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

“Exactly. In circumstances can change really quickly. So I wanted it to be enduring and meant partly just avoiding changing things and changing these controversial ones. But of course, I think about them. And so a lot of my time, I decided actually last year to teach a class where I'd take all these contemporary conflicts that wasn't.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the infant intifada, like that was the most violent episode. Why did that happen? And why did that last several years? That would be like we could analyze that and we could say, what was it about these periods of violence that led there to be prolonged intense violence? Because that was nobody's interest that didn't need to happen. And part I don't talk about that in the book. I wanted to avoid really contemporary conflicts for two reasons. One is I... Could change really quickly. I didn't want the book to be dated. I wanted this to be a book that had longevity and That would be relevant still in 10 years or 20 years maybe before someone writes a better one or an update”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you can think of what's going on in Israel, Palestine. There's a stalemate. Both of them are exhausted from the violence that has occurred. Neither one of them is quite willing to, for various reasons, to create this sort of stable agreement. There's a lot of really difficult issues to resolve. And maybe the sad thing, maybe we'll end up in the same situation with Russia, Ukraine. This is where if they stop fighting one another, but Russia... That might within there, there's going to be a lot of tension and skirmishing and violence, but then never really progresses the war for 30 years. That would be a sad, but maybe possible outcome. So that's kind of where Israel-Palestine looks to me. And so if we're going to talk about why we fight, then the question we have to ask is like, why?”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not always, but I mean, it's what it's kind of my worry. To go back to the Russia Ukraine example, it's going to be really hard to find an agreement. Both sides can feel they can honor, that they can be explicit about, that they'll hold to, that will enable them to move on”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sporadic violence that can be repression of civilians, it can be terror bombings and terror actions can be counterterror violence. It can be mass arrests. It can be repression. It can be denying people the vote. It can be Rattling sabers, all these things that are happening, right? And it can be sporadic three week wars or sporadic, very brief episodes of intense violence before everybody sees sense and then settles down to this uneasy. That's not like we're right now to think of that as like a piece and there's certainly no stable agreement, right? So a stable agreement and amity and any ability to move on from this extreme hostility, we're not there yet. And that's maybe very far away. But this is a good example of two rivals who most of the time have avoided really intense violence.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we think about this conflict in the sense of like this dispute, this sort of contest, this contest that's been going on between Israelis and Palestinians, it's been going on for a century. There were really just 10 or 15 years of pretty serious violence in that span of time, most of it from 2000 to 2009 and stretching up to like 2014. They're like sporadic incidents which are really terrible. I'm not trying to diminish the human cost of these, by the way. I'm just trying to point out that whatever's happening as unpleasant and challenging and difficult as it is is actually not war. And so it is at peace. There's sort of an uneasy stalemate. The Israelis and Palestinians are actually pretty good at just sort of keeping this at a relatively low scale of violence. There's a whole bunch of like low scale.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, how do we bring some sense to this big project and policymakers? What do we know? And what do we know about building peace? If you don't know what the reason for wars are, you're probably not going to design the right cure. And so, anyway, so that was the, but I started off studying Civil Wars because I stumbled into this place in northern Uganda basically by accident. No intention of working in civil wars. I never thought about it. And then, you know, Basically, I followed a woman there. Oh, we'll talk about that. I got to ask you first.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, there isn't any more. It's like a flourishing area of study, but in economics. But at the time, it wasn't. And so there were people like me and Ted who were sort of part political scientists because political scientists obviously had been studying this for a long time, who started bringing economic tools and expertise and partnerships with political scientists and adding to it. And so we wrote this. So after people have been doing this for five or ten years in our field, we wrote like a review article telling economists what was going on. And so this was like a summary for economists. So the book in some ways is a lot in the same spirit of this article. This article, I mean, it's designed to be not written as like a boring laundry list of studies, which is what that's the purpose this article was served. It was for graduate students and professors who wanted to think about what to work on and what we knew. This book is like now trying to not just say what economists are doing, but sort of say what economists”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were mostly looking at like the late 20th century. I mean, I was trained as a what's called development economist, which is somebody who studies why some places are poor and why some countries are rich. And I, like a number of people around that time, stumbled into violence. I mean, people have been studying the wealth and poverty of nations basically since the invention of economics. But there was a big blind spot for violence.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was, I mean, when I finished in graduate school, and this was a paper with my advisor at Ted Nigel at Berkeley,”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the tragedy. We don't have war, and that's good, but we have really limited abilities to incentivize our enemies not to arm and to keep ourselves from arming. We'd love to agree to just both disarm, but we can't. And so the mess is that we have to arm and then we have to threaten all the time.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're talking about groups bargaining over stuff, right? We're talking about Russians versus Ukraine or Russians versus the West, or maybe it's Medigin gangs versus one another. A lot of their bargaining power comes from their ability to burn the house down, right? And so if I want to have more bargaining power, I can just arm a lot and I can threaten violence. And so the strategically wise thing to do, I mean, it's terrible. It's a terrible equilibrium. Trust or hope that your enemy is going to see reason. and avoid this really terrible inefficient thing which is fighting. But the thing that's going on the whole time is both of you arming and spending like 20% of GDP or whatever on arms, that's pretty inefficient.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best effort to find an agreement that's going to protect the interests of a group that's Temporarily has an interest in violence in order to. To not be violent”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give a group that's temporarily powerful some assurances that when they're weak in the future, that they'll still have a say, right? Just like we portioned seats in the Senate in a way that's not demographically representative, but is like unequal, quote unquote, in a sense, to help people be confident that there won't be a tyranny of the majority. And now that just happens to have been like a really unstable arrangement in Lebanon because eventually the de facto power on the ground just gets so out of line with this really rigid. System of the presidency goes to this ethnic religious group and this prime ministership goes, that it didn't last, right? So, but you can think of every post. Conflict agreement and every constitution is like a little bit of”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Lebanon, one of the ways Lebanon had tried for a long time to preserve the interests of minority groups, powerful minority groups who were powerful at the time and knew that the demographics were working against them would guarantee this ethnic religious group gets the presidency and this ethno-religious group gets the prime ministership in this ethno. And a lot of countries will apportion seats in the parliament to ethno-religious groups. And that's an attempt to like”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, 250. Years later, we're still honoring those commitments. It was part of the deal that meant that there actually would be a union. And so we do this all the time. So constitution is a good example of how Every country's constitution, especially a country who's writing a constitution after a war, that constitution and all the other institutions they're building are an attempt to provide commitment to groups who are worried about future shifts in power.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The La Facina can do that. They can say, listen, yes, combo that's strong today is going to be weak tomorrow. You have an incentive to eliminate this combo over here because they're going to be strong. But guess what? You're not going to do that. And we're going to make sure we're going to promise that when these guys do get strong, we're going to restrain what they can do. Most of our constitutions in most stable countries have done precisely that, right? There's a lot of complaining right now in the United States about the way that the Constitution has apportioned power between states. That was a deal. That was a commitment. The Constitution was in the United States was a deal made to a bunch of states that knew they were going to be weak in future because of economic and demographic trends or guess they might be. And it said, listen, you cooperate and will commit not to basically ignore your interests over the long run.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wield our and abuse our, or just merely just sort of take what we can get in the future when we're strong. We're going to restrain ourselves in future. Or we're going to hand over something that makes us powerful because that's the bargain that would make us all better off. And the reason political economists call it a commitment problem is because that's a commitment that would solve the problem. And they can't make that commitment because there's nobody who will hold them accountable. So anything, any international legal architecture, any set of enforceable agreements, any UN Security Council, any world government, anything that would help you make that commitment is a solution. All right, if that's the core problem. And so that's why, you know, in Medellin,”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me use World War I as an example. Suppose as many German generals said at that time we have a window of opportunity before Russia. Where we might not win a war with Russia. So the probability that we can win a war is going to change a lot in the next decade or two, maybe even in the next few years. And so if we are in a much better bargaining position now, both to not use violence, but if necessarily use violence. Because otherwise Russia's going to be extremely powerful in the future, and they'll be able to use that power to change the bargaining with us and to keep us down. And the thing is, in principle, Russia could say, look, we don't want to get invaded right now. We know you could invade us. We know we're weak. We know we'll be strong in the future. We promise to like not.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other commitment problem, the other shift that was happening that he wanted to avert that is kind of wrapped up with his ideology is this idea of a cultural and a demographic window of opportunity. That if he wanted, if conditional on having these views of Germanic people and a pure race and that now is that he had to strike now before any opportunity to sort of establish that was possible. I think that's one, it's an incentive that requires his ideology as well.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And prevent the strengthening of Russian alliances as well. And so we have an incentive to strike now. And there's a window of opportunity that's closing and that they thought was closing as soon as 1917 in World War I. And I don't know that that story is as persuasive in World War II. I think there was an element of a closing window.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their superiority and their ability to bargain without much of a fight. And then you can see the Western response as a principled stand. I think that's, and there's a lot of truth to that. You know, in terms of the strategic forces, a lot of political scientists see a version of a commitment problem basically where Germany says, you know what, we're strong now. We're temporarily strong. We're not going to be strong forever. if we can get this terrible bargain and get everyone to capitulate through violence if we strike now and then solidify our power and keep these in World War I it was prevent the rise of Russia”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean one obvious driver of that war was. Things that Hitler valued and and then was able to use his autocratic power to either convince other people or to suppress them. And so some people stop there and say that in the West basically, and then of course they were able, you know, because they were such an economic and political powerhouse, they were able to sort of make demands of the rest of Europe that you can kind of see the Nazis march into Denmark without a fight or France folding very quickly. You can kind of see as like an appeasement or an acknowledgement of”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It took me a while. Well, you know what? It's not so easy. In the middle of it, I didn't understand that. I don't think a lot of people did. And I'm not, I think I could persuade most people who study or work there now to see it that way. I think people that would make sense to people, but it didn't make sense in the moment. And, you know, in the moment, this is happening. It's terrible. And you kind of, you know, you don't realize how avoidable it was that basically it was the absence of effective police actions that kept a lunatic from being contained. And that lunatic would never, you know, he's not that skillful of our movement, right? It could have been shut down and there was just never any political will to shut it down. The opposite. That's what I meant. That unchecked leader not only do you not bear the cost, but you might have a private incentive as an autocrat to see that violence happen. And in this case, it was just keeping a troublesome part of the country busy.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then that's just going to help me consolidate control. So he was an autocrat, he was an unchecked leader who allowed a lunatic to run around and cause mayhem because it was in his political interest to do so. And there's no puzzle. In some ways, it's that simple and kind of tragic”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was from the south. In his, he was fighting against these dictators, and he was fighting for a freer and better Uganda. And in many ways, I mean, he's still a dictator himself, but he did create a freer and better Uganda, so he's better than he was better than thugs before him. And he came to power, and he was like, and some of the northerners were like, we want to keep up the fight. And he was like, you know what? You guys, I'm strong enough to continue the north. You guys go, you want to have a crazy insurgency up there. And some kook believes he's like speaking, you know, through the Holy Spirit's speaking through him, and he's going to totally disrupt the North. I don't care. That's great. You guys just fester and fight. And that's going to totally destabilize this power, this traditional power base.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's been super elusive. I mean, why? Yeah. I mean, why he's fought this, I don't even know. You know, it's not a great example of The way I look at that situation is A little bit particular the way Uganda works, but most of the political leadership, for most of its post-independence history, came from the north of the country. That was like the power base. And it was dictatorial. You've heard of people like Edie Mean, but people have heard of Milton Abote. And all these people were all from the north. And then you get the current president who came to power in 1986. So he's been around a long time. This guy was 70.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hopeless and ideologically empty rebel movement. So, in some sense, it's, yeah, so that's maybe the short story. It was a real tragedy.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe, like, I don't know, but say, like, maybe one in a hundred will like buy the rhetoric. So we just have to conscript or abduct large number of kids and then some small number of them will not run away. And those will be our committed cadres. And those people can become commanders. And because they'll buy the propaganda and they'll buy the messianic messages. But because most people wise up, we have to, especially as they get older, we just have to abduct vast numbers of kids in order to have a committed cadre. So it has the other benefit of sort of being terrifying for the population and being a weapon in itself. But I think for them it was just primarily a way to solve a recruitment problem when you're a totally like”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you want to conscript and you don't, here we conscript and then we say if you run away, we'll shoot you and we control the whole territory. So that's a credible promise. If you're a small insurgency organization, people can run away and then you can't promise to shoot them very easily because you don't control all the territory. And so what these movements do is they try to brainwash you. And I think what they figured out after years of abducting children, you know, you talk about evil. They figured out that, you know, we have to.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little bit, I mean, you know, most of those people they just let go after they carried goods, they held on to, they tried to hold on to thousands. The short story, listen, if you're not popular, if you're running an arm movement and you need troops. And nobody wants to fight for you. You can either give up. Or you can have a small clandestine terror organization that tries to different set of tactics. But if you want a conventional army and you don't want to give up, then you have to conscript.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They must have kidnapped. They probably kidnapped for at least a short time, like a few hours to a day, more than 50,000 kids.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if only because I can't understand the street vernacular, like I'm just totally hopeless, nor could many people who speak Spanish as a second language, it's totally, you go to prison, you talk to these guys, and they're speaking in the local dialect, and it's tough. But more importantly, I just don't need to be there. And that's not my, I'm a quantitative scholar. I'm the guy who collects the data. So we have people, we have people on our team and colleagues and employees who are doing full-time interviews. And then I just sometimes go with them.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helped a lot, yeah, yeah. We do that. So we have, I mean, I don't do, I do some of those, but I'm on the side. My Spanish is okay, it's not great.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're the regulator for oil and energy or for finance. And then you get in the job and someone says, well, how many firms are there? And what do they sell? And what are the prices? And we're like, well, you know, we don't really know. Would not be a very good regulator, right? And if you're a policeman or you're someone who's in charge of counter-organized crime, you're just a regulator. You're trying to regulate an illicit industry. You're regulating an industry that happens to be illicit and you have no information. And so that's kind of what we do. We figure out how the system works. And what are the economic incentives and what are the political incentives?”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shaking down businesses for money or selling services in some cases, and they make a lot of money into business, and they're in prison, so they can talk about most of what they want to talk about because there's no double jeopardy. They've been incarcerated for it. And you're just talking shop. And they're just, you know, so it's worth it, I think, because the risk is very low, but if you actually want to weaken these organizations, and they're extremely powerful, they're extremely big facet of life in a lot of cities in the Americas in particular, including in some of the American cities. If you want to understand how to weaken these groups over time, you have to understand how their business works. And imagine you were made whatever the oil cesar of the United States. Or maybe you're in charge of the finance industry.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've chosen, but I've also advised my students, and I wouldn't go and do this with an armed group that would. Would think I knew too much, and therefore some people do that. Some journalists, I think, are very brave and take risks and do that, and good for them, and I'm happy they do that. I don't personally. I don't personally do that. So these guys are very, I mean, a Medellin is a business. They're just selling local drugs and they are laundering money for the big cartels and they are...”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm not trying to say there's zero risk. I think there's like a calculated risk, and I think you become good at. Work at becoming good at being able to assess these risks and know who can help you assess these risks.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's some Warzones. You know, I worked in northern Uganda and I worked in Liberia and I worked now in Medellin and I'm starting to work in Mexico. And both those particular places and then the things I did in those places where I spent a lot of time making sure that what I was doing was not unduly risky.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I actually don't think let's compare it to something, okay, you know, I'm in Austin for the first time and I'm walking around and there's all these people buzzing around on these scooters. Without helmets”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. There's lots of reasons for that. I can't say exactly why. I think one reason is like they know what'll happen is that there'll be consequences that the government will crack down and make them pay. And so they don't do it. And that's not what happened in Mexico. They won't kill like a DA agent. They know that the U.S. has made it clear you kill one of our agents. We will make you pay. And so they're very careful to minimize death of American. But you kill journalists and nobody comes after them or is able to come after them. And so they've realized they can get away with this. And that seems to be the equilibrium there. That's my initial sense from, and but that's, we spent a lot of time before we started talking to criminals. We spent a year trying to figure out what was safe before we actually and failing. We kept lots of safe things to do. It was also really hard to figure out how to talk to people in these organizations. And we failed 40 times.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, so This is true of a Chicago gang, and this is true of a Medellin gang. It's probably true of a Mexico gang is like you might have your group of 30 people. One or two of them might be shooters. Most people don't shoot. Most people don't like to do that. Or you don't even have any of those people in your group because you're trying to run a business. You don't need any shooters. You can just hire a killer when you need them on contract. And so if somebody's asking questions and you don't want them to ask questions or you think they know too much in a way that threatens you, and it's cheap for you and you have no personal compunctions, then you can put a contract out on them and they'll be killed. That doesn't happen in Colombia. It doesn't happen in Chicago.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, journalists are routinely killed for knowing too much in Mexico. There's no compunctions about killing them, and there's no consequences.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's sometimes true. I'm starting to do some work in Mexico probably, and I'm not going to be talking to any criminal. They'll kill people.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really depends on the situation. So, like, the first time I worked in a conflicted place was in northern Uganda in the maybe the last couple years of a long-running war. So this would have been 2004, 2005. This is a small East African country. And the north of the country had been engulfed in, think of it as like a 20-year low-level insurgency run by a self-proclaimed Messiah. Wasn't that popular, and no one joined his movement, so he would kidnap kids And so I could talk to people who'd come back from being there. I never once, if I'd wanted to, and I was writing about that armed group, I never talked to anybody who was an active member of that armed group. It was quite rare. It wouldn't have been easier safe.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is back to its normal, unfortunately not zero, right? But it's back to where it was because it didn't make sense to have a war. And everybody, government, mafia leaders, everybody sort of like... Figured it a way to sort of bargain their way to peace.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're kind of feeling each other out through fighting and the homicide rate doubled and then it increased by the same amount again. So it was approaching something that might get out of control, which wasn't in anybody's interest. It wasn't in the government's interest, wasn't in their interest. And so then magically... These leaders in these patios, right? Different prisons are spread out around a bunch of prisons. Everybody gets transferred to a new prison on the same day, which means they all get to be in the same holding area for three days before they're all moved elsewhere. So the government had a role in this. And then somebody who's like a trusted mediator on the criminal side gets himself arrested and happens to be put in the same spot. And a week later, the homicide rate is 30% of what it was.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, something that happened last year, we were a little bit able to watch in real time because we had a few contacts. We've been meeting and talking to a lot of these leaders in prison and a bit outside of prison. Many of them will talk to us. And so the homicide, I mentioned homicide ray in Medellines maybe a two-thirds or half of the Chicago level. It had been climbing. Some of these street level gangs were starting to fight. Maybe at sort of the on some level it seems that like maybe some of those own leaders were like saying well you know we're actually not sure how strong these guys are let's let them fight just to test it out let's have these skirmishes right it wasn't prolonged warfare it was like let's just sort of feel out how strong everybody is because then we'll be able to reapportion the drug corners and stuff accordingly”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those are pretty imperfect. Like, that's, you know, there's these, we have five nations with a veto on the Security Council and a lot of unequal power, and they're manipulating this in their own self-interest or their group's interests. So anyway, so it's actually some of That work in Medellin and why they work help give me a lot of perspective on what works in the international arena and why we have some of the problems we have is like.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make unchecked leaders face the cost of war. It's a solution to one of the five problems, right? And mediators are a solution to uncertainty. And international institutions that can enforce a peace and agreement are a solution to commitment problems. And all of these things can be solutions to these intangible incentives, like these preferences for whatever you value and miscalculations because they will punish you for your miscalculation or they will get a mediator to sort of help you realize why you're miscalculating. So they're doing all these things and it made me realize that the comparison to the UN Security Council and all our tools is actually a pretty good one because those are pretty unequal too.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source