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

1. 0:00 – 1:04

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      What are your thoughts on the ongoing war in Ukraine? How do you analyze it within your framework about war?

   2. CBChris Blattman0:06

      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.

   3. LFLex Fridman0:31

      The following is a conversation with Chris Blattman, professor at the University of Chicago, studying the causes and consequences of violence and war. This he explores in his new book called Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. The book comes out on April 19th, so you should pre-order it to support Chris and his work. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Chris Blattman.

2. 1:04 – 12:14

   What is war?

   1. LFLex Fridman1:04

      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, violent struggle between groups. That includes villages, clans, gangs, ethnic groups, religious sects, political factions, and nations. Wildly different as these may be, their origins have much in common. We'll see that the Northern Irish zealots, Colombian cartels, European tyrants, Liberian rebels, Greek oligarchs, Chicago gangs, Indian mobs, Rwandan genocidaires..." A new word I learned, thank you to you.

   2. CBChris Blattman1:49

      (laughs)

   3. LFLex Fridman1:50

      Those are people who administer genocide. "English soccer hooligans, and American invaders." So first, let me ask, what is war? In saying that war is a prolonged violent struggle between groups, what do the words "prolonged," "groups," and "violent" mean?

   4. CBChris Blattman2:12

      I sit at this sort of intersection of economics and political science, and I, I also dwell a little bit in psychology, but that's partly because I'm married to 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, that's an important way to make progress, uh, as a social scientist. But I'm not trying to make progress. I'm trying to sort of help everybody step back and say, "You know what? There's, like, some common things that we know from these disciplines that, uh, relate to a really wide range of phenomena." Basically, we, 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, you know, has a lot in common, but, but individuals choose to engage in violence for more and sometimes different reasons. So let's just put that aside so that we can focus a bit. And let's really put aside short incidents of violence, because those might have the same kind of things explaining them, but actually, there's a lot of other things that can explain short violence. Short violence can be really, uh, demonstrative. Like, you can just... I can use it to communicate information. The thing that all of it has in common is that it doesn't generally make sense. It's not your best option, most of the time. And so I wanted to say, "Let's take this thing that should be puzzling." We, we, we kind of think it's normal. We kind of think this is what all humans do. Uh, but let's point out that it's not normal, and then figure out why, and let's talk about why. And so that's... So I was trying to throw out the, the short violence. I was trying to thr- throw out the individual violence. I was also trying to throw out all the competition that happens that's not violent. That's, that's the normal, normal competition. I was trying to say, "Let's talk about violent competition," 'cause that's kind of the puzzle.

   5. LFLex Fridman4:03

      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.

   6. CBChris Blattman4:18

      Yeah.

   7. LFLex Fridman4:18

      And, 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 sort of 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 don't, cannot achieve a deep level of understanding of why it happens and how it can be avoided.

   8. CBChris Blattman4:46

      Right, and a common... Basically, like, recognize that common principles govern some kinds of behavior that look pretty different. Like, an Indian ethnic riot is obviously pretty different than invading a neighboring country, right? But, uh... And that's pretty different than two villages, or two gangs. A lot of what I work on is studying organized criminals and gangs. Two gangs going to war, you'd think is really different, and, and of course it is, but, but there are some, like, common principles. You can just think about conflict and the use of violence, and, um, not learn everything, but just get a lot, just get, get really, really far by sort of seeing the commonalities rather than just focusing on the differences.

   9. LFLex Fridman5:24

      So again, those words are "prolonged," "groups," and "violent." Can you maybe linger on each of those words? What does prolonged mean? What's, where's the line between short and long? What does groups mean, and what does violent mean?

   10. CBChris Blattman5:39

       So let me... You know, I, I have a friend who, um... Someone who's become a friend through the process of my work and, and writing this book also, uh, who was, 20, 30 years ago, was a, was a gang leader in Chicago. Um, so this guy named Napoleon English, or Nap. And I remember one time he was saying, "Well, you know, when I was young, I used to..." He was 15, 16, and he'd go to the neighboring gang's territory. He says, "I'd go gangbanging." And I said, well, I didn't know what that meant. I said, "What does that mean?" And he said, "Oh, that just meant I'd shoot 'em up. Like, I'd shoot at buildings. I, I might shoot at people."Uh, 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 wanna call that war, right? That was, that was, that's something different. That was just, it was short, it was kind of sporadic, and, and he wasn't in... And he was, he was basically trying to send them information. And this is what countries do all the time, right? We have military parades, uh, and we, uh, we might have border skirmishes. And, uh, and, and I wanted to sort of... So is it, what's short? Is, is a, 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 wanna ... But, but I wanna point out that, like, these long, grueling months and years of violence are, are like the, are the problem in the puzzle. And I just, I didn't want to spend a, a lot of time talking about, um, the n- the international version of gangbanging. It's a different phenomenon.

   11. LFLex Fridman7:13

       So what is it about Napoleon that doesn't nap, let's call him, not, not to add confusion.

   12. CBChris Blattman7:19

       Yeah. (laughs)

   13. LFLex Fridman7:19

       That doesn't qualify for war? Is it the individual aspect? Is it that violence is not the thing that is sought, but the, um, communication of information is what is sought? Uh, or is it the shortness of it? Is it all of those com- uh, combined?

   14. CBChris Blattman7:39

       It's a little bit o-... I mean, he was the head of a group. Or he was becoming the head of a group at that point. Um, and that group eventually did go to war with those neighboring gangs, which is to say it was just long, drawn-out conflict over months and months and months. But I think one of the big insights from my field is that, you know, you're constantly negotiating over something, right? Whether you're officially negotiating or you're all posturing, like, you're, you're kinda, you're bargaining over something. And, uh, you should be able to figure out a way to split that pie. And you could use violence. But violence is... Everybody's miserable. Like, if you're Nap, like, if you start a war, one, you know, there's lots of risks. You could get killed. That's not good. Uh, you could kill somebody else and go to jail, which is what happened to him. That's not good. Uh, your soldiers get killed. No one's buying your drugs in the middle of a gunfight, so it interrupts your business. And so on and on, 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... It, if it didn't dawn on them before, it's dawned on them now just how brutal and costly this is.

   15. LFLex Fridman8:47

       As you describe for everybody. So everybody is losing in this war.

   16. CBChris Blattman8:51

       It, yeah. I mean, that's maybe the insight. Everybody loses something from war, and there was usually, not always, but this, the point is, there was usually a way to get what you wanted or be better off without having to fight over it. So there's this, it's just a... Fighting is just politics by other means. And it's just inefficient, costly, brutal, devastating means. And so that's like the deep insight. And so I kind of wanted to say, um... So I, so I guess like, what's not war in my... I, I mean, I don't, I don't want, I don't try to belabor the definitions 'cause some, some, you know, there's reams and reams of political science prof- papers written on like what's a war, what's not a war, right? People disagree. Uh, the... I just wanted to say, where's the thing that we shouldn't be doing? Or where's the violence that doesn't make sense? There's a whole bunch of other violence, including gangbanging and skirmishes and things that might make sense, uh, precisely because they're cheap ways of communicating or they're, they're way, they're, they're, they're, they're not particularly costly. Where's the thing that's just so costly we should be trying to avoid it, is maybe like the meta way I think about it.

   17. LFLex Fridman9:59

       Right. Uh, nevertheless, definitions are interesting. So outside of the academic bickering-

   18. CBChris Blattman10:06

       Yeah.

   19. LFLex Fridman10:06

       ... every time you try to define something, I'm a big fan of it, the process illuminates. So the destination doesn't matter 'cause the, the moment you arrive at the definition, um, you lose the power. (laughs)

   20. CBChris Blattman10:20

       Well, yeah. One of the interesting thing, I mean, so people, you know, if you wanna do, you know, some of what I do is just quantitative analysis of conflict.

   21. LFLex Fridman10:27

       Yeah.

   22. CBChris Blattman10:27

       And, and if you wanna do that, if you wanna sort of run statistics on war, then you have to code it all up. And, and then lots of people have done that. There's four or five major data sets where people or teams of people have, over time, said, "We're gonna code years of war between these groups or within a country." And what's interesting is how difficult... These, these data sets don't often agree. You have to make all of these... The decision gets really complicated. Like, when does the war begin, right? Does it, does it begin when a certain number of people have been killed? Did it begin, did it... What if there's like lots of skirmishing and sort of like little terror attacks or a couple bombs lobbed, and then eventually turns into war? Do we, do we call that, did... Do we backdate it to like when the first act of violence started? And then what do we do with all the one, the times when there was like that low-scale, low-intensity violence or lobbed, bombs lobbed, and do we, do we call those wars but on- or maybe only if they eventually get worse? Like, so you get... It actually is really tricky.

   23. LFLex Fridman11:26

       And the defensive and the offensive aspect. So everybody... Uh, Hitler in World War II, it seems like he never attacked anybody. He's always defending against the unjust attack of everybody else as he's 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 kinda 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 estimates of the number of troops moved from one location to another, and that kind of thing. And the in- the other interesting thing is there's, um, quantitative analysis of war.

3. 12:14 – 35:02

   Justification for war

   1. LFLex Fridman12:14

      So for example, I was looking at Just War Index or people trying to measure, uh...... trying to put a number on what wars are seen as just and not.

   2. CBChris Blattman12:24

      Oh, really? I've never seen that.

   3. LFLex Fridman12:26

      It's the- there- there's numbers behind it. It's-

   4. CBChris Blattman12:29

      Okay.

   5. LFLex Fridman12:29

      It's great. (laughs) So, it's great because, again, as you do an extensive quantification of justice-

   6. CBChris Blattman12:37

      Mm-hmm.

   7. LFLex Fridman12:38

      ... you start to think what actually contributes to our thought that, for example, World War II is a just war and other wars are not. Um, a- a lot of it is about intent, and some of the other factors like, that you look at, which is prolonged, the degree of violence that is necessary versus not necessary given the greater good, uh, some measure of the greater good of people, all those kinds of things. The, then there's reasons for war, you know, looking to free people or to stop a genocide versus, uh, conquering land, all those kinds of things, and people try to put a number behind it. And a lot of-

   8. CBChris Blattman13:20

      And it's based on... I mean, I, what I'm trying to imagine is... I mean, suppose I wake up and... Or it's... Whatever, my... Suppose I think my god tells me to do something, or- or my- my god thinks that, uh, or my moral sense thinks that something that another group is doing is repugnant. I'm curious like, are they evaluating, like, the validity of that claim or just the idea that, like, "Well, you said it was repugnant. You deeply believe that. Therefore it's just."

   9. LFLex Fridman13:46

      I think, uh... And I could be corrected o- 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.

   10. CBChris Blattman14:05

       Yeah. I mean, I- I kind of ended up dodging that because... I mean, one is to just point out that wars... Actually most wars aren't necessary, and so... In the sense that there- there's- there's another way to get what you wanted, um, and so on- on one level there's no just war. Now that- that's not true because... Take an example like the US invasion of Afghanistan. The United States has been attacked, uh, there's a culpable agent, reliable evidence that this is Al-Qaeda. They're being sheltered by- in Afghanistan by the Taliban. And then the Taliban... Anywa- this is- this is a bit murky. It seems that there was an attempt to, say, hand him over or else, and- and they said, "No way." Now you can make an argument that invading and- and attacking is strategically the right thing to do in terms of sending signals to your future enemies. Or you just- if you think it's important to bring someone to justice, in this case Al-Qaeda, then- then you- maybe that's just war or that's a just invasion. But it hinges on the fact that the- the other side just didn't do the seemingly sensible thing which is say, "Okay, we'll give him up." And, uh, and so- so it was completely avoidable in one sense. But if you believe, and I think it's probably true, if you believe that for their own ideological and other reasons, um, you know, Mullah Omar in particular and Taliban in general decided, "We're not going to do this," uh, then- then- now you- you're not left with very many good choices. Uh, and now I- it- it- the... You know, I didn't want to talk about is that a just war or is that... what's justice or not. I- I just wanted to point out that, like, it... One side's intransigence, if that's indeed what happened, one side's intransigence 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- to invade. And I think that's a slight oversimplification, but I think that- that's like a- that's like one way to describe what happened.

   11. LFLex Fridman16:14

       So your book is fascinating, and your perspective on this is- is fascinating. I'll try to sort of play devil's advocate at times to try to-

   12. CBChris Blattman16:21

       Sure.

   13. LFLex Fridman16:21

       ... get at clarity. But so 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 theoretic perspective, uh, nobody wins.

   14. CBChris Blattman16:40

       Yeah.

   15. LFLex Fridman16:41

       And so war is essentially a breakdown of reason, a breakdown of negotiation, of healthy communication or healthy operation of the world, some kind of breakdown. You list all kinds of ways in which it, uh, it breaks down. But there's also- there's also human beings in this mix. (sighs) 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-

   16. CBChris Blattman17:15

       Mm-hmm.

   17. LFLex Fridman17:15

       ... of the many that have been there. The- the wars that were seen as just, first of all, the most just war is seen as World War II by far. Um, it's the- actually the only one, uh, that goes above a threshold as seen as just. Everything is seen as unjust.

   18. CBChris Blattman17:30

       (laughs)

   19. LFLex Fridman17:30

       It's- it's, uh, less- it's like degrees of unjustness. And I- I think the ones that are seen as more just are the ones that are fast, that you have a very specific purpose, you communicate that purpose honestly with the global community, and you strike hard, fast, and you pull out, uh, to do sort of... It's- 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. Uh, 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 ha- as hard and as fast as possible....to stop the expansion of the suffering. And so that's kind of how they see... I don't know if you can kinda look with this, uh, framework that you've presented and look at Hitler and think, "Well, it's not in his interest to attack, uh, Czechoslovakia, Poland, uh, Britain, France, uh, Russia, the Soviet Union, uh, America, the United States of America." Uh, same, same with Japan. What, is it in their inter- long-term interest? I don't know. I- I- it, uh... So for me, who cares about alleviating human suffering in the world, yes, it's not... It seems like almost no war is just. But it also seems somehow deeply human to fight. And I think your book makes the case, no, it's not. Can you, can you try to, like, get at that? '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 that's like a relic of the past and we need to get rid of it. It's deeply irrational.

   20. CBChris Blattman19:44

       Okay, so obviously we go to war, and obviously there's a lot of violence. And so we have to explain something, and, and some of that's going to be aspects of our humanness. So, so I guess what I, I wanted us to sort of start with a... 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, and most of the time-

   21. LFLex Fridman20:18

       Can I... Sorry to interrupt. Uh, and that's you, why you also describe, very importantly, that war throughout human history is actually rare.

   22. CBChris Blattman20:25

       Right.

   23. LFLex Fridman20:25

       We usually avoid it.

   24. CBChris Blattman20:27

       You know, most people don't know about the US invasion of Haiti in 1994. I mean, I mean, a lot of people know about it, but it'll, people just don't pay attention to it. We don't, we, we, we're gonna w- 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, in the history books. And it's because it, it didn't actually happen, because, uh, before the troops could land, the person who'd taken power in a coup basically said fine. There, there's this famous story where, where Colin Powell goes to Haiti, to this new dictator who's refused to let a democratic president take power. And, um, and tries to convince him to step down or else. And he says, "No, no, no." And, and then he shows him a video, and it's basically troop planes and all these things taking off. And he's like, "This is not live. This is two hours ago." So it's a... And, and, and basically, he basically gives up right there. So th- that was-

   25. LFLex Fridman21:27

       That's a powerful move. (laughs)

   26. CBChris Blattman21:29

       Yeah. (laughs) I think Powell might have been one of his teachers in, uh, like a US military college, 'cause a lot of these military dictator trained at some point in... So they had some, there were some personal relationships at least between people in the US government and this guy that they were trying to use. The, the point is, is... And that, that's, that's like what should have happened. Like, that makes sense, right? Like, yeah, I'm... Maybe I could mount an insurgency. And, yeah, I'm not gonna bear a lot of the cost of war 'cause I'm the dictator. And maybe he's human and he just wants to fight or he gets angry or it's just in his mind whatever he's doing. But at the end of the day, he's like, "This does not make sense." Um, and that's what happens most of the time, uh, but we don't write so many books about it. And, uh, and, and, and now some political scientists go and they count up all of the nations that could fight 'cause 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 'cause they have, there's some tension and they're right next to one another. And, and then whatever, some number, like 999 out of 1,000 don't, don't fight, um, because they just find some other way. They don't like each other, but they, they just loathe in peace, because that's the sensible thing to do. Uh, and that's what we all do. We loathe in peace. Uh, and we loathed the Soviet Union in, in relative peace for decades, and India, uh, loathes Pakistan in peace. I mean, two weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, again, it was in the newspapers, but most people didn't, I think, take note, India accidentally launched a cruise missile at Pakistan. And calm ensued. So they were like, "Yeah, this is... We do not wanna go to war. This will be bad." Uh, "We'll ex- we'll be angry, but we'll accept your explanation that this was an accident." And so, um, so these things fly under the radar. And so we overestimate, I think, how likely it is 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, uh, and so then the book is sort of about, half the book is, is just sort of laying out, well, actually, like, there's just different ways this breaks down. And some of them are human. Some of them are this... I, I, I actually don't think war beats in our heart. It does a little bit, but we're actually very cooperative. We're, as a, as a species, we're deeply, deeply cooperative. We're really, really good. The, so the, or the thing we're not... We're, we're okay at violence and we're okay, and we're okay getting angry and vengeant. And we have principles that will sometimes lead us. But we're actually really, really, really good at cooperation. And, and so that's, again, you know, I, I don't, I'm not trying to write some big optimistic book where everything is 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, 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?

   27. LFLex Fridman24:30

       So, yeah. The natural state of the human body with the immune system and all the different parts, uh, wants to be healthy and is really damn good at being healthy, but sometimes it breaks down. Let's understand how it breaks down.

   28. CBChris Blattman24:43

       Yeah, exactly.

   29. LFLex Fridman24:44

       So what are the five ways that you list that are the roots of war?

   30. CBChris Blattman24:48

       Yeah. So I mean, they're kinda like buckets. Like, they're sort of things that rhyme, right?
4. 35:02 – 1:18:30

   War in Ukraine

   1. CBChris Blattman35:02

   2. LFLex Fridman35:02

      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?

   3. CBChris Blattman35:12

      A Russian colleague of mine, Konstantin Sonin, tells this story about a visiting Ukrainian professor who was at the university, and one night he's walking down the street and he's talking on two cell phones at once for some reason. And a mugger stops him and demands the phones. In this sort of, like, deadpan way, Konstantin says, you know, "And because he was Ukrainian, he decided to fight." And, and I think that's a little bit like what happ- Most of us in that situation would hand over our cell phones, and, um, and, and so in, 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, and the fact is, um, most people do. Most people faced with a superpower or a tyrant or an autocrat or a murderous warlord who says, "Hand this over," they hand it over. And, uh, and that's why, that's why there are so many unequal, imperial relationships in the world. That's what empire is. Empire is successive peoples saying, "Fine. We'll give up our, some degree of freedom or sovereignty 'cause you're too powerful." And the Ukrainians said, "No way. Uh, this is just too precious." And so I said one of those buckets were that there are ... there's a set of values. There's sometimes there's something that we value that is so valuable to us and important. Sometimes it's, it's terrible. Sometimes it's the extermination of a, an other people, but sometimes it's something noble, like liberty or refusal to part with sovereignty, and, and in those circumstances, people will decide, "I will endure the costs." They probably ... I mean, I think this-... I think, I think they knew what they were probably risking. Um, and so to me, that, that's not to blame the Ukrainians any more than I would blame Americans for the American Revolution. It's actually a very similar story. You had a tyrannical, militarily superior, um, pretty non-democratic entity come and say, "You're gonna have partial sovereignty." And Americans, for ideological reasons, said, "No way." And that, you know, people like Bernard Bailyn and other historians, that's like the dominant story of the American Revolution was in the ideological origins, this attachment, this idea of liberty. And so I start... Now, there's lots of other reasons, I think, why this happened, but I think for me, it starts with Ukrainians failing to make that sensible, quote unquote, "rational deal" that says we should, we should relinquish some of our sovereignty because Russia is more powerful than we are.

   4. LFLex Fridman37:50

      (sighs) So, that's a very clinical look at the war. Meaning, there is a man and a country, Vladimir Putin, that has... makes a claim on a land, builds up troops, and invades.

   5. CBChris Blattman38:09

      Yeah.

   6. LFLex Fridman38:11

      The way to avoid suffering there, and the way to avoid death, and the way to avoid war, is to, uh, back down, and basically let, l- you know, there's a list of interests he provides, and you go along with that. Um, that's when the goal is to avoid war. Now, 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.

   7. CBChris Blattman38:56

      Mm-hmm.

   8. LFLex Fridman38:57

      He is one of the rare humans in history who had that, "We shall fight on the beaches."

   9. CBChris Blattman39:03

      Mm-hmm.

   10. LFLex Fridman39:04

       It made no sense. Hitler did not say he was going to destroy Britain. He seemed to show respect for Britain. He wanted to, uh, keep the British Empire. He, it made total sense Brit- it was obvious that Britain was going to lose if Hitler goes all in on Britain as it seemed like he was going to. And yet, Winston Churchill said a big F you.

   11. CBChris Blattman39:26

       Yeah.

   12. LFLex Fridman39:27

       Similar thing, Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people said F you in that same kind of way.

   13. CBChris Blattman39:33

       So I think, I, I think we're saying the same things. I'm tr- I'm, I'm being more clinical about it.

   14. LFLex Fridman39:38

       Well, I'm trying to understand, and we won't know this, but which path minimizes human suffering in the long term?

   15. CBChris Blattman39:49

       Well, on the eve of the war, Ukraine was poorer in, uh, per-person terms than it was in 1990. The economy's just completely stagnated. In Russia, meanwhile, like many other parts of the region, it's 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, and from a very cold-blooded and calculated point of view, I think one way Putin could, and Russia could look at this is as, "Look, we were temporarily weak after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the rest, and the West basically took advantage of that." Like, "Bravo, you pulled it off. You basically crept democracy and capitalism and all these things right up to our border, and now we have regained some of our strength. We've consolidated political control, we've got 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, we're powerful enough to demand it. And, and you've been taking advantage of this situation," which is maybe a fair, impartial analysis. And, uh, in the West, but more specifically Ukraine said, "But that's a price too high," which I totally respect. I would, maybe I'd like to think I'd make that same decision. But that is, that's the answer. If the, 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, "deserved." Just like Americans said to Britain, "Yeah, of course, you, you're, we ought to accept semi-sovereignty, (laughs) um, but we are just, we refuse, and we'd rather endure a bloody fight that we might lose than, than take this." And so, um, so you need some of these other five buckets, you need them to understand the situation. You need to sort of ... There, there are other things going on, but I, but I do think it's fundamental that there's just, that this i- this noble intransigence is like a big, is a big part of it.

   16. LFLex Fridman42:03

       Well, let me just say a few things, if it's okay?

   17. CBChris Blattman42:06

       Yeah.

   18. LFLex Fridman42:06

       So your analysis is, um, is clear and objective. My analysis is neither clear nor objective. (sniffs) First, (sighs) 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, I'm 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.

   19. CBChris Blattman43:08

       Mm-hmm.

   20. LFLex Fridman43:09

       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 they- 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.

   21. CBChris Blattman43:43

       Mm-hmm.

   22. LFLex Fridman43:43

       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 in that Russian winter, and, you know, a lot of people, and that pisses me off, because if you, if you know your history, it's not the winter that stopped Hitler. It's the Red Army. It's the people that refused to back down, they fought proudly. That pride, that's something. That's the human spirit. That's, in war, you know, war is hell, but it really pushes people to, to stand for the things they believe in. It's the, the William Wallace speech from Braveheart, I think about this a lot. That does not fit into your framework.

   23. CBChris Blattman44:37

       No, no, no. I, I'm gonna disagree. I, I think it totally fits in, and it's this, there's nothing irrational about what we believe, especially those principles w- which we hold the most dear, right? I'm, I'm merely trying to say that there's a, there's a calculus, there's one calculus over here that says Russia'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, 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 lo- all of these other peoples in the Russian sphere of influence have, have not stood up. Uh, and Russians, many Russians have tried to stand up, and they've been beaten down. Um, and now people have, 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, but don't. And, and so, and my point is that, sadly, we live in a world where a lot of people, uh, get stepped on by...

   24. LFLex Fridman45:56

       Yeah.

   25. CBChris Blattman45:56

       ...tyrants and empire and whatnot, and don't rise up. And so, so I think we could admire, especially when they stand up for these reasons. And I think we can admire Churchill for that reason. I think we could, that's why we admire the leaders of the American Revolution and so on. But it doesn't always happen. And I, I don't actually know why. But I don't think it's irrational. I think it's just, it's, it's something, it's about a set of values and it's hard to predict. And it was hard for, hard for, I, I, Putin might not have been out of line in thinking, "Just like everybody else in my sphere of influence, they're gonna roll over too."

   26. LFLex Fridman46:31

       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.

   27. CBChris Blattman46:45

       Yep.

   28. LFLex Fridman46:46

       That said, I care little about leaders that do cruel things unto the world. They lead to a lot of suffering. But I still believe that the Russian people and the Ukrainian people are great people that stand up, and I admire people that stand up and are willing to give their life, and I think Russian people are very much, um, that too, especially when the enemy is coming for your home over the hill.

   29. CBChris Blattman47:17

       Yeah.

   30. LFLex Fridman47:17

       Sometimes standing up to an authoritarian regime is difficult, because you don't know ... It's not a, a monster...
5. 1:18:30 – 1:29:51

   Nuclear war

   1. CBChris Blattman1:18:30

   2. LFLex Fridman1:18:30

      Back to nuclear war. What do you think about this, that people were nonchalantly speaking about nuclear war as if it doesn't lead to the potential annihilation of the human species? Um, what are the chances that our world descends into nuclear war? Within your framework, with ... You, you wear many hats.

   3. CBChris Blattman1:18:52

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:18:52

      One, (laughs) is, uh, sort of the anal- uh, analyst, right? And then one as a human. What do you think are the chances we get to see nuclear war in this century?

   5. CBChris Blattman1:19:05

      Well, you know the, the doomsday, the official Armageddon clock for nuclear warfare sits in the lobby of my building. Um, it, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists sort of shares a building with us, so it's, it's always there every day.

   6. LFLex Fridman1:19:16

      Can you describe what the Armageddon clock is?

   7. CBChris Blattman1:19:18

      The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, it's, it's something that this group of physicists sort of said to sort of mark just how close we are to nuclear catastrophe, and they started it decades ago. And it's, and it's a clock, and it's sort of how close are we to midnight, where midnight is nuclear Armageddon, and, or the destruction of humanity. And, and it's been sitting ... I mean, it's actually, it hasn't moved as close to, it hasn't moved as close to, um, 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, it, 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 al- it always sits there, but it, it, it forces you to think about it a little bit every day. Um, and I admit I was nonchalant about it until recently in a way that many, many other people were. Um, I still think the risk is very low, but, um, kind of for the reasons we've talked ab- just so, you know, unimaginably costly that nobody wants to go that route. So, so it's like the, it's like the extreme version of my whole argument with why we most of the time don't fight, is because it's just so damn costly. And so this is, that's, that's the incentive not to use this. And, and, and if they do use it, that's the incentive to use it in a very restrained way. Um, but that's not a lot of ... But, but because we know we do go to war and there's all these things that interfere with it, including miscalculation and all of these human foibles, and, and w- 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 it out earlier, like, the whole reason we're in this mess is because the only people who have this private interest in, like, having Ukraine give up its freedom is this Russian cabal, an elite that gets their power and, and is preserved only ... An- and is threatened by Ukrainian democracy. What would, how far would they go to hang on to power when push came to shove is I think the thing that worries me the most, and is plainly what worries most people about the risk of nuclear war. Like, at what point does that unchecked leadership decide that this is worth it, especially if they can emerge from the rubble still on top? I don't know. So, um, and I don't know that any of us have really fully thought through all of that calculus and what's going on. Very recently around the anniversary of January 6th, there were a lot of questions about w- was the United States gonna have another civil war. On the one hand, I think it's almost unimaginable. Sort of like, in the same way I think that a nuclear war and complete Armageddon is unimaginable. But I remember something that, uh, I, when both of those questions get asked, I remember something I, I was in the audience of listening to some great economists speak about the, the, 20 years ago, about the risk of an Argentina-style financial meltdown of the United States. Like, what's the total financial collapse? And they said, "You know what? The risk is vanishingly small, but that's terrifying because until recently, the answer was zero." And so the fact that it's not zero should deeply, deeply scare us all, and we should devote a lot of energy to making it zero again. And that's how I feel about the risk of a civil war in the 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.

   8. LFLex Fridman1:22:57

      To me, what terrifies me is that all this kinda stuff seems to happen, like, overnight, like super quick, and it escalates super quick when it happens. So it's not like ... I don't know. I, I don't know what I imagine, but it just happens ... Like, if a nuclear war happened, it would be something like a plane, like, in this case with Ukraine, uh, uh, a NATO plane shut down over some, uh, piece of land-

   9. CBChris Blattman1:23:26

      Mm-hmm.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:23:27

       ... uh, by the Russian forces, or so the narrative would go, but it doesn't even matter what's true or not in order to spark the first, um, moment of escalation, and then it just goes, goes, goes, goes.

   11. CBChris Blattman1:23:40

       Well, I think that happens sometimes. I mean, again, it's this thing that, you know, what social scientists call selection on a 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." Um, and, and so we remember-

   12. LFLex Fridman1:23:59

       Yeah.

   13. CBChris Blattman1:23:59

       ... the times when it went boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the really terrible thing happened. But that, fortunately that's not ... You know, I start off the book with an example of a gang war that didn't happen in, in, in Medellin, Colombia, which is third ... That's like, my day job is actually studying conflict and gangs and violence and, and of these other kinds of groups, also very sinister. Um, and, and most of the time, they don't fight. And the, that escalation doesn't happen. So, so the escalation does happen quickly sometimes, except when it doesn't, which is fortunate.

   14. LFLex Fridman1:24:29

       So we remember the ones when it does. It's really important to think about all that. Like, um, (laughs) I remember talking to, I, 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," uh, 'cause I think I said like most of human history is, um, had been defined by these horrible wars. He's like, "No, most of human history is just peaceful, like, farming life." (laughs) Like war-

Episode duration: 2:48:26