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 onto 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 unchecked leadership
decide that this is worth it?
Especially if they can emerge from the rubble still on top.
The following is a conversation with Chris Blatman,
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 Lux Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Chris Blatman.
In your new book titled Why We Fight,
The Roots of War and the Paths for Peace,
you write, 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 violence
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,
Sydares, and you 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 violence 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 also do all a little bit
in psychology, but that's partly because I'm married
to a psychologist, 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 an important way to make progress
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 relate to a really wide range of phenomenon.
Basically we can talk about them in a very similar way
and we can 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 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 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 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 the 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.
So 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.
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, and that's pretty different than two villages
or two gangs.
A lot of what I work on is studying organized criminals
and gangs.
You know, where you think is really different.
And of course it is, but there are some common principles.
You can just think about conflict and the use of violence
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 in each of those words?
What does prolonged mean?
Where's the line between short and long?
What does groups mean and what does violent mean?
So let me, you know, I have a friend who,
someone who's become a friend through the process
of my work and writing this book also,
who was 20, 30 years ago was a, was gang leader in Chicago.
So this guy named Napoleon English or Knapp.
And I remember one time he was saying,
well, you know, when I was young, I used to,
I was just 15, 16 and he'd go to the neighboring
gang's territory.
He says, I'd go gang banging.
And I said, well, I didn't know what that meant.
I said, what does that mean?
And he said, oh, that's just meant I'd shoot him up.
Like I'd shoot at buildings.
I might shoot at people.
I wasn't trying to kill the, 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 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 and we,
we might have border skirmishes and,
and I wanted to sort of, so is it,
what's short is a 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 the problem in the puzzle.
And I just, I didn't want to spend a lot of time talking
about 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,
that doesn't qualify for war?
Is it the individual aspect?
Is it that violence is not the thing that is sought,
but the communication of information is what is sought?
Or is it the shortness of it?
Is it all of those?
It's a little bit, I mean, he was the head of a group
where he's becoming the head of a group at that point.
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 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 napped, like if you start a war,
one, you know, there's lots of risks,
you can get killed, that's not good.
You could kill somebody else and go to jail,
which is what happened to him, that's not good.
Your soldiers get killed.
No one's buying your drugs in the middle of the gunfight.
So it interrupts your business.
And so on and on, it's 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 at 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 described for everybody.
So everybody is losing in this war.
Yeah, I mean, that's maybe the insight.
Everybody loses something from war.
And there was usually, not always,
but 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,
so I guess like what's not war?
And I mean, I don't want,
I don't try to belabor the definitions
because some, you know, there's reams and reams
of political science papers written on like,
what's a war?
What's not a war?
People disagree.
I just wanted to say,
war is the thing that we shouldn't be doing
or war is 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,
precisely because they're cheap ways of communicating
or they're not particularly costly.
War is the thing that's just so costly,
we should be trying to avoid it.
It's maybe like the meta way I think about it.
All right.
Nevertheless, definitions are interesting.
So outside of the academic bickering,
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,
you lose the power.
Yeah, one of the interesting things,
I mean, so people, if you want to do,
some of what I do is just quantitative analysis
of conflict 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 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 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 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 little terror attacks
or a couple of bombs lobbed
and then eventually turns into war?
Do we call that, do we backdate it
to like when the first act of violence started?
And then what do we do with all the times
when there was like that low scale,
low intensity violence or bombs lobbed
and do we call those wars?
But or maybe only if they eventually get worse.
Like so it actually is really tricky.
And the defensive and the offensive aspect.
So everybody, 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 taken 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 the other interesting thing
is there's a 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'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.
A lot of it is about intent and some of the other factors
like that you look at, which is prolonged,
that a 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,
then there's reasons for war, looking to free people
or to stop a genocide versus conquering land,
all those kinds of things.
And people try to put a number behind it.
And a lot of...
And it's based on, I mean, what I'm trying to imagine is,
I mean, suppose I wake up and, or whatever,
I suppose I think my God tells me to do something
or my God thinks that, or my moral sense thinks
that something that another group is doing is repugnant.
I'm curious, 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 not to 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 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 another way
to get what you wanted.
And so on one level, there's no just war.
Now that's not true because, take an example
like the US invasion of Afghanistan.
The United States has been attacked.
There's a couple bull age and reliable evidence
that this is al-Qaeda, they're being sheltered
in Afghanistan by the Taliban.
And then the Taliban, this is a bit murky.
It seems that there was an attempt to say hand him over
or else 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 maybe that's just war or that's a just invasion.
But it hinges on the fact that the other side
just didn't do the seemingly sensible thing,
which is say, okay, we'll give them up.
And 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, you know,
Mullah Omar, in particular in Taliban in general,
decided we're not going to do this,
then now you're not left with very many good choices.
And now, you know, I didn't wanna talk about
is that a just war or is that what's justice or not?
I just wanted to point out that like one side's
in transigence, if that's indeed what happened,
one side's in transigence 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's like one way to describe what happened.
So your book is fascinating,
and 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, nobody wins.
And so war is essentially a breakdown of reason,
a breakdown of negotiation, of healthy communication
or for healthy operation of the world,
some kind of breakdown,
you list all kinds of ways in which it breaks down.
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 wars that were seen as just,
first of all, the most just war is seen as World War II,
by far.
It's actually the only one that goes above a threshold
that's seen as just, everything is seen as unjust.
It's a less, it's like degrees of unjustness.
And 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.
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, and 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 hard as hard and as fast as possible
to stop the expansion of the suffering.
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, same with Japan.
Is it in their long-term interest?
I don't know.
So for me, who cares about alleviating human suffering
in the world, yes, it seems like almost no war is just.
But it also seems some kind of,
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 try to get at that?
Cause it seems that war, there is some,
that like drum 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
that 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 some of that's going to be aspects of our humanness.
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 gonna be really costly.
And so all of these other human or strategic things,
all these things, the circumstantial things
that will eventually lead us to go to war
have to be pretty powerful before we go there.
And most of the time.
Sorry to interrupt.
And that's why you also described 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're gonna, you know, the history books
and school kids are gonna learn
about the invasion of Afghanistan for decades and decades.
And nobody is going to put this one in the history books.
And it's because it didn't actually happen
because before the troops could land,
the person who'd taken power in a coup basically said,
fine, there's a famous story where Colin Powell
goes to Haiti to this new dictator
who's refused to let a democratic president take power.
And tries to convince him to step down or else.
And he says, no, no, no.
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 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 US military college
because a lot of these military dictator 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 point is, and that's like what should have happened.
Like that makes sense, right?
Like, yeah, maybe I can mount an insurgency.
And yeah, I'm not going to bear a lot of the costs of war
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,
this does not make sense.
And that's what happens most of the time,
but we don't write so many books about it.
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 one another one another
or they look at the ethnic groups
that could fight with one another
because there's some tension
and they're right next to one another and then whatever,
some number like 999 out of 1,000 don't fight
because they just find some other way.
They don't like each other,
but they just loathe in peace
because that's the sensible thing to do.
And that's what we all do, we loathe in peace.
And we loathe the Soviet Union in relative peace
for decades and India 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.
We'll be angry, but we'll accept your explanation
that this was an accident.
And so these things find to the radar.
And so we overestimate, I think,
how likely it is the sides are gonna fight.
But then, of course, things do happen.
Like Russia did invade the Ukraine
and didn't find some negotiated deal.
And so then the book is sort of about,
half the book is 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 actually don't think war beats in our heart.
It does a little bit, but we're actually very cooperative.
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 at getting angry and vengeance
and we have principles that will sometimes lead us,
but we're actually really, really, really good at cooperation.
And so that's, again, I'm not trying to write
some big optimistic book where everything's gonna 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 gonna focus on the sick, right?
I'm gonna try, I know there's sick people,
but I'm gonna recognize that the normal state is health
and that most people are healthy.
And that's gonna 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 the normal state is health.
And then we're gonna 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
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?
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 it's overwhelming for a lot of people.
It was overwhelming for me for a lot of time.
And 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, the terrible metaphor, right?
I had it metaphors.
So the idea was that like that basic,
instead of like something overrides these incentives.
And I guess I was saying there's five ways
that they get overrided.
And three are, I'd call strategic.
Like they're kind of logical.
There's circumstances that, and this is,
they're sort of where strategic is,
strategy is like the game theory is,
you could use those two things interchangeably,
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 one of them is when the people who are deciding
don't bear those costs.
So that's, or maybe even have a private incentive
that's gonna, that's, if they don't,
if they're ignoring the cost,
then maybe the costs of war are not so material.
That's a contributing factor.
And others just, there's uncertainty.
And we can talk about that,
but there's just the absence of information means that
it 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 words in theory, 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 is sort of saying 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 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.
We misunderstand or misjudge our enemy
or misjudge ourselves.
So if you put all those things into buckets,
how much can it be modeled 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,
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 bargained for.
You're thinking a few steps ahead
about what your opponent's going to do
and you stake out a high, like a low price
and the seller stakes out a high price.
And you might both say, oh, I refuse to,
I could never accept that.
And there's all this sort of cheap talk.
But you kind of understand where you're going
and it's efficient to like find a deal
and buy the market, buy the carpet eventually.
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,
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 just ought to be able to avoid.
We ought to be able to find something between ourselves
that doesn't require this hiring lawyers
and a long drawn out trial.
And most of the time we do, right?
And so we all understand that incentive.
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.
And so I'm more channeling my colleagues to do this
and what I know.
But it's not rocket science.
I mean, I think that's what I try to lay out in the book
is like there's all these ideas out there
that can actually help us just make sense of all these wars
and just bring some order to the morass of 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 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 problem, the downside 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.
And sometimes that simplification
is actually getting it to 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 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,
or do we also have to model the culture, the people,
the suffering of the people, the economic frustration,
or the anger, the distrust?
Do you have to model all those things?
Do they come into play?
And sometimes, I mean, again,
it 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, I mean, you're absolutely right in the sense
that it's totally possible to oversimplify these things
and take the game theory too seriously.
And some, and people who study those things
and write those models and people like me who use them
can sometimes make that mistake.
I think that's not the mistake
that most people make most often.
And what's actually true is I think most people,
we're actually really quick,
whether it's the US 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.
So, we're really quick to blame it on these things.
And then we're really, we tend to overlook
the strategic incentives to attack,
which I think we're probably dominant.
I think those things might have been true to a degree,
but I don't think they were enough to ever,
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 grand visions of being the next Catherine the Great
or nationalist ideals and the misstakes
and the miscalculations were really quick to sort of say,
oh, that must be, and then kind of pause and,
or not pause, but maybe even stop there
and not see some of the strategic incentives.
And so, I guess we have to do both,
but the strategic, I guess I would say,
like the war is just such a big problem
and it's just so costly that the strategic incentives
and the things that game theory has given us
are like really important in understanding
why there was so little room for negotiation and a bargain
that things like a leader's mistakes start to matter
or a leader's nationalist ideals or delusions
or vengeance actually matters.
Cause 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, it's sort of like saying,
like an elderly person who dies of pneumonia, right?
Pneumonia killed them, obviously,
but that's not the reason pneumonia 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 of 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
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.
No, 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 it's possible to communicate and learn this stuff,
but it's still really hard.
And 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,
Konstantin Sonin tells this story
about a visiting Ukrainian professor
who's at the university in 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 he's sort of like dead pan way Konstantin says,
and because he was Ukrainian, he decided to fight.
And I think that's a little bit like what happened.
Most of us in that situation would hand over our cell phones.
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 gonna hand this over.
And the fact is 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 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 Ukrainians said, no way.
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 terrible.
Sometimes it's the extermination of another people.
But sometimes it's something noble,
like liberty or refusal to part with sovereignty.
And in those circumstances, people will decide,
I will endure the costs.
I mean, I think they knew what they were probably risking.
And so to me, 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 gonna have partial sovereignty.
And Americans for ideological reasons said,
no way.
And that, people like Bernard Bale and other historians,
that's like the dominant story of the American Revolution.
It wasn't the ideological origins
just attachment to 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 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 makes a claim on a land,
builds up troops and invades.
The way to avoid suffering there,
and the way to avoid death and a way to avoid war
is to back down and basically let,
there's a list of interests he provides
and you go along with that.
That's when the goal is to avoid war.
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.
It made total sense, 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 the same kind of way.
So I think we're saying the same things.
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,
it sort of has 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 from a very cold, blooded, and calculated point of view,
I think one way Putin and Russia could look at this as this,
look, we were temporarily weak
after the fall 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 caled 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 wanna roll back some of your success
because we were powerful enough to demand it.
And you've been taking advantage of the situation,
which is maybe a fair impartial analysis.
And 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 Britain,
yeah, of course you're, we ought to accept semi-sovereignty,
but we are just, we refuse.
And we'd rather injure a bloody fight
that we might lose than take this.
And 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 do think it's fundamental that there's just,
that 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.
So your analysis 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 sacrifices, 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 their power falls.
I just love that that spirit burns bright still.
And I do, maybe I'm wrong in this,
do 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 a lot of people, and that pisses me off
because 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, war is hell,
but it really pushes people to stand
for the things they believe in.
It's the William Wallace speech from Braveheart.
I think about this a lot.
That does not fit into your framework.
No, no, no, I'm gonna disagree.
I think it totally fits in and it's this,
there's nothing irrational about what we believe,
especially those principles which we hold the most dear.
I'm merely trying to say that there's a calculus.
There's one calculus over here
that says Russia's more powerful than it was 20 years ago
and even 10 years ago and Ukraine is not
and it's asking for something
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 not stood up.
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 appeased
and lots of people hear that speech
and think I would like to do that, but don't.
And so, and my point is that sadly,
we live in a world where a lot of people
get stepped on by tyrants and empire and whatnot
and don't rise up.
And 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 of the American revolution and so on.
But it doesn't always happen.
And I don't actually know why,
but I don't think it's irrational.
I think it's just, it's something,
it's about a set of values and it's hard to predict.
And it was hard for,
Putin might not have been out of line
and thinking just like everybody else
in my sphere of influence, they're gonna roll over too.
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 that too,
especially when the enemy is coming for your home
over the hill.
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 sort of what people call red pilled,
is to see that there,
maybe the thing I've been told all my life is not true.
And at every level,
it's a thing very difficult to do in North Korea.
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 in transigence or whatever is key.
I think the authoritarianness 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 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 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 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 apparatus of political control
and economic control that Putin and Kronys
and this sort of group of people that rule,
this elite in Russia, 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 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 some,
they're bearing some costs of war, right?
They're very, and they're certainly bearing costs
of sanctions, 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,
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 transigence because they were threatened.
And so that's extremely important, I think.
And so that's, those two things in concert
and make this a very fragile situation.
That's, I think, why we ended up is go,
not all the way, but a long way to understanding.
Now, you could layer onto that these intangible incentives,
these other things 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 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 so he asked, he made this cruel list of demands.
I mean, I would say I'm just one human who the hell am I,
but I just have a lot of anger towards the elites in general,
towards leaders in general that fail 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,
anyone 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 the freedom to show themselves,
to celebrate themselves,
and the thing 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.
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?
There's something 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 was 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 and China.
We have appeased China.
We've basically said you can just do
really, really, really horrible things in this region,
and you're too powerful for us to do anything about it,
and it's not worth it.
And there's nobody standing up and making a Churchill speech
or the Braveheart speech about standing up
for people of Xinjiang when what's happening is,
you know, in that realm of what was happening in Europe.
And that's happening in a lot of places.
And then when there is a willingness to stand up,
people, there's a lot of opposition to those.
You know, so there were a lot of reasons
for the invasion of Iraq.
For some, it was the humanitarian thing.
Like, what I'm saying 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 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.
Cause most of the time you get neither the principles
nor the life, you die, 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.
We 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.
I want to give my respect as a human being to Churchill,
to the British people for standing up,
to the Ukrainian people for standing up
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?
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 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 then that principle that you go to war on
is in the eye of the holder.
And I mean, I think liberty 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.
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 that 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,
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, or 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 on,
even 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 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 the, 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 they didn't pay most of the suffering.
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 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 the things,
all five buckets, they're all,
we're all more susceptible to these things,
to all five of these things,
when leaders are not accountable to the people
and their group.
And that's what makes it like the meta,
for me, the meta cause of conflict in all of human history
and sadly today.
Does the will to power play into this?
The desire for power, like that's a human thing again,
in the calculation, shall we put that
in the misperceptions bucket?
Or is it, is misperceptions essentially
about interaction between humans
and power is more about the thing you feel
in your heart when you're alone as a leader?
You know, I said there were three strategic reasons,
like the unchecked leaders,
the commitment problems, uncertainty.
There were two sort of more psychological,
and I called them intangible incentives
and misperceptions.
The way that like a game theorist
or the way that behavioral economists would think
about those two was just to say preferences.
And then erroneous beliefs and mistakes is like,
so our preferences are our preferences, right?
And so utility functions, whatever we wanna call it,
like there's not, that's why I wouldn't call them
a misperception or a rationality.
We want, we like what we like.
If we like power, if we like relative status,
if we like, 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 shared logic of these things
is maybe just, you know, they're really dissimilar,
but let's be clear about the shared logic.
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.
And so I just wanna 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.
So we probably put a little bit too much emphasis on them.
It's maybe the only thing that I would caution
because the others are more subtle
and they're often there and they contribute.
So just to link on something you said before,
would it be accurate to say when the leaders become detached
from the opinion of the people,
is that's more likely to lead to war?
So.
And mechanically, it's just they're gonna bear fewer costs.
So it's gonna basically narrow the set of deals
that they're gonna 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 that the end of the day,
your regime is broke as a result of war.
And so you still internalize that a little bit.
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 and Transigence.
And then I jumped and then I said the essential,
then you really have to understand Russian autocracy
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 of it, like think of all of the things,
the way this has played out
and just in some ways how many ways we've been surprised.
We've been surprised by the unity
and the coherence of the West and the sanctions.
That 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.
And then the other thing that's been revealed
is just how the corruption and ineptitude
and problems on the Russian military side.
Again, within the realm of possibility,
maybe people who really knew the Russian military
are less surprised than the rest of us,
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 probability.
It was based on just expecting something
in the middle of the probability distribution
and not 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 and 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 you miscalculated.
I think he just, he got a really bad draw
on in terms of 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.
Well, there's also economic pain,
not just for the Russian people and the Ukrainian people,
but the whole world.
So, you know, 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 just 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 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 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 in this context,
but still plays a role, but less important than many wars,
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 conflict begins?
Before the conflict, everybody should be like,
you know what?
You lay on the table, here's my cards.
No one wants, yeah.
Here's your cards.
Exactly, like that's, as a competitor in this,
you can use that uncertainty or 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 to bluff, that's the inefficient,
that's like, that's the analogy in some ways towards,
not the perfect analogy, but the uncertainty
in the circumstance, you don't have to miscalculate.
The fact that you, if you bluff and lose,
it doesn't, it 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 pay in that round.
And so the uncertainty of 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 gonna, you're gonna mount an uncertainty.
Well, guess what?
Every other, you know, people on my border has folded.
And you're gonna fold too, the minute the tanks roll in
and the minute the Air Force comes in,
I'm gambling that you're bluffing.
And so we, that inherent uncertainty of the situation
and just causes a lot of short wars actually
because it's the sort of bluff and call dynamic that goes on.
And, you know, the thing that we're threatening
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's on it, 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 effectively neutral, never joins NATO,
is not being militarily supplied by the West
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 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 an unwillingness to do that
without fighting on the part of the Ukrainians,
an autocratic leadership in Russia
who would make those demands
because it's in their self-interest
and then uncertainty leading them to fight.
And that, sadly, is like the best case,
that feels like the best case scenario right now,
which is the war's just five months and not five years.
Given the current situation.
Given the current situation.
Because the suffering has already happened.
It lost homes, people moving,
having to see their home and rubble
and millions of people, refugees having to escape the country
and hate flourishes versus the common humanity
as it does with war.
And on top of all of that,
if we talk from a geopolitical perspective,
the warmongers all over the world are sort of drooling.
They now have got narratives
and they got that whatever narratives,
you can go shopping for the narratives.
The United States has its narratives
for whatever geopolitical thing it wants to do
in that part of the world.
That's another little malevolent interaction
between two of these buckets,
like those unchecked leaders
and those intangible incentives, those preferences,
is that unchecked leaders spend,
autocrats, whatever, spend enormous amounts of time
trying to manipulate the values and beliefs
of their population, of their group, 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 idea is 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,
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 the 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 NGM summit is the most present throughout the world.
But the more subtle thing that I feel like
maybe more generally applicable
is this kind of pacifism.
But I think people in the United States felt like,
it's not my conflict.
Why do I need to get involved with it?
And I think Churchill was fighting that, the general...
Apathy.
It's like, it's the apathy of rational calculus.
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 maintain your sovereignty
as the great people of Britain.
Like, why are we fighting again?
And that's the thing that's hard to break
because you have to say,
well, they have to speak to principle.
You have to speak at some greater sort of
long-term vision of history.
So it's 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 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 suspect what's at least a minimum true
is Putin's trying to manufacture support
for an invasion in the population through propaganda.
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.
But doing it 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,
there's moments in World War II
where Hitler's propaganda,
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 where there was uncertainty
and they decided to do propaganda
and that propaganda resolved the uncertainty in his own mind.
So for example, he believed until very late
that America is a weakling,
militarily as an economic power
and just the spirit of the people.
And 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 he didn't need to at all.
He could have avoided that completely,
but he thought, eh, whatever, they're easy.
So that's, I think that propaganda first believes second.
And I think 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 very human way
the conflict in the world.
I mean, when I said the meta,
the big common factor that causes war
and over and over and over again is unaccountable power.
It's not just because it's mechanically,
like one of my five explanations is 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 earlier 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 have very few ways to aggregate information
if they're not popular, right?
And 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 solves an information problem.
Like that's your crucial,
if you're like Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin,
you need to solve an information problem
just to avoid having a 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's like another nasty interaction
between uncertainty and unchecked leaders
is you end up in this situation
where you're getting bad information.
And 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,
that was a surprise to me 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 gonna 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, what are the chances
that our world descends into nuclear war?
Within your framework, you wore many hats.
One is sort of the analyst, right?
And then one is a human.
What do you think are the chances
we get to see nuclear war in the century?
Well, you know, the official doomsday clock
for nuclear warfare sits in the lobby of my building
that the bulletin of atomic scientists
sort of shares a building with us.
So 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 a clock, and it's sort of how close are we
to midnight, where midnight is nuclear armageddon
or the destruction of humanity.
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 forces you
to think about it a little bit every day.
And I admit I was nonchalant about it
until recently in a way that many, many other people were.
I still think the risk is very low,
but kind of for the reasons we've talked to,
it's just so unimaginably costly
that nobody wants to go that route.
So it's like the extreme version of my whole argument
was why we most of the time don't fight
is because it's just so damn costly.
And so this is, that's the incentive not to use this.
And if they do use it, that's the incentive
to use it in a very restrained way.
But that's not a lot of, but because we know
we do go to war and there's all these things
that interfere with it, including miscalculation
and all of these human foibles.
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
and elite that gets their power and is preserved only
and is threatened by Ukrainian democracy.
What would, how far would they go to hang onto 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 unchecked leadership
decide that this is worth it?
Especially if they can emerge from the rubble still on top.
I don't know.
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 6th,
there were a lot of questions about
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 arm again is unimaginable.
But I remember something that
when both those questions get asked,
I remember something I was in the audience
of listening to some great economists speak about
the 20 years ago, but 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 US 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 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 moment of escalation
and then it just goes, goes, 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, whoa.
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 Medellin, Colombia,
which is, my day job is actually studying conflict
and gangs and violence of these other kinds of groups,
also very sinister, and in most of the time,
they don't fight and that escalation doesn't happen.
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, I remember talking to, I think Elon Musk
on this podcast, 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, 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, you know, is life.
And war, 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 there are moments when they rise up in revolt
and there's a revolution, we remember those,
but most of the time they don't.
And the story of political change and transformation
and freedom is there's a few revolutions that are violent,
but most of it is actually revolutions
without that kind of violent 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 gonna march.
So even if we wanna understand something like,
the march of freedom over human history,
I think we can draw this same insight
that actually we don't,
most of the time we don't fight, we actually concede power.
Now you don't, the elite doesn't sort of give power
to the masses right away,
they just co-op the few merchants
who could threaten the whole thing
and bring them into the circle.
And then the circle gets a little bit wider
and a little bit wider until the circle is ever wide
and maybe not ever, but in clumpus is 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 war throughout history,
this or the rate of war throughout history
does seem to be decreasing significantly
with a few spikes and 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 famous scholar who brings up 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, where he's completely right.
So interpersonal violence, homicides, everyday violence
has been going 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 violence.
Now the warfare between groups is that less frequent?
Well, it's not clear that he's right,
that there's fewer wars.
You might say that wars are more rare
because they're more costly,
because our weapons are so brutal.
The cost of war go up.
As the cost of war go up, not entirely,
but for the most part,
that gives us an incentive not to have them.
And but then when they do happen, they're doozies.
So it's 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,
that there is this,
this is speaking to the general point that you made,
which is like we overemphasize 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
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, I don't know,
maybe 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.
Cause the, if you look broadly,
there is just, just like how you highlight,
there's a will for peace among people.
Yeah, you mentioned Medellin.
By the way, how do you pronounce it, Medellin or Medellin?
Both are fine.
I think the, there they say Medellin
because that's kind of the accent is the just 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 Columbia, Medellin?
What's the economics of peace and war
between drug cartels?
Here's what was really insightful for me.
So I live in Chicago and people are aware
that there's the violence problem in Chicago.
It's actually not the worst American city
by any stretch of the imagination for shootings,
but it's pretty bad.
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 and 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 so what's going on there?
I mean, one thing that is 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 rasones,
some people would call them bandas,
criminalis, criminal bands.
You might just call them mafias.
And they, there's about 17 of them
depending on how you wanna count.
And they themselves have a little operating board called,
sometimes they call it the office,
lawfusina, sometimes they call it la mesa, 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 in prison.
They have represented, oh, they meet in prison.
Well, whatever, if I'm on a cell block with you,
I'd be to 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 you're a 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 hotheaded 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 reduces imperfect information
and uncertainty, right?
It provides a place for them to bargain, they can talk.
And so Laofacina is like a lot of these informal meetings.
And so, you know, 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 Risones 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 don't.
It's a little more honest than the sanctions between nations.
Exactly, but they will sit them down.
They'll help them negotiate.
They will provide,
I said there are these things called commitment problems
where like there's some,
I have some incentive to like exterminate you,
but that's gonna be costly for everybody.
So I'm gonna, what's the solution?
Well, I'm gonna provide commitment.
I'm gonna 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 gonna give you a counter-incentives.
And so they keep the peace.
And so, and it's a little bit,
so they're a little bit like the UN Security Council
and peacekeeping forces and sanctions regimes.
It's like the same kinds of tools, the same parallels.
And they're imperfect.
They don't always work that well.
And they're unequal, right?
Cause it's not like they're pursuing this
in the interests of like democratic, blah, blah, blah.
But it kind of works until it doesn't.
And 10 years ago in the mid 1990s,
there were wars and this breaks down.
And 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 peace
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 miscalculations
because they will punish you for your miscalculation
or they will get a mediator
to sort of help you realize why you're miscalculating.
So they're doing all these things
and it made me realize that the comparison
to the UN Security Council and all our tools
is actually a pretty good one
because those are pretty unequal too.
And those are pretty imperfect.
Like it's, you know, 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.
So anyway, so it's actually the,
some of the things that work in Medellin
and why they work helped 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 the UN Security Council.
The UN Security Council.
Oh, we're such a funny descendant of apes.
So we put on suits.
I'm sure there were different,
they have different cultural garbs that they wear.
What are your thoughts?
I mean, that's the sense I got
from Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa
who founded the Medellin Cartel is like having spoken
with people on this podcast, Dr. Roger Reeves,
who was a drug transporter,
it seems like there, it seems like it was,
I don't know the right term,
but it was very kind of professional and calm.
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 have peace.
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.
And so they're, the homicide rate,
I mentioned homicide rate in 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.
Maybe at sort of the, on some level,
it seems that like maybe some of those
our own leaders were like saying,
well, 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 were kind of feeling each other out through fighting
and the homicide rate doubled
and then it increased by the same amount again.
And so it was approaching something
that might get out of control,
which wasn't in anybody's interest.
It wasn't in the government's interest,
it wasn't in their interest.
And so then magically, all of these leaders
in these patios, different prisons,
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.
It happens to be put in the same spot.
And a week later, the homicide rate is 30% of what it was,
is back to its normal model.
Unfortunately, not zero, but it's back to where it was
because 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.
Can I say this almost like a tangent,
but you mentioned you got a chance potentially
to talk to a few folks, some of them in prison,
some of them or not.
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 maybe the last couple of 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 20-year low-level insurgency run
by a self-proclaimed messiah who wasn't that popular
and no one joined his movement,
so he would kidnap kids.
And so the, I never, I could talk to people
who'd come back from being there.
I never once, if I'd wanted to,
and I was writing about that armed group,
I never talked to anybody who was an active member
of that armed group was quite rare.
It wouldn't have been easier safe.
And that's sometimes true.
I'm starting to do some work in Mexico, probably,
and I'm not gonna 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, which people?
So, I mean, journalists are routinely killed
for knowing too much in Mexico.
There's no compunctions about killing them
and there's no consequences.
Who kills a journalist?
It's not the main people that you spoke with.
It's their, is it their lackeys or is it rival?
No, so gangs, this is true of a Chicago gang
and this is true of a Medellin gang.
It's probably true of a Mexico gang.
It's like, you might have your group of 30 people.
One or two of them might be shooters.
Most people don't shoot, 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
and it's cheap for you and you have no personal compunctions
and then you can put a contract out on them
and they'll be killed, that doesn't happen in Colombia.
It doesn't happen in Chicago.
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'll happen
is that there'll be consequences,
that the government will crack down and make them pay
and so they don't do it.
And that is not what happened in Mexico.
They won't kill like a D.A. agent.
They know that the US has made it clear.
You kill one of our agents, we will make you pay.
And so, they're very careful to minimize death of an American
but you kill journalists and nobody comes after them
or is able to come after them.
And so, they've realized they can get away with this
and that seems to be the equilibrium there.
That's my initial sense from,
but we spent a lot of time
before we started talking to criminals.
You know, we spent a year trying to figure out
what was safe before we actually, and failing.
We kept, there's a lot to say 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 gonna 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 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 as risky as that.
That's a nice way to compare journalism in a war zone.
And that's scooters.
Yeah, there's journalism in 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 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 doubt it's the riskiest thing
because now we have to look at the data.
I understand the point you were making, but wow.
So I'm not trying to say there's zero risk.
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 think there's another aspect to it too.
When you're riding a scooter,
once you're done with the scooter, the risk has disappeared.
There's something, the lingering
when 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 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 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 shaking down businesses for money
or selling services in some cases
and they make a lot of money, it's a business
and they're in prison, so they can talk about
most of what they wanna talk about
because there's no double jeopardy,
they've been incarcerated for it
and you're just talking shop
and they're just, so it's worth it,
I think because the risk is very low
but if you actually wanna 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 American cities,
if you wanna understand how to weaken these groups over time,
you have to understand how their business works
and imagine you were made like the,
whatever the oil sources are of the United States
or maybe you're in charge of the finance industry,
you're the regulator for oil and energy or for finance
and then you get in the job and someone says,
and then you're like, well, how many firms are there
and what do they sell and what are the prices
and then we're just like, well, we don't really know.
You would not be a very good regulator,
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?
And the 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.
You have 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.
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.
I'm seeing here, he kidnapped 591 children
in three years between 2000.
Oh, they must have kidnapped.
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, 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 in our movement and you need troops,
you can, 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 conscript 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, they figured out that, you know,
we have to, maybe like, I don't know about them,
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 cause they'll buy the propaganda
and they'll buy the messianic messages.
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 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 when you're a totally
like hopeless and ideologically empty rebel movement.
So in some sense, it's, yeah.
So that's maybe the short story, it was a real tragedy.
I heard one interview of a dictator where the journalist
was basically telling them like,
how could you be doing this?
Basically calling out all the atrocities
the person is committing.
And the dictator was kind of laughing it off
and walked away and like he cut off the interview.
That feel 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,
but that feels unproductive.
It feels like the goal should be
some level of understanding.
Yeah.
He's been super lucive.
I mean, why he's like, it's going in, yeah.
I mean, why he's fought this, I don't even 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 to the way Uganda works,
but 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 that was dictatorial and they were,
so you've heard of like people like Idi Amin,
but people have heard of like Milton Abote,
and all these people were all from the north.
And then you get the current president
who came power in 1986.
So he's been around a long time, this guy in 1970.
He was from the south and his,
he was fighting against these dictators
and he was fighting for a freer and better Uganda.
And in many ways, I mean, 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 was better than thugs before him.
And he came to power and he was like,
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 to have a crazy insurgency up there.
And some kook believes he's like speaking,
you know, through the Holy Spirit's,
you know, speaking through him
and he's gonna totally disrupt the north.
I don't care, that's great.
You guys just fester and fight.
And that's gonna totally destabilize this power,
this traditional power base.
And then that's just gonna help me consolidate control.
So he was an autocrat, he was an unchecked leader
who allowed a lunatic to run around
and cause mayhem because it was in his
political interest to do so.
And there's no puzzle.
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 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.
And 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.
And that lunatic would never, you know,
he's not that skillful of our movement, right?
They could have been shut down
and 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 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.
Are there other wars to 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 II have been avoided?
This is one of the most traumatic wars, global wars.
I mean, one obvious driver of that war was these,
the things that Hitler valued and then was able
to use his autocratic power to either convince
other people or to suppress them.
And so some people stopped there and say that.
And then in the West basically,
and then of course they were able,
because they were such an economic and political powerhouse,
they were able to sort of make demands
for the rest of Europe that you can kind of see the fold,
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 Western response
as a principled stand.
I think that's, and there's a lot of truth to that.
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 gonna be this strong forever.
If we can get this terrible bargain
and get everyone to capitulate through violence,
if we strike now and then solidify our power
and keep these in World War I,
that was prevent the rise of Russia
and prevent the strengthening of Russian alliances as well.
And 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 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.
They really thought there was a closing window.
I think there's a nature of that window is different
in that there was a kind of pacifism
and it seems like if war broke out,
most nations in the vicinity would not be ready.
We could buy 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 leaders in war that feels like the timing is now.
The other commitment problem,
the other shift that was happening that he wanted to avert
that is kind of wrapped up with his ideology
is this idea of like a cultural
and a demographic window of opportunity
that if conditional on having these views
of a Germanic people and a pure race
and 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 do we sort of avoid it when in this framework?
Would you say is there,
that you kind of provide an explanation
but is there a way to avoid it?
Is violence the way to avoid it?
Because people kind of tried rational peace,
peaceful kind of usual negotiation
and that led to this war.
Is that unique to this particular war?
Let's say World War I or World War II.
So there's an extra pressure from Germany
and both wars to act, okay?
So we've highlighted that.
Is there a way to alleviate that extra pressure to act?
Let me use World War I 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.
So the probability that we can win a war
is gonna change a lot in the next decade or two.
Maybe even in the next few years.
And so if we were in a much better bargaining position now,
both to not use violence, but if necessarily use violence.
Because otherwise, Russia's going to be extremely powerful
in the future and they'll be able to use that power
to change the bargaining with us
and to like hold, keep us down.
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 gonna restrain ourselves in future.
Or we're gonna 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 set of enforceable agreements,
any UN 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.
And so that's why, you know, in Medellin,
you know, the Loficina can do that.
They can say, listen, yes,
combo that's strong today is gonna be weak tomorrow.
You have an incentive to eliminate this combo over here,
but because they're gonna be strong,
but guess what?
You're not gonna do that.
And we're gonna make sure,
we're gonna promise that when these guys do get strong,
we're gonna restrain what they can do.
All right, 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 a portion 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 guess they might be.
And it said, listen, you cooperate and we'll,
and we'll commit not to basically ignore your interests
over the long run.
Now, 250 years later,
we're still honoring those commitments.
It was part of the deal that meant
that there actually would be a union.
And so we do this all the time.
So constitution is a good example of how
every country's constitution,
especially a country who's writing a constitution after a war,
that constitution and all of 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 lessons you learned from civil wars?
Yeah.
Perhaps the American Civil War and the others.
So Lebanon, one of the ways Lebanon had tried
for a long time to preserve the interests
of minority groups, powerful minority groups
who were powerful at the time
and knew that the demographics were working against them
were to guarantee, you know,
this ethnic religious group gets the presidency
and this ethnic religious group
gets the prime ministership and this ethnic,
and a lot of countries will apportion seats
in the parliament to ethnic religious groups.
And that's an attempt to like give a group
that's temporarily powerful some assurances
that when they're weak in the future
that they'll still have a say, right?
Just like we portion seats 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 goes,
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 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 in the West
or maybe it's Medizhins games versus one another.
Like, 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 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 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 masses that we have to arm
and then we have to threaten all the time.
Yeah, so the threat of violence is costing nevertheless.
You've actually pulled up that now disappeared a paper
that said the big title called Civil War
and your name is on it.
What's that about?
Well, that was, I mean,
when I was finishing graduate school
and this was paper with my advisor at Ted Miguel at Berkeley.
Most nations, the paper opens,
have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960.
Yet while, were you still in grad school on this or no?
Maybe last year or just graduated, I think.
I wish I was in a discipline that wrote papers like this.
This is pretty badass.
Yet while Civil War 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.
And I like a number of people around that time
stumbled into violence.
I mean, people have been studying
the wealth and poverty of nations
basically since the invention of economics.
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
had been sitting 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 10 years in our field
we wrote like a review article
telling economists like what was going on.
And so this was like a summary for economists.
So the book in some ways is a lot
in the same spirit of this article.
This article, I mean, it's designed to be
not written as like a boring laundry list of studies
which is what, that's the purpose this article was served.
It was for graduate students and professors
who wanted to think about what to work on
and what we knew.
This book is like now trying to like
not just say what economists are doing
but sort of say what economists,
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 gonna design the right cure.
And so anyway, so that was the,
but I started off studying civil wars
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 then, you know, basically I followed a woman there.
And-
Oh, we'll talk about that.
I gotta ask you first.
And for people who are just watching
where we have an amazing team of folks
helping out pulling pictures and articles and so on
mostly so that I can pull 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.
But let me ask you,
one of the most difficult things going on in the world today
is you're a 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.
What's the path for peace?
Will we ever see peace?
Yeah, if we think about this 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 been going on for a century.
And there are 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's happening as unpleasant and challenging
and difficult as it is, it's 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.
It 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 sabers,
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're right now to think of that
as like a peace.
And there's certainly no stable agreement, right?
So a stable agreement and 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,
rivals just like avoiding violence
and hating each other in peace.
So is this what peace, so to answer my question,
is this what peace looks like?
Not always, but I mean, it's kind of my worry
to go back to like the Russia-Ukraine example.
Like I kind of, 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 a greatness for both nations
and a peaceful time, flourishing, that kind of thing.
I mean, you can think of like what's going on
in Israel-Palestine, there's a stalemate.
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 maybe we'll end up in the same situation
with Russia-Ukraine, this is where,
if they stop fighting one another,
but Russia holds the east of the country and Crimea
and nobody really acknowledges their right to that,
that might, and there's just gonna 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.
So that's kind of where Israel-Palestine looks to me.
And so someone, if we're gonna 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 that,
and why did that last several years?
That would be like, we could 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 in nobody's interest,
that didn't need to happen.
And 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 would be relevant still in 10 years or 20 years,
maybe before someone writes a better one.
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 avoiding these controversial ones.
But 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
that 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 focused in the Israel Palestine case
of mostly trying to understand why it got so violent
and then spend 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, it's easier to do the full analysis
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 these attachment to liberal ideals.
They have an attachment to democracy
and they have an attachment to a Jewish state.
And those things are not so easily compatible
because to recognize the rights of non-Jewish citizens,
right, or to have a one state solution
to the current conflict undermines
the long-term ability to have a Jewish state.
And to do anything else and to deny that
denies their liberal democratic ideals.
And that's a really hard contest
of priorities to sort out.
Yeah, it's complicated.
Of course, everything you just said
probably has multiple perspectives on it
from other that would phrase all the same things
but using different words.
Well, 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 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 other like human rights.
So it has those ideals.
And it also sees itself as a superpower
and as a employer 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
where their father is now mother or dead.
They have a very different view of this.
Well, you're beginning to see why I didn't,
I decided, I wanted to write about those things
and think about those things,
but I wanted this book to do something different.
I didn't want it to follow along one of these polarizations.
You know, 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 just, the fact that people are,
they're not represented and they, you know,
and they got a very raw, real politic 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 something from you.
It's a good summary of history, by the way.
That's it.
History is just full of raw deals.
For regular people.
Right, and both sides are in a principled way
refusing to make a compromise.
And I'm not, that's not like a both sides
are right kind of argument.
I'm just sort of saying, I just think it's a factual statement
that like, neither one wants to compromise
on certain principles.
And they're both, they both can construct
and in some ways have very reasonable,
I don't have self-justifications for those principles.
And that's why I'm not very hopeful is 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, 100 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 interrelationships.
And another one is more checks and balances on power.
I think there's more,
but those are two that are really fundamental here
because I think those two things
reduce the incentives for war in two ways.
One is like, remember when we were talking
about this really simple strategic game
where whether Russia and Ukraine or whatever,
any two rivals, I want more of the pie than you get
and the costs of war are deterrents,
but only the costs of war that I feel, right?
I don't care.
I do not care about the costs of war to your side,
my rivals side.
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, many groups
do care about the wellbeing 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,
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 help.
And then if we're ideologically intertwined,
maybe we share 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 providing some insulation, 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, 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.
Yeah, social one with the internet is a big one.
So basically make friends with the people
from different nations, fall in love,
or you don't have to fall in love,
you just have lots of sex with people
from different nations, but also fall in love.
The thing that also should comforts me about China
is that China's not as centralized
or as personalized regime as Russia, for example.
And neither one of them is as centralized or personalized
as some tin pot, purely personalized dictatorship
like you get in some countries.
The fact that China powers much more widely shared
is a big insulation, I think, against this war,
well, future war.
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 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
in the last few centuries have actually widened power.
But anything that's moving in the other direction
does worry me because it's gonna 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, maybe I'm projecting,
maybe it's just my own problem,
but there seems to be a bigger cultural gap
than there is with other superpowers throughout history
where it's almost like this own world happening in China,
it's own world in the United States,
and there's this gap of total cultural understanding.
It's not that we're not competing superpowers,
they're almost like doing their own thing.
There's 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.
The language barrier, but also cultural understanding,
making movies that use both and explore both cultures
and all that kind of stuff,
to where it's okay to compete, like Rocky,
where Rocky Balboa fought the Russian.
Fact, historically inaccurate
because obviously the Russian would win,
but we have to, I'm just getting,
as a Philly person, I was of course reading for Rocky.
But the thing is those two superpowers are in the movies,
China is like its own out there thing.
We need more 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.
So I think that's true, but 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
to 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 30, 40 years ago,
because we're so intertwined.
So I don't know 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 like I said, lots of inter-Chinese
in the United States, sexual intercourse,
no, and love and marriage and all that kind
of social cohesion.
So once again, returning to love,
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's set me on the path to meet, work with,
and most importantly, Mary Jenny Anon.
Jeannie Anon.
Jeannie, Jeannie Anon.
There's a lot of beautiful letters
in this beautiful name.
This book have been impossible without her
and that chance encounter.
What's, 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 was, I didn't know what I wanted to do.
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 true.
And therefore I need to go study firms and industry
in Africa.
And so I went and I ended one of the most dynamic place
for firms and industry at the time,
still to some extent now is Kenya
and all these firms are on Nairobi.
And so I went and I got a job with the World Bank
who was running a, 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.
With no laptop.
And just like, you know, Kenya didn't exactly,
Kenya didn't get connected to the,
to 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 there's this whole customer norm
if you just chat to the next person
and beside you all the time.
It was true all over anywhere I'd worked on the continent.
And so I strategically sat next to the attractive looking
woman that when I came in and I had 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 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 had a fling for that week.
And then we didn't really,
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 Uganda and then one day I was chatting
with someone I knew who worked on this 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 the, cause she, like you guys would have like,
you know, professional research interests overlap.
There's so few sort of people looking at armed groups
in 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 Jeannie and I, and I said, remember me
and you know, tell me more,
I was just talking to someone with this, tell me more.
Like 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, 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 gonna track 1,000 of them.
We were gonna randomly sample them
and then we were gonna find them today
and we were gonna track them.
And then we were gonna use like some variation
in 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.
So cockamamie 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 were actually, we want you to only talk
about this other thing that you were gonna do
because this is like, you should not go.
Oh, wow.
And I mean, it is incredibly ambitious,
super interesting though.
It actually worked exactly according to plans.
The first and last time in my entire career,
you actually pulled off an ambition,
like a gigantically crazy ambition.
Well, all of my work, that's my stick.
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 it 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 as planned.
And so Ted Miguel, who I wrote that paper with
was actually the one person of my advisors who was like,
well, you know what, he was sympathetic to this.
He was like, eh, why don't you just go for a couple of 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 she, but, and I don't know, what's this?
I always remember, you know, this movie Speed,
the Ken Reeves and Sandra, whatever these people are.
And they have this relationship
in these intense circumstances.
And they like, well, and I think at the end of the movie,
they are sort of like, this will never work
because these relationships
in intense circumstances never matter,
which is what we assumed.
And that does not be true.
So we've been married 15 years and with two kids.
Yeah. And that's when you fell in love with psychology
and don't to appreciate the power of psychology.
Exactly.
So that's the psychology in the book as well.
Because I, and so we ended,
for most of our work for the first five or 10 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?
Cause 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 gain an understanding of human nature,
maybe from an economics perspective.
What's, 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 and two cents.
The hardest emotionally was interviewing all those kids
in Northern Uganda.
That was just like a gut punch every day.
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 it.
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'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'll be 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 you get maybe harder in a way
that you have to be guard 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 could 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, but there's some voice in the back of your mind
saying, okay, we really need to get to the other thing.
You know, we know, 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 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 solutions,
to the next.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that was, yeah.
So that was because you then have to deal with yourself.
So it's very helpful if you will like come home every night
to someone who's A, gone through the same thing
and B as a professional and very, very, very,
very good counseling psychologist.
The hardest thing, I mean,
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,
of 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 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 nobody knows how to do that.
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 it'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 really gonna be unique to that city and place.
So there's not like a website
for each of the 17 mafia groups.
There's no Facebook group.
Well there is now, 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 have, they can't see,
you can't go online and see this unless you.
That's individual researchers.
So it's not, I mean, they're hiding by design.
Some of them have Facebook pages and things of this nature.
So they do have public profiles a little bit,
but not so explicitly.
No, so they're clandestine.
Here's an example.
So one of the things that's really endemic in Medellin
is true in a lot of cities.
It's true in American prisons.
Gangs govern everybody's everyday life.
So if you have a, in an American prison,
particularly in Illinois or California, Texas,
is another big one, but also in a city in Medellin,
if you have a problem, a debt to collect
or dispute with a neighbor or something,
you could go to the government and they do
and 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 of like,
how do you actually figure out
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?
And what would get you to go from the gang to the police?
And then how's the gang strategically gonna 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 was, so that was just hard in a different way.
But I don't do the most,
they're mostly punishing stuff I couldn't do any longer.
So that's much easier in that sense.
By the way, on, you know, Jorge Achoa,
some of these folks are out of prison.
Have you got a chance to talk to him by any chance?
One of my collaborators on this guy named Gustavo Duncan,
who's who spent a lot of time interviewing
pair of militaries has written a book.
He's talked to more of these people than I have.
I haven't talked to those.
We haven't been talking to them about this stuff,
but also 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.
We're trying to understand.
Yeah, that was 30 years ago.
And the system over, I mean, La Fesina,
Pablo Escobar created La Fesina.
He integrated what's, all these 17 of the Sonnes
and all these street gangs are the fragmented
former remnants of his more unified empire,
which he gave the name La Fesina.
I mean, I think it's a little bit apocryphal,
but the idea is, I think he said,
every doctor has an office, so should we.
I still can, I still love that there's parallels
between these La Fesina groups
and the United Nations Security Council.
This is just wonderful.
It's so, so, so deeply human.
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 the people
that have gone through suffering,
what do you think about your own mortality?
Do you, how has your view of your own finiteness changed
having 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, I mean, 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.
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 think about mortality enough that I just,
because I'm kind of an anxious person,
and I'm kind of a worry ward, like in a way.
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 risk, and you're trying to minimize it.
And yet there's still the existential dread.
Your risk minimization doesn't matter.
Yeah, I've never been in a life-threatening situation.
Yeah, that's somebody who, you know what you sound like?
That's Alex Honnold that does the free climbing.
He doesn't see that as life.
Well, 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, so I've actually been a rock climber
for like 25 years with a long break in the between.
But I'm the same way, you know, actually rock climbing
is an extremely safe sport if you're very careful.
But he's, free climbing is the opposite of that.
But I mean, like, if you're like, you've got a rope,
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 fine.
Like this, you know, anywhere helmet, you're good.
You're totally fine.
Yeah, but this is super safe too.
Cause don't free climbing.
No, no, no.
We're watching free climbing Alex Honnold.
I mean, because you're only going to put your hands
and feet on sturdy rock and, and then you know the path and.
No, no, no, no.
No, totally.
I, I know, I, I know some people, I have some friends
in college that have known people who do some
of these totally wacky extreme sports
and have paid the price.
So I think it's totally, totally different.
I think, so even in that, by the way, this,
I can't even watch those movies
cause those freak me out too much cause it's just too risky.
Like I can't, I don't even, I, yeah.
So those things I've, I've never watched
like free solo or anything.
There's just too much.
It's still not as dangerous as riding a scooter
and all that.
Totally not.
I'm not going to let that go.
So, but even in that, it's just risk minimization
in the work that you do versus the sort of philosophical
existentialist view of your mortality.
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,
Genie's father is an evangelical pastor actually.
He's now retired, but, and this he would,
we would talk about when we were getting married,
they weren't terribly thrilled that she was
marrying a agnostic or atheist or something.
We love each other very much.
It's fine now, but I only started discussing this
and some of the, cause 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 what I've 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 under, 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.
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, I, yeah, I minimize, you know,
I try to optimize like groceries in the fridge too.
Like, I mean, I put-
That's a very economist way to live, I would say.
That's probably why you're good at-
That might be true.
That might be, there's some selection in economics
of these cold calculators.
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-
Yeah, exactly.
Or maybe a dating advice.
How to-
Well, that part's easy.
You have to fly coach and go to the internet cafes.
You can't like all the development workers
that I know that fly business class
and like, you'll never meet somebody.
Yeah.
You know, 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 I never got the kind of advice I needed
to like pursue this career.
So it's very 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 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 that's what a lot of the posts are about.
Do they have 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'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 would do it for free.
And they're passionate about,
and they really find meaning in the work.
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 they find like meaning in their career.
And so the thing,
so I don't have to tell them whatever you do find meaning
and try to make it a vocation,
something that you would do for free
amongst all of these many, many, many options.
That's what I would tell,
but that's what I would tell high school students
and young people in college.
Sometimes it's hard to find a thing and hold on to it.
Well, that's the other thing.
It took me a long time.
So I actually started off as an accountant.
I was an accountant with Deloitte and Touche for a few years.
So I did not.
Did you wake up in the morning excited to be alive?
I was miserable.
I found it by accident,
which is another different story,
but I landed in this job in a degree
where I studied accounting and I was miserable.
I was totally miserable and I hated it.
And I was becoming a miserable person.
And so I eventually just quit and I did something.
But then I was working in the private sector
and I actually just need to 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 international development.
And what did you know that this was love
when you found this kind of international development?
Like this was the academic context too.
The key lesson was just trial and error,
which we all have to engage in 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, it'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 I was doing, I was in account,
but I was reading about like world history
and international development
and 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 just
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 that's a great path too.
Like, I mean, that's,
because not all of us can just have a vocation
or you don't find it, I think.
And then you just circumscribe what you do in your work
and then you go find, 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 I think it's not, 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 local, local minima.
Yeah.
The hardest part was, it got easy after a while.
It was quitting.
But now I take this to a lot of,
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.
He's like, walk to the movie theater after half an hour
if you don't like the movie.
And...
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 the meals is not good,
I could see him just walking away,
like paying for it and just walking away from the 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 stop watching a movie.
But then I convinced my wife,
we lived in New York when we were single
initially, sorry, when we were childless.
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, no, here's the logic.
Here's what Tyler says.
And then we started doing it
and it was so freeing and glorious.
We'd just go, we'd take so many more chances on things.
And we would, and if we didn't like it,
and we were walking out of stuff all the time.
And so I think I did that.
We're realizing that that's how I took,
I just kept quitting my jobs
and trying to find something else at some risk.
Cause that's how wars start without the commitment.
I go in time back to early.
You need the commitment.
Otherwise, no.
That's a different kind of commitment problem.
That's a different commitment problem.
So some of it, I'm sure there's a balance.
Cause I mean, the same thing is happening
with dating and marriage and all those kinds of things.
And there's some value to sticking it out.
Cause some of the, like maybe, you know,
don't leave after the first act
cause the good stuff might be coming.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I mean, that's, yeah.
Well, I don't know.
So when I met Jeannie,
she was very wary of a relationship with me
because I explained to her,
I hadn't had a relationship longer
than two or three months and 11 years.
And so she thought this person's not serious.
And what I said to her, she tells the story.
This is how she tells the story.
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
of 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 dating,
like as soon as I thought it wasn't going to go somewhere.
And then I decided with her that this was it,
this was going to work.
And then I like, and then never,
and she didn't believe, now she believes me.
You finally got to be right.
Okay, so this is an incredible conversation.
Your work is so fascinating just in this big picture way
of 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 so much.
That was an amazing conversation.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Chris Blackman.
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please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with 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.