YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Blattman

lines on the record: 194
first: 2022-04-03
most recent: 2022-04-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Well, I don't know. So when I met Jeannie, she was very wary of a relationship with me because I explained to her I hadn't had a relationship longer than two or three months and 11 years. And so she thought this person's not serious. And what I said to her, and she tells this story, this is how she tells the story. She says, I didn't believe him when he said that I just, after two or three months, you kind of have a good sense whether this is going somewhere and I would just decide if it was over. And I walk away. So I took this approach to Dayton. And then I decided with her that this was it. This was going to work. And then never, and she didn't believe, now she believes me.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think I did that without realizing that that's how I like to just kept quitting my jobs. Trying to find something else at like some risk”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and to go eat something better. That's exactly right And I thought that was kind of crazy. And I was the person I would never just put a book down halfway and I would never stop watching a movie. But then I, and I convinced my wife, we lived in New York when we were single initially and when we were childless and we lived in New York, there's all this culture and theater and stuff. And I just said, let's go to more plays, but let's just walk out after the first act if we don't like it. And she thought that was a bit crazy. And I was like, no, no, here's the logic. Here's what Tyler says. And then we started doing it. And it was so freeing and glorious. We take so many more chances on things. And if we didn't like it, and we were walking out of stuff all the time.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tyler takes this approach to everything. He takes this approach to movie. He says, walk to the movie theater. After half an hour, if you don't like the movie.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the hardest part was it got easy after a while was quitting, but now I take this to a lot of, you know, and one of the people, I think, one of the reasons I discovered your podcast, or maybe Tyler Cow”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's not entirely true because everyone in my family does like their job and get a lot of fulfillment out of it. But I think it's not a different path in some ways.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's true. Right enough, I mean, I was really intellectually engaged. Like, I just loved learning about it. I wanted to read more in some sense, but I was reading about world history and international development in poor countries in my spare time. And so it was like this hobby. And I was like, wait a second, I could actually do that. I could research this thing and even write the neck, those books. And that's kind of what I did like 25 years later. That didn't occur to me right away. I didn't even know it was possible. This is the other thing people do. do their nine to five job and then they find meeting and everything else they do they're volunteering and their family and their hobbies and things and that was my social media and and um and that's a great path too like i mean that's because not all of us can just have a vocation or we don't find it i think and then you just circumscribe what you do in your work and then you go find”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be alive, I was miserable. I got, I found it by accident, which is another different story, but I landed in this job in a degree where I was studying accounting, and I was miserable. I was totally miserable. And I hated it. And I was becoming a miserable person. And so I eventually just quit and I did something new. But then I was working in the private sector. And I actually just needed trial and error. I actually had to try on like three or four or five careers before I found this mixture of academia and activism and research and international development.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the other thing. It took me a long time. So I actually started off as an accountant. I was an accountant with Deloitton Touch for a few years. So I did not.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that they're all trying to do that I think is the right, I don't have to give them a really basic piece of advice because they're already doing it, they're trying to find a vocation. They're really interested. And what I mean by that is it's like a career where they find meaning, where the work is almost like superfluous because they would do it for free. And they're passionate about and they really find meaning in the work. And then it becomes a little bit all consuming. So scientists do that in their own way. I think international development humanitarian workers, people who are doctors and nurses, like we all do our careers for other reasons, right? But they find meaning in their career. And so I don't have to tell them whatever you do, find meaning and try to make it a vocation. Something that you would do for free amongst all of these many, many, many options. That's what I would tell, but that's what I would tell high school students and young people in college”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I actually spent a lot of time writing advice on my blog and I've got like pages and pages of advice and one of the reasons is because I never got that like when I grew up I went to like a really good state school in Canada called Waterloo. I loved it, but people didn't go on the trajectory that I went on from there. And I had some good advisors there. But I never got the kind of advice I needed to pursue this career. So it's very concentrated in elite colleges, I think sometimes in elite high schools. So I tried to democratize that. That's like a, that was one reason I started the blog. But a lot of that's really particular because every week, like I have students coming in my office wanting to know how to do international development work and I just spent a lot of time giving them advice. And that's what a lot of the posts are about.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or maybe a dating advice. That part's easier. You have to fly coach and go to the internet cafes. You can't like, yeah, all the development workers that I know that fly business class, you'll never meet somebody.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, maybe if I was worried, but if I was more worried about it, maybe I wouldn't be able to do, I don't know, I don't know. But then again, I don't take the risk. I'm still like, I don't know. But I minimize all sorts of risks. I'm like, yeah, I minimize, you know, I try to optimize groceries in the fridge too.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't convince myself. I believe what I like, I can't convince myself otherwise. Anything else seems completely impossible to me. And for some reason, I can't understand. I'm at peace with that. Like, it's never bothered me that one day it's over. And the fact that people have angst about that and that they would seek answers makes total sense to me. And I can't explain why that doesn't consume me or doesn't bother me.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I have this amazing capacity not to think about it, which might just be a self defense mechanism. You know, my father-in-law, Jeannie's father, is an evangelical pastor, actually. He's now retired, but... And this we would talk about when we're getting married, they weren't terribly thrilled that she was marrying a agnostic or atheist or something. We love each other very much. It's fine now, but I only started discussed this and some of the, because that was one of his questions for me, like, well, how can you possibly believe that there's nothing afterwards? Because that's just too horrible to imagine. And we really never saw eye to eye on this. And my view was like, listen, like.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't even watch those movies because those freak me out too much because it's just too risky. Like, I can't even, yeah. So those things, I've never watched free solo or anything. There's just too much”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. Totally. I nope some people have some friends in college. I've known people who do some of these totally wacky extreme sports and have paid the price. So I think it's totally different. I think”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've actually been a rock climber for like 25 years with a long break in the between, but I'm the same way. You know, actually rock climbing is an extremely safe sport if you're very careful. But free climbing is the opposite of that. But I mean, like if you're like, you've got a rope that's attached to you that goes up is like attached to 18 trees and comes back down, you're fine. And you wear a helmet. You're good. You're totally fine.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There, yes, yeah. I guess I know I'm in a place where there's risk, and so I think a lot about. Minimizing any risk such that I think about mortality enough that I just Because I'm kind of an anxious person, like I'm kind of a worry ward, like in a way. And so I'm really obsessive about making sure anything that I do is low risk in a...”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“System was totally different. That's super interesting. Maybe one day we'll do that. Yeah, that was. 30 years ago And the system of, I mean, Lao Ficina, Pablo Esquire created La Ficina. He integrated all these 17 horizones and all these street gangs are the fragmented former remnants of his more unified empire, which he gave the name La Ficina. I mean, I think it's a little bit apocryphal, but the idea is, you know, I think he said. Every doctor has an office, so should we.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my collaborators on this guy named Gustavo Duncan, who spent a lot of time interviewing paramilitaries, has written a book. He's talked to more of these people than I have. I haven't talked to those. We haven't been talking to them about this stuff. But also, they were there in a different era.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you actually figure out what services they're offering and how much they pay for them? And do you actually like those services? And how do you comparison shop between the police and the gang? And what would get you to go from the gang to the police? And then how's the gang strategically going to respond to that? And what was the impact of previous policies to make state governing better? And how did the gangs react? And so we had to sort of figure that out. And so that was just hard in a different way. But I don't do the mostly punishing stuff I couldn't do any longer. So that's much easier in that sense.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them have Facebook pages and things of this nature, so they do have public profiles a little bit, but not so explicitly. No, so they're clandestine. Here's an example. So one of the things that's really endemic in Medagine. It's true in a lot of cities. It's true in American prisons is gangs govern everybody's everyday life. So if you have a, in an American prison, particularly in Illinois or California, Texas is another big one, but also in a city in Medellin, if you have a problem a debt to collect or dispute with a neighbor or something, you could go to the government and they do and they can help you solve it or you go to the police or you can go to the gang. And that's like a really everyday phenomenon. But then there's a question of like, how do you actually?”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no Facebook group that can do that. There is now. We've created our own, we have a private wiki. Where we document everything, and it's a collaborative enterprise between lots of researchers and journalists and things. So they now have, they can't see, you can't go online and see this unless you.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we had to sort of really slowly, not nobody, there's a few other, I think there's other academics like me who are doing this, but it's a pretty small group that's trying to like collect systematic data. And then there's a slightly bigger and much more experienced group that's been talking to different armed groups. But every time you go to a new city and there weren't that many people working on this in Medellin, there were a few. You have to like discover anew. It's really unique to that city and place.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was because you then have to deal with yourself. So it's very helpful if you come home every night to someone who's A, gone through the same thing and B is a professional and very, very, very, very good counseling psychologist. The hardest thing, I mean, the organized crime stuff has been the hardest, just figuring out how to get that information. It took us years of just trial and error, mostly error, of just how to get people to talk to us or how to collect data in a way that's safe for me and safe for my team and safe for people to answer a survey. Like, how do you get the information on what gangs are doing in the community or how it's hurting or helping people like you've got to run surveys and you've got to talk to gang members, all these things that nobody knows how to do that.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really need to get to the other thing, you know, we know that I know how this goes, like I've heard, you know, there's this thing like, okay, okay, I'm not learning anything new here. Like there's some evil, terrible part of you that's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But let's get on to the other thing, but I know I have to go through this, but every day you have to go through that to get to the, because you're trying to actually understand how to help people. You're trying to understand how that trauma has manifested, how they either, some people get stronger as a result of that. Some people get weaker. And if you want to know how to help people, then you need to get to that. I wasn't trying to get to something for my selfish purposes. I was trying to figure out, okay, we need to know what your symptoms are now.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the best way for me to do that is for to make you, force you to do something really, really, really, really horrible that you could, you almost incredibly believe you could never really go back. And it might be like killing a loved one. And so just having, hearing people tell you that story. In all of the different shapes and forms. To a point, what was horrible about it is they did this so routinely that you'd be sitting there in an interview with somebody and they'd be telling you the story and it's like the most horrible thing that could happen to you or anyone else. But there's some voice in the back of your mind saying, okay.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember, I said your dispassionate self and your passion itself. I think I had to learn to create the dispassionate self. I mean, we all have that capacity when we analyze something that's far away and happens to people different than us, but you have to. I think I discovered and developed an ability to put those aside in order to be able to study this. So you get maybe harder in a way that you have to be guard against. So you have to try to remember to put your human head on. It's really horrible. Like if I want to conscript you. And I don't want you to run away, then I want to make you think you can never go back to your village.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, the hardest, there's hard and two cents. The hardest emotionally was interviewing all those kids in northern Uganda. That was just like a gut punch every day. And just hearing the stories, like that was the hardest, but it wasn't hard because it was, their kids were everywhere and everybody would talk to you about it and they could talk about it. You could. No one had gone and interviewed. Kids that had gone through war in the middle of an active war zone, nobody was going to displace all the things we did. No one had done that before. So now lots of people do it.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So that's the psychology in the book as well. So we end up for most of our work for the first five or ten years was together actually.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Circumstances, and they're like, well, and I think at the end of the movie, they're sort of like, this will never work because these relationships and intense circumstances never matter, which is what we assumed, and that turned out not to be true. So we've been married. 15 years and we have two kids”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of my work, that's my stick. Like my day-to-day research job is not writing books about why we fight. My thing is like I go, I collect data on things nobody else thought you could collect data on. And so I always do pull it off, but it never turns out like I thought it was going to. Like it's always, there's so many twists and turns and it always goes sideways in an interesting way and it works, but it's all, but this one actually we pulled off in spite of ourselves. And as planned. And so Ted Miguel, who I wrote that paper with, was actually the one person of my advisors who was like, well, you know what? He was sympathetic to this. He was like, eh, why don't you just go for a couple months and like check it out and then come back and work on the other thing? And so I followed Jeannie there and went there. And then, but, and I don't know. I always remember, you know, this movie Speed, the Kano Reeves and Sandra, whatever these people are. And they have this relationship and these entire.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They unanimously met without me to decide that this was totally bonkers. And to advise me not to go. And they coordinated to read my old proposal so that when I showed up for my defense, they said, you actually think you're defending, but we were actually, we want you to only talk about this other thing you were going to do because this is like, you should not go.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plan basically, we were going to find the names and all the kids who were born like 20 or 30 years ago in the region. And we were going to track a thousand of them down. We were going to randomly sample them and then we were going to find them today and we were going to track them. And then we were going to use like some variation and exposure to violence and where the rebel group was to actually like show what happens to people when they're exposed to violence and conscription. We were going to tell, you know, psychologically, economically, we were going to like answer questions, which would help you design better programs, right? And so we hatched this plan, which is totally cockamy. So cocky made me that when I pulled my previous dissertation proposal from my committee like the next week and gave them a new one.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, Oh, you know, you work on similar issues. You should meet this woman. I talk to because you guys would have like, you know, professional research interests overlap. There's so few sort of people looking at armed groups. African civil wars, at least at the time. And he said, wow, that's a fascinating research question. And I thought, and I walked out of the building, and I thought, that is a fascinating research question. And I phoned Jeannie and I said, remember me. And tell me more. I was just talking to someone about this. Tell me more. I started asking her more questions about. We ended up talking for two or three hours. And over the course of those three hours, we hatched a very ambitious kind of crazy.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kids affected by this war, all these kids who are being conscripted were coming back because they're all running away after a day or 10 years and needed help or to get back into school. She was working on things like that. And I think she talked to me in spite of the fact that I was wearing a suit, maybe because I knew a little bit about the war, which most people didn't. Most people were totally ignorant. And then we had a fling for that week. And then we didn't really, then we met up a little short while later. And then it was kind of, then we kind of drifted apart. She was studying in Indiana and spending a lot of time in Uganda. And then one day I was chatting with someone I knew who worked on this, young professor who was a friend of mine, but...”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With no laptop, and just like, you know, Kenya didn't exactly. Kenya didn't get connected to the The sort of the big internet cables until maybe 10 years later. And so it was just glacially slow. So it would take 10 minutes for every email to load. And so there's this whole customer norm if you just chat to the next person. Beside you all the time. It was true all over anywhere I'd worked on the continent. And so I strategically sat next to the attractive looking woman when I came in. And it turned out she was a psychologist and a PhD student, but she was a humanitarian worker. And she'd been working in South Sudan and northern Uganda.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in that internet cafe, I think it was 2004. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I thought I was a good development economist and I cared about growth, economic growth. And I thought firm, like industrialization is the solution to poverty in Africa, which is, I think, still true. And therefore, I need to go study firms and industry in Africa. And so I went, and one of the most dynamic place for firms in industry at the time, still to some extent now, was Kenya. And all these firms around Nairobi. And so I went and I got a job with the World Bank who was running a, they were running a firm survey, and I convinced them to let me help run the firm survey. And so now I'm in Nairobi and I'm wearing my suit and with the World Bank for the summer. And my laptop gets stolen by two enterprising con artists. Very charming. And so I find myself in a cafe.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think there's a certain inscrutability to the politics there and an insularity to the politics such that it's harder for Westerners, even if they know even just to learn about it and understand what's going on. I think that's a problem and vice versa. So I think that's true. But at the same time, we could point to all sorts of things on the other side of the ledger, like the massive amounts of Chinese immigration into the United States and the massive number of people who are now, like so many more Americans, business people, politicians understand so much more about China now than they did 30, 40 years ago because we're so intertwined. So I don't know where it bounces out. I think it balances out on better understanding than ever before. But you're right. There was like a big gulf there that we haven't totally bridged.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's successfully moved in that direction also worries me. So anything that moves China in the other direction, not necessarily being democratic, but just like a wider and wider group of people holding power, like all of the business leaders and all the things that have been happening over the last few centuries have actually widened power. But anything that's moving in the other direction does worry me because it's going to accentuate all these fibrous.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that also should comfort me about China is that China is not as centralized or as personalized a regime as Russia, for example. And neither one of them is a centralized or personalized as like some tin pot, purely personalized dictatorship. Like you get in some countries. The fact that China power is much more widely shared Is a big insulation, I think, against this war, well, future war Attempts by Xi Jinping to personalize power over time and to make China a more centralized and personal ruled place, which”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever could be the followed of these sanctions or a closer Chinese alliance with Russia, all the things could happen. Those would make me more worried because I think we've got a lot of cushion that comes from all of this economic, social, cultural interdependence.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way for peace, and we shouldn't get complacent because we have a globally integrated world, but that's going to be a disincentive. And if we're socially entwined because we have great social relationships and linkages and family or we're intermarriage or whatever, all these things will help. And then if we're ideologically intertwined, maybe we share notions of liberty or maybe we just share a common notion of humanity. So I think the fact that we're more integrated than we've ever been on all three fronts in the world, but with China is providing some insulation, which is good. So I would be more worried if we started to shed some of that insulation. U.S. Economic Nationalism”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want more of the pie than you get and the costs of Word are deterrence, but only the cost of war that I feel. I don't care. I do not care about the cost of war to your side, my rival's side. I'm not even thinking of that. That's just worth zero to me. I just don't care. In that simple game. Now, in reality, many groups do care about the well-being of the other group, at least a little bit, right? In some sense, to the degree, we, first of all, if our interests are intertwined, like our economies are intertwined, that's not a surefire.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the second part of the book, I talk about what I think have been like these persistent paths to peace. And one of them is increasing interdependence and interrelationships. And another one is more checks and balances on power. I think there's more, but those are two that are really fundamental here because I think those two things reduce the incentives for war in two ways. One is when we were talking about this really simple strategic game where whether Russia and Ukraine or whatever, any two rivals.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. In both sides are in a principled way refusing to make the compromise. And that's not like a both sides are right kind of argument. I'm just sort of saying, I just think it's a factual statement that neither one wants to compromise on certain principles. And they're both construct and in some ways have very reasonable, I don't want to have self-justifications for those principles. And that's why I'm not very hopeful is I don't see a way for them to resolve those things.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're beginning to see why I didn't. I decided I wanted to write about those things and think about those things, but I wanted this book to do something different. I didn't want it to fall along one of these polarized lines. On a personal level, because I think I'm kind of a liberal democratic person at heart, my sympathies in that sense lie in many ways with the Palestinians, despite the way I mean I'm just the fact that people are they're not represented and they, you know, and they got a very raw real politic kind of deal. Like most people in history have gotten like this raw real politic kind of deal in their past, right? Where somebody took something.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Israel is in a tough place. They have this attachment to being part of the West, they have this attachment to liberal ideals. They have an attachment to democracy. And they have an attachment to a Jewish state. And those things are not so easily compatible Because to recognize the rights of non-Jewish citizens, right, or to create, or to have a one-state solution to the current conflict Undermines the long term ability to have a Jewish state And to do anything else than to deny that Denies their liberal democratic ideals. And that's a really hard. Contest of priorities for to sort out.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working on the book, and where I wasn't really an expert, whether it's India, Pakistan, China, Taiwan, Israel-Palestine, Mexican cartel state drug wars, and a few others, and then teach a class on them with students, and we'd work through it. We'd read the book, and then we'd say, all right, none of us are experts. How do we make sense of these places? And we focused in the Israel-Palestine case of mostly trying to understand why it got so violent and spent a little bit of time on what the prospects are for something that's more enduring.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source