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

“But it kind of works. Until it doesn't, and 10 years ago and the mid-1990s, there were wars, and this breaks down. And it kind of gave me this perspective on the international institutions and all the tools we've built, that we do the same things, right? Sanctions are designed to”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. But they will sit them down, they'll provide, they'll help them negotiate. They will provide. I said there are these things called commitment problems where there's some dynamic. I have some incentive to exterminate you, but that's going to be costly for everybody. So I'm going to, what's the solution? Well, I'm going to provide commitment. I'm going to enforce this deal. And yeah, you don't like this deal now because you could take advantage of your situation and wage war. But I'm going to give you a counter incentives. And so they keep the peace. And it's a little bit, so they're a little bit like the UN Security Council and peacekeeping forces and sanctions regimes. It's like the same kinds of tools, the same parallels, and they're imperfect. They don't always work that well. And they're unequal, right? Because it's not like they're pursuing this in the interests of democratic, blah, blah, blah.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So having these guys all in the same prison patios is actually it reduces imperfect information and uncertainty. It provides a place for them to bargain. They can talk. And so Lauficina is like a lot of these informal meetings. And so they have these tools that they use to control the street gangs. So instead of there being like 400 gangs all sort of in this anarchic situation of competing for territory and constantly at war, the Rosones are keeping them in line. And they will use sanctions. They will, sanction might be, I will put a bullet in your head if you... If you don't”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever. If I'm on a cell block with you, I'm meeting you anyways, right? So actually imprisoning leaders and putting them in the same cell block, but not putting them, you know, if you get arrested here in the United States and your criminal leader and you get put in a Supermax prison, you cannot run your criminal empire. It's just too difficult. It's impossible. There, it's possible. And you might think, and they do. They still run their empire. And you might think that's a bad idea. But actually, cutting off the head of a criminal organization leading”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a group. So they meet and they don't meet personally all the time. Sometimes they meet, but they consult a lot of the leaders of these groups are actually in prison. And so they're in the same wings in prison.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now, I mean, there have been moments when these gangs go to war in the last 30 years when Medellin has become the most violent place on the planet. But for the most part, right now they're peaceful. And so what's going on there? I mean, one thing that is there's a hierarchy of organizations so that above these reasonably well-organized neighborhood gangs, there's a set of sort of more shadowy organizations that have different names. Some people call them Rasones, some people would call them bandas criminales, criminal bands. You might just call them mafias. And they, there's about 17 of them, depending on how you want to count. And they themselves have a little operating board called sometimes they call it the office, Lafisina, sometimes they call it La Mesa, the table.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's what was really insightful for me. So, I live in Chicago, and people are aware that there's the violence problem in Chicago. It's actually not the worst American city by any stretch of the imagination for shootings, but it's pretty bad. And Medellin has these better, much many more and probably many better organized gangs than Chicago. And yet the homicide rate is maybe half.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both are fine. I think there they say medagen because that's kind of the accent on the double L. But Medelline would be totally fine as well.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wars are more rare because they're more costly, because our weapons are so brutal. The cost of war go up. As the cost of war go up, not entirely, but for the most part, that gives us an incentive not to have them. But then when they do happen, they're doosies. Is Pinker right? I hope he's right, but I don't think that officially that trend is there. I think We might have the same kind of levels of intergroup violence because... Maybe those five fundamentals that lead to war have not fundamentally changed. And thus made us, given thus a more peaceful world now than a couple hundred years ago.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stephen Pinker's one person, one famous scholar who brings out this hypothesis. I mean, there's sort of two ways, there's actually two separate kinds of violence that one where I think he's completely right and one where I think we're not sure, probably maybe not, where he's completely right, sort of interpersonal violence, homicides, everyday violence has been going down, down, down, down, down, down, down. That's just unambiguously. And it's mostly because we've created cultures and states and rules and things that control that violence. Warfare between groups Is that less frequent? Well, you know, it's not clear that he's right, that there's fewer wars. You might say that there's...”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you don't. The elite doesn't sort of give power to the masses right away. They just co op the few merchants who could threaten the whole thing and bring them into the circle. And then the circle gets a little bit wider and a little bit wider until the circle is ever widened, maybe not ever, but encompasses most, if not all. And that's like a hopeful and optimistic.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the story political change and transformation and freedom is there's a few revolutions that are violent, but most of it is actually revolutions without that kind of violent revolt. Most of it is just the peaceful concession of power by elites to a wider and wider group of people in response to their increased economic bargaining power, their threat that they're going to march. Even if we want to understand something like the march of freedom over human history, I think we can draw this same insight that actually we don't, most of the time we don't fight. We actually concede.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, most of the competition between nations was like blood, I would say bloodthirsty without drinking that blood in the sense that it was intense, it would loath some. And so a lot of the rivalry and a lot of the competition, which is also can be. Problematic in its own ways is not violent. Most of human history is about the oppression of the majority by a few. And there are moments when they rise up in revolt and there's a revolution. Remember those, but most of the time they don't.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of the time they don't fight that escalation doesn't happen. So the escalation does happen quickly sometimes, except when it doesn't, which fortunately.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that happens sometimes. I mean, again, it's this thing that social scientists call it selection on the dependent variable. Like there's all these times when that didn't happen, when it stopped, when it escalated one step and then people paused or escalated two steps, then people said, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And so we remember the times when it went boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the really terrible thing happened. But that fortunately, that's not, you know, I start off the book with an example of a gang war that didn't happen in Medellin, Colombia, which is third, that's my day job is actually studying conflict and gangs and violence of these other kinds of groups, also very sinister.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they said, you know what? The risk is vanishingly small. That's terrifying because until recently the answer was zero. And so the fact that it's not zero should deeply, deeply scare us all, and we should devote a lot of energy to making it zero again. And that's how I feel about the risk of a civil war in the U.S. And that's how I feel about the risk of nuclear war is higher than it used to be, and that should terrify us all.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decide that this is worth it, especially if they can emerge from the rubble still on top. I don't know. And I don't know that any of us have really fully thought through all of that calculus and what's going on. Very recently around the anniversary of January 6th, there were a lot of questions about was the United States going to have another civil war. On the one hand, I think it's almost unimaginable. Sort of like in the same way, I think that a nuclear war and complete Armageddon is unimaginable. But I remember something that, uh, When both of those questions get asked, I remember something I was in the audience of listening to some great economists speak about 20 years ago about the risk of an Argentina-style financial meltdown of the United States. Like, what's the total financial collapse?”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's not a lot of, but because we know we do go to war and there's all these things that interfere with it, including miscalculation and all these human foibles and several of those nuclear powers are not accountable leaders. I think we have to be a lot more worried than many of us were very recently. I pointed out earlier, like the whole reason we're in this mess is because the only people who have this private interest in having Ukraine give up its freedom is this Russian cabal and elite that gets their power and is preserved only and is threatened by Ukrainian democracy what would how far would they go to hang on to power When Push came to shove, is I think the thing that worries me the most and is plainly what worries most people about the risk of nuclear war. Like at what point does that unchecked leadership”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's really hard if you're the person in charge of that clock to move it away because that's always very controversial. So it always sits there, but it forces you to think about it a little bit every day. And I admit I was nonchalant about it until recently in a way that many other people were. I still think the risk is very low. Kind of for the reasons we've talked, it's just so unimaginably costly that nobody wants to go that route. So it's like the extreme version of my whole argument is why we most of the time don't fight is because it's just so damn costly. And so this is that's the intent of not to use this. And if they do use it, that's the incentive to use it in a very restrained way.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The bulletin of atomic scientists, it's something that these group of physicists sort of said to sort of mark just how close we are to nuclear catastrophe. And they started it decades ago, and it's a clock. And it's sort of how close are we to midnight, where midnight is nuclear Armageddon, or the destruction of humanity. And it's been sitting, I mean, it's actually, it hasn't moved as close to, it hasn't moved. As close to midnight in the last few weeks as it probably should have only because. Was already so close. There's actually limited room for it to move for a bunch of other reasons. I think there's a whole political thing that it's really hard. It's really easy to move it closer.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the doomsday, the official doomsday clock for nuclear warfare sits in the lobby of my building, the bulletin of atomic scientists sort of shares a building with us. So it's always there every day.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And unchecked leaders is you end up in this situation where you're getting bad information. And it's not that you believe your own lies. It's just that you never, you sort of believe, you're sort of averaging what you believe over the available information and you don't realize that it's such a distorted and biased information source.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they have very few ways to aggregate information if they're not popular, right? And so there's a whole cottage industry of political science sort of talking about why autocrats love fixed elections and why they love Twitter and why they actually like it in a controlled way. It solves an information problem. That's your crucial, if you're like Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, you need to solve an information problem just to avoid having a rebellion on your hands in your own country every day because uncertainty kind of gets magnified and you get all this distorted information.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, when I said the meta, the big common factor that causes warren over and over and over again is unaccountable power. It's not just because it's mechanically like one of my five explanations to saying, well, if you're unaccountable, you don't bear the cost of war, you might have private incentives. So yes, bargains are harder to find, but it leads to all these nasty interactions. So earlier I said there's this interaction between the values and the unchecked leaders because those idiosyncratic values of your leader become more important when they're unchecked. But the uncertainty point you just made is like a deep point. It's to say actually that like the fundamental problem that all autocrats have is an information problem because nobody wants to give them the right information.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he's doing on some level the same thing that Winston Churchill was doing in mechanical terms, which is to try to manipulate people's preferences, but doing it in a sinister, malevolent evil, self-serving way, because it's really in his interest. This was anything but right in the Churchill example”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to think about this with the current case with Russia, I mean, some people look at Putin's speeches and papers he's written on Ukraine historically being a part of Russia and trying to deny the... Basically, create all these nationalist narratives, and they think, well, Putin really believes, and he might. Putin really believes this. And that's why he's invading. And that might also be true. And that would contribute to just make a peaceful bargain even harder to find. But I suspect what's at least a minimum true is Putin's trying to manufacture. Support for an invasion in the population through propaganda.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hitler, not such a bad guy. His idea is not so terrible. I never liked those Jews anyways. Many were thinking, right? We had political leaders in the US who were basically not pro-Nazi, but were just not anti-Nazi. And Churchill was just trying to instill a different resolve. He was trying to create that thing. He was trying to create that value. And in the American Revolution, it was as well the founding fathers, the leaders of the revolution were, it's not that everybody just woke up one morning in the United States and had this ideology of liberty and freedom. Some of that was true. It was out there in the ether, but they had to manufacture and create it, you know, in a way that I think they believed and was noble. But there's a lot of manufacturing and creation of these values and principles that is not noble, and that is exactly what Hitler did so well.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's another little malevolent interaction between two of these buckets, like those unchecked leaders and those intangible incentives, those preferences. Is that Unchecked leaders spent autocrats, whatever, spend enormous amounts of time trying to manipulate the values and beliefs of their population of their group. And now sometimes they do it nobly, but that's what Winston Churchill there was trying to, it's not clear that Britons were like ready to stand up. There were a lot of Americans and a lot of Britons who were like, you know what?”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Putin's delusions of glory or whatever to get there, you would just need the ingredients I've given so far, which is like an unwillingness to do that without fighting on the part of the Ukrainians. Autocratic leadership in Russia who would make those demands because it's in their self-interest and then uncertainty leading them to fight. And that sadly is like the best case, that feels like the best case scenario right now, which is the war is just five months and not five years.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rushes on it, I want a neutral. I mean, who knows how it's not the ambitious thing the Russians wanted, but if we end up in a place where Ukraine is effectively neutral, never joins NATO, is not being militarily supplied by the West, and where Russia has de facto control over the East and Crimea, if not fully recognized, probably who knows if they'll get ever internationally and Ukrainian recognized, but effectively controls. Russia will have accomplished What it asked for in the first place, and both parties had to get there through violence rather than through negotiation. And you wouldn't need misperceptions and mistakes, and you wouldn't need...”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every other people on my border has folded and you're going to fold too the minute the tanks roll in and the minute the Air Force comes in, I'm gambling that you're bluffing. And so that inherent uncertainty of the situation just causes a lot of... Short wars, actually Because it's this sort of bluff and call dynamic that goes on. And the thing that's worth recognizing is we might end up at a place in a few months where the thing that Ukraine concedes is not so far from what Russia demanded in the first place.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, like that's as a competitor in this, you can use that uncertainty to your advantage. I can try to convince you, I can bluff. And so anyone who's ever played poker in bluffed or called a bluff, that's the analogy in some ways towards. It's not the perfect analogy. The uncertainty in the circumstance, you don't have to miscalculate. The fact that you, if you bluff and lose, isn't that you miscalculated? You made an optimal choice given the uncertainty of the situation to take a gamble. And that was a wiser thing for you to do than to not bluff and just to fold or to just not pay in that round. And so the uncertainty the situation gives both sides incentives to bluff, gives neither side an incentive to try to reveal the truth. And then at some point, the other side says, you know what? You say you're resolved. You say you're not going to mount an insurgency. Well, guess what?”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so the question is, why did Russia choose to invade when Ukraine didn't give this up? Well, Russia anticipated that it would be able to seize. What it wanted. The available bargain that it deserved unquote based on its power in the world, it wasn't getting. And so it thought it could take that. And the uncertainty around that made it potentially more likely that he would choose to do this. But in particular, one of the other things that I think is probably less important this context, but still plays a role, but less important than many wars is the fact that it's really hard to resolve that uncertainty, right? In theory, Ukraine should be able to say look. This is exactly how resolved we are. We're super resolved. And your military is not as strong as you think it is”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Based on a different set of probabilities, it was based on just expecting something in the middle of the probability distribution and not all these different tail events. And so the fact that the world's so uncertain and the fact that Putin can come with a different set of expectations than the Ukrainians in the West and all these players can just have a hard time agreeing on just what the facts are because we live in an uncertain world. Everyone's quick to say, oh, we miscalculated. Well, I don't know if he miscalculated. I think he just got a really bad draw. In terms of what the realized outcomes are here. And so, I mean, good for everybody else in some sense, except the fact that it's involving a lot of violence as the tragedy.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the other thing that's been revealed is just how the corruption and ineptitude and problems on the Russian military side. Again, within the realm of possibility, maybe people who really knew the Russian military are less surprised than the rest of us, but also one of the worst possible draws for Russia. And so Putin asking this terrible price and expecting Ukraine to roll over or the West to roll over at least to a degree.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something so cruel. But I mean, I think the uncertainty is really important here as well. Like if you think of it, like think of all of the things, the way this is played out and just in some ways in how many ways we've been surprised. We've been surprised by the unity and the coherence of the West and the sanctions. That sort of, what's happened is it was in the realm of possibility, but it was sort of like the best case scenario from the perspective of the West and the worst case scenario for the Russians. The second thing is just the pluckiness and the effectiveness and the intransigence and the nobility of this Ukrainian resistance. That's, again, was within the realm of possibility, but wasn't necessarily the likely thing, right? It was, again, maybe the worst realization for Russia, the best realization in some sense of revealed strength and resolve.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mechanically, it's just they're going to bear fewer costs. So it's going to It's going to basically narrow the set of deals that they're going to be willing to accept instead of violence. At the same time, most of the time, Not enough because the leaders still bear a lot of costs of war. You could be deposed, you could be killed, you could be tried, and the public purse is going to be empty. That's like the one story throughout history, is that the end of the day, your regime is broke as a result of war. And so you still internalize that a little bit. If I had to say, you know, in my three buckets, or through in my buckets so far, I've sort of started with Ukrainian intransigence. And then I jumped and then I said the essential, then you really have to understand Russian autocracy for just understand why they would ask.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. When I said it was a big bucket full of stuff that rhymes, that's a pretty messy bucket. Like there's a lot of different stuff in there. And I'm just trying to say, like, let's be clear. That just about the shared logic of these things is maybe just, you know, they're really dissimilar, but let's be clear about the shared logic. And if it were true that deep down we were aggressive people who just liked violence and enjoyed the blood or some percentage of us do, that would be there too. And so I just want to say that's, but you know, we're really quick to recognize those, right? When we diagnose a war as an armchair analyst or as a journalist or something, we really jump to those. We don't need a lot of help to see those happening. So we probably put a little bit too much emphasis on them is maybe the only thing that I would caution because the others are more subtle and they're often there and they contribute.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said there were three strategic reasons, like the unchecked leaders, the commitment problems, uncertainty. There were two sort of more psychological, and I called them intangible incentives and misperceptions. The way that like a game theorist or the way that behavioral economists would think about those two was just to say preferences. Erroneous beliefs and mistakes is like so the preferences are our preferences. Right. And so utility functions, whatever we want to call it. That's why I wouldn't call them a misperception or rationality. We like what we like. We like power, if we like relative status, if we like If we like our racial purity, if we like our liberty, if we like whatever it is that we have convinced ourselves we value.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Combined with, you know, you mingle it with this one bucket, that uncheckedness, and you mingle that with the fact that leaders might have one of these values, noble or otherwise, that carry them to war combined to explain a good number of conflicts as well. And that's a good illustration of why I think autocracy and unaccountable power is I could make that story for all of the things, all five buckets. We're all more susceptible to these things, to all five of these things when leaders are not accountable to the people and their group. And that's what makes it like the meta, for me, the meta cause of conflict in all of human history and sadly today.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the story of the kings and to some lesser extent the queens of Europe for hundreds of years. It was basically a contest and it was the war was the sport of kings and to some extent they were just seeking status through violent competition and they paid a lot a big price out of the royal purse but they didn't bear most of the suffering. And so they were too quick to go to war. And so I think that detachment of leaders.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the Ukrainian politicians didn't concede to these cool Russian demands because even if they had it would have been political suicide because it seemed, or I think it seems that the Ukrainians would have just rejected this. So they were in some sense channeling the values of the broader population, even if they, I don't know what was going on, even if they didn't share those principles. They self interestedly followed them. Probably they shared them, but I'm just saying that even if they didn't, they wouldn't compromise. Occasionally get the reverse, which is where the leaders are not accountable. And now they have some value which could be glory.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an explanation. So that's a whole class of explanations that helps us understand that the compromise that was on the table, given the relative balance of power, was just repugnant at least to one side, if not that. There's something they're unwilling to part with. And then you get to the leaders. Well, what happens when what the leaders want? What happens when the leaders are detached from the interests of their groups, which has been true for basically most of human history? There's a narrow slice of societies in the big scheme of things that have been accountable to their people. A lot of them exist today. To some degree, they're channeling the interests of their group.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think this links us back to what we were talking about earlier about just war is in some sense just war is saying that in spite of the costs, that our enemy has done something, our opponent has refused to compromise on something that we find essential and is demanding that we compromise in a way that's completely repugnant. And therefore, we're going to go to war despite these material costs and these human costs. And then that principle that you go to war on is in the eye of the beholder. And I mean, I think liberty and sovereignty, I think we can understand and sympathize with. And maybe that's just the greatest cause of just war. But other people make that. Go to war for something considerably less, a principle that's considerably less noble, which is what Hitler was doing.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For some, it was humanitarian, things like Saddam Hussein was one of the worst tyrants of the 20th century. He was just doing some really horrible things. You know, he'd invaded Kuwait. He'd, you know, committed domestic, attempted domestic genocide and all sorts of repression. And it was probably a mistake to invade in spite. So it's important not just to select on the cases where we stood up and to select on the cases where that ended up working out. In the sense of victory. It's important to sort of try to judge, not judge, but just try to understand these things in the context of all the times we That speech, or when we did, and then it just went sideways.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess here's the thing though think of what's happening in Xingjiang in China. We have appeased China. We've basically said you can just do really, really, really horrible things in this region. And you're too powerful for us to do anything about it. And it's not worth it. And there's nobody standing up and making a Churchill speech or the Braveheart speech about standing up for people of Xinjiang when what's happening is. In that realm of what was happening in Europe, and that's happening in a lot of places. And then when there is a willingness to stand up, There's a lot of opposition to those. So there were a lot of reasons for the invasion of Iraq.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that'll weigh against his costs of war as well. But fundamentally, I think he just saw his regime as threatened. That's what he cares about. And so he asked, he made this cruelest of demands.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they don't bear all the costs of war, obviously. And so they're quick to use it. But more importantly, like. In some sense, I think there's a strong argument that they had a political incentive to invade and or at least to ask Ukraine this sort of impossible to give up thing and then invade despite Ukrainian nobility intransigence because they were threatened. And so that's extremely important, I think. And so that's Those two things in concert make this a very fragile situation. That's, I think, why we ended up. Go not all the way, but a long way to understanding. Now, you could layer on to that these intangible incentives, these other things that are valued, that are valued on Putin's side. Maybe there's a nationalist ideal. Maybe he seeks status and glory. Maybe those things are all true. And I'm sure they're true to an extent.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economic control that Putin and cronies and the sort of group of people that rule, this elite in Russia, it was a threat to them. And so they had to ask the Ukraine to be neutral or to give up NATO or to have a puppet government or whatever they were seeking to achieve and have been trying to achieve through other means for decades, right? They've been trying to undermine these things without invasion. And they've been doing that because it threatens their interests. And that's like one of these other logics of war. It's not just that there's something that I value so much that I'm willing to injure the cost. It's that there are people not only does this oligarchy or whatever elite group that you want to talk about in Russia not, first of all, they're not bearing some costs of war, right? And they're certainly bearing costs of sanctions.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking about this Ukrainian whether you want to call it nobility or intransigence or whatever is key, I think. The authoritarianness of Russia and Putin's control or the control of his cabal is the other thing I would really point to is what's going on here. And if you ask me like big picture, what do I think is the fundamental cause of most violence in the world? I think it's unaccountable power. In fact, for me, an unaccountable power is the source of underdevelopment. It's the source of pain and suffering. It's the source of warfare. It's basically the root source of most of our problems. And in this particular case, It's also one of our buckets in the sense that like why what is it that why did Russia ask these things? Like, well, was democracy in the Ukraine a threat to an average Russian? No. Was capitalism? Is NATO? Is whatever, is this a threat to average Russians? No. It's a threat to the apparatus of political control.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source