket like there's a lot of different stuff in there and i'm just trying to say like let's be clear that just about the law the shared logic of these things is maybe just you know they're really dissimilar but let's be clear about the shared logic uh and if it were true that deep down we were aggressive people who just liked violence and enjoyed the blood or some percentage of us do that would be there too um and so i just want to say that's but you know we're really quick to recognize those right when we diagnose a war as an armchair analyst or as a journalist or something we really jump to those we don't need a lot of help to like see those happening we so we probably put a little bit too much emphasis on them is maybe the only thing that i would caution because we're the others are more subtle and they're often there and they contribute so i just to look at something you said before would it be accurate to say when the leaders become detached from um the opinion of the people is that's more likely to lead to war so uh and mechanically it's just they're gonna bear fewer costs so it's gonna it's gonna basically narrow the set of deals that they're going to be willing to accept instead of violence at the same time most of the time it's not enough because the leaders still bear a lot of costs of war you could be deposed you could be killed you could be tried and the public purse is going to be empty that's like the one story throughout history is at the end of the day your regime is broke as a result of war and so you still internalize that a little bit um if i had to say like you know in my three buckets or through my bucket so far i sort of started with like ukrainian intransigence and then i jumped and then i said the essentially then you really have to understand russian autocracy for just to understand why they would ask something so cool but i mean i think the uncertainty is really important here as well like if you think about like think of all the things the way this is played out and just in some ways how many how in how many ways we've been surprised we've been surprised by the unity and the coherence of the west and the sanctions that's sort of what's happened is it was in the realm of possibility but it was sort of like the best case scenario from the perspective of the west and the worst case scenario for the russians the second thing is just the pluckiness and the effectiveness and the intransigence and the nobility of this ukrainian resistance that's again was within the realm of possibility but wasn't necessarily the likely thing right it was again maybe the worst realization for russia the best realization in some sense for in terms of revealed strength and resolve um and then the other thing that's been revealed is just how like the from the corruption and ineptitude and problems on the russian military side them again within the realm of possibility maybe people who really knew the russian military are less surprised than the rest of us but but also one of the worst possible draws for russia and so putin asking this terrible price and expecting ukraine to roll over or the west to roll over at least to a degree was based on like a different set of probably it was based on just expecting something in the middle of the probability distribution and not one of all these different tail events and so the fact that the world's so uncertain and the fact that putin can come with a different set of expectations than the ukrainians in the west and all these players can just have a hard time agreeing on just what the facts are because we live in an uncertain world everyone's quick to say oh we miscalculated well i'm not i don't know if he miscalculated i think he just he got a really bad draw on in terms of the what the realized outcomes are here and so that i mean good for everybody else in some sense except you know the fact that it's involving a lot of violence is the tragedy so uh well there's also economic pain yeah just for the russian people and the ukrainian people but the whole world the whole world yeah so it you know uh you could talk about things that you we are surprised from an analysis perspective of small victories here or there but i think it's universally true that everybody loses once again in this war right and so the question is is like when does it you know why did why did russia choose to invade when ukraine didn't give this up well russia anticipated that it would be able to seize what it wanted the the available bargain that it deserved quote unquote based on its power in the world it wasn't getting and so it thought it could take that and and the uncertainty around that made it potentially more likely that he would choose to do this but in particular one of the other things that i think is probably less important this context but still plays a role but less important than many wars is the is the fact that it's really hard to resolve that uncertainty right in theory ukraine should be able to say look this is exactly how resolved we are we're super resolved and your military is not as strong as you think it is you mean before the conference before the conference everybody should be like you know on the table here no one wants yeah here's your cards exactly like that's as a competitor in this you can use that uncertainty to your advantage i can try to convince you i can bluff yeah all right and so anyone who's ever played poker and bluffed or called a bluff that's the inefficiency that's like that's the analogy in some ways to war it's not the perfect analogy but it the the uncertainty in the circumstance you don't have to miscalculate the fact that you if you bluff and lose this wasn't that you miscalculated you made an optimal choice given the uncertainty of the situation to take a gamble and that was a wiser thing for you to do than to not bluff and just to fold or to just not paying in that round and so the uncertainty the situation gives both sides incentives to bluff gives neither side an incentive to try to reveal the truth and then at some point the other side says you know what you say you're resolved you say you're not you're going to mount an insurgency well guess what every other you know people on my border has folded and you're gonna fold two the minute the tanks roll in and the minute the air force comes in i'm gambling that you're bluffing and uh and so we that that inherent uncertainty of the situation just causes a lot of short wars actually because it's this sort of bluff and and call dynamic that goes on and you know the thing that's worth wrecking is we might end up at a place in a few months where the thing that ukraine concedes is not so far from what russia demanded in the first place russia wanted i want a neutral i mean who knows how it's not the ambitious thing the russians wanted but if we end up in a place where ukraine is is effectively neutral never joins nato is not being militarily supplied by the by the west uh and where russia has de facto control over the east and crimea if not fully recognized probably who knows if they'll get ever internationally and ukrainian recognized but effectively controls russia will have accomplished what it asked for in the first place and and both parties had to get there through violence rather than through negotiation and you wouldn't need misperceptions and mistakes and you wouldn't need putin's delusions of glory or whatever to get there you would just need the ingredients i've given so far which is like a an unwillingness to do that without fighting on the part of the ukrainians uh an autocratic leadership in russia who would make those demands because it's in their self-interest and then uncertainty leading them to to fight and and and and that sadly is like the best case that feels like the best case scenario right now which is the war is just five months and not five years given the current situation given the current situation because the the suffering has already happened it lost homes people moving you know having to see their um their home in rubble and millions of people refugees having to escape the country um and hate flourishes versus the common humanity as as it does with war and on top of all of that if we talk from a geopolitic geopolitical perspective the war mongers all over the world are sort of uh drooling they now got narratives and they got the whatever narratives you can go shopping for the narratives the united states has its narratives for whatever geopolitical thing he wants to do in that part of the world um that's another that's another little malevolent interaction between two of these buckets like those unchecked leaders and those intangible incentives those preferences is that un unchecked leaders spent autocrats whatever spend enormous amounts of time trying to manipulate the values and beliefs of their population of their group yeah right and they now sometimes they do it nobly but that's what winston churchill there was trying to it's not clear that britons were like ready to stand up there were a lot of americans and a lot of britons who were like you know what hitler not such a bad guy his ideas not so terrible i never liked those jews anyways they many were thinking right we had political leaders in the u.s who were basically not pro-nazi but were just not anti-nazi and churchill was just trying to instill a different resolve he was trying to create that thing he was trying to create that value and in the american revolution it was as well like the founding fathers the leaders of the revolution weren't it's not that everybody just woke up one morning in the united states and had this ideology of liberty and freedom some of that was true it was out there in ether but they had to manufacture and create it you know in a way that i think they believed and was noble but there's a lot of manufacturing and creation of these values and principles that is not noble and that is exactly what hitler did so well yeah the anti-semitism was present throughout the world but the the more subtle thing that i feel like may be more generally applicable is this kind of pacifism that i think people in the united states felt like it doesn't it's not my conflict why do i need to get involved with it and i think uh churchill was fighting um that the general apathy um it's like it's the apathy of rational calculus like uh it's like what are we going to gain if we fight back like hitler seems to be pretty reasonable he's saying he's not going he's going to stop the bombing that you're still going to uh maintain your sovereignty as the great people of britain like why why are we fighting again and that's the thing that's hard to break because you have to say well you have to speak to principle you have to speak at some greater sort of long-term vision of history so like yes now it may seem like it's a way to avoid the fight but you're actually just sort of putting shackles on yourself you're destroying the very greatness of of our people if we don't fight back and to think about this with like the current case with russia i mean some people look at putin's speeches and papers he's written on ukraine historically being a part of russia and trying to deny the basically create all these nationalist narratives and they think well putin really believes and he might putin really believes this and that's why he's invading and that might also be true and that would contribute to just make a peaceful bargain even harder to find but i i suspect what's at least a minimum true is putin's trying to manufacture support for an invasion in the population through propaganda and um and so he's doing on some level the same thing that winston churchill was doing in mechanical terms which is to try to manipulate people's references and but doing it in a in a sinister malevolent evil self-serving way because it's really in his interest whereas this was anything but right in the churchill example the dark human thing is like uh there's moments in world war ii where hitler's propaganda he began he began to believe his own propaganda it's like i think he probably always believed i think he was a sincere believer well no no there's but there's a lot of places in um where there was uncertainty yeah and they decided to do propaganda and that propaganda resolved the uncertainty in his own mind like so for example he believed until very late that america is a weakling militarily and as an economic power and just the spirit of the people and like that was part of the propaganda they're producing and because of that propaganda when he became the head of the army he was making military actions he like nonchalantly started war with america with the united states of america where did he didn't need to at all he could have avoided that completely but he thought ah whatever doesn't they're easy so that that's has i think that propaganda first belief second and i think as a as a as a human being as a dictator when you start to believe the lies with which you're controlling the populace you're not able to you become detached from this person that's able to resolve in a uh very human way the conflict in the world i mean when i said the meta the the big common factor that causes warn over and over and over again is unaccountable power it's not just because it's mechanically like one of my five explanations to saying well if you're unaccountable you don't bear the cost of war you might have private incentives so yes bargains are harder to find but it leads to all these nasty interactions so early i said there's this interaction between the values and the unchecked leaders because those idiosyncratic values of your leader become more important when they're unchecked but the uncertainty point you just made is like a deep point it's to say actually that like the fundamental problem that all autocrats have is an information problem because nobody wants to give them the right information and they they have very few ways to aggregate information if they're not popular right and so so there's a whole cottage industry of political science sort of talking about why do like why autocrats love fixed elections and why they love twitter and why they actually like it in a controlled way is it it solves an information problem like that's your cruci if you're like xi jinping or or or vladimir putin you need to solve an information problem just to avoid having rebellion on your hands in your own country every day because uncertainty kind of gets magnified and you get all this distorted information in this apparatus of control and so that so that's like another nasty interaction between uncertainty and unchecked leaders is you end up in this situation where you're getting bad information and and you it's not that you don't you believe your own lies it's just that you never you sort of believe you're sort of averaging what you believe over the available information and you don't realize that it's such a distorted and biased information source one of the other things about this time there was a surprise to me in in the fog of uncertainty how sort of seemingly likely nuclear war became not likely but how it less unlikely than before exactly that's a better way to say it it started to take a random stroll away from zero percent probability into this kind of land of maybe like it's hard to know but it's like oh wow we're actually normally talking about this as if this is part of the calculus part of the options but before we talk about nuclear war because i'm going to need a drink do you need to go to the bathroom sure i'll take a break so back to nuclear war what do you think about this that people were nonchalantly speaking about nuclear wars if it doesn't lead to the potential annihilation of the human species um what are the chances that our world descends into nuclear war within your framework with you you wear many hats yeah one is uh sort of the and now uh analyst right and then one is a human what do you think of the chances we get to see nuclear war in this century well you know the the doomsday the official doomsday clock for nuclear warfare sits in the lobby of my building um the bulletin of atomic scientists sort of shares a building with us so it's it's always there every day can you describe what the doomsday clock is the bulletin of atomic scientists it's something that this group of physicists sort of said to sort of mark just how close we are to nuclear catastrophe and they started it decades ago and it's and it's a clock and it's sort of how close are we to midnight where midnight is nuclear armageddon and or the destruction of humanity and and it's been sitting i mean it's actually it hasn't moved as close to it hasn't moved as close to midnight in the last few weeks as it probably should have only because it was already so close there's actually limited room for it to move for a bunch of other reasons i think it's there's a whole political thing that once it's really hard it's really easy to move it closer and it's really hard if you're the person in charge of that clock to move it away right because that's always very controversial so it always sits there but it it forces you to think about it a little bit every day um and i admit i was nonchalant about it in till recently in a way that many many other people were um i still think the risk is very low but um kind of for the reasons we've talked it's just so you know unimaginably costly that nobody wants to go that route so so it's like the it's like the extreme version of my whole argument with why we most of the time don't fight is because it's just so damn costly and so this is that's that's the incentive not to use this and and if they do use it that's the incentive to use it in a very restrained way um but that's not a lot of but but because we know we do go to war and there's all these things that interfere with it including miscalculation and all these human foibles and and several of those nuclear powers are not accountable leaders i think we have to be a lot more worried than many of us were very recently i pointed out earlier like the whole reason we're in this mess is because the only people who have this private interest in like having ukraine give up its freedom is this russian cabal an elite that gets their power and is preserved only and is threatened by ukrainian democracy what would how far would they go to hang on to power when push came to shove is i think the thing that worries me the most and is plainly what worries most people about the risk of nuclear war like at what point does that uncheck leadership decide that this is worth it especially if they can emerge from the rubble still on top i don't know so um and i don't know that any of us have really fully thought through all of that calculus and what's going on very recently around the anniversary of january 6 there were a lot of questions about it was the united states going to have another civil war on the one hand i think it's almost unimaginable sort of like in the same way i think that a nuclear war and complete armageddon is unimaginable but i remember something that uh i when both of those questions get asked i remember something i i was in the audience of listening to some great economists speak about the 20 years ago about the risk of an argentina-style financial meltdown of the united states like what's the total financial collapse and they said you know what the risk is vanishingly small but that's terrifying because until recently the answer was zero and so the fact that it's not zero should deeply deeply scare us all and we should devote a lot of energy to making it zero again and that's how i feel about the risk of a civil war in the u.s and that's how i feel about the risk of nuclear war is it's higher than it used to be and that should terrify us all to me what terrifies me is that all this kind of stuff seems to happen like overnight like super quick and it escalates super quick when it happens so it's not like i don't know i don't know what i imagined but it just happens like if a nuclear war happened it would be something like a plane like in this case with ukraine a nato plane shut down over some piece of land by the russian forces or so the narrative would go but it doesn't even matter what's true or not in order to spark the first um moment of escalation and then it just goes it goes well i think that happens sometimes i mean again it's this thing that you know what social scientists call it selection on the dependent variable like there's all these times when that didn't happen when it stopped when it escalated one step and then people paused or it escalated two steps and people said whoa whoa whoa whoa um and and so we remember the times when it went boom boom boom boom boom boom boom and then the really terrible thing happened but that fortunately that's not you know i start off the book with an example of a gang war that didn't happen in in in medicine colombia which is third that's my day job is actually studying conflict and gangs and violence and of these other kinds of groups also very sinister um and and most of the time they don't fight and that escalation doesn't happen so so the escalation does happen quickly sometimes except when it doesn't which so we remember the ones when it does it's really important to think about all that like um i remember talking to i think elon musk on his podcast is i was sort of like talking about the horrors of war and so on and then he said well you know like most of human history because i think i said like most of human history is um had been defined by these horrible wars he's like no most of human history is just peaceful like farming life like war we kind of remember the wars but most of human history is just you know is life yeah and most of the competition between nations was like blood i would say blood thirsty without drinking that blood in the sense that it was intense it would loathe some and so a lot of the rivalry and a lot of the competition which is also can be problematic in its own ways is not violent and most of human history is about the oppression of the majority by a few and the their moments when they rise up and revolt and there's a revolution we remember those but most of the time they don't and um and the story of political change and transformation and freedom is is there's a few revolutions that are violent but most of it is actually revolutions without that kind of violent revolt revolt most of it is just the peaceful concession of power by elites to a wider and wider group of people in response to their increased economic bargaining power their threat that they're going to march so so even if we want to understand something like the march of freedom over human history i think we can draw this same insight that that actually we don't most of the time we don't fight we actually concede power no you don't you don't the elite doesn't sort of give power to the masses right away they just co-opt the few merchants who could threaten the whole thing and bring them into the circle and then the circle gets a little bit wider a little bit wider until the circle is ever wide and maybe not ever but encompasses most if not all and that's like a hopeful and optimistic trend yeah if you look at the plot if you guys could pull it up of the the wars throughout history this so the rate of wars throughout history just seemed to be decreasing significantly with a few spikes and the the sort of the expansion it's like half the world is under authoritarian regimes but that's been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking stephen pinker's one person one a famous scholar who brings out this hypothesis i mean there's sort of two ways there's actually two separate kinds of violence that one where i think he's completely right and one where i think we're not sure probably maybe not the where he's completely right sort of interpersonal violence homicides everyday violence has been going down down down down down down down that's just unambiguously and it's mostly because we've created cultures and states and rules and things that control that that violence now the warfare between groups is that less frequent well you know it's not clear that he's right that there's fewer wars you might say that there's there the wars are more rare because they're more costly because their weapons are so brutal the costs of war go up as the costs of war go up not entirely but for the most part that gives us an incentive not to have them and um but then when they do happen they're doozies so is pinker right i hope he's right but i don't think that officially that trend is there i think that we might have you know the same kind of levels of intergroup violence because maybe those five fundamentals that lead to war have not fundamentally changed and thus made us given us a more peaceful world now than a couple hundred years ago that's something to think about so obviously looking at his hypothesis looking at his data and others like him but i have noticed one thing which is the amount of pushback he gets yeah that there is this this is speaking to the general point that you made which is like we over emphasize the anecdotal like the and don't look objectively at the aggregate data as much there's a general cynicism about the world and not i don't even mean cynicism it's almost like cynicism porn or something like that where people just get for some reason they get a little bit excited to talk about the destruction of human civilization you know in a weird way like they don't really mean it i think if i were to like psychoanalyze their geopolitical analysis is i don't i think it's a kind of um i don't know maybe it relieves the mind to think about death at a global scale somehow and then you can go have lunch with your kids afterwards and feel a little better about the world i don't know what it is but that it's not very scientific it's very kind of personal emotional and so we shouldn't we should be careful to look at the world in that way because uh the if you look broadly there is just just like hey you highlight there's a will for peace uh among people yeah uh you mentioned medellin by the way how do you pronounce the medellin both are fine i think the there they say medellin because that's kind of the accent is the on the double l but that's but medellin is would be totally fine as well what lessons do you draw from the medellin cartel from the different gang wars in colombia medellin uh what's the economics of peace and war between dark drug cartels here's what was really insightful for me so i live in chicago and the chicago people are aware that there's a violent problem in chicago it's actually not the worst american city by any stretch of the imagination for shootings but it's pretty bad um and medellin has these better much many more and probably many better organized gangs than chicago and yet the homicide rate is maybe half and now i mean there have been moments when these gangs go to war in the last 30 years when medellin has become the most violent place on the planet but for the most part right now they're peaceful and and so what's going on there um i mean one thing that is there's a there's a hierarchy of organizations so that above these reasonably well organized neighborhood gangs there's a set of sort of more shadowy organizations that have different names some people call them resonates some people would call them bandas corinales criminal bands you might just call them mafias and they there's about 17 of them depending on how you want to count and they themselves have a little operating board called sometimes they call it the office la fiscina sometimes they call it um la mesa at the table well each individual one or as a group as a group as a group so they meet and they don't meet personally all the time sometimes they meet but they consult a lot of the leaders of these groups are actually in prison and so and they're in the same wings and prisons they have represented oh they meet in prison well they're whatever if if i'm on a cell block with you i've beaten you anyways right so actually imprisoning leaders and putting them in the same cell block but not putting them in you know if you get arrested here in the united states and your criminal leader and you get put in a super max prison you cannot run your criminal empire it's just too difficult it's impossible there it's possible and you might think and they do they still run their empire and you might think that's a bad idea but actually cutting off the head of a criminal organization leading it to a bunch leaving it to a bunch of like hot-headed young guys who are disorganized is not always the path to peace so having these guys all in the same prison patios is actually it they it it reduces imperfect information and uncertainty right it provides a place for them to bargain they can talk and and so alphacena is like a lot of these informal meetings and so so you know and and they have these tools that they use to control the street gangs so instead of there being like 400 gangs all sort of in this anarchic situation of competing for territory and constantly at war the resonates are keeping them in line and they will use sanctions they will where they'll sanction might be i will put a bullet in your head if you right if you don't a little more honest there's no more sanctions between nations exactly but they will but they they will sit them down they'll they'll provide they'll help them negotiate they will provide commitment i said there are these things called commitment problems where like there's some dynamic i have some incentive to like exterminate you but that's going to be costly for everybody so i'm going to have what's the solution well i'm going to provide commitment i'm going to like enforce this deal and yeah you don't like this deal now because you could take advantage of your situation and wage war but i'm going to give you a counter incentive and and and so they keep the peace and so and it's a little bit so they're a little bit like the u.n security council and peacekeeping forces and sanctions regimes it's like the same kinds of tools the same parallels and and they're imperfect they don't always work that well and they're unequal right because it's not like they're pursuing this in the interests of like blah blah blah um but it kind of works until it doesn't and and 10 years ago in you know the mid-1990s there were wars and this breaks down and i it kind of gave me this perspective on the international institutions and all the tools we've built that we do the same things right sanctions are designed to make unchecked leaders face the cost of war it's a solution to one of the five problems right and mediators are a solution to uncertainty and international institutions that can enforce a piece and agreement are a solution to commitment problems and all of these things can be solutions to these intangible incentives like these preferences for whatever you value and miss calculations because they will punish you for your miscalculation or they will get a mediator to help you realize why you're misconceiting so so they're doing all these things and it made me realize that the comparison to the u.n security council and our all our tools is actually a pretty good one because those are pretty unequal too and those are pretty imperfect like that's you know it's there's these we have five nations with a veto on the security council and a lot of unequal power and they're manipulating this in their own self-interest or their group's interests um so so anyway so it's actually the some of the things that work in medellin and why they work help give me a lot of perspective on what works in the international arena and why we have some of the problems we have is like so there's not in some deep way there's not a fundamental difference between those 17 mafia groups and security councils [Laughter] oh we're like funny descendant of apes put on suits i'm sure there were different they have different cultural garbs that they wear yeah uh what do you thought i mean that's the sense i got from pablo escobar and jorge ochoa who founded the car the medellin cartel is like uh having spoken with people on this podcast talked to roger reeves who was a drug uh transporter it seems like there it seems like it was um i don't know the right term but it was very kind of professional and calm it didn't have a sense of danger to it like it's negotiating so like the danger is always on the table as a threat as part of the calculation but you're using that threat in order to de-escalate in order to fps everybody is interested in peace so something that happened last year we were a little bit able to watch in real time because we had a few contacts we've been meeting and talking to a lot of these leaders in prison and a bit outside of prison many of them will talk to us um and so uh their the homicide i mentioned homicide rate and medellin's maybe a two-thirds or half of the chicago level it had been climbing some of these street level gangs were starting to fight um maybe at sort of the on some level it it seems that like maybe some of those horizon leaders were like saying well let you know we're actually not sure how strong these guys are let's let them fight just to test it out let's have these skirmishes right it wasn't prolonged warfare it was like let's just sort of feel out how strong everybody is because then we'll be able to reapportion the drug corners and stuff accordingly so they're kind of feeling each other out through fighting and the homicide rate some doubled and then it then it increased by the same amount again and so is approaching something that might get out of control which wasn't in anybody's interest was in the government's interest wasn't in their interest and so then magically um all these leaders in these patios right different prisons and they're spread out around a bunch of prisons everybody gets transferred to a new prison on the same day which means they all get to be in the same holding area for three days before they're all moved elsewhere so the government had a role in this and then somebody who's like a trusted mediator on the criminal side gets himself arrested happens to be put in the same spot and uh and a week later the homicide rate has is 30 of what it was uh it's back to its normal mode unfortunately not zero right but it's back to where it was uh because they it didn't make sense to have a war and everybody government mafia leaders everybody sort of like they figured out a way to sort of bargain their way to peace cancer is almost like a tangent but you mentioned you got a chance potentially to talk to a few folks someone in prison somewhere or not um is it productive is it interesting maybe by way of advice do you have ideas about talking to people who are actively criminals yeah it really depends on the situation so like the first time i worked in a conflicted place was in northern uganda in the maybe the last couple years of a long-running war so this would have been 2004-2005 this is a small east african country and the north of the country had been engulfed in think of it as like a a 20-year low level insurgency run by a um self-proclaimed messiah who wasn't that popular and no one joined his movement so he would kidnap kids and um and so the i never i could talk to people who are who'd come back from being there i never once if i'd wanted to i and i was writing about that armed group i never talked to anybody who's an active member that armed group was quite rare it wouldn't have been easy or safe um and that's sometimes true i'm starting to do some work in mexico probably and i'm not going to be talking to any criminal they'll kill people when you say you're not going to talk to them and they'll kill people [Music] which people so i mean journalists are routinely killed for knowing too much in mexico there's no there's no compunctions about killing them and there's no consequences who do you who kills a journalist it's not the main people that though you spoke with it's their lackeys or is it rival no so so um gangs this is true of a chicago gang and this is true of a medellin gang it's probably true of a mexico gang is like you might have your group of 30 people one or two of them might be shooters most people don't you most people don't like to do that or you don't even have any of those people in your group because you're trying to run a business you don't need any shooters you can just hire a killer when you need them on contract and so if somebody's asking questions and you don't want them to ask questions or you think they know too much in a way that threatens you uh and it's cheap for you um and you have no personal compunctions and you can then you can put a contract out on them and they'll be killed uh that doesn't happen in colombia um it doesn't happen in chicago uh pro there's no i don't know there's lots of reasons for that i can't say exactly why i think one reason is like they know what will happen is that there will be consequences that that the government will crack down and make them pay and so they don't do it um and that's not what happened in mexico you they don't they won't kill like a d agent they know that the us has made it clear you kill one of our agents we will make you pay and so they they're very careful to minimize death of american but but you kill journalists and nobody comes after them or is able to come after them and so they realize they can get away with this and that seems to be the equilibrium there that's my my that's my initial sense from and but that's we spent a lot of time before we started talking to criminals you know i we spent a year trying to figure out what was safe before we actually and failing we kept there lots of safe things to do it was also really hard to figure out how to talk to people in these organizations and we failed 40 times before we figured out a way to actually access people is it worth it talking to them if you figure out because it's not never going to be safe it's going to be when you estimate that there's some low level of risk like what's the benefit as a researcher as a as a as a scholar of humans yeah so i actually don't think let's compare it to something okay you know i'm in austin for the first time and i'm walking around and there's all these people buzzing around on these scooters without helmets we need to definitely interview them and say what the hell is wrong with you so nothing i have ever done in my entire career is riskier is as risky as that um that's a nice way to compare journalism in a war zone and not well scooters there are some yeah they're journalists some war zones you know i worked in northern uganda and i worked in liberia and i work now in medellin and i'm starting to work in mexico and both the those particular places and then the things i did in those places where i spent a lot of time making sure that what i was doing was not unduly risky todd could you pull up a picture of a person on a scooter in austin so we can just compare this absurd situation where i i doubt it's the riskiest thing because now we have to look at the data i understand the point you're making but um wow so i'm not trying to say there's zero i think there's like a calculated risk and i think you become good at you work at becoming good at being able to assess these risks and know who can help you assess these risks yeah i i think um there's another aspect to it too when you're riding a scooter you're once you're done with the scooter the risk has disappeared yeah there's something the lingering where you have to look over your shoulder potentially for the rest of your life as you accumulate all these conversations yeah i've chosen but i've also advised my students and i wouldn't go and do this with an armed group that would would think i knew too much and therefore some people do that some journalists i think are very brave and take risks and do that and good for them and i'm happy they do that i don't i don't personally i don't personally do that so these guys are very i mean medellin is the business they're just they're selling local drugs and they are laundering money for the big cartels and they are um shaking down businesses for money or selling services in some cases and they make a lot of money it's a business and um and they're in prison so they they can talk about most of what they want to talk about because there's no double jeopardy they've been incarcerated for it uh and you're just they're just talking you're just talking shop and they're just you know you're so so it's worth it i think because the risk is very low but if you actually want to weaken these organizations and they're extremely powerful they're extremely big facet of life in a lot of cities in the americas in particular including in some of the united some american cities uh if you want to understand how to weaken these groups over time you have to understand how their business works and we're like imagine you were made like the whatever the oils are of of of of of the united states you're entire or maybe you're in charge of the finance industry yeah right you you're the regulator for oil and energy or for finance and then you get in the job and someone says um and then you're like well how many firms are there and what do they sell and what are the prices and everyone's like well you know we don't really know you would not be a very good regulator right and if you're a policeman or you're someone who's in charge of counter-organized crime you're just a regulator you're trying to regulate an illicit industry you're regulating an industry that happens to be illicit and you have no information and so that's kind of what we do we figure out how the system works and like what are the economic incentives and what are the political incentives any interviews and conversations help with that they help a lot yeah yeah we do that so we have i mean i don't do i do some of those but i'm on the side my spanish is okay it's not great and it's a translator usually if you ever go directly well if only because i can't understand the street vernacular like i'm just totally hopeless nor could many people who speak spanish as a second language it's totally you go to prison you talk to these guys and they're speaking in the local dialect and it's tough uh but more importantly like i just don't need to be there and that's not my i'm a quantitative scholar i'm the guy who collects the data so we have people we have people on our team and colleagues and employees who are doing full-time interviews so and then i just sometimes go with them so what about if we you mentioned uganda yeah yeah joseph coney the ugandan warlord um seeing here he kidnapped 591 children in three years between two totally they must have kidnapped i i had they probably kidnapped for at least a short time like a few hours to a day more than 50 000 kids as a terror tactic a little bit i mean um you know most of those people they just let go after they carried goods they held on to they tried to hold on to thousands the short story listen if you're not popular if you're running an arm movement and you need troops um you can i and nobody wants to fight for you you can either give up or you can have a small clandestine terror organization that tries to a different set of tactics but if you want a conventional army and you don't want to give up then you have to conscript and if you want to conscript and you don't you know here we can script and then we say if you run away we'll shoot you and we control the whole territory so we'll that's a credible promise if you're a small insurgency organization people can run away and then you can't promise to shoot them very easily because you don't control all the territory and so what these movements do is they try to brainwash you and i think what they figured out after years of abducting children you know you talk about evil um they figured out that you know we have to maybe like i don't know but say like maybe one in a hundred will like buy the rhetoric so we just have to conscript or abduct large number of kids and then some small number of them will not run away and those will be our committed cadres and those people can become commanders and because they'll buy the propaganda and they'll buy the messianic messages but but because most people wise up we have especially as they get older we just have to abduct vast numbers of kids in order to have a committed cadre and so so it has the other benefit of sort of being terrifying for the population and being a weapon in itself but i think for them was just primarily a way to solve a recruitment problem uh when you're a totally uh like hopeless and uh ideologically empty rebel movement so in some sense it's it's yeah so it that that's maybe the short story was a real tragedy i heard one interview of a dictator uh where the journalist was basically telling them like how could you be doing this uh basically calling out all the atrocities the person is committing and the dictator was kind of laughing it off and walked away yeah and like he cut off the interview that feels like a very unproductive thing to be doing you're basically stating the thing that everyone knows to his face maybe that's pleasant to somebody uh but that feels unproductive it feels like the goal should be some level of understanding yeah he's been super elusive i mean why yeah i mean why he's fought this i don't know you know it's not a great example of that's an you know what the way i look at that situation is it's a little bit particular the way uganda works but um most of the political leadership for most of its post-independence history came from the north of the country that was like the power base and and it was dictatorial and they were so you've heard of like people like eddie mean but people heard of like milton a boat day and all these people were all from the north uh and then you get the current president who came to power in 1986 so he's been around a long time he's coming 70 he um he was from the south and his he was fighting and he was fighting against these dictators and he was fighting for a freer and better uganda and in many ways i mean he's he's still a dictator himself but he did create a freer and better uganda so he's better than these he's a thug but he's better than thugs before him um and he came to power and he was like and and and these some of the northerners were like we want to keep up the fight and he was like you know what you guys i'm gonna i'm strong enough to continue to the north you guys go you want have you want to have a crazy insurgency up there and some kook believes he's like uh speaking you know through the holy spirit's you know speaking through him and he's going to totally disrupt the north i i don't care that's great you guys just fester and fight and that's going to totally destabilize this power this traditional power base and then that's just going to help me consolidate control so he was an autocrat he was an unchecked leader who allowed a lunatic to run around and uh cause mayhem because it was in his political interest to do so and there's no puzzle it's it's it's in some ways it's that simple and kind of tragic there's little to understand yeah it took me a lot well you know what it's not so easy in the middle of it i didn't understand that i don't think a lot of people did and and i'm not i think i could persuade most people who study or work there now to like see it that way i think people that would make sense to people but it didn't make sense in the moment you know in the moment this is happening it's terrible and you kind of you know you don't realize how avoidable it was that basically it was the absence of effective police actions that kept the lunatic from being contained um and and that lunatic would never you know he's not it's not that skillful of our movement right they could have it could have been shut down and that there was just never any political will to shut it down the opposite that's what i meant like that unchecked leader not only do you not bear the cost but you might have a private incentive as an autocrat to like see that violence happen and in this case it was it was just keeping a troublesome part of the country busy if it's okay to look at a few other wars so we talked about drug wars and medellin um are there other wars that stand out to you as full of lessons we can jump around a little bit maybe if we can return briefly at world war ii from your framework could world war two have been avoided this this one of the most traumatic wars global wars i mean one obvious driver of that war was these the things that hitler valued and and and uh and then was able to use his autocratic power to either convince other people or to suppress them um and so some people stop there and say that and then in the west basically uh and then of course they were able you know because they were such a economic and political powerhouse they were able to sort of make demands of the rest of europe that that um that you can kind of see the full you know letting nazis march into denmark without a fight or france folding very quickly you can kind of see as like an appeasement or an acknowledgement of their superiority and their ability to bargain without much of a fight and then you can see the the western response as a principled stand i think that's and there's a lot of truth to that you know in terms of the strategic forces a lot of political scientists see a version of a commitment problem basically where germany says you know what we're strong now we're temporarily strong we're not going to be the strong forever if we can get this terrible bargain and get everyone to capitulate um through violence if we strike now and then solidify our power and keep these in world war one it was prevent the rise of russia um and prevent the strengthening of of of of russian alliances as well um and we so we have an incentive to strike now and there's a window of opportunity that's closing and that they thought was closing as soon as 1917 in world war one and i i don't know that that story is as persuasive in world war ii i think there was an element of a closing window they kept talking about a closing window yeah they really thought there was a closing window i think the nature of that window's different uh in that there was kind of pacifism and it seems like if um war broke out most nations in the vicinity would not be ready by the people the leaders that are in power they weren't ready so the timing is really right now but i wonder how often that is the case with with leaders in war it feels like the timing is now the other commitment problem the other shift that was happening that he wanted to avert that has kind of wrapped up with his ideology is this idea of a like a cultural and a demographic window of opportunity that if he wanted if conditional on having these views of uh you know germanic people and and and a pure race and that that now is that he had to he had to strike now before any opportunity to sort of establish that was possible i think that's one it's an incentive that requires his ideology as well how to uh so to avoid it yeah within this framework would you say is there uh that's you kind of provide an explanation but is is there a way to avoid it is is violence the way to avoid it because people kind of tried rational yeah peace peaceful kind of usual negotiation and that led to this war is that unique to this particular or let's say world war one or world war ii so there's an extra pressure from germany and both wars the to act okay so we've highlighted that is there a way to alleviate that extra pressure to act let me use world war one as an example suppose as many german generals said at that time we have a window of opportunity before russia where we might not win a war with russia like so the the probability that we can win a war is going to change a lot in the next decade or two maybe even the next few years and so if we we are in a much better bargaining position now both to not use violence but to if necessarily use violence because otherwise russia is going to be extremely powerful in the future and they'll be able to use that power to to change the bargaining with us and to like hold keep us down and and the thing is is in principle russia could say look we don't want to get invaded right now we know you could invade us we know we're weak we know we'll be strong in the future we promise to like not wield our and abuse our or just merely just sort of take what we can get in the future when we're strong we're going to restrain ourselves in future or we're going to hand over something that makes us powerful because that's the bargain that would make us all better off and the reason political economists call it a commitment problem is because that's a commitment that would solve the problem and they can't make that commitment because there's nobody who will hold them accountable so anything any international legal architecture any uh set of enforceable agreements any u.n security council any world government any anything that would help you make that commitment is a solution all right if that's the core problem um and so that's why you know in medellin you know the the the la fasina can do that they can say listen yes combo that's strong today is going to be weak tomorrow you have an incentive to eliminate this combo over here but because they're going to be strong but guess what you're not going to do that and we're going to make sure we're going to promise that when these guys do get strong we're going to restrain what they can do most of our constitutions in most stable countries have done precisely that right there's a lot of complaining right now in the united states about the way that the constitution is apportioned power between states that was a deal that was a commitment the constitution was in the united states was a deal made to a bunch of states that knew they were going to be weak in future because of economic and demographic trends or guests they might be and it said listen you cooperate and will and and will commit not to basically ignore your interests over the long run and now you know 250 years later we're still honoring those commitments um it was part of the deal that that meant that there actually would be a union and so we we do this all the time so constitution is a good example of how um every country's constitution especially country who's writing a constitution after a war that constitution and all the other institutions are building are an attempt to like provide commitment to groups who are worried about future shifts in power and does that help with avoid civil war so could you speak to um lessons you learned from civil wars yeah perhaps the american civil war any others so lebanon one of the ways had tried for a long time to um preserve the interests of minority groups powerful minority groups who were powerful at the time and knew that the demographics were working against them would guarantee you know this ethnic religious group gets the presidency and this ethnic religious group gets the prime ministership in this ethno and will and a lot of a lot of countries will apportion seats in parliament to ethno-religious groups and that's an attempt to like give a group that's temporarily powerful some assurances that they're when they're weak in the future that they'll still have a say right just like we portion sheets in the senate in a way that's not demographically representative but is like unequal quote unquote in a sense to help people be confident that there won't be a tyranny of the majority and now that just happens to have been like a really unstable arrangement in lebanon because eventually like the de facto power on the ground just gets so out of line with this really rigid system of the presidency goes to this ethnic religious group and this prime ministership was that that it didn't last right so but you can think of every post conflict agreement and every constitution is like a little bit of humans best effort to find an agreement that's going to protect the interests of a group that's temporarily has an interest in violence in order to to to not be violent yeah and so there's a lot of ingenuity and it doesn't always work right which actually from a perspective of the group threatening violence or actually doing violence is one way to make progress for your group we're talking about groups bargaining over stuff right we're talking about russians versus ukraine or russians versus the west or maybe it's managing gangs versus one another like they're a lot of their bargaining power comes from their ability to burn the house down right and so if i want to have more bargaining power i can just arm a lot and i can threaten violence and so the strategically wise thing to do i mean it's terrible it's a terrible equilibrium for us to be forced into but the strategically wise thing to do is to build up lots of arms to threaten to use them to credibly threaten to use them but then trust or hope that like your enemy is going to see reason and uh and and avoid this really terrible inefficient thing which is fighting but the thing that's going on the whole time is both of you arming and spending like 20 of gdp or whatever on arms that's pretty inefficient yes that's the tragedy we don't have war and that's good but we have really limited abilities to like incentivize our enemies not to arm and to keep ourselves from arming we'd love to agree to just like both disarm but we can't and so the the masses that we have to arm and then we have to threaten all the time yeah yeah so the threat of violence is costly nevertheless you've actually pulled up uh that now disappeared a paper that said the big title called civil war and your name is on it uh what's that about well that was i mean when i was finishing graduate school and this is a paper with my advisor at ted miguel at berkeley um most nations the paper opens have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960 yet while that were you still in grad school on this or no last post maybe last year or just just graduated yeah i wish i was in a discipline that wrote papers like this this is pretty badass yet while civil is central to many nations development it has stood at the periphery of economic research and teaching so on and so forth and this is looking at civil war broadly throughout history or is it just particular civil wars we were mostly looking at like the late 20th century i mean i was trained as a what's called development economist which is somebody who studies why some places are poor and why some countries are rich um and i like a number of people around that time stumbled into violence i mean people have been studying the wealth and poverty nations basically since the invention of economics um but there was a big blind spot for violence now there isn't any more it's like a flourishing area of study but in economics but at the time it wasn't and so there were people like me and ted who were sort of part political scientists because political scientists obviously been studying this for a long time who started bringing economic tools and expertise and like partnerships with political scientists and adding to it and so we wrote this so after like people have been doing this for five or ten years in our field we wrote a review article telling economists like what was going on and so this was like a summary for economist so the book in some ways is a lot in the same spirit of this article this article i mean it's it's designed to be not written as like a boring laundry list of studies which is what that's that's the purpose this article was serviced it was for graduate students and professors who wanted to think about what to work on and what we knew um this book is like now trying to like not just say what economists are doing but sort of say what economist political scientists psychologists sociologists anthropologists like once what's how do we bring some sense to this big project and policymakers like what do we know and what do we know about building peace given you know because if you don't know what the reason for wars are you're probably not going to design the right cure um and so so anyway so that was the but but i started off studying civil wars and and i because i stumbled into this place in northern uganda basically by accident it was a never no intention of working in civil wars i'd never thought about it and and then you know uh basically basically i followed a woman there and oh we'll talk about that and for people who are just watching we're um we have an amazing team of folks helping out pulling pulling pictures and articles and so on mostly so i can put pull up pictures on instagram of animals fighting which is what i do on my own time and then we could discuss analyze maybe with george st pierre that's what all he sends me for people who are curious uh but let me ask you one of the most difficult things going on in the world today israel palestine will we ever see peace in this part of the world and sort of your book title is the roots of war and the path for peace or the subtitle why we fight um what's the path for peace will we ever see peace yeah if we think about this uh uh conflict in the sense of like this dispute this sort of contest this contest that's been going on between israelis and palestinians it's going on for a century and there there were really just 10 or 15 years of pretty serious violence in that span of time most of it from 2000 to 2009 and stretching up to like 2014. they're like sporadic incidents which are really terrible i'm not trying to diminish the human cost of these by the way like i'm just trying to point out that whatever is happening as unpleasant and challenging and difficult as it is is actually not war and so it is at peace there's sort of an uneasy stalemate the israelis and palestinians are actually pretty good at just sort of keeping this at a relatively low scale of violence there's a whole bunch of like low scale sporadic violence that can be repression of civilians it can be terror bombings and terror actions can be counter terror violence it can be mass arrests it can be repression it can be denying people the vote it can be rattling sabres all these things that are happening right and it can be sporadic three-week wars or sporadic you know very brief episodes of intense violence before everybody sees sense and then settles down to this uneasy that's not like we we're right now to think of that as like a piece and there's certainly no stable agreement right um so a stable agreement an amity and any ability to move on from this extreme hostility we're not there yet and that's maybe very far away but this is a good example of two rivals who most of the time have avoided really intense violence so you talked about this like most of the time yeah rivals just like avoiding violence and hating each other in peace so this is this what peace so to answer my questions yeah sometimes i mean that's what peace looks like not always but i mean it's it's what it's kind of my worry to go back to like the russia ukraine example like i kind of it's really hard it's gonna be really hard to find an agreement that both sides can feel they can honor that they can be explicit about that they'll hold to that will enable them to move on yeah it feels like a first step in a long journey towards greatness for both nations and a peaceful time flourishing that kind of thing i mean you can think of like what the the what's going on in in israel palestine there's a stalemate both both of them are exhausted from the violence that has occurred neither one of them is quite willing to for various reasons to create this sort of stable agreement there's a lot of really difficult issues to resolve and um and maybe the sad thing maybe we'll end up in the same situation with russia ukraine this this is where you know if every if they stop fighting one another but russia holds the east of the country and kumaya and nobody really acknowledges their right to that that that might within their there's going to be a lot of tension and skirmishing and violence but that never really progresses to war for 30 years that would be a sad but maybe possible outcome um so that's kind of where israel-palestine looks to me and so someone if we're going to talk about why we fight then the question we have to ask is like why you know like the second intifada like that was the most violent episode like why did that happen and why did not and and why did that last several years that would be like we could uh analyze that and we could say what was it about these periods of violence that led there to be prolonged intense violence because that was nobody's interest that didn't need to happen in part i don't talk about that in the book i wanted to avoid really contemporary conflicts for two reasons one is i things could change really quickly i didn't want the book to be dated i wanted this to be a book that had like longevity and that that would be relevant still in 10 years or 20 years maybe before someone writes a better one uh or before the human civilization ends exactly and circumstances can change really quickly so i wanted it to be enduring and meant partly just avoiding changing things and changing these and avoiding these controversial ones but i of course i think about them and so like a lot of my time i decided actually last year to teach a class where i'd take all these contemporary conflicts i wasn't working on the book and where i wasn't really an expert whether it's india pakistan china taiwan israel-palestine mexican cartel state drug wars and a few others and then teach a class on them with students and we'd work through it we'd read the book and then we'd say all right none of us are experts how do we make sense of these places and we focus in the israel-palestine case of mostly trying to understand why it got so violent and spent a little bit of time on what the prospects are for something that's more enduring it's hard to know that stuff now i mean yeah it's easier to do the full analysis when when looking back when it's over well israel is in like a tough place they have this attachment to being part of the west they have this attachment to liberal ideals they have an attachment to democracy and they have an attachment to a jewish state and that those things are not so easily compatible because to recognize the rights of non-jewish citizens right or to wrecking or to create or to have a one-state solution to the current conflict undermines the long-term ability to have a jewish state um and to do anything else and to deny that denies their liberal democratic ideals and and that's a really hard contest of priorities for to sort out yeah it's complicated of course everything you just said probably has multiple perspectives on it from other yeah that would phrase all the same things but using different words yeah well i'm trying to i try to analyze these things in like a dispassionate way but unfortunately just having enough conversations even your dispassionate description would be seen as a as a as one that's already picked aside and i'll say this because there's holding these ideals i'll give you another example united states also has ideals of freedom and and other like human rights so it has those ideals and yet it also sees itself as a superpower and as a deployer of those enforcer of those ideas in the world and so the kind of actions from a perspective of a lot of people in that world from children they get to see drones drop bombs on their house whether their father is not mother or dead they have a very different view of this uh well you're beginning to see why i didn't i decide i wanted to i wanted to write about those things and think about those things but i wanted this but i wanted this book to do something different and i didn't want it to follow along one of these polarizations my you know in on a personal level because i think i'm kind of a liberal democratic person at heart my sympathies in that sense lie in many ways with the palestinians despite the way i i mean i i'm i just the fact that people are they're not represented and and they you know uh and they got a very raw real politick kind of deal like most people in history have gotten like this raw real politic kind of deal in their past right where somebody took a summary of history by the way history is just full of raw deals for regular people right and uh and both sides are in a principled way refusing to make the compromise and and i'm not that's not like a both sides or right kind of argument i'm just sort of saying on a i just think it's a factual statement that like neither one wants to compromise on certain principles and and they're both they both can construct and in some ways have very reasonable i want to have have self-justifications for those principles and that's why i'm not very hopeful as i don't see a way and to for them to resolve those things speaking of compromise and war let me ask you about one last one which may be in the future china and the united states yeah how do we avoid an all-out hot war with this other superpower in the next decade 50 years a hundred years because sometimes when it's quiet at night i can hear in the long distance the drums of war beating yeah you know in the second part of the book i talk about what i think have been like these persistent like paths to peace and one of them is increasing interdependence and into relationships and another one is more checks and balances on power i think there's more but those are things too that are really fundamental here because i think those two things reduce the incentives for war in two ways one is like right now remember when we were talking about this really simple strategic game where i whether russian ukraine or or whatever any two rivals i want more of the pie than you get and and and uh the costs of ward are deterrence but only the cost of warf that i feel right i don't care i do not care about the costs of war to your side my rivals i'm not even thinking of that that's just worth zero to me i just don't care in that simple game now in reality uh many groups do care about the well-being of the other group at least a little bit right we're in some sense to the degree we first of all if our interests are intertwined like our economies are intertwined um that that's not a surefire way for peace and we shouldn't get complacent because we have a globally integrated world but that's going to be a disincentive and if we're socially entwined because we have great social relationships and linkages and family or we're intermarriage or whatever this is all these things will will will will help and then if we're ideologically intertwined maybe we share a notions of liberty or maybe we just share a common notion of humanity so i think the fact that we're more integrated than we've ever been on all three fronts in the world but with china is is providing some installation which is good so i would be more worried if we started to shed some of that insulation which i think has been happening a little bit us economic nationalism um whatever could be the fallout of these sanctions or a closer chinese alliance with russia all the things could happen those would make me more worried because i think we've got a lot of cushion that comes from all of this economic social cultural interdependence that the social one with the internet is a big one so basically make friends with the people from different nations yeah fall in love or you don't have to fall in love you can just have lots of sex with people from nature but also fall in love the thing that also should comforts me about china is that they china's not as centralized or as personalized regime as russia for example and neither one of them is as centralized as personalized as like a as some tin pot like purely personalized dictatorship like you get in in some countries the fact that china the power is much more widely shared is a big installation i think against this war will future war um the the attempts by xi jinping to personalize power over time and to make china a more centralized and personal ruled place which is he's successfully moved in that direction also worries me so anything anything that moves china in the other direction not necessarily being democratic but just like a wider and wider group of people holding power like all of the business leaders and all the things that have been happening the last few centuries have actually like widened power but anything that's moving in the other direction does worry me because it's going to accentuate all these five risks i am worried about a little bit of the demonization so one of the things i see with china as a problem for americans for maybe i'm projecting maybe it's just my own problem but you know there seems to be a bigger cultural gap than there is with other super powers throughout history where it's like it's almost like this own world happening in china its own world in the united states and there's this gap of total cultural understanding like we're it's not that um like we're not competing superpowers they're almost like doing their own thing there's that that feeling and i think that means there's a lack of understanding of culture of people and we need to kind of bridge that understanding i mean you know the language barrier but also cultural understanding making movies that's uh that you use both and explore both cultures and all that kind of stuff to where like it's okay to compete you know like rocky where um uh rocky balboa fought the russian uh fact you know historically inaccurate because obviously the russians win but you know we have to i'm just kidding as a philly person i was of course rooting for rocky but the the thing is those two superpowers are in the movies china is like its own out their thing we need more rock rocky seven i do think there's a certain inscrutability to the politics there and an insularity to the politics such that it's harder for westerners even if they know even just to learn about it and understand what's going on that i think that's a problem and vice versa um so i think that's true but i at this at the same time we could point to all sorts of things on the other side of the ledger like the massive amounts of chinese immigration into the united states and the massive number of people who are now like how many so many more americans business people politicians understand so much more about china now than they did 34 years ago because we're so intertwined so so i don't know where where it balances out i think it balances out on better understanding than ever before but you're right there was like a big gulf there that we haven't totally bridged yeah and uh like i said lots of inter chinese in the united states sexual intercourse no uh and love and marriage and all that kind of social social cohesion so once again returning to love uh i read in your acknowledgement and as you mentioned earlier the acknowledgement reads quote i dedicate this book to a slow and now defunct internet cafe in nairobi because it set me on the path to meet work with and most importantly mary jenny and on gigianon genie there's a lot a lot of beautiful letters in this beautiful name this book have been impossible without her and that chance encounter what's uh okay tell me tell me chris how you fell in love and how that changed the direction of your life i was in that internet cafe i think it was 2004 i'd uh i was um i didn't know what i wanted to do i i thought i might i thought you know i was a good development economist and i cared about growth economic growth and i thought firm like industrialization is like the solution to poverty in africa which is i think still still true and therefore i need to go study firms and industry in africa and so i went and i and the one of the most dynamic place for firms in industry at the time still to some extent now is was kenya and all these firms are on nairobians and so i went and i got a and i went i got a job with the world bank who was running up they were running a firm survey and i convinced them to like let me help run the firm survey because and so now i'm in nairobi and i'm wearing my like suit and with the world bank for the summer and my laptop gets stolen by two enterprising con artists very charming and so i find myself in an internet cafe um with no laptop with no laptop and just like you know kenya didn't exactly can you didn't get connected to the to the the sort of the big internet cables until maybe 10 years later and so it was just glacially slow so it would take 10 minutes for every email to load and so if there's this whole customer norm if you just chat to the next person in in beside you all the time it was it was true all over anywhere i'd worked on the continent and um and i so i strategically sat next to the attractive looking woman that when i came in and um and it turned out she was a psychologist and a phd student but she was a humanitarian worker and she'd been working in south sudan and northern uganda and this kids affected by this war all these kids who were being conscripted were coming back because they're all running away after a day or 10 years and needed help or to get back into school she was working on things like that and uh and i think she talked to me in spite of the fact that i was wearing a suit maybe because i knew a little bit about the war which most people didn't most people were totally ignorant and then we we had a fling for that week and then we didn't really we actually then we met up a little short while later and then it was kind of then we kind of drifted apart she was studying in indiana and spending a lot of time in um uganda and and then one day uh i was chatting with uh someone i knew who worked on this a young professor who was a friend of mine but and i said oh you know you work on similar issues you should meet this woman i talked to because she like you guys would have like you know professional research interests overlap there's so few sort of people looking at armed groups yeah african civil wars at least at the time and he said wow that's a fascinating research question and i thought and i walked out of the building and i thought that is a fascinating research question and i phoned genie and i uh and i said remember me and you know tell me more i was just talking to someone about this tell me more like i i started asking her more questions but we ended up talking for two or three hours and over the course of those three hours we hatched a very ambitious kind of crazy and like plan we basically what it was we were gonna like find the names and all the kids were born like 20 or 30 years ago in the region and we were going to track a thousand of them down we're going to randomly sample them and then we're going to find them today and we're going to track them and then we were going to use like some variation and exposure to violence and where the rebel group was to actually like show what happens to people when they're exposed to violence and conscription we were gonna like tell you know psychologically economically we're gonna like answer questions and that which would help you design better programs right and so we hatched this plan which is totally cockamamie soccer made me that when i pulled my previous dissertation proposal from my committee like the next week and gave them a new one they unanimously met without me to decide that this was totally bonkers and to advise me not to go and they coordinated to read my old proposal so that when i showed up for my defense they said you actually think you're defending but we're actually we want you to only talk about this other thing you were going to do because this is like you should not go oh wow i mean it is incredibly ambitious super interesting though it actually worked exactly according to plants the first and last time in my entire career he actually pulled off an ambition like a gigantically crazy well all of my work that's my shtick like my day-to-day research job is not writing books about why we fight my thing is like i go i collect data on things that nobody else thought you could collect data on and so i always do pull it off but it never turns out like i thought it was going to like it's always there's so many twists and turns and always goes sideways in an interesting way and it works but it's all but this one actually we pulled off in spite of ourselves and um as planned and uh and so ted miguel who i wrote that paper with was actually the one person of my advisors was like well you know what he's he was sympathetic to this he was like yeah why didn't you just go for a couple months and like check it out and then come back and work on the other thing and that's and so i followed jeannie there and went there and then but and and i don't know what's this i always remember you know this movie speed the ken reeves and and sandra whatever these people are and they they have this relationship in these intense circumstances and they're like well and i think at the end of the movie they're sort of like this will never work because these relationships and intense circumstances never matter which is what we assumed and that turned out not to be true so we've been married 15 years and we have two kids and yeah and that's when you fell in love with psychology and learned to appreciate the power of psychology exactly so that's the psychology in the book as well because i and so we end up for most of our work for the first five or ten years was together actually what's the hardest piece of data that you've been chasing that you've chased in your life like what are some interesting things because you mentioned like one of the things you you kind of want to go somewhere in the world and find evidence and data for things that people just haven't really looked to okay gain an understanding of human nature maybe from an economics perspective what's uh what what what kind of stuff either in your past or in your future you've been thinking about well i mean the hardest there's hard in two cents the hardest emotionally was interviewing all those kids in northern uganda that was just like a gut punch every day um and just hearing the stories like that was the hardest but it wasn't hard because it was you could the kids were everywhere and everybody would talk to you about it and they could talk about it you could no one had gone and interviewed kids that had gone through war in the middle of an active war zone nobody was going to displace all the things we did no one had done that before so now lots of people do it could you actually speak to their their stories what what's like the shape of their suffering what what were common themes what how did that those stories change you i remember i said you could you like your dispassion itself and your passion itself i think i had to learn to create the dispassion itself i mean we all have that capacity when we analyze something that's far away and happens to people different than us but you have to i think i discovered and developed an ability to like put those aside in order to be able to study this so um you get maybe harder in a way that you have to be guarded against so you have to try to remember to put your human head on it's really horrible like if i want to conscript you and i don't want you to run away then i want to make you think you can never go back to your village and the best way for me to do that is for to make you force you to do something really really really really horrible that you could you almost incredibly believe you can never really go back and it might be like killing a loved one and so and just having hearing people tell you that story in all of the different shapes and forms to a point what was horrible about it is they did this so routinely that you'd be sitting there in an interview with somebody and they'd be telling you the story and it's like the most horrible thing that could happen to you or anyone else and and but there's some voice in the back your mind saying okay we really need to get to the other thing you know we know that i know how this goes like i've heard you know there's this thing like okay okay i'm not learning anything new here like there's some part you know deep evil terrible part of you that's like yeah yeah yeah like but let's get on to the other thing but i know i have to go through this but every day you have to go through that to get to the because you're trying to actually understand how to help people you're trying to understand how that trauma has manifested how they either some people get stronger as a result of that some people get weaker and if you want to know how to help people then you need to get to that i wasn't trying to get to something for my selfish purposes really i was trying to figure out okay we need to know what your symptoms are now that's such a dark thing about us so if you're surrounded by trauma god that's voice in the back of your head that you just go yeah i know exactly how this conversation goes let's skip ahead to the to the solutions to the next yeah yeah and so that was that was yeah so that was because you then you have to deal with yourself so it's very helpful if you like come home every night to someone who's a gone through the same thing and b is a professional and very very very very good counseling psychologist um the the hardest thing i mean this the the organized crime stuff has been the hardest just figuring out how to get that information it took us years of just trial and error mostly error of like just how to get people to talk to us or how to collect data in a way that's safe for me and safe for my team and safe for people to answer a survey like how do you get how do you get the information on what gangs are doing in the community or how it's hurting or helping people like you've got to run surveys and you've got to talk to gang members all these things and that nobody knows how to do that yeah and so we had to sort of really slowly not nobody there's a few other i think there's other academics like me who are doing this but there's a pretty small group that's trying to like collect systematic data and then there's a slightly bigger and much more experienced group that's been talking to different armed groups but every time you go to a new city and there weren't that many people working on this in medellin there were a few you have to like discover a new like it's it's really going to be unique to that city and place so there's not there's not like a website for each of the 17 mafia groups there's no facebook group there is now we have a we've created like our own we have a private wiki where we document everything and it's a collaborative enterprise between lots of researchers and journalists and things so they now they can't see you can't go online and see this that's that's individual researchers it's not i mean they're hiding by design some of them have facebook pages and things of this nature so they they do have public profiles a little bit but not not exp not so explicitly no so they're clandestine here's an example so one of the things that's really endemic in medellin it's true in a lot of cities it's true in american prisons is gangs govern everybody's everyday life so if you have a in an american prison particularly illinois or california texas is another big one but also in a city in medellin if you have a problem um a debt to collect or dispute with a neighbor or something you could go to the government and and they do and you they can help you solve it you go to the police or you can go to the gang and so and that's like a really everyday phenomenon but then there's a question like how do you actually how do you actually figure out how what services they're offering and how much they pay for them and do you actually like those services and how do they how do you comparison shop between the police and the gang um and what would get you to go from the gang to the police and then how's the gang strategically going to respond to that and what was the impact of previous policies to like make state governing better and how did the gangs react and so that's we had to sort of figure that out and that that was um so that was just hard in a different way but i don't do the emotion emotionally punishing stuff i couldn't do any longer so that's much easier in that sense by the way on um uh you know jorge ochoas some of these folks are out of prison yeah have you got a chance to talk to anybody by any chance one of my collaborators on this guy named gustavo duncan who's who spent a lot of time interviewing paramilitaries has written a book he's talked to more of these people than i i have um i haven't talked to those and i we haven't been talking to them about this stuff but also they were they were there in a different era yeah so it doesn't the system was totally different that's super interesting maybe one day we'll do that yeah it's that was 30 years ago yeah and the system over i mean la fascina pablo escort created la fiscena he integrated what's what the all these 17 resonates and all these street gangs are the fragmented former remnants of his more unified empire which he gave the name la fiscena i mean the i think you know it's a little bit apocryphal but the idea is you know i think he said um every doctor has an office so should we i still can't ima i i still love that there's parallels between these uh mafia groups and uh united nations yeah security council this is just wonderful it's so so so deeply human uh let me ask you about yourself so you've been thinking about war here in part dispassionately just analyze war and try to understand the path for peace but you as a single individual that's going to die one day maybe talking to um the people that have gone through suffering what do you think about your immortality do you how has your view of your own finiteness changed haven't thought about war maybe the reason i can do this work is because i don't think about it a lot your own mortality or even like mortality yeah well i have to think about death a lot so but there's a way to think about death like numbers in a calculation when you're doing geopolitical negotiations and then there's like a dying child or a dying mother yes yeah i guess i know i'm in a place where there's risk and so i think a lot about minimizing any risk such that i i think i think about mortality enough that i just because i'm kind of an anxious person like i'm kind of a worrywart like in a way uh and so i'm really obsessive about making sure anything that i do is low risk you know so that gives you something to focus on a number is the the risk and you're trying to minimize it and yes there's still the existential dread your risk minimization doesn't matter i yeah i've never been in a life-threatening situation um yeah that's somebody who you know what you sound like that's alex honnold that that does the free climbing he doesn't see that well that's that's but no but i well that sounds exactly the same because you just said i've never done anything as dangerous as those people right right scooter so i've i've actually been a rock climber for like 25 years with a long break in the between um but i'm the same way you know actually rock climbing is an extremely safe sport if you're very careful it but he's free climbing is the opposite of that but i mean like if you're like you've got a road if you've got a rope that's attached to you that goes up is like attached to 18 trees and comes back down you're you're fine like this you know and you wear a helmet you're good you're totally fine yeah but this is super safe too because no free climbing no no no no no we're watching freaking out i mean because you're only gonna put your hands and feet on sturdy rock and and then you know the path and no no no totally i i know i i know some p i have some friends in college i've known people who do some of these totally wacky extreme sports and have paid the price uh so i think it's totally totally different i think um so even in that by the way this i can't even watch those movies because those freak me out too much because it's just too risky like i can't i don't even yeah so those things i i've i've never watched like free solo or anything there's just too much um still not as dangerous as riding a scooter and awesome yeah absolutely not gonna let that go uh so but even in that it's a risk minimization in the work that you do versus the sort of philosophical existentialist view of your immortality you know this like this thing just ends like what the hell is that about yeah i have this amazing capacity not to think about it which might just be a self-defense mechanism you know my father-in-law jeannie's father is a evangelical pastor actually he's now retired but um and this he would we would talk about when we were getting married they were terribly thrilled that she was uh marrying a agnostic or atheist or something like that we could love each other very much it's fine now but i i only started discussing this and some of the because that was one of his questions for me like well how can you possibly believe that there's nothing afterwards because that's just like too horrible to imagine and we we really never saw eye to eye on this and my view was like listen like i can't convince myself i believe like i can't convince myself otherwise anything else seems completely impossible to me and for some reason i can't understand i'm at peace with that like it's never bothered me that one day it's over and and i unders the fact that people have angst about that and that they would seek answers makes total sense to me and and i can't explain why that doesn't consume me or doesn't bother me um but and yet you are at peace yep maybe if i was worried but if i was more worried about it maybe i wouldn't be able to do i don't know i don't know but then again i don't take the risk i'm still like i don't know but i minimize all sorts of risks i'm like uh i i i i yeah i minimize uh you know i try to optimize like groceries in the fridge too like i mean i put a very economistic way to live i would say uh that's probably why you're good that might be true that might be there's some selection into economics of of these cold calculations chicken or the egg we'll never know do you have advice for young people that want to do as ambitious as crazy as amazing of work as you have done in life so somebody who's in high school in college either career advice on what to choose how to execute on it or just life advice how to meet some random stranger maybe a dating advice that part's easier you have to fly coach and go to the internet cafes you can't like uh all the development workers that i know that fly business class and like you'll never meet somebody and uh yeah no the you know i i i actually spent a lot of time writing advice on my blog and i've got like pages and pages of advice and one of the reasons is because i never got that like when i grew up i went to like a really good state school in canada called waterloo i loved it but people didn't go on the trajectory that i went on from there and i had some good advisors there but but i never got the kind of advice i needed to like pursue this career so i it's very uh concentrated in elite colleges i think sometimes in elite high schools so i tried to democratize that that's like that was one reason i started the blog but a lot of that's really particular because i every week like i have students coming in my office wanting to know how to do international development work and i just spent a lot of time giving them advice and i think that's what a lot of the posts are about definitely very specific questions like what is it the country by country kind of specific questions or what the thing that they're all trying to do that i think is the right i don't have to give them a really basic piece of advice because they're already doing it like they're trying to find a vocation they they're really interested and what i mean by that is it's like a career where they find meaning where the work is almost like superfluous because they just they would do it for free and they're passionate about and they really find meaning in the work and and and then it becomes a little bit all-consuming so scientists do that in their own way i think international development humanitarian workers people who are doctors and nurses like we all do our careers for other reasons right but but they they find like meaning in their career and so the thing so i don't have to tell them whatever you do find meaning um and try to make it a vocation something that you would do for free amongst all of these many many many options uh that's what i would tell but that's what i would tell high school students and and young people in college sometimes it's hard to find a thing and hold on to it well that's the other it took me a long time so i actually started off as an accountant i was an accountant with deloitte and touch for a few years so i i did not that did you wake up in the morning excited to be alive i was miserable i got i found it by accident which is another different story but i landed in this job and a degree where i study accounting and i was miserable i was totally miserable and i hated it and i was becoming a miserable person um and so i eventually just quit and i did something but i was that still you know but then i was working the private sector and i i actually just needed trial and error i actually had to try on like three or four or five careers before i found like this mixture of academia and activism and research and and international development and how did you know that this was love when you when you found this kind of international development like it's decade academic context too the key lesson was just trial and error which we all have to engage until until it feels right it's okay all right step one is trial and error but until it feels right because like it often feels right but not perfect yeah that's true right enough i mean i was really intellectually engaged like i just loved learning about it i wanted to read more like it in some sense like like i was doing i was an account but i was reading about like world history and international development in poor countries in my spare time right and so it was like this hobby and i was like wait a second i could actually do that like just i could like research those things and even write the neck those books and that's kind of what i did like 25 years later that didn't occur to me right away i didn't even know it was possible this is the other thing people do people do their nine-to-five job and then they find meeting and everything else they do they're volunteering and their family and their hobbies and things and that was my social media and um and that's a great path too like i mean that's because not all of us can just have a vocation or we don't find it i think and then you just circumscribe what you do in your work and then you go find um and that's not entirely true because everyone in my family does like their job and get a lot of fulfillment out of it but um but i think it's not it's that's that's a different path in some ways so it's good to take the leap and keep trying stuff even when you found like a little locum local minima yeah the hardest part was it got easy after a while it was was quitting but but now i take this to a lot of you know and one of the people i think one of the reasons i discovered your podcast or maybe tyler cowan yeah he's amazing tyler takes this approach to everything he takes this approach to movie yeah he's like walk into the movie theater after half an hour if you don't like the movie and um you know what kind of person he probably is i don't know but now that you say this he's probably somebody that goes to a restaurant if if the meals is not good i could see him just walking away like paying for it and just walking away yeah meal and to go eat something better that's exactly right and i thought that was kind of crazy and i never i was the person i would never just put a book down halfway and i would never um stop watching a movie but then i and i convinced my wife we lived in new york when we were when we when we were single initially and sorry not religion when we were childless uh and we lived in new york there's all this culture and theater and stuff and i just said let's go to more plays but let's just walk out after the first act if we don't like it and she thought that was a bit crazy and i was like no no here's the logic here's what tyler says and then we started doing it and it was so freeing and glorious we just go we take so many more chances on things yeah and we would and if we didn't like it we were walking out of stuff all the time um and so i i think i did that without realizing that that's how i like to i just kept quitting my jobs yeah and trying to find something else at like some risk because that's how wars start without the commitment you need the commitment otherwise uh no that's a different kind of commitment problem that's a different different commitment problem so some of it i'm sure there's a balance because i mean the same thing is happening with dating and marriage and all those kinds of things and there's some value just sticking it out because some of the like maybe you know don't leave after the first act because the good stuff might be coming yeah yeah that's a good point i mean that's yeah well i i don't know so when i met jeannie she was very wary of a relationship with me because i explained to her um i hadn't had a relationship longer than two or three months and 11 years and so she thought this person's on serious and what i said to her she tells the story this is how she tells her she says i didn't believe him when he said that i just after two or three months you kind of have a good sense whether this is going somewhere and i would just decide if it was over so and i walk away so i took this approach to dayton like as soon as i thought it wasn't going to go somewhere and and then i ha and then i decided with her that this was it this was going to work and then i like and then neverland she didn't believe now she believes me i finally got to be right because this is an incredible conversation your work is so fascinating just in this um big picture way looking at human conflict and how we can achieve peace especially in this time of the ukraine war i really really really appreciate that you would calmly speak to me about some of these difficult ideas and explain them and that you sit down with me and have this amazing conversation thank you it was an amazing conversation thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with chris blattman to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some well known simple words from albert einstein i know not with what weapons world war iii will be fought but world war iv will be fought with sticks and stones thank you for listening and hope to see you next time