Tucker’s interview with Jeffrey Sachs: Trump’s Plan to Stop WWIII, CIA Coups, and Warning of the Next Financial Crisis

Editor’s note: This is an interesting interview, mostly about foreign policy. You can’t come away without realizing that the CIA is basically running our foreign policy (e.g., men in dark suits telling the president to backtrack on making peace with the Russians). It’s been going on for decades, and the mainstream media are complicit in maintaining the narrative. The CIA’s role is shrouded in secrecy (e.g., the New York Times refused to cover a CIA coup in Haiti), and even when the truth comes out, it’s quickly off the front pages and becomes irrelevant to the political discussion. (The same would likely happen with the USS Liberty disaster and maybe even the holocaust).  The U.S. foreign policy establishment wants to run the world and has repeatedly gotten us into stupid, costly, pointless wars that are not in U.S. interests—Russia with Ukraine as our proxy (including U.S. troops on the ground), Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and is itching to go to war with Iran and China (over Taiwan, which, as Sachs emphasizes, is historically part of China). No mention of the country that has obviously benefited from these wars (it begins with the letter ‘I’). These wars cost trillions of dollars that could have been used to upgrade infrastructure to the level seen in China, much of Europe, and even Turkey. Sachs does a good job of providing historical contest, e.g., by emphasizing how the U.S. basically never stopped the Cold War with Russia after the collapse of the U.S.S.R because its foreign policy establishment wants a unipolar dominated by the U.S. and fears Russia as a competitor—the same reason that war with China is quite possible.

There is some mention of neocons and the Israel Lobby but of course no general discussion or even mention of Jewish power in the U.S. that enables this, especially power in the media and as funders of the political parties, especially the Democrats; Sachs is Jewish). (Neocon Charles Krauthammer was an early champion of the unipolar world dominated by the U.S. after the collapse of the U.S.S.R.) This is despite the obvious power of the neocons who identify as Jews and are ultra-Zionists. They have been deeply involved in all of these wars.

The last part relates to financial matters, particularly emphasizing the bifurcated world of the educated urban and suburban Democrats versus those with only high-school education. No mention of IQ or of the Democrat coalition of uneducated non-White urbanites who are essentially provided table scraps by the Democrat elites—a phenomenon that will increase dramatically as a result of the Democrats’ success in importing millions of low-IQ Third World migrants under Mayorkas. When Sachs says that the working class has defected to the GOP, he is implicitly referring to the White working class who are much hated by the Democrats, just as Labour hates the White working class in the UK. No mention of race and how that factors into the wealth gap via IQ.

This is edited to try to make sense of a rather poor job by the machine editing program.

Link

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Jeffrey Sachs [00:01:39] Well, Ukraine’s losing the war on the battlefield. That’s the basic point. There’s been a bit of a diversion with the a an incursion of some brigades of Ukraine and, NATO mercenaries, a so-called, into a fairly rural northern part of Russia that got a lot of attention, but it’s militarily meaningless. On the real battle front, Ukraine has been a treated. In other words, they just don’t have, they don’t have the people, they don’t have, the weapons systems. They don’t have the air defenses. And so, Russia is continuing. Russia has said all along we can negotiate, we can stop, but we have issues. And, the West, and the US and especially Britain, [says]we’re going to win. We’re going to win. So. Ukraine loses, 1 to 2000 soldiers a day, dead and wounded. Yeah, a day. This is a terrible, terrible onslaught. But nobody, counts the dead in — not the Kiev leadership or in Washington or in London, or in Warsaw. And so this continues because no one wants to take any responsibility in the West for bringing it to a close.

Tucker [00:03:04] So, but there is kind of a forcing action with this election, because if there is a change in administration, then presumably there will be a change, of course, in U.S. policy toward Ukraine. I mean, I hope anyway, if Trump wins … . That provides some incentive to the current administration to. I don’t know what kind of scenario does that set up?

Jeffrey Sachs [00:03:26] Well, there’s there’s nothing really, that this outgoing administratio is going to do. I don’t think the president probably is in any mental state to, to lead anything at this point. So I think we’re kind of on autopilot, which is very bad place to be, in general, in a dangerous world. There are no active discussions that we know of between the United States and Russia, which is the essence, the sin qua non, of ending this war and ending it on a responsible basis. This is a war between the United States and Russia. It’s not a war between Ukraine and Russia. This is the most basic point. This is a war, provoked by the U.S with U.S. intentions, with U.S. aims, for NATO enlargement. And, it would take a president that understands the basics of this and why this was so wrong headed. And, such an absurd and tragic idea that dates back 30 years now. … But Biden was not that person. Clearly, Joe Biden, bought into this whole reckless approach 30 years ago already. And it’s been part of this tragic adventure. That was somehow going to bring down Russia. But in the end, it’s destroying Ukraine. So, yes, we need a new president, and we need a president that honestly understands what this has all been about. And the one thing we’ve discussed and the one thing that’s absolutely true, is the American people have never been told what this is all about. They’ve been told exactly the opposite.

Tucker [00:05:28] And I don’t think even now there’s an appreciation that NATO forces, clearly U.S. forces in some form, federal employees or federal contractors are fighting in Russia, fighting Russia.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:05:40] Oh, this is, absolutely clear.

Tucker [00:05:42] We are at war with a hot war with Russia right now.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:05:45] We are in a hot war because it’s not only our financing, our equipment, our aims, our objectives, our strategy, our, advice, but it’s our personnel on the ground. They are not necessarily in U.S. uniform. Sometimes they’re called mercenaries, sometimes they’re just not identified. But they are calling the shots. And, Russia knows it. And that by itself is, is is a big reason for alarm.

Tucker [00:06:17] Well, especially because Russia doesn’t need to lob a nuke into Poland or Europe or the United States to fight back. Russia could disable critical American infrastructure without. You know, being obvious about it. Like, we’re very vulnerable if Russia decides to strike at us.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:06:36] Well, the horrible thing about this war from the start was that it could never conceivably have made sense for the United States to cross Russia’s red lines, because either Russia would win on the battlefield as it’s doing, or Russia would lose on the battlefield and then escalate. And the escalation could be in many forms. Like you say, it could be attacks on U.S. interests around the world, through proxies, or it could be, as the Russians made clear, if they’re losing, tactical nuclear weapons to start, and, with, escalation always in sight if, Russia was really profoundly threatened. So in the end, there was no path to success of a venture that started back in the Clinton administration continued with Bush.

Tucker [00:07:42] Obama.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:07:43] Trump and Biden, which was to push NATO to Ukraine despite the clearest possible, greatest, biggest red line that Russia could convey in peace time, which is: don’t do that. And Russia’s attitude towards NATO and Ukraine was exactly analogous to what our attitude would be to a Russian military base on the real ground in Mexico. It would be, don’t try that. Yes. And, this is obvious. It’s not subtle. It has been expressed for more than 30 years, but now we know and more and more comes out and will come out. But Clinton approved this plan in 1994 that NATO would go east, including to Ukraine. Zbigniew Brzezinski laid it out in 1997, in an article which I always asserted was not Brzezinski’s idea, but his way of telling. His colleagues in the civilian sector, let’s say what was already decided. And that is that, yes, of course we will go all the way to Ukraine. It became public in 2008 when George W Bush Jr. pushed at the Bucharest NATO summit the commitment to enlarge NATO to [include] Ukraine. It became a cause of war in February 2014, when the U.S. conspired to overthrow a Ukrainian president that was against NATO enlargement, who wanted Ukraine to be neutral because that president understood that if you are Ukraine between East and West, try to keep your head down and stay neutral. And he understood that. So we had to overthrow him. And the U.S. did. And that’s when the war started. So this was, predictably a failure on every scenario. The particular scenario that is unfolding right now, for the moment is, ironically, perhaps the safer one, which is that Russia’s winning on the battlefield. Yes. Because if Russia were losing on the battlefield, we would be seeing escalation to nuclear war. And everyone in punditry that says, don’t worry about that. That’s a bluff. I profoundly resent the ignorance of those people. Generally, when people are ignorant. I don’t resent it. I try to help, but I try to correct it. Yeah, I resent the ignorance when it endangers my grandchildren. Yeah. That’s it. And they endanger my grandchildren by saying, don’t worry about nuclear war. Yeah, that’s a bluff. And that I don’t want to hear from anybody, because anyone that says that understands nothing about the reality of are the [situation].

Tucker [00:11:05] People who say that I feel exactly the same way, and I’m outraged by it and but also distressed by it because of what it says about our leadership class. But I notice that a lot of people who say that are former U.S. military officers working in some think tank, you know, Hudson or Eli or CSIs or whatever, you know, all these, they’re-

Jeffrey Sachs [00:11:24] Paid to say it.

Tucker [00:11:25] They are paid to say it. But you also wonder where in the officer class are the wise people, you know, who in the Pentagon has a realistic assessment of risk and a deep concern for the future of the United States, where those people dare.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:11:38] No doubt, there are some. But it’s always a close call because we’ve known throughout the nuclear era there have been hotheads, irrational people, vulgar people who have called for nuclear war. We have come extraordinarily close to nuclear war. And we’ve had people in the U.S. military all along, who called for first strikes on, various occasions against the Soviet Union, which, in, any, plausible scenario could well have ended the world. And those people were in positions of authority. The case that I’ve studied most closely in, in my life is the Cuban Missile Crisis. I wrote a book about the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy’s diplomacy in 1963 to pull back from the brink. But in the Cuban missile Crisis, almost every one of President Kennedy’s advisers said strike. And there is very good reason to believe that that would have led to a, full scale nuclear war that would have ended civilization. Kennedy was, in that case, almost the sole restraint within the senior U.S. leadership. So we came extraordinarily close. And there have been other occasions where we’ve come extraordinarily close. We have, I don’t know if we discussed it before, but, it’s one of my go to, emblems for trying to help people understand the situation. The atomic scientists who were, dead worried about this from the beginning of the atomic age in 1945, established this emblematic doomsday clock in 1947, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. And what this is, is a an expert view of how close or how far we are from nuclear war. We are the closest ever to nuclear Armageddon today, during the entire period since 1947. According to this Doomsday Clock, the Doomsday Clock started a few minutes from midnight. Midnight. Meaning doomsday, meaning Armageddon. And it went farther away from midnight or closer to midnight, depending on how the Cold War was unfolding, whether we were at the height of tensions or, during a period of some, pull back from the tensions. Well, suffice it to say, that an end of the Cold War one, because and maybe it never really ended, because the U.S. never really changed its attitude towards Russia. But at the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991, at the beginning of 1992, and with the arrival of the Clinton administration, the atomic scientists put the clock at 17 minutes from midnight. That’s the farthest that it has ever been since the beginning of the nuclear, arms age. Every president since then has brought us closer to Armageddon. Clinton. Bush. Obama. Trump. Biden, every one. I inherited a clock that they then pushed, I think, through US provocations and policies, all these wars of choice, all these invasions of the Middle East, all this NATO enlargement, all of the disdain for anything Russia or China says. How dare they even express an opinion? We’re the only ones that can have an opinion. The disdain for Iran. Evil. This view has led to an aggressiveness and a hubris that has pushed us closer and closer to the brink, because the whole attitude of the U.S. since 1992 was, we don’t have to listen to anybody. We don’t have to listen to Russia. Russia is a gas station with nuclear weapons. Was, of course, the very un clever phrase, but the idea was, yeah, humiliate them. Humiliate them. They only have 6000 nuclear warheads. What could possibly go wrong? Of course, the way we treat China, the casual talk in Washington these days about, the likely war with China. You have people in service generals talking about. Yeah, there could be a war with China in the next 2 or 3 years. Are these people mad out of. Are they out of their minds? Do they have any idea what they’re doing? But. Typically I and the theory of our system is we have a president civilian who is responsible for keeping our country safe, not pushing us to the brink. But of course, we don’t have such a president right now. Even when he was functioning, he wasn’t keeping us from the brink. He was making declarations that, for God’s sake, that man must go. Speaking of the president of Russia. As if that’s the American choice. Well, that’s not something one should say about even an adversary, but a counterpart that happens to be the second nuclear superpower. But that’s how we have acted. And. Biden walking off soon after his meeting with the Chinese president, XI Jinping, and then muttering, I think it was, as usual at some kind of donor gathering. Oh, he’s a dictator. This the idea of the arrogance and the disdain, and the, silliness. But the attempt to humiliate the counterparts. That’s why in this doomsday clock, we are now 90s to midnight. And from all that I see. And. No, I just got back from, an extended trip through Asia and Europe and talked to many leaders along the way. There’s worry everywhere. There is absolute worry everywhere. Every leader I spoke to when it was a number of them. What is happening with your country? Are we being pushed to war? Why do we have to choose between having trade with China, or having trade with the United States, or having trade with Russia? Why are sanctions on Russia applying to us and breaking our economy? I spoke to leaders all over Asia about these issues, and the answer is there is no good answer to this, and there is no, way to say to them, don’t worry, everything’s under control because it’s not.

Tucker And there’s no I don’t think, widespread understanding of this in the United States. How quickly things around the world are changing. The extent to which the U.S. government is driving these changes, and the overwhelming sense from outside America that America is in decline because of these decisions, like we’re hurting ourselves. In addition to a lot of other people. But here it seems like everybody in charge wants a war with Iran. And I just know from experience watching the Iraq invasion, which I never thought was going to happen, watching the current war with Russia, which I never thought was going to happen, that when everyone in DC started saying, hey, let’s have a war with somebody, you’re probably going to have a war with that person. Are we going to have a war with Iran?

Jeffrey Sachs [00:22:42] Israel just wants that war so much. And, the Israel lobby’s very powerful. So we could, but I’ve never seen such recklessness as the this Israeli government, reckless, extremist, provocative, assassinating, counterparts left and right. And, of course, in the most provocative ways, assassinating, the Hamas political negotiator in Tehran on the occasion of the inauguration of, the new Iranian president. You know, this is aiming for pulling the US into a broader war.

Tucker [00:23:31] Can I ask you something? Sure. Well, I said, are we going to have a war with Iran? And you immediately said we’re being pushed by another country with Iran. Is there any reason for the United States acting solely in its own interest to have a war with Iran?

Jeffrey Sachs [00:23:43] Of course not. And it would be devastating because Iran has allies, including Russia. So a war with Iran could easily become World War Three, world War Three for everyone to understand could easily become a nuclear war, a nuclear war, you know, whatever you’re going to say or do with your children or your grandchildren, say it now, because the world will end, in a very quick moment. If we fall into that.

Tucker [00:24:11] I should just pause and say, you wrecked my morning over breakfast today by describing and describing at length the new Annie Jacobson book on nuclear war. You will not.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:24:21] No, I mean I won’t do it for everybody except that it’s a remarkable book. It’s chilling. I listen to it because I go for a long walk. So I listened to it as an audio book with the author, Annie Jacobson, narrating it in a very clipped, precise way. But it, describes in meticulous, rigorous, technical language based on, voluminous research, how the world could come to an end in a few minutes. And, it’s a very serious book, and it’s completely chilling.

Tucker [00:24:57] It’s called nuclear war.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:24:59] Nuclear war.

Tucker [00:25:00] A scenario by Annie Jacobson. I just ordered it. Having recovered, though, I don’t want to read it, but I’m not like myself. I’m sorry to interrupt. I just want to throw that out there because it sounded important. But you don’t think if the United States were acting in its own interest, that war with Iran would even be on the table?

Jeffrey Sachs [00:25:16] If the U.S. were acting in our own interest, we would not even have an argument with Russia right now. We would not have an argument with China right now. We would not have an argument with Iran right now. We’d actually be trading, having peaceful relations. And by the way, not to mention saving some hundreds of billions of dollars a year so that we could fix our roads and our potholes and our broken elevators and escalators and our, decrepit, passenger rail travel in this country that I keep having to get off trains that are broken down because Amtrak breaks down all the time, it seems, or maybe only when I’m riding it. But in any event, yeah, we could actually do something for our country, if we were less obsessed about, or less drawn into. These conflicts, which are all solvable on a political level without war. And but we don’t want to do politics. Say we are the United States or we are the Israel lobby, or we have a plan that goes back to 1994 to expand NATO completely contrary to what we promised the Soviet Union and Russia. Back in 1990 to 92, we cheated, we lied. But we’re going to do it. So we’re in a very funny way, in this country. Yeah, obviously. Major. Major challenges at home of just basic living conditions and infrastructure and keeping up with things. Yeah, we of course we we we’ve we’ve got some dazzling technology and some very rich people, but we’ve got a lot of people in this country that are not living that way, you know, and, we’re not attending any of it because the most important thing for us is picking fights or being drawn into other people’s fights. And we. Israel’s trying to draw us into a broader war in the Middle East that is completely, totally, 100% against American interests now. I would say that, I give very little credit to this administration for anything. But I would say they give signs that they don’t want to be pulled into a war with Iran, and they know that Israel is trying to provoke that. And they’re torn because the Israel lobby is really powerful. And, it’s clear the games that Israel is playing in provoking, Iran and Hezbollah in, northern Lebanon and, essentially at the core, being unwilling to talk about any. Political settlement that gives the Palestinian people a stated surprise as the way to end all of this conflict. And instead what Israel wants is say that the U.S. say, you know, you know, protects their most extremist positions. And, this is, of course, not in the U.S. interest. It’s not in the U.S. interest to be in a war with Russia. Why should we be in a war with Russia? Russia told us. Absolutely. And by Russia, I mean President Putin. And before him, President Yeltsin. And I was an advisor to President Yeltsin. The Russian president told us absolutely, clearly. We can cooperate. We can have normal relations. But don’t crowd us with your military bases on our border. Something the United States leaders should understand. It the exact meaning of because we set that position 201 years ago in the Munroe Doctrine. Yes. And we have repeated it basically every year since, which is don’t crowd us with your military in our neighborhood. That’s all. That’s all the Russians said. We absolutely refused to listen to this.

What did the Chinese say? Something very, very simple. The Chinese say. We are one China. You, the Western countries led by Britain in the 19th century, and then with all of the imperial powers, including Japan, at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, tried to dismember us. China. You tried to pull us to pieces. You conquered territory. You invaded us many times. In fact, to my mind, the most cynical war of modern history was Britain’s invasion of China in 1839, called the First Opium War, which was to force China to accept British opium and trade. The Chinese knew no way to become opium addicts. And Britain said, well, this is free trade. It’s our opium. As if, you know, the Colombian cartel would invade us Sunday and free trade principles. So in any event, the Chinese are saying one thing. Don’t dismantle us, okay? We went through that. We went through 150 years of that. So Taiwan, that’s part of China. You said it United States. That’s the basis of our diplomatic relations. Stop provoking, that’s all. We can have perfectly normal relations, but don’t play the game of trying to break us apart. But we have forces in the U.S. that seem compelled to make trouble. It’s literally that we must provoke. We must overthrow Russia. We must divide Russia. We must dismember China. We must not allow other countries just to get on with things. That’s all the other countries are saying when I say these things. It sounds so weird, by the way, to Americans who are reading the New York Times or reading the Washington Post or reading the Wall Street Journal, because Mr. Sachs, China’s our enemy. They’re doing all these terrible things.

Tucker [00:31:58] Russia.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:31:59] They’re the imperial, blah, blah, blah, because we’re fed a bunch of lines that are complete nonsense. But if you say it again and say it again and say it again, and the US is, you know better than anybody USG trying to control the narrative, trying to control what we hear, trying to control, what social media can say. Well, the simplest truths become completely clouded. So the point is, you ask me, does the U.S. have an interest in war with Iran? Of course not. Does the U.S. have an interest in war with Russia? Of course not. Does the US have an interest in war with China? God forbid, is my only answer. It would be probably the end of the world.

Tucker [00:32:53] And I think there’s a widespread recognition of that, that we can’t win a war against China, obviously. And I think most people know that, that we’re not winning our current war against Russia. Most people understand that. But I think in the public mind I’m just guessing, but that Iran seems very far away and primitive. And maybe it is a country we can kind of push around, and maybe we could have some sort of limited engagement with Iran and kill the leadership, and then the freedom fighters take over and it becomes a democracy again. I think people may believe that. What would you say to them or to our policymakers who are making that case?

Jeffrey Sachs [00:33:29] Let me start by saying that Iran or Persia, to use its, classical name, is one of the greatest, and ancient civilizations on the planet. And, it is an amazing civilization and an amazing place and a highly sophisticated country of about 100 million people and a highly technologically sophisticated place, including. A militarily sophisticated place, and we have known that. And one of the concerns, about Iran is that with all of that technical sophistication, they felt threatened by the United States, and, threatened by other neighbors as well, and to have had a program to develop nuclear weapons of their own. And that seems no doubt to be true. And what the Iranians said is if we had the right, geopolitical context where you’re not threatening us, where you’re not trying to crush us, where you’re not trying to overthrow our regime, we will end that nuclear program. But if you’re trying to overthrow us and threatening us and damning us in every possible way. I mean, how can we deal with you? And that led to a number of years of negotiation. And the negotiations culminated, during the Obama, last years of his government in a treaty that was, called the JCPoA, the Joint comprehensive, agreement to, in which Iran would stop its nuclear arms development and, we would end the sanctions on Iran and normalize relations. Well, our neocon world, and especially the Israel lobby could not accept that, because Iran is the, it is the pure enemy from Israel’s point of view. And so the Israeli side, to my mind, in a kind of mad, self-defeating, devastatingly wrongheaded approach, convinced the Trump administration, and Bolton was there, of course, doing his usual, job of messing things up, which he’s done all his career, to break this agreement. And, the U.S., kept sanctions pulled out of the agreement with Iran. And where are we today? Well, where we are today is that. It’s commonly said I and reported that Iran is now, either already with the nuclear weapons or with the nuclear weapons within reach in days or weeks because it has been, enhancing, its uranium, and it could make a nuclear weapon, if it chooses to do so. In other words, pulling out of. Diplomacy solve nothing. It didn’t end any threat. It didn’t topple any regime. It, only pushed Iran to continue the course that it was on. And, to put, Iran, and. The U.S. on this collision course. Now, Israel is trying to provoke an outright war on this basis. The idea that diplomacy, that normal relations, that an agreement that actually was reached and backed by the U.N. and backed by all the major powers, including the United States and Europe and Russia and China and the United Nations, that maybe diplomacy could solve something, that I, of course, is utterly rejected by, Israel and by the Israel lobby. And, what? Bebe is trying to do. What Netanyahu is trying to do is to pull the U.S. into a full fledged war, to destroy Iran.

Tucker [00:38:26] But if he wants a war with Iran, just go have your war with Iran. Why do we have to be involved? What do we have to do with this? I don’t understand.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:38:32] If Israel were to have a war with Iran. Iran could, you know, and would, cause grievous, damage to Israel and Israel, might in the end, by the way, use its nuclear weapons.

Tucker [00:38:51] And why not? I mean, look, people face problems like this, not just geopolitically or on the global stage, but in their daily lives. Like, I would like this, but there are restraints on what I can do because of things I can’t control. I maybe I hate my neighbors, but you have to. These are the things you deal with in life. Like you figure it out.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:39:09] If you don’t like your neighbor, you think your neighbor is a little bit dangerous to provoke them every day and try to humiliate them and, and do whatever you can to damage their interests, maybe invade their lawn, maybe destroy their shed. I don’t think so.

Tucker [00:39:26] And it’s like, I don’t.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:39:27] I don’t think so.

Tucker [00:39:29] That’s not good for you or for anyone else. I guess what I’m saying is, I certainly don’t want Israel or any other country to be destroyed or have a war, but I’m still baffled by why we have to be in, like, what in the world do we have to do with this? We’re the United States for America. We’re on the other side of the planet. We don’t have any connection to Iran. Why would we even consider fighting Iran? I think this is just nuts.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:39:52] We would consider it because, Iran is our implacable foe, according to the Israel lobby. And according to a propaganda that, of course, went back to the hostage taking crisis of 1979 and the revolution in Iran. And like so many things in our world. You can tell a narrative as you like, as long as you hide every bit of real history. So, Iran was not an enemy of the United States in some natural and implacable way. But in 1953, when a democratically elected and popular and very decent and clever leader of Iran thought that maybe Iran should get some more benefit from oil that Britain was willfully extracting in imperial terms, its oil.

Tucker [00:41:03] Iranian oil.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:41:04] Sorry. Yes. The well, as the old joke said, how did our oil get under their sand? You know, this was, this, of course, is their oil, but the vision of imperial powers was we can go where we want, when we want, and it’s really our oil. We need your oil. Thank you very much. That was the British view. The British Empire was not, a nice little, fair enterprise. The British Empire was a completely extractive empire. Well, suffice it to say. And the point I was going to make without diverting us so much as that. In 1953, Britain and the U.S. teamed up to overthrow most of this democratic government. We love democracy. So let’s put in a police state, which is exactly what we did. So we overthrew the democracy. We put in a monarchy which became a police state. And the Iranians lived under that, and they didn’t like it. And in 1979, as, the Shah of Iran that we installed through a coup, a CIA, MI6 coup, was dying of cancer. The Iranians said, okay, we want our country back. And that, of course, was the occasion, at the time for the hostage taking of our, diplomats. Because, it’s a long story, but, Carter had taken the Shah in. Who was the mortal enemy of so many people in Iran after decades ofh is police state? Well, all of these issues have history and ways to resolve them. And by the 1990s or by the early 2000, had we behaved like normal adult people. Well, maybe not normal, but, seeking, people. This could all have been long ago, past history. But what did the United States do? The United States, after the release of the hostages armed Iraq to attack Iran, and to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians during the 1980s, including with chemical weapons. That was our ally. One should recall Saddam Hussein, our ally, whom we executed, of course, who we later executed, which we do for most of our allies.

Tucker [00:43:51] So this is a stressful time here. The kids are going back to school. Vacation is over. It’s the height of a presidential election season. There’s a lot going on. You need a good night’s sleep, but it’s never been harder to get it. So we’re talking with this in the office the other day, and a couple people who work here were raving about a product called eat, sleep. And I wanted to know more about it. It turns out that temperature has a lot to do with whether or not you sleep comfortably and wake up feeling rested, like you actually slept. Now, the makers of a sleep pod figured out that if you make a climate controlled mattress cover, you can add to your existing bed. You don’t have to buy a new bed just to cover that. It changes everything. You get far fewer problems with falling asleep and staying asleep, and so you feel rested the next day. Sleep actually has its desired effect. The pod can be used to warm up or cool off your bed, and that matters because temperatures change seasonally. We have climate change in this country. It’s called winter and so you can feel comfortable all night long. It even adjusts to different preferences on either side of the bed, which might be helpful in your relationship if you have one of those relationships where the different partners want different temperatures, and those are pretty common. The sleep pod has been studied. It’s been proven to improve people’s sleep and health. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk on the other side, many others use this product, including people here. So try it. Go to eat sleep.com/tucker. Use the code Tucker to get 350 bucks off the pod for ultra recommended.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:45:22] But the point is, we don’t seek peace. And especially, after 1991 when we got the idea that not only do we not seek peace with anybody, no one can touch us. We’re the most powerful country, we can do anything we want. We’re the world’s sole superpower. We’re the indispensable nation. We are the greatest colossus in the history of the world, including, the Roman Empire. Every one of those things was said by, again, I’ll say, grownups who don’t act like grownups. But the idea was, we can do anything we want. So, Iran, you’re our enemy. Axis of evil? Yeah. We don’t have to negotiate with anybody over anything. You know, one of the points that’s very interesting about the Ukraine war is a principle that we have. It’s stated; it’s article ten of the NATO charter, that we are so proud of, which is that Russia has no say in any decisions we want to make about enlarging NATO up to Russia’s borders, that this is not a matter of any legitimate interest of Russia. That’s explicit. That’s called our open-door policy, which is we don’t accept even on principle. The idea that Russia has any say or any interest in whether Ukraine hosts U.S. military bases and U.S. missile systems. Putin was told by Blinken, according to very knowledgeable sources. In January 2022 that the U.S. reserves the right to put missiles in Ukraine next door. Putin said, but I thought President Biden said the U.S. wouldn’t do that. And apparently I wasn’t in that conversation. But apparently the response of Secretary Blinken, was no, no, no. We reserve the right to do what we want. Those are our systems. This is not something you have to say about. So this is our approach to the world.

Tucker [00:47:47] Link. So you just reveal something interesting. It sounds like Blinken’s running the administration or its foreign policy.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:47:52] Well, who knows who tells Blinken what to do?

Tucker [00:47:56] Who do you think tells him what to do?

Jeffrey Sachs [00:47:58] I think that it’s important to understand this is a big machine. It’s a, you know, trillion dollar plus machine. The military industrial system of the United States. It gets set in course, in a pretty deep way. There’s a strategy. The strategy is not changed when a new president comes to office. They may think they have some say about it, but they have not very much say. The strategy of NATO enlargement, as I said, goes back literally to 1994. So this has been a 30 year program. It’s very deeply and trained. And, President Putin has a nice line that I read recently in a forthcoming book, where he talks about the fact that he’s talked to U.S. presidents. He said it in his interview with you, which is in the morning. They say one thing, and then in the afternoon they explain to you, well, it’s the opposite, because someone has come to them to explain. No, it doesn’t work that way.

Tucker [00:49:00] Everybody ratios.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:49:01] Us. And in this, in this, forthcoming, wonderful book by a historian who tracks this whole period, he quotes Putin is saying that, you know, the president will say something, but then the men in the dark suits and blue ties show up, and they explain to the president how it really is. And I think that this is basically correct, which is there is a permanent state, it is a permanent security state. It is a big business. Remember, we have 750 overseas military bases. We have 6000 nuclear warheads. We have $1 trillion military budget on the surface, not to mention other kinds of spending that aren’t, directly in that budget. This a big, big machine. And this machine is out explicitly according to every doctrine that is published. Also not just private, but published is out for what was already defined by the Defense Department decades ago as full spectrum dominance in every part of the world. Full spectrum dominance is an interesting term, but it means the United States will be the dominant power of every region of the world. It’s a kind of crazy idea. I call it completely delusional, in fact. Yeah, because as you travel and I travel, we see the world in a little bit more symmetric way. Yes. The US is a powerful country, but it’s 4.1% of the world population. There’s another 95.9% of the world population. They don’t quite see themselves as being run by us in every region of the world. And for the U.S. to say we have full spectrum dominance in Central Asia or on Russia’s border, or in, over, other nuclear powers, or in East Asia where China has it. Industrial base twice the size of the United States, and a population four times the size of the United States, and hundreds of nuclear weapons and their own interests, and a civilization that is ten times longer-lived than the United States that we dominate China—well, that just seems like a recipe for nonstop war. And in the nuclear age, a recipe for at some moment, whether it’s 90s or whenever it is from now, triggering the absolutely catastrophic unimaginable. And because we provoke, we don’t talk. We provoke. And this is the most important thing that any president needs to understand.

Tucker [00:52:13] So if, and I do think Trump understands it, the King does.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:52:17] By the way, and JD Vance understands.

Tucker [00:52:20] JD Vance definitely understand. Yes.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:52:21] And this is extremely important because we’ve not even had candidates talk in this way from the major parties.

Tucker [00:52:27] So before you, let’s say Trump wins is allowed to win. I mean, not to be too cynical about our system, which everyone wants to believe in. You know, I think pretty tough to overcome what you’ve just described for anybody, to overcome that. But let’s say Trump wins. Trump advanced win. What? What are the first things they should do to change the trajectory away from self-defeating, away from the self harm that we’re committing against our own country in toward, you know. Toward a series of policies that help the United States and restore sanity to the world. Like, what do you need to do?

Jeffrey Sachs [00:53:06] You know what? What both Trump and Vance are saying about Ukraine is exactly right, and it’s completely spot on, and it’s utterly urgent that it be heard and understood. And that is there is no basis for this war and that it was provoked. Deliberately, accidentally, on a bluff, whatever, by the U.S. pushing this NATO business up to Russia’s border in a way we would never accept in our own hemisphere. So they both get this. Exactly. And that’s great. And they understand this is a completely losing proposition. And that’s correct also, because if Russia wins, it’s a losing proposition of Russia loses. It’s even a bigger losing proposition by the risk of nuclear war. So they get that very much. And Trump is absolutely right also that this war could end in a day that’s not even, that’s not even a rhetorical gloss. This war will end the moment a U.S. president picks up the phone or uses my zoom account, as far as I’m concerned, connects with President Putin and says, you know, that NATO enlargement. That was a bad idea. I don’t know how that got started. I know went on for 30 years, but that’s the end of the war. The fighting will stop that moment, though. There will be things to resolve, but that will be the end of the war, because that’s the whole premise of this war. And to this moment, the current administration is saying Ukraine will be part of NATO. So they’re guaranteeing that the war will go on. So Ukraine, they got it nailed down. What I would want to say that.

Tucker [00:55:02] But how do you do that even if you’re president? I mean, you said a minute ago, presidents arrive in office with the fantasy that they’re in charge, but they’re not these balls.

Jeffrey Sachs [00:55:10] No, no. The presidents can be in charge. I. They are. They will sit down and it’s like we now see, I think I haven’t read the new Poindexter book, which was just reviewed, which dumps on Trump and the Bolton book, which I did read, parts of which I found revolting. But, part of what, these aides do is, they try to trick the president. They lied to the president. They try to continue an aggressive agenda. So it takes smarts for a president to be able to pull this off. Absolutely. But the president actually has the power to do it. But they have to be really tough and really resolute, and they have to know that they’re going to hear a lot of bullshit from a lot of people from their own dark suits in blue with blue ties. They will hear a lot of bullshit because this is a deeply entrained process. Yes. And? So that it can be done. It’s not impossible. And what makes it more likely right now is that I think we’re at the end of a 30-year neocon cycle, because remember, this started 30 years ago. I saw the beginning of it. I didn’t understand it at the time. I was advisor to President Yeltsin. I saw the U.S. was not being cooperative. I couldn’t understand why. You had a president that wanted democracy in Russia. He wanted normal relations. And the United States was saying, the hell with you, basically on many different things. And I didn’t get it then. But now I understand, of course, much better that this was the beginning of 30 years of ‘we will corner you,” we will defeat you, we may dismember you, but we will make sure you’re a fifth-rate country. Okay. That 30 years, I believe, has now been exposed as a terrible failure. So no one could call our foreign policy over the past 30 years as a success in any way. Every war we fought has been a disaster. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. Ukraine. These are all wars of choice that we decided that we went in and we’ve spent, depending on the count, $5 trillion, $7 trillion. We ran up our debt, we busted the economy. We ignored all of our infrastructure and our domestic issues for this remarkably delusional idea that we would run the world. So if Trump and Vance come in, or whoever comes in. They have one advantage, which was no one could call the current course successful. And there are probably people in the deep state. Not everybody by any means who know. My God. Okay, we’ve done enough. No more perpetual wars. We better do something different. So the president has the I. Certainly the constitutional authority. And if they’re a smart leader, the capacity to push and they’re coming in at a moment where maybe the door’s a bit ajar to a change of direction. By no means automatic. It’s not like the Washington establishment is sitting up and saying, oh, we get it. No, but they can’t be sitting there saying, it’s all working great. So I think that there is that recognition. But the main thing I would say to want to wait, President Trump and JD Vance, if they win or whoever is president is. That lesson that you understand about Ukraine is actually the same with China. That’s even more hard to accept and swallow idea in Washington right now, because in Washington, one idea, I think even JD Vance says it, but I really disagree. And I want him to use the same reasoning to understand it is we have no intrinsic fight with China. It ain’t true. We have to compete with China economically. We have to compete with China technologically, of course, we have to trade with China also. We should go visit China, by the way, because a wonderful place. But we have no intrinsic fight with China. And it’s the same logic that they have understood vis-a-vis Ukraine and Russia. We have no intrinsic fight with Russia. We have no intrinsic fight with China. So that’s the main thing I want. Understood. Which is all of these debacles are based on the idea that we have to run everyone else’s business. We have to determine who’s in power. We can even change their borders if we want. We can overthrow their governments. That whole approach has been a disaster for us. A multitrillion dollar, millions of lives lost, worldwide disaster of U.S. foreign policy. And we don’t need for our security 750 overseas military bases. We don’t need that. They’re expensive. And we need to fix our roads, for God’s sake. We need to make our country work properly. Because you and I see when we go abroad, the infrastructure abroad sparkles compared to what we live in.

Tucker [01:01:17] And that’s the most.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:01:18] Distressing.

Tucker [01:01:18] State. And it’s not even I’ve traveled my whole life as I know you have, and you know you’re used to thinking of the developing world and then coming back to the kind of rest of the United States thing like that anymore. Pull into Kennedy or SFO or LAX. or Boston Logan from abroad. And the first thing you notice is that it’s dirtier and more chaotic. It’s less attentive to the individual. It’s harsher than the developing country you’re flying in from. And it’s so heartbreaking. You can’t believe if people traveled more. We’d have a revolution in this country if they saw that Turkey is nicer than the United States.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:01:56] What I had a wonderful.

Tucker [01:01:58] Did you feel that.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:01:59] I had a wonderful conversation with an Italian political leader who, I was in northern Italy and nibbles on a beautiful city in the Alps, and I was saying how sparkling all the infrastructure is. And he he kind of sighed and said, yes, it’s very nice, but it isn’t Oslo and Copenhagen there it’s even more. But then he said, I was really surprised. But Oslo and Copenhagen, if you go to China right now, they’re leaving those places behind. And and that’s what we see, which is absolutely true.

Tucker [01:02:33] Well, it’s just so depressing. It’s just so awful. And it’s what’s awful about it is that most people don’t understand it. They don’t know how thoroughly they’ve been betrayed by their leaders and by the advisors to their leaders. You know, the bill crystals of the world who really just don’t care at all about the NHS at all. Not even it’s not even an afterthought to them. It’s all about something very different. And they’ve been screwed, like all the money went overseas. Yeah. All the energy is focused abroad.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:02:59] Maybe in their little communities, wherever they live. Things are are nice enough. But for the rest of America, well, what are we doing? Why are we pouring unbelievable amounts of money and danger and lives into all of these conflicts? And so my main message to, you know, because I really think Trump and Vance get it, and Ukraine completely. But what I don’t want is and you hear it in Washington is the idea: Well, we have to stop that so we can take on our real foe, which is China.

Tucker [01:03:37] Or Iran.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:03:38] Or Iran. They’re not our real foe in any way, shape or form. We have issues with them. We have competition in the markets and technology, as I said, and in many things. But they’re not an enemy and there’s no reason for them to be an enemy. And so it’s the exactly the same logic.

Tucker [01:03:58] Except on the question of Taiwan, I think there are a lot of people who maybe haven’t thought it through, who feel like preserving Taiwan’s sovereignty to the extent it has sovereignty. I guess, is a core American interest. What’s your view?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:04:13] The the issue with Taiwan is that the United States policy is absolutely clear. It’s the basis of our diplomatic relations with China is what’s called the one China policy. Right. Which is that Taiwan is part of China. As everybody knows, there was a civil war in China in 1949, the losing side of the civil war, the KMT, the Kuomintang, fled in their remnants to Taiwan. Formosa, which was part of it. It was actually for a period a Japanese colony because Japan had invaded the Qing dynasty and taken Taiwan away, but it was part of China traditionally in the I Ching period, for centuries. But the ROC, the Republic of China, which was the losing side of the civil war, installed themselves as a military government on the island of Taiwan, off the coast of the mainland. Now, what’s interesting is that the Republic of China, that is the Taiwan installed government on the losing side of the civil war, said there’s one China, but it’s us. And on the other side in Beijing, they also said, yes, we agree there’s one China, but it’s us. And so there wasn’t a disagreement of whether there’s one China or two Chinas. There’s one China, according to the Republic of China and according to the People’s Republic of China, People’s Republic of China being the mainland, the place with the 1.4 billion people. When the U.S. normalized relations with the People’s Republic of China, it said. We do so on the basis of a one China policy that Taiwan is part of China. But the understanding was that, there are two systems, because Taiwan has developed now, actually for more than a century, partly under the Japanese imperial rule, and then later under the KMT or the, coming Tang, period, into a market based system. And China was not yet a market based economy at the time. So one country, two systems. And we said there should be peace across the Taiwan Straits, so that the two sides should resolve their differences amicably, which to my mind is a perfectly sound and achievable standard. So our policy is that there is one China, China’s policy. By China, I mean the mainland. There is one China. And lurking in China’s mind is don’t break us apart because we had enough of you, the outside world breaking us apart from 1839 to 1949, trying in every which way to dismember us, to invade us, which was done repeatedly, as I mentioned earlier. So China’s position is, yes, there’s one China. We want a, an amicable relationship with Taiwan. We. Have accepted two systems. And, that principle. But we don’t want the United States or anyone else provoking secession. Independence. A war across. This narrow straits, because both sides understand that there is one China and we should not be divided. But in the U.S., because it’s part of our deep state ideology, it is provoke, provoke, weaken, create, divisions, bad mouth name call, support insurgencies, which we do. I hope no one shocked about that, but that is standard CIA ops. And so there is part of our government which spurs secession, or independence movements in Taiwan, which would lead to war. Absolutely. And I tell my Taiwanese friends and I have many Taiwanese friends, don’t become the next Ukraine. Don’t let the U.S. create a disaster in your neighborhood. The worst words from the United States are ‘we have your back’. That’s what we told the post-coup government of Ukraine in 2014. That is 600,000 dead. Caused by that kind of idea. So I tell my Taiwanese friends. Take a deep breath and don’t be provoked into something extremely dangerous. Because there are hotheads in the United States that want to provoke, and that shouldn’t be provoking and that provoke completely against our own diplomacy. Now, in 1982, the U.S. and China signed a communique. It’s very important people can go online and look it up. And it was a statement by the United States that said, we have no intention to harm Taiwan for the long term. We are providing arms for Taiwan now because historically we backed Taiwan, but now we have established diplomatic relations with PRC. But we have no intention of doing this for the long term. In fact, we will taper off our arms support for Taiwan and it will come to an end. That was 1982. That’s like so many things the United States promises and then reneges on. It’s essentially the same as the promise that was made to Gorbachev and to Yeltsin in 1990, 91, 92 that NATO would never enlarge. In other words, we say things, we sign documents, we make communiques, but we regard them as as opportunistic moments because we want our complete freedom of action. In my view, our smart diplomacy would be very straightforward. We would not have what we call strategic ambiguity, which is a term that is  so wrongheaded in my view. But it is. Meaning we won’t say what will really do about Taiwan and what we really feel will keep the other side guessing. Oh, why? So that we have an accidental nuclear war. … What do we want them to guess about? Exactly what I would like us to say very clearly is, of course, we support a One China policy. We will not arm Taiwan over the opposition of Beijing, not only because it’s one country and we should not arm parts of another country over the opposition of the government that we recognize, but we understand it’s incredibly provocative to do so. But on the other side, we and the world community expect China, the government in Beijing and the government in Taipei in Taiwan to work amicably so that there is no military attack by China on Taiwan, and there is no reason in the world why they would do so. If it’s understood that it is one China and it’s a matter of working things out.

Tucker [01:12:36] What about the argument you often hear, that Beijing wants Taipei because of TSMC, because of semiconductors that the world needs, that I will need in order to become, you know, driver of the new world economy, etc., etc. But that that’s the price semiconductors. In Taiwan, and we cannot allow mainland China to have them.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:12:58] Well, so many things. First. That supply chain will not be disrupted by the mainland for us and our needs. As long as we don’t provoke a war. So from one point of view. We have a, you know, circumstance in our country that we design advanced microchips, but we don’t produce them. And, that was a decision that went back to the 1970s where we basically decided as a matter of policy, not just at the industry level, but at the national political level, that we would outsource AI production to Korea, to Japan. And then, in Taiwan, this came from a very clever person, Maurice Chang, who established the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, TSMC. So nothing about TSMC, per se, is at stake in this. Actually, it is the case right now that the U.S. is imposing sanctions on TSMC exporting advanced AI microchips to China. I don’t support that policy at all. I think that the idea of doing it is wrongheaded and provocative and not actually in anybody’s interest. It’s part of the U.S. misguided attempt to, quote, contain a country that is larger. I am very clever, technologically sophisticated, and will engineer around these restrictions in short order. And that’s my guess of, with our technology export bans, we’re not really accomplishing anything except speeding up China’s, ability to innovate around any of the U.S. bans. So I don’t see TSMC as really, an important part of this story. There may be people who do. I think they’re wrong. I believe, and that’s the point I’m trying to make: if we don’t provoke, if we treat China as we should, as, another great power, as, by the way, a really great civilization with lots of wisdom and lots of history and lots of beauty and lots of culture, and lots that can be shared with us as a great manufacturing power, but not one that is out to go conquer the rest of the world. Because China is not. We will have perfectly fine relations. China will continue to develop. Interestingly, I think people should understand China is now a larger economy than the United States, but not in per capita terms. It’s still, around a third of the U.S. per capita income level. So it’s not as if we’re facing some, you know, impossible, you know, threat that is about to overtake the United States. They’re just trying to catch up for lost time. They’re trying to develop. They’re doing an excellent job of it. They’re very clever. They’re working very, very hard. They’re working very long hours. They’re saving and investing a lot. They’re building a modern economy and all credit to them as far as I’m concerned. They’re doing it the right way—saving investment, education, innovation. And catching up, which they needed to do after a really horrible 150 years. Basically, we. …

Tucker [01:16:51] So I’m everything that you’ve said for the last I don’t even know how long we’ve been sitting here. But last, you know, hour and a half or whatever hour and 20 it’s been. I’ve never heard on NBC’s CBS. Read the New York Times. I mean, these are all ideas and perspectives that are just missing from big media outlets in the United States. You’ve been banned from those outlets after spending like a lifetime on them. So the only reason that we’re able to have this conversation is because we’re doing it on social media and alternative media. It seems to me that if you’re running, a regime, a government that has really unpopular and destructive policies, you have to shut down these kinds of conversations. We just saw Pavel Durov, the founder and owner of telegram, jailed in France.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:18:09] Unbelievable.

Tucker [01:18:09] It is unbelievable. But it’s also. But it’s also believable.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:18:13] No, but it’s so crude and so disgusting and so dangerous.

Tucker [01:18:18] Of course it’s true. But it also strikes me as like a harbinger. I mean, that’s that looks like the future to me. What do you. I mean, will there be a, you know, free exchange of information 20 years from now?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:18:34] It’s a it’s a big question, you know. I was on, a show with someone that I’ve liked and known and, you know him as well, and, that I’ve admired for decades. Dmitri Simes, who’s, a Russian American, who lives, sometime in the United States, sometimes in Moscow. He was a young advisor to Richard Nixon, who, by the way, had a lot of intelligent ideas about how relations with China and relations with Russia, that I admire more and more in retrospect, as well. But, Dimitri Simes, a home was raided by the FBI. And I found it especially unnerving because I was on his show, by zoom. You know, he has a talk show. Very serious discussions about how to avoid nuclear war, the kinds of things we’re talking about, and their rating, his house. And, of course, we’re seeing more and more of that, all over the United States. We know you know much more about it than I do, but we know. And your phenomenal, interview with Bobby Kennedy, also explained a lot of it. How much, is being shot down on the social media, how the government, basically leans on, our leans on platforms, that, are trying to get, some normal discussion, going on. I don’t know how much I’m supposed to say about it, but I think I can say that, you know, one of my favorites, Judge Napolitano, whom I, discuss these issues with his YouTube account closed for a week because of something that a guest said, that suddenly they told him that’s one strike. Do that again. That’s two strikes. If it happens the third time, you’re off permanently. This is a weird, dangerous situation we have in our country, which was founded on the principle that there is a marketplace of ideas, that you discuss things that that if you want to have a free country, you need an informed citizenry. It’s it’s absolutely fundamental and it is completely at risk right now.

Tucker [01:21:14] If you can be punished for criticizing the regime, isn’t that regime by definition a dictatorship?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:21:20] We are in any event, it has to be understood. The American people have only the slightest say, and slightest knowledge about what our government does abroad. The American people have more knowledge to some extent about what it does at home. But what it does abroad has been deliberately, made highly, secret and confidential for decades. And so, some of it is obvious and in broad daylight, but all denied when it does it. You know, I talked about the U.S. role in the coup in Ukraine in February 2014. That is a covert regime change operation according to the technical jargon. We do that for a living. This is how the U.S. operates dozens and dozens of overthrows of foreign governments. I’ve seen many close up because I’m an economic advisor. I’m not a military advisor. But presidents say things to me or I see with my own eyes these occurrences, but none of it shows up in our domestic discourse. That’s why that. Permanent state machine runs on its own to a large extent, and why it is the unique job of a president to stop it, because I regard the job of of a proper job of a president is to stop the war machine. It’s the number one job. If you have a president that’s not mentally competent, and I think that’s probably the situation with Biden right now or not a very clever president, which may have been the situation before with Biden or one who was bought into the military industrial complex. They don’t even know what their most basic job is. So whether it’s through AI, laziness or, being pushed or, being lied to by aides or being of that mindset or being of no mindset, we are a war machine. And, and that is not known by the American.

Tucker [01:23:42] When it shows if, you know the famous Eisenhower retirement speech.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:23:46] Yes.

Tucker [01:23:47] Which I just watched last year.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:23:49] Well addressed if February 17, 1961.

Tucker [01:23:53] Army base.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:23:54] I’m almost sure that’s the date. Amazing.

Tucker [01:23:57] I’m almost sure I’ve often heard referred to but I never I’ve never. It’s on YouTube. I watched it one day on the treadmill, and I was really struck by it. It’s much more intense than it is, given credit for being. But he seems to suggest this began with the the war, the Second World War. Do you think that’s right?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:24:17] Well, it began, with the National Security Act of 1947. It began with the creation of the CIA, and the empowerment of the CIA to engage in, blatantly illegal, vulgar, activities, of course, including assassinations of foreign leaders, overthrows of foreign governments, and to do so in a completely secretive way and with an agenda, of course, the agenda which even predates, 1947, it goes back to 1945, and by some accounts, even earlier, was that the CIA was the instrument to confront the Soviet Union, to defeat the Soviet Union, to overthrow the Soviet Union, to dismantle the Soviet Union, but that it was the, it was the instrument of our. We used to call it war and communism. But what’s interesting is that after communism ended, the war on Russia continued exactly the same way. So it’s it’s not really about communism, apparently. It’s really about a big country that the U.S. resents for being a big country. That’s basically what this is about. The U.S. does not like peers. And that was especially the idea of why should we have peers? We need full spectrum dominance. We need to run things. We need to be the indispensable country. We need to be the world’s only superpower. It’s quite a vision. It gets you into a lot of trouble because most of the rest of the world doesn’t see things the way you do. But that goes back to, especially the institutional creation of the CIA, because the precursor, the OSS, was, you know, doing things during World War two. Okay. That’s, we were we were in a world war. But, that kind of covert operation continued, and it became a cornerstone of American foreign policy. But it means completely secret.

Tucker [01:26:37] And it sort of took over the whole government.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:26:39] Though, by being completely secret. You can do things that are absolutely unbelievable. And, you know, I think you believe, but I certainly believe that the CIA, had its role in the coup in the United States in 1963, which was the assassination of I.

Tucker [01:26:58] Think that’s I think that’s confirmed. I mean, it was confirmed by me, by someone who saw the.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:27:03] The document, the implications of that are so profound. Not only was it, a, a murder most foul is as Bob Dylan. Said in that incredible song that he wrote about it, but it in a way marked the end of our democratic institutions, because the presidents after that, maybe they are afraid for their lives. Maybe they are, absolutely paralyzed. Maybe the CIA got away with something so extraordinary. A murder in broad daylight, with plenty of eyewitnesses that pointed out that some there was a conspiracy under way because shots were coming from different directions, and they got away with a narrative that was so absurd. So, shoved down our, our throats that nobody believed it, but it didn’t matter. And now it’s, 61 years later. So who talks about it? It’s a, you know, it’s a footnote. So maybe they learned, oh, we could get away with everything, including regime change in our own country.

Tucker [01:28:15] Well, what do you think of the attempted assassination of Trump?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:28:19] We don’t know the story. Yeah, yeah, it’s absolutely shocking. We don’t know the story. And whether we ever will know the story is like so many other things right now that are huge events. We talked briefly about Covid. You know, I think it came out of a lab that’s one of the biggest events in history. Oh, that’s so passé. Who wants to talk about that anymore? Assassination attempt on Trump that that’s it’s now weeks ago that’s you know, that’s old news. We don’t even talk about that anymore. Blowing up Nord Stream. No. Some cockamamie story. Yeah. A few people on a sailboat. Oh, it was Ukrainians. Oh, was this always. You know, this is part. We have no attention span. We have complete lying from the government. We have secrecy and confidentiality. So we never actually ever solve any of these issues because it’s very hard to have a systematic, methodical discussion where one discusses and then where there’s a response. It the thing that gets me about, Washington is they don’t feel they have to respond to anything. And you watch the spokespeople, Matt Miller at the State Department or Kirby in the white House, they smirk right in your face to tell you you are nothing. We can tell anything to you. Do you understand? I mean, that’s my interpretation, I agree, they smirk.

Tucker [01:29:51] The contempt they have for the people who pay their salaries, who own this country. It’s for the.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:29:55] Salary they pay. Can’t they get the smirk off their face? You know, it’d be.

Tucker [01:29:59] It would be like getting spit at by your housekeeper. I’m sure you’re fired.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:30:03] No no no no no no, it’s exactly you see it that they know that they have the little laugh at the end. So it’s the carefree lie. But we’re talking about absolutely essential issues. And that’s what’s missing in our discussion right now. And it’s and and it is closed down systematically if you try, if you yeah. You you just can’t discuss the things can I.

Tucker [01:30:34] Because take it I’m, I have trouble staying on track as well. So many questions. But just back to Durov Pavel Durov. Yes. Jail in France right now. Is there any chance the Macron government arrested him without coordination from the Biden administration?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:30:51] Probably not. I think the network the people should understand. Again, this is it’s not exactly out there to to go read off the shelf how it works. But the intelligence agencies are a network in and of themselves. So whether Blinken knew about this beforehand, I don’t know. Did the CIA know about this: far more likely. It’s interesting when you look, for example, at negotiations, these endless, hopeless negotiations on a ceasefire in Gaza. Hopeless, by the way, because of Israeli absolute, lack of interest in a cease fire, just to say that. But when you look at when the negotiations take place, who goes? You would think it might be our diplomats. No, it’s the CIA and Mossad. It’s a little weird. Those are quote unquote intelligence agencies. They’re doing the negotiations. That part’s not hidden because you have to say, okay, Mossad and the CIA and, Hamas.

Tucker [01:32:01] The CIA. So as if it’s its own government or-

Jeffrey Sachs [01:32:04] As if it’s the leader of our foreign policy. Exactly.

Tucker [01:32:08] I thought CIA was by charter, an intelligence gathering agency.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:32:12] By charter. It is two things, by the way. Literally by charter. It is an intelligence gathering agency, and it is any other mission. That is exactly how it became the covert operations enterprise. And one more thing, I think that it’s worth pointing out, by the way, about CIA, because we should take note of it. There has been one and only one congressional review of the CIA, and that was 49 years ago, 1975. Next year will be the 50th anniversary of the Church Committee and, maybe President Trump and, and Vice President Vance, if they’re in power, maybe they would call for another Congress.

Tucker [01:33:00] Trump in this intro of Bobby Kennedy on this past Friday, when when Kennedy endorsed him, said that he would like a commission to look into the CIA’s involvement or look into the Kennedy assassination.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:33:15] You know, it’s interesting. It it was a. Very strange confluence that allowed that one time for the CIA to be looked into because, Nixon had resigned. Ford was president, but had come directly from Congress. And so Ford had this sense in 1975 that he wasn’t a, you know, a directly elected president. And he respected Congress because he really came from Congress. So he actually, told his chief of staff, who was Dick Cheney, let this happen, you know, because Cheney was trying to close down church and probably could have closed down the church commission. But there was this odd confluence that enabled this tiny moment when the CIA operations could be reviewed, when they lifted the cover. It was horror after horror after horror, because when Church started, he didn’t know that he was going to uncover. A plethora of assassinations and assassination attempts, and mass surveillance of, of the US public and, regime change operations and many other things. Well, that cover was put back down, as a as Bobby said in your interview with him. Those, committees in Congress, that are quote unquote, overseeing the CIA are the protectors to make sure that no one looks right now. But it’s been 50 years, a half a century since we’ve had an account of what has really gone. Well, I see things. I don’t like what I see, and I don’t see them because, you know, I’m, because somehow it’s my area of knowledge or responsibility. I see them on the side, like when, I, the president of Haiti told me one day, Jeff, they’re going to they’re going to kill me. They’re going to they’re going to take me away. And I said, no, no, no. And I thought he was being, figurative and metaphorical. And I said, no, everything’s going to be all right. I’m going to help you get this loan, blah, blah, blah. Of course, the upshot of it was, as usual, I was naive. And, they took Aristide out to an unmarked CIA plane one day as president of Haiti and flew him to the Central African Republic and deposed him and deposed him literally in broad daylight. I mean, it was middle of the day. And the U.S. ambassador walked him out to this unmarked plane. But the interesting story for me was that I called, since I was an economic advisor a little bit and a friend, and, I don’t like presidents getting taken out to CIA unmarked planes and flown the  center of Africa. I called a reporter on the beat of the New York Times, and I said to her, well, could you cover this story? There’s just been a coup. She said to me: My editors are not interested. That’s my editors. Not interested. That’s a literal quote, because I was. My jaw dropped, so stunned, even the phrasing of it. But the New York Times would not cover a coup in broad daylight by the CIA in Haiti when it occurred. 

Tucker [01:36:54] And why do you think that is?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:36:56] Because these are, organizations that serve the American power structure, and they are both suborned by them because, they get their information from the CIA. They probably have, you know, literal people on staff, that are part of the USG in one way. And, they, their sources and everything else, and they view it as patriotic. Also, when the government says it’s not a good thing to handle. And so they don’t view themselves as the, as the defenders of democracy, they view themselves as the defenders of, of, of the permanent state. And they absolutely do.

Tucker [01:37:41] And so you think that the Intel agencies played a role in shaping news coverage?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:37:45] Well, I think that there’s no question at all. Some places are just literal mouthpieces of the CIA. But I don’t think anyone doubts that The Washington Post is just just the place where you, the CIA, issues its statements sometimes, by the way, helpful because sometimes the intelligence community wants the public to understand something. That’s right. So it’s not all wrong or all misinformed.

Tucker [01:38:12] No, no, that’s absolutely true.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:38:14] But of course, that is the place to go to, to hear what the CIA.

Tucker [01:38:20] Says and the Wall Street Journal, the Wall Street Journal, too.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:38:23] Yeah, it’s it’s not subtle. It’s it’s not even close. What’s amazing, though, is that any counter narrative. There’s no room for that in any of these papers.

Tucker [01:38:38] So then you have the CIA or. No, the whole panoply of agencies, but acting not simply as sources, but really as masters. Like they’re controlling the coverage.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:38:48] The idea is, yes. You know, the I think the, the most important cliched word is the narrative. There needs to be a story. They control the narrative. It’s like Orwell told us. He who controls the past controls the president, who controls the present, controls the future. They have to shape the past. They have to define everything. They need their narrative. And that’s what these mainstream outlets do, is have their narrative. They have completely, completely lost the idea of even one time saying, well, there’s this argument, and then there’s the argument on the other side and perhaps having competing columns or trying to understand this. I think we talked last time I tried to get 700 words in the New York Times. I got up to the point where they actually edited my piece before they killed it, but they would not run a 700 word story from someone who knows. I think about as much of the about the Ukraine crisis going back for more than 30 years is I, I’d say most of the people to write for them and, they won’t. They’re not interested in any other side. There’s a narrative and so that is how it works. The narrative does not have to be believable, by the way. Most of the time, it’s not believed. The war in.

Tucker [01:40:23] Russia blew up the Nord Stream two.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:40:25] Pipeline. The the Warren Commission was not believed by the American people. The, most Americans believe that, there was a lab leak that caused the pandemic. Most Americans, I would suppose, believe that, that the US blew up Nord Stream or, you know, certainly had its, had its role in it. So these narratives are not believed but they, they buy enough time that the attention goes away and you get on to something else. It’s just a way to, to make sure that there’s no need to answer anything, no accountability. That’s what this is about. Not convincing people of outlandishly weird stories. The lone gunman who killed President Kennedy when everyone’s pointing in another direction and, the count of the board says something else and blah, blah, blah. No, you don’t have to believe it, but you need to be able to say something for long enough that something else comes up and that you stop talking about the previous thing. And it’s extremely dangerous, because what it means is that beneath that, it’s not to convince people, it’s to have the ability to do what you want to do and know that you won’t be held accountable for it.

Tucker [01:41:47] I do think, though, a wrinkle in the program, a huge problem for the people who’ve been conducting, their affairs this way is alternative media of solar, which went from being really niche and kind of far out and not credible to being the, the-

Jeffrey Sachs [01:42:06] The only place you can.

Tucker [01:42:06] Find information. Exactly. So just a ton of for example. Yes. There’s a really sweet man. Yeah. I worked on lost his last job. You guys ever said that in public? But I know he’s a terrific guy. I saw absolutely terrible. Lost his last job for having views on foreign policy that were not consistent with what you were supposed to say. He got fired for it. And so he winds up doing his own little tiny thing on YouTube, and all of a sudden it becomes a real thing.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:42:32] Yeah. Because you talk, you reason. Yeah, exactly. He looks at the evidence and you can’t find that in in in what you show.

Tucker [01:42:40] Rogan’s like some sort of MMA fighter comedian, sitcom actor to starts doing this little program on a something called a podcast. It becomes the biggest thing in the world. So that is just a massive that’s too big a threat. Elon Musk making rockets, then buys Twitter and then opens it up. These are these are the biggest threats they face. So I mean they can’t allow that to continue can they.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:43:05] Well this Durov they just arrested. Well that’s it. You know, Elon is is is a force of nature. Of course. And, may be able to face down, the, the USG, but, we know it. And, you know, Elon is, really you’ve been very clear, very brave and doing the right things. But we know that the other platforms are already so heavily policed and with U.S. engagement. And, we heard about.

Tucker [01:43:37] Government engagement.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:43:38] From Bobby Kennedy and, but we know it also and we saw it with the, with Judge Politano also, you know, here’s the threat. You why you deviate even a guest deviates from our narrative. You got two times. But the third time you’re off our [platform].

Tucker [01:43:58] Who is the guest?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:43:59] But the guest was Pepe Escobar, who’s, a reporter. Journalist, provocative. And, I don’t even know the details, but, this is the threat, and I see it and, you know, many YouTube channels there, certain words, you, you know, must not say even if you needed to define something, specifically because they’ll boot you off. And, this is already clear now that we’re seemingly getting to the next stage of ransacking houses and, other kinds of threats. It’s, it it could be that. As all of these foreign policy strategies. This. Hegemonic strategy doesn’t work and is unraveling on many fronts. Maybe the proponents of that are doing their own kind of escalation to keep things in train. The interesting thing is, I think there are three main points that we’re seeing right now. One is the foreign policies of failure. So it doesn’t deliver whether it’s fair or unfair. Right? Wrong. Like it just doesn’t work. It’s gotten the United States into trillions of dollars of failed wars. Everyone can see this. The American people do not back our foreign policy at all. So that’s, I think, one, point. Second, we’re seeing politicians that are starting to say, no, we got to do something a different way. So that’s extremely important. And third, we we have, the truth coming out, you know, in, in these kinds of conversations, that, even if the so-called mainstream media won’t do it. People are tuning in and they’re tuning out of the, the, the boring pablum narratives that they don’t believe, of the mainstream. And that’s consequential to.

Tucker [01:46:08] Actually invited to kind of talk about the economy since you are an economic advisor. Yeah, once.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:46:11] In a while.

Tucker [01:46:14] But I couldn’t resist asking you about the state of the world, the state of our economy. Many parts of it. But I’m really fixated on credit card debt. And how high it is, is that it’s obviously something to worry about for the people who hold it. But how big a factor is it in the health of the economy? What do you make of that? Why is it so high? Highest ever?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:46:35] Well, I think the main thing to understand about our economy is that for the last 40 years or so, we’ve had two economies. We’ve had an economy of college grads, and professionals who have done quite well. And we’ve had an economy of high school grads and working class that have really had a hard time. And they have a lot of debt and they have a lot of, difficulties. And, we’ve had, basically two worlds, in, in, in our one nation that don’t communicate very clearly with each other. And that’s our, our basic economic reality. And so nice. So that that means that, you know, things like, we know that, and many surveys fed data which collects this kind of information, has looked at it or how many people in this country. Could not manage a sudden $400 emergency. Oh, you know, whether it’s dental or some medical or prescription or suck.

Tucker [01:47:42] Tires.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:47:42] And it’s and it’s a huge proportion of the country. And if, you know, in my neck of the woods, it’s not even known in a sense because, you know, I, I live in a world of people who are earning good incomes and. Where things look completely different. I mean, I’m aware of it because I’ve written about it for decades and said, you know, this is our our challenge and our our real problem, and we don’t face up to it. But that’s that’s the reality. So the credit card debt is not the professional class out on the binges. It’s people trying to make ends meet. And they can’t necessarily put food on the table for the family, can’t face a medical emergency, of which we have the rising number of, part of our population, that is experiencing that. And that’s our real situation. We don’t deal with it. We don’t talk about it very clearly. Clearly, our politics has, in, in, a more and more clear way organized along this lines. And, and the irony is the Republican Party became the party of the working class, and the, professionals became, or the Democratic Party became the party of the professionals. And that was a kind of flip over time. But, the reason is that. Reasons are complicated, but the the basic point is that when these divisions started, back in the 1970s and then really evolved after that. Nothing happened in this country. And so working-class voters who were voting for the Democrats in the Franklin Roosevelt era through Kennedy and Johnson, felt more and more wealth. This party doesn’t do anything for us. And, Trump, obviously, you know, with great political savvy saw his, entree, into that in 2016, understood that reality, and, took away the working class out of the Democratic Party, basically. But the underlying economics of that is a country that, just spread apart. It’s got many different aspects of it. But the biggest divide in our country is education, educational attainment, because basically that’s the underlying organizing principle for almost the whole economy, which is university graduate and up. You’re doing well. Your incomes are going up. You’re enjoying life. High school. And less you’re struggling and, it shows up in so many places. It shows up in housing, it shows up in credit card debt, but it actually shows up in life expectancy, which is unbelievable. There’s an eight-year gap of life expectancy between high school grads, who have a life expectancy of around 75, and college grads who have a life expectancy of around 83. Can you imagine, this is two different societies. And to the point of how long you live, how you live, whether you’re healthy or not. And this has been going on for decades now and completely almost un-understood and unaddressed and the political system more or less incapable of solving anything, unfortunately.

Tucker [01:51:38] It’s interesting, though, how little anyone cares. That’s I mean, I think these are complicated problems. Very complicated problems you suggested. I’m not exactly sure how to solve it, but I know that the first step is acknowledging it and caring about it.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:51:52] And discussing it.

Tucker [01:51:53] Discussing it. And you’ve been in it least since you were undergraduate at Harvard in one world. Yeah, I have two. Yeah. And so I can verify I know you can as well, that there’s like, no conversation about this, that everyone in the world that I grew up in blames the people who were dying earlier, hates them for it, hates them for their weakness and their suffering. And that just strikes me as such an ugly, vicious impulse. I don’t understand.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:52:16] It. Yeah, it’s and it’s a great observation. You know, you really can close the gates and literally on gated communities. But even if the community is not gated, we are segregated by residential area, by cities, by yes, live by rent by the cost of housing and so on. And so you can go on like this without, any, you know, real attention. And certainly I think it’s right to say that, you know, the, the lucky part of our society is more or less insulated not only by how they live and where they live and, you know, they get nice services from people who are working extraordinarily hard for extraordinarily low incomes. But the political system is paralyzed.

Tucker [01:53:12] Because the social. So we grew up in a country you’re a little bit older than I am, but we grew up in roughly the same country. There was an acknowledgment that there were people who were not as well-off as you, and that was that. Now, among affluent people, I see only race guilt. I see no economic guilt at all. And I think there’s you can believe in capitalism, our system or whatever system is and still feel like, gee, you know, I feel sorry for people who are deep in credit card debt. I don’t see any of that.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:53:38] No, no, this is this is a, I think, exactly right. It’s, it’s another part that isn’t in our, our discussion, our discourse and. I think it’s right to say that basically, you know, the political system doesn’t really want to address any of this because it’s complicated. You have to pay for solutions one way or another. No one wants to pay for anything. We just run up debt anyway. We’re I mean, if we run a if it’s not credit card debt, it’s our national debt. Yeah. And anyway, as we’ve been talking about, I, we’re much more interested in blowing up places and overthrowing other governments than we are in addressing any of these issues.

Tucker [01:54:20] What would happen if a lot of people stop paying their credit card debt?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:54:24] Well, you know, the, the way that our system works is that, it more or less goes along on deep trends, whether technology or other trends, until there’s some kind of crisis. We had a crisis in 2008 that was a very particular kind of crisis where, a not very clever move by, I think, a not very clever, Treasury secretary at the time decided he would bankrupt, a company he didn’t like, you know, was Hank Paulson, who came from Goldman Sachs. Not my part of the Sachs family. I need to explain. So I just wanted to clear a different branch, I suppose. And he didn’t like Lehman Brothers, so he decided literally one weekend, rather than try to sell off Lehman Brothers is going to close it down. And, it was a kind of lame brained operation. And he created one of the greatest financial crises of modern history.

Tucker [01:55:33] Wait, wait. Yes. You think Paulson created the oh eight meltdown because he had a grudge against Lehman?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:55:39] Yeah, basically, he wanted to teach them a lesson. He thought they were a lazy, terrible firm. Which they may well have been, by the way. But he decided in 2008, you had there was a housing bubble and the housing bubble was breaking. And no, a lot of the investment banks were on the edge because they had invested in crappy, crappy, mortgages and that they were trying to securitize. So it was a fragile situation. We would have had a normal downturn for sure. We would have had a recession. But Paulson decided in, September 2008 that rather than do another rescue where you take a weak bank and you may add some public money and then you. You to sell it off to a buyer. And there was a potential buyer for Lehman Brothers, who was Barclays, a British bank. And the USG government could have put in a bit of money or taken some of the bad stuff off the balance sheets and given the rest to, Barclays. But Paulson, wanted to do two things. He wanted to teach Lehman Brothers a lesson, I believe, you know, we can’t prove this stuff, but Lehman was kind of a know a rival of a of Goldman. And I think there was that personal bit, from what I know. But also Paulson thought, well, we should show the markets we can be tough and firm and let the markets determine the outcome. So, he said we’re not going to do any, any, patch up to get Lehman into somebody else’s hands. We’re going to just let it close, let it go bankrupt. And that was September 14th, 2008. And, when the markets open the next day, he had triggered one of the greatest financial crises of history, actually, within.

Tucker [01:57:46] Why have I never heard the story?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:57:49] Maybe they didn’t want to advertise how unbelievably incompetent they were, but this was complete in confidence. And by the way, it was incompetence of the whole economic team that included the fed, New York Fed, Washington, the Treasury. This was a crisis that absolutely was not only human made, but you can pinpoint the hour and the day and the event. Because the point I was making. Because you asked me a question about.

Tucker [01:58:20] Sorry, my jaw’s open. I mean, I’m kind of interested in the subject.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:58:23] I bet you.

Tucker [01:58:24] Read a book on it, I guess.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:58:25] And you asked me a question about credit card debt, and.

Tucker [01:58:29] But that’s.

Jeffrey Sachs [01:58:29] When I was making a decision.

Tucker [01:58:31] Widely. Well, I’m digressing again. But is that is this widely known?

Jeffrey Sachs [01:58:35] It’s not very well understood. It’s not a secret, but I can explain why it’s not understood. But, in a moment. But the point is, a financial panic is a specific kind of event. It is the same event as when people are trampled running out of a stadium. Yes. Okay, so that happens. So once every. I don’t know how many hundred football games something happened. Somebody there’s a fight, people start running and then trampling, and then lots of people, get crushed. So that’s a specific event. It’s a panic. In finance, the same thing can happen and financial panics happen, on occasion throughout history. And you can identify them. And usually there is a cause, that is a trigger of it. But with the panic, like a stampede out of a stadium. The cause is completely incommensurate with the outcome. In other words, the cause may be that someone has someone punched someone else and that started commotion and that started and a thousand people got trampled in the end. So the cause was some stupid little thing, but then it led to a cascade of disaster. That’s exactly what a financial panic is. Or a bank run. I don’t know if anybody ever remembers my favorite movie of my youth and for my children, Mary Poppins, but Mary Poppins is a children’s story, of course, that has a bank run in it, where the young boy wants to get his £0.02 out of the bank and there’s resistance, and he starts screaming, you won’t give me my money back! And then everyone runs to the bank to take their money out of the bank fails and it’s a panic. So Hank Paulson made a panic in September, 14, 2008, and he made it deliberately. The action was deliberate. The outcome was not deliberate. He had no idea what he was about to do, which was to create, this rush for the exits by all banks on all loans all over the world within three days. And that’s what he created. And it created the biggest economic downturn, since the Great Depression itself. And so, yeah, and that’s, by the way, an interesting, very interesting child story also because just like a panic can create something that’s completely incommensurate with any fundamental reason, but it leads to total disaster. The opposite can sometimes happen also, which I was reminded of because the Great Depression, which was this calamitous event in the days up to Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration, which was March 4th, 1933. There was a bank panic in the United States, and by the time that Roosevelt became president on March 4th, 1933, the whole U.S. banking system had closed down because everyone had rushed to the banks to withdraw their money. Just like in Mary Poppins. But it was all over the U.S., so the whole U.S. banking system was closed. When Franklin Roosevelt became president on March 4th, 1933, and with a smile and a tilt of his head. He said: and I firmly believe that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And with those words, people stopped panicking. And they went back and put their money in the bank. And within a few days the US banking system reopened. And it was Franklin Roosevelt’s personality and his spirit and his tilt of the head and his smile and his phrase that it’s only fear that we have to fear. That undid the panic after that, many reforms were made. Like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and and the SEC and public reporting and many things were done, but the banks actually opened on a matter of words. So you asked me a question. Why did I make this big digression? Because financial markets are capable of creating all sorts of disasters. And the first rule that you learn is be careful. Don’t let liquidity mess you up. Don’t let panics destroy things. Hank Paulson apparently didn’t know any of that. And he walked the world into a $10 or $20 trillion disaster loss via deliberate action, because there were better ways he never got.

Tucker [02:03:53] That’s a absolutely remarkable story. Remarkable because it happened in front of all of us. Yeah. I was paying, I don’t know, 30% attention. I mean, I actually did sell my house that year. So, I mean, it affected me in a lot of, a lot of people. Well, less than most. But still it affected everybody. And he was Treasury secretary and a famous guy, and he’s still kind of a famous guy.

Jeffrey Sachs [02:04:12] Yeah, he still is.

Tucker [02:04:13] No one ever.

Jeffrey Sachs [02:04:13] Probably nice guy, by the way.

Tucker [02:04:15] Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. I do doubt that, but I don’t know, I don’t know. But trying to let my bigotries affect my view. But, why does he not carry the stain of that with him?

Jeffrey Sachs [02:04:26] The reason is, strangely enough, people don’t understand what I just described. In general, though, there is a group. I’m a finance economist, so I studied this throughout history, and I’ve studied these events and I’ve I’ve watched them actually close up because I’ve often been called into crisis situations. So I’m very, attuned to them. And another example and then I’ll give you an answer. I was in the summer of 1997 when Asia experienced a full fledged financial crisis that you may remember, called, we know it as the Asian financial crisis. What happened? What happened was Thailand devalued the Thai baht. Well, so, you know, you want to put your thumb in your mouth and suck your thumb. What difference could that possibly make? It triggered a panic, and the IMF addressed it. The International Monetary Fund addressed it in completely the wrong way, because both the 2008 and the 1997 or the 1933 story that I told you about Franklin Roosevelt, if you’re in a stampede or a panic and you say, you see, you’re so immoral. You created this disaster. We are living in sin. This is why our banking system has failed. You will do nothing but crush what you have left standing. But if you say, oh my God, we just had a panic. You don’t have to panic. Fundamentals are fine. We’ve got this under control. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Yeah, you could calm down the situation.

Tucker [02:06:18] So this is not a matter of math. This is human psychology.

Jeffrey Sachs [02:06:21] This is understanding what’s going on and then responding to it in an appropriate way. Now it happens. And now we’re getting really into the weeds of economics. My field is macroeconomics. So I look at an economy as a whole. And I study business cycles or crises or ups and downs of the economy. So to go back to 2008, we were going to have a recession. A recession means that the people stopped buying houses. And, there’s unemployment and the unemployment may go, you know, from 4% to 7%. And economic growth may turn negative for 2 or 3 quarters. And there’s a lot of pain and people can’t make ends meet and so forth. But then the economy recovers in maybe 18 months or so. That’s not what happened in 2008. What happened in 2008 was a prolonged deep crisis with soaring unemployment, with bankruptcies, with mega bailouts, with the whole world economy suffering. There was no reason for that. Bigger. Outcome, the normal thing would have been. A recession. Why a recession? Because there was too much liquidity that, and deregulation of the mortgage markets. And there was a bubble and the bubble burst and housing, went into recession and we had another business cycle. Okay. That would have been the normal. But we had Hank Paulson on September 14th, 2008, pulling the plug on an investment bank that triggered a panic among all banks, so that by Monday morning, when the markets opened, first, there were legal problems in Britain because, Lehman had a branch in Britain that, under British rules, created lots of problems. But then the investment banks started to call in their loans because they said, oh, hell, all hell’s breaking loose. And the the stampede started that led to the mega downturn. So then you ask, well, how was this interpreted afterwards? Because that’s your question. Why isn’t this standard? Well, the answer is that it was all explained as the downturn from the housing bubble, not the panic caused by the bankruptcy of Lehman. So, in other words, what would have been a normal downturn became the narrative for what was the calamitous, crisis. In other words, it was mis explained. And that’s how they like to explain it, because Hank Paulson did not want to stand up the next day and say, oh, shit, I really did that wrong. That was that was a stupid thing to do. I didn’t understand how financial markets work. Even though I had been the lead of Goldman Sachs. I really messed these things up. Ben Bernanke at the fed did not want to say, oh my God, that weekend we really should have buffed this up to get it out to Barclays. And he said afterwards, I couldn’t have sold it anyway. I didn’t have the legal authority. And then, a scholar at Johns Hopkins wrote a long book explaining very carefully, yes, Ben, you could have done it differently. We could have avoided this crisis. It could have been sold to Barclays. You had all the authority in the world to do it and so on. So the narrative that I’m giving is the, the, the explanation that I’m giving was hidden from view, partly because of confusion. Partly because when a crisis happens, you want to blame it on fundamental things. So it was easy to say, oh, that mortgage market was, you know, there’s a lot of cheating and. No, and there was a lot of cheating and, all the securitization made messes and so forth. So you want to say, oh, if there’s a downturn or if there’s a, a panic, it’s because you’re sinners. And so that’s a normal narrative and no one wants to take responsibility. God, I really messed up.

Tucker [02:10:53] But it’s important to know why things go wrong so you can take steps to prevent them from going wrong again in the same way.

Jeffrey Sachs [02:10:58] Well, it’s also it’s a, you know, again, this is not really getting into the weeds of my profession. But. As a macro economist. I’ll just if anyone’s interested. But this is really getting technical. We have a standard theory that we teach at university level about why downturns happen, and it’s a theory that’s attributed to John Maynard Keynes, who was a really great, brilliant British economist that I’ve learned, a whole career from, in, in his writings. But. John Maynard Keynes wrote famously about the Great Depression. And he said, the cause of the Great Depression is this particular phenomenon we call the decline of aggregate demand that people stop buying. And that leads to a downturn. So maybe they stop buying houses. So that leads to a downturn. So that’s called an aggregate demand shortfall. And the problem is that all subsequent business cycles after John Maynard Keynes then became interpreted through that lens that he had established because he was such a wonderful personality and such a fascinating writer and thinker, that his interpretation of the Great Depression became the standard way to interpret any event that followed afterwards. And my experience, because I happened to have the experience of working in very acute crises like hyperinflation or debt crises or financial panics, which became my thing for a while in my career. I saw. Oh, those are really quite different from how Keynes described the Great Depression. These are phenomena of their own, right. They’re very particular. A banking panic is not just a decline of demand, it’s a panic. We need to understand the panic. Now, I’m not the first to observe that by any means. There’s a whole theory and history about this, but it’s kind of. I made a comparison 20 some years ago that because I’m jealous of my wife, she’s a medical doctor and an extraordinarily excellent medical doctor, and she would see a patient and do a diagnosis and save the kid because she’s a pediatrician. And I thought, oh, God, if I want you to confiscate, actually save something, you know? But she did what she was trained to do, called a differential diagnosis, which means, you see a fever. It’s not one thing you have to figure out what’s the cause, right? So I came to understand. You see, an economic crisis, you better understand the cause of it, not just the standard narrative. And so for me, I’m very much attuned to what really caused that event. Well, Hank, you caused that incident in this case on September 14th, 2008. I’m sorry to say it. I don’t want to make it, you know, personal, but you really made a mess at that point. This was not just world markets having their thing. This was something that we made a mistake. You should understand that.

Tucker [02:14:32] So given everything you know about the current US economy and the current, you know, guardians of it, stewards of it, what do you think the next crisis will look like?

Jeffrey Sachs [02:14:44] First. We’re in an ongoing crisis, but it’s a slow-moving crisis. So a crisis doesn’t have to be an immediate event. A crisis can be a set of unsolved problems that persist and are difficult. And that, I think, has been true for a long time. Our economy does not work for half our country. Yes, that to my mind is a crisis. I agree, and it’s not news. It’s not something that started this year or under the Biden administration or under any recent administration. It’s been decades. Why did it happen? It happened because I think actually, this is another long digression. But technology changed. And jobs that people used to do, good working class high school grad jobs no longer existed. The assembly line ended except for robots. Yeah, and I’ve toured robotic factories for, you know, 30 years. This isn’t something new. Already 30 years ago, I went to a Toyota plant. Probably. Yeah, probably 30 years ago, there were no people in the whole building. It was in a Japanese plant, probably in the 1990s, you know, because it was all incredibly sophisticated robots. What I found fascinating about it, by the way, was that every car that was coming off the line was custom, you know, specification. So a truck followed by a sedan, followed by, you know, two seater and so on. The robots were just program. They could put together any different thing and the right parts would come in. And it it wasn’t, you know, super standardized. It was a very sophisticated plant, but it meant that the autoworkers didn’t have jobs. So those jobs had already gone away. Jobs in agriculture went away 75 years ago. You know, we have 1% of our workforce provides the food for the whole country. Yes. And for a lot of the world, 1%, because agriculture became so mechanized, so proficient and so on. And, you know, when I spoke to a farmer a few years ago, he said, yeah, I still like to ride the tractor. Of course, I read a book when I do, because the tractor drives itself, it puts the fertilizer on the field exactly in the right places. Everything is, geographically specified and so on. But the point is that the fundamental technology of our world changed already 50 years ago, not just with the ChatGPT. This is a long, ongoing story. And it meant actually high school wasn’t going to cut it for demand for workers, you know, because, yeah, what was more than 20% of the workforce, which was manufacturing back in 1980 or so, is now less than 10% of the workforce. And that’s not, by the way, because of China or because of Mexico. That’s because of robots, that’s because of automation, that’s because of digital technologies, that’s because of a sophisticated economy. So this trend has been deep. It’s been widening for decades. It has led to two societies. The professionals are mainly in cities and they’re mainly in the Democratic Party, and they’re mainly doing rather well. Thank you. And, the, the people that are in working class, well, they’re in rural areas, or semi-rural areas or suburban areas in many places and not doing very well. And that’s been going on for a long time. And, I call that a crisis. It’s a crisis of our country. What do we do in response? Well, we go to war, we overthrow governments. We do all sorts of things. We call ourselves the greatest country in the world, and we let our infrastructure go to hell. And, we didn’t address these issues, and we didn’t face up to the question of, you know, how to share better or how to address these challenges, in a more effective way, or what are we going to do about it? What are the underlying trends? And now we’re going to face a new wave, with the, our, even more remarkable, artificial intelligence, which is actually going to wipe out lots, lots more jobs, and that’s going to be a very, very big deal. And this time, a lot of professional jobs, by the way, because, you know, frankly, I if I need to find sources or to look at the, at, you know, what’s been written about a topic, what used to take me and I was hired to do it days or weeks to, you know, go through journals and literature and books I could do in one minute. Now, on, you know, just asking a question to, to my favorite chat program. And so this is going to cause even more disruptions. It also means, interestingly, of course, that a few people who own these platforms and systems, are, you know, getting a wealth that is simply beyond any imagining and any prior experience in the history of the world. I looked up as as I was arriving, today’s net worth of the top, ten, net worth people of the United States. So with Elon number one, you know what? The or not, of the United States of the world, because I think one, is for I think, maybe of the top ten, you know, what the, the ten richest people. Ten people. Just ten. What their net worth is today $1.7 trillion. Ten people. This is a funny world. You got tens of millions of people who can’t pay the bills, can’t to fill a dental appointment, can’t fill a drug prescription. You have ten people, many of them really creative, by the way. But even if you’re really creative. Elon, I think today, and I love Elon for lots of things, and, know him and admire his genius. But he’s got 200 billion something bucks. That’s interesting. You know, this is the economy’s changing in fundamental ways. And it’s. Bifurcating may not even be the right word. In other words, dividing in two. It may be dividing in even more fractured ways, and we need to figure out what we’re going to do about that as a society. And we’re not figuring that out. And. Also because of the way our political system works. We don’t want to do anything that would cost anything because government doesn’t accept war. Government doesn’t want to raise any revenues, even on people. Can use their wealth in a million lifetimes. So we’re a little bit stuck. And all of this. The reason I mentioned all of this is that normal economics. The way we discussed this issue is as bad as the way we discuss the wars and everything else. It’s at an extremely superficial level that is all about will growth be 3.1% next quarter or 2.9%, or is the economy, you know, a slow patch, or will it pick up where the deepest changes of our lives are underway, where technology is transforming everybody’s jobs, everybody’s lives? Where, if you don’t have the right kind of job, you’re living 8 or 10 years less than your neighbor that has the right kind of job, that that’s the kind of society we have right now. And those are issues that are really important. But where do you discuss them? You’re not going to hear about that on the campaign. You’re not going to hear about that in, almost all of the financial journalism, because financial journalism is mainly about what will the markets do? Will the fed raise interest rates, lower interest rates? Those are not. Completely uninteresting, but I find them completely boring, so I just do. Even though that was what I went into to to begin with, but I thought of how much fun it would be to turn dials and make economies go up and down, but it turns out to be the least interesting part of the whole story.

Tucker [02:21:16] Jeffrey Sachs. I. I do think at some point you should sit down and figure out ten stories over the past 30 years that have been mis told or misunderstood in the, in the, in the public’s view of them, and just do four hours each as university lecture and put them online and just make higher education as usual.

Jeffrey Sachs [02:21:37] Tucker. Great idea.

Tucker [02:21:39] Thank you, I appreciate it. To watch the rest unlock our entire vast library of content. You can visit TuckerCarlson.com and activate your membership today in the name of free speech. We hope you will.