https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-jeffrey-sachs
https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-jeffrey-sachs
Jeffrey Sachs: The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID’s Origin
Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of many best selling books, including The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization
Transcript
Tucker Do you drink coffee?
Jeffrey Sachs All the time. Nonstop.
Tucker Me too!
Jeffrey Sachs Nonstop. 9 or 10 cups a day?
Tucker Yeah. It's good.
Jeffrey Sachs I like coffee, and I drink it straight until minutes before bed.
Tucker I do too…..
Jeffrey Sachs Oh. Do you? Yeah?
Tucker And we will never drink as much as Voltaire drank.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah, yeah. Oh, is that right?
Tucker Like 40 cups?
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. Oh, is that right? Oh, yeah.
Tucker And it worked. Okay. So the one thing that we know, we heard about the movement of Russian troops into eastern Ukraine in February of 2022, was it was unprovoked. Here's it. Here's a selection of what we know about that. The Russian military has begun a.
Jeffrey Sachs Brutal assault on the people of Ukraine without provocation.
Tucker Without justification, without necessity. This is a premeditated attack. Russia's unprovoked and cruel invasion has galvanized countries from around the world to Russia's unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine. Russia conducted an unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine was unprovoked. Russian war of aggression has got to be met with strength. Vladimir Putin decided, unprovoked, to start this war. So was it unprovoked? Well, we did hear that a lot of times, but I actually asked a Research assistant. Of mine to count how many times we heard that in the New York Times in that first year from February 2022 to February 2023, in their opinion.
Jeffrey Sachs Columns was 26 times. Unprovoked. Of course, things aren't unprovoked. It's almost a brand name, unprovoked invasion. It's the lazy person's. Dodge for actually trying to think through what's going on. And this. And it's very highly jammed, right, because the Russians are really good at jamming. Yes. And the Ukrainians, where they've developed, they've innovated taking a cheap racing drone, like with the goggles that somebody wears a drone and you put a a beer can size charge that, you can 3D print the casing for it in the field with a little copper disc on the front of it, and drive that into the back of the tank. And for $1,500, you destroy a $2 million tank. So that is like having a sniper rifle versus a guy with a longbow. The step change in warfare, and we're there right now. And the longer this combat goes in Ukraine, the Russians are getting a lot better. Ukrainians have to, but they're just trying to, you know, the the battle is the ultimate cauldron of learning. Yes. And bad ideas are quickly destroyed and discarded. And and so the proliferation of that knowledge is staggering.
Tucker So what are we learning from watching?
Jeffrey Sachs I don't think the U.S. military is learning much. Good. Oh, good. No learning. Well, no. The problem is the US weapons systems aren't even that high demand because they're not that effective in that highly jammed environment for 20 years of global war on terror. You're fighting against a very comparatively unsophisticated enemy now in a big state on state type war. The US systems are not holding up. You know, the javelin missile, which javelin, which Raytheon sells to the taxpayers for $200,000 a shot with a $300,000 command launch unit. The Ukrainians can only use that for the first shot in a, in an ambush because their air detector, if they shoot the first tank, the tank is very hot. It's burning. If they try to shoot a second and third missile, the other missiles go for the very hot spot on the battlefield. You can't even discern. So then the Ukrainians shift from a $200,000 missile from the Americans to one that they build themselves for $29,000, and it works just as well.
Tucker And it's delivered on a drone?
Jeffrey Sachs Deliver on a drone or from an anti-tank missile. Yeah. So there's the the the super high dollar American stuff is not doing so well in that battle space.
Tucker So I would assume I mean, the world is watching this. Potential future adversaries are seeing on display American military capability.
Jeffrey Sachs And we should be concerned as taxpayers and as citizens, that all this money we've spent, we have not gotten very good value for in the same way.
Tucker But doesn't it, doesn't it display our our vulnerability to if our weapons systems aren't working in Ukraine, why would they work in other parts of the right? Are we sort of showing our hand?
Jeffrey Sachs Look, some of the stuff works well, but at what cost?
Tucker Right.
Jeffrey Sachs Because, you know, the hoodies are using a 20 to $50,000 drone to attack commercial shipping or US shipping in the Red sea, Gulf of Aden. And the US has to shoot that down with not one, but two missiles that cost $2 million apiece. So you're costing us $4 million to shoot down a $50,000 drone? Bad math. So even in Washington, DC.
Tucker Why wouldn't? Because this is on display in the world is sort of watching. Why wouldn't military planners in the United States be taking notes and adjusting accordingly?
Jeffrey Sachs Because the money flow keeps on going the same way with no accountability and no, no self introspection, no learning. Look who who got fired, who got punished for a complete debacle in Afghanistan, where over 20 years we replaced the Taliban with the Taliban. Yeah, and nobody's been fired. The only guy that got fired was Stu Schiller.
Tucker What a good man.
Jeffrey Sachs The young marine who stood up and said enough. That's right. Because if one of.
Tucker Shell aren't in jail.
Jeffrey Sachs I know, because he said, look, if a couple of my young Marines lost a rifle on the rifle range, they would be punished. We lost. We left 80 some billion dollars worth of military equipment and turned over the country to a terror organization. And everybody's been promoted, and everybody is just it's business as usual. That's a problem. This kind of incompetence is not going to end well.
Tucker So, I mean, I have too many questions. And I do want to circle back to your initial point that warfare's completely different. A step change, as you said. But how on this thread, how does the U.S. Congress, how do people who claim to support our troops, back the military, strong defense, the Liz Cheney wing of the of the Congress, like, how do they keep sending money to an organization that's increasingly incapable of defending the country?
Jeffrey Sachs I spoke to a bunch of members yesterday morning, in Congress, and they were at the point of despair because they're trying to restrict the money and to bring some accountability. And they said the the money is the amount of money that is sprinkled around the Capitol by the defense contractors, by the effectively, the brigades worth of lobbyists, thousands of lobbyists spreading tens of millions of dollars around politicians. And they just keep the money train going. It's it's really disgusting. And the in the big thing I and the article I wrote recently, I'd said. You know, in Rome, like when the Romans lost a whole bunch of people at the Battle of Cannae. Yes. When their Senate met a couple of weeks later, it was 40% undermanned. Why? Because the Roman elites actually served in the military and bore the consequences of failure. Our elites don't serve in the military. They have very little skin in the game or no skin. And so for them, it's about it's about money and grift.
Tucker Or their children serve in foreign militaries. So just back to back to the technology itself, which you've been watching all your life because you've been around it all your life. I think you had the world's largest private air force at one point. Is that true?
Jeffrey Sachs We had 73 aircraft that, we owned and operated and flew into garden spots for for the US. It was fun. So I was just at a Blackwater reunion, last weekend. And, we had it at the Alamo. And it was just it was really cool standing there on hallowed ground. Because I didn't realize that across the street from the Alamo is the major bar. And that's actually where Teddy Roosevelt started the Rough Riders. So there's all kinds of Rough Rider memorabilia in this bar. Raising a glass to a great American. And if I'd convinced Trump to change policy in Afghanistan to prevent the debacle which ended up happening, I was going to call that unit the second U.S Volunteer Cavalry. The first all US volunteer cavalry was a Rough Riders.
Tucker San Juan Hill.
Jeffrey Sachs Exactly. This is going to be a two USV. It would have worked. Afghanistan would be stable. We would have, we'd have saved America the embarrassment. Yes. And really that I'd say a a, a pivotal moment for a massive collapse in American credibility and deterrence. And it would have cost 5% of what the US was already spending.
Tucker So why couldn't I remember that very well? And and, in my memory, you were not making the case for a forever occupation. You were making the case for a sensible drawdown that didn't destroy the.
Jeffrey Sachs All the convention, all the conventional forces could have left, right? 90% of the contractors could have left. There would have been a small stay behind. Special Operations Force, 6000 contractors. That's it. And would have kept accountability for the tens of billions of dollars of U.S. equipment that was already there and would have kept the government upright. And, you know, there's now every Al-Qaeda, every every crazy terrorist organization has set up shop there in Afghanistan. Again, we've not heard the last of Afghanistan. It's really sad.
Tucker Why? And I remember again, I remember that, in fact, I think we talked about I know we talked about it at the time and it seemed it seemed sensible to some kind of non-ideological, practical. How do we get this is kind of a clusterfuck. How do we get out in the best way possible, preserving our own interests to the extent that we can? Why didn't the administration, the Trump administration, take you up on that?
Jeffrey Sachs I would say the same neocon, the perpetual war presence in Washington that wants to do it the same way, that we've been doing for decades. And I would argue losing doing that. Yes. And it's about it's about money and power and perpetuation, not about actually having a, putting a bow on a bad situation.
Tucker But how do those people, as they inevitably do, seize the moral high ground in the in the opening moments of the ideological battle and position themselves as like the champions of freedom and human rights, when in fact they're monsters. Like, how do they how do they get away with that every single time?
Jeffrey Sachs I think it's a direct result of the all volunteer force, which seems a good idea. I'm still supportive of it, but it means it's a very. The people that actually serve that bear the cost of these overseas efforts is maybe one half of 1% of the population you're serving 3 or 4%. Know that 1%. And then 95% of America has no clue and no skin in the game. And so they're easily bullshitted by the, the posturing jackasses in Washington.
Tucker It's. Yeah. That's why Dan Crenshaw has a job. So I just want to get back to to the technology because I'm just I'm interested on behalf of all people who sensed turmoil ahead and say, stockpiling ammo. Right. I think there are people like that. Is that fruitless given the technologies?
Jeffrey Sachs I would argue for Taiwan, for example, facing a possible invasion or issue from coming from mainland China, the best thing they could do is build a home guard because a well-armed, well motivated people. I mean, as we showed in Afghanistan, as the Taliban showed the US military, yeah, well, motivated people, even using weapons that are 70 years old can still be the superpower with all the techno gimmickry. Yes. It's not the steel in the ships that make a great navy. It's the steel in the man, the steel, the crew.
Tucker But are you ever going to see another war between states that's won or lost on the basis of artillery tanks? I mean, is that have we get close to the cavalry charges of today?
Jeffrey Sachs Cavalry. Artillery is still the king of battle. As Ukrainians are learning the hard way and the Russians have gone from you know, if you shot at the Russians a year and a half ago, it would take them about an hour and a half to shoot back accurately. Yes. To geo locate, and to coordinate with their fire, you know, fire control centers to shoot back. Now they're down to about 2 or 3 minutes. So they've learned and they're coordinating and they've gotten a lot better. And it is wrong for us to assume that our kung fu is all that good right now.
Tucker And what role did drones play going forward? To the extent you can predict and imagine it.
Jeffrey Sachs Very significant. You know, people say the tank is dead, is gone forever. It will go just like chariots or the attack helicopter of 2000 years ago. There will still be a role for tanks, but people are gonna have to figure out how to knock down the swarms of incoming drones with hard kill and soft kill, etc.. It is always going to, you know, warfare is going to ebb and flow, but the ability to program very sophisticated devices that fly very fast, that are very hard to kill. You know, the first strategic offset after World War Two was nuclear weapons. Yes, we had nukes. Then the Russians did. And then it was about tonnage. Then the second offset was precision weaponry. Now everybody has precision weaponry. So I would argue that the third offset that the US should try to pursue, dominance when we're far from it is in an AI drone innovation application. And I would say the most innovation that's happened has been in Ukraine and Russia right now. And we are way behind because, again, Washington procurement people, the the appropriate people in Congress keep spending money in the same way on the same stupid cartel of defense contractors, with the same failing result when at the bleeding edge of battle, actual innovation is happening by dudes in their garage in Ukraine that are fighting for their lives and they've, they've innovated. But, and we ignore that to our, to our detriment.
Tucker So these are countries with fewer marketing majors and more engineers coming out of here, right?
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah, they've marketing definitely.
Tucker Bad at creating drones.
Jeffrey Sachs They've done well at Stem. Yeah, they have done well.
Tucker And they're smart people, which no one wants to say. But it's true.
Jeffrey Sachs You could load a face and between network surveillance and the the facial recognition on that drone, find one person and fly into that person's head that fast. Seriously? Yeah. So identity management privacy will become even more, essential. You think about how many cameras, how much data is being constantly collected everywhere, from street cameras, from Dornoch, from doorbell cameras, from facial recognition at the airport? Privacy is really under attack. Well, yeah. Well I've noticed.
Tucker And now TSA has decided to take your photograph every time you walk through. I went through yesterday and they had to, you know, stare into the screen and will assess your face. I said to the guy, is this mandatory? And and he said, no, it's not. And I said, fuck that, I'm not doing that. And he goes.
Jeffrey Sachs I agree with you. Look.
Tucker Okay, I mean, but like, what is that? Why are they doing that?
Jeffrey Sachs Data aggregation. Because they can.
Tucker So it's not a good sign when your own government is gathering data on you, is it? Like, why would they possibly need that?
Jeffrey Sachs Well, think about what, what chipped our founding fathers off.
Tucker Right.
Jeffrey Sachs Paying some taxes on TI and, you know, land taxes. And I mean, I guess our idea of, of what we will resist over, in terms of liberty and government intrusion has been very steadily eroding. And now it's, I would say, increasingly a steep curve of descent.
Tucker Yeah. And it does seem like the purpose of politicizing the military and making it left wing, anti-white, pro, trans, all the stuff which I think the right to sort of says, well, that's going to be less effective military. It's bad. They make fun of it. But that seems way darker to me. I mean, it does seem like it's being weaponized against dissent in the United States.
Jeffrey Sachs I, I think, you know, the military was one of the most trusted institutions for sure. And, and I saw already even in the 80s. I mean, look, I went to the Naval Academy in 1987, and I left after a year and a half because I found the political correctness and the nonsense already. Then on the double standards that were pursued by the the Academy leadership, while saying there are no double standards, I just found ridiculous. What were the double standards? I remember going to the, the Old Course the first time and they said, there's this is one height of a of a wall to get over for one gender and one height for the other one. And they said all the standards are all the same. But wait a minute, they're liars. So yeah. So just let's if you're going to if you're going to call it the same, then be the same. But but listen let's be consistent. And so the and the amount of recruiting for specific sports teams of people that were completely unqualified to be there or to be naval officers was staggering. I love the Navy. I just didn't like the a school run by the federal government.
Tucker You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalist. Right? Laughed. The real battles between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth, it's between good and evil. It's between honesty and falsehood. And we hope we are on the former side. That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network, and we invite you to subscribe to it. You go to Tucker carlson.com/podcast, our entire archive. Is there a lot of behind the scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn, when only an iPhone is running Tucker carlson.com/podcast? You will not regret it. So Bush did not make that decision.
Jeffrey Sachs Bush did not make the decision, right?
Tucker I mean, it's out if I'm hearing.
Jeffrey Sachs What I'm saying. Yeah. No, Bush did make the jump. Okay. But you know what.
Jeffrey Sachs I'm saying is he had told the Europeans. I hear you, I'm not going to do it, but it sounds like he was influenced by the people around him. Oh, no, that could be. Yeah. I don't know whether it was CIA or whether someone explained.
Jeffrey Sachs To him or whether.
Jeffrey Sachs Someone said, George.
Jeffrey Sachs Mr. president, this is a long standing project.
Jeffrey Sachs You know, it's not something.
Jeffrey Sachs For a European country to object to. I don't know what happened there, but what I do know.
Jeffrey Sachs Is that. He came back and told the European leaders, no, we're we're doing it. They said, no, no, no, we're not doing it. And then they had the NATO summit in Bucharest. And this was 2008. And the Europeans. Chancellor Merkel, the French president, all of them. George, don't do this.
Jeffrey Sachs Don't do this. This is extraordinarily dangerous. This is really.
Jeffrey Sachs Provocative. We don't really need or want NATO right up to the Russian border. Bush pushed, pushed, pushed.
Jeffrey Sachs This is a U.S. alliance fundamentally.
Jeffrey Sachs And they made the commitment. Ukraine will become a member of NATO. The Dodge was okay. We won't given them exactly the roadmap right now. But Ukraine will become a member of NATO because.
Jeffrey Sachs And we went to, we went to the Baltic Liberation Tour with Pat Buchanan and Lew Rockwell from the Von Mises Institute, and we went to, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and we visited the government buildings, which were still surrounded and occupied by Soviet Interior Ministry troops, but they'd had free elections. It's always fascinating to see a place literally at the inflection point of embracing.
Tucker What month free anyone was us.
Jeffrey Sachs That was me.
Tucker Okay, so I got married that summer also, and I went to the Ocean Club and Tuckers Town, Bermuda. It seemed more romantic than Estonia. What is your wife? Think you're young bride. Think when you're like, we're getting married. But actually, the honeymoon is in Eastern Europe. In this, like, the hellscape of Eastern Europe. Honey, do you know anything about Stalinist architecture?
Jeffrey Sachs We we we road trip through. But it was it was really funny. I I'll never forget. Bay Buchanan bought an entire uniform off of a Soviet border guard, a captain for 20 bucks. And we were at a restaurant and comes back with a whole uniform on the hanger and 20 bucks. And as we're leaving the country, another one of our group had a, luggage that you have to put through the scanner and. You can see in the scanner, it looks like there's a manhole cover in the suitcase. There's this huge disk. The Soviet border guard opens the thing. This is a very big problem. Well, how much to make the problem go away? $50. It was an entire bronze bust of Lenin that had been yanked off a building. And my our friend was exporting it. So I thought, you know, if they're selling Lenin for $50 off a government building, this is not long ago.
Tucker And in fact, it was, I think it was in August.
Jeffrey Sachs It was too much later it was done.
Tucker That's incredible. So my final question about the drones. I mean, is it is it a crazy thing to consider the possibility that the government might employ this technology against its own citizens, deploy it against all citizens? They're putting people if people are still rotting in prison for protesting at the Capitol on January 6th. If they're putting a woman got four years in prison yesterday for protesting outside an abortion clinic. It's a government at war with its own citizens. So why wouldn't drones be part of that?
Jeffrey Sachs Entirely possible.
Tucker How hard are they to shoot down with, say, a 12 gauge?
Jeffrey Sachs It's actually one of the, it's a big problem for the small FPV drones that are so small and small, so hard to hit. It's almost like hitting a, a ptarmigan.
Tucker Very hard to hit that bird.
Jeffrey Sachs Very fast.
Tucker Very fast.
Jeffrey Sachs I know you love bird hunting, so I try to correlate it to, you know, or maybe a very like a quail on cocaine.
Tucker Oh, it's that tough? Yeah. It sounds kind of sporty. So what is the defense? So if nets. Net nets.
Jeffrey Sachs Nets. Our nets are a cheap, simple defense for small FPV drones because that's a small charge. If you can keep the charge away from the target, the small charge doesn't have that much effect. But you know, for plenty you can always increase the the poundage.
Tucker My sense is that police departments and state police have drones now for surveillance?
Jeffrey Sachs Yes.
Tucker For surveillance. How hard is it to to alter a surveillance drone to become an offensive weapon?
Jeffrey Sachs Well, the Ukrainians and the Russians have done that in their garages or in a tent on the edge of battle pretty easily.
Tucker Okay, so why wouldn't. I mean, if you care about living in a non totalitarian country, if you care about America, why wouldn't someone say, and say, actually, no, we're not, you know, we're we're just going to pass a federal law that no law enforcement or Intel agency or the US military, these things cannot be used domestically against Americans, period, under any circumstance.
Jeffrey Sachs Or certainly not armed.
Tucker Or surveillance. Like why do you need. You know what I mean.
Jeffrey Sachs Look for for stopping a mass shooter or some actual terrorism event. It provides good situational awareness and it protects the cops who are trying to do an honest job. But the leakage, in the same way that the forever wars of Iraq or Afghanistan and all those surveillance tools that the government tells us they need to protect us. The danger is certainly some of that tech on the arm side leaking back to be used domestically.
Tucker I don't see any effort by the US government to stop mass shootings. In fact, they seem to be abetting them. And time and time again, you find in the small print in the write up after the shooting that the person has been detained repeatedly by some branch of government you saw in Uvalde. The cops refused to go in and save the kids as they were being executed, etc., etc. there just doesn't seem any will to stop mass shootings or seems to be instead.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah, but I don't see that I don't. The Uvalde one was not a I wouldn't say that's not a top down federal conspiracy. That was that was individual inadequacy of training percent. Because there's because there's dozens of other ones where the cops have just been spectacular, like in Nashville.
Tucker Yes.
Jeffrey Sachs But then you see the political correctness of them being reluctant to release the, the, the, the writings of this trans shooter who was out to kill Christians.
Tucker Right.
Jeffrey Sachs So great individual valor by those cops, bad by the cop leadership or the law enforcement leadership by not releasing the truth. Let's have a massive disinfecting effect of truth on this situation.
Tucker So for sure. But there's no will obviously, in the media to get to that information. So it's left to like people on X to do it. But I mean, you've been in and around the government since you were 18 and shipped off to Annapolis. So do you think it's fair for the rest of us who haven't to be skeptical of massive increases in government power, particularly military and law enforcement power that are justified by some threat?
Jeffrey Sachs Like we should be highly skeptical. Yeah.
Tucker Mass shooters, child molesters, human traffickers, Islamic terrorists. Like, I don't think the government does a good job of protecting us from any of those things, but they certainly increase their power and their power to kill me and my family on the basis of those threats.
Jeffrey Sachs War on poverty. More poverty. War on drugs. More drugs. War on terrorism. Didn't go so.
Tucker Well, right? And just to that, I know we're jumping around, but I have too many questions. But.
Jeffrey Sachs Maybe we both suffer from a little A.D.D.. Yeah.
Tucker Well, I mean, there's just a lot to go through. So you were at the center of the war on terror? More than any other American, I would say. Oh, well. Oh, I mean.
Jeffrey Sachs We had we had a our shoulder to the wheel pushing like everybody else.
Tucker I'm just but that the scale was. You know, I don't think there's ever been a more effective military contractor, you know, in a war that I'm aware of in the United States than than Blackwater, which you started in ramp. So but, you know, you were subject to the policymakers as well. And as in the Afghanistan withdrawal, not one of them. Not only was not like indicted or punished, but not a single one of them sort of lost a step in career advancement. They all kind of went on to the Atlantic Council or whatever.
Jeffrey Sachs Or their board seats or their board seats on the big defense contractors.
Tucker So how is it, since you watch that, how did that happen? Like, how did Toria Nuland go from Dick Cheney's office to being like the number two person in the State Department overseeing the war in Ukraine? Like, that's just crazy to me.
Jeffrey Sachs Because it's at that it's almost a unit party. It is the party of big government and big Washington and more spending and more warfare and 100% wrong.
Tucker The guys that you serve with, in the Seal teams and you know who you've been around in the subsequent 30 years, like, how do they feel about that? Like guys who did, you know, 3 or 4 deployments or.
Jeffrey Sachs The guys that actually paid the cost?
Tucker That's exactly.
Jeffrey Sachs Right. Bad policy maker decisions.
Tucker You know, where their friends commit suicide and they didn't get to see their kids grow up, or they got killed or lost a limb like those guys? Yep. What do they think?
Jeffrey Sachs They're disgusted. They're angry. The righteously angry because they believe in the Republic. When you when you join the military, you swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and you kind of join thinking all those enemies are going to be abroad. But some of the enemies of liberty are probably here. And when when a elite enriches themselves and separates them from the realities of consequences of accountability, that's a that's a pendulum that swings out far. But nature has a way of swinging the pendulum back to the middle, and so that either it gets done and within the rule of law and accountability or things can come apart very quickly.
Tucker Frighteningly, it's part of the accountability is informal. It's social pressure, which is very effective.
Jeffrey Sachs Shame.
Tucker Exactly.
Jeffrey Sachs And humor we need. First of all, we need to just laugh at the freaking incompetence. I'd say when you when you track. I made the last deployment on the USS America, an old, it was a fuel fired aircraft carrier, and they used to, everything is measured on an aircraft carrier, especially the landings, because it's all about the aviators. And who has the best, launch and recovery, especially the, you know, the traps. So they measure which which wire you catch and everything. So once a month, there's a thing called the Forecastle Follies, which is the front of the ship, but below the flight deck where the the chains come out of the belly. And so all the air wing and the, the senior ship's crew would muster there, and they'd go through all the scores, but then it would go through the most merciful, merciless roasting of anybody. It was the most vicious humor I've ever seen in my life.
Tucker Like guys who screwed up the landings.
Jeffrey Sachs Screw up the landings, the XO, the CEO. It was no holds barred. It was fantastic. It was hilarious and very healthy. And but now that you've you have a much more politically correct military. You can't do that at all.
Tucker They don't do that anymore.
Jeffrey Sachs No.
Tucker No. But I mean, if if you can't land an aircraft on a pitching deck of an aircraft carrier, I mean, you put your own life, the hardware and the lives of the sailors at risk, correct? Right, right. So the stakes could not be higher.
Jeffrey Sachs High stakes, very important mission literally lives on the line. And it's good to to reinforce good behavior and to punish bad behavior and and shame and derision of your peers matters.
Tucker So looking back, since again, you were so close to what was happening during that whole period, or at least until maybe 2012, but for the critical years, who were like, right there, who who do you blame most for the mistakes made in Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent wars? Who are the villains who shouldn't get board seats?
Jeffrey Sachs Oh, look, any we went through like 18 different commanders, 18 different four star generals over the course of Afghanistan.
Tucker Lot of four star generals.
Jeffrey Sachs We have as many generals now as we did in World War two, when we had 14 million men under arms. So now you have 10% of that. So you have basically 1.4 million under arms versus 14. And we have the same amount of flag officers. So yeah, we are massively overstaffed. And you think about all the m this I mean they have.
Tucker All chiefs or no Indians.
Jeffrey Sachs Each four star general has a personal butler and a valet and a driver and a cook and all those kind of, quaint 18th century habits of staff that they surrounded military generals with. We have that yet for our general.
Tucker Back when generals were brave, though, generals got killed in the Civil War.
Jeffrey Sachs Yes. And not so much now. So it's just it's it's enormous. The there can be a massive winnowing of, of headcount across the board in generals, in staffs and in civilians. The tooth, the tail ratio of the military of like how many when you say teeth, people that put warheads on foreheads versus tail has gotten way out of whack. We have way too much tail, like an alligator sized tail with a salamander sized bite.
Tucker It's it's just it's so unbelievably corrupt.
Jeffrey Sachs But again but again it's it's, it's corrupt because we just keep throwing money at it. And no one ever calls bullshit a business that goes through a massive growth cycle. Everybody can get fat and sloppy and lazy because you just there's always more money and there's we never have to tighten the belts. And so the, the U.S. military has been on like a, a, Krispy Kreme bender of donuts. Compounding amount of donuts consumed every day, and no one's ever tightened them up and saying, all right, today we're just PTA and we're not eating donuts. That's across our entire government, but especially in the military, which is supposed to exist constitutionally to defend and deter. And and I don't think we're we're not getting the money that we're we're not getting the value that we're spending money on right now.
Tucker No, it seems we're at a point where it's dangerous.
Jeffrey Sachs Yep.
Tucker And it does seem I just want to restate it. I don't know this as a dessert, in fact, but I can feel it very strongly. I think the purpose of it is to keep, you know, I think I think the enemy that they're seeking to fight lives here. I mean, I think this is a political. I think the policymakers feel that way. They're very anxious to control any instrument of force.
Jeffrey Sachs I would argue. It's about for for the defense contractors. They just want to keep selling expensive weapons. Right. And they will keep paying politicians to keep buying the expensive weapons. I almost feel. I don't feel sad for that for the white House as they deal with a problem like in Yemen, where the Houthis have become long range pirates and have shut off the entire Red sea, like 50% of global container traffic flowed through the Red sea. Now it doesn't. Egypt is losing $800 million a month. In lost toll fees from from container traffic. And all those ships have to go all the way around South Africa now to make it to Europe, coming out of Asia. It's a big problem and I'm sure the Navy, the or the, the DoD policymakers only provide the administration with the 50 and $100 billion solution to go beat down the Hutus to make them behave. And in that article I wrote, I just come back to there is such a constant rejection of market based private sector solutions because the Saudis and the Israelis actually had this problem back in the 60s when, there was a war in Yemen, and they hired David Sterling, the founder of the SAS, saying that there were 30 guys and they kicked ass. And it worked. And it was cheap and simple and practical. And in this article I wrote, just is a is a litany of those kind of rejections. And that's my frustration because I provided a lot of those options, even to deter the Ukraine war in the first place. You know, when, I, my internal Intel sources gave me a pretty good idea that already in December of 21, three months before the invasion, that the Russians were going to invade. It was not a it was not a song and dance. And so I wrote a paper proposing a combination of Lend-Lease and Flying Tigers to deter the war. Was in 1940, when Britain was really in it. The US gave 50 destroyers a bunch of aircraft guns, gave it to the Brits. We also provided aircraft and allowed us pilots to take leave and go to work for the Nationalist Chinese to stop the Japanese from bombing cities called the Flying Tigers. Yeah, in this case.
Tucker And we are, Stalin.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. And made it possible to go from Moscow to to Berlin to to stop the Nazis. But. Biden could have done one very simple thing. He could have announced. Okay, no war necessary in Ukraine. They're never going to join part of NATO, but they're at least going to have an Air force because there was already, 200 aircraft set to retire from the US Air Force to be flown to the desert in 2022, 50, 1550 F-16 some it's already written down to zero value to the taxpayer. They're going to be flown to the desert, to the boneyard and parked for eternity. Transfer loads of Ukrainians would have been less than $1 billion. Prevent the war and the discussion of NATO done.
Tucker But they wanted the war, obviously.
Jeffrey Sachs Apparently. Why? Or they or they believed their own bullshit that they that their PowerPoints and their posturing would dissuade. Look, I understand why the Russians get ornery about it, because if if the the Russians, the Chinese were looking to make, the northern provinces of Mexico into active parts of a Chinese or Russian alliance, we'd get ornery about that or obviously.
Tucker Yeah, right. They're putting if they put, you know, look.
Jeffrey Sachs At what happened when they put missiles in Cuba in 1962.
Tucker Missiles in Taiwan. And it would be unacceptable. Right. So my question is, and this is all complex and delicate, and, you know, I understand to some extent, but what I don't understand is sending Kamala Harris to the Munich Security conference and saying at a press briefing with cameras rolling to Zelensky, we want you to join NATO. You only say that if you want a war, you want the Russians to invade. Like, why would they want that?
Jeffrey Sachs I. Maybe. Maybe they're just that dumb.
Tucker I don't think. And I think they are dumb. I mean, they're well, they're definitely dumb, Tony Blinken. I mean, really dumb.
Jeffrey Sachs Having a rock concert in Kiev. During massive combat operations while Ukrainian army is getting crushed. He just who he just visited and he's up there on stage. Video. He's up there on stage with his guitar. It's like that is Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
Tucker Here it is.
Jeffrey Sachs All right.
Tucker So, yeah, I mean, he's a child, obviously. And like an angry, destructive child. But what happens? Like, where does this go? We send another $60 billion to Ukraine.
Jeffrey Sachs Most of that money goes to five major U.S. defense contractors. Yes. To replace at five times the cost. The weapons costs that we already sent the Ukrainians. Meaning, you know, if we send them something that was built ten years ago, well, now it's going to cost four and five times as much. So again, it's a massive grift paid by a Pentagon that doesn't know how to buy stuff cost effectively. It doesn't change the outcome of the battle. The as as the fields dry. It's May now coming up on tank season.
Tucker The those it tank season again.
Jeffrey Sachs At weather still matters and warfare and you know if you have a a wet snow covered farm field it's very muddy, very gooey. Not great for tanks.
Tucker Mud season.
Jeffrey Sachs Mud season. I think the Russians call it the great Rasputin to the great slush. Yeah, that's done now. And, as June comes, it'll be game on. And I think the Russian bear is hungry, and. And they're going to have a time. So the war should have been ended. Never should have started. It should. They should have made a deal. Froze the lines six months into it. Well, that's right, but the Biden administration believed that, all this American weaponry would have saved the day. It hasn't. And it's ugly. And, you know, the Russian, the Russian commanders are not idiots. They know their history. The Battle of Kursk, which happened just north of where the fighting is now, was the largest tank battle in history. It was the last offensive effort of the of the German army against the Soviets. And, they tried to push from the north and south on this salient. It was a bulge, and the Russians knew they were coming. And so they built lots of lines of defenses. It's the same thing they've done that that they did last summer, which ate up all that equipment. And now the Ukrainians are very thin. They've had a lot of corruption issues. All the defenses that were supposed to be built by the Ukrainians are much smaller or nonexistent. And so now it's allowing maneuver, and especially as the tanks as the fields dry and you can maneuver. It's going to be a very ugly summer. What do you.
Tucker What do you think the Russians want?
Jeffrey Sachs I'd say now they want to absolutely humiliate the West. And make sure that they never have a problem with Ukraine again.
Tucker And that seems achievable.
Jeffrey Sachs Right.
Tucker So what happens to Ukraine?
Jeffrey Sachs I don't know if it survives as an independent country. If they take Odessa, if they take the ability for Ukraine to export its grain. That really threatens the long term economic viability. Maybe, maybe it goes back to Western Ukraine. Used to be part of Poland, right? Eastern Ukraine used to be part of Russia. So, you know, maps, maps move depending on, you know, military victories drive diplomatic breakthroughs. So you think right now the Russians are winning and they're going to have a very good summer?
Tucker Is there anybody who's knowledgeable on the subject who believes Ukraine can, quote, win, which is to say, push Russian troops all the way back to the to the old Russian border?
Jeffrey Sachs Well, I didn't really believe it ever.
Tucker Oh, I know that.
Jeffrey Sachs But I don't, I don't know who's advising the white House at this point or who they're listening to, but, they probably need to change out their advisor list.
Tucker But. But then you have the secretary of state, buffoonish secretary of state Tony Blinken. Boomer parody, showing up and telling the Ukrainians during his rock concert that, you know, we're with you forever. Like, how could you say something like that when I've never met a single person who knows anything about the region, who thinks Ukrainians will achieve victory, no matter how much money we send them? Like, how could you say something like that?
Jeffrey Sachs It's good money after bad. And all we're all we're doing now is facilitating the demise of of Ukrainian men and destroying them for future generations.
Tucker So how many have died? I've asked members of Congress who are funding this stuff.
Jeffrey Sachs Hundreds of thousands.
Tucker But here's what I understand. If you're paying for this war, which the United States is the U.S. Congress is Mike Johnson is, don't you have a moral obligation to know its consequences? Like, how can you just how can you get up there with a Ukrainian lapel pin and talk about the brave Ukrainian people who are being killed by the hundreds of thousands? And you don't even keep track of the casualties, like, aren't you kind of a monster for doing that? I don't understand.
Jeffrey Sachs And you look at if you if you made the pictures of the modern battle space on the front, a little grainy and black and white. Yep. It's indistinguishable from the battle of the Somme or World War One.
Tucker Well, that's just right.
Jeffrey Sachs Artillery. A grinding, crushing, pointless loss of humanity.
Tucker But it's being abetted by our policymakers like they they're responsible for this to some extent. Like what?
Jeffrey Sachs And and it's it's shocking how, you know, party government has become.
Tucker You don't seem shocked that they don't care about how many Ukrainians have died.
Jeffrey Sachs They don't care about how many U.S. troops die. Really?
Tucker Good point. No, it's totally fair point.
Jeffrey Sachs Because because they'll send they'll send us troops to war with a whole bunch of cockamamie rules of engagement and policies, and it's just not a serious way to wage warfare. The, the the whole premise of got was that we could buy surgical by American magic and precision. We could always just clip off the head of the snake, and the whole body would die of the snake. And that's just proof that flies in the face of every kind of warfare. When you look back to World War Two, we killed off 30% of the German male population. World War one, same American civil war, same. The the continental wars in Europe in the 17 1800s. Back to the Punic and Peloponnesian Wars. You destroy their manpower, the logistics, and their finance. This cutting off the head of the snake is a fool's errand.
Tucker Is there any precedent for that in history?
Jeffrey Sachs No.
Tucker So I thought it's sort of a key component of education of the military academies was military history. No, I'm sure he's. And you. I mean, you're a big example of it. You went to one and you know an awful lot about your business.
Jeffrey Sachs I didn't read, I didn't learn that at the Academy.
Tucker Really?
Jeffrey Sachs No, no, that's a lifetime of curiosity I had. I was a military history geek as a kid. When we. My family went to Normandy when I was 11. And, you know, I was the tour guide. Sword gold, Juno Beach, Pegasus Bridge, all that. Yeah, I was, I was that, but I mean, nerdy, geeky kid.
Tucker So do you think your average, like, modern flag officer is just sort of not aware of the history of warfare?
Jeffrey Sachs I'm sure they get some level of it, but they have not made it a career. I I'd say the best book I read on General Officers was that one. It was a British military study. It's called The Psychology of Military Incompetence. And it and it went through five of the biggest disasters in British military history, like the surrender at Singapore.
Tucker Yeah. Khartoum.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. Khartoum, Baghdad in World War One, of course.
Tucker The Afghan withdrawal.
Jeffrey Sachs Yes.
Tucker Into Peshawar.
Jeffrey Sachs Yes. And and it and it literally looked through the guy's childhood where he went to school, his relationship with his father, all the rest, and very consistent themes. And what were they? They they're very bookish, very geeky, not, not self. No introspection.
Tucker Yeah. So there, Tony Blinken basically.
Jeffrey Sachs Are just not not people able to say, okay, this is not working. We're gonna we're going to attack. We're going to attack the boat because the this is not working in this direction. And so they're weak men.
Tucker In other words.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. Look, the the anomaly of pattern is doesn't occur very often.
Tucker Pattern? Who's been maligned since his death? Remarkable human being. And of course, you know, Hollywood is I don't know how many movies they've done telling us pattern was bad. But, you know, there are some suggesting the pattern was also murdered. Do you think that that's possible?
Jeffrey Sachs It'd be a hell of a difficult. Well, I don't know if the traffic accident, the Jeep rollover. Yeah, yeah, but it was an accident then.
Tucker But he survived it and then Douglas.
Jeffrey Sachs I mean, I don't know, but he hated the Soviets. He hated communism.
Tucker No, I know, so I don't want to get too far afield here, but I that does seem like a pivot point in world history where that were, you know, April 1945 Hitler kills himself, Berlin is occupied by the Russians, etc., etc. we we win in Europe and then we sort of like kind of pivot toward the Soviet Union for a few years until maybe the Rosenbergs or.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. Well, and even the amount of communists agents that were surrounding Roosevelt.
Tucker Oh, well.
Jeffrey Sachs Yes, I've got well.
Tucker Harry Hopkins is literally a communist Soviet agent. Yeah. Right. So, but, like, why did that happen? Like, how do we fight this war for freedom and then wind up sort of handing Poland to Stalin, for example, or on the side of the totalitarian.
Jeffrey Sachs Handing all of those countries of the world? Of course. Yeah. It showed.
Tucker So how is this a war for freedom beforehand and and.
Jeffrey Sachs Exhaustion of moral leadership? Yeah.
Tucker I think who was that? Who do you think if we could hold one person responsible.
Jeffrey Sachs For that, Truman was president? Yeah. Because Roosevelt was dead. So as Churchill said, he died in the traces. But I think, I think when you look at history, the the lie of socialism, communism, it is such a it's it's easy for elitists to love that paradigm because it's because the, because the right wing Austrian school economics approach is massive decentralization. Yeah. Decision making at the micro level. The farmer knows what prices are, has a good idea what demand is going to be, decides whether he's going to plant more acres that that year or not and takes that risk himself. The Soviet planner says I need everyone to plant this many acres, and we're going to do it at this price. And it's it's the lie of individual incentive versus massive central planning to the betterment of elite thinking.
Tucker Right. Well.
Jeffrey Sachs With the grift that goes with it. And that's just a that's like a mind worm disease that so many people continue generation after generation continue to fall for.
Tucker Yeah, it's a mom based system. Whereas the let the farmer figure it out. It's a dad based system. Yeah. It's true. What are you, a farmer like? How do you know? Like that's what your dad says. Your mom's like, no, it's what's going wrong. Well, I'm sorry.
Jeffrey Sachs But that's why I'm I, I'm so excited to see me, like, having success in Argentina for a guy. And maybe it's analogy to. To America because he got sick. I mean, you know, at the end of World War two. Cap per capita living standards in Argentina were higher than Switzerland. Yes. Peronist is. Socialists take over. They run the company. They run the country basically off the cliff. Hyperinflation, economic wreckage. Terrible. I get sick of not only the Peronist is, but the pathetic so-called right wing opposition, which is not opposition. He starts his own political party and he wins. I mean, I like any guy that campaigned with the chainsaw. I agree.
Tucker With that. You think that'll happen here?
Jeffrey Sachs I don't think the Republican Party is really that salvageable anymore. No, of course, because it's been gobbled up by corporatist.
Tucker Yes.
Jeffrey Sachs And the you know, the defense industry now spreads money equally. Right and left. Not even really right. Just across the Washington insiders. So, yeah, maybe an entirely new political movement. That's why Trump is transformational. Because he kind of came outside the Republican Party, right. And did it. And. I hope he can. I hope he can move the needle somewhere in the right direction because it's it's teetering.
Tucker So I got to ask you a personal question. We're in the Middle East together. Not that long ago, and I noticed two things. One, you flew coach to the Middle East, which obviously don't cheat you, but you did it on purpose. I think that is your custom. We're the same age, three weeks apart, and I think most like. Why would you do that? And the second thing I noticed is you went from there to some far more obscure part of the world. So, like, explain those things, if you would.
Jeffrey Sachs When I, I got out of the Seal teams earlier than I wanted to. I loved being a Seal. I was pretty good at it, I think. And, I would have had a nice career going there.
Tucker Those are another story. If you're just plain why you got out.
Jeffrey Sachs Oh, my dad died. And when I was 25 and my wife got cancer. No, I was 26. He was 29, and she got cancer. So I got out to sort out the homefront. And that's really why I started Blackwater. Just as a way to stay connected to the Seal teams. I knew nothing of business, nothing of land development, nothing of government contracting. But I kind of knew what the special operations community needed. And building that business was, was a really great experience. It was it was family policy for my dad to not come and work in the family business after college. You had to go do your own thing. I had nothing, I didn't want anything to do with his business. I was not I don't think I was really suited for it. And. But I was going to come and work with him after 12 years or so of being a seal. Starting Blackwater building. It was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done in my life, because bringing together people with great talents that were really good, that they'd gained in the military and they'd retired or gotten out and having it smashed the way it was, really left a bad taste in my mouth. And I'll be honest, I carry a big chip on my shoulder yet. Yeah. And I try to keep it in perspective. So look, I had a business that was crushed and lost. Thousands of guys lost their lives, their limbs, their mental health, their spouses over a badly run war in two theaters by idiot Washington elites. Same idiots that smashed my business. So, yeah, I got a chip on my shoulder to do something. Big and effective and spectacular again and run hard until that happens.
Tucker But I mean, you know, 54, 55 year old guys who've been successful, what you have been, despite having your business smashed. They don't fly coach. Like, what is that? Is that like a just a spartan impulse? So you just don't get this off.
Jeffrey Sachs You get there at the same time.
Tucker Yeah, but it's I.
Jeffrey Sachs Tucker. I fly so much that anyway it look and I'm not. I'm weird.
Tucker I know we're the same age. I know how this look.
Jeffrey Sachs I'm not I'm not a purist. I do fly business class 10% of the time.
Tucker I mean, that's that's fine if you're flying to Fort Lauderdale from DC or something. But, you know, Dubai is a long way. I just think it's very, very interesting.
Jeffrey Sachs Learn to sleep in any position.
Tucker So that's what that's what it is. Yeah, I like that. What's the weirdest place you've been recently? Why are you always in Africa? What do you do for a living, Eric?
Jeffrey Sachs Hahaha.
Tucker I feel like I know you pretty well. I really sure.
Jeffrey Sachs I would say there are lots of countries that, need help organizing. With the basics of tax collection and security assistance and border security and, police advisement. Because what we take for granted in America, if you want to start a business in America, you can call a law office in Delaware, get a business in two hours for 200 bucks. It's simple. And you can get title to your land here and you can get a bank account. You get a business license. You can you can do all those things that make capital formation possible. There are so many parts of the world that's not possible. And so providing them the very basic means of a reliable police department or the means to stop gangs, jihadi gangs, criminal gangs, whatever. So I do provide some advice to countries how to do that from time to time.
Tucker I, judging by what little I know of your travel schedule, it seems pretty frequent. That's interesting. So since you are everywhere all the time, and most Americans are including me, sort of only dimly aware of what's happening around the world. Name three places we should be paying more attention to now than we are.
Jeffrey Sachs The Chinese Communist Party has been very active in Mexico. The fentanyl crisis is very much, you know, last year, fentanyl in America killed like 109,000 people. Yes. It is funded, organized, logistically, facilitated by the Chinese Communist Party to move the precursor chemicals that are actually made near Wuhan, China, shipped to either Venezuela or Mexico, fabricated into fentanyl and basically blended with other common drugs that people are taking. And it doesn't make any sense to do so because why would a drug dealer want to kill his customers? That's what's happening. And it is an absolute it's a fuck you from the CCP against the West for the Opium Wars of the 1840s. And it's done to.
Tucker To murder American children.
Jeffrey Sachs 100%. Yes.
Tucker And and these are not junkies who, like, took too much. These are kids. That's a.
Jeffrey Sachs College kid. College kid.
Tucker Off Instagram.
Jeffrey Sachs Yes. Or a, a bootleg Percocet or something.
Tucker Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Jeffrey Sachs And so they're people dying, and that is you trace that and I can show all of that going right back to mainland China.
Tucker Why wouldn't why are we sending all these armaments to Ukraine? And we could bomb those facilities in Mexico if they're. If killing. Oh, excuse me, 100,000.
Jeffrey Sachs You don't you don't you don't you don't need to bomb fires and underutilized tool. That's.
Tucker What's happening here. I know quite a few manufacturing and agricultural facilities that seem to be going up in smoke in this country.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. And so look at this. And on that last time Blinken was in Beijing, he didn't even call him on it to say stop. He said, well, no, it's yeah, maybe some of the stuff is coming from China, but it's really just a shipping accidental shipping problem. I mean, it's it is such a denial of reality.
Tucker It's it's just I mean, you're so against who you're saying is you're not speculating about this. This is known.
Jeffrey Sachs 100%.
Tucker To the intelligence to assume. No, this.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah, but nobody wants to do anything. Why? I think the. You have an agency that doesn't want to do their job. Which agency? CIA. Because I think, and I know you have rightly very mixed feelings on the CIA. However, the mission of the CIA, if you think about the State Department, can handle 5% of issues. Diplomats and embassies. You want your military over here, your conventional military. It's a big, angry dog waiting to be let off leash that hopefully never is the middle of the world. Those those problems. You think about how the Soviet Union was really undermined in the 80s. There was there was 20 covert action findings that were signed, a couple by Carter, mostly by Reagan, done to undermine the Soviet Union economically, politically, culturally, socially. And that was done under title 50 authorities, and that worked without having to involve big military expenditure. There are if you want to stop. Like how we know? We know fentanyl is a problem. We know the Chinese are a problem doing it. That's specifically what the title 50 authorities are for to say to six guys, go make that problem stop. I think if you have an agency that doesn't want to do their job. That's why it's not happening.
Tucker But they seem to be doing so many other things. I mean, I'm exactly my dad work was I am not I was never against CIA. I thought only like dumb liberals were against CIA, you know, and traitors or whatever. So my views on CIA have evolved based on things that I have seen and personally experienced. And my conclusion is not that everyone they are particularly know the paramilitaries. I know a million of them seem like great guys, whatever. But on some like basic level, it seems totally out of control to me.
Jeffrey Sachs I it is. I mean, when you have the leadership of the CIA, this Havana syndrome is a real thing. What does that mean? It's a, it's effectively a microwave weapon that's been used to. Effectively, blast the brains of Americans working out of embassies. First in Havana, Colombia. Delhi. Hanoi. Vienna. Washington, D.C.. Lots of places. Okay. Hurting. Severely hurting Americans serving abroad. And the CIA director says. It's all in their minds.
Tucker It's believe me.
Jeffrey Sachs It's that that's wrong when your people are getting screwed by.
Tucker So you think that I don't have a view on that? I mean, I'm sort of. I don't know the answer, but I'm sympathetic to open to both possibilities being true. But you think based on evidence that this is absolutely real.
Jeffrey Sachs Yes, I know it to be real.
Tucker Wow. Who's doing this and why?
Jeffrey Sachs It was a it was a it was, a device that was developed in the Soviet Union in the early 70s, actually in Ukraine. So and, I think the Kharkiv, development plant, not that nothing to the Ukrainians now, but it's a, it's about the size of a, like a beverage cart on an aircraft that size device, and it's very damaging in the fact that the Russians can do that to us without consequences. It it shows how how pathetic they view the CIA and the US government to not push back on consequences.
Tucker To CIA it. What motive would they have to pretend this wasn't real?
Jeffrey Sachs Because it would require push back somewhere somehow.
Tucker But they're literally fighting Russia. In Ukraine, CIA is all over Ukraine fighting Russia.
Jeffrey Sachs Good question. I mean, put it this way, they don't like me enough that I was uninvited from a dear friends retirement ten days ago.
Tucker Oh, I bet, I bet they don't like you. And you've obviously worked with them most of your life, right?
Jeffrey Sachs I we did a lot of great work for them. 100% success rate. But yeah, they look people with the wrong people being in charge. The agency is also gotten hyper bloated. Basically the same number of case officers that there's always been for 25 years, but the place has grown tenfold. Of all the wrong kind of people under the, you know, the decision making of a guy like Brennan. Yes. And why does Brennan hate the actual deal with the director of operations? Because he's a failed case officer. He. He flunked out of school. No, I mean, how did a guy that voted for Gus Hall in 1976 who was Gus Hall?
Tucker Gustavo Hallberg, he was the Finnish American head of the American Communist Party in New York City.
Jeffrey Sachs Exactly how does a guy vote for the head of the Communist Party in 1976, at the height of the Cold War, and then pass whatever background check the agency is doing and have a security clearance? I find that stunning.
Tucker He retains his security clearance because the last administration refused to strip him of his security clearance, despite the fact he was actively working to undermine a democratically elected president. Yeah, no, I know the levels of betrayal and self betrayal are just almost mind boggling. Let me ask you specifically about what the CIA does in Ukraine. So I think it's fair to say, based on what even The New York Times has reported, that the, the CIA is running effectively, the Ukrainian Intel services.
Jeffrey Sachs I don't know. I honestly don't know that I'm certainly they have they have been there advising and supporting. But I think the Ukrainians probably grew frustrated at, you know, lack of, like a willingness to do certain things. So I don't know where the US support ends and where the Ukrainian unilateral stuff be.
Tucker So but they I ask because they've assassinated people. I think they tried to assassinate me, for example, but they definitely killed Aleksandr Dugin's daughter. They, you know, allowed an American critic of the Ukrainian government to die in prison. Lira, Gonzalo Lira. And you're sort of like, well, wait a second. If this is a proxy war and we're overseeing it, then is the US government aware of this, responsible for it? Like what? U.S. government should protect American citizens, but it clearly.
Jeffrey Sachs And if you and if you had a honest look, Devin Nunez did a good job as the chairman of the Gypsy. Yeah, I'm trying to dig into the nonsense. And he obviously met all kinds of resistance, but he had fight in him. Now, the Republican oversight of the Intel Committee of of the Intel agencies completely inadequate even then.
Tucker And I like Devin a lot. But they were those guys are all afraid of the CIA, as you know. They're afraid of them. They know they're being spied on by CIA or NSA or any, you know, FBI. They know they're being members, and they're supposed to be in charge of overseeing these agencies or being spied on by them. They're fully aware of that. I know, because they've told me to. My face, I'm guessing. And that's just that's not democracy. That's a totally crazy.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. That's like it's like Markus Wolf in the Stasi.
Tucker Well, yeah, that's exactly that's exactly right. The East German.
Jeffrey Sachs The most of it, because the Stasi was way more effective than any other Intel service, even the KGB. Yes. It was the embodiment of German efficiency innovation.
Tucker And it was like the only effective institution in the entire country.
Tucker What does that mean?
Jeffrey Sachs Everything was in order. Yeah. Nice. So.
Tucker And then I know that CIA runs businesses, like, runs businesses outside the country, and those are sources of income for the agency that, like, how can a government agency run businesses? I don't understand that. And profit from the.
Jeffrey Sachs I am I am truly not aware of any of that. Okay.
Tucker But how do you rein it in? I mean, because it of course could be a an essential tool of diplomacy, statecraft of, you know, the projection of power. And you could see how CIA could be helpful to your country.
Jeffrey Sachs The agency is the most easy to reform of all federal agencies. Civil service rules don't apply. Yes, you can fire anyone for any reason that fast. You can clean house, have have a all hands meeting at the bubble on a Friday. Yeah. And send 50% of them home. Send them out to send them out to their cars and tell them we'll ship your stuff from your desk. You could clean it out that fast.
Tucker But what is? No one do that?
Jeffrey Sachs Maybe no one's had the balls to as the director or the deputy director do that.
Tucker Do you believe CIA has, in last 25 years use violence against any American citizen?
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. Barack Obama killed, American citizen and his 16 year old son. Correct. In, in Yemen.
Tucker Right. And that's publicly known. But there, you know, there are all sorts of. You know, there's evidence that there that's not I and I think maybe.
Jeffrey Sachs There's more, but I know that one.
Tucker Yeah. So you don't think it's crazy to assume that?
Jeffrey Sachs Entirely possible. Well, there's a lot of there's a lot of people that are considered American citizens that probably shouldn't be considered American.
Tucker I agree, I agree with that. But but in actual America, some of the other.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah, yeah. Fair. But the left has so devalued citizenship, right. It should mean something to be an American. I mean a Roman citizen. It meant something.
Tucker Oh, some Venezuelan gang member who's here illegally is every bit as American as you were born in western Michigan. So, yes, I'm quite, quite aware of that.
Jeffrey Sachs Anchor babies, birthright citizenship. All of that must go.
Tucker Yeah. You wonder, you know, if we've reached a point where that it's impossible for the country to act in its own interest just because of the changes due to immigration.
Jeffrey Sachs I read a lot of history, and I know that things have been a lot worse in certain societies. And, corrective events can be shocking and traumatic to people, but it's still possible.
Tucker CIA and not just CIA, but FBI and other agencies supposed to be enforcing the law and gathering intelligence have. This has been shown withheld information from democratically elected presidents. A number of them. Certainly. Trump. That's a crime, is it not?
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. And it should be met with immediate discipline. And and that's a matter of having people that will follow through and wade through the bureaucratic process and, and exercise the authority that they're charged with doing. Right. If you've when you join the military, you swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign, domestic. We should probably do something similar for any civilian employee of the federal government that they swear to defend the Constitution, not swear allegiance to a political.
Tucker Leader, not.
Jeffrey Sachs Constitution.
Tucker Right. But it's not a constitutional republic. If we, you know, unelected employees of the federal government ignore the elected employees.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah, well, that's something to love it or hate it. At Blackwater, every contractor that worked for us swore to defend the Constitution. The same oath they swore when they joined the military or law enforcement. They swore it again in our presence as a reminder that we're here to serve.
Tucker So, I want to ask you about spying, on American citizens. So we know that it's widespread. It's accelerating. Data is being collected about every single one of us. And the vector for a lot of that is the phone. So it's it's like super useful. Of course. But it's also the main vulnerability if you care about privacy and freedom. So you've created a phone that allows people, to some extent, to opt out of the current spying regime.
Jeffrey Sachs But let me let me back up to where, I guess, where this started. You know, if you think about after nine over 11, suddenly, holy shit, all these federal agencies are waking up, and how do we prevent this kind of conspiracy and attack against us again? And so they start looking at data. But of course, in 9/11, we didn't have smartphones. But as smartphones become available and the, technology that goes around a smartphone because what is a smartphone? It's basically a highly capable personal computer in your hand. Yeah, that's constantly linked to a network.
Tucker Yes.
Jeffrey Sachs And so as ad data in the the private sector always innovates much faster than governments do. And so as Apple and Google mobile services, start developing phones, they put ad IDs and tracking information on those phones. Why? To hide to micro target you to sell advertising. They they gather and collect micro information about you so that they can sell precision information to advertisers who want to sell you stuff.
Tucker Can you give us a sense of what that what that information is? What do they know about you?
Jeffrey Sachs Well, an advertising ID is a it's like a 25 digit alphanumeric code that sits on your phone, and it enables you to collect where you go, what you buy, who you call and what you browse. It even works with the apps sitting in your phone, which are also built with a software developer kit that comes from Google. And they they pay you more to put the Google hooks in so that those apps can also turn on the microphone on your phone or the camera or the GPS so that your phone, yes, it's a computer, but effectively becomes a mobile microphone collection listening device that fits in your pocket or sits in your nightstand, and it collects anything and everything about what you do. And so it's been it's almost been like a slow boiling of a frog because we as smartphones become common, that becomes very convenient and it's wonderful. And it becomes more and more, pervasive in our lives, providing us music and news and communications and in, pictures and videos of our family. Every bit of that data is collected, analyzed, parsed and resold to advertisers. That's the five leading big tech companies have a combined market cap that's like the third or fourth largest nation in the world off of that surveillance capitalism model. So as smartphones have become available, it's slow boiled all of us into a point of holy shit. And I guess for me, the oh shit moment was after the 2020 election and seeing the power that Big Tech had to sway that election and to then coordinate and to to control who, who could speak, who could speak on certain platforms and zooming out, certain people. And I actually had a tech team together at the time doing a forensics thing. And in a rage phone call, I said, fuck it, we're going to build a phone. And then we pivoted and that team, then started working and, yeah, we built a phone, as a, as an answer because we're never going to make big tech change by whining about it. There's way too much money and way too much power. We had to provide a means for people to. Communicate freely. Securely and most importantly, that they can control their data. I think it's inherently American that we accept. We expect privacy as Americans. Think about the Constitution. First amendment of free speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom of assembly. Second, we know what that guarantees. The first. But what's the Third Amendment? What was most important for the Founding Fathers? Privacy. Get these damn British troops out of my house. Of course, no quartering act, because there was actually British soldiers being put into people's houses. Privacy. Fourth amendment, the right to privacy. In our in the. In the searches of our personal data. Yes. What big tech has created in surveillance capitalism is more pervasive and more intrusive than anything you could ever possibly. It's more it's more pervasive than Marcus Wolf of the Stasi or Beria of the KGB. NKVD. Could ever possibly.
Tucker Think that happens in contemporary North Korea?
Jeffrey Sachs Yes, exactly. And we give it away if we give it away freely. And so people will still close the bathroom stall. When you go into the toilet, you still close the shower curtain. We still do lots of things that we expect to have a of privacy, but yet people with a regular phone put on their nightstand. And are surprised that the microphone is listening. I've had so many people I've talked to about, they said I was talking to my wife about needing a new mattress in our bedroom, and the next day they're getting advertising for mattresses, which means the camera or the phone was listening to them in their bedroom. With all the follow on conclusions to be drawn from that.
Tucker Yeah. Given what happens in healthy bedrooms. That's it. I mean, so what happens to those recordings?
Jeffrey Sachs Well, we've been doing a study following our device, a Google Mobile Services phone. Any Android running Google Mobile services, which is all of them. Or an iPhone. And about 3 a.m.. We're seeing a spike of data leaving the phone. But 50MB. That is basically that phone dialing home to the mothership. Exporting all of your goings on.
Tucker While your pillow talk is going to pillow talk.
Jeffrey Sachs Whatever. Right. It's so. Zuckerberg paid $20 billion for WhatsApp. Why? Because every message, call, video, picture, voice, note, everything that goes through there, they say, well, it's end to end. Encrypted. Yeah, it's end to end until it passes through their server where it's sliced and diced and analyzed and used to push used to sell advertising to that customer. If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer, you are the product. So if you want to get. Well, I think people people right now are used to Mark Zuckerberg listening from their nightstand every night, because that's effectively what what your phone is.
Tucker And he's like the creepiest person in world history. If he's listening to what's going on in your bedroom.
Jeffrey Sachs Because they're able as big tech to shape that message. That's that's the frightening thing about the power of big tech and their ability to to influence what you watch, what you think about candidates. If you search something, how they how they score those rankings, it's, it is shocking. We have an antitrust problem here in America, vastly worse than in the early 1980s, late 1800s, early 1900s with oil and railways.
Tucker And this is.
Jeffrey Sachs Another.
Tucker This is more important.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. This is literally how we communicate, interact with other human beings in our lives, how we gather and and share information about the realities of life, of food, of medicine, of vaccines, of health care, issues of of truth. And so it's in especially in an era of AI, it's scary stuff. The average kid in America, by the time they reach the age of 13, has had 72 million data points collected on them by Big Tech. So. So it's almost like, that that much collection allows digital grooming. By big tech to to share and to shape your preferences, how you interact, etc..
Tucker Your sexual preferences. I mean, if we're being honest here. Yeah, exactly. Considering that young people are introduced to sexuality through pornography.
Jeffrey Sachs Yep.
Tucker Yeah. Given that there's no privacy, it's probably pretty dumb to watch porn.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. Nothing's private.
Tucker Right? So, what happens to all this data?
Jeffrey Sachs Well, now, obviously, that's it's used and stored. I mean, it's the the, the bloom of data centers surrounding all these tech hubs around America is horrific. And all that data is being collected and stored and and just.
Tucker Has to just the far field question was interested. So given that those data centers are some of the biggest users of electricity through like a steel plant. Okay. Yeah. Massive electricity draw. And using electricity is, of course, destroying the planet and accelerating climate change. Why are the climate change zombies defacing paintings in museums and not protesting data centers?
Jeffrey Sachs It's a I would say there. If if they were coming after data centers, then they would be getting a nonstop stream of, of social media messaging of why they should be attacking art instead of data science.
Tucker Well, exactly. But like why? Why are the AI ghouls? Why is Mark Zuckerberg? Why are they not climate criminals? Why am I a climate criminal for having a woodstove and a Silverado? But with the people who run data centers which literally draw more power.
Jeffrey Sachs Than with 100% steel, with 100% backup as.
Tucker Well, right? So I'm not against using energy. I'm pro energy, actually, and cheap energy. But but by the current rules, they're criminals. So why does no one call them criminals?
Jeffrey Sachs Because Big Tech has shockingly, complete control over how that messaging is.
Tucker Over our minds and what we think. Sorry, sorry, but that you brought it right back to the point which is.
Jeffrey Sachs And so now. Congress, including a lot of Republicans in their idiocy, have not only extended FISA right. FISA started as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Tucker Yeah, 1977 ish. Yeah.
Jeffrey Sachs It's supposed to be measuring, monitoring how you collect intelligence, communications going to foreigners. Now FISA is really all about Americans. I guess we're treated as foreigners by our own government. And and so the federal agencies got sick of getting beat up when they'd come before Congress for millions of times, illegally accessing what was supposed to be FISA, unauthorized communications information, and for buying. All this commercial data that's that's collected and held and disseminated by Big Tech to facilitate advertising and typing and measuring where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse, everything about you in a way that any, any previous intelligence boss would have salivated over. So now the new Pfizer, it's not an extension. It's a massive enlargement. Says that any federal agent, for any reason without probable cause or a warrant, can compel any company that holds any of that personal data to turn it over. Allowing. A massive fishing expedition on anybody that's considered a. An opponent of that off the reservation. Federal agent. It's really disgusting. Really? If it's not a, a, stamp act tea party, 1775 moment, I don't know what is, but it is ultimately your government having carte blanche to do a digital pathology exam on you with no questions asked.
Tucker Well, considering that these companies hold, you know, audio of you having sex with your wife, video of you watching pornography, like, stuff that, you know, audio of you telling racial jokes or whatever, like your most intimate moments, the ones that could be used to blackmail and destroy you, doing things you would not do in public and shouldn't do in public. Like, that's just that's the ultimate power, isn't it?
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. I guess, you either have to not give a shit and fight anyway. Yeah, or.
Tucker Try to live virtuously too, which helps.
Jeffrey Sachs That always helps. Yep.
Tucker So how does your phone protects people?
Jeffrey Sachs So again this like I said, this, this era started three and a half years ago, and we came at it from a completely contrarian view. Yeah. This phone, it's our hardware mate in Indonesia at a Singaporean facility. Our operating system, all our code. And we are solely focused on data sovereignty that you control.
Tucker It's pretty cool. Just that I am kind of impressed that you made hardware. You didn't just build an app like you are.
Jeffrey Sachs Correct, because you have to control it down to the root level of, of the hardware and the software so that our, we don't have an advertising ID and our operating system blocks any, any attempt by any app to turn on your camera or your WiFi or your microphone or your GPS or anything. We don't allow any of that leakage. In fact, we have a privacy center.
Tucker This is called the unplug.
Jeffrey Sachs This is an unplugged phone. And this is a effectively a firewall, which prevents apps from doing all the things they are used to doing on all the other phones. So you're in control of what of your data goes out, which is effectively zero. This is like a this is like a safe comes in. It doesn't come out.
Tucker So I'm just to bottom line it I'm protected from what am I protected from if I use that.
Jeffrey Sachs Here's the thing. The, the if you're using apps and some federal agency goes to that app purveyor and says, give me everything you have on Tucker that he's been using on that app, there'll be nothing because there's no data leaking from you from your device to that to that app. If, if you call somebody, we have our own secure messenger, for example, you want to call and make a secure call and you call me. It takes about five seconds to connect because it's literally creating a encrypted tunnel between you and me generates a new encryption key every call. It's completely different.
Tucker So the government hates that. And there have been all kinds of legal battles over this question. They don't want secure communication between citizens because all of a sudden they care about human trafficking or something.
Jeffrey Sachs Yes. And their their latest excuse for this, massive FISA enlargement was drug trafficking.
Tucker Drug trafficking. Right.
Jeffrey Sachs Because they've been failing for 40 freaking years at that. Well, they.
Tucker Just opened the southern border to fentanyl and human trafficking. So these exact same people are suddenly really worried about human trafficking and drugs.
Jeffrey Sachs It's just it's a it's a joke. So we've, we, we produced 500 units field of them. Last fall. We did a big data, big beta test, and now we have 10,000 units so people can order and deliver. And look, it's, it is our effort to, to fight the power of data.
Tucker Can't I do I mean, I'll just confess that I use an iPhone made by a company I actually kind of hate and that hates my country and me, and I use it anyway, because.
Jeffrey Sachs We figured there's a lot of people like you that would want to digitally opt out of the lie of big tech. And so what you can't do, obviously we don't have the Apple Store. We don't have Apple Music, but you can use Spotify. You can use, a lot of the other streaming services on here. We just prevent them from collecting your data as to what you're listening to or, or where you are when you do it.
Tucker What about pictures?
Jeffrey Sachs Of course you can take pictures. And you can share pictures. You can send pictures. We have a lot of the other privacy related apps, whether it's Signal or Rema or Proton or Telegram.
Tucker We have what is usually done this. So everyone complains about this, everyone who pays any attention or all understands. Plus the iPhone is incredibly expensive. But they have a hammerlock on your life and so this seems like a pretty other.
Jeffrey Sachs People have tried it before and they they burn through a lot of money. And I don't think the timing is right.
Tucker They're not flying coach to Dubai, are they.
Jeffrey Sachs We we did. We did this.
Tucker Man, you are Dutch. I love that it's like goats to to.
Jeffrey Sachs This phone also has a kill switch. An actual, a switch which separates the battery from the electronics. You can't shut your iPhone off.
Tucker Oh, I know.
Jeffrey Sachs It's always listening. It's always pinging towers, is always pinging Wi-Fi, building a digital breadcrumb trail of where you go and what you do.
Tucker Then even if I turn the iPhone off, it's not off.
Jeffrey Sachs Correct this. You turn that off. It's off because it physically separates battery from electronics. It's just like pulling the battery out of an old, Nokia phone.
Tucker So I'm sorry I interrupted you. So this I love this. Of course. It's incredibly ambitious, but also on some level, it's kind of obvious. Like, why haven't we had this before? So you said people have tried. They spent too much money. And then I interrupted you.
Jeffrey Sachs When they tried. Maybe just with an app and just with an app doesn't work. And people have tried to do it with a reskinned Google phone. We have this is this phone is incapable of running Google Mobile services. So you're not going to get Google Maps. We have a way to navigate that works well. But again, so many of the the freemium approaches where they've been boiling the frog of the American, of the people of the world, we provide them a digital alternative to that, where you are in control of your First Amendment rights and your Fourth Amendment rights.
Tucker How how a man, how hard is it to text people who don't have that phone?
Jeffrey Sachs It's just we look, it emits electrons. So ultimately you can see if it's on a tower or not, but we even provide it with a, with a sim, with a SIM provider, a data provider, a network airtime provider that, collects the minimum amount. Basically, all they need is your zip code where you're buying it. That's.
Tucker So what I'm saying is, if I am using an unplugged phone and my wife has an iPhone, I can text her.
Jeffrey Sachs Yes. Sure. And she can even put unplug messenger on her iPhone as well.
Tucker How much more expensive a set than an iPhone?
Jeffrey Sachs This is $989, so it's cheaper, but $500 cheaper and it's comparable in speed storage camera quality.
Tucker Can you actually get one?
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. You can order it at, unplugged.com/tucker. And we'll, we will. Look, we're we're big believers or big believer in your audience. I'm a art long, ardent fan. And, we think, your fans are our people. And so we are happy to compensate them. And, and you guys, and we want to we want to win in this together and give people a digital alternative to big tech owning their lives, man.
Tucker So if, I mean, it's not a threat to Apple right now, but if if there's big take up, it could be. So what? How do you expect them to try and stifle competition? It's monopoly. Sure. They want to retain monopoly status.
Jeffrey Sachs Look, if you search for if you do a Google search for unplugged phone or things like that, they tend to stack every negative article possible written about it first.
Tucker Oh, there have been bad pieces written.
Jeffrey Sachs Of course. Of course, of course. The the left will always, come after me and hate on me for anything.
Tucker Is anything. Is it a racist phone.
Jeffrey Sachs That the left used to be about free speech? Right. And now they're really about kind of state control. But, does the.
Tucker Phone deny the election in 2020?
Jeffrey Sachs I would argue that, the phone cares about your first and Fourth Amendment rights and. Okay. We are, we are. This is not a political phone, so there's.
Tucker No Q anon feature on the phone at all.
Jeffrey Sachs There's not a I don't know if there's a QAnon app there. You know, we do have this funny thing is we do we are lying. So we we we even have an app, a dating app for people that are unvaccinated because they were thrown out of the Apple in the Google Store. So yes, we are we are also a repository for the apps that have no hold elsewhere.
Tucker So if you want to have like really healthy babies, you can go on to this dating app.
Jeffrey Sachs If you're not a big fan of of the mRNA strand, you know, changing your, your genetics for future generations. Yes, you need it.
Tucker Unplug phone. And let me just ask actually follow up in that. I think what you just said, the last sentence you uttered is maybe the most interesting story of my lifetime. The possibility that the mRNA technology could affect your genes. Which is not crazy, actually. Yeah. I don't know if it's true or not. Do you think it's true?
Jeffrey Sachs It would be an interesting study to ask how many of the. The executives of those pharmaceutical companies actually took their own product. That should be a congressionally. I don't care if it's a HIPAA issue or not. That's that. Someone should find that out.
Tucker Well, Hitchbot doesn't exist. I mean, when they're when they're forcing you to declare your vax status to use businesses or travel, clearly it doesn't mean anything, right? There's no medical privacy.
Jeffrey Sachs Look, and since, the erosion of that privacy, I just want to encourage everyone to use cash yet as well. Don't don't go to these. You know, I anyone that says that goes to these these woke coffee shops and they say we don't accept cash anymore. Look on the front of a dollar bill. It says this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private. No one has the ability to deny you using cash. So leave them the right change on the table and tell them to have a nice day. They cannot make you pay with a credit card. That's that is that is actually insurrectionist. If these businesses are denying you the ability to use legal tender of the United States government, I had never.
Tucker Thought of that. Has anyone tried that?
Jeffrey Sachs Oh, yeah. I make an issue of it all the time. Much to my kids embarrassment. But yeah, I'm a big I have cash is freedom, but the amount of data that is collected on you everywhere. You want to buy gas? Buy gas, pay cash. Whatever. But the the what? What do we we see in China? Where they really don't accept cash anymore, and it's become the ultimate surveillance state. That's where we're heading. Unless free people unite and resist that kind of totalitarian impulse of big government, big tech working together in China that you have to pay with, with a WeChat app. So you do your banking through that. You acquire tickets for a bus, an airplane, a train through that you pay road tolls through that, everything is through this app controlled by the state. And so before they even go to a central bank digital currency, they literally have you by the balls and they can.
Tucker See material at that point instantly.
Jeffrey Sachs Right. Correct. And so we did this as because for free people to be able to live in a free society, they have to communicate. They have to be able to hold and store data, and, and be able to gather that data without someone else filtering it through an app store that the bad guys control, that the that the big government guys control. You know the where do.
Tucker You get cash.
Jeffrey Sachs From bank?
Tucker Should you? It sounds like a stupid question, but there seem to be fewer ATMs. I don't think it's my imagination. In fact, it's not sure. Yeah. They don't want you to use.
Jeffrey Sachs There's a de-emphasis on.
Tucker Cash, right?
Jeffrey Sachs So if she goes freedom.
Tucker I could not agree with you more. And there's something kind of old school and cool about it anyway.
Jeffrey Sachs But I used to remember my dad having $500 bills.
Tucker Yeah. Why don't we have those anymore?
Jeffrey Sachs Or on drugs? Really? Yeah. That would be a great thing for the next president of United States.
Tucker What does that mean? War on drugs. They just.
Jeffrey Sachs They stopped the war on cash to to cut out illegal activity that was paid for in cash. William McKinley is on the $500 bill. I think they should bring it back and put Donald J. Trump on it. Can you imagine the heads exploding? Yeah, that'd be pretty wild. But, you know, so much of this explosion of government, perpetual wars and perpetual government stupidity comes back to very unsound money. And when we went off the gold standard. When Nixon did. How is it done? Was it a vote through Congress? No. Was it debated? It was an executive order. Which means you can go back on with executive order as well.
Tucker Where are you on gold?
Jeffrey Sachs I'm very pro gold. It is for millennia been a store of value. And I'd say, digital blockchain currencies. Also interesting. It's hard. Look, anything is of value if someone recognizes it as a medium of exchange rate, right? I mean, there was a there was a tulip inflation in the Netherlands in, like, I 500 years ago. Yes, but tulips were currency tulip bulbs. So lots of things can become, if things need.
Tucker Currency ever created.
Jeffrey Sachs If things get really scary. Ammunition will be currency. Yes. Always has been.
Tucker Yes, I've had that thought personally.
Jeffrey Sachs You know, you're storing up ammunition.
Tucker Dogs have a lot of dogs, too. So I feel like dogs will be more valuable at some point. But, so. So are you a goal buyer without getting too specific about it?
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah. But I mean, for heaven's sakes, started a company which took, not one, but two multitrillion dollar companies because, you know, that was a dumb, crazy idea. You know, three and a half years ago. So that's that's I've been investing in this capability for people to communicate securely and freely. And I hope it works. What are the. And it will never be a public company. We've taken no institutional money. It will be a private company not subject to the SEC and all the other nonsense. It's not even an it's not even an American registered company, because I didn't want the U.S. government to be able to shut it down.
Tucker Yeah. It's interesting again. We haven't done, had a conversation really, about your personal story, which is one of the most amazing personal stories of anyone I've ever met. But, among the many twists and turns and ironies of your life is that someone is patriotic, as you was basically at one point forced to flee to a foreign country.
Jeffrey Sachs Well, I didn't flee. I went there for a job opportunity, but I'd been, attacked unbelievably.
Tucker So I remember talking to you in jail.
Jeffrey Sachs I remember every federal agency in the world was coming after us. And I paid a bit about $2.5 million a month for two years straight in legal fees. I paid the highest per capita fine in State Department history, as the only federal agency that actually stuck us with something because we had no means to contest it, because they at that point, we were working for the State Department doing diplomatic security, protecting Americans, something we did more than 100,000 times. With no State Department or U.S. official ever killed or injured on our watch. And sometimes the State Department would be demanding, I need 50 more men here. I need 30 more men there. Go immediately. But another part of the State Department, the licensing department of the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, moving at the speed of a at the speed of peacetime would be slow rolling on the licenses. The export license for like body armor or helmets, right. Or guns used by our people working for the State Department. And yeah, I'm not going to send a guy naked to a war zone. So we'd send stuff to do that mission for the State Department in Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever. And so, yeah, that was what they had us over the barrel. So they find me $42 million for that. Did you pay? Had to. Yeah. Hillary Clinton.
Tucker Why didn't she like you?
Jeffrey Sachs I don't know.
Tucker Didn't like your vibe, I guess, but.
Jeffrey Sachs Not that so much.
Tucker She doesn't fly, coach. Once again, where where do people watching get that?
Jeffrey Sachs So I've been very active in the media, but they can go to unplugged.com/tucker.
Tucker Simply been very active in the media. In other words, you're out there talking about.
Jeffrey Sachs Yeah, I'm for for lack of a better spokesman. I'm kind of it for now, but we're, we're looking for more, if you'd like to be. But, yeah, no people can order and they'll get it, within, 36 hours usually.
Tucker How hard is it to operate?
Jeffrey Sachs It's very simple. Look. So it's it's based on the Android kernel. So anybody any of the apps built for Android? Almost 95% of them work on, on this phone, but they look a little different because they're not blasting all the personal ads at you. Right. For using the app. So again, it's a way for people to be in the world digitally, but not of the world, and not have all your stuff collected, stored and disseminated to all kinds of people that hate you.
Tucker Oh yeah. And then it's available, of course, to the US government, which.
Jeffrey Sachs And and another important feature which I think you appreciate on our messenger. We even have a dump feature. So if you're using unplug messenger and someone comes and says, Tucker, give me your phone, I'm here to inspect it. And you say, sure, officer. And you unlock it with a certain code when you hand it to them. It's a brick. It's a paperweight because it wipes. It's an auto dump feature which wipes the messages. Or it can even dump the entire phone dump as in zero without hard factory reset. Unrecoverable if you.
Tucker Seriously?
Jeffrey Sachs Yep.
Tucker So you're traveling through a foreign airport, which is where there's no airports. This happen? Yeah. And you can. Yep. Erase the phone.
Jeffrey Sachs Instantly.
Tucker So one of the reasons that I really passionately dislike, Apple and Google is because they'll take your communications and give them the government without telling you. Yes.
Jeffrey Sachs In fact, under this FISA bill just passed. They're not even allowed to tell you. That your stuff has been accessed by this random federal agency or whatever. So it's just, it is a Big Brother expansion bill is what that was. So in this, I mean, luck or timing or, I don't know, anticipating where the problem is going to be started this journey three years ago. We're now here. It's not it's not hypothetical anymore. These are available. And, we've just shipped, I mean, 500 of them, and there's a few.
Tucker See this in civil suits, too? Not that I'm speaking from experience, but, you know, the people who oppose you can wind up with all your text messages, and then it's a it's a short trip from there to, say, The New York Times.
Jeffrey Sachs Exactly. In a text with a context is a pretext for trouble.
Tucker Oh, I love that. A text without a context is a pretext for trouble. Yeah, luckily my case. I wasn't really doing anything wrong other than using naughty language, but.
Jeffrey Sachs All the better to have a burn time and all those messages so it's not looked at a year or five years later, like with some completely.
Tucker Different groups that because. Right.
Jeffrey Sachs And so and again nothing is it's, it's either on your device if you send me a message, it's on this device or your device, and we can set a burn time where it's gone unrecoverable, but they.
Tucker Can never come to you and say, as the owner and spokesman for unplug, we want the text messages for so-and-so.
Jeffrey Sachs We got nothing, man. We store nothing. It's stored on your device or this device, and you can say, Where is Apple?
Tucker If I use iMessage, which I did correct.
Jeffrey Sachs And you can set a burn time on this where it disappears and it's gone here.
Tucker So if I'm this is my grubby iPhone, if I'm but if I'm, if I'm texting on iMessage and they're.
Jeffrey Sachs Storing all of it.
Tucker Yeah. I got 59 text messages while we were talking this morning.
Jeffrey Sachs That's why you're so slow to respond to the text. This text, you're deluged.
Tucker Well, it's also my birthday, so lots of people are texting me. But anyway, the point is, and I don't have any unauthorized birthday messages, but. But that's a lot. I mean, people conduct their own speak for myself. I conduct my life through text message. Exactly. Apple has all of that.
Jeffrey Sachs For all eternity.
Tucker And they will happily give that to the government without question.
Jeffrey Sachs And now they're compelled to turn it over without even a warrant. Or probable cause. So again, if people are sick of that.
Tucker So users of unplugged are protected for the invulnerable there's no that can be.
Jeffrey Sachs Unplugged. If you send a regular text an unplugged. It was going to pass through a phone carrier, right? They'll have that message. But if you send a message on unplug messenger. Yeah. God, you can set a burn time on it and it's gone and unrecoverable, not stored by us or anybody else.
Tucker That seems like freedom to me.
Jeffrey Sachs I will always choose freedom.
Tucker Amen.
Jeffrey Sachs And fight like crazy for us.
Tucker So let me just end this with, kind of an apology for interrupting you in the middle of one of the most interesting things you were saying. So I said, name three places that Americans are not paying attention to. Since you are, I don't want to violate your privacy by saying where you are, but I just happened to know that you're like, you're in places. I can't even find them on a map. And I'm pretty good at geography. So I think you are the person to ask, what are three places that we're not paying attention to that we ought to be in the I interrupt you after the first one, because was so interesting. And you said Mexico.
Jeffrey Sachs Mexico, fentanyl. The CCP very much promoting. So Amlo is a super socialist president there now.
Tucker Yeah.
Jeffrey Sachs There's a even worse leftist female about to take over an absolute leftist female.
Tucker Look how you describe her.
Jeffrey Sachs She's a she's very much a Marxist protege. So she.
Tucker Has. No she's a leftist female for sure.
Jeffrey Sachs With active programs by the CCP to support the most leftist candidates there. In Mexico. That's a problem. It's become more and more of a narco state with with cartels having very significant influence, if not control, locally or regionally throughout the, throughout the country. And that's literally our southern border. And, and in the Amlo government, actively promoting, and cooperating with that kind of CCP nonsense. Positive note. Just a right wing guy elected in Panama who says he's going to shut the Darien Gap, which is the area that moves all kinds of people. Now. You you asked for three. I might give you a couple more than three, if you please do. The active spend of NGOs that the US government funds, which enables mass migration into Latin America to walk north, to invade across our southern border, is massive and disgusting and illegal and wrong. I was just I remember, three months ago, I was contacted by an NGO in Haiti asking if I could organize an aircraft to fly from port au Prince to Managua daily. I said, why on earth would you want to do that? They said, well, can Haitians can fly to Nicaragua visa free? I said, I know why. It's to facilitate Haitians coming to Nicaragua and then walking north to facilitate illegal migration.
Tucker We have a Haitian shortage here.
Jeffrey Sachs I don't think so. No. And there is a. A massive network of those NGOs, and some of those guys are making the CEOs of these things are making $1 million a year, taking U.S. taxpayer money, facilitating the maneuver entrance, of illegal migrants into the United States, funded by the US taxpayers. It's disgusting. And if Republicans actually have the power of the purse, this needs to stop in the fact that they don't means we have a unit party problem. So we probably need a melee type solution of a complete change in parties to to fix this.
Tucker I agree completely, but you do sort of wonder, since there's no economic justification for this level, millions of uneducated people from the poorest countries of the world coming to your country. There's no especially with I like there are no jobs for these people there just.
Jeffrey Sachs But just the fact that the Democrats were actively seeking to register them as voters and to make it possible to vote, you know exactly what they're doing. They're trying to stack the deck.
Tucker But, I mean, you've been around wars your whole life. Like you tell me if you've got the mass movement of young, of military age males into a country, some of them with prison records, like, what are you looking at here? Yeah. Like, does that make you nervous at all?
Jeffrey Sachs Sure. But I also know. Cannon fodder doesn't do very well against a sophisticated capability. Yeah. And and the fact is, the people that actually did the fighting and the dying in the hard combat, in the last 20 years, they don't agree to that kind of nonsense because they've laid their lives and their brothers and their health on the line for America for a long time. And they're not going to sit quietly about that nonsense.
Tucker I mean, so but there's already an effort in the Congress to make illegal aliens citizens if they serve in the U.S. military.
Jeffrey Sachs I'm not opposed to a longer term Legionnaire type program. If someone comes here and actually serves and with the obviously very, very strict performance guidelines. I mean, we're not don't hire a guy to be a truck driver in the in the Army and get US citizenship. No. But, I'm not so opposed to that, but but all the other stuff they want to do around voting and driver's licenses and all that stuff, there's a lot of actions that the next administration could take to make it very difficult for those illegals to remain here by debunking and platforming them. What the left have been doing to people like us for the last 20 years.
Tucker Here.
Jeffrey Sachs To make that difficult. Okay, so Latin America, big problem in Guyana country most people haven't heard about is that where Jim Jones served Kool-Aid? Made the largest energy discovery in the in this hemisphere in the last 50 years. So it's enormous. And Venezuela has been, now declared that 70% of Guyana's territory is theirs. Dusting off a 130 year old border dispute. And I think you're going to see Venezuela annex or seize that, with largely impunity, in the coming months or years, certainly, if the if the Democrat administration continues, they'll take it because there's no consequences for it. And they so you really seeing a a complete collapse, a erasure of the Monroe Doctrine, this idea that what happens to the Western Hemisphere is America's business and not the business of Russia and China. The collapse of credibility of France and of the United States in Africa is now, it really accelerating the the jihad problem that was persistent in Mali and Burkina Faso and Niger? And why do these countries matter? Huge gold, huge uranium, other minerals there. And now Chad, Sudan, the US had two big bases in Niger and they were just pushed out, cost a billion plus easily, bigger bases, drone bases that were trying to do cwrt support. All across Africa, pushed out by a collapse of credibility, by the US, by the French. And the Russians have pushed in and the Russians are using a, a Wagner capability, a hybrid private military company type capability to enable the expansion of military capability in those countries, while at the same time a voracious appetite for gold and other minerals, uranium of high value there. And so you're seeing to me it's a it's a resort. It's a, it's a reversion to the norm of what you saw in the 1600s.
Tucker In that exact same thing as the dollar declines, of course, gold becomes more important.
Jeffrey Sachs Who was the person who saved the world.
Jeffrey Sachs Whose name? Nobody knows. And I'm pretty sure I have the name right. Was a party official that had a higher rank than the, the ship's captain.
Jeffrey Sachs And said, I don't think.
Jeffrey Sachs That's a good idea. I think we should surface. And he countermanded the order at the last moment.
Jeffrey Sachs And the ship surfaced and.
Jeffrey Sachs They found out there was no war and no.
Jeffrey Sachs Crisis. And that was.
Jeffrey Sachs The end of it. And we came within a moment of a full nuclear annihilation. Now. That is true.
Jeffrey Sachs Story. If people want to read about it in detail. The most remarkable book about.
Jeffrey Sachs This is a book.
Jeffrey Sachs By the late historian Martin Sherwin called Gambling with Armageddon.
Jeffrey Sachs Which is a absolutely.
Jeffrey Sachs Phenomenal work. And Martin Sherwin, some people may recall.
Jeffrey Sachs Is the historian.
Jeffrey Sachs Who's the coauthor of Oppenheimer, which became the yes, the.
Jeffrey Sachs Screenplay. He's a wonderful historian. Who died a. Few years ago. And he tells this story in unbelievable, riveting detail. Now. I take this not only. As a literal event. But as a metaphor for our reality. Which is something can always go wrong. Stay away from the cliff. Exactly. And stay away from the cliff. This is how close we are. talk to President Putin. Negotiate with China.
Jeffrey Sachs Make a two state solution to stop. The war in the Middle East.
Jeffrey Sachs Stop carrying on like you run the world because you don't.
Tucker Thank you for this and I hope that you are heard everywhere.
Jeffrey Sachs Well thank you. Thanks for all your great leadership.
Jeffrey Sachs In this, Tucker, because.
Jeffrey Sachs You're playing a huge, huge role.
Tucker Just bumbling along. But that that's the greatest kind of ever heard. So thank you. Thanks for watching. You can go to TuckerCarlson.com for our entire library of everything we've done. And we hope you will.
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