9/4/24: Trump On Lex Fridman, AOC Attacks Green Party, Israel Siege On Hospital, Jeffrey Sachs Joins
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Good morning. Welcome to CounterPoints. Ryan, how are you doing? I'm doing great. How about you? I'm doing well. We've got a big show, including a very interesting conversation that you set up with Jeffrey Sachs and Matt Taibbi. Tell us a little bit about what we can expect from this. Yeah, this is going to be good. So we had Matt Taibbi on the show a month ago or so, and Matt and I

Both made some gently disparaging remarks about Jeffrey Sachs, the old Jeffrey Sachs. As one does. From the 80s or 90s. But we were both kind of going off what we understood from the time, the reporting at the time about what he'd been doing in the Soviet Union and into the transition from the Soviet Union into Russia. He reached out and added some fascinating context to what we'd been talking about. And I asked him if he'd be willing to write what he said for Dropsite News and then come back on the show and talk about it.

talk about it with Matt. So we're going to add some, I think, genuinely new historical context to our understanding of the U.S.-Russian relationship since the breakup of the Soviet Union and leading all the way up to the war in Ukraine, in which we have some news from there of Vladimir Zelensky insisting that he is not leaving Russian territory, which

Of course, that's what you would say. Right. You're not going to start out your negotiation by saying that you're about to walk out. Foreign minister resigned overnight as well. That's breaking as we're recording this. So lots of Ukraine news to get to. We will get to that in the show. We're going to start with Donald Trump. Doing an interview with Lex Friedman, there's a lot to break down from how they had that conversation, what they talked about, what they didn't talk about, and all that good stuff. AOC and Jill Stein are at war. Right.

one reason or another. So we're going to dive into all of that. It's actually a pretty interesting conversation, especially given the RFK Jr. context. He is remaining on the Michigan ballot, it appears. So lots to talk about there. And some updates, of course, from Israel as well, Ryan, because just yesterday we got some statements out of the Biden administration that add to this discussion. Yep. Biden administration is saying that they're going to offer a take it or leave it deal to both Israel and Hamas. Right. At the same time that

Israel is now leading its biggest invasion into the West Bank since 2002. Dropside, we have a reporter who was on the ground there who sent a dispatch last night that we can talk about. Yeah, no, excited to talk about that. Also hundreds of thousands of people in the streets in Israel. So a lot of pressure on Netanyahu. Let's start with Donald Trump on Lex Friedman's show. We're going to play this first segment.

sought, where Lex Friedman pushed him. This was the most Lex Friedman pushed him in their 45-minute conversation on voting irregularities in the 2022 election, alleged voting irregularities in the 2020 election. Lex Friedman said he's independent, his friends are independent, they like what Trump says about a lot of things, but it's just...

the 2020 election lies that gives him pause. So here's how Donald Trump responded to that. I became president. Then the second time I got millions more votes than I got the first time. I was told if I got 63 million, which is what I got the first time, you would win. You can't not win. And I got millions of more votes than that. And

Lost by a whisker. Lost by a whisker. A whisker. The way he said whisker. That's so good. Yeah, it was classic. And he paused before he said it. He's like, well, he did not want to admit that he actually lost. But then to his great credit, he said he lost by a whisker. Yes. Also, whoever told, here's what he doesn't understand, and which is so fascinating. Why did so many more people vote in 2020 than

than voted in 2016 and voted in any presidential election in American history. A, obviously, population's higher in 2020 than it was in 1920. But why did so many millions more people come out in 2016 to vote against Donald Trump after he was in the office for four years? He just can't seem to stumble on the answer

that a lot of people were just motivated to come out and vote against him. He animated millions of people to get off the sidelines, register to vote,

And just come out and say, I do not like this man. I mean, it's interesting because the Cope has some truth to it in this case, which is there was this massive multi-hundred million dollar effort to make voting really easy during COVID. And so that's, I mean, he's not wrong about that, but-

He also, on the one hand, when Lex Friedman says a lot of people will call you authoritarian or fascist or something, I actually thought the most interesting part of the interview was that exchange. Lex Friedman says, I don't think Kamala Harris is a communist. And Donald Trump is basically like, well, they call me authoritarian, so I can call her a communist. I have to fight fire with fire. That's

That's hugely significant because it's such a Trumpian moment. It is so rare that you see the candidate admitting that their political spin is a lie. I mean, you just don't ever, that is an unspoken fact. Everybody knows it, but nobody ever says it. And he said it right there and he's just like so Trumpian, completely honest about it.

Right. On the one hand, during this interview, he says the thing about running for president is you have to not care what people say about you.

Because it's it takes a lot of courage to get into the ring and if you care you're gonna choke on the other hand He cares very clearly cares very deeply and is wounded by all the things that people say about him particularly When they call he talked about I never said that you know World War one soldiers were suckers and losers Yeah, like he has a lot of things that he's

has grievances about that he thinks he was unfairly maligned or that were attributed to him in an unfair way. One of them, Lex Friedman says, well, they call you a fascist. And he's like, right. That's why I call her a communist. They can dish it, but they can't take it. So it was clear that, yeah,

He doesn't really think she's a communist. No, he said her father's a Marxist. Right, right. And Friedman's like, oh, that's true. Yeah, but he said it's important to fight fire with fire, meaning if they call me one thing, I have to respond. And that's to your point about just to get back to the voting thing for a moment. Yeah, that's also part of his cope that, you know, it's,

And there's some truth to it as well, that people have lied about him and hyperbolized about him for so long that obviously if the people knew the truth, they would love me, which is not necessarily true. But that's probably how he sees it. And Lex Friedman always reminds me of James Lipton from Inside the Actors Studio. Actually, Will Ferrell's impression of James Lipton from Inside the Actors Studio, where he's just like, if heaven is real, what do you want to hear God say to you when you can't?

there, just trying to open up this part of Donald Trump that hasn't quite been unlocked. And Trump is just so good at not really answering those questions. You know, he's so good at just totally running out the clock and saying nothing. He's better than Kamala Harris at saying nothing. Yet also letting you know kind of what he's thinking about. Sometimes. Even if he's trying to conceal it or trying to say it in a way that you can't kind of tie him to it later. Well, let's talk about that because here's

Lex Friedman pushing Donald Trump on whether or not he would release files related to Jeffrey Epstein. So here's the clip. But a lot of big people went to that island. But fortunately, I was not one of them. It's just very strange for a lot of people that the list of clients that went to the island has not been made public. Yeah, it's very interesting, isn't it?

Probably will be, by the way. So if you're able to, you'll be... Yeah, I'd certainly take a look at it. Now, Kennedy's interesting because it's so many years ago. They do that for danger, too, because it endangers certain people, etc., etc. So Kennedy is very different from the Epstein thing.

But yeah, I'd be inclined to do the Epstein. I'd have no problem with it. He really didn't want to talk about Epstein to the point where he pivoted to JFK. Like if the Kennedy assassination is your crutch to get out of an uncomfortable situation. That's your easy question. Right. And for people who don't have the background, Roger Stone. Hmm.

He's one of the people who is Trump's best friend, has been pushing for the CIA's Kennedy documents to be released basically his entire life. Roger Stone had one job as friend of Donald Trump, and that was to get your friend, the president, to declassify all of the JFK documents while he was president. And they were due on schedule, court ordered to be declassified under the Trump administration.

And he buckled to Mike Pompeo and pressure from the CIA to withhold an enormous number of those documents toward the end of his tenure. And now he's saying that he will

He'll do it this time if he if he goes back in. He's also saying she has no problem. He's gonna do the Epstein ones. Yeah, but Trump is not good at hiding his body language. He was so uncomfortable He's talking about Epstein there Uncomfortable but almost like bemused when Friedman was like a lot of people went to that island and you can see the look of Donald Trump's face where he does fortunately it wasn't me. Yeah elsewhere. He says yeah, it wasn't me. There's this incredible video of Trump

And Epstein. Right, at Mar-a-Lago. Yeah, like ogling women at a party and laughing. Trump tells Epstein some joke and Epstein doubles over laughing. Mm-hmm.

Licks Friedman asked him why did people, why was he so effective at insinuating himself into people's lives? And Trump says, what, he was a Hale the Well fellow and he had a lot of assets. Yeah. Like an island. Right. That he used to, right. He would use to attract people. But yeah, he, at first he does not seem interested at all. Right. In releasing those names or...

In really talking about it at all. Mm-hmm, but then by the end he says, okay, I'll do it Roger Stone by the way also friends with Howard Hunt's son So just so much to unpack in the dance. Oh, yes And Howard Hunt's son is the one who claimed that Howard Hunt on his deathbed. Yes Confess that there was a CIA right? There was a CIA conspiracy if you listen to the tapes

it's not quite like it's not really quite there and he kind of leaves him and it's not clear how how their howard hunt is but yes howard hunt's son is because yes roger stone is

If there was a guy who was going to convince his friend to release the documents, it was Roger Stone. You'd think. Yeah. You'd think. Well, let's hear how Trump responded when Lex Friedman passed him on Project 2025. This is the clip. Let me ask you about Project 2025. So you've publicly said that you don't have any direct connection to Project 2025. Nothing. I know nothing about it. And they know that too. Democrats know that. And I purposely haven't read it.

Because I want to say to you, I have no idea what it's all about. It's easier than saying I read it and all of the things. No, I purposely haven't read it. And I've heard about it. I've heard about things that are in there that

I don't like. And there's some things in there that everybody would like. That was sort of a useless exchange. I felt it was sort of just like Donald Trump in any kind of mainstream interview being asked about Project 2025. I don't know. What did you make about that? Right. He didn't press any further on it. Right. And he didn't talk about what's in it. Right. It just...

Which is, that's the, like, what's good about alternative media is when it gets into the specifics of it. At least he had the thing up on the side that said, you know, firing 50,000 federal workers is one of the things in Project 2025. There's a lot of other cultural stuff in there. That's the stuff that Trump is running from. You know, I haven't read the exact details of what it says around abortion and IVF, but it's not going to be, it's not going to be

It's not going to be the remotely moderate stuff. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, what else in there do you think that he's is he running from? And on Project 2025, I mean, I think he just is running from the image that Democrats have successfully created of it being a boogeyman that you can kind of because there are things that are not in Project 2025 that.

The Harris campaign is pretty successfully just getting to associate with Project 2025, and they've already associated Project 2025 with Trump. It's been like this brilliant marketing effort, PR effort to build something out of just the name Project 2025, which is so broad that you can kind of

project onto it, what do you want to project onto it? So I think he's running away from Project 2025 itself entirely. And that's why the Trump campaign has started to put out its own sort of policy plans so that they can say, this is what we want to do. It has nothing to do with what, like you can compare and contrast, but they don't own our plans. We thoroughly own what our policy plans are going forward. And to the extent that the Trump campaign does own

Project 2025 is just because there would be I think overlap in staffing that there would actually be a lot of people who were involved with project 2025 who would end up working in a Trump administration like that's and and they have Ideas that they've put on paper about what some of the policies are that they'd want to implement But it's you know, that's why the Trump campaign is running from the whole thing from my perspective. Yeah, and it seems

fair to ask Trump to actually put out some policies? He gets a pass from that from the media.

Because I think he's Trump and there's something almost absurd about him even like having detailed policy. Mm-hmm like when he said I haven't read it because I wanted to be able to Say to you that I have nothing to do with it. It's like well Yeah, you also didn't read it cuz you just don't read stuff. Mm-hmm Like you didn't you didn't need a reason not to read a long document Like we've all read the recording like the military like draws pictures and stuff because he has a very short attention span listen I don't think anybody wants to read project 2025 because it's it's

So long. I haven't read it. Yeah, it's insane. I've looked at it, but I haven't like. Read it all the way through. I'm like, yeah. So. I should. I'm not doing my job here. Well, Trump was also asked by Lex Friedman about basically how he posts on Truth Social. That I did find useful and interesting in the sort of James Lipton inside the actor studio sense because he said that he posts from bed.

And that sometimes, you know, if you don't sleep much, right, he's not one. He's not one for sleeping. Yes. Something like this. So let's roll this clip of Donald Trump talking about reposts on Truth Social. I'd love to get your psychology about behind the tweets and the posts on Truth. Are you sometimes being intentionally provocative or are you just speaking your mind? And are there times where you regret it?

some of the truths you've posted. Yeah, I do. I mean, but not that often, honestly. You know, I do a lot of reposting. The ones you get in trouble with are the reposts because you find down deep they're into some group that you're not supposed to be reposting. You don't even know if those groups are good, bad, or indifferent. But the reposts are the ones that really get you in trouble. When you do your own words, it's sort of easier. But the reposts go very quickly. And if you're going to check every single little thing

symbol. And I don't know, it's worked out pretty well for me. I tell you, it's truth is

It's the reposts. It's always the reposts. It's the reposts that get you. Mm-hmm. It's true. Now, the Harris campaign. He's not wrong. So the Harris campaign took that video and tweeted, Trump asked about reposting QAnon and misogynistic content. Quote, I do a lot of reposting. It's worked out very well for me. Yes, he did. In the end, he's like, yeah, it worked out great for me. So this brings us full circle to, I know we're breaking down. Real quick, the reason it works out well for him is that he can dog whistle to these groups. So he's like, oh, there's some symbol.

that I didn't realize what that symbol was. Well, it's on Truth Social and it's controversial. It's some type of a white nationalist symbol that he's referring to in general. And so he re-truths that or whatever his word is. And what is that? You mean something specific? No, no. The way that he said it was like, you don't look all the way down at the bottom of the post that you're reposting and there's some symbol there that represents some group that you didn't know about. Right.

And it's controversial and you reposted it and now you're tagged with associating with that group. QAnon stuff did happen. 90% of the time you're talking QAnon stuff or white nationalists. The where we go on, we go all hashtag. Stuff like that, exactly. Or 14 words or something that's like. Pepe. So what he gets is to give a little bit of a.

love to those groups while maintaining plausible deniability. Because he genuinely, I think, probably in many cases doesn't know what that symbol is. But he knows that there's a bunch of stuff he doesn't know and he knows the direction it's going. So he's like, oh, I can be clever here. I can show them that I'm on their side while being like, ah, gee, it's just 14 words. I didn't know what 14 words meant. Which, I mean...

plausible deniability on that one. For the first time. Yeah, but I mean also that's sort of like the typical politician has gatekeepers. Right, exactly. And it also shows to his people that he's not a typical politician. But I think what it shows is he knows what he's doing because in the end he says it works out really well for me. Yeah.

He said, and this brings us, I think, to the 30,000 foot view of Donald Trump doing an interview with Lex Friedman. They talked about whether he would do an interview with Joe Rogan. He said, I don't really know Joe Rogan. I see him when he walks into the arena with Dana, Dana White. And Lex Friedman pushed him a little bit and said, there's some tension between you and Joe Rogan because he, you know, said he really likes RFK Jr. And Trump was like, I don't think there's really any tension. I don't.

really know the guy. I don't know if I'd do a show. I'd probably do a show, but I'm not going to ask him. He says, I haven't been asked, but I'm not going to ask him. He said, and he said, he seems like a liberal guy, which I wish the left could understand. Yes. Yes. Like Trump is right. Like Rogan does have, like post 2020 when he got completely destroyed for endorsing Bernie Sanders, I think he's drifted right in some cultural ways.

But in general, he has a lot of left-wing instincts. Higher minimum wage, supports unions, supports Medicare for all, endorsed Bernie Sanders. There's a reason Trump...

Says that he seems like a liberal guy right because he has a lot of liberal impulses. Yeah almost I mean, yes Bernie Sanders he likes Tulsi Gabbard He likes, you know, I don't know where he stands on Tulsi Gabbard now, but obviously he likes RFK jr. And yes so all that is to say though Donald Trump has been on this tour of alternative media podcasts and it's

It's pretty interesting as a political strategy. Sometimes, Alex Friedman gets a little bit of, or Theo Vaughn is a good example. I thought Theo Vaughn got more out of Trump psychologically than Lex Friedman did, just because they were talking. And it's Donald Trump having a long-form conversation with a comedian.

It becomes interesting in ways nobody expects. But Lex Friedman, I think, got some genuinely interesting stuff out of Donald Trump. On the other hand, that's not like Trump sitting down with, you know, Katie Couric in some ways that are good and in some ways that are bad. I don't know. It's a campaign strategy, pretty interesting. He talked, this was one of the most compelling parts of the interview as well. Trump talked about why you need to do new media.

He was like, maybe it's more powerful than TV. And hearing that from Trump is so interesting because this is a man who mastered the use of television before he became a political candidate and when he became a political candidate. So there's something going on. I think that was a window into the way he's thinking about it. He talked about how Elon had him on his spaces and got more listens than anyone. There's something going on where he's starting to reckon with the alternative media or the old media.

media, the gatekeepers having less and less power, which is interesting to watch him reckon with that in real time because he was a huge, like he's the one that poured the fuel on the fire of people starting to question the gatekeepers more than they ever have before. I mean, it was him coming out in 2015 and 16 talking about fake news and baiting the media into kind of exposing itself. Again, for better or worse, I think, you know, for better when it comes to having transparency about how awful the media is, but to see him sort of not

Look at himself as a main character and that was interesting as well. When's he gonna come on here? What are we doing wrong? That's right. I mean, come on. What are we doing wrong? Come on, come on, Trump. He probably said all kinds of things he would consider things that we're doing wrong. Does he take that personally? He said, hey, you have to not care. I'm sure Lex Friedman

Has said some interesting stuff, too. I'm sure he has. Yeah. So anyway, it's smart. I mean, Kamala Harris would never do it. We're not asking him. He's not going to ask us. Well, Kamala Harris did Breakfast Club, probably. She did Charlemagne and just face-planted on Charlemagne, if I'm remembering correctly. I remember seeing some clips from it, which is not good. Right. But, hey, they should both get even more comfortable with new media. But, you know, I'll take one candidate becoming comfortable with new media because it's the

And JD Vance, he's been here. Yeah. I did reach out to the Walls camp and say, look, JD Vance comes on these shows. You might as well, too. Hey, that's right. He's not here yet.

This election season, the stakes are higher than ever. I think the choice is clear in this election. Join me, Charlemagne Tha God, for We The People, an audio town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris and you, live from Detroit, Michigan, exclusively on iHeartRadio. They'll tackle the tough questions, depressing issues, and the future of our nation. We may not see eye to eye on every issue, but America, we are not going back.

Don't miss this powerful conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris. Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific on the free iHeartRadio app's Hip Hop Beat Station.

Let's move on to this feud between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jill Stein. Ryan, do you want to set the table for us on this? Because it's sort of straight out of your book. Well, so AOC was doing an Instagram live and taking questions from her audience. And one of them was,

Basically, what should I say to my friends who are considering voting Green Party or thinking about voting for Jill Stein? Let's roll the AOC clip that kicked this off. You are the leader of your party. And if you run for years and years and years and years and years in a row and your party has not grown and you don't add city council seats and you don't add down ballot candidates and you don't add state electives.

That's bad leadership. And that to me is what's upsetting. Because if you have been your party's nominee for 12 years in a row, four years ago and four years before that and four years before that, and you cannot grow your movement pretty much at all,

and can't pursue any successful strategy, and all you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you're just showing up once every four years to do that? You're not serious. You're not, to me, it does not read as authentic. It reads as predatory. I'm sorry, I'm just saying it. - And let's roll Jill Stein's response from an airport here. - Jill here.

I'm about to board, but very quickly, I just wanted to thank AOC Pelosi so very much for her very authentic concern about growing green power. Clearly, AOC is the attack dog du jour, and the Democrats are running scared, and they should be, because who wants to support a genocide? Who wants to vote for a genocide? And if there's anything that's predatory here,

It's saying that your candidate is working tirelessly for a ceasefire when actually they are actively funding and arming genocide and actually refusing to even consider an arms embargo, which would bring the genocide to a screeching halt. AOC, who's supposed to be in leadership of the Democratic Party, it's amazing if she doesn't know about the anti-democratic tactics and strategies that the Democratic Party uses to crush genocide.

and silence political opposition. And to take it to another level, the DNC is now attacking Jill Stein, if you can put up this element here. So Jill Stein went down to support three women

black nationalist activists who are charged with acting as agents of Russia. She went down to support them. DNC spokesperson said Jill Stein is a useful idiot for Russia after parroting Kremlin talking points and being propped up by bad actors in 2016. She's at it again. Jill Stein won't become president, but her spoiler candidacy

That both the GOP and Putin have previously shown interest in can help decide who wins a vote for Stein is vote for Trump. Mm-hmm Which is that that is the like that's the oldest line in the book from mainstream parties towards third party candidates that a vote for X is actually vote for Y As somebody on the outside when you watch these those those three different clips, what was your your

reaction to them. I mean, I think Jill Stein got the better of AOC in that exchange because on the question of like, they're both talking about what they believe is genocide. So it's pretty black and white when you can spit back at AOC that she's on the side of the party that's saying Joe Biden is working tirelessly or Kamala Harris is working tirelessly for a ceasefire. I mean, that felt like kind of a slam dunk, even though

Obviously, Jill Stein, AOC is correct that Jill Stein has not found much of a constituency over her many years in politics. But where it's somewhat, I don't know if disappointing is the right word, but somewhat frustrating to hear from AOC, who I disagree with on most things, but so thoroughly enjoyed her defeat of Joe Crowley, is disappointment.

You know, that's not all for, that's not all Jill Stein's fault. There are a lot of other forces that AOC should theoretically be opposed to that were gatekeeping Jill Stein. I don't think Jill Stein is like a brilliant once in a generation politician or is anyone that could turn out to be like a Ross Perot level third party candidate. I just,

don't find her that compelling. I don't think a lot of other people find her that compelling. There are many people who do, but not enough to obviously become viable. There are though a lot of gatekeepers that are pushing to ensure people like Jill Stein aren't viable. And you'd think AOC would have some sympathy because her entire sort of Instagram video, her entire argument in that Instagram video was sort of saying, if you're not finding, it was kind of smug, right? It's like, if you're not finding a constituency, then that's on you. It's like, well,

probably also on a lot of the factors you say you don't like too. It is, but you have to, you know, if you're one person, you work with the world you've got. One correction to AOC's argument there, it was actually Howie Hawkins who was the Green Party nominee in 2020. Classic Ryan Groom. You remember Howie Hawkins? No. Which goes to the point, like,

Nobody even knows who the Green Party nominee was for instance in 2020 Yeah, like we know Ralph Nader in 2000 was a Green Party not pretty much the last time they were kind of relevant It so it's Jill Stein in 2016 out Hawkins in 2020 Hawkins Hawkins a lot of greens were upset with Hawkins because they thought that he didn't kind of challenge that the duopoly enough and kind of made way in different states and

for Biden to take on Trump. Because there is this perennial concern that as a third party does better, let's say like the Greens in 2000, a substantial number of those voters then get concerned, oh, we did better, the party did not improve, did not move our direction, and now we're getting blamed for spoiling the election. And then it drains support from them again in the future.

I've got my own complicated green history. I was actually a Green Party member. Least surprising information I've ever received. In New York, shout out to Paul Gilman who invited me to join the Queens Green Party back in 1999, 2000. I even went to, with a convoy of buses, I literally went to the Green Party convention. Just Doc Martens everywhere. In 2000. Yeah.

door knocking, like volunteered this Madison Square Garden rally where he packed the entire event. So every single argument that anybody could make for the Green Party. You're sympathetic to. I made myself. Right. In a louder and more obnoxious way. Many, many times over. And the basic arguments are there's no difference between the two parties. And then the second argument is by building third party power,

you're going to kind of force the Democrats to move in your direction. And we can take each one of those. So the Greens also have this thing that they do where they say, and I did it myself, that, okay, look, if you say, look, Ralph Nader got X thousands of votes in Florida, and that swung the election to Bush,

The Greens, and go scroll down to the comment section, you'll see I'm doing it right now. The Greens will say that's absolutely not true. Do the math. They were registered Democrats who ended up voting for George Bush and that's the fault of Democrats.

Those were like, but those are Southern Democrats, like who are actually Republicans. Sure. Who were always going to vote for Republicans. There were definitely, like it was 537 votes in the end separated Gore and Bush. Like you just have to say like, okay, there were tens of thousands of people who voted for Nader who if he wasn't running, they would have voted for Al Gore. Like that's just a fact. And to me as a third party supporter,

The proper answer is not to like split hairs about this and argue that, no, it didn't actually have an effect. You have to own it. Yeah, right. Because it's your argument. That's your argument. There's no difference. There's no difference. Yeah. And it's good. Like whatever, like we're going to vote for this person come what may. Yeah. And there's no difference anyway. And then as soon as it has some impact on the real world, they run from any responsibility from it. Mm-hmm.

And so then a couple things happen after 2001. Which implies you don't like the consequences. Right. Even though you were threatening those very consequences as a good thing. Right, exactly. So I have much deeper respect for the argument that, yeah, that's right. It did cost them. And you know what? Democrats should have been a better party. Right. And if they were a better party-

then we wouldn't have run and he wouldn't have gotten as much support. Or Al Gore should have earned those votes. Nobody is born with the right to having you vote for them. Right. Those are better arguments to me on a moral level. That's a great point. Than to say, I didn't actually. And so you get this from Greens all the time. Actually-

It didn't matter like the the thing that I talk about all the time My choice to vote third party doesn't actually mean anything. Yeah, like well, then why won't why are you talking about it constantly? It didn't actually mean anything so after 2000 you get September 11th happens Bush is in office He invades Iraq and so a lot of people including myself were confronted with the question now I voted in New York didn't matter and

Well, also, this is the question of would Al Gore have done the same thing? Right. I think the answer is no.

Think in order to in for the u.s. To invade Iraq you need the neocons in positions of power I mean he had been those levers I mean the the George W. Bush going from saying we're going to end Middle East interventionism to right now championing Middle East right but that but it was his vice president Dick Cheney and his you know secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and like though that that clack of people really kind of

Did a lot of internal organizing to make sure that that happened you can read Bob Woodward's book about 9/11 like within a day or two of the attack on the World Trade Center Rumsfeld is saying we need to invade Iraq because there aren't enough targets in Afghanistan and

And they immediately start laying the groundwork for that. And this was a particular set of people who had a particular vision. It was, the neoconservatism gets thrown around a lot, but it is a very specific, like in its most literal sense, there is a very specific sort of group of people that it refers to. These were the intellectual leaders of it, and they were in the exact right positions of power.

to kind of jam it into happening. That said, the Greens, like yourself, at that very moment, may have had a good case to own, frankly, that personnel in an Al Gore administration continued from the Clinton administration could have made some of the very same errors. I'm not saying that's absolutely accurate. I'm just saying there was the Green case that both parties are the same through the lens of

The Iraq war or the response to 9-11. Not a terrible argument because there is some overlap between Clinton neoconservatism and ultimately what became Bush neoconservatism. Some important differences too, but it's, yeah, it's hard to say. Yeah. And that gets to the more difficult question of today because I think- Yes, yes. I think back then it was clear the Republicans were

Much more both part like this is America most both parties have like enormous numbers of warmongers in them on the scale of warmongers in 2000 Republicans had to had the neocons they had the they had the aggressive militarism of Reaganism still kicking and Democrats

had like, let's say half of that. Today, I think if you're asking about workers, unions, on the economy, on domestic policy, I genuinely do think Democrats are better for workers than Republicans are today. When it comes to American militarism abroad and foreign policy, I can't say that for sure. - And don't you think AOC is saying that? I mean, she obviously is. - AOC is a Democrat, and she's saying,

Democrats are better than Republicans and and any Democrat ought to say that but when it comes to foreign policy Trump could be a complete madman his second term who knows mm-hmm, but we know that Democrats have embraced a militarism and a hawkish foreign policy that that is frightening

And does it from that perspective make them better? So then you're then you're asking yourself a real question It's a lesser of two evils. Of two, you've got two parties Which one is better or worse on it on the particular issue that I care about more? Like if I think it's clear if it's domestic policy, it's Democrats like there's I don't think there's any question about that right now You this this realignment is fascinating four years eight years from now. We might have a different answer that question and

foreign policy, they might be better, but they might not. It's like, it's not as obvious a question to me. Yeah, I agree. As it used to be. Because there are wars happening in both parties right now over who gets to control foreign policy. Yeah. Yeah, that's clearly happening. I think it's...

more interesting right now on the Republican side because there are people who have genuinely heterodox views on foreign policy that are starting to look like they're coming out ahead in tug of war. J.D. Vance is one of them. That doesn't seem like it's happening as much on the left, although Ilhan Omar is someone who's certainly ascendant and has staked out a position actually directly during DNC week against AOC. Mm-hmm.

And to me, those are the real questions that you have to ask yourself. And if you notice, what's not in there is the third party stuff. Right. Or in particular, the Green Party. The Green Party has just done a

deplorable job of growing power at the local level and at the state and at the federal level. But some of that is clearly the fault of gatekeeping on behalf of vicious, the DNC operatives and the media. And I mean, like, they're not entirely wrong about being marginalized by, you know, the pro lowercase d democracy factions and American factions. But

People kind of sometimes make the mistake of assuming that a political party that is named the Democrats would support democracy. Big mistake. Big mistake. Huge. They don't. They support the Democratic Party. Yeah. And so, yes, whatever is in the interest of the Democratic Party, that's what they're going to do. And if that means trying to kick the Greens off the ballot, that's awfully hypocritical, but it's exactly what you would expect of them. The fundamental problem that any third party has is

is the system that we have, which is this, it's not parliamentary. In Europe and some other places around the world, you win 7% of the vote, you get 7% of the seats in parliament, and then you join a coalition, and then you can, that's the leverage that you have. Here our coalitions are formed ahead of time, and then it's a first past the post. Whoever gets

Not even a majority. Whoever gets more votes. That's why, like, Bill Clinton could win with, you know, 30-some percent. Or 41% whatever he had in 1992 because Ross Perot drained out 19%. And so that means that a voter going into the polls, by the time they get into the booth, knows it's either going to be this person or this person. And so...

all of the different lawfare and legal challenges and gatekeeping that the media does to the Greens and to other libertarians and other third parties, even RFK Jr. That hurts them a lot.

But nothing hurts them more than just the fundamental design of the system we have. Because people go in and they want their vote to count between one party or the other. Yeah. And that's what's interesting about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's response. She could have said, she could have expressed any sort of empathy for that perspective. And I think instead with the sort of smug dunk, which I get because to the point that you're making, and as we're talking about this, I find it so interesting, there are

you know, there's a real blame on the Greens for not being more compelling to the average American voter. That, you know, there's something that they haven't tapped into. There are real failures on their part. There are things that they can do better. I get that. I just would think as somebody who's sort of sympathetic to the anti-establishment movements on either the left or the right, that you would be

Your priority would be saying like hey, I hear you agree with you Well, she did say at the beginning which we didn't play in that clip She said at the beginning look I'm not talking about the people themselves who are considering voting for Jill's sign She's like look I get that because the parties suck and and frankly like she went up on stage and said Kamala Harris working tirelessly to end a ceasefire Walt to Kamala Harris's administration is

sending weapons to Israel. And while Netanyahu is using the Biden administration's support of Netanyahu to fight off pressure from his own coalition to reach a deal, we are actively thwarting a deal, not working tirelessly to get one. So yeah, we can all understand why somebody would not want to vote for one of these two parties. So she's not talking about those

voters themselves, she's saying that people like Stein herself are the ones that are being predatory. And one other point on the Greens, ask yourself, why did Cornel West run for the Green Party nomination, spend about three weeks looking at the mess that the Green Party had become and decide that he wasn't going to run anymore? Like,

And we can say, okay, maybe it's not their fault, et cetera, because of all the structural problems that they have.

Anybody who's active in the Green Party knows yeah, the Green Party's a mess. It's a complete and total mess It's the same thing with the libertarians. I mean it's in both of us know this it's like they're fringe political movements are often led by eccentric characters who are already fighting the Sisyphean battle against the system that is designed to crush them but anybody who is willing to expend the like tireless effort that involves to fight that's the Sisyphean battle more often than not is eccentric and

more often than not, not

It's not the like best organizer in the world. It's like a lot of like very interesting, you know, principled people on in green circles and libertarian circles and those spaces get really, really messy. I mean the inner nice- I bet on the libertarian side it's the same that it becomes a lifestyle for people. 100%. That it's a social thing. It's happening right now. Now a lot of Democrats like the ones who go to the convention as like delegates. Same thing.

That's a lifestyle thing for them too. They just like being Democrats. They go to the county meetings. It's what they do for their community. The difference there is that they might win some elections sometimes.

with Greens and Libertarians, it just becomes like, this is my identity. This is the thing I do. Yeah. And so as we're saying this, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is staying on the Michigan ballot, which is actually fairly huge news because there were a lot of voters that he appealed to. I mean, we're getting into Nader territory potentially with something like Michigan right now. There were a lot of voters he appealed to who will not be persuaded to vote for Donald Trump because they were double haters. And they are not going to, you know, sort of along the lines of what we talked about with

In the debate we hosted with Michael Tracy and an RFK Jr. field organizer former last week, there's just a whole lot of people that cannot be persuaded to vote for Donald Trump. They are the sort of RFK Jr. green equivalent. Both parties are the exact same thing.

And when you are in a race that could—you just—what was it, 500 and something votes in Florida in 2000? When you're in a race that could be just as close as that one, and the Electoral College is on the line in states like Michigan, having his name on the ballot is—for people who don't pay super close attention to politics and just want to cast a protest vote—

That's really dangerous for the Trump campaign. And Mark Cuban tweeted, you know who helped pay for the lawsuit that got RFK Jr., Cornel West on the North Carolina ballot? Me. He said, I help fund voter choice. I'm not a fan of the two-party system and voter choice helps get candidates on the ballot. And we are good at it. His North Carolina organization came to us for help. We helped no cost to them. So I don't feel bad that he can't get off the ballot. So Cubans are taking a victory lap on that one because the RFK Jr. campaign was a

trying really hard to get on the ballot in all of these states. And then when you flip for Trump, you can't get off of it because it's late in the game. I could really, I think that could really, really hurt Donald Trump. Yeah. Hard to, hard to think of a scenario. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Yeah, because if you go in, because his job,

He's not going to make himself more popular Trump. He's going to make Kamala Harris more less popular. That's his goal. And, you know, she's going to try to tear him down. But, you know, views are kind of baked in on him. So by the time people go into the booth, a lot of them are going to hate both. And if RFK Jr.'s name is there, then maybe

Right. Well, when we're planning the show, just a little inside baseball here, we come up with topics that we think, you know, make good blocks for 15 minutes, something like that. And we just turned a block on an Instagram post from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into like half hour discussion about Ryan's history of the Green Party, which was so interesting, actually. And I'm just cut all that. Yeah, it's all gone. You'll never see it.

This election season, the stakes are higher than ever. I think the choice is clear in this election. Join me, Charlemagne Tha God, for We The People, an audio town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris and you, live from Detroit, Michigan, exclusively on iHeartRadio. They'll tackle the tough questions, depressing issues, and the future of our nation. We may not see eye to eye on every issue, but America, we are not going back.

Don't miss this powerful conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris. Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific on the free iHeartRadio app's Hip Hop Beat Station.

All right, Ryan, let's move on to the Middle East. Now, there's a story up on Dropsite right now with some important reporting. Tell us what's going on. Yeah, we throw this element up on the screen. So Israel's launching its biggest invasion of the West Bank since 2002. And I'll just read from a note that Jeremy Scahill attached to this article that we published yesterday. He wrote, a few days ago, we reached out to Palestinian journalist Mujahid al-Sadi for coverage from the ground on the targeting of Janine's hospitals by the Israeli military.

A reporter from Jenin who has covered the region since 2012, al-Sadi is no stranger to the dangers. In 2022, he was just a few feet away from his friend and colleague, Shirin Abu Akleh, the legendary Al Jazeera correspondent, when an Israeli sniper shot and killed her.

We can put this VO up on the screen, the second element here. Jeremy goes on. You can hear the gunshots here from the IDF. And on Monday, as he was reporting this story, al-Sadi was among a group of journalists who came under attack by Israeli forces and bulldozers while they were covering the destruction of a roundabout and surrounding shops in downtown Jenin.

The soldiers opened fire on them, injuring two, while the bulldozers drove at them at high speeds, forcing them to take cover inside shops. "It's quite terrifying to have the bulldozer rush at you for them to shoot at you," he told us. "They were trying to prevent us from doing our coverage." The next day, Palestinian journalists Ayman al-Nubani and Mohammed Mansour were shot and injured by Israeli forces in the village of Kafr Dan, west of Jenin. So this story was commissioned for us by Sharif Abdel-Quddous,

Legendary correspondent from the Middle East who is working with us now. He edited and translated this report from Arabic. You can check it out. There's some harrowing details in it. One of them, among the many, has details on how much, how many sewer lines have been ripped up, the extensive damage to the infrastructure. But then some of the personal details he got are intense. One about a mother who,

Of three who took two of her children to a doctor's appointment in a hospital in in Janine last week Left her five month old five month old home with family and that's when the assault happened and she has been trapped in this hospital ever since right just trying to imagine like taking my kid to the dentist and then all and then the then then you're surrounded for days and you're Can't even you know, the the cell phone lines been cut like there's no internet. I can't even get in touch You don't even know like

Is my family still okay? When am I ever going to leave? It's like, are they getting attacked? And this, again, is this of the West Bank. This is not Gaza. And it's unfolding with exponential force, it seems like, day after day. Meanwhile, all while the U.S., Netanyahu, and Hamas kind of jockey over the terms of,

a potential ceasefire deal. We have Netanyahu delivering a press conference recently where he laid out some of his conditions. Let's roll Netanyahu. I was asked whether Israel is not, I'm not doing enough to the release of hostages. Well, I want to set the record straight. On August 28th, that's five days ago, five days ago, Deputy CIA Director said that Israel shows seriousness in the negotiations

Now Hamas must show the same seriousness. I want to ask you something. What has changed in the last five days? What has changed? One thing. These murderers executed six of our hostages. They shot them in the back of the head. That's what's changed. And now after this, we're asked to show seriousness? We're asked to make concessions? What message does this send Hamas?

It says kill more hostages, murder more hostages, you'll get more concessions. White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby in a briefing with reporters has said the opposite of what Netanyahu has been saying. We can put up this Times of Israel article that quotes Kirby here. He says, "The deal itself, including the bridging proposal that we started working with, includes the removal of IDF forces

from all densely populated areas in phase one, and that includes those areas along and adjacent to that corridor. He's talking about the Philadelphia corridor. And this is yesterday, right? Yes, and he says that's the proposal that Israel had agreed to. So Israel had previously agreed to a proposal that would remove...

IDF troops from the Philadelphia corridor, which is down in Rafah, the border between Israel and Egypt. Netanyahu is now saying that he has American support not to do that. It's a complete public disagreement. We can play a little more Netanyahu just to show how stark this divide is. The Philadelphia corridor, which separates Egypt from the Gaza Strip, will not be evacuated. If Israel will give up control of it,

Gaza will become an enclave of terror. When I resigned from the government, when I realized that they were going to do the disengagement and they were going to break up these Jewish communities, I gave a myelitive resignation to Prime Minister Sharon. And I said in it that the minimum requirement of mine was to leave the Philadelphia Corridor in Israeli control. So in that press conference, Emily,

And he said to, he said, Sinwar, it's not going to happen. Yeah. Like he was, he's like, I am not leaving the Philadelphia corridor. Like he's not going to agree to anything that requires IDF troops to leave. Meanwhile, you have the U.S. saying that he has agreed to that and the U.S. wants him to do that. And you have Netanyahu telling his cabinet, Barack Rabid reported this. He's like, the U.S. has agreed to let them stay. Why are you trying to get us to cave?

What kind of incompetent incoherence are we witnessing here? What's the US policy? At least Netanyahu's policy seems, well, I mean, he's incoherent too because he previously approved a plan and a deal that would see Israeli troops leave the Philadelphia corridor. Now he's saying that he won't.

Sure. And your colleague Jeremy Scahill has talked to at Dropsite people on the Hamas side about what these negotiations have looked like. There isn't a lot of that reporting in mainstream media, which makes it kind of difficult to weigh competing claims, which is something that we're doing, for example, between Ukraine and Russia right now. You can sort of weigh the competing claims and and

Try to get a window into these negotiations that are happening right Russia says this Ukraine says this right and some of it is you know They're both some of the the spin is obviously different than what's being said behind closed doors and some of it is What's that in public to pressure the other side is different or to pressure people in your own country? Is different than what's being said behind closed doors, so I guess right I'm curious for what your sense is about

if there's similar incoherence that because if you're fighting incoherent demands from one side with incoherent demands from another side that makes mediation extraordinarily difficult obviously, but what's what's your sense having worked with Jeremy and read that reporting Hamas has actually been incoherent in its response to

to the killing of the hostages, you had a beta basically confirming that Hamas as the result of a new directive given to guards of hostages after, so if you remember back in June, there was a hostage rescue operation that was successful but that led to more than 200 Palestinians being killed.

entire neighborhood strafed and bombed and after that they said they put in a new order that if that happens Execute the hostages that pretty clear confirmation that they had done it you had and you can find this on our Twitter account elsewhere you had a political bureau spokesperson go on Al Jazeera last night and say well, maybe they died in crossfire and like throwing a lot of like

of mud and dust up in the air and saying who knows exactly what happened.

Wait a minute. Your your people on the ground basically confirmed it yesterday, right two days ago now You're saying that who knows so there is there does seem to be a serious divide between the political bureau Hamas types who were like in Doha and The and the people still on the ground in Gaza, but when it comes to the ceasefire negotiations There there's coherence from Hamas. They are saying that

That their terms are very clear, Israel has to leave Gaza. And the war has to end. Those are their demands. And Netanyahu had previously agreed to that. And Hamas is saying, we just implement that previous agreement that they laid out, that Israel laid out, and that Biden made public. Just do that.

And Netanyahu was saying, no, we're not doing that one anymore. Let's look at this map. So this is C5, if we could put this up on the screen. Ryan, can you explain what we're looking at, especially for people who are listening to, because this is fairly interesting. Yeah, so this is Netanyahu during his very long press conference the other day where he's laying out his position, his

on not being willing to leave the Arafa border crossing. And anybody with any familiarity of the region would look at that and be like, there seems to be something missing there. The entire West Bank. Right. The entire West Bank. Right before October 7th, he gave a presentation at the UN where he put up a similar map

That didn't even have Gaza then. Like that one, at least this one, I guess, has the Gaza Strip still there. It has to because he's talking about the Gaza Strip. Right. But that is the, like, what critics have said is that this map represents Netanyahu's vision. And in fact, the vision of greater Israel extends even further, goes back, like there are still huge factions within the Israeli body politic that

think that giving back the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in the 70s was a mistake and that they still need to, like that deep into Lebanon, Syria, that this is all greater Israeli territory by just God-given right or natural right or whatever it is. So yeah, so when people saw him put up another map,

After taking so much heat internationally for the last one that he put up that didn't include either the West Bank or Gaza, this one he puts up doesn't include West Bank. We're like, God.

Meanwhile, here in the States, it's the first day or was the first day of classes at Columbia University. Obviously, the center of the widespread campus protests really was the center of the momentum as protests fanned out across campuses. And we can start rolling this clip that if you're listening to it, what you're going to see is the alma mater statue at Columbia University being

drenched in red paint meant to look like blood. And this is going to play out in some interesting ways. I'm very curious how this plays out in the fall because to the conversation we were just having, there is really no light at the end of this tunnel and there's really no end in sight. There seems like there's no path to a ceasefire in sight, no matter how much the Biden administration, Biden administration,

insists that we're getting closer and closer. We've been hearing that obviously over and over again for months. So this could take off. And the other news to mention, we can put C7 up on the screen, is in the United Kingdom, amid pressures, not unlike pressures from the left in the United States,

they have decided to suspend some arms to Israel. That's what the Reuters headline says, UK decision to suspend some arms for Israel frustrates both sides, and it's pretty apparent why that would frustrate both sides. So, Ryan, this is, the way that this is playing out in the West, as we keep hearing, we're just centimeters away from a ceasefire, and everyone kind of is calling BS on that. I mean, everyone kind of knows that at this point. Yeah, if you look at the

Right. The reporting out of Israel is that Netanyahu is genuinely starting to feel some pressure. If you look at his public statements, he doesn't seem like he's willing to bend on this.

It's also September, so we're now two months away from a presidential election in which he might think, who knows? He's one of those politicians you live to see another day. Now he's two months away from a who knows moment. So at that point you think, well,

why agree to anything now? - Yeah. - If I can just slow walk it into November. - Totally. I mean, the way that these external pressures are affecting negotiations, we don't have super clear information on yet, but we can guess. We can sort of surmise what might be affecting it. And obviously, Netanyahu, Kristalln Sager covered this, but hundreds of thousands of people, general strike in cities like Tel Aviv, taking to the streets,

Similar crowd. This was either I read this in either AP or Reuters I thought this was an interesting bit of information pretty similar crowd in terms of overlap between people who were Trying to protest his we're protesting his attempt at judicial reform so ain't I Netanyahu people but

The anti-Netanyahu people, after October 7th, were not immediately still anti-Netanyahu. They weren't in the streets, that's for sure. Yes, that's for sure. So pressure is certainly looming over his decision-making too. Yeah. All right, Ryan, you have some reporting to share. Let's get to that.

This election season, the stakes are higher than ever. I think the choice is clear in this election. Join me, Charlemagne Tha God, for We The People, an audio town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris and you, live from Detroit, Michigan, exclusively on iHeartRadio. They'll tackle the tough questions, depressing issues, and the future of our nation. We may not see eye to eye on every issue, but America, we are not going back.

Don't miss this powerful conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris. Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific on the free iHeartRadio app's hip-hop beat station. So after the IDF discovery of six hostages who'd been killed in a tunnel in Gaza, Hamas released a video of Idan Yerushalmi speaking to the camera. It was a cold display of cruelty to Idan's loved ones who were only beginning to process her tragic and needless death.

In the video, which is undated, Idan tells her family how much she misses them and lambasts Netanyahu for the relentless bombing campaign and for failing to free the hostages. The New York Times rightly cited human rights groups in condemning Hamas's production of the hostage video, writing, quote, Rights groups and international law experts say that a hostage video is, by definition, made under duress,

and that the statements in it are usually coerced. Israeli officials have called the video a form of "psychological warfare" and experts say their production can constitute a war crime." I agree. Now let's take that moral clarity and apply some moral consistency.

Earlier this year, former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg produced a documentary that was screened at the White House and on Capitol Hill. Last year, Hamas committed horrific acts of sexual violence. Sheryl, I thank you for all your work to bring to light the horrors of this issue.

and for your film about what happened on October 7. - The way that Sandberg proved her case, shockingly, was significantly through the use of coerced interrogation videos. -

-

The documentary, of course, won praise in the pages of the New York Times and is to this day sitting on the White House website. The White House website now says, quote, preventing and responding to conflict related sexual violence is a top priority for President Biden and Vice President Harris. Since October 7th, President Biden, Vice President Harris and our entire administration have consistently condemned Hamas horrific sexual violence activities.

June 17th, the vice president hosted an event at the White House, which included a panel discussion and remarks by advocates and survivors of CRSV from around the world and a partial screening of Sheryl Sandberg's documentary Screams Before Silence on Hamas's sexual violence on October 7th.

Now Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Bet Salem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel all rejected the use of hostage interrogation videos in the months after October 7th. And most news outlets chose to reject their use as well, citing the likelihood the confessions were extracted by torture. Sheryl Sandberg, the White House and Hamas have all gone a different direction. The innocent people caught in the middle deserve so much better.

And Emily, it was so infuriating to me to see Hamas post those photos of the hostages after they were killed and post the video as well. And then it reminded me that the New York Times, the White House and others

CNN has had Sandberg on to talk about this documentary has said absolutely nothing about the fact that she's so prominently relied on these these coerced interrogation videos and coerce is doing a lot of work there and in euphemistically describing what Bet Salem the Israeli Human Rights Organization calls you know a hell on earth like they're there their recent report on Israeli detention centers is called welcome to hell and

And it describes the systematic torture and sexual violence that is doled out to Palestinian detainees to then, while they're still in custody, to use interrogations of them. And also, by the way, the press has tried to follow up on a lot of these quote-unquote confessions that were produced by these IDF videos. And even the ones that have extraordinary amounts of detail.

they have never been able to find any remote substantiation. If the stories told by those men in those coerced confession videos were true, you would think you'd be able to find a victim that somewhat matches the descriptions because the descriptions are so clear and precise and nothing. And so that's why human rights groups and the media in general don't rely on this. And it's why Hamas should never have posted that video. It's why the White House should be deeply ashamed of itself from my perspective of

playing those videos. Of having played the Sandberg videos. Yeah. I struggle with this a lot. A lot. Because...

On the one hand, I mean, maybe it's okay to just not have a strong opinion on this because I'm not sure that I do. And it's very... You're forgiven for that. Thank you. But no, I mean, the reason I say that is I almost feel like... I'm curious what you think about this. The Hamas videos and the...

confession videos, the alleged confession videos are apples and oranges, if that makes sense. That like what Hamas did with this is so different than, even if like totally as I do accept the argument that those may well have been coerced out of torture. I still feel like Hamas's publishing of the hostage videos before they killed these people, that they had taken hostage,

It just seems to me like they're different things, but I don't know. I'm curious what you think about that. Maybe not. We don't know without seeing evidence and without a trial whether the people, the Palestinians in those videos had anything to do with Hamas or PIJ. They might. Right.

But they also might not. They may well have done all of those things. They may well have been. Because one thing we know is that there were absolutely inexcusable and reprehensible, disgusting acts of violence on October 7th. And maybe those guys were a part of that. That's what's so crazy. There was horrific violence on October 7th. That is on camera. Yeah. Innocent civilians were slaughtered. Yeah.

The need to ratchet it up to something different is something that I never quite understood. It's horrible. And there's always something to... There's always something to...

upholding these standards of decency and civilization and morality that are then undermined consistently by countries in the West. The quote that I've always gone back to since October 7th and has nothing to do with it is that Ali North quote in his memoir where he talks about, and actually the Israelis are involved in it, where he talks about how the worst thing for him was

That the US was doing exactly what it was telling other countries not to do and was saying that it wasn't doing right and now Israel's caught is caught in this like public debate with Defending the use of sexual violence by IDF soldiers against Palestinians in prisons. Yes Incredible. Yes. Yeah, absolutely agree on that part No, it's a Sheryl Sandberg documentary about that yet. Not yet. Just a very like

I know that I said I don't have a super strong opinion on this, but I think it is a really provocative and worthwhile point. And I'm glad that you caught it so we could talk about it. All right. Up next, we're going to have Jeffrey Sachs and Matt Taibbi in what is sure to be a fascinating conversation about the roots of the Ukraine conflict. Absolutely.

This election season, the stakes are higher than ever. I think the choice is clear in this election. Join me, Charlemagne Tha God, for We The People, an audio town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris and you, live from Detroit, Michigan, exclusively on iHeartRadio. They'll tackle the tough questions, depressing issues, and the future of our nation. We may not see eye to eye on every issue, but America, we are not going back.

Don't miss this powerful conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris. Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific on the free iHeartRadio app's Hip Hop Beat Station.

Well, for what is sure to be a fascinating segment, Ryan and I are excited to be joined this morning by Jeffrey Sachs, the one and only. Ryan, what are we going to be talking about today? So first of all, we're going to start with Ukraine, and then we're going to back up into how we got to the situation that we're in now. People may remember a couple months ago, Matt Taibbi was on the program, and in a kind of offhanded way, he

Matt and I were talking about the role that we understood that Dr. Jeffrey Sachs had played in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet Union, a transition into Russia in derogatory terms and said what a remarkable kind of journey it had been for Dr. Sachs to have gotten to kind of where he is now, somebody who's often challenging

power and that was that that was from what we understood just from the kind of pop culture that we were raised in at the time I'm glad that professor Sachs reached out and said look I'm happy to come on and and talk about what actually happened during that time we're hopefully going to be joined by Matt Taibbi as well who lived in Russia at that time has done enormous amount of writing

on that question. Dr. Sachs has written an essay for us over at Dropside News, which we'll be publishing later today. It will also be published over at Matt Taibbi's racket. But we want to start with the latest in Ukraine because this is related to everything that we're talking about. So we put this first element up on the screen. You've got Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy.

condemning Russia for a strike, killing more than 50. And meanwhile, saying that the Ukrainians have no designs whatsoever on leaving Russian territory that they have recently conquered. Let's roll this clip from Zelensky. Now you've captured this territory in Russia. So the big question is,

What do you plan to do with it? We don't need the Russian territory. Our operation is aimed to restore our territorial integrity. We capture Russian troops to replace them with the Ukrainian. We tell them, you know, we need our military soldiers in exchange with the Russian one.

The same attitude is to the territories. We don't need their land. Is the plan to take more territory? I will not tell you. Sorry, I can't speak about it.

It's like the beginning of our discourse operation. With all respect, I can't speak about it. I think that the success is very close to surprise. But conceptually, you have this territory now. You say you don't want to keep it long-term. Conceptually, we will hold it.

conceptually, we will hold it. And meanwhile, there's a split screen going on in the front line. If we can put up this third element from The Economist, they say, even as it humiliates Russia, Ukraine's line is crumbling in the Donbas. Shock rate inside Kursk has not distracted the Kremlin from advancing. So you've got Russia advancing in ways that we have seen them over the past year, even as this incursion is succeeding to

gaining ground inside russia so professor sachs what what is your as somebody who's been following this extraordinarily closely what what is your assessment of of where we are today

Ukraine is losing on the battlefield. Zelensky's government is in its last legs, maybe even its last moments, actually, because the contact line, the front line, is in a state of collapse for Ukraine. Not surprisingly, this whole war was misconceived and generally falsely reported by the mainstream media.

Western media because Ukraine could not win this war. And it is, in fact, losing one to two thousand soldiers every day now to death or serious wounds. This is a disaster underway. It's hidden from view.

by the official narratives of the US government and the British government, especially by NATO spokespeople. But this is a disaster and it's a disaster that was largely caused by the United States. Tragically, again, basic facts that are hidden from view.

But the U.S. walked Ukraine into this disaster, and some of us have been saying this for years, and now it's becoming plain as day as Russia advances on the battlefield. So Zelensky is either delusional or just doing what he does. He's an actor who plays his part.

That's probably a great time to start looking back because actually I imagine you have a lot of thoughts on the days after the fall of the Soviet Union, how poorly Western media reported on it and how poorly they sort of understood what NATO and others were doing at the time. So Dr. Secks, I guess maybe one good place to start on that question is why

What does Western media get wrong and how why are they so bad at reporting the truth? the reality of what happens between Russia and now other countries in Eastern Europe and

Well, what Western media in the mainstream do is report the official narrative. So the question really is, what is the U.S. government get so wrong? And then why is it parroted by The New York Times or The Washington Post or the other mainstream media? What the U.S. government has gotten wrong all along since 19...

1989, or I would say since 1945, is the idea that there could be peaceful relations with Russia, just normal, cooperative, peaceful relations. But, uh,

From the first moments after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the US government prepared for war with the Soviet Union, turned on what was an ally during the war and made it the great enemy. We came close to global annihilation between 1945 and 1989 in the Cold War.

I played a role as a much younger economist in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the Cold War was ending, or so I thought. I advised the Polish government. I advised the Gorbachev government, his economic team.

I advised the Yeltsin government. I advised the Kuchma government of Ukraine. So I was there during that period, front row seats at least. And what I saw was that the United States was

eager to cooperate and to support the likes of Poland, for example, or the Central European countries that had been under the Soviet sphere and Soviet domination. But when it came to the Soviet Union and then later to Russia, that remained an enemy, even at the end of the Cold War, completely contrary to

What I saw, what I understood, what I believe till today, that what Gorbachev and Yeltsin were doing

offering was normalcy, peace, cooperation, the chance for a very different and vastly safer world. Well, the United States would have none of it, in fact. What the U.S. wanted was domination. It wanted hegemony. It wanted full spectrum dominance, as the Defense Department famously put it.

What the U.S. wanted was expanding NATO, even breaking apart Russia, because that was a part of the CIA ideas that we can intervene in the periphery of Russia and perhaps break it apart on ethnic lines, just like the Soviet Union had broken apart.

So this is what I did not understand as I was trying to give economic advice at the end of the 1980s and early 90s. My advice was help, help the Soviet Union, help Russia, help. Because that's what I understand good economics and good geopolitics and security to be.

But all my recommendations were rejected. Basically, whenever I said help the Soviet Union or help Russia, no, are you kidding? No way we're going to do that. And I didn't quite believe them that they would be so blind to the usefulness of this. But, you know, if you look back and now with a lot of documents that have been exposed and explained,

We never ended the Cold War in 1991. We continued to prosecute the war against Russia. Already by 1994 in the Clinton administration, the decision was taken that NATO would enlarge, contrary to promises solemnly given in 1990 to Gorbachev and to the Russian leaders, to Yeltsin and others, that we would not move one inch eastward.

1994, Clinton already agrees. Not only will NATO move eastward, it will move to Ukraine, to the 2,100 kilometer border with Russia. And that is the provocation that has gotten us into this mess. And this period to me, 1989 to 1994 or so, is to me one of the great hinge moments in world history because you can quite...

easily imagine a world in which the United States has a relationship with any country that is similar to that that we have with say Germany or Japan. I mean, we're in a cataclysmic world war with Germany and Japan and here we are, you know, some decades later

There's some tensions here and there when it comes to trade and other foreign policy, but in general, we're allies with those countries. There's no chance we're really going to war with either at any time soon. So welcoming Matt Taibbi, who was a journalist in-

It was materialized out of thin air. At the time, yeah. So I know that you lived through this period and you were equally fascinated by this piece that Professor Sachs has written for us. I wanted to ask you if you wanted to ask him to tease a few parts of it out or...

Yeah, first of all, hello, Professor, and thanks for coming on and joining us. Of course. With this discussion. I was really amazed by some of the things in this essay. Could you talk first about, you know, you advised Yegor Gaidar. I believe he was still the prime minister of the Soviet Union at the time. No, he was prime minister of Russia, Gaidar. I advised Yelensky earlier, who was the economic advisor to Gorbachev.

Right. I'm sorry. Okay. This was in November 91, but you advised him to go to the G7 and ask for debt stabilization. What happened when he did that?

Basically, you know, when I was asked to come help, why would they ask me for all, you know, for God's sake? And the answer was that I knew something about the financial stabilization and financial crises. And I had a view that, by the way, went back to John Maynard Keynes, who wrote

was the great British economist who was involved in the Versailles negotiations after World War I. He said, don't make a harsh settlement. You'll pay for that later. Very prescient, very powerful. And

analysis, I was very much influenced by that as a young economist. And I said, don't make a harsh piece and don't let the Soviet Union or Russia spiral into a deep financial crisis. Well, they had a deep financial crisis. That's why things were falling apart. And they asked me, help us get out of this financial crisis. And I took the normal tools of the trade, for example, and

saying you need to not pay the debt temporarily, at least maybe permanently, but you need a debt standstill. In other words, you're running out of money. You're in the deepest crisis. This is a historic moment of profound significance. I'm talking about 19,

91. Russia is about to become an independent and wants to be a democratic country. My God, this is phenomenal. So this is a big deal. So get some space on your debt because you don't have financial reserves. You're in deep financial crisis. That's what I suggested to

Yegor Gaidar, who was then the head of the economic team for Boris Yeltsin, who was about to become president of an independent Russia.

And it was the kind of advice I had given to Poland two years earlier, which had worked to stabilize Poland's economy and the kind of advice I had given a few years earlier than that to help end a hyperinflation in South America. Now,

I gave it to Gaidar. I sat in the ante room as he walked in to meet with the so-called G7 deputies. That means the finance ministry deputies, or in the case of the U.S., the U.S. Treasury undersecretary or deputy secretary on finance. And this was a key meeting in November 1991.

And I sat in the ante room and he came out ashen face. And Yegor, what happened? He said, they told me you pay every penny of interest as it falls due or we stop the shipments of food on the high seas that are coming as emergency relief for you. Unbelievable.

But that's actually the advice. That's what they did, by the way. They continued to pay until they went into default early in 1992 because they literally ran out of foreign exchange reserves. So they went to zero. And then massive crisis came. And the U.S. is just sitting there, I thought, sucking its thumb. But it was even worse than that. It was

Watching a crisis unfold with no real intention to do much about it, as far as I'm concerned, because nobody I thought it was ignorance, delay, bureaucratic ineptitude. But it turned out to be a persistent policy that the U.S. was just not going to help what it was going to do.

was build US power in the region. It was going to expand NATO. It was going to make its demands. It was going to tell Russia, yeah, you can be a player. Listen to us. Join our team. Do what we say. Don't complain. That was the idea of US foreign policy beginning in 1991, 92. But it was, in a way, a continuation from 1945.

Interestingly, and I need to mention it, back in 1945, we were allies with the Soviet Union against Hitler. And the Soviet Union had lost 27 million people. This unbelievable disaster had borne the brunt of defeating the German army. And within weeks or months of the end of World War II, we started to hire people.

German Nazi scientists, those, of course, who had made the V2 missile systems, germ warfare specialists who had tortured inmates and killed inmates in concentration camps, done human

experiments. We took them on because the idea already in 1945 and then it just built in 46 and 47 and 48 was the next enemy is the Soviet Union. We need to prepare for total war. So this idea is very deep seated in

in America. But I thought, hey, I could not have been more thrilled in 1989, 1991 to be witnessing the birth of worldwide peace in front of my eyes. But we just wouldn't have it. The end of history. And one of the, so there's kind of multiple layers of the scandal and the way that the Western world treated Russia. One of them is the macro level that you talked about, kind of driving them into

one of the greatest, you know, maybe the greatest financial collapse in world history. Well, I wouldn't say that, but a big one, a big one. It's a big one. Very big one. But then the second one is on the micro level, the extraordinary theft and corruption around the privatization of national industries. And you've gotten lumped into that sometimes because the Harvard Institute for International Development, which you were involved with,

had some of its members involved with that. So can you talk about that connection? Like who was involved with that? And I know you write in the essay that, anyway, just you go ahead and tell them. - Yeah, just very, very briefly. My gig and my side of the work was finance and macroeconomics.

I'm an international finance economist by training.

stopped the hyperinflation. I had helped cancel debts. I had helped Bolivia to get back on its feet. I was asked to help bring in Western money to help stabilize the situation in the Soviet Union in 1990, 91. That didn't work because the White House turned it down flat, the whole idea. And then again for

Yeltsin, where I thought this is a slam dunk. Now we have an independent Russia, post-communist, democratic, all the rest. I thought it was slam dunk. They turned that down again. I was not part of privatization and I was not asked to be, frankly, because there were other people involved who didn't really even want me to be involved. OK, that's fine. So I was doing my thing.

not succeeding because I couldn't convince Washington about any of this, by the way, which was really strange for me because what I had recommended in Poland had worked. And so I was saying, it's the same, multiply by four, you know, it's bigger country. But they said, no, no, we're not doing that. No, we're not doing that. It was very, very strange. Now on the privatization, uh,

I was not part of strategy or even asked. I had my own views, which were very, very different. But it wasn't my bailiwick. I actually, after a year of trying to help Yeltsin, I told him I can't help. They're not interested. I can't be helpful for you. I can't bring any money to Russia to help the stabilization.

A new finance minister was appointed at the end of 1992, and he begged a very nice person named Boris Fyodorov, who died young. He begged me, please stay, please help. So I stayed another year completely ineffectually because the Western idea was quite different. The U.S. government idea, the IMF idea and so forth.

So I stayed and then I resigned at the end of 1993. The big things that created the oligarchs were things like a shares for loans scandal of 1995-96, which, by the way, was also part of financing Yeltsin's reelection campaign at that time.

So I was nowhere nearby at all in any of that, except that I knew the people and the players. One of them described to me, laughing, how the whole shares for loans thing had gone down. And I found it disgusting, corrupt, gross. So I called U.S. government officials and IMF and World Bank officials. I said,

Well, maybe it's like the line in Casablanca. There's corruption going on in this place. There's gambling going on in this place. But I was serious. You know, you really need to look into that. And I just got blank stares back because, of course, they knew what was going on, but they weren't interested. Well, I took a lot of shit for that, if I can say that on your show. For years, completely the opposite. I was the one trying to say, stop it.

But of course, I wasn't on the inside. I wasn't anywhere near, but I was trying to push the USG and World Bank and IMF to stop it. Then, and I actually don't want to go into details because it's 30 years later and its personalities and so forth.

But some of my colleagues didn't do the right thing at Harvard. And they messed up and it's public record and people can look it up. And it was an unpleasant experience. It was part of my responsibility to tell them that they were

in trouble, but it wasn't my responsibility to do anything about it. But again, I was a very known person. And so I was lumped together as the Harvard boys do Russia. Okay. You know, this is media. You guys are the world's authorities on this. This is media. Once you got the media, you can't fight the media when you get this waves of slogans that are so good. So,

Truly, let me say two things. The big part of this story is that the U.S. didn't want to help

and didn't help in the 1990s on the economic side. But there's a second part of this story which is more important, which is that even with that, even with the financial crisis that Russia went through, which was very painful, even with the default of 1998 that Russia went through, which was very painful,

Putin was not anti-American or anti-West or anti-Europe when he came to power. He wasn't in love with the U.S., let me put it that way, but he wanted normal relations. Even then, this did not set things in an inevitable course. It didn't help.

But the real changes that put things in a disastrous course were on the security side. First, the expansion of NATO.

Then the bombing of Belgrade in 1999, 78 straight days of some harebrained, terrible scheme of Madeleine Albright. And to break apart Serbia, which was Russia's ally, and create Kosovo and put the largest NATO military base, Bondarskijl, in Kosovo to cover Southeast Europe. Okay.

Putin watched that he didn't like that at all then came 9/11 and Putin said okay We want to cooperate with you. We can help we also face insurgencies We don't we don't like this the u.s. More or less brushed Russia off at that point in 2002 the u.s. Did something even more provocative and profound which was to abandon the anti ballistic missile treaty this for Russia was a first-class

security disaster because the ABM Treaty was viewed as a protection against the US nuclear first strike.

And this was viewed in an incredibly harsh way by Russia and it is a massive danger. Then immediately in 2003 came the Iraq invasion over Russia's absolute objections over the UN Security Council, absolute objections. Then in 2004 came a NATO enlargement to seven more countries, including the three Baltic states.

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, including two Black Sea countries, Bulgaria and Romania, and including two Balkans countries, Slovakia and Slovenia. So by 2007, then the temperature was up to here. And President Putin gave at the Munich Security Conference a very strong message. Stop this. Stop this. You are pressing right up against our red lines. Do not go further.

And then famously in 2008, the US announced a policy that had actually been adopted 14 years earlier, but it made it public, which was the demand that NATO would enlarge to Ukraine and to Georgia in the caucuses. And this for Russia was unbelievable. Now Russia would be surrounded by NATO in the Black Sea region.

And European leaders at the time called me privately. I had long conversations. What is your president doing? This is so reckless, so provocative. By the way, many of these same leaders now are completely mum. We love the United States. This has nothing to do with NATO, this war. Of course it's about NATO. The whole thing is about NATO. It's always been about NATO. And this was true in 2008. And then quickly to bring the story up to date, it

In 2011, again, these neocons doubled down. We're going to overthrow Syria, where Russia happens to have a naval base. We're going to overthrow Libya,

where Russia has an ally. And we then took steps and in 2014 overthrew the government of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, on February 22nd, 2014. This was a coup in which the U.S. played a significant role

Sad to say, I saw some of it with my own eyes, which I did not want to see, but I did see some of it with my own eyes. The U.S. was up to its neck in that coup. And of course, the Russians knew it. They even did us a favor of intercepting Victoria Nuland's phone call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Jeffrey Piat, who's now a senior State Department official. Victoria Nuland's my colleague at Columbia University, president.

unbelievably. And that's the Yats is our guy call. What's that? That's the Yats is our guy call. That's the Yats is our guy call. And the reason I saw some of it is that Yats, Yatsenuk, who became the U.S. installed prime minister of

called me, said, I want you to come talk to me about this economic crisis I'm in. Oh, my God. Well, I knew Ukraine. I had advised Kuchma. I did not understand exactly what had happened by any means. So when Yatsenuk asked me to go there, I flew there. And this was just I don't remember exactly a day or a few days after Maidan, after the violent coup. And when I got there,

American or somebody representing an American NGO said, you want to go see the Maidan because we have a few hours before the meeting with the prime minister.

And when we went to the Maidan, they explained to me how much American money had gone into pumping up the Maidan. You know, I saw literally we gave 50,000 to this one, 5,000 to this one, so forth. This NGO, extraordinarily unpleasant. I got the hell out of there that night. And this is the reality. So where did this war come from? It came from the fact that

that the US was, we call it now Cold War 2.0, but it's really the same Cold War. It never really stopped. The US had a campaign. Well, Russia is going to be second rate or maybe divided or decolonized, to use a favorite word in Washington. But we're going to continue this effort because they're on the other side.

you know, it turned out didn't have anything to do with Bolshevism, didn't have anything to do with communism, didn't have anything to do with democracy or not democracy. The U.S. did not want a big power there except one completely subservient to the U.S.,

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Don't miss this powerful conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris. Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific on the free iHeartRadio app's Hip Hop Beat Station. When do you think the Russian government figured that out? I mean, I know from living there at the time that sort of the ordinary person in Moscow or St. Petersburg figured

Right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a lot of hope and enthusiasm that there was going to be this glorious partnership with the United States. And you mentioned your hopes that there would be kind of a new Marshall Plan. I know that there were people in Russia who were kind of hoping the cavalry would come and help stabilize their economy and there would be this –

you know, this new flowering of a relationship. But it sounds like what you're saying and what you've written is that there was never any intention to really integrate Russia as any kind of democratic partner. I know when

The ordinary Russians started to feel that that was going to not happen. I think Serbia was really a breaking point for them. But when do you think the Russians figured it out? Was it, you know, by the time Putin came to power or before that? Or when did this relationship turn sour finally? I think, look, the situation was very tough economically.

Throughout this whole period, Gorbachev was reviled because of an economy that was in collapse already in the late 1980s. Shortages were everywhere, prices were soaring, living standards were falling, and there was tremendous disarray. When the Soviet Union ended, another dimension of disarray came because now you had 15 successor states that couldn't

couldn't even manage the mechanics of trade among each other, even though they were deeply interconnected in physical supply chains. That used to be on the basis of orders from Gosplan, from the state planning ministry. But now that didn't exist anymore. So there weren't even mechanisms for trade. So for the person in the street, this was a terrible period, very difficult, very dark from the start.

Maybe they hoped the U.S. would do something. And Bill Clinton did smile a lot and did toast Yeltsin and so forth. But I don't think anyone felt too warmly about the United States. I thought it was great.

inevitable that we would help because how could we not? The opportunity was so great. And so I said to President Yeltsin in December 1991, of course we're going to help. He said, we want to be a normal country. We want to have good relations. I said, of course, and we're going to help. It's going to be wonderful. So I thought, and I'm a little slow to learn because I thought it was so right to do

I kept thinking in 1992, they'll figure it out. In 1993, Clinton's now in, they'll figure it out. No. Well, they never figured that part out. What I did not know, of course, and didn't pay attention to at the time was the NATO side that already basically they're planning the NATO enlargement. And

And now we know a lot more about the actual timing of that. Interestingly, as usual, there's a very pointed article by Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1997 published in Foreign Affairs magazine where it's called Strategy for Eurasia. And he lays out a timetable for NATO enlargement to Ukraine, which he says will be 2005 to 2010.

Now, it's clear he was reporting actual policy. He wasn't just putting forward a Brzezinski plan. He was reporting what Washington had settled on, in fact. So I think things took time. But I know that Putin was still optimistic about.

about normal relations, good relations with Europe when he came to power and even in the early 2000s. You know, he's a cynical guy for understandable reasons and maybe he never expected like I did that the West would actually help, but he thought, okay, we can still live together. And I know many Western European leaders

like wonderful Romano Prodi, former prime minister of Italy and former president of the European Union,

who had very good relations with Putin, and Putin reciprocated the good relations. And it seemed just natural, even in the early 2000s, that things would be okay. And remember then in 2003 with the Iraq war, which the Russians hated, of course, many European countries were at that point ready to express their

opposition to the US. France and Germany said, no, this is a bad idea. So that was siding on the Russian side in a way. Now we have a full block where the US has put its foot down and every word you hear from Western European politicians is yes, NATO, yes, NATO, yes, United States. But it wasn't like that in the early 2000s. So things got worse and worse over time. And before you go, I wanted to get

you respond to the left-wing critique of your time as an economist, both in Bolivia, Poland and beyond. Shock therapy became the name for this kind of series of neoliberal reforms that were applied to kind of

countries that were facing hyperinflation. The argument being it was too harsh, that it cut out too many government subsidies, that it broke the backs of the stability that people needed and fueled inequality. That's the kind of Naomi Klein critique of shock therapy would be along those lines. What's your response? What was your response at the time? How do you look back on it now?

Well, my response at the time was, and it's fun for me to look back to an interview that I gave to Lawrence Weschler in New York.

the New Yorker in 1989 when I was advising Poland. And he asked me, you know, what are your views? I said, look, you know, my favorite country, Sweden, I'm a social Democrat. I have been a social Democrat all along. So just to understand where I come from and what I advocate and what I believe today, I'm

a kind of center-left social democrat in the Scandinavian style. That's always been my economic approach and economic philosophy, and it was true then. I, as a specialist, was then and had some good results in

ending hyperinflations, you don't end a hyperinflation by going from 24,000% this year to 12,000% next year to 6,000% the year after to 3,000% the year after. You actually end it immediately, by the way. And not because it's draconian. Actually, ending the hyperinflation is the basis for

the society surviving. So by the time I got to Bolivia, there had been six years of utter chaos. And in the 12 months preceding my arrival, the inflation rate was 24,000%, which at the time was the seventh highest hyperinflation in world history. And I helped to end it, not by brutal means,

But actually, by the most normal way, within a week, simply stopping a shambolic movement

disastrous mispricing of their one government resource, oil, which was being given away to rich people, which was being exported on barges across Lake Titicaca. And the hyperinflation came to an end immediately. And to show you my philosophy and my belief,

They had defaulted on their debt. This was a completely bankrupt country. And the IMF said, OK, now you start paying your debts. And that's where I said, no way this country is going to get debt cancellation. This is a poor country. It needs help urgently. This is not neoliberalism. Excuse me. This is trying to help save a country that had fallen into bankruptcy.

one of the worst, deepest crises of peacetime in history. And it worked, by the way. They got the debts canceled. I will pat myself on the back to an important extent on that. And if you look at afterwards, I told them you'll go from a

an impoverished country in disarray and hyperinflation to just an impoverished country. And then you have to start economic development after that. But that's the first step is get out of this complete chaos. And in Poland, I was truly a social Democrat in that they had and I expected afterwards they would have

a more public health system than the United States. They would have a more public education system than the United States. They would have more social protection than the United States, but they were in a collapse. So they needed debt cancellation, which I helped them arrange. They needed emergency stabilization. They needed a way out of a completely collapsed economy.

And if you look at the results over the 30 years from 1989 onward, I was only involved for the first three or four years, but it set the stage for the fastest economic growth in the history of Poland. And essentially, if you want one measure of that, one basic measure, look at Poland's per capita income compared to Germany.

In 1989, Poland's per capita income was about one third of the German level. Now it's about 70% of the German level. In other words, it didn't close the gap with Germany, but it substantially closed the gap. That's what you want. That's what I said. That's what you could hope for in economic development, that you will not only have stability, but a normal economy.

It is, by the way, essentially a social democratic economy because national income going to government outlays for social protection, for health, for education, so forth, and for other purposes, around 40% of GDP, higher than the United States. So this is not the things that were said yesterday.

By the way, I like Naomi Klein a lot. I admire her work a lot. And what she wrote about...

the shock doctrine of the U.S., which is we're going to run the world and we're going to run it our way, I think is accurate. I don't think she understood exactly what I was saying and trying to do in terms of macroeconomics. So I never really very much liked the confusion

But I appreciate your asking about it. It gives me the chance to explain. But I explained it back in 1989. I'm a social Democrat then. I'm pretty stubborn. I'm still a social Democrat now.

Matt, I know you got to run pretty soon. Matt or Emily, any final questions or thoughts? I was just going to ask Matt, reflecting even on our initial conversation in which you were reflecting on your experiences with your own front row seat to a lot of this that was transpiring in the 90s. If you have any thoughts on what we've heard from Dr. Sachs during this conversation.

Yeah, I guess I just have a general question because, I mean, I was there for the whole decade of the 90s. And by the end of it, I know a lot of people in the expat community, journalists were saying, you know, the CWIS policy towards Russia is so strange. It's almost like they're trying to screw things up or they're trying to destabilize this country. But it sounds like that might have actually been

a plan security-wise, or at least that they were indifferent to the consequence of policies within Russia. I mean, do you think it's logical to draw a straight line between what's going on right now, the complete tension between these two countries and, you know, us being essentially in a proxy war with Russia?

To the end of the Soviet Union, when we decided we were going to adopt this posture towards Russia, I mean, was there at any time a moment where we were actually trying to bring them in and, you know, as any kind of partner?

First, we're not in a proxy war with it. We're in a hot war. We're in a real war. We are not only providing the weapons, the financing, the munitions, the targeting, the intelligence, but we have our personnel in Ukraine

fighting this war also. Not the soldiers in the uniforms and the boots on the ground, but there are a lot of U.S. weapon systems that have U.S. support. We're in this war. The Russians know it. They say so every day. It is a terrible risk for the world that this is the case. It is so wrongheaded to

unnecessary and threatening that the United States is provoking directly militarily with attacks, a war with the only other nuclear superpower. The only thing that can threaten the United States and its security is nuclear war, which can end everything and everybody. And we should understand, respect the

some red lines of your nuclear superpower counterpart. So we don't get that until today. We're still playing chicken. We're still playing games. We're still making lies. Now, what was the U.S. intent? The U.S. intent was not per se to destabilize Russia. The U.S. intent was U.S. unipolarity.

that the U.S. will be the most powerful country in the world. It will have no rivals. It will have only essentially obedience to the U.S. demands. That was the goal. It was thought through already by Cheney and Wolfowitz in the defense documents of early 1992.

And it never really changed. The idea is full spectrum dominance, unipolarity, liberal hegemony, terrible term because nothing liberal about it, hegemony by the United States. So

Russia, OK, may be divided. I'm pretty convinced that the U.S. has supported Chechen rebels, for example, to eat away at the Russian soft underbelly in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The Russians say so, and I see a lot of evidence for it because we had a lot of fancy people who were on the Chechnya committee. What do they know about Chechnya? Nothing, except that they know that it is against Russia. And so we played a lot of dangerous games, mainly against.

for what Brzezinski wanted, which was for Russia to be a second-rate country, to stop being a superpower. And that was the gambit all along, because the United States, in this so-called unipolar moment, wants to rule alone. It's a madness and it's a delusion when you're talking about superpowers.

huge, powerful countries with thousands of nuclear warheads. But the U.S. wanted its way. That's the point. It wanted to do what it wants, to put its military where it wants, to get the resources where it wants, to be able to dictate foreign policy as it wants. And that is the whole story from beginning to end. It did not want

the nukes going off. It didn't want to bring Russia into such disarray that there would be disaster, but it did not want a strong competitor. It wanted a unipolar world.

Well, Jeffrey Sachs, Matt Taibbi, fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. And thank you, Dr. Sachs, for reaching out and for writing the essay. Absolutely. You guys do such great, great work. I'm really delighted to be together with you. And we'll be able to read that in Dropside and Racket, I believe. And Racket, which Matt Taibbi's outlet. You'll be able to catch that at both of those. Thank you guys so much for joining us. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Great to be with you. Thanks, guys.

I feel like I need a cigarette after that. I don't even smoke. What do you think? I feel like I need 10 cigarettes after that. There's Sager's nicotine gum under here. That was interesting stuff. Just casual anecdotes about what he was telling Boris Yeltsin in 1991. Incredible. Incredible. I mean, such a window into history. We threatened to...

The Russian people were starving to death, literally. And the only thing they were surviving on was the humanitarian aid and getting sent in. And we threatened to turn the ships around unless they paid every dollar of their debt financing, which all macroeconomics economists understood at that time was the wrong thing to do in that circumstance. Even from the US's perspective, like the shock therapy that the US wanted to apply to Poland and to Bolivia.

And also around Latin America, but not for a rock not not even not even that for Russia But you know what was really interesting to me is that as we're having this conversation about malign actors with I think lacking Lacking long-term Consequence that lacking a view of potential long-term consequences are failing to take seriously what we are now looking back at and

You had people like Jeffrey Sachs, you had other people, if we had more time I wanted to ask him about this, who were sincere, who were maybe talking to people like Yeltsin and actually were there to do what they thought was-- - And who had read the economic consequences of the peace by Keynes. - Right, by Keynes. - Forecast that if you do this treaty you're gonna get World War II out of it. - Right, and so there are people who are on the ground representing the West, representing American interests, who genuinely wanted

to have this partnership for the best of both countries, for the best of both the United States and Russia and the West and these former, you know, Ukraine, these former Soviet bloc countries. And they were learning the lessons of history and trying to implement them. It's that there are people behind the scenes. And one question I would have for him going forward is what the breakdown was. You know, is it...

Because he's basically then acting as a tool of these malign interests is what he's saying in retrospect. So how many people were also in that same position? Yeah. Because it just gets the duality of the United States that like in the aftermath of the Cold War and the aftermath of, actually I should just say in the aftermath of World War II, there were a lot of actual small L liberals who were,

worked genuinely, had the values of decency, trying to use the power and the muscle of the United States for good. And in some ways that turned out to be foolish, but in some ways that were genuine and could have borne better fruit if they hadn't been undermined by people who had, you know, no interest in other powers potentially rising to challenge the United States. So it's

Sort of an enduring mystery of American history, I guess we'll probably never have the answer to it But there are a lot of there's been a lot of good and there have been a lot of good actors in the United States It's just they've been undermined by bad actors. Yeah, I

Yeah, quite a history. Dark timeline we're on. By the way, no Friday show this week, but consider that your Friday show. I was going to say. That's pretty long form. That's the Friday show. Rewatch it on Friday because this is the kind of thing I'll rewatch. Yeah. Because there's a bunch in there. Yeah, there's a lot to absorb. Yeah. Also, the question about shock therapy in Bolivia, I mean—

Interesting stuff. So interesting, especially in light of Melee and everything going on now. So that's got to count as a Friday show. There you go. Exactly. All right. So I'm back for breaking points tomorrow. Otherwise, we'll see you guys next week.

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