Jeffrey Sachs is an economist and professor at Columbia University who challenges the mainstream media narratives on subjects as varied as the pandemic, the ongoing war, and the outrageous claim that Joe Biden is communicating with dead people. In this episode of Stay Free With Russ and Brand, we talk to Jeffrey Sachs about his journey with addiction, and how he overcame his own addictions to become a better human being. He also discusses his work with the Strive Foundation, which is a non-profit organization that provides resources to help people who are struggling with addictions and mental health issues. Jeffrey also talks about how he became a drug addict, and what it was like growing up in a drug-addicted household, and why he decided to stop taking drugs in order to live a life of purpose and purposelessness. Stay Free with Brand is produced by Russ F. Brand and is brought to you by Gimlet Media and produced in partnership with the Stay Free Foundation, a New York-based organization dedicated to providing resources to people in need of help with their mental health, addiction and recovery. Stay free with Brand! Stay free, stay free, and stay free! Thank you for being a friend of the show, and thank you for supporting the show! . - Russ and Gareth and Stay Free! - Stay Free, Brand . . . Stay free! . . , , , and stay safe, and keep free, stay free. , stay free ! Thanks for listening, and rest in peace, love, and gratitude, and light, and good vibes, and love, your support, your continued support, and support, you are so much appreciated. - R.Says -R.S. R.A. . , R. . . -S.R. and R.P. & R.E. ~R.B. :P -A.S., R.V. ( ) - A.S, -P.A., & P. - (A. -B.M. -E. ( ) . (S. (s. ) (C. (P. ) , P. (M. (C) ) ( ) (C.) (V. (R. (J. (D. (A) ) )
00:02:17.000Thanks for watching Stay Free with Russ for Brand.
00:02:19.000On this show we do a variety of things.
00:02:20.000Sometimes we talk to guests, like Jordan Peterson or Eckhart Tolle, and generally we try to cover the news in a way that, whilst explains how, let's face it, Terrifying things are, doesn't strip you of the essential hope that's required to be a human being, that things could improve, that life could get better, that there is some joy, some glory to be had out there.
00:02:44.000Today we're talking to Jeffrey Sachs, who's one such figure in my mind, not Solely because he's willing to challenge establishment narratives, not just because he's an economist and professor at Columbia University who's willing to talk out against the kind of mainstream media narratives that we're fed around subjects as varied as the pandemic or the ongoing war, but also because of this face that he does when he's under pressure.
00:03:20.000And in our interview today, which is going to be sort of coming up in about 10 minutes, I'm going to try and get him to do that face.
00:03:27.000If you have any questions for Geoffrey, particularly those of you on locals, send them now because that's one of the things we're going to do.
00:03:35.000If you're a member of our State Free AF community, we're going to frankly prioritise your questions because you support us in the work that we try to do.
00:03:43.000You know it's Addiction Week and We have this foundation here, the Stay Free Foundation, where people that are drug addicts and mentally ill can apply for individual or group grants.
00:03:54.000What I mean by that is, we might give a grant to people that are running a treatment centre, or we might give a grant to an individual drug addict.
00:04:01.000But there's a real proviso, there's a sting in the towel, and that sting is simply stop taking drugs.
00:04:34.000The first thing I wanted to talk to you about as producer of the show, as co-creator of the show, is Joe Biden.
00:04:44.000Is there anything this man can't do, is what I'm saying, because, like, there's being forgetful, and then there's telling lies, and then there's the outrageous claim that you're communicating with dead people, that typically when people say that, I don't know, do you know anyone that said that?
00:05:08.000Like, when I was a drug addict, I would take any drugs.
00:05:10.000Now that I'm not a drug addict, or at least not taking drugs anymore, I will do any whack, crazy, spiritual thing To get myself, like, that's why, you know, and I'm not saying these things are all whack and crazy because I believe in a lot of these people.
00:05:22.000The tapping with Nick Orner, love that, he's not whack and crazy, it's been proven scientifically.
00:05:53.000Chocolate, masturbation, if you want to call it a type of drug.
00:05:56.000Certainly it can be addictive if you really lean into it.
00:06:00.000And then like the rest of the marijuana, the cannabis, then the amphetamines.
00:06:04.000Then you climb that drug ladder to you hit what I call the beggar man's gold.
00:06:09.000That's the hero in itself, the sweet lady, the brown mistress, the naughty snake.
00:06:16.000But like on that journey, one time I went to see a medium and I went there like in a sheepskin jacket with no top on and that, and essentially pressurised her into saying that Mark Bolan was my spirit guide.
00:06:30.000Like, she, I had every, I really had the look of a man who wasn't going to leave until I was given... Oh, you also had the look of Mark Bolan.
00:06:38.000Essentially, I went in there, sort of in eye shadow, wearing a sheepskin jacket with no top on, and sort of jewels and stuff, and a look of desperation.
00:06:48.000Anyway, so... Was this a bit like when you pressured your mum into saying you were the new Jesus?
00:06:51.000I didn't pressure her into saying I was the new Jesus.
00:07:41.000Whether or not it's communing with the dead as, you know, me as a young man with Mark Bolan, God rest his eternal glittery soul, or Joe Biden, President of the United States, tottering around the stage, claiming to have had a face-to-face conversation with the inventor of insulin.
00:08:24.000Not when you're president and you're sort of doing an insulin talk.
00:08:27.000Also, as I understand it, the insulin is sometimes up to 600% I think it's risen in price 680% in terms of like the kind of profits that they've been making over time.
00:08:38.000Yeah, and I feel like it's not a strong suit for Joe, the sort of availability of insulin in the United States right now.
00:08:44.000Well, I think Americans pay still 10 times more than we pay elsewhere.
00:08:47.000And this is before we've got to the bit where he claims to speak to the dead.
00:08:51.000We said, okay, you know how much it costs to make that insulin drug for diabetes?
00:09:24.000I've I tried to read what it said about their prophets and it was just basically a black limitless expanse of nothingness, so it's difficult to understand.
00:09:38.000He didn't, and to be honest, I'm beginning to think that that lady in Southend-on-Sea when I was a lad only said that Mark Bolan was my spirit guide because she wanted me to leave.
00:09:47.000Are you sure there are no spirit guides coming through?
00:09:50.000Are you sure there are no spirit guides coming through?
00:09:52.000Do you want to know a bit about insulin?
00:09:55.000Insulin, a hormone produced in the body, was never invented at all, but was discovered, so that's the first lie, discovered by Frederick Banting, a physician and scientist who died at the age of 49 in 1941, and Biden was born in 1942.
00:10:09.000So even if he'd done it, you know, just before, it would have been an early conversation in his life.
00:10:13.000You know like how Dalai Lama's and that, there's sort of a moment where they sort of cross between spaces, and in fact this is the time of Halloween where the veneer between the realms is thinner than ordinary.
00:10:25.000All saints' days are coming, or it's here already, I don't know, I've not really been following stuff like that.
00:10:30.000Maybe young Joe Biden and the passing soul of who I'm going to call Freddie Insulin, like ships in the Meta Knight, crossed briefly.
00:10:40.000At that point, I don't know, it seems it's a difficult story to sell.
00:10:45.000You are starting to form the opinion that Biden is just enlightened, aren't you?
00:10:50.000What it is, is like, they say that as people sort of deteriorate and decay, the soul becomes more evident and prominent, and like, this cadaverous man is like, I think, now reaching the point where he's more dead than living, and is sort of gaining Tibetan Book of the Dead, Dead Sea Scroll-type knowledge.
00:11:24.000He's in a Pokemon Go world, and in his Pokemon Go world, it's like, well, the staircase is over there, along with Pikachu or one of the other lads.
00:12:09.000Stars directing their faith, in the words of Dear Robbie.
00:12:12.000OK, so, also though, while we're talking about decrepit leadership, according to potential propaganda or actual reality, Putin does have Parkinson's and pancreatic cancer.
00:15:20.000Okay, so, like, according to Russian propaganda, Putin pretty mighty, commanding a nuclear army, according to other propaganda, vulnerable and weak.
00:15:30.000But I suppose to give it a slightly different perspective, if this is a time of decay in a more macro perspective, in a more cosmological perspective, it's interesting I think that the leaders that we're looking at Our leader's in decline.
00:15:44.000It's interesting that there are doubles, that it's sort of a literal simulacrum, if you can have such a thing, that it's a sort of a baffling array of entropying, atrophying rather, figures just falling apart before our eyes.
00:15:57.000I think it tells you something integral, that this is but the mask of power, this is but the veil.
00:16:06.000You know, like, we're on Rumble right now.
00:16:07.000You're watching this on Rumble, presumably.
00:16:09.000Rumble has pulled its services from France, refusing to cave to demands to censor Russian news sources.
00:16:15.000Now, I think YouTube did censor Russia Today, right?
00:16:19.000Yeah, that's right, and I think that's what this is over as well, is that they've been told to take down Russia Today on Rumble, and they've refused.
00:16:26.000And so, therefore, they've pulled their services from France.
00:16:28.000That's a proper wartime move, and I suppose when we're talking to Jeffrey Sachs later, one of the things I'll be interested in asking him is about whether or not it is a proxy war, and indeed what constitutes a proxy war.
00:16:38.000This funding, whether it's the explicit funding coming out of the Pentagon, what's been referred to as lethal aid, or the loans that are coming out of the World Bank and the IMF, that sort of is funding.
00:16:50.000The NATO support, the NATO encroachment that led to this, the meddling in Ukrainian... I mean, to what point Is Ukraine an independent nation in a war with Russia?
00:17:06.000I suppose the difficulty is that in the last century, we've gone from wars that went from real plain, even down to the costume, goodies versus baddies type wars, Wars against terror, wars against drugs, wars against germs, proxy wars, wars where the goodies have got Nazis in their team.
00:17:28.000It's just become more and more difficult to get a cohesive angle.
00:19:13.000I don't understand what happened from, like, you know, when somebody was 29, or young Putin there, who's, I think, 19 now.
00:19:23.000You're dealing with, like, sort of like, when we were younger, it was like, the left is this, the left is for freedom of speech, for standing up, now it's, everything is sort of to anti-war, big anti-war marches against Iraq, now it's like, what, I'm not sure what we're supposed to do.
00:19:38.000I understand that the world is complex, I understand that the truth is complex, but what I'm beginning to believe is that because there are no actual principles in politics, they sort of ghost and shift around according to what is convenient in order to meet their objectives.
00:19:54.000It's not as straightforward as, these are the goodies, these are the baddies, they seem to have gone.
00:19:58.000No, I mean, it's amazing that with all the information that we have now, more information than ever, you would think, or certainly have access to, that the arguments seem to be more reductive than ever, in terms of the shutting down, and obviously we'll talk to this, talk to Jeffrey Sachs about this, but the kind of reductivism that goes around conversations about nuanced subjects such as this war, for example, seems to increasingly be shut down.
00:20:20.000But perhaps it's because of the availability but perhaps the reductivism is the response because now you
00:20:26.000literally can watch a channel like this, you can watch if you wanted Young Turks or you could watch
00:20:31.000Tim Pool or you could watch Crowder or Shapiro or Redacted or Double Down News,
00:20:37.000like across the sort of you know the political spectrum of left to right, we call it libertarianism to sort of old
00:20:42.000school leftism, like there has to be a machine that dominates information
00:20:48.000and like we were talking earlier about Musk and Twitter, and like my belief is that Musk is an individualist, he is
00:20:58.000a libertarian and like as he said in his recent tweet and a free speech absolutist.
00:21:04.000But clearly he has like a private agenda that relates to essentially, I think, a technological revolution, space travel.
00:21:13.000And it's interesting, I was thinking as well about, like, because he was like, initially at least, the sort of Tesla person, like, and the affiliation between Tesla and ecological responsibility, which maybe doesn't hold up under scrutiny, let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments what you guys think.
00:21:30.000It's interesting that he is now seen as someone that's almost beyond the arguments of climate and ecology and he's sort of talking about I think like transhumanism through the neural link like you know sort of a kind of technological human hybrids and of course he famously said we already are sort of cyborgs um and also the idea of interplanetary human beings
00:21:53.000Because of this, his agenda, I was arguing, is somehow at odds with American hegemony.
00:21:58.000The idea that America, through globalist affiliations with organisations like the WHO, IMF, which I believe they have undue influence over, along with private financial interests that are pretty well documented, that ultimately align with American corporatism and the American agenda.
00:22:17.000Musk has found himself at odds with the agenda to create a unipolar world.
00:22:21.000That Russia, obviously, believe in a kind of pluralism of power because they want their own Russian imperialism.
00:22:37.000I mean, you know, he's an interesting figure.
00:22:40.000There's another side of it that is argued by a lot of people that he's as much a part of the system as anyone else and that what's happening with Twitter at the moment is all for show in a way.
00:22:49.000A lot of those money that he's made has come through government contracts.
00:22:53.000You know, he's kind of integrated into that system.
00:22:57.000A lot of the ways in which Tesla makes money is selling carbon credits to people who, you know, because of the business that he operates in.
00:23:04.000So it's like companies who like have big old carbon footprints now buy carbon credits to make sure that they're carbon neutral or whatever that is now in order for their businesses to carry on doing what they're doing.
00:23:23.000I think Bill Gates buys a lot of carbon credits.
00:23:26.000So there's someone who goes around talking about emissions and who has bought a private jet company, takes private jets everywhere, offsets his carbon emissions.
00:23:35.000And I think, you know, Tesla, as what I've heard, makes a lot of money through selling those carbon credits.
00:23:41.000I think to say he's, like, outside of the system and an independent is not true, but obviously there's other complexities to it.
00:23:48.000When we have him on, Gareth, will you carry that part of the conversation?
00:23:52.000Because I'm actually, as you know, if you're a regular viewer of our show, Stay Free with Russell Brand, cultivating a friendship with him.
00:23:58.000Most recently, when I text him, he was like, sorry, I've been so busy with Twitter, he said.
00:24:02.000I go, well, I'm on there a couple of times a day myself, so... Yeah, I don't know.
00:24:07.000And, like, also, I go, do you want me to come there?
00:24:15.000Now, so, like, when, like, if we do get him on, it's like, you know, I do recognise this is still a billionaire, like, ultimately a billionaire.
00:24:21.000Sort of an oligarch with a great deal of power.
00:24:23.000And I'm really interested in putting those arguments forward.
00:24:25.000But, do you know, that's something for the future.
00:24:28.000Here's something for the present, baby.
00:24:30.000A man that's become a recognised radical.
00:24:33.000A man who's been confronting mainstream narratives all over this cultural space, using his adorable face, creating an iconic expression, the recoiling look of shock that only Jeffrey Sachs, economist and professor at Columbia University, can deliver.
00:25:32.000We've been looking at the idea that... Let's start where we were when you joined us.
00:25:38.000We were talking about how a figure like Elon Musk may be controversial even if he's ultimately pursuing self-interests
00:25:46.000because his purchase of Twitter prevents the control of the public sphere in a
00:25:52.000way that would be ultimately amenable to the establishment whose ultimate goal
00:25:56.000and when I say the establishment I mean American corporate interests and how
00:25:59.000they align with unelected globalist bodies like the IMF, WHO etc.
00:26:05.000A shared objective to create a unipolar world, a kind of new world order, a one-world government one way or another, even if it's implicit and tacit rather than overt and explicit.
00:26:17.000And obviously Russia have their own Weltanschauung.
00:26:20.000Obviously China have their own agenda. Thank you. I'm glad I got the Welton Shong nod
00:26:24.000there. Thanks from a Columbia professor. So what do you do you think that's true
00:26:30.000of Elon Musk? Is he a disruptor in some way even if he is not ultimately unique
00:27:08.000lies for a living, as we know, but the mainstream media do nothing about it and just repeat the lies, amplify them, and it's getting pretty dangerous.
00:27:50.000Forget the shifting perspectives of the left and right and this new Liberal authoritarianism that seems to be emerging.
00:27:58.000Why is there now such a demented attempt to control the public space and the public narrative?
00:28:06.000And your personal experience surely speaks to that, being shut down publicly when sort of talking about the Nord Stream pipeline, when talking about Wuhan.
00:28:16.000Tell me what you think is driving this new extreme sensorialism.
00:29:04.000I don't think there's a simple answer.
00:29:06.000Of course, corporate ownership, yes, it's definitely part of it.
00:29:10.000But the complete collapse of professionalism in journalism in these mainstream media, not everywhere because there are some really brave people out there, but in what we call the mainstream, is pathetic and very dangerous because we're deep into a war that is escalating and we can't even have a decent Discussion about what the sources of this war are or how to end it and I had the experience I wrote for one Syndicate project syndicate for 20 years.
00:29:43.000I was their most published writer, but they wouldn't print the pieces that I wrote that were contrary to the official line about this war and it was pretty amazing to me after 20 years I couldn't even post a piece and that that's not good in my view
00:30:03.000No, I believe nowadays Woodward and Bernstein would be doing their work online.
00:30:09.000Even in recent memory, a figure like Chris Hedges has gone from being a Pulitzer Prize winner within New York Times to having his content taken off YouTube because he was like interviewing Zizek or Edward Snowden on Russia Today.
00:30:25.000So that's sort of like measurable increase in a sensorial mentality.
00:30:29.000And when it comes to this war in particular, Jeffrey, when you have figures like Noam Chomsky and Donald Trump advocating for diplomacy and ultimately peace, what does it tell you about the sort of central space and how radically it's being controlled?
00:30:43.000And what does this level of control suggest to you?
00:30:48.000Well, you know, what I've seen, because I've really lived it and I've been involved with dozens of governments across the world for 40 years now, basically the neocons took over U.S.
00:32:58.000By your reckoning then, Geoffrey, this is an agenda that began sort of broadly in the 90s with the new American century, with like the Wolfowitz, Cheney, and the think tank that sort of indicated for America to achieve true hegemony, there would be sort of military action in the Middle East around resources, and you see that broadly whilst it expands numerous administrations and bipartisan ones at that, This is ultimately a continuation of that.
00:33:27.000And of course, it is shrouded in secrecy, and that's why Julian Assange is right now in Belmarsh and Snowden is, with some degree of irony, right now in Russia.
00:33:37.000Now, I wonder if you would talk to us a little more about the... If the accepted mainstream narrative is that this war began on, as I think you said, January the 14th...
00:33:54.000So you're not talking about the 2014 elections, not talking about NATO infringement, not talking about the sort of sponsorships and coups that have taken place.
00:34:02.000Could you give us a bit of insight into an alternative narrative and could you speak more particularly about the sort of peace deal that potentially could have taken place that Boris Johnson delayed, deferred in his sort of talks with Zelensky?
00:34:16.000And yeah, can you give us an alternative narrative please?
00:34:19.000Absolutely, because there is a real story behind all of this.
00:34:25.000I happened to be there, actually, 32 years ago, 33 years ago, because I was an economic advisor to the economic team of Gorbachev, actually.
00:34:37.000And in 1990, Gorbachev wanted to end the Cold War.
00:34:41.000He wanted to and the Soviet military alliance, the so-called Warsaw Pact
00:34:46.000Germany wanted to reunify, or Helmut Kohl wanted to reunify Germany,
00:35:34.000Very wise people at that time, and I think the wisest of the era was George Kennan, a great historian, scholar, and diplomat of the time, said this is the beginning of the new Cold War.
00:35:49.000The warnings went completely unheeded.
00:36:16.000You're right in our neighborhood, we have national security concerns.
00:36:19.000Then in 2008 at the Bucharest NATO Summit, Bush, over the objections of the Europeans—and European leaders talked to me privately at the time—but they don't talk publicly.
00:36:35.000says what it's going to do, and the European leaders may complain, they may squirm, but they don't explain to their own people what's at stake.
00:36:45.000But what Bush pushed in 2008 was that NATO would now expand to Ukraine and to Georgia.
00:36:54.000Now, if people take a map out and look at the country Georgia on the east end of the Black Sea, I don't think that's a North Atlantic country.
00:37:04.000I don't think that's a NATO country, actually.
00:37:07.000What you see at play there is this neocon idea of surrounding Russia in the Black Sea.
00:37:19.000And what our strategists have said for decades is that would basically corner Russia, and Putin said it, don't do this in our neighborhood.
00:37:32.000And actually there was a NATO-Russia meeting the next day after Bush pushed through this enlargement commitment, and at that NATO-Russia meeting, Putin said to Bush, if you push NATO into Ukraine, we take back Crimea.
00:38:03.000First, there was a pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who He very wisely said, I don't want Ukraine to be in the middle of a war between these two nuclear superpowers.
00:44:15.000One day in the second half of March of this year, the Ukrainian spokesman, the Russian spokesman, and the Turkish spokesman said, we're very close to a deal.
00:44:29.000It wasn't propaganda from one side or another.
00:44:50.000There are lots of stories that make a lot of sense about how Boris Johnson flew there, never accept neutrality, fight on, we arm you.
00:44:59.000There are stories about the United States at that time telling them you don't have to accept any of this because those were the days when Biden came to the NATO meeting and said this is going to be a long war and then spoke in Warsaw and said that man cannot stay in power and his defense secretary Lloyd Austin said just after that that our aim is to weaken Russia so it can never do this again.
00:45:25.000In other words, something really went haywire at the moment when negotiations could have been concluded.
00:45:36.000And now we've been in this for months.
00:48:14.000It seems that one agenda is continually being addressed and followed without that narrative ever being divulged or discussed or ever actually being within reach of due democratic process.
00:48:34.000If it's, you know, to colonise or dominate or control Ukraine through the sort of involvement of NATO and I've heard things about NATO and their sponsorship and involvement with military-industrial complex and them sponsoring and organising arms deals.
00:48:49.000I've heard stuff about NATO that's pretty damn dubious.
00:48:52.000I wonder, how could a policy that is so reckless be pursued To the very, to the dawn of Armageddon.
00:49:02.000Like, you know, now this is not a country like Iraq or, you know, other countries that were destabilised in what we call the Middle East.
00:49:09.000This is a, this is a sort of a former superpower that has nuclear capacity.
00:49:14.000So how is it that there is no contingency for the ability for Russia to respond?
00:49:23.000Is that something, obviously that's something you must have pondered.
00:50:08.000You know, it's not a matter of nuclear blackmail.
00:50:12.000It's a matter of us not getting the world blown to bits.
00:50:16.000And one of the things I've spent my whole life studying as an adult, because I lived through it since second grade, was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was exactly 60 years ago this year.
00:50:30.000And we came—we came within one second of nuclear war, literally, because the nuclear-tipped torpedo was put in the bay, the firing bay of a disabled Soviet submarine, and the order to fire was countermanded at the last moment by a Communist Party official that happened to be on the submarine and could countermand the captain's order.
00:51:02.000So when you have studied these things, looked at them, know the kind of the tick tock, minute by minute of how that crisis 60 years ago almost ended the world.
00:51:16.000And you know, today, how much irresponsibility there is.
00:51:21.000And Frankly, you know, there are field commanders, there are accidents, there are planes that collide, there are misunderstandings, misreadings of everything that can happen right now.
00:51:32.000Of course, we need to pull back from this path that we're on.
00:51:38.000But one of the parts of the campaign is to tell us nothing to worry about.
00:52:18.000is we used to have two sides of our foreign policy, by the way, because going all the way back to the end of World War II, there was a hardline side, which we would call the neocons, which was looking for U.S.
00:53:09.000I also know in Europe there's a lot of consternation in European leaders, but they don't say anything.
00:53:18.000It's not only imperialistic, it's also imperious.
00:53:21.000There's an incredible arrogance here, and I feel like a sort of psychological disassociation.
00:53:27.000I wonder, Geoffrey, what role the pandemic played in creating these conditions.
00:53:34.000Obviously, you've described a narrative that takes us back considerably earlier than the ordinarily agreed commencement date of this war.
00:53:44.000I wonder how we can have a culture where ordinary people appear to have been groomed and coached into a state of dumb numbness and compliance where the kind of phatic and emblematic support of Ukraine through badges and flags and platitudes doesn't, cannot in fact, incorporate the Apocalyptic narrative that ought be at the forefront of all of our minds.
00:54:13.000I wonder if we've somehow been groomed into compliance in 30 years of saccharine consumerism and the sort of sudden shock of two years of lockdowns.
00:54:27.000Which in themselves seem to have been somewhat dubiously underwritten, whether it's about the inauguration of how this disease indeed began, the use of scientific narrative, the conveyance of information, the way that generally speaking the stories we were told supported centralised power And corporate objectives, whether that was medical policy, social policy.
00:54:56.000I wonder how you see the pandemic as being part of a broader story of the induction of compliance and ignorance and the creation of a sort of a global state where there is a separate strata of geopolitical conflict or, you know, objectives that are kept entirely separate from our ordinary understanding.
00:55:20.000You know, it actually, it really does go back a long way because I date it to 1947.
00:55:28.000That was when the National Security Act was passed in the United States.
00:55:33.000It created the CIA and it made just a profoundly dangerous blunder for a republic.
00:55:42.000And that was that it made the CIA two things.
00:55:45.000One, an intelligence agency, understandable.
00:55:49.000And the other, a secret army, a covert operation for dirty operations that would never be divulged,
00:55:59.000basically at the president's discretion.
00:56:02.000Even Truman knew something's going to go very wrong with this.
00:56:07.000So when the hardliners are in power, they think they can act with impunity
00:56:12.000because they don't have to explain anything.
00:56:15.000We learned it from the Brits, by the way.
00:56:17.000You know, this is British Empire behavior for the...
00:56:22.000We just needed to get tea at a reasonable price, and we weren't willing to take over a few continents to get it.
00:56:29.000Well, that, and true, you know, you needed to open up the opium market in China, which was extremely important, so... But you're right, that was partly to get tea, so I think you've got the primary objective.
00:56:45.000We don't even do it for tea or coffee, by the way.
00:57:31.000put us into overdrive is that starting in the 2010s, really around 2015, China's rise freaked out the unipolarists, freaked out the neocons, because something was not on the script.
00:58:37.000began, also under Trump, unilateral actions.
00:58:42.000Even Obama was playing this, we're going to write the rules for Asia without China, which is a little bit obnoxious, by the way, and a little bit naive. It was
00:58:52.000called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and it was explicitly put forward by Obama on the grounds
00:58:58.000that the United States needs to write the rules, not China. But, you know, the U.S. is an Asian power.
00:59:05.000China, I'm not so sure. But in any event, this is what has really also increased this sense of
00:59:13.000anxiety, because we're told now all the time it's not just Russia that's the enemy it is China
00:59:22.000And China's the big enemy, Russia's the regional enemy, China's the world threat.
00:59:27.000And so we're in a two-front fear We're in a proxy war in Ukraine, and at the same time we're stoking incredibly dangerous tensions with China.
00:59:44.000And we explicitly are saying, our government officials are saying, we must take actions, for instance, stop the export of high technology goods to stop China's continued progress.
01:00:01.000When you hear it from the other side, that's a little bit provocative.
01:00:06.000And then we have the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, flying to Taiwan.
01:00:12.000The Chinese have said, please don't do this.
01:00:43.000Look, it's another piece of dislocation.
01:00:49.000It's another hot button for me because I'm also in that debate about where this virus came from, and I lean towards that it came out of some super-duper U.S.
01:01:05.000In partnership with China, most likely, so that this is not even a natural virus.
01:01:12.000But it raises another point, by the way.
01:01:14.000I headed a commission on the pandemic for two years for the Lancet Journal.
01:01:21.000It was a thoroughly fascinating, riveting assignment.
01:01:27.000I came to understand how much the U.S.
01:01:30.000government has lied about the origins of the pandemic it's wanted to paint this narrative just like the other narratives we talked about it wants to paint the narrative that it absolutely was natural it could not possibly have been anything else and it chose that false narrative right from the start of the pandemic way before they could have known
01:01:56.000And at a time when the insiders were saying, that looks a lot like it came out of a lab, but they created the narrative.
01:02:06.000And that is that narrative creation is what is the business of the US government.
01:02:14.000It creates a narrative about China as the enemy.
01:02:18.000It creates a narrative about Ukraine as an unprovoked war by an unhinged new Hitler Russian president.
01:02:30.000It creates a narrative about the virus.
01:02:35.000You know, once in a while some of this might actually be Correct or not, I'm not even going there, but what it is is the narrative is the essence of how politics is to be conducted right now.
01:02:51.000And then the main method of reporting by the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Financial Times even, which I think is a much better newspaper, is senior unnamed U.S.
01:04:02.000Russia blew up its own pipeline, its own billions of dollars of infrastructure, the pipeline that carries Russian energy to European markets, which was a lot of the point of this, whereas the other side said they were going to do it.
01:04:20.000So this is, this narrative business It's really pretty clear, obviously, when I said that thing on U.S.
01:04:32.000That was that face, because they stopped me.
01:04:35.000I was supposed to be on for, usually, typically a half an hour on that show, and after three minutes they said, well, that's enough, Mr. Sachs.
01:04:42.000And then the moderator went on a kind of five-minute rant.
01:04:47.000Which I got to hear because they cut me off of the show, but they left me on Zoom, so I got to hear the rest of it.
01:04:53.000So watch what you say afterwards if you're—unless you cut me off.
01:04:57.000But they went on a five-minute rant about me.
01:05:01.000Why do we have an economist talking about this and so forth?
01:05:05.000And the answer is, I've been involved in diplomacy in more than a hundred countries for decades, and so I watch these things and I have something to say about them.
01:05:14.000It's extraordinary that even words like doves and hawks, common idioms that used to define the potential for polarity in these conversations have kind of drifted from the common lexicon.
01:05:27.000There is nobody taking up that side of the argument, I suppose there is, there's Tucker Carlson, there's Noam Chomsky, there's Donald Trump, but it's in some cases I imagine it's just sort of anti-establishment motivated by the kind of dualistic nature of American politics rather than a genuine appetite For real peace.
01:05:44.000What was it very interesting to hear there Jeffrey was like that with case after case we are seeing whether it's the war, NATO expansionism, meddling in foreign democracies, a sort of a kind of psychotic, vampiric recklessness Followed by maddening lies.
01:06:05.000It feels like the sort of contemporary law that is delivered through sci-fi of, oh, the machines will one day become intelligent and they realize they don't need us.
01:06:16.000It's sort of being acted out by machine-like minds.
01:06:20.000Minds that are so disassociated from common humanity that they're acting Just in accordance with a sort of a binary rationality that excludes common humanity and the obvious fact that if you continue to provoke Russia, if you continue to provoke China, you're ultimately going to end up in conflict situations.
01:06:42.000Now, I can't believe that they have failed to calculate The possible, even likely outcomes.
01:06:51.000So I begin to think that they have a contingency that includes the annihilation of many, many people.
01:06:59.000Like, if you think in a post-industrial world, the sort of former proletariat and working class becomes disposable and therefore available to sort of addiction, prison populations, just fodder for the machine.
01:07:13.000I wonder sometimes, and I hope it doesn't sound fanciful, but there are only really two alternatives.
01:07:19.000One, they haven't thought about the possibility that Russia could respond with apocalyptic weaponry.
01:07:27.000Or they have thought about it, and they don't care.
01:07:32.000What alternative is left other than that?
01:09:00.000That's almost not even known, except that Zbigniew Brzezinski let us in on this fact a few years ago in an interview that it was a secret, covert operation.
01:09:13.000To fund the Mujahideen, to incite or provoke the Soviet Union to invade.
01:09:30.000On the way out, the United States grabbed the eight billion dollars, the measly eight billion dollars of their foreign exchange reserves to make sure that there would be no conceivable economy.
01:10:16.000It's not even discussed in American life.
01:10:20.000So I think what we're seeing is they don't think ahead.
01:10:25.000As soon as this policy started in February and March with the sanctions and this and that, I talked to my... I can't call them friends anymore.
01:10:38.000They don't want to be known as my friend inside the U.S.
01:10:42.000government, but people that I've known for a long time, I like them.
01:12:09.000But if you don't have to explain it, it doesn't bother you so much.
01:12:14.000If we could break open just one or two of these stories, really understand Nord Stream, for example, which, again, I'm putting my chips on the U.S.
01:12:44.000If we could just open up on one of these things.
01:12:48.000It would really help people to understand that we're fed stories that don't make sense.
01:12:55.000You know, let me give you another one, which is another pet peeve of mine right now.
01:13:02.000We're talking about global pandemics, nuclear Armageddon, a co-opted, hollowed out, zombie democracy, marching us all to mutual nihilism and death, and you're peeved!
01:13:14.000Yes, I'm a little peeved about the next one, alright?
01:14:00.000If one side is in the plant and the other side's trying to retake the plant, who's probably shelling the plant?
01:14:08.000So even this one, and I've spoken to senior international officials, I can say I've spoken to very senior people.
01:14:18.000On this issue, I have a supposition that Ukraine is actually shelling the plant, and that it's extremely dangerous, and that we should say to Ukrainians, even if they're our best friend, don't shell a nuclear power plant.
01:14:58.000How about supporting them by having this war end and stop having them be the fodder of a proxy war of neocons fighting the latest of their 30 years of disastrous wars.
01:15:10.000How about that way of supporting Ukraine?
01:15:12.000I think it would be really nice for the Ukrainian people not to have the missiles falling on their head because NATO wants to expand.
01:15:33.000With the midterms approaching, the control over... And with some members of the Democratic Party revolting, you know, there was that letter signed by people that was kind of repressed.
01:15:44.000Is this war being used as a political pawn, even on the domestic front?
01:15:49.000That's one thing I'd like you to answer.
01:15:51.000And also, when we talk to people that are more of a kind of, what I would say, orthodox liberal perspective, they say, like, no, Putin is a unique monster, he's deranged, he's going crazy, it's his agenda, he's a fan of this philosopher, he wants to reunify the Soviet Union, he'll not rest, as if he's the one with the imperial project.
01:16:13.000What do you do when you're confronted with that argument, which sort of amounts to that it's kind of unpatriotic, and that Russia, particularly in the hands of Putin, may have their own imperialist agenda, and also that domestic midterm thing?
01:17:50.000They were asking for, can you help repair our society, which is ripped apart?
01:17:56.000And that's what Biden's promise could have been.
01:17:59.000So the whole idea that he got us in and he did because this war could have been avoided had he negotiated over the NATO issue and talked to Putin and done something in 2021.
01:18:32.000And are there, you know, permanent state forces that just press this?
01:18:37.000But in any event, the job of the president of the United States is not to do this.
01:18:42.000And so when the midterms come, Probably, you know, just according to the polls, I'm no prognosticator except that it looks like the Dems are going to lose one or both houses of Congress.
01:18:55.000I would say, yeah, all the voters say we don't like the inflation.
01:18:58.000Well, I can tell you as an economist, This foreign policy has stoked exactly the things that are driving the Democrats' prospects down.
01:19:49.000Kennedy may have paid with his life for it, because his peace initiatives were profoundly unpopular with the CIA and with others, and God knows what happened.
01:20:02.000But he understood putting the brakes on.
01:20:09.000And whether this was Biden's initiative or his naivete or this is our foreign policy, Mr. President, and you stick with it, whatever it is.
01:20:18.000This, ironically, was the biggest weakness of his domestic policy, which is why he was elected, to do something about a society that's really, really wounded right now.
01:20:33.000I mean, with our shootings, with the addictions, with the poverty, with the inequality, with the dislocations, with the divide, this was the time for some domestic healing.
01:20:45.000What you've described to us, Geoffrey, is how power might really operate without recourse to conspiratorial chitter-chatter.
01:21:01.000If an agenda can be pursued that spans various administrations but alters but barely and includes some identifiable protagonists and organisation, Organizations that are also transcendent of the acknowledged machinery of American democracy.
01:21:20.000It tells you that there is an agenda that is able to endure the apparent fluctuations of vicissitudes of American democratic life.
01:21:29.000So, in a sense, the conversation is this.
01:21:32.000What do we do to interrupt this machine that currently is uninterrupted by the will of ordinary people?
01:21:40.000It's rather heartfelt, I thought, when you described the actual domestic problems that the United States, and indeed the world, face right now, and how this agenda is being pursued regardless, that this is a time when people could be reaching out in peace.
01:21:54.000We shouldn't be talking about wars in Europe or wars anywhere in 2022.
01:21:58.000We learned enough in the last century.
01:22:01.000There has to be an entirely new mentality and sometimes I feel that what's required is the introduction of entirely different psychological, and might I venture the word, spiritual approaches to politics.
01:22:14.000No, look, I really think what we're doing right now, which is talking about it, helping people to understand what's going on, getting people to question again what they're being fed.
01:22:27.000And by the way, people don't have trust, so it's not impossible to get them to think through, but they need the information.
01:23:35.000If these stories break open just a little bit and people say, hmm, this is not what
01:23:40.000we were told, now, in this, every kind of crazy demagogue can come.
01:23:46.000That's what is unsettling about highly charged times, because they can go from bad to worse.
01:23:54.000But they can also go from bad to better.
01:23:56.000And I think that that's what we really need to be pressing for.
01:24:01.000That's the challenge when information is so tightly controlled.
01:24:04.000That's the challenge when it is difficult to convey these stories that have a degree of complexity, when people rush towards simple conclusions, damned platitudes, and what amounts to pugnacious, bellicose jingoism, just sort of repackaged in a sort of a new multicolored flag.
01:25:34.000I stared at your banana for a bit, covetously.
01:25:36.000It's interesting that whilst Jeffrey Sachs was talking about all that geopolitical madness, we were both focusing on a banana.
01:25:43.000I was looking around at all of us, and I was thinking, he's actually sort of, you know, like, it's weird, isn't it?
01:25:47.000Because even we are sort of talking about it, but with actual nuclear war, like, when you're sort of saying it, we are a bit detached, aren't we?
01:25:56.000Isn't it like that even if I thought someone was going to cut off one of my fingers or like sort of throw sort of like some paint at one of my children I'd like stop everything I was doing that would be the sole focus of my life for like I'm not doing anything else forget all of this it doesn't matter.
01:26:11.000Yeah the fact that it can still be a kind of concept to us the idea of Armageddon you know when it seems so real and possible at the moment.
01:26:19.000You know well like in that that trope in sci-fi where sort of like extraterrestrials turn up or whatever and they're like What the fucking hell are you all doing?
01:26:57.000Look, all I'm suggesting, Gal, is that we can do our best by...
01:27:01.000Putting out the stories of people like Jeffrey Sachs, combining it with the spiritual insights of people like Eckhart Tolle, the practical activism of Vandana Shiva, but what we're going to need is a very charismatic attention seeker to stand somewhere near the front, sort of making it about them in some way.
01:30:20.000I'll have to look for an Australian number.
01:30:21.000When I was in Australia, there was this bit where I went round his house for the whole of the show.
01:30:25.000When I was around, like, there's a bit, like I was in Australia, there's a big killer spider out, and I go, I go, so what's this one, Chris Hemsworth?
01:35:17.000And remember, it's Addiction Week, and I've been an addict over the years, and we're going to talk to you a bit more about addiction over the course of the week, are we?