Camp Gagnon - Scientist Explains HOW Russia Miscalculated Ukraine

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

Political scientist Dr. Chris Blattman tells me how Putin and Russia miscalculated going to war with Ukraine, when World War III will happen, and the secrets behind geopolitics. WELCOME TO CAMP.Thanks to Morgan & Morgan for sponsoring today's episode!Mark Gagnon is our HostWill Schwartz is our Content Producer and Lead EditorAce Taylor provides Additional EditingKostis Zacho is our Clips Editor

Sun Tzu, this famous Chinese general who has this famous line, he says, there's no war from which a country has benefited. Suppose you're fighting over an oil field. You're fighting against someone who is basically evenly matched. He said, okay, we could just split the oil down the middle. Or we can fight over it. I can spend an enormous amount of money. And then I flip a coin for whether or not I get the oil or you get the oil. That's the basic choice every time. And it's almost always better to just split it down the middle. It's like going to Vegas and the house always wins. This is Chris Blatman. He's a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has dedicated his life. to breaking down the science of gang violence, organized crime, and wars. And today, we're going to discuss the real reason why Russia invaded Ukraine,

why World War III probably won't happen, and why geopolitics is like a massive game of poker. Now, enjoy my conversation with Dr. Chris Blatman. Welcome to camp. Chris Blatman, aka Dr. Blatman. We were talking out there, I really prefer to call you doctor, but if you insist that I call you Chris, then I can do that. You have dedicated your life to research

in conflicts, wars, gang violence, poverty. You've been in wars. You are a warrior. You've been at the Civil War. You've been in the revolution. I'm trying to hype it up. You know what I mean? That way people are like, oh, this guy's been in it. But no, you are, you know, obviously a researcher that has done awesome research. You wrote a book called Why We Fight. And I'm honestly annoyed. I'm annoyed by that title because it's called Why We Fight. And then you just explained to me in the beginning of the book, why we don't fight. So I want to start there. Okay. So tell me Why do we not go to war? Why is war costly and ruin us?

And why does it prevent us from killing each other all the time? Yeah. So, I mean, I didn't even realize that it's not like I knew this. And I said, oh, I'm going to write the book and tell people why we don't fight. There's something actually I realized when I was writing the book and as I was doing it, that it's really easy to forget. So peace is breaking out every day. And I like to say, like, enemies prefer to loat with one another in peace. Yeah, peace is breaking out every day.

It's a funny way to put it. Yeah. So a lot of people, you know, you open the news. paper even now, we're almost a year from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And the first 14 stories are about that. Uh, you know, our attention is glued. Um, and then I remember, uh, two weeks into the Russian invasion, scrolling through my phone, uh, and getting through the 40 pages of Ukraine news, because even I have my limits. And, uh, and there's this story. And it says, India accidentally launched a cruise missile at Pakistan. Yeah. And nothing happened. Don't you hate that? A

Hesky accidental missile launch. That's the worst. Right. But if they had gone to war over that, which they could have, we just would have heard about nothing else for the last 12 months. Right. And they didn't. And they haven't.

They haven't gone to war. They hate one another, right? They're just, there's this brinksmanship constantly. There's some big issues. And if they did go to war, we'd have all these reasons. Oh, it's obvious why they went to war. And then they didn't, right? That's just common sued.

Right. But it never makes the news why people don't go to war. Yeah. So we don't, yeah, we just sort of, we just pay attention to the dogs that bark. Right. And it's like an emergency room doctor who forgets that most people are healthy. Hmm. Right?

That does, I mean, and actually emergency room doctors have to spend time on the people who are super sick. Like, that's their job. Yeah, of course. But if you don't want them to forget that actually, you don't want them to think that everybody's sick all the time. Right. Because then they'd be super depressed. and they'd think, oh, the world's a sickness. Yeah, I wonder if you, do you think Americans have a distorted view of how frequent war is

because America has sort of been in perpetual wars since, you know, like the 1940s? That's what it feels like to me as an American. I'm like, we're constantly in war, we're invading these countries, we're doing proxy wars everywhere. World War III is about to break out. And then you're telling me that war never happens. So I'm like, what's going on? Well, war, I mean, I didn't write a book called Why We Don't Fight. So obviously it happens, right?

And I've been in it. So it does. But it's just like a start. point, but it's not just Americans. Like, I mean, Hobbs, this sort of like, this guy who writes this famous book, Leviathan, like five years ago, Thomas Hobbes. He writes, you know, he says, the natural state of humanity is war. Yeah, that's how it feels. Exactly. And that's so that, so everyone feels like this, right? And why will he just, he'd have to flee to Europe from the English of a war? And so he just witnessed the most miserable, brutal thing. He almost died and probably

a lot of his friends are killed. And so it feels like it's always present. And so we just, you know, we're just, our attention is, is glued to that. And, or take like a lot of people, like, no, there's World War I. There are more books on World War I than maybe on any other war. And every single person writes a book on World War I starts there and they trace it back to all the things that were led up to it. Yeah. You know, there's like this assassination of an Archduke, but there are all these flawed leaders. There's poverty. There's, this, there's that, and nobody, or very few people write books about the 42 World War Ones that didn't happen.

Like all these crises in the world that were sort of like the assassination of an Archduke, you know, like some standoff and fights between this side and that side in the Sudan or Morocco or here or there. And then they were like, you know what, not worth it. This is just same leaders, same mess. They were like, mm-mm, because this is like too costly. It's like so, like, war's just ruinous. Right.

And so that's like basically why we don't fight because it's so costly. Is that a recent phenomenon or is this data that goes back to? No, all the way back. I mean, you go back to the Greeks and the Romans and the Egyptians, you go back all the way. Like often they would fight, but their fights were infrequent and the fights would be over in like a few days or like one or two battles. This is like the American Civil War thing when people were like camping out to watch it because they thought it'd be like five days. Well, because most wars are. days. Right. I mean, we only pay attention to the long wars. So like the average war in the last 200

years has been 100 days long. Really? And so, and a huge number of them were like three weeks long. We don't write as many books about the, we write books about the 20 year wars, right? So when America goes into Afghanistan and Iraq and it's a 20 year mess, pay a lot of attention to that, everybody knows about that. When America went into Liberia, which is a place I worked in West Africa, And 100 Marines go in and help stop the Civil War in about a few weeks. And it works. Like we, you know, we don't, nobody knows about that. Interesting.

And so, so you can't, you can't just look at the, you can't just look at the sick cases and forget the healthy, healthy cases. Because not only you get depressed, but then you get really bad at diagnosis. Oh, that's interesting. So like if a doctor's only thinking about all of his sick patients all the time, he comes up with this distorted hypothesis that, oh, people are. just generally sick always. Right. And like somebody comes into, someone sick comes in and you start to trace back all the things that's wrong with them. And you're like, oh, they eat parably, they don't exercise enough. They have this family history, that family history, you know, all these different things. And you're like, well, that must be why they're sick. But if they took, if they started to

pay attention to the healthy people and they traced back and you know, oh, actually they eat poorly and they don't exercise and they have that family history, oh, but they don't have this family history. You know, they're like, oh, maybe we should focus on the thing that makes them different. And fortunately, that's actually what medical science does. Right. They're kind of forced to. They do it now instinctually. Right.

Through a process that was instilled. But if that process didn't exist, then you'd probably create this bias in your mind. Well, I mean, listen, I mean, I guess you go back 500 years. They didn't have that, whatever. They were like, oh, there's some gnome in your stomach that's making it ill. And I don't know. The stomach gnomes. You got a bad case of stomach gnomes.

Exactly. Yeah. So it came slowly. Sure. But they do it. And so we don't, I think that's the mistake we make with war. It's like, oh, we need to like pay attention. So take something like that's easier to count, like ethnic violence.

So you have in places like Eastern Europe or sub-Saharan Africa, you have lots of hostile ethnic groups, different people who speak different languages. And maybe they have a different religion. They live right next to one another and they hate one another. Right. Right. There's lots of ancient hatreds. And they're in competition for something. Yeah.

Right. And if there's a thousand of them, maybe one in a thousand every year engages in violence on a serious level. So that's serious, right? But 999 did not because they were like, oh, fighting is like the worst way to sell our differences. There are like 400 other ways we could figure this out without actually use. using violence because violence is just super ruinous. Right. Yeah, I guess I just have this distorted view that like, especially in the past, like obviously

living in America in the modern day, I don't feel like I'm at threat of war. Maybe more now. I'm like every now and again, I'm like, what if there's a bomb that gets dropped or something? But like I think back in the day, like if I was living in feudal England or something, like I'm living inside these walls and I'm constantly at threat of some other tribe coming in and killing all of us. Like it feels like, you know, if I had to imagine what life was like back in the day that the threat of war and violence was constant and perpetual.

Yeah. Do you, is that the case? Yeah, it's based. I mean, there's been, yeah, in the sense of what's my risk of getting murdered by my neighbor, a rival ethnic group or gang, or frankly, like the local noble or king, like my risk of getting murdered was pretty high. Mm-hmm. And it's gotten a lot better over time in most places in the world.

Right. because we have like systems of rules and enforcement, institutions, these things we call states and checks and balances and all sort of the basics of like good government. The places that have developed those turns out they just, fewer people get killed. Right. And now I know in your research you've compared and sort of like analyzed war and how that is analogous to like gang violence. Yeah.

And correct me if we're wrong, you found like the, the, functions that create those things are fairly similar. Yeah. So, yeah, so, yeah, so, you know, my day job, originally, like, I spent 10 or 15 years, like working in civil wars and ethnic violence in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly in Uganda and in Liberia. And then I started getting interested in organized crime and criminal violence, both in Columbia, Mexico, and Chicago. I moved to Chicago.

And when you moved to Chicago, which I did seven years ago, everybody, everybody says, oh, why do you work in violence over there? Because we have a violence problem here. Interesting. And I became really interested in like the parallels between rebel violence and civil war violence and ethnic violence and gang violence. And they are super different. And if you're like a social scientist like me, your whole job is to like super specialize. And people become like civil war scholars or ethnic violence scholars or they study like international warfare and or gang warfare and you don't really talk to the other people in the other group or you do but I imagine it creates some type of like myopic view of like this is what things are without contextualizing and progress

comes from specialization too right so so but then it also helps to step back and say oh actually what are all these things have in common and so I actually thought more of my colleagues would get mad by like sort of saying oh you're I'm going to yank you guys out of your silos and and and make it all talk to one another and that actually happened a lot less than I thought because I think Either they're nice and they just haven't told me that they're angry or actually like, I think it was persuasive. Like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. These things are more similar than I realized. The reasons like Chicago gangs have fought in the past or are fighting now actually have a lot in common with like why we have international warfare.

There's some basic principles that we can just learn. We can actually understand better. And then if you're better at diagnosis, you're better at treatment. So that same thesis that you applied to war, that war is generally pretty rare. Yeah. It's, you know, peace is breaking out all the time. Do you find that that same thing, you know, I'm watching the news. And it's like, you know, there's gang violence in every city and gangs are breaking out.

In Colombia, there's gang violence everywhere. It's just like there's a feeling that there are more gangs and there's more violence in the streets. And New York isn't safe. And Chicago's not safe. And as you watch this, you're like getting a distorted view of how violent things really are. So that same hypothesis, war is rare is gang violence. similarly rare? Yeah, so, well, so I think gangs have a tough, for a few reasons we could get into,

gangs have a slightly tougher time, I think, finding peace. But a lot of them do. We don't talk about those cases, right? We write articles about the cities like Chicago where there's a current big spike or Baltimore, which has even higher levels. And then nobody writes a story about Medellin, which is just sort of like armed to the Gills, 12,000 hyper-organized, hyper-armed young men earning money, hand over fist from drugs, 12,000 of them in maybe 400 groups. Homicide rate is like a quarter of that of, you know,

a lot of American cities. And they've maintained like a peace for 10 or 12 years. And the same, you go to Sao Paulo as well in Brazil. Everyone focuses on Rio where there's a literal war between the police and the gangs and in all sorts of groups. Like it's just massive, massive homicide rates. And Sao Paulo, same number of armed groups, same number of guns, they managed to sort of keep a lid on it. It's not very violent. And so if we want to understand why Chicago Rio is having a problem, you kind of have to look to the places that don't have a violence problem. It's sort of a basic point, which is sort of obvious, I guess, in retrospect, but I mean, even me after doing this for 10 or 15 or 20 years, like, what was like, oh, actually, I hadn't even really thought about it in those terms. Yeah, that's interesting. So, I mean, I don't know if you want to get into the gang violence situation first, but I'm curious, what is the biggest delineator between a city that has a ton of weapons and a ton of, you know, drugs or some other reason why gangs would be fighting, that leads to a lot of violence? And then a city that has those same variables that doesn't have violence. What is happening that's causing a disparity?

I mean, at the most general level, this is so, and this would be true for nations and, like, political factions, every level of war. Like, the idea is that like, everybody, it's super. costly. Like, everybody knows that. Gang members know, like, nobody's buying drugs in the middle of a gunfight. People, shopkeepers aren't paying their extortion money when this gang war going on. Like, there's this great line from

Godfather to where one of the couples is like, I'm a businessman, I hate war. And I've heard that from real life guys like him. Yeah, we hate this because, you know, they put us in jail. We, they start to

newspaper articles about us. We lose our invisibility. Our drug sales are interrupted. We don't want this fight. And nobody, you know, I work now with a lot of guys like running gangs in gangs in in Chicago in Medellegene. And like, it's really miserable to sort of have a price on your head and constantly to be looking over your shoulder because the guy from the crew around the corner

would like to kill you. Like, that's a really miserable. So people are basically like, I don't want that. Right. Yeah, I guess my perception of like a gang leader or a kingpin is like these are hardened guys that don't care, you know, if there's a bounty on their head and blah, blah, blah. But I guess it's, you know, you can intuit like, these people don't want the stress either. No, that they want to make their money and they want to, you know, and it's unethical. You shouldn't be selling drugs. But at the same time, it's like they, they're running a business and the way a lot of businesses function and they just want to live their lives and not have to be threatened with people killing them all the time. And so they would rather this other gang have territory. Yeah. And them being, you know, have. their comfortable drug living, and just make their good drug money and raise their good drug family,

without the fear of like, you know, someone killing me all the time. Yeah. And the guys who, like, they're traumatized. Like,

they're like super, they're hyper roused. They're like totally on edge because at any moment, this could happen. Not all of them, but this is like just normal human reaction of that kind of stress.

Yeah. And no one wants that. Yeah. So, so everyone's striving to avoid it. And then the question is, is like, are you able to?

So, you know, the, I guess when I tell people, like, if, you know, it's a big book, it's like my attempt to like take, it's not really my ideas. It's my attempt to take like all this social science. Like, so I'm an economist by training. Then I taught in political science departments for many years.

Now I'm in public policy schools. I married a psychologist and we do a lot of research together. That must be tricky. And then the gang stuff is very much. Yeah, it's very much a sociology job. And so like, I'm like, oh, let's bring this together. And then I'm always talking to, I'm sending all this time. with either people who are running non-profits

or they're in the government or they're in the military and they're coming up with solutions and everybody's just not talking to one another. And so this is like, oh, let me just boil down everything they know. Right. And acting as the conduit to bring all of these things together to create a bigger picture.

Yeah. Yeah. And so like the common thread across everything. So I say if you remember one thing, we don't fight because it's super costly. It's just totally ruinous. And then every reason we do fight is a reason that our leaders or our society either are ignoring those costs of war or or are willing to pay

them for some reason. Got it. So, okay, let's say I agree with you that war is rare. Okay, I'll ride with you for that one. Or just not the norm. Sure. You just get there. Yeah.

Okay. So not the norm. And that makes sense. Like, it seems crazy because when you get all the media, your brain gets distorted. But then you say it's extremely costly. Yeah. I'm like, it seems like it's mostly costly for the side that loses. You know, if you win the war, then there's a great bounty.

You can go get oil. Back in the day, you could get resources. You can get land. It seems like in all the wars that people win, it's worth doing. And they had a really great reason. You know, you and I are fighting over some type of precious commodity. If I kill you and everyone, you know, I get to have it. And then that's going to make it worth it, even if I lose, you know, some percentage of my men.

Yeah, I mean, so Sun Tzu, this famous Chinese general who writes this volume 2,500 years ago, he has his famous line. He says, there's no war from which a country has benefited. And he seems crazy. They're just... So individuals benefit sometimes, right? So, so it's true that here's the thing. Like, basically, okay, suppose you win the war. Suppose you're fighting over an oil field or a territory and you win the war.

And you were fighting about somebody, you were fighting against someone who is, you guys are basically evenly matched, right? So we both have an even chance of. winning this war. You had a choice. You said, okay, we could split the oil down the middle. I'll take half, you take half, because in rough proportion to our mutual ability to burn the house down.

Or we can fight over it. I can spend an enormous amount of money. And then I flip a coin for whether or not I get the oil or you get the oil. All right. And so it's like, okay, I can either split the whole thing down the middle or we can destroy a share of it. and then flip a coin for it. And so that's the choice.

That's the basic choice every time. And it's almost always better to just split it down the middle. Because if or I can flip a coin for a damaged fight. Like in economics, we'd call that expected value. Like the expected value of a coin flip for a shrunken thing is lower value than actually 50% chance, which is also a coin flip of the unbroken thing. That makes sense. So if I can get 50%, which maybe that's $100 million of oil or something,

or I can spend $200 million to get, you know, like $200 million of oil. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, oh, it's a wash. Like you spend all this money to get. And then if you spend $300 million, then you're losing money to get $200 million oil. Even if you had to spend $10 million to get a 50% chance at the $200 million in oil, it doesn't work out. Like it just a bad, it's like going to Vegas and the house always wins.

Right. But now this is the assumption that the two. two sides are a coin flip. Right. No, but even, let's say now I'm the superpower. I'm Russia versus Ukraine or I'm like the huge gang versus the little gang. And I have 80% of the guns and 80% of the economic might and you have 20%. It doesn't feel like a coin flip.

Right. It's not a coin flip. So now I say, oh, now the choice is I want 80% of that. I want 80% of the oil and you get 20%. And or we could fight over it and we both spend money to fight over it. And then I have it with an 80% chance. Like the basic thing is it's just easier to split it before we damage it. Because I'm basically just taking a gamble.

Gamble might be more in my favor, but I'm still gambling for something that's now broken. So due to the nature of leverage, my negotiating and bargaining power is dependent on my force. And so I will proportionally get that in a deal regardless. So exactly. So think about that makes sense. Think about every. Okay, we write books about all the revolutions where all the people rise up against the dictator. Most people don't do that. Most of the oppressed do not revolt. Russians have not risen up

against Putin. Putin has 80 or 90% of the power. The Russian people have 10 or 20%. So they get a little bit, but they basically acquiesce. And that's the sad. So there's nothing just about peace and there's nothing equal, right? The mighty get their way most of the time because most oppressed people that don't revolt. And they don't revolt because it's too costly. And so, and this is just the story through human history. And now occasionally we do revolt. We have revolutions. We have riotous rebellion. Some of them are peaceful. Many of them are not. But most of the time, we don't do that. The same dynamics that are happening with inter-country are happening intra-country with the leaders in their constituency. The Iranians might be protesting, but they're not

violently. There's no armed rebellion. There's no armed rebellion. There's no armed rebellion. in China. There's no armed rebellion in Russia. These are all examples of a powerful clique having 80 or 90 percent of the power and then people quietly acquiesce because that's the the tragic, unjust but natural thing to do in the face of this like threat of destruction. And when you're talking about power, you're talking about like military force that. Military economic force, just the ability of propaganda. Because I'm thinking like millions of people, obviously have more power than one guy. Yeah.

But that one guy has a military at his behest and economic forces and other things that he can sort of exert on his people. And, you know, I'm not the Russia expert. You know, down the hall, I have a Russia expert and a Ukraine expert. They keep me honest. Call them up right now. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, what Putin's genius, his evil genius has been to like fragment opposition.

You have all these oligarchs. And people are like, where are they going? They own all these companies, they have this wealth. They're losing money. I mean, Russia, you talk about cost of war. Russia has set itself back. Its economy is like shrunk almost by half, I think. It set itself back one or two stages of industrialization.

And that's like, that's not like a U.S. intelligence report. That's actually a report from the Russian central, the governor of the central bank. Like that's their own admission. Like we're just set 30 years back. Maybe it's even worse than that. And it's getting worse. Yeah. that's so all these people who are just losing all this money from the ordinary people to oligarchs yeah

you're getting your yachtsies yeah yeah yeah like no one wants this so why aren't they phoning him up and saying cut this out because that's what would happen his genius was he fragmented all those people and how do you fragment all the people with money well he just i think he kept them i don't know actually it's a good question people should be sure someone has a better answer you could have someone on this podcast somehow he has managed to like keep them from collectively organizing sure so that's like a whole so not only, so military power, the number of guns you have matters. Economic might matters, but social mobilization. Your ability to actually like collectively organize is a source of power, right?

And so when a group in society learns how to use Facebook or social media to mobilize on the streets. Like Arab Spring situation. Exactly. That's all of a sudden, now you're in a position to negotiate a better deal. And that's what happened. Arab Spring was like, aha, we're going to. we figured something out, we want to negotiate a different deal. We're still going to be kind of oppressed.

Like a lot of these are still autocracies, but we're going to demand a little bit more freedom. And you're going to give it to us because it's easier to concede. It makes more sense to concede than to fight us for it. So this is, I don't want to become a conspiracy theorist. But if I'm a ruler, I'm like, oh, it is at my benefit to have my constituency fragmented. of course and not working together. There's no conspiracy theory about it.

That is like literally the dictator's handbook. But I'm looking at America and I'm like, obviously, we don't necessarily have a dictator. You know, we have a president. We have a whole, you know, governmental system. But is it possible that it is at their benefit to potentially stoke a racial issue or potentially stoke a class issue or create any of these sort of, you know, socially cultured, you know, issues within society to then have people not be able to collectivize? So that is exactly.

what, I don't know, we'd call it like political entrepreneurs, economic entrepreneurs, but political entrepreneurs are constantly trying to like do that, sort of stoke the rage machine in political science. Some people called it the institutionalized riot machine. Like you just want to constantly keep people a little bit angry and full of loathing and hatred and poisonous use towards the other side so that when you need them, you can mobilize them to either come out and vote or maybe do something. something more nefarious.

Right. And that's kind of like the genius of the founders of the American Republic, which is they were like completely aware of this. They just spent all of their time worrying about the ways that somebody could come in and do this. So they made it, they did everything possible to make it impossible to actually take over anything or get anything done as a dictator. So they devolved power to the state.

they didn't even have a real president for the first, I don't know, five or ten years of the Republic until they were like, oh, I guess we need somebody at the executive. They just, so all the political dysfunction in this country and the inability to get anything done is by design. Because they're like, if the problem with getting things done, like easily is that then that same person can not do what you call it a conspiracy theory. That's just like the playbook. It's just the normal playbook. try it. So like, so many leaders try this out. And then they only get so far because they stretch the limits of what they can do because we've constructed the system that's almost impossible to hijack. I see. So the framers are trying to prevent tyranny. And so they're like, let's create as many

like compartments and sort of roadblocks to getting things done. Right. To prevent a tyrant from coming in and just like getting this whole thing going crazy. And whipping up these animal spirits. Right. Pitting group A about group B. Like, let's just make that really hard. It's still possible. Like, people... Right. But it just takes a lot of compliance in organization.

And I guess the downside of that is now, you know, if you don't have a tyrant, so to speak, it is just harder to collectivize and get regular things done. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so, I mean, I think, like, you know, one of the... Towards the end of the book, like, one of the meta reasons I think that we fight is that, the places find are people that are run by tyrants. People where there aren't, places where there aren't checks and balances are really, really

fragile. And I would say this is like the one country on the planet where I'd say is two checked and balance. We could be like 10%. Interesting. Like less checked in balance and we'd probably be better off. Huh. But I mean, you and I are both originally Canadian.

Right. Right. Like that's a funny case where actually you, there's no, there's actually not a lot of checks and balances officially. there's a prime minister who has a majority in parliament, it basically gets to make policy. Just is like an elected dictator for five years, four years, whatever the term will be. That's not totally true. There's lots of informal checks, but like it's actually, that's a country works pretty well in many ways.

It's still checked, but it's not as dysfunctional, I think, some ways as the United States because it's just like maybe not so restrained. Right. That's interesting. Okay. So I agree that war is not the norm. Yeah. And that it's really costly. And it, you know, obviously is, I guess, I don't know. I'm still sort of like hung up on the idea that no one benefits. Like, yeah. And that Sun Tzu quote, I'm like, I don't know if there's ever, there's got to be a war where someone's like, hey, we came in. So, so I mean, so that gets us, so I, in the book, I say there's five, okay, I said there's, there's five ways we ignore the cost of war or are willing to pay them. Yes. Because we do fight. And so your instincts are totally right, which is that, oh, some, people do benefit and that's like reason number one is there are some leaders or elites who are running the nation or the gang who do benefit so war is in their interest it's not the interest

into the interest of their group so Putin is Putin chose part of Putin's calculation to go to war was because he and his regime stood to benefit Russia didn't stand to benefit Russia's paying some costs but he's acting against the interests of the group because he's only carrying about himself. Interesting. And it's not just, you know, in the book, I give the example, I just don't want to paint a picture of autocrats. I give the example of George Washington, right? Right. And you know, George Washington, rightly, you know, we sort of think it's like this noblest of leaders. He's a great president. He's a good guy. He wanted to help America. And he didn't want a tyrant either. And he stepped down after one term precisely because he

wanted to demonstrate that he wasn't going to become a king. Right. And he wanted to institutionalize this like transfer of power. Which is very beautiful. And I feel like my view of American history is like very romantic. Right. I'm like, this is just a pure. a guy. And the thing that we don't learn was that the guy was the most like money mongering. Like he just wanted wealth. He loved his clothes. He loved his carriages. He was just obsessed with wealth and land his whole life. And a previous war, not the American Revolutionary War, but what we call, in America we call French Indian War, which kicked off globally the seven years war basically like almost two decades earlier than the American Revolution was ignited by him

because he made this sort of greedy land grab on his own behalf and on behalf of a bunch of Virginia landowners who were like, oh, look at all this stuff that's kind of controlled by the French, let's grab it, and then encountered like a French ambassador or French party and then slaughtered them and then ignited this devastating worldwide conflict. Partly it is like own venal land interests. Right.

So in that case, he stood to benefit a lot. Yeah. But all of those, you know, 15-year-olds that were fighting in the war didn't necessarily benefit. Right. So he, yeah, exactly. And so now, you know, George Washington is a great example because it's counter-duitive, like, people don't hear that story. That's not the typical story. The typical story is, I think, someone like Putin who, okay, here's the thing.

If you are unchecked, meaning, you know, you're a dictator or quasi-dictator, right? You're only accountable to, like, an elite, you know. what do you care of about half these costs of war right you don't bear them all the soldiers that are dying the the cities just put them to rubble whatever that's not my people they're my people but i don't really care about them so i don't so now i'm ignoring most of the costs of war so my biggest deterrence is like eroded and then if i think that actually i'm more likely to hold on to power because we go to war, then now I'm going to do it.

And that's private interest. And we could, and a lot of wars start and end with that reason number one, which is that the leaders had private interest in going to war. They were either going to get rich or gain more power or get re-election as a result,

and therefore they take their country to war against the country's interest. And so in Putin's example, if he hadn't invaded Ukraine, he would have stayed in power, right? Like, there was no threat to his power in that case. Maybe. Well, so this is what we don't know, right?

Nobody has some inside line into his circle or his thinking. It's totally closed. So everything you read in the newspaper is like speculative fiction in the sense of people who are just guessing, like, what's in this guy's mind? Sure. But here's the thing. So Russians identify with Ukrainians more than any other people on the planet. And Ukraine threw out two Russian faces.

presidents in the last 20 years. Right. And we're an increasingly thriving democracy. And so it's sort of like this paragon for your, you know, that's worse. If you're running like a totally authoritarian regime and everyone's looking next door to be like, holy moly, our brothers and sisters are like having, you know, this is, they live a totally different life. That's kind of dangerous.

I see. So I don't think that's like reason number one. one why he went. I think it's up there maybe in the top three is we need to extinguish this dangerous example. Because what is the fear that the people see this new Western democratic life in Ukraine? Yeah. And then that potentially causes them to collectivize and rise up against the tyrant? I think that's a little bit of the fear.

Like I said, I don't know that that was reason number one. That contributes to a big pot of reasons. Yeah. But you sort of, I think we get part of the way there. We like, we get part of the way there with reason number one. which is like Putin doesn't pay most of the costs, and he has at least some private benefit. Got it.

Which is he gets to like maybe hold on to his regime a little bit longer by extinguishing this shining example on a hill. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I have to tell you a short story. I was riding home one day after a long day at the studio, hanging out with my boys. And all of a sudden out of nowhere, I'm crossing an intersection on my bike. Wham, Honda Civic blast through a stop sign.

Hits me. I fly out of the hood. I slide up. This is a true story. Fly under the hood. I slide off. I hit the ground. The dude gets out.

He's like, bro, what happened? I was like, dude, I don't know. We talked for a little bit. He's like, you want me to call the police? I was like, nah, what's the point? He leaves. The bike is destroyed. My back kind of hurts.

I was just a kid. I don't know anything. I don't want to get attorneys involved. I don't know what it takes. Okay? I thought getting an attorney would be like an impossible task, right? I could have checked out Morgan and Morgan. And the reason I could have checked them out is that with eight clicks or less.

If I go to their app or their website, I can submit a claim. It's more like using an app than getting an attorney. I don't have to call some random dude in an office somewhere that I don't know, hope he's reputable, check his reviews or whatever. Uh-uh. With over $15 billion, one for its clients, Morgan & Morgan has an amazing track record all over the country. And if you're concerned about getting a reputable attorney,

trust me, Morgan and Morgan is nationwide. They are the biggest personal injury law firm in the country. With over 100 offices nationwide and more than 800 lawyers, they're legit, man. If you're ever injured, you can check out Morganandmorgon.com. Their fee is free unless you win. That's an amazing deal. For more information, you can go to for the people.com slash gagnon.

That's right. For the people. com slash gagnon. Or dial pound law. That's pound 529 from your cell phone. That's for the people, F-O-R-the-people.com slash gaggon, G-A-G, N-O-N, or pound law, pound five-29 from your cell phone. Get control of your life.

And stop getting taken advantage of it. If you're getting a little fender bender, you know what I mean? Get justice for what you need. Let's get back to the show. Just to run through them. Like, so how do we ignore the costs or are willing to pay them? either our leaders are unchecked in so they don't pay them or they have their own their own interests. They might have their own ideological reasons to be willing to pay or societies.

They're biased, so they get wrong. And then things I call when they're either uncertain or unreliable. And so in the Russia-Ukraine example, it's pretty simple. Okay, and we can get there. You know, we just add them up. We actually probably only need four of the five. You don't need all five to explain every war. Sometimes you might need one. Okay, he doesn't pay most of the costs and he might have a private incentive from staying in power. Ideology. Every story you've heard about getting the nation back together, bringing the empire back together, rather, of extinguishing Ukrainian national identity of personal glory. Those are all intangible things that he can get by invading that he doesn't get any other way.

Compromise doesn't get him that. And he doesn't have to bear the cost. And yeah, they all interact. Yeah, plus, so now he not only has this like private benefit. of staying in power. He has this like ethereal like, oh, I have this ideological, like, mother Russia will be greater. Of course. And was there any, in terms of timing, yeah, was there any part of it that you believe, like, due to personal health? He was like, oh, I need to kind of push this issue. Yeah. Now we're back in like speculative fiction world where

maybe, right? We'll find out. Like in 10 years, we'll know or 20 years, the archives will be open. Somebody will, you know, and then we'll know, like, does he have cancer? Who knows? So maybe. I have a different idea about timing. But we have. have to get to like number five maybe to get there okay so so we're now at like either unchecked ideological biased and so this is the story we've all heard about like this isolated insulated leader who got rosy information on his prospects of of a successful invasion who thought yeah there's a good chance we can just take the country in a few days um and and that that would probably partially true and he just got unlucky is is one state of the world i think that's uh but mostly i think it's also true

like the classic problem of most presidents, especially dictators, is like nobody tells them what they don't want to hear. And the more brutal and ruthless you are, the worst the information you get. And so you get these over-optimistic predictions. And so these are stories of bias. And that's, but that's like an institutional story of bias. There's also like psychological stories of bias, the ways in which presidents, CEOs, whatever, can be like just either persistently say overconfident and overestimate success, right? So if you know that war is costly, but you grossly overestimate your success, right? Well, now war doesn't look so bad because you're like, oh, I'm going to get, I'm going to totally win. Like, this will be easy. Right. And there are

ways that in times that happens. And most people stop there. And they're like, okay, we've just explained the invasion. We have an unchecked leader with a little bit of a private incentive, this big ideological incentive, and then he had bad information. But did he stand to benefit financially, either through acquisition or acquisition of resources or some other type of like private financial situation? Maybe not from Ukraine specifically, but I mean, you know, people compare the Russian state and Putin's circle to an organized criminal ring for a good reason, which is that it's just that whole elite with Putin at the top has been focused an incredible amount on self-enrichment

over the last 20 years. And so I don't know so much that the Ukraine adds, surely it adds that somewhat. But actually, I think that's maybe the incentive to keep the regime going and extinguish the Democratic flame because that way we can keep our organized crime ring. I see. Is one argument. How much that weighed in his decisions we don't really know, right? Again, the historians will have to tell us exactly which of these things.

Right. But these are the stories. And most people say, oh, the combination of these three things gets us all the way there. And I think that's possible. But I say, actually, there are these two things we always forget, like the last two reasons, that are a little bit more nuanced, but are maybe like the most important reasons that both Russia and the United States, frankly, finds itself at war. And one of them is the one of them is called uncertainty. And the other one, which I called unreliability is we have this terrible name in political science called commitment problems.

But they're so important to like understand because like they kind of blew my mind when I learned them. Their old ideas, like 30 years old blew my mind. And the fact that nobody else knows about them, I think they're mind blowing. Okay. Now I'm excited. So, okay, but you already understand them. This is the funny thing is we don't apply them to war. We don't realize that it's happening around it.

But you already, everybody understands this because probably most of your audiences like played a game of poker. Right. So if you and I are playing poker, you don't know my hand, right? I'm playing aggressively. And you don't know, you know that maybe I'm bluffing, right? Because you know that my optimal strategy is not to bluff none of the time. You also know that my best strategy is not to bluff none of the time, right? Sorry, my optimal strategy is to bluff some of the time.

Right. And you're like, oh, all right. And so in response, nobody would say, oh, my best strategy is to fold all the time. That would be a terrible strategy. You just instinctually know that. And you would also know that your best strategy is not to call every time or invade, right? It's to do it sometimes. And so that's what uncertainty does.

Russia's not sure how strong Ukraine is. Ukraine's not sure how Russia is. Both of them are saying, no, no, no, no. We're super serious. Like Russia's mounting all these troops on the border going, hey, hey, hey, hey, like we are not kidding around. And Ukraine's like, no, no, no, we're going to like stand up. We're going to call.

Yeah. And we're not, you know, we're not kidding around. And the U.S. and the West are saying, we're going to sanction the hell out of you. And we're not kidding around. And everyone's wondering if the other side's bluffing. And so that's why, you know, if we got to like, I don't know, look at the multiverse and see like the million worlds and replay this like last year, in how many worlds we just idiosyncratically don't invade? And I think that's like maybe a lot of those worlds because it's your best strategy is just to bluff and call some of the time.

And so I think just Russia chose to call and invade. because that's the best strategy amidst uncertainty. And so, but we forget that. Even though we all know this when we play poker, we're like, oh, it has to be totally deterministic. There has to be like a reason. He has to be because he's crazy and misinformed, not just gambling in a can't win situation when there's uncertainty.

Well, the stakes just seem way too high to gamble. Like, I think most people are like, let's just kind of chill, you know, like what's the point? Why do we need this? Which is why? time most of the time we don't fight exactly and which is why indian pakistan because like india fires the cruise missile by accident and then pakistan's thinking wasn't really by accident you know they don't know and they can choose to call and they go no you do that on purpose so now we're going to

fire some shit back we're going to get a popping exactly and um so so the uncertainty is really yeah it's just it's it's it's it just sort of means there's this ever present risk that even when it's against our interests, we do it. Now, in poker, you can kind of see how someone plays. Yeah. You can say, oh, when they play aggressive, that means they actually don't have something. So over time, you can kind of get an idea of what this person's strategy is based off of how they're playing.

And you can read them, even though you don't have to read their cards. Yeah. And imagine if in poker you got to do things like, oh, I could build an intelligence agency and a diplomacy service that is actually going to learn to read you really well so that I have a better sense when you're bluffing and when you're. you're not. Right. That would be a smart thing for you to do, right? Of course. And that's what we do. Right. And then you've got to trust that intelligence is telling, is reading them correctly. And then you're making inferences based off the intelligence that then goes back to some of like the bias stuff.

It's like, are they just telling you the good intelligence because they know if they tell you bad or if they tell you like negative intelligence that you'll kill them or send them away or banish them. Yeah, that's really, really tricky. But your instinct is right that like, listen, if instead of just competing, if we're playing poker not for a pot, but like, uh, we'll, whichever one of us loses gets killed. Yeah. Right. Maybe we'd bluff and call, we do a little bit more cautious, right?

Yes. So, and that's true. That's probably why we try not to fight most of the time. Right. And as technology has advanced, I imagine wars have probably decreased because the cost is so insurmountable. Certainly things like nuclear weapons have that logic. Exactly. More cost is war than more we strive to avoid it.

But the other, there's another thing going on. And this is where like it's like this sort of meta uncertainty that is so important. But like, okay, suppose I'm bluffing against you. And every person I'm ever going to play poker with is like a standing around watching. And they don't know my cards. But if I successfully pull off a bluff that they assume that maybe I'm stronger than I am. I get to actually get a better deal with all of you in every next poker game I play. right? So I get to send a signal that people are, oh, like, he pulled off something pretty

miraculous right there. And now that's now, so I don't want to bluff because we die if we get this wrong. But if I'm successful, the next 50 games go my way. And that is, we live in a dangerous world. So if you're a gang or if you are a country, you like the United States right now is like backing this dangerous game. And it's because they're not looking just at this game with Russia. They're saying, oh, we have to play this game with Russia next year and the year after and the next regime. And we have to play this game with China.

And we have to play this game with Iran. We have to play this game with all these other people. And they're all watching how resolved are we? How much will we hold our coalition together? and if we can make a stand now against an international invasion, then we're in a better bargaining position for the next 40 years. That's interesting. So, and guess what?

We don't pay most of the cost. We're on check. Who's paying the cost? Those Ukrainians. We pay literally zero costs. I mean, other than money. Yeah, we're paying money and we're shipping over a bunch of tanks and whatever, not tanks, but soon.

Oh, wow. And that's like the best deal out in the world for America. Yeah. Like, oh, we're going to fight a proxy war and inject money into this other. other country, they're going to incur the cost of their city's getting destroyed, people dying, like the most horrific tragedy ever. And this is going to cost us, 80 billion, 150 billion. And for that money, we're basically spending 150 billion to then show every other superpower in the world, hey, don't fuck with us. Yeah. Wow. And it's even better, quote unquote, better than that

in the sense that Russia rattled a nuclear saber. They sort of committed nuclear blackmail. They said, let us get away with this because we've got the bombs. We're willing to use them. Right. And you get a different press release every day from like their ministry of whatever being like, this will be costly. It'll be the end of times. Blah, blah, blah.

And that's super serious. And I'm glad I'm not in the job of like deciding what to do against that. Me too. But here's the thing. Like if and a lot of people are like, holy shit, like we need to totally, we cannot go there. Like let's just find peace. And again, if you're thinking. thinking about this one game, that's the sensible thing to do. If you're thinking about the next 40

games, you're thinking, oh, if we do that, we've now given everybody else an incentive to get more nuclear weapons so they can do the same thing. So if we show that nuclear blackmail works, then we're going to get nuclear blackmail forever. Right. We're incentivizing this thing because people are seeing how we play. Yeah. And if we look weak or we look passive or we look like we have something that we'll fold on, then we'll fold everything. every time. And the funny thing is, is nobody frames the war in these terms as far as I know. Like in the public eye and the way the president gives speeches and so on and so on, they don't say, hey, we're doing this because we're thinking about the next 40 wars and improving our,

you know a little bit. Like we're sending a signal to China. You hear that. You don't hear about the we don't want everybody else to think they can get away with nuclear blackmail. I think it's like the secret agenda. They're like, well, we can say that. That sounds kind of nefarious and calculating and self-interested. And it's just a lot easier to say we are supporting the Ukrainian sort of revolutionaries who are fighting for liberty. So you create this sort of flowery, like literary narrative, which is like, oh, there's a battle between good and evil and there's a big bad guy and there are these good guys and Zelensky's the sweetest comedian. So we have to send the money to, you know, help the underdog. That is also true as it happens. So fortunately,

we don't have to sometimes, I mean, this country's been good at constructing that narrative. even when it's not true, right? Back when, like, the Mojin in Afghanistan were the good guys. And, of course, now they're the bad guys. But the... Right, yeah, I guess both can be true. Yeah, yeah. But in my mind, it's 100% because America, you know,

fights for the little guy and the underdog and we're supporting the little guy. So that's also true. And that's why it's great. We don't have to, like, make this terrible sacrifice of, like, let's support some, like, proxy war in another case and just have a bunch of people who don't care about kill. to one another in our own self-interest, which this, which is basically what happens, has happened a lot of the time last 50 or 60 years.

This is actually a chance where like it's like win-win. Like, we can a historic enemy send a signal to every future adversary, show that nuclear blackmail doesn't work and support like a freedom movement, freedom fighter movement. It's like a dream come true on some level. I mean, on the flip side of this is this like terrible, small, but like super frightening risk of escalation. Yeah. And so that's why I'm glad I'm not in this job. That's why it's actually not an easy choice.

Right. Because you're like, aha, we're probably playing this game with someone who's rational enough not to start a nuclear war. Inshallah. Probably. Exactly. You know, so probably it doesn't feel good enough. And so I think that's where people, I think smart people differ on. on this war.

Some people are more willing to like pay attention to those uncertain future payoffs, which might not materialize. Some people are more fearful of that nuclear escalation. And then some people are really suspicious of the U.S. military and political establishment and anything they're doing, maybe it's not such a good idea because some things haven't gone so well. So you could just come at this from different directions. Really just, and I think reasonable people can disagree for that reason.

That makes sense. So if, you know, I hear a lot of conservatives will be like, why are we sending money to these people? Yeah. We have all these problems in America. We have all this, you know, taxes, whatever else. And all of my tax money is going to this other country to go help these other people with a war that they got into. Why are we involved? And your answer would basically be something to the effect of like, you don't understand the greater, you know, 40 wars later play chess move that.

is happening. Yeah. Well, I mean, well, actually, a lot of, this is one place where there's a lot of conservatives who are totally supportive of this for these reasons. And so, so that I think both in the United States, both parties are actually quite split and conflicted on this. And even a lot of people who take a position, there's a lot of conflicted people or like, these are hard, hard things to like trade off. Right. So some of the opposition comes from people who, like I say, just take different positions. They're like, I'm going to focus more in the present, which means the present risk of nuclear war and how much this is costing us. And this whole future stuff of this paying off, like, that's a pipe dream, right?

Like that, you're telling me that, but you're totally exaggerating how that reputational effect. And they might be right. I don't think they're right, but they might be right. Or sometimes you have to play a political game. Like, oh, like the party in power is saying, you know, green light. So I'm going to say red light. But if they were saying red light, I'd say green light. There's a little bit of that that goes on.

Yeah, it's contrarianism for the sake of. But this is actually one issue where there's actually, I think, there's actually a lot of bipartisanship. We'll see. We'll see what happens now. But I think this is one place to agree. Yeah. So now these five reasons why we're going to war and the reasons why we would sort of overcome

the costliness of war are really, really interesting. But we only did four. I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, I don't know. Well, we should get the last one out of the way. I got excited. Yeah, no, okay.

So we said, okay, why do we ignore that? Because leaders ignore the costs of war because they might have some ideological payoff because they might be biased because there's this uncertainty. And then the last one is this thing about unreliability, which is just don't, there's a deal to be made. And I just don't think, I think you're going to renege in future. I think that like something will happen next year or in 10 years and you're going to, you're going to, you're going to bruneg on this deal and therefore it just unravels now.

Why bother making this deal? And the classic example, and I don't think we need this to explain the war in Ukraine. The classic example, and people use this to understand World War I, World War II, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Almost every big long war in history often has this logic, which says you're going to be way more powerful in future. Right. So you're in 1913, you're Russia, and you're just going to be this monster in future because your economy, everything's going on, military power, all these other things. Or you're Saddam Hussein in the 90s and early 2000s, and there's a small chance you're going to get a nuclear weapon.

Even if you've stopped your nuclear weapons program now, you could restart it in secret, and in five years you have the bomb, and then the tables have totally turned, because now you'll be able to do nuclear blackmail. That's a lot of leverage. Right. So something could happen, maybe just a small probability, but something could happen that makes you super powerful.

So my choice is try to make a deal with you that you won't do that or invade and lock in my advantage now. And so people call this the preventative war, right? That says, I'm just going to, but just lock in my advantage while I'm strong. And so that's not what happened here, right? Like Ukraine wasn't going to like, there wasn't the story where Russia had to eat Ukraine for lunch because Ukraine. was going to eat Russia for dinner. That wasn't happening. But now Ukraine was like absorbed into NATO and like they were able to get a lot of like

collective power from the West. That would obviously. So that's right. So I think you're totally under. And that's why like why did this war break out now? Well, I don't know. Maybe it's idiosyncratic because Russia gambled. But but, um, but maybe like there is a little bit of this now or never logic and lock

in our advantage because you can make an argument that a year ago Russia was at as like peak leverage. versus Ukraine because Ukraine, not only was getting closer to Europe and NATO, but they were actually, like all of these Turkish drones that were making a difference. They were buying those hand over fist, all right, and the Russians do about that. And the Neptune missiles that were like, have sunk some ships in the Black Sea. They were building those. And the Russians knew about that too. Yeah, that's an issue. And so, and they were like, oh, this is just going to get harder. So, and Russia who, Russia is just sort of like, the economy galloped ahead for 15 years.

And then about five or six years ago, it just flatlined. And they were like, oh, so now we're not getting more economically powerful. So there is a sort of now or never logic that probably made it not inevitable, but tempting. We're plateauing. Our neighbor country is growing a lot. Yeah. And growing really quickly. I guess this is like, you know, back in the day, like a king might like,

kill the child of his nemesis or something because he has more power than the kid. Yeah. But the kid will eventually want to have more power than him and his family. So let's just get him now. Because I want that kid to commit to the deal that he's going to let me stay in power once he's powerful. Right. And but he can't.

Right. And there's no like Super King, right? There's no, in the UN Security Council to like keep that deal. Mm-hmm. So he has a commitment problem. And that's where this term comes. And so it's like a bad. term but it's like so fundamental because people use it to understand like so much

violence of course and so so that's sort of like a common theme in the book which is that listen all of this like autocracy and these psychological causes like these ideologies and biases are really really important for understanding war but as human beings are really well programmed to like notice that and are as armchair you know, you know, I don't know, what the war version of sportscasters, armchair generals, right? As armchair generals, we're really good at recognizing those.

And then there are these subtler strategic things like uncertainty and reputation or this commitment problem that even if we understand it when we play poker, we kind of forget it when we're analyzing what's going on the world around us. Yeah, that's really interesting. Has this research changed your opinion

on like patriotism? like you know obviously we're told a narrative about patriotism and patriotism as a tool to sort of galvanize the masses to then go do some type of action against some other country yeah knowing sort of like this framework of like look this is going to be costly it's not going to help the country it's going to help very few people at the top for you know xyz reason does it change your relationship with this sort of like I don't even know how to describe patriotism like this literary tool to then get people to hurt themselves? I mean, okay, so there's a beautiful thing and a terrible thing about something like patriotism.

Okay, so on the one hand, so in one way it can make peace and one way it can make war. All right. So what does patriotism do? So, you know, before like maybe you were like a, you were from this ethnic group, I'm from that ethnic group. Like so you're Irish American. I'm like Irish or actually here's some better idea I was Anglo-Canadian yeah and you were French Canadian yeah and our families were both in Montreal yes all right and there's literally a dividing line in the city most people don't know this right but they're like but but in the and and everybody in one

side is English everyone on the other side was French that describes like a lot maybe in the US it's like if you ever watch gangs of New York by Martin Scorsese right you have the Irish gangs and the nativists right and so there's just or or we can just just go to sub-sastern Africa or Eastern Europe, we could just two different groups. And if we start to think of ourselves no longer as French versus English or natives versus Irish or Kikuyu versus Luo, and instead we think of ourselves as Canadians or as Americans or as Kenyans, we think of ourselves as nationalists with patriotism, now all of a sudden, I care about you.

and if and I share an identity with you. And so if I kill you or my group kills people from your group, I feel like some pain. Like I don't want that to have. Plus we've like intermingled our economies, we trade. So by creating patriotism and nationalism, I like quell some of the interneasing conflict in my country. Yeah. Okay. So it's pacifying.

That's great. So now all of a sudden the whole country can unifying. And it's not bloods and crips and all these different gangs all warring. That's great. And so or. because my leaders chose, or we maybe like a butterfly flapped its wings and we all sort of started to feel American, or more likely my leaders chose their propaganda to construct these national identities to bring us together.

So that they can attack somebody else, probably. But some leaders do the opposite. And they're like, oh, if I want to get ahead, I have to make you forget that you are Kenyan and make you think that you are Luo and the enemy or the Kikuyu. Or I have to make you remind you that you're Hindu and the enemy or the Muslims. Or I have to make you think that you're white or black and that's more important than being American. Or I have to make you think that being French is more important than being Canadian. And that would be beneficial.

And that gets me because listen, it's actually not in your interest to go to war with like the other group. But guess what? I get a payoff as like the elite. Right. Again, I'm like this unchecked leader. So what do unchecked leaders do throughout history? They like try to actually amp up like ethnic hatred, that institutionalized riot machine that we talked about that just stoke the anger.

And, and they've all done it. That was like, that was Hitler's brilliance, evil genius over radio. That was the Rwandan, uh, uh, Hutus. Right. Evil genius, also over radio. All of British colonialism in Africa, essentially. It was a similar sort of playbook, like, hey, let's side with the minority. Let's put two ethnic warring groups in the same country, even though there's no reason

for them to be in the same country when we cut things up. And then they'll war. And then that conflict will then give us more power. But what's worse is then you use the tools of propaganda to accentuate people's loathing of the other group rather than make them feel together. Okay. So some leaders might make this estimation that this infighting will actually be better for me. Yeah.

And then... Or no, or they just say they're the leader of that group and they're like, if I'm the leader, if so, if I'm Hitler and I sort of, I'm not trying to get, eventually I get people really mad at France, but mostly I'm focused on the internal enemy. To start. Or if I'm like a Hindu nationalist in India, like I want, I'm trying to mobilize people to go riot and kill Muslims. I see.

So you're not saying some type of like greater governmental tyrant. Right. They wouldn't necessarily want that in fighting. Exactly. But it would be the general or the leader of that small fact. that then is trying to absorb power from the greater whole. Yeah. So now let's take it to like the January 6th insurrections or something.

Like there's a way in which and like this resurgent white nationalism in just like in, you know, 30 years ago there was sort of a resurgent black nationalism. Those ethnic leaders try to in a somewhat self-interested way get everybody sort of to quell all these things. We don't call patriotism because it's not about the nation, but it's a certain kind of in-group pride that's about the ethnicity, right? We ascribe patriotism to countries, but you could have very localized patriotism. That is like, you know, I ride with black people, I ride with Hindus, and that is effectively patriotism. Yeah, but people would might call it if it's, if it's, they call it ethno-nationalism or something like that. Tribalism is another good one. Like,

we have lots of words. for it. It's effectively the same thing. Yeah, religious fanaticism. So all of the way, like humans are really groupish. Of course. Right. And so, so that's like of these three things that I mentioned, there's sort of these

five causes, that's one of these things that fits in that middle group of like these psychological biases where a leader, a calculating leader can try to exploit our groupish tendencies as human beings to hate the enemy. And thus, because if they decide they want to go to war, their problem is, oh, now I have to bring the whole country. It's against the group's interest to go to war. It's in my interest. Now I have to convince them to go along with me. I can do that by paying them.

I can do that by pointing a gun at their head. Or I can do the cheapest thing of all, which is convince them that this is like the right thing to do and get, you know, I can just basically propagandize them. Right. And so propaganda is great. If you're good at that, that's like great because it's cheaper than paying them. And it's more effective than pointing a gun at their head. Do all the great tyrants and military leaders all have good propaganda? Is it possible to have one without the other?

I mean, I think it's like a big ingredient of success. Like obviously we know Hitler's story with Goebbels and that so much of his success and convincing an entire, you know, country that one ethnic group is the problem. and then all these other countries, the problem is by way of great propaganda. Yeah. So is it possible to, you know, have a great tyrant with bad propaganda? I'm trying to think like of a counter example. Okay, so like the first yes and no. So the first conflict I worked in, I mean, a lot of people have heard about Invisible Children

in this big movement, which was bringing. Yeah, exactly, Joseph Coney. Yeah. Because there was this really effective sort of social media and popular sort of student movement in the United States to bring awareness to this 20-year war northern Uganda. Just before that sort of invisible children coney thing broke out, I began working there by accident. By accident. Well, so the story, I met, I met a woman in an internet cafe in Nairobi because it took 10

minutes for every email to load. And she was a humanitarian worker working in northern Uganda. And in the middle of the war, she was working. again like sort of reintegrating child soldiers because this guy at coney was abducting tens of thousands of kids in order to try to build an armed movement so he was terrible at propaganda so he just had to force people he was that I'm going to do this at the point of a gun I see yeah when if you don't have a good propaganda you got to be more brutal more exploitative and he was and so he's the worst of that and so I found I wasn't so much said by accident I went

there because I followed her there because I was interested in her we've been married 15 years have two kids. Oh, really? And they've written papers together and like, and, and like work on on conflict. So this is how I became, uh, this is, this is why I study war. Oh, that's so cool. Because of your wife. Yeah, because. Don't tell people that. The reason I study war is because of this woman I married. You're like, ugh, that doesn't sound good. The, uh, so, so, no, that's my, like, like, origin story. Because I wasn't, I didn't know, like, it didn't, it was so far away. It's always so distant. And, and then I was there. And I was like, oh, this. This is like the worst thing in the world.

Yeah. And like how could I, everything else I cared about just sort of paled in comparison. The stakes are so hot. Yeah. It's just unthinkable. But so he was an example of someone who was ridiculously terrible at propaganda. So he wasn't like a terribly successful like war leader in many respects. He still managed to maintain like as an insurgency for 20 years.

you can you can manage it and a lot of African civil that you know there's a you can kind of there's a whole bunch of civil we think about people like to paint African Civil Wars with like the same brush of a bunch of we have this image that mostly comes from places like Liberia of these like drugged out child soldiers you know carrying AK-47s who are like kidnapped or forced that come from like either the Conies or like the Liberias of the world and those are true there's several cases like that and then there are a whole bunch of other African art movements that were super ideological driven, that the propaganda and the ideology was very effective. And those were the much more disciplined forces that didn't commit all these ridiculous abuses

or fewer. Right, because they had good enough propaganda that they could convince people here and not convince people with a gun. Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. So there are examples, but I guess the more successful you're at propaganda, probably the more successful you are at war, if only because it's cheaper. Yeah, that makes sense.

I mean, I would just show I spent yesterday at West Point. which is our premier military academy for the Army. And it was really funny. And they have an economics department, political science department there. And I was chatting with them. And I was fascinated by, I was asking them, okay, like, obviously the U.S. military is really, really good at this. All organizations are good at this.

Google is good at this. We can either pay you wages or we can try to make you value working for the company and doing the things that the person at the top of the company values. And it's cheaper to do that. So for example, I think I even have it in my pocket here. They have this thing in West Point. They hand out these coins all the time. They gave me one for being a visitor.

Can I say that? Okay, so you get a coin. So that's, I don't know what coin that is. That's like some welcome to be like honored speaking guest at West Point. Yeah. And you get coins for everything in, you know, they hand out all of these awards all the time within the army. If you're, you can get Ranger tabs. And I didn't know what that was.

How do you get a Rangers tab? Because I'm a little bit ignorant about it. Because I work on Civil Wars and stuff. And they're like, oh, the way you get a Rangers tab in the Army is you basically go do, you basically go live in the woods by yourself for like 60 days and show that you like can handle it. And if you don't get that, like nobody really, nobody at your like officer level and beyond. And none of your people below you, maybe people above you don't really respect you. And so there are all of these rewards that are like little things that they put on your uniform or coins or because we want to get people to do something that's really, really hard and put your life on the line every day.

You can't pay for them to do each money. Well, we do. We paid them not bad, but they don't get paid very well. But I mean, you can't pay them for each little thing that they do. It would just be exorbitantly expensive to try to incentivize them through money. Yeah. And it's actually not even clear that money is the best incentive. the time, right? Because you get sometimes perverse incentives. You don't want, like,

armies that are motivated by moneymaking end up having all these guys who go and like basically start stealing the diamonds or the lumber or whatever, running their criminal businesses. So you want to motivate people with these other like non-monetary benefits like coins or honor or status. And it's not just, you know, I'm picking on the army here, but armies are become really good at it. Right. This is prevalent in basically every feature of society. Some type of like external status syndicator to say, hey, I'm someone that did something great. I'm someone worth respecting. And you're able to cut out all of the, you don't have to prove or explain yourself. It is just clear, hey, I'm on Twitter and I have a blue check. I'm on Instagram.

I'm a blue check. It's an external status indicator. I mean, there's probably, listen, if you're, so me, I'm an academic, an economist, like a PhD is partly about teaching you economics. A PhD is partly about socializing you to value a whole set of things that are good for the group or good for science, but actually are totally against your interests. And it totally changes your values. Can you give me an example? Okay, so, you know, if you're, if you care about getting published in five journals. Yes. And all of your status comes from getting published in these five journals and a handful of other status indicators. And people live or die and stress out and like literally by trying to pursue these things, which, you know,

Before I came in, I didn't care about that. Like, I was like, oh, I'm interested in, like, helping people. I want to do social change. And I think I can do social change, the research and knowledge and, like, trial and error, finding new things, finding ways to solve violence. And I can do that in the academy. And I do that, too. So I'm intrinsically motivated for the right reasons.

And, you know, these weird five status indicators also on some level keep me up at night because I've been successfully socialized. And if I work for Google, I'm sure there's some set of, like, things that I, There's some sort of things that consume me about my status that, I don't know, what is it if you run a, what's like, how have you been socialized in this world? Like with comedy, like, one of the ways is like getting like a Netflix special. Okay. So you get a Netflix special. And, you know, you can get a Hulu special.

You can get like a Showtime special and HBO special. And they carry, in my opinion, at least, they carry less status than a Netflix special. That is like the gold star. So you tell people you're on Netflix and they go, oh, wow, you're funny. you're successful, you're worth doing business with. Yeah. You know, obviously here we have existed in a different way that's sort of like rogue. Yeah.

You know, obviously my buddy, Andrew, uh, is infamous for posting things directly on YouTube, which is like very taboo. Don't do that back in the day. Um, and he was like basically the first person that really like promote his content on YouTube. Yeah. And went around and it's kind of circumnavigated this systemic like paradigm of like, it has to be on Netflix, Netflix, Netflix.

Yeah. But comedians are conditioned to be like, get on Netflix. you're good. Everything else is irrelevant. And now there's like this rogue undercurrent where people are going on YouTube and going directly to the audience that is almost like at odds with the system. So it's creating like this weird cultural paradigm. It's very different than getting, you know, a Purple Heart or a Ranger badge or whatever. Yeah. Well, what's the interesting thing about and true, so we have all these things, but also like me getting like a great journal article, are you getting a Netflix special is status enhancing not just because it's symbolic, but also because it's

actually is like a thing, right? And the genius about organizations that come up with like the coins, like the coin is totally useless. You can't trade that. Like you know, it's just a coin and they're handy to you. And then you feel like proud because you get, or the metals or things like they're kind of, they're almost purely symbolic. Yeah.

And they're kind of free to give out. And everybody in the army will tell you that. Oh yeah, we love these incentive systems because they're free. Right. I can either pay you wages or I can pay you in these like fake coins and I do both, but I can pay you lower wages because I give you these coins. So like I'm now I'm all constantly on the look at it in my life. Like what are the things that I'm doing for fake coins? Yeah, exactly. And so I'm curious like in comedy or the podcast world, like are there like fake coins? Yeah, exactly. Well, like with comedy,

people will forego more money somewhere else or like if your goal as a comedian is to tour and do a lot of people, you know, and you get to sell a lot of tickets going through YouTube, you might actually get more views than if you go through Netflix. Yeah. But Netflix says, hey, we're the gold star. Yeah. So you might get a smaller audience. Yeah. But you'll have. our cosine. Yeah. And you'll get some money up front. But if you were to break someone down, be like, look, you'll make more money here in the long run if you go this route than if you go this route. Yeah. But you can't tell your parents. And it's actually funny. There's like a cultural thing that happens also. Yeah. Where I think that some like comedians that come from

cultures where their parents really value external status indicators. Like I have friends that might be like Indian or Asian. And their parents really value like, you know, some type of like newspaper write up. Yeah. Yeah. And so getting a newspaper. ever write up to them is worth more than, you know, selling a bunch of tickets and actually doing the thing. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. No, there's all these status things. So actually, I tell a story in the book because a friend of mine did the study, he was like, okay, uh, okay, economists sometimes get too rational and they like, they forget that like we're real humans and we're motivated by cookie things like this. Yes. And like status, right? We're basically all chimpanzees.

and we are just and there's and there's a big line of chimpanzees and we're like we're like grooming the chimpanzee just in line in front of us and we all know who the top chimpanzee in our world is or it's super hierarchical and all of our self-worth comes from where we are in the line of chimpanzees

and and and and what he showed is he sort of the equivalent in the World War II of the coin was in for the German pilots German fighter pilots was a right up in this big magazine. And what he showed is that suppose, you know, some third guy, not you and me, but some third guy who's a fighter pilot gets honored in that magazine, but we didn't say train together. It doesn't really change my behavior. But suppose you and I train together.

So I really am competition with you, and that's how I define myself worth. And you mount up some kills and you get written up in this magazine. Well, what do I do the next? He shows them the data that I go and I get that many more kills. Yeah, and you go harder and you make more risks. But the problem, exactly, the problem with making more kills is that you're probably going to get killed. And so if you get written up and you're my peer, then I'm like 25% more likely to die next year, next month.

Because I take, so that's how much we care about status. Like it's just sort of to point out how bonkers we are that status competition and these coins and these honors are so important that we will like, raise our risk of death by dramatic amounts just for that little endorphin boost. Yeah, of course. So I mean like clothing and fashion are similar ways where like if I have these cool pair of sneakers, that is an external indicator that I have money and that I know cool things and I have connections. Yeah.

And that, you know, I'll spend my last paycheck, the last dollars that I have in order to indicate this status. Yeah. And it makes no sense that it's not rational. Like you can't like put into a quantifiable economic model because you would think like, oh, human beings will spend money on food before they spend it on shoes. Yeah. But that's not necessarily the case if you're able to attach all of these intangibles to it. Yeah.

And so to bring it back to why we fight, well, I think at the end of the day, we fight because for the most part, our leaders are finding it in their interest to either ignore or pay those costs. And then some of them are really successful at bringing the rest of us along. Yes. By convincing us that it's in our interest, even if it's not. Okay. So I really like these five these five. Yeah.

Can we go through some different wars in history and you kind of explain how the reasons manifest? This is a pop quiz, okay? I don't know if you expected to be on the spot here. Well, no, this is the problem with writing a book on All Wars is then I get like pop quizzes and then sometimes I get and then sometimes someone's like, what about Myanmar? And they're like, look, I don't know what that is. Exactly.

No, so I called Stump the Chump. Okay, cool. All right. I'm going to use some easy ones. Revolutionary War. Okay. That seemed like a really benefited America. Mm-hmm.

So that's boom, already breaking your whole hyperchievous. here. And yeah, George Washington is a great guy. Maybe he was doing it to land speculate a little but he wanted to help me. So what are the five reasons? Why did the Revolutionary War happen? And how would this fit within your framework? Right. So, yeah, actually, we never ask the question, like, why didn't they just compromise? Like, basically, Britain said, look, you guys are not covering the cost of your own defense. So we're just going to tax a bit because you guys need to pay for your own defense. This is. is super expensive. And we're going to let you self-governed locally, but there's certain things

you can't self-govern. Right. So you're going to have a little bit less sovereignty. You're going to pay a little bit more taxes. And by the way, we're like a tyrannical superpower. And there's very little chance you'll win a war. So you should accept that deal. Yeah. And so our forefathers accepted that deal and the Australians accepted that deal. And everybody else in the whole British Empire was like, yeah. I don't like it. But. But okay, you know. And if you're paying for the defense, you can't be in charge of like who you're instigating with because you could start a war and then we have to pay to help you.

Yeah. And so like there's two answers. You know, the answer, you know, there's a little bit of answer as well, maybe, listen, it's not a coincidence that all the founding fathers and all the revolutionary leaders had a financial stake in independence because they were the ones who bade, who bore the burden of the taxes. And all the loyalists. you know, we're recording this in New York. New York was a hotbed of loyalism to the British crown.

They stood to benefit from the crowns. A lot of people took sides based on their economic interest. But actually, fundamentally, that's, I think, a bit of a side show. I don't think that George Washington was a selfish, you know, self-enriching tyrant. I think actually he was, they were all principled. They were super, super principled. They said, no way. Liberty, sovereignty is indivisible.

They were idyllogs. They were fanatical. They were fundamentalists, but they were fundamentalists about liberty and sovereignty. And so this tyrannical superpower said, here's a compromise that you have to make some sacrifices. And they said, no way, that's repugnant. And they act, if you go back to the writings of John Adams or some of these other founding fathers, they actually talk about they had to construct slowly over decades this idea of liberty in the American people and that the true revolution, I think he wrote, was in the minds of the

American people. The true revolution wasn't the fighting. The true revolution was the minds to say, no way. And actually, this is to me, like, that's what's happening in Ukraine. This is exactly the story we talked about earlier. Like the Ukrainians, like the Belarusian said, okay. And the Russian people went, yeah, we don't like it, but we'll do with you. And the Kazakhstan, and it's, Georgians, everyone. Everybody's like, for the most part, well, we don't like it, but, and the Ukrainians said, not having it. And just like the Americans said not having it.

And so when does that happen? I don't know. I don't know if we have like a good predictor. But, and that to me, like one of the most famous books in the American Revolution and one of my favorite tree, it's called the ideological origins of the American Revolution. It was basically the idea that we became stubborn. I say we because now I'm an American. Welcome to the team.

Thank you. We became like stubborn ideologues. And then won the war partly by luck. You know, the French came in at the right time, which wasn't obviously going to happen. Got lucky in many occasions. The British made a bunch of strategic errors. In the metaverse. Yeah.

How many of those times does Britain crush the American rubber? Probably, you know, I'm far from the expert on the American Revolution, but my, like, my judgment is like more often than not Britain wins. Right. But, you know, we don't know. We don't know that. Yeah, of course. So of the things in the framework. So, like, there's an incentive for the leaders and the founding fathers, you know, obviously individually.

Yeah. It satisfies the intangibles because, like, they have this ideology that they've subscribed to. Yeah. I think we get most of the way there with those. two. I don't, you know, we could use the other three. Okay. We could say that there was bias that everybody was like delusional over optimistic with their chances at winning. I don't know if that was true. I've never seen that. There was a lot of uncertainty. Like actually, you know, King George is like, oh, very far away. It takes a long time for messages. So probably like, was,

was the British Parliament sort of did they overestimate their chances at crushing this? And did they underestimate the resolve? Maybe. So there was some uncertainty. Um, so, that adds to it, but my own view is this is really fundamentally was about this ideological intransigence. I mean, Americans are kind of famously ideologically intransigent in a lot of things. I think that's a lot of our wars. Right. Was any part of Britain trying to preemptively, kind of in the way Putin was preemptively, you know, striking in Ukraine before they got too powerful? Was Britain like, oh, these colonies are going to get a lot more power and they're going to become more unified.

Yeah. So let's send some troops in there to start this war going now before they get too powerful. That's a good question. Nothing I've read tells that story. Okay. Which isn't to say it wasn't part of it. I think, yeah, I think, you know, this is like 1776, right?

This is like before the Industrial Revolution. Like the idea that like economies could just explode in growth and that America would become like an economic superpower. It was just unimaginable. Yeah, the rate of growth. So like even looking at like resources. Yeah. Like obviously, like if I'm a colonial leader, I'm looking at all my colonies to be like,

oh, all of these places are pumping money into our systems. Yeah. And America is this giant piece of land that inevitably will make us a lot of money. Yeah. Is that part of also their calculation to say we want to control the money, power, and influence of this colony? Yeah, absolutely. Okay.

Also, you have to think, well, they're like, well, if we let these guys do it, what are all the other colonies going to do? So there is always this sort of signaling thing that you're sort of, you play, okay, we're playing a poker game with America. Yeah. But the Canadians, the canyons, the Jamaicans, like the, you know, it's like, you know, the Australians like this is the sun never sets on this empire. Yeah, of course.

Everyone's watching. And so we, so there might have been an incentive to say, let's clamp down on these fanatists just in case, you know, the Indians or the Canadians start to get uppity too. That makes sense. Okay. All right. That satisfies that one. So you pass that one.

Civil War, American Civil War. I'm like, look, that seems like a noble fight. I'm like, look, we are liberating, you know, slaves in America. We are ending slavery. This seems like generally a good thing, a just war that in the long run had a great benefit to America. Obviously, it didn't end, you know, systemic. will you, you know, systemic racial issues in America. But the ending of that institution is a net positive for us.

How does that fit in your framework? Right. So, well, it wasn't a net positive for everybody, right? One side was willing to fight because they were these unchecked leaders, right? The Confederacy, you know, the majority of people in their territory were either enslaved or were freeborn blacks. But that was like a really, that's a, to them, this was a super frightening prospect. They're like, oh, my goodness.

Like, so I don't know what percentage, 67, 80, whatever percent, if we end slavery, we're outnumbered. And so, and actually, we don't know how to solve this problem. Even the people on the Confederate side who are like, yeah, I don't like this institution. They're like, but what do we do? Like, what's the alternative? Because the alternative to like, let them be free? Is the alternative let them organize?

Is the alternative let them vote? Like, that's if you are. a white nationalist or just whatever self-interested, that does not look good for you, right? So even people that, because obviously I look at like a slaveholder, they have an obvious financial interest in keeping this institution. But the majority of people in the South were not slaveholders. Exactly. And so their motivation might not have been financial, but it might have been social to say,

you know, if that person is a white nationalist, they don't want this new like slave class to integrate and have all the same rights, etc. Yeah, yeah. Even if you're... So it's an ideological opposition. Exactly. Right. And so even if in this world or even if you found who's not actually racist in the South at this time, right?

And even if these people, they're still like, oh, this group is in opposition to me. And they're in the majority. So if we don't maintain this institution as unpalatable as maybe I think it is, and these people exist, right? And so there were lots of, there are lots of Southerners and, is trying to come up with solutions. There were a whole back to Africa movements. Right. That's how like, so I worked in Liberia. Liberia is kind of an American colony. Right. Which was sort of an experiment in a back to Africa movement. Right. And it was like, it was where a bunch of like

basically black intellectuals and free blacks and a bunch of white racists came, found common ground to say, we don't want you here and you don't want to be here. So why don't we help you colonize a part of Africa that frankly, you weren't from. Right. And then if that works, we'll just send as many people back as possible. And that's a solution to this problem we have that comes about from us not wanting to live with you. I see. Right. And so one side just, one side to lose because they are this unchecked elite who also happen to be ideologically racist.

So they both have like a private economic reason to want to preserve this institution. And they just, to them, this loathsome idea of a question. of the races. That gets us there. That gets us to why they don't compromise. Right. And so then why doesn't the North compromise? And actually there were, I think it was called the Cringtonin compromise.

There were a whole bunch of things suggested to avoid a war that sort of says, well, what if we restrict slavery? What if we phase it? What if we do this? What if we do that to try to find some way to present? reserve it and have it gradually fade out. What if we do that alongside a back to African movement? Like all these things that were an attempt to compromise. And I think one, maybe there's a commitment problem and none of those. So there was a little bit of commitment problem.

The North is definitely, like now the industrial revolution is starting. Now people can sort of see on the horizon, oh boy, like we used to be the money makers in this country in the south. And there's a sense of that, oh, the world has changed. Right. And you got these factories of North that are pulling the GDP. Right. So we could make a deal. We could make this compromise, but you're going to renege in the future. You're going to renege both because you'll be more powerful and also because a lot of your ideologically committed against this thing we're doing called slavery. So there was also a bit of a commitment problem there. And then I think some northerners, I think we all like to think that it was everybody, right? But some northerners, We're also ideologically committed to eradicating human slavery at all costs. Right. And so they were willing to fight at any price potentially. Got, so they weren't willing to compromise in any capacity.

I don't think they were the majority, certainly before the war. And then I think maybe in the process of fighting, that became a position that sort of hardened and people ideologically came together. I'm not an expert on the Civil War, so this is all speculative, but my sense from a distance is like at least some Americans were. And of course, we honor those and we all like to think that that's what we would have done in that situation. Of course. Yeah, this is the World War II thing. Right, right. I would have never been a Nazi. Exactly. All right. If you were a 20-year-old in, you know, Germany, I, yeah, yeah, there's a chance you probably would have done when most people

did. Exactly. And so, so that's my sense. And so it's a good example of where, you know, and so here's the thing. Like somebody could take a totally different position on the Civil War and say, no, no, no, you don't know what you're talking about. And some civil war historian listening, you know, all the armchair civil horror historians around there could say, no, no, no, it's this. This guy hasn't read these five books, which I haven't. It's actually this. I would just say 99 times out of 100, that just fits into one of the other five reasons. Gotcha. Because the five reasons, this isn't like a thing where we're saying, like, believe my theory, everybody else is wrong. That's not like that, what kind of book this is. This is a book saying

there's a million reasons out of there, out there. It's totally confusing. to the average person, even to people like me who are specialists. And I'm now just going to like organize it for you. I'm going to show you there are different kinds. They're like common logics that kind of become evident when you see them this way. And so now you can kind of like organize this mess in your mind. Also, occasionally people will tell you some reason for war. And then it's like, oh, that doesn't fit in.

And that's your first sign that it's actually probably not while you're fighting. So a good example is I'd say two good examples What I would A great one actually is poverty A lot of people say poor people fight Like why is African fighting? Well it's very poor

And that makes sense man I'm like scarcity You know if we are in a tribe And there's only a certain amount of food To feed one of the tribes I'll kill you Because either I kill you and get the food Or I die anyway

And it's so persuasive that That was going to be my dissertation For my PhD show that. And then I failed. I got all the data on all the places that fought and didn't fought. And I got all the numbers on poverty. And then I got all the things that shocked that poverty, like made some places suddenly rich or suddenly poor. So you produce, your whole country produces cocoa and then the cocoa market bottoms out or you're based on oil and all of a sudden oil goes up or goes down. That's a great way to sort of show that's, now I'm going to

be able to show how poverty leads to conflict. Exactly. Totally not true. As it turns out, big fat, not quite zero, but close to zero. That seems crazy to me. So, and I, so I was like, what the hell is going on? And it's because I'd forgotten the very basic thing we started with, which is that war's costly, and there's better ways to settle our differences. War is the worst way.

So, so here's the thing. We're fighting over a territory. Remember we're fighting over oil, right? that oil suddenly gets much more valuable, right? So you'd think we're going to fight over it. But actually, it's so valuable now that we don't want to fight it. We'd still rather split it without fighting and both make more money than fighting over it, destroying some of it, and then getting all of it, right?

I can actually get more money by splitting it than like by spending a gazillion dollars to like get a 50-50 shot at it. And it's just sort of like basic, you know, investment advice. You say it's basic, but it seems kind of counterintuitive. Right. And so I'm curious, are our brains equipped to deal with the counterintuity of that example? Or do we need strategy and analysis in order to come to that conclusion? Well, we must need it because I managed to get like through three years of a PhD and like dozens of smart people advising me.

Yeah. Like who thought this was like probably true and a good idea and then only to discover that it's not true and then having to reflect on why that is. So yeah, yeah. So we aren't equipped. A lot of these things are counterintuitive. And here's the thing. When you're really poor and war is costly, you've actually got a lot more to lose because like suddenly if it costs like 20% of your income to fight, well, that was the 20% that

was like keeping you or your kids alive. So here's what is true, though. And here's where the intuition is correct. It's actually in a poor country, once we decide to fight for other reasons, for one of these five reasons, once our leaders decide to take us to war. In poor countries, it's easier to recruit because the wage is cheaper, right? So actually, it's easier for me to mobilize you. Also, if there's a bunch of poor people and a bunch of rich people, I might also be able

to get you ideologically motivated to hate the rich people. Okay. Okay. So poverty might make wars more violent and go on longer because it's easier to recruit. That seems to be true. The more desperate people you have, the easier it is to mobilize them. Right. And so our wars are longer and we pay more attention to them.

but they weren't more likely to break out. Right. So, so, so, so like wars and poor places. So poverty doesn't launch wars, but once a war is launched, poverty might help sustain it. Okay. And so we just needed like, not only like theory and like some careful thinking, but like hard data to hit us in the face and show that that was not true

by systematically looking at all the times we fought and all the times we didn't fight before we could like realize it. But I mean like class revolutions. Yeah. Those are almost certainly created and sustained through inequality and poverty, right? Right. But most of most underclasses don't revolt. Right.

Right. Like the Russians are not rising up. There have been some protests from time to time. But there hasn't been a violent revolution in Russia for 105 years. Right. So, so despite a ton of oppression. you know another I mean a lot of people like if you sort of said to somebody name the other than like what's going in Russia right now name the most important conflict in the world some people would say Israel Palestine right well that is a dispute that's gone back 100 years about roughly 15 of those years have been violent so 85 out of the 100 years they've just loathed one another in peace

I mean, peace in the sense of really low-scale. There's always lots of low-scale violence. Putting that aside is that's a different phenomenon. I'm talking like intense, super-costing warfare. You don't count that as war necessarily, a skirmish between three or five people. Exactly. That's, and that, and skirmishing is like a way of sort of like figuring out how strong the other side is or little mistakes and then it's over quickly. So they've only been at what you could think of as war for maybe 15, let's say 15 of those hundred years, depending on where you want to cut off the number of deaths or violence.

And then within those 15 years, most of those years, it's like three weeks long. Right. It's like Yom Kippur. Right. Is it the Seven days war? Seven days war is a good one. But even just some of the violence in a lot of the violent uprisings, the first, the second and topata, the actual, even what happened, I think it was, I lose track of time because it just

seems like a lifetime has happened in the last few years. But just in the last few years, the last couple years, there was a, you know, a two or three week flare up of rockets and invasions and levellings and building, but it was three weeks long. Why? Because it's really horrifically costly. So, like, I don't know the number, but you add up all the weeks in the last 100 year. And of those, like 5,200 weeks, how many weeks have they actually been at war? I mean, too many.

But most of them not. So that's like the sense. And even, so even there, they're not fighting most of the time. And then once you realize that, I think the smartest people who have like studied this war have sort of said, oh, what's special about those weeks? And that's like the right way to approach these things. And we don't do that instinctually. I think, you know, I certainly, I was like managed to like be prepared enough to write a book about it. And I didn't even realize it until like I was deep into the book.

That there's like there's something happening on specific weeks. weeks that are triggering week-long conflicts that then level up. Yeah. So, for example, like, there's a woman at Northwestern names Wendy Pearlman, and her argument, which I find super persuasive. So there's lots of reasons those weeks are different. Her argument is like, look, like, it's not as simple as two sides, this are early versus Palestinians. Both sides are like weak coalitions of different interests. And, you know, on the Palestinian side, there's like Fatad, Hamas, and there's these splinter groups and the Israeli side, there's the right, and the center of the left, all these

things, right? And so it's, and so sometimes they manage to hold it together. And then other times some Yahoo fires a rocket or some splinter group or some faction says, no, no, no, we're not going to stick with the program. We have our own ideological or private interest. We're unchecked or ideological. And so we're going to launch a war. We're going to launch a fight because the coalition couldn't hold, Yasser Arafat or whoever's at the top just couldn't keep the people in line. Or same thing on the other side. And so it's that, it's those little splinter groups. Those are not so much the unchecked leaders at the top,

but the unchecked leaders in the middle who are then spoiling the piece for everybody else. And how they get weapons, I guess, is right. That's a different combo, but. Well, and then a lot of these cases, maybe not this case perfectly, but a lot of these cases, if there's some third country that's like saying, hey, hey, hey, how would I funnel you the splinter faction weapons in order to destabilize this? I don't pay the cost of war and I have some interest, which was either the Soviet Union of the U.S. government for like 40 years.

That's another reason. You can fracture these groups. So I think it helps us understand these conflicts a little better. And then you're like, oh, if that's the problem, well, then maybe I'm just going to approach that conflict totally differently in terms of how we actually try to construct a peace. Right. Yeah, that's, I don't know.

I look at some of these conflicts. guess my my natural instinct is to be like you know I paint a story where I'm like it's good and it's bad and there's a you know in the Civil War I'm like there's a good side there's the bad side World War II there's a good side and there's a bad side and it seems like very singular but now this framework is kind of changing the way that I'm approaching like all media so I'm curious like how can I use these tools when I'm like has this affected you as you watch the news all of a sudden you're like oh this is not what I thought it was or I shouldn't be you're persuaded by these messages and is there a way that I can apply us to my life where I

watch the news and actually create a more informed idea of what is actually happening? Yeah. So, for example, if you asked me like a couple years ago, why the United States went into Afghanistan, why it stayed so long, right? Which is obviously a really important thing. And all of us are like wondering. The way this whole process has made me, I totally changed my mind. mind about how I think about it, what the answer is. And like I said, I was actually at the

Pentagon last week and West Point this week. And I think I certainly a lot of the people I talked to didn't think of it in these terms. And I think I persuaded them that it might actually be correct. But I'm not an Afghan expert. But here's my perspective. The way I've changed my mind is like, I used to think this was about the Bush administration and then the Obama administration's mistakes, right? Just systematic overconfidence about what they could accomplish. And I thought it was about vengeance, which is about basically bringing bin Laden and senior al-Qaeda and some old Taliban leadership either to justice or killing them. And those are both true to some extent.

I think that's part of the reason. Revengeous is a good motivator. Yeah. That'll make you act very irrationally and make bad decisions. And so I'm not saying those aren't true, but what I realized is that actually this is, to me, a war about uncertainty and reputation, that the U.S. was engaged in 20 years of reputation building. So in 2001, we were perceived as a nation that could be attacked with some degree of impunity and that America wouldn't put boots on the ground or invade in response to this.

Right. Because they pulled out of Somalia, they didn't go into Rwanda. There are all these things that sort of suggested. And so America, thinking about every future fight, just like we talked about with Ukraine, had to say, no, no, no, this is what happens if you attack Americans on American soil. And when the going got tough, and it was time for the surge or no surge, pull out or don't pull out, it's not that they said, oh, they were thinking, well, what would the Taliban do if we pulled out? That was always part of the calculation.

But I think they were always thinking, oh, what will the Russians think? What will the Chinese think? What will ISIS think? What will al-Qaeda think? What will the next terror group think? So they were, it's like they're playing the game of poker. And like if we sort of show how strong we are, they won't mess with us in future. And so we can't pull up now, even though the going is getting tough.

Right. And so that, that like tragic, strategic logic was never apparent to me. And now I sort of instinctively try to look for it when I read the news. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. And that's maybe why I wrote the book to sort of maybe help people do that. But it's hard. I don't even think like military generals, some of the ones I've talked to have, have had at least someone pose it in those terms. So maybe I'm wrong, but they should at least

like say, oh yeah, we thought about that and that's not why. Yeah. And I guess that is the other thing that I'm hung up on is like it requires so much analysis to sort of look at a conflict and be like, okay, are we going to actually gain more than we spend? And because I can feel the instinctual level of like this type of retaliatory vengeful thing where it's like there's an attack and we're going to attack them back and it doesn't matter what we lose blah blah blah it requires analysis to do that and so but we have like tens of thousands of really smart people who are trained and are doing this analysis in America but I'm like if you look at every war in conflict around the world you know how many of them don't have that how many of them is it just a lone general

that's just like they piss me off I'm going to piss you off on like some chimpanzee shit where it's like you hit me in the head with the stick I'm going to hit you you in the head of the bigger stick. That's true. Although even then there's like often there's some there's other there's usually other powerful people around, but even it's like a business person or the subgeneral or somebody else who's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And there's some deliberation. And even if that happens and they start fighting, Mm-hmm. Often they quickly realize their mistake when they do that. And going back to this point, most wars are short, right? We don't rate books about the short wars, but most floors are short. Because they get a little bit in and they go,

all right, we're losing a lot. And maybe I'm not as actually as angry as I thought that I was. Yeah. So that's one reason we have skirmishes. Oh, interesting. I thought I was stronger. But now, sometimes with skirmishes, you're just trying to actually signal that you're serious, right?

Right, yeah. But sometimes your skirmishes are, oh, I think I'm stronger than I am. So I launched this thing because you guys don't realize how strong I am. And then we're like, oh, oh, yeah, that was. It sounds so dumb when you explain it that way. like how dumb humans are. Like, it's just like, you made me mad. I'm gonna send a rocket.

We're gonna kill you. And then you get a little bit and you're like, all right, maybe, never mind. It's like the drunk guy at the bar that's like, oh, let's go. And then you kind of get hit with a punch and you're like, all right, you know, fuck you, man. You kind of both walk away.

And it's like, but we're doing this on a national level with the human lives. It just seems, it's just so crazy that like, I don't know. Well, I mean, but I mean, again, so maybe we need, that's why like I focused on like the lung or wars and the more intense wars and I say, well, the skirmishes aren't because I'm like,

yeah, we kind of know what the skirmishes. Scrimmishes are just a lot of like chance and stupidity and mistakes that quickly get resolved. We need like something a little, but then how do they, that on day like 962, presumably, a lot of people like to talk about World War I is like this big mistake and oh, we thought it was going to be a short merry war home by Christmas, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, okay, that helps us get to like day 12. But like that can't be why the war happened because that does not get us to like four years.

So, so yeah, we need something maybe a little bit more. We need something a little different. Yeah. And so that's kind of what what captured me. And I'm curious in your research and just being completely transparent, do you think that there's any blind spots in the way that you've set things up where you're like, you know, based off of everything I've input, this framework works and it's effective. But, you know, there might be certain examples maybe in the future as technology changes or as society's change or as things become more globalized that these things might not hold up or

that you're unsure about within your own research. Yeah, I mean, the thing we don't know where this all starts to fall apart, like that whole idea that we shouldn't fight over the oil field because it's better to compromise than fight, actually starts to fall apart if there's like 40 of us or even five of us. Right. Where actually, like, it's really hard for us to actually make that bargain and have it stick. And so the most unstable places on the planet, and I don't get into this as much in the book because it's like, it's messy, it's hard to, but like, could be Chicago where you have like hundreds of fragmented, we don't call them gangs anymore. They don't call themselves gangs anymore because gangs are hierarchical and organized.

These are like small little mobs, cliques, crews. How many people roughly? three to 10, maybe 12 plus some hangers on. They live on a block. They're in block. They're engaged in like feuds with guys around the block who used to be part of the same gang back in the day, but those are all fragmented. This is where you get like, you know, bloods, but they'll have like neighborhoods.

So like Hoover Bloods or like. Yeah. And you know, you know you have like you might have the insane and the non-insane. And like they have all these different sort of modifiers. So but then so there's Chicago. fragments lots of fragmented groups finding difficult to coordinate and bargain like this eastern Congo lots of fragmented rebel groups um the moments of between Israelis and Palestinians when they were fragmented uh maybe like periods of european history when you had all of these like little states

and not you don't have these like stable coalition so like these are moments where all of the logic and that pull towards peace becomes like much more difficult because it's really hard to So the way you get peace oftentimes is by helping people form stable coalitions. Right? So, so, so, so, so, so like a bipolar world is maybe more peaceful than like a multipolar world. And that's true at a city level. I think it's true at a global level. That's interesting.

So, yeah, I guess so much of your research is like analyzing why war happens and why it doesn't happen. Yeah. Is there a future? Do you foresee a future where things are more peaceful and that they're even more peaceful than they are now? Yeah. And maybe where there's no war. Is that possible?

So there's two answers. So one is like within countries, within groups or within nations, we're on this like long run, stable downward trajectory and violence. That because we live in more and more stable societies with lots of rules and force. That our chance of getting killed and now is just lower every year, more or less. Yeah, 100 years you've seen more likely and 500 years you've seemed even more likely than that. Within nations. then there's some nations that haven't developed those cultural, informal or like state-like

institutions to do. So they're not on that trend yet. A lot of them will probably go on that trend. Hopefully. But then there's war between these groups, war between nations or war between political factions. And there's no reason that that has to go down absent that kind of like some sort of global set of state like, or formal institute, informal institute, like things like collective ideas about what's okay, which is not like a formal rule or it's not a UN Security Council, but it's like

Geneva Convention type stuff. Yeah, or just a collective sense that like certain things are wrong. Like we've all just collective, the world is kind of collectively decided that leaders should be elected. So even the autocrats hold elections. Right? Because we've all decided that that's like minimum basis for legitimacy. It's like a norm. There's no rule. that says you have, but everybody, even like, you know, Putin runs elections. So they're totally fixed. Like, why run a fixed election? Well, there's lots of ventures, but one reason is because like, that's what you kind of have to do.

And we don't, we don't like, yeah, and we don't like kill, for the most part, we don't like kill our prisoners and we don't recruit children, like for the most, it's these things still happen, but we've kind of decided that these things are just beyond the pale. Right. Whereas back in the day, it'd be the norm. Right. And so we could construct more rules like that. And you don't violate international borders. That's actually enshrined in law. But it's also something that people kind of find repugnant and react to.

But we can all construct like formal institutions, something like a little bit less slimly than the UN Security Council, you know, something with teeth. And that isn't, it doesn't like fall apart as soon as one of the big five decides they want to go to war. So that I think we're probably on a trajectory, because I'm kind of an optimist, I think we're probably on a trajectory to do that better. Right. But there's no reason it has to go that way.

Yeah, that makes sense. And I understand that some people might be listening to this and they don't find comfort in your words if they've lived in a world that's been war torn their whole lives. Yeah. And they're like, I grew up in war. I moved to a place where there's a war. I fought in a war. I knew people that died in war.

Like the idea they're like, oh, no, but it's getting better. It doesn't really do anything for them. Yeah. So I recognize that like some people will be like frustrated. But. Yeah. Like, listen, I live in the south side of Chicago. Mm-hmm.

I live in Hyde Park, which is a. a pretty safe place right around the New Chicago, but like some of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods in the entire country are literally, I just have to stay on my street and go like a mile in either direction. Right. And that's actually where some of the Chicago projects are, and that's where I work. I don't have to get on a plane to go to Liberia. I can get in an Uber. And yeah, they don't, they're not safer than they were 50 or 100 years ago. Right. So there are definitely pockets even in America where this is not true. But it's part. Partly because those are pockets where, yeah, this thing that makes us safe, like the state and the justice system in a lot of America is like has malfunctioned there for a long time and then has like no legitimacy.

So nobody cooperates with it because why would you cooperate with this thing that for for decades was just basically designed to oppress you? Yeah, of course. And so that's and then a bunch of young tufts, even actually most people in those neighborhoods like the police and want more justice. but there's a bunch of young guys with guns who are hard to control, and they don't know how to, they kind of just lost control of these groups. Like, what do you do with that? I wouldn't be able, what would I do if they were in my neighborhood? Right.

So there are pockets even in America where we haven't fixed that problem yet, and they're really hard to solve. And are you optimistic that those specific pockets where things are not getting resolved quickly will get resolved in the future so long as the systems that govern them kind of self-correct? Yeah, I think. I think we're moving on average. It's been a bad few years in America. Homicides have been going opposite direction

in a lot of cities for a bunch of reasons. That's what I feel. I think a lot of people, especially since COVID, are looking at the cities and they're like, this is crazy. And obviously there's like conservative news propaganda that I think are trying to paint a picture.

But it seems like the data is supporting that in a lot of places. I don't know, 100%. So I think, I'm again, maybe I'm too much of an option. I think we're on a long run improvement. Yeah. But I think there's a bunch of things that are happening in the short run that are leading to this being a more violent moment.

And I'd like to think that actually some of the lessons learned and the ideas and the conversations were happening, having about a more just police system. You know, in some sense, policing being done right. And all the other non-policing things we can do that complement that, which are some of the projects I work on. actually can be really successful. And there are cities that are doing these things right. And I'm seeing mayors and the White House, like, invest a lot in these. So that's good. And, you know, we can get in the monkey details if you wanted.

But so I, but in the moment, the pandemic, the George Floyd thing, the police going, whoa, like, we don't want to get, you know, everyone's filming us. I get into this fray. Suddenly my life or job is on the line. So I'm just going to like maybe not respond to that call or not intervene. And now some of these disputes turn lethal when they would have otherwise had some kind of intervention. And nobody, there isn't another sort of system. The police aren't stepping in in the, there isn't another system stepping in to resolve that

dispute. And now it's going sideways. Right. So that's kind of what's happening in this moment. I don't think that will last. Maybe it's a overcorrection to like, I guess, like over-policing, that maybe there's a little, like, an over-correction to kind of like pulling things off. Yeah, I would say it's a response to like the wrong kind of policing.

Like, you know, I think the refrain, I think of police doubled down on investigating and prosecuting homicides and also if we had a set of robust social programs that were actually settling these disputes because these are just targeted assassinations and disputes between individuals right and if we had an apparatus that that's not the police's specialty they're not mediators like if we had an apparatus that was like helping people settle disputes in other ways uh the combination of those two things would make for more peaceful city and we have lots of cities like that in this country and in this, like, this hemisphere that are doing that well. And Chicago is slowly getting there.

That makes sense. And within like urban crime situations, how much does poverty play a role in that type of crime? Well, the reason I say not much is because, look, there's like several hundred thousand poor, at least a million poor people in Chicago, several hundred thousand of them are young men and young black man or young Latino men, which is the neighborhoods where a lot of this violence is currently happening. And maybe only, and there were maybe less than a thousand murders per year in the last few years.

And maybe totaled three or four thousand shootings in total. So there's like three, there's hundreds of thousands of young, poor men. And there's only like three thousand of them are shooting. I understand. So you're saying proportional to. Right. Poverty. Most poor people are not shooting.

And even people who are not these, most of them aren't gang members, right? Their mob, click crew members. Most of those guys are not shooting. Let's say there's 12,000 of them. There's some unknown number. Like, the vast majority of them are not shooting. Right. And have no desire to shoot.

Yeah, of course. Right? So this is not a problem of poverty or underdevelopment. Like, those are all mad. We should fix those things for a hundred reasons. And yeah, more economic opportunities in the long run it might mean that fewer people turn to the drug market, which frankly is not that profitable right now.

But this is a problem of like 3,000 guys in the city. Yeah, I guess like Pareto principle, right? Where it's like 20% of crime is done by, or 80% of crime is done by like 20% of criminals or whatever. It's even worse than that. It's even in some that's easier than that, right? Like stopping homicides just means identifying those 3,000 people. and then doing something about them.

Now, the response, and that is sometimes successful, and then sometimes comes with lots of neighborhood harassment, it's like stop and first, like lots of things that are like harassment and coercive. Others, there are lots of solutions where people are trying to do something that's not coercive. So we just, we helped, based on some work I did in West Africa, that was hugely impactful,

based on some work that a colleague of mine did in Chicago high schools, it was hugely impactful using some, using something called cognitive behavioral therapy, which is basically helping people slow down their thinking, calm their emotions, try to think about what it would take to adopt a different life. We started a project with the city and a bunch of nonprofits and a bunch of gang outreach organizations to find those 3,000 guys. Half of them were offered this program randomly.

We did it as a randomized control trial, just like a vaccine trial because we don't know if it works. We followed them for two years. and the guys that got this program of this 18 months of the therapy and the job it's not a universal success in all measures but we are seeing 60% lower homicide arrests in that group so that's like and policing is also important but guess what like we could actually help them solve their disputes through means like this or through violence interruption which is basically mediation right we could actually just have about we could have small armies of mediators and hyper, hyper-targeted job and therapy programs

at those 3,000 people, not at the 500,000 poor guys, the 3,000 guys, and take care of a lot of the violence. Right. Mitigating the trauma and then adding purpose and direction to someone's life. Yeah. It's going to be the biggest factor that's going to change whether or not they're committing violent crime or not. Because why were they, they were engaging in, they had vengeance.

Right? That was our ideological. That was one of our five. They have certain biases, they're a little bit more emotional. And they're also engaged in, there's uncertainty and reputation. They have to respond to these slights violently because if they don't, then it's open season on them. Yeah, of course. So there's three of the five. That's why these guys are engaged in targeted assassinations. Yeah. Our program is addressing two of those.

The mediators and the violence interruptors are addressing some of the reputation and vengeance stuff. They're giving them alternative. So the combination of these two programs are like addressing the three causes of violence. And that's the secret of you. Get the diagnosis right. Now you got better treatments. You test whether they work. Some fail. This one happens to work pretty well. That makes sense. The one other thing that I just wanted to bring up, because I do think it's an important point that I think other people will be listening to this and might be frustrated that if you're talking about compromise within countries or within gangs, I think a lot of people put themselves on the side of, oh, I have 80% of the power.

So if we split up like an oil field or something. Yeah. And let's just split at 8020. Yeah. If you're on the opposite side, it feels like just resolving to someone coming in and taking your stuff. Yeah. And from an economic perspective, it makes sense. But like, you know, if I have an oil field in my country and some bigger power comes in and

goes, hey, let's split this 80. 20. That's not fair. Yeah. And I go, no, fuck you. This is my oil field. I should get 100% of it. But just because you're bigger, you think you're going to take 80%. Like, no, let's let's go.

That, yeah, that's, that's, every time we told that story about like the Ukrainians, the Americans saying, no way, it's because they thought there was a split that was natural, quote unquote, given the balance of power, but that felt unfair. We had an idea of what's a fair split that's different than the split that reality suggests we can deserve. And, and yeah, that is when we, that's those ideological fights, to some extent, a lot of them fit in that category. when we just perceive this as unfair. Yeah. I guess I would just be frustrated if I'm like, why is this guy just telling me to roll over? Like,

you're telling me to find a deal when it's not fair in the first place. So true at the same time. I mean, just think about the U.S. relations with a lot of the world or any autocrats relationship with their people. Like, it's not fair. And people resent it.

and they're angry. They might protest, they might do some things, but they generally don't go to war against that tyrannical superpower. Right. So I guess basically life's not fair. Yeah, right. Because there's nothing just about peace.

Right. There's nothing just about peace. That's a great quote. But a more just society would probably be more peaceful because people wouldn't have that motive for war. Right. But so long as that motive for war exists,

peace won't be just. Yeah. I mean, that's like maybe a way to sort of step back and like wrap it up in a way of saying like, look, when I said we can loathe one another in peace, that's what some people call negative peace. We just, we hate one another and we're on the brink of war, but we don't do it because it's just too costly. But I resent you. I hate this being unfair, a lot of all these things. Positive peace is sort of this idea of like a more just world or more or having checks and balances or having checks and balances or. having these states or having these rules or having these systems of enforcement or having shared identities, all these things that get us further back from the brink and thus make us so far from that point where we actually even loathe one another, where we're just rivals competing and like a, you know, and in a maybe not super, you know, we're not like singing kumbaya and like super happy, but nonetheless like healthy competition. And so that's, that's what peace scholars

called positive peace. And that's kind of like the whole second half of the book is about that, but, but about how, and that's why most of the time we don't fight, because humans, we're actually like a cooperative species. We're not a warlike species because we're actually really, really good. We're the best species at cooperation. And we're really good at constructing all of these kinds of positive peace. And that's why we don't fight most of the time. And there's just parts of the world, including our international order, that, like, has ways to go. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. This has been really fun. I feel like I learned a lot. Last, last thing, do you have any advice for me as a 26-year-old guy? If I'm interested in your work, what can I do in my life to, like, be involved?

Just general life advice. I know you're a smart guy. This is kind of pulling out of the microcosm of what we're working on. But just generally speaking, I think there's a lot of people like me. Yeah, I mean, what life advice do you have? I'm a professor. And so all I do is see people in their 20s, thinking about what the hell can I do with my life because I care about some issue. I just tell people to, like, you could choose to act local or you could choose to act global, but I do think like all of the, and this is kind of how I end the book because I ask myself that question. People ask me that question all the time. And so I think the answer has always been like incrementally, like great social change and all of this like peace or wealth or prosperity or any great thing has never happened.

in some great leap by some great man or woman like making a decision. Every like great success story has been like bit by bit incrementally trial and error. And so it's like this very human scale. And and so I think it just requires whether it's the career you choose or that thing you do on the weekend or whatever. Like what's that little thing you can do incrementally? And actually like when you actually look at the people who study what societies succeed and fail, it's the ones who do it like incrementally trial by error. So it doesn't feel like it.

You're like, oh, I don't matter. But it adds up. Yeah, that's awesome. And where can people find more of you? Where can they get more of your brain? Right. So I have been blogging on like international affairs and development and peace and conflict for like years on Chris Blatman.com, which is just my name, the book, of course, as well,

why we fight. And then I have, I tweet sort of far too much. actually at Sea Blatz. Awesome. So that would be that. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me. This was a lot of fun. Yeah, I really appreciate it.

Dr. Chris Blavin. Thank you.