The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Jeffrey Sachs: Economics, Conflict, and Real-World Diplomacy

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

Jeffrey Sachs was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history when he was promoted only a few years after receiving his PhD. And for good reason. He is one of the most remarkable intellects I know. I have always been amazed and the breadth of his reading and knowledge, and when I give him one of my physics books, he reads it in a day, and comes back with great questions. Jeffrey has not been content to stay within the confines of academia, and for 17 years served as a senior advisor to the head of the UN, and has worked, sometimes controversially, with numerous governments to help them out of economic hardships. His interest in world affairs has caused him to write a great deal about power politics, global conflict, and diplomacy, and I wanted to sit down and talk to him about two conflicts about which he has written recently, Ukraine and Gaza. But first, we talked about his own career, his interest in economics, and also his thoughts about the UN, an agency which of late has dropped considerably in my own estimation.I agree strongly with Jeffrey that only diplomatic solutions to military conflicts have any hope of lasting, and that nationalist politics that sustain military adventurism inevitably only causes the people within both warring countries undue hardship. But how to extricate countries from the cycle of violence is a difficult challenge, and Jeffrey doesn’t mince words in that regard. I have to say that I agree with him wholeheartedly about Ukraine. Not as completely on the Middle East, though our disagreements are subtle. We both agree that a two state solution in the middle east is essential, and detest many policies of the current Israeli government, especially on the west bank (although no more than I think we both detest the policies of the terrorist lunatics governing Gaza, who seem intent on inflicting as much or more hardship on their own populace as any external government does, most often to score political points on the world scene) I am less sanguine about the likelihood that UN troops and Arab nations could or would realistically and fairly implement and police such a situation, but I sympathize with his views that the UN may be the last resort. I expect I may read some angry feedback about some of Jeffrey’s suggestions, but once again, reasoned discussion, especially about disagreements, is essential if we are to make progress, in science, and in the real world. As a result I feel particularly lucky to have people like Jeffrey to have such discussions with. I hope you are as stimulated and educated by the discussion as I always am when I talk to him. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I was so excited to finally have on the program, the world-famous economist Jeffrey Sachs. Jeffrey is one of the most amazing intellects I've ever had the privilege to meet, and I've wanted to have him on the program for a long time. I've learned so much from him and been amazed at the breadth of his reading and his ability to understand a wide variety of concepts,

including those from physics when I've given him my own books. He comes back a day later with the moment. most piercing questions. He rose to prominence early on as an economist. In fact, after being at the Harvard Society of Fellows, within three years, he became the youngest tenured professor at Harvard. He moved from Harvard to Columbia, where he became director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and president of the UN Sustainable Network Development Solutions Network. He has advised numerous governments on real-world policies to improve their economic environment to try and address issues of poverty. And he has been, was for 17 years special

advisor to the UN Secretary General. And his relationship with the UN continues in a variety of ways. And that's relatively important. Because beyond discussing his own background and why he got into economics and economics in general, I wanted to discuss two of the most controversial global conflict problems happening in the world today, the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. both of which Jeffrey has written eloquently about. And I'm sure that some of the listeners here will disagree profoundly with some of the things he suggests regarding those conflicts. But his knowledge about the background of those situations is incredibly important.

And I admit that I agree with the general notion that the only way to end conflicts like this is diplomacy, that military solutions inevitably don't work out, that diplomacy is the way out, And of course, Jeffrey has been involved deeply with the UN, adheres to that notion importantly. Now, many people may think that ending the war in Ukraine through diplomatic arrangements with Russia or ending the war in Gaza with diplomatic relations,

which may require compromises, for many people, that may seem like surrender one way or another. But in fact, all of these conflicts can only be solved with win-win solutions and when will when solutions require compromise. I'm sure I'll receive some angry emails for some of the things he proposes, but I found it incredibly enlightening to talk to him, and I think we should have these conversations,

even especially about topics, which some people may disagree about. It's the only way we'll make progress. I think you'll find the discussion with him very interesting and informative. He's a lovely human being, and he's incredibly clear and precise in his language. You can watch the podcast ad-free on our Critical Mass Substack site, and if you subscribe to that site,

you will support the Origins Project Foundation, which produces this podcast, or you can watch it on our YouTube channel or listen to it on any podcast listening site, no matter how you watch it or listen to it. I hope you enjoy and are entertained and probably provoked by this conversation, about this all-important public policy issue today.

With no further ado, Jeffrey Sachs. Well, Jeffrey Sachs, one of my favorite people, and I'm so pleased that we are finally able to come on. I know that your schedule is incredibly busy and that you have to head to Washington, and so we have limited time, but I want to spend a little time talking about you, and then I want to spend time talking about some of your recent writing,

which will allow me to get lost. Lots of hate mail. All right. Well, join the crowd. And Jeffrey, so you are, without a doubt, one of the world's most preeminent economists. You were the one of the, I think at the time, the youngest tenured professor at Harvard in 28. You were 28. We've talked about this before.

We were both in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, you a few years before me. And I moved from the Society to becoming a postdoc. and you almost immediately became a tenured professor because of your activities. But I want to ask you a question. Why did you choose economics? I never asked you that. Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I started traveling abroad.

My family actually took me on a trip in 1970 to the Soviet Union. So that was very eye-opening. Yeah. And, you know, it was to see the other world. And I met a young man in a lobby of a hotel in Moscow who became a pen pal in East Berlin, which was also very interesting. So in 1972, when I graduated high school, I went through Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin across the Berlin wall to visit my pen. pal in East Berlin. And interestingly, at the end of the visit, since I had had to change a certain number of dollars per day into the East German special tourist marks at the time that could only

be used, redeemed in special shops during this communist period. We went to the shop the last day of my visit and there was nothing I was going to carry in my backpack except some books, of course. And so I loaded up with Mark's historical and dialectical materialism and whatever was on the shelf. And of course, it was opened up to this, whoa, this is weird. I never heard about this in high school. Came back to start college, Harvard College. and we were assigned readings for the first week. So I was assigned on top of what I just read about historical and dialectical materialism.

I was assigned the book by Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, which was a great polemical tract written in 1942 by Joseph Schumpeeder, who was an Austrian, a economist and financier who had been a finance minister of Austria just after World War I and then came to teach at Harvard. Well, I read that and I read another book, The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbrai, who was also a Harvard professor and very famous in those years. And so, Lawrence, by the time I arrived at Harvard, I was just all these ideas floating around. I was amazed, dazzled, and I went to economics at 10, economics 10, our introductory lecture, and I was mesmerized. And so basically I fell in love with economics right at the very beginning of university studies. That was 52 years ago.

I never fell out of love with it, actually. I think it was a lucky choice for me. But it started then. It started with the question, how does this world work? Why is there in East Germany? What is socialism? What is capitalism? So big questions, and more than 50 years later, I'm still trying to find the answers.

You, of all the people I know, it seems to me, you were one of the people with the most, with the broadest interests and also an intellect that's capable of assimilating material in a wide variety of areas. I'm a, I'm we shocked by that. So I wondered whether earlier on, I mean, you must have had so many interests when you younger. and I know we've talked science. Did you ever consider science or did you ever, you know, I'm sure you were, I think we shared this. I mean, when you were young, you were probably reading everything, right? I assume you. Yeah, you know, I think I kind of assumed I would do something in politics from high school.

My dad was a constitutional lawyer and labor lawyer. And so I grew up in a political milieu and civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War, the late 1960s. So I liked politics. In high school, I did a little project using some journal article to learn how to do, actually was to place the justices of the Michigan Supreme Court on a left-right spectrum. So by hand, I did kind of my first little bit of econometrics. So I love the idea from the first days that you could combine mathematics and politics. That to my mind was absolutely fantastic. My high school science wasn't great.

If it had been, maybe I would have gone in a different direction. So I got to college loving math and loving the idea of politics. the idea of politics and being mesmerized about the idea that you could put the two together. Okay. So that's, and did you have good math teachers, by the way? Did you? I had pretty good math teachers in high school. And then I always love math and had good math courses at Harvard. And so that was the combo that was kind of my science. It was kind of the science of politics that interested me. And economics seemed to be really that. And when I first learned macroeconomics, again, now it's 51 years ago, oh my God, I love the idea you could turn

dials and pull levers and manage an economy. You know, how cool is that? And John Maynard Keynes, who I learned about first in introductory economics. economics said that. And then there were systems and equations and oh my God, it just seemed like a world, a magical world. And you still feel that. So you don't think it's a dismal science 50 years later. Well, there are parts of it that are very dismal, parts of it that are very dumb. I'm writing my little polemical tract right now about how to fix some of the basic ideas. So there are parts that that I still love, but I love the inquiry of it, and I find it still very helpful because the world's diverse. We do not share a common understanding in different parts of the world. And I think that

the questions that economics raises, if asked properly and viewed properly, are helpful to figure out what we're going to do on this planet. Okay, yeah. And so I think, I mean, what I hope people will get, and I've always gotten from you, is this incredible inquisitiveness, curiosity, asking questions and exciting, and the excitement of learning, of learning in general,

which is kind of interesting for someone who's actually involved as you are in the practical world. As an economist, you're not just a, you're not a ivory tower scholar. You've been involved intimately in real world problems. which are much more messy than standard academic problems. Yeah, and what I found a couple of things about that. One is that if you're trying to solve a real world problem, and I got lucky early on in,

lucky and I wanted to do that, but I got lucky in having some opportunities, then you find out your narrow disciplinary knowledge is just not going to help you to succeed. Enough. You just need to know things that you weren't taught. And so you better find them out. And I don't like to be in a room when I don't know at least as much as what other people are talking about, about something that I'm supposed to know about.

So I've worked hard to try to know, anticipate, understand, and be able to be able to ask questions and not be a dummy about it. So that is really part of it. If you're working on real problems, you don't get to choose what you need to know. It's all interconnected. And the more that I worked on those, the more that I realized you just have to go that way.

The second thing is it's, on the one hand, a little frustrating, but on the other hand, it's a reality. I'd say every day I learn something that I say to myself, oh my God, how did I not realize that? Or why didn't anybody tell me that? Or how did I not know that fairly basic stuff, by the way? And it's very annoying because I've kind of walked around my whole life, a relative said to me, this was literally 52 years ago. Why do you always have a book in your hand? My tendency is always wherever I'm walking. I want a book. Now it can be on the phone on the Kindle, but I want to read. So I've been reading all my life. And then I read something every day and saying, God, how did I not know that? That's ridiculous. And so that's

another piece of this thing, which is it's frustrating, you know, that you reach this age. I'd like to be able to say, well, I learned all that I need to know. Now I'm going to tell you or teach you, but I don't. Well, it's life long learning. I think, I mean, it's interesting you say that because the real world has forced you to learn things you didn't want, didn't think you needed to know or didn't even know you needed to know. It's true, though, in research. I mean, as a physicist, I've said on this program elsewhere, I learned much more physics after my PhD than before. In the process of research, what you learn is what you have to learn in order to solve a problem. And it's maybe nothing that you ever thought you'd have to learn. And you

also learn that you don't have to know everything to solve something. Yes. That's probably the hardest problem to overcome. But I always think in physics, there are few key results or equations. Of course, then applying them requires an incredible amount of ingenuity. But it seems of course harder, but also simpler. Yeah, it is simpler. It's simpler than, it's simpler than. Nature has organized things with some grand equations. Well, that's why, you know, I keep saying people, physics is simpler.

It is. It's much, you do physics and deal with things especially related to human behavior, which is in some ways economics, which is not just, as you point out, just not just mathematics, but politics. you before we get i want to talk in the in the in the bulk of this in some recent forays into politics of yours which are which many people may find quite controversial um uh or disagree with which is fine but before i do the the there's two things about your general career that that i want to at least confront you with one is okay so you have been involved in real you know talk about macroeconomics

and you are mr macroeconomics you've been involved in actually minute doing what you learned you could do in class, namely manipulating economies by twisting dials in Bolivia, Poland, the USSR, you've been directly involved with those governments, especially as in the case of Poland, the USSR, as they came out of communism. And by the way, I visited Moscow in 1967, had a very similar experience to you. So I won't know. Oh, very good. But, and Bolivia as well. Around the same time. Yeah, exactly. You and I have had a, yeah, anyway, it doesn't matter. but Bolivia, Poland, USSR, involved in what some people would call shock therapy,

I think it's been called shock therapy, dealing with how to move from that system to capitalism. And it's been successful in a number of cases in vastly reducing inflation, Bolivia in particular, but some people would say it's done that at the expense of many people. In the process, of course, part of this is saying, inefficient industries have to be you know have to ultimately go by the wayside if you if you want an efficient economy and that's been useful for the country but of course some people who were involved

in those inefficient um industries and then are out on the street uh suffer so how would you respond to that well i i think the main thing is uh each uh historical crisis is distinct so uh i i found i I learned a lot about the media and about public ideas and so forth through these experiences because nothing is like what's said. Partly, by the way, by design, because there's great returns in having a narrative be the dominant narrative. So our governments manipulate information or how things are told, partly because, because in a complex world, things get described in a very simplistic way, necessarily, perhaps,

but they have nothing to do with reality. So Napoleon said that history is a fable that is often told. So it's a pretty good definition, which is don't believe the simplicity is that one hears. But in general, cases like the ones that I've been involved in have had very different economic, political, financial, cultural realities. And they've been complex, but they don't come loosely labeled and they're not single events. So just to give an example, in Bolivia, which was. was my first foray into this.

Bolivia had a hyperinflation. It had a hyperinflation, meaning that the inflation rate at the time that I was asked for help had been 24,000% over the previous 12 months. This is a very rare phenomenon. It means a collapse of government, which had happened in Bolivia. There had been a dictatorship,

and then a failed attempt at democratization, and then essentially a dozen governments, coup at narco state, there were many. It was pretty complicated. I arrived when a new government had come in on an election, but this was very fraught, but it happens that hyperinflation is a rather specific kind of phenomenon, very rare,

but it's like a disease where, you know pretty much what the proximate causes and you know pretty much what the proximate solution is. And that's the most applicable case of shock therapy a term that I find stupid and simplistic but frequently used, where you can stop the hyperinflation immediately, basically. So it's not a long dragged out process. You don't go from 24,000 percent to 15,000 percent to 10,000 percent to 5,000. You go from 24,000 percent to price stability if you do that right. And that's pretty much known and shown from history. And that, interestingly, is mostly turning dials, actually. You do that at the finance ministry and the central bank, basically. So I, you know, advised essentially on what to do.

They did it. And, oh my God, the inflation stopped. And so you watch this, yeah, you watch this like, you know, putting two drops of something into the test tube and it changes color. And oh my God, it's just like they said. And so that was, that was pretty amazing. Now, I always said, and it was this maybe stupid expression, but the thing that I said at the beginning, you know, if you, I said to the government, if you do

everything right, if you're bold, if you're brave, you can turn an impoverished, broken country with a hyperinflation into an impoverished broken country with stable prices. So, you know, because the idea is that there is a symptom, which is a runaway fever or a hyperinflation, But it also has deeper social, geopolitical, political, economic, structural reasons. And you could end the hyperinflation, which you have to do because otherwise it's nuts. But you can end the hyperinflation, but you don't end any of those longer term things. You just have the ability to survive to start rebuilding the basics of society, of economy, of government, and so forth. So you don't get a miracle out of it,

but you end the hyperinflation. I knew that much. And the rest wasn't in my bailiwick at that point. There were years and years and years that followed. Now, by the time, based on that work, I became known because I was a young economist. And then other governments said, hey, help us do that, you know, cancel our debts or do that.

So I ended up within four years of that gig, advising the post-communist transition in Eastern Europe, in Poland in particular. That also had so much context to it that it would take us, I mean, it's fascinating, but maybe not for every listener. But anyway, it would take days to really describe what it meant for a society that, been behind the Iron Curtain for 45 years, that even beforehand, Poland was very complicated, new country reborn after World War I because it had been parceled out among the empires from the 1700s to 1919. So this was a very complicated geopolitics. I understood a bit more than I did in 1985 because now I had a broader context. Okay, I could help you with your hyperinflation. I know about your debt. And I also know a little bit more about the world than I did because of 1985.

And the State Department and the Treasury and the White House know me now because of that so I can help make some connections. I wrote a plan for them. It was literally an all-nighter, which was one good experience from my Harvard days. It was literally from, because one of the leaders of the post-communist movement said, we need a plan. And I said, I'll go home from Warsaw and I'll send you something in a couple weeks. He said, I need it in the morning. So what do you mean? I need it tomorrow morning. Are you kidding? No, I need it tomorrow morning. So we went to a, we went to a nursery school that had been converted to be the newsroom for the first post-communist newspaper, the Gazeta v. Borgia. And over the sink was a plank of wood, on top of which was an IBM, an IBM first generation

desktop. And I typed at night from midnight to 6 a.m., the first ever plan to convert a socialist economy to a market economy. And I still have that. memo because a colleague located it in the rummage decade a couple of decades later. So it actually had a lot of clever ideas in it and it became the basis of Poland's transformation efforts. Then a couple of years later, oh my God, you know, even Gorbachev's team said, okay, we watched what happened in Poland to work pretty well to help us. Now, This was really my first foray into the core of geopolitics. Because even with Poland, it was geopolitics was easy.

You're on our side. This is the U.S. So everything I suggested, actually the White House said, okay, okay. It was weird, but I raised a billion dollars one day for Poland from 9 a.m. in the morning to 5 p.m. in the afternoon because I suggested that Poland needed a billion dollars to stabilize its currency and the White House approved it within eight hours. And so when I got to the Soviet case, I didn't realize that I was doing economics, but Cheney and Wolfowitz and others in the Bush Defense Department were doing geopolitics of a sort not to my liking, which was, they're the enemy.

What the hell are you talking about, you know, reforming them or restoring them or solving their financial issues? They're the enemy. I didn't understand that for decades afterwards in some sense, because I gave good advice, but it was rejected out of hand, especially a lot of my advice. was what I had learned from John Maynard Keynes, which was don't lean on a defeated bankrupt country. In the case that Keynes was talking about in 1919, it was the defeated German state. He said, worse, we'll come back to haunt you, so you should make a financial settlement that is sane that doesn't lead to a huge backlash.

And Keynes famously predicted if we have these war reparations after World War I, which was imposed by the Versailles Treaty, will have the specter of war haunting us soon enough. So my advice was help the Soviet Union bail them out. And the idea of the cold warriors who would soon become called the neocons, bail them out. Hell no, we got them just where we want. We won. They're on their knees. You know, if we can knock them lower, we're going to do that. So this was a different experience.

And truly, I didn't understand it at the time because I kept saying, you know, I gave advice in Poland and within eight hours it was accepted. And here, everything I'm saying is rejected. And I don't really understand that. So I took a lot of shit afterwards for things that were the opposite. of what I said. The U.S. government did not really have the great motive to say, you know, Sachs was right, but we were doing something different. So I got, you know, caught in a kind of narrative. And I would say, by the way, on the left, a kind of very naive narrative, blame the economics, don't blame the geopolitics. But this was already a geopolitical.

game from 1992 onward. And it's the game that we're in right now. And it's a game in the strategic sense that the word game is used. It's, it's not a game in the sense that we use it in daily life. There's no game about it. People are dying. We have a war raging. But it's about geopolitics. Well, we'll get to geopolitics. We'll get to a few of the recent geopolitics. Thanks. That's an interesting, you know, in a brief time. summary of what I would like to spend hours with you on it sometime. But let me ask you the other sort of confront, I don't plan to confront you,

but the other question, which, so okay, the other thing is you've been involved as a, as a special advisor of the UN, the Secretary General of the UN for like 20 years. Yeah. Why the UN? I mean, the UN seems to me to be fraught with problems.

And I'm not sure it's the best organization to help. So I've become more, more, despairing about that over the last, say, five years. And so I want to ask you, why do you have faith in the UN? Well, it's the best we have. You know, I'm a big believer that because we're interconnected so profoundly across the world in our fate, whether it is environment, climate, nuclear war, pandemic, you name it, you know, national borders are not so meaningful as sometimes we think,

but we got organized in a world of nation states, one that was largely built by European imperial powers in the 19th and 20th century. I believe we need global government, not as a sole government, obviously, but as a way to solve global problems. And this is an idea that is essentially one century old. You know, we never had a, we never had global institutions until the middle of the 19th century, starting with the telegraph and postal union and the beginnings of global pandemic preparedness, we'd say now, but it was for infectious disease. That was the beginning in the 1850.

under European imperial domination and control. But even then, that wasn't really global government in any way. Then after World War I, the idea was to create a league of nations. And that got started by the British and the US in 19, 2021. But the US decided not to join. So it was kind of stillborn. and it didn't prevent World War II, obviously. Then in the middle of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt, who's my favorite all-time president,

said we need to try again with another organization. This time it ended not in Geneva, but on the East River, the United Nations. And it was born in 1945. It is only the second attempt in all of human history to have a universal body to address global scale issues. It's filled with problems. And one of the big problems is it was designed in a two-tiered way. Five countries were given preeminence that you can't do anything binding without their unanimous agreement and that is the u.s and it was originally the soviet union china which was

originally the nationalist china and britain and france so five powers which we now call the p5 or the permanent five members of the security council can veto anything that is binding and can block any change in the charter itself that is the constitution of the UN. And then at the same time, it's also a universal body, but it has a single chamber, a little bit like the Senate in that each state in the U.S. gets two votes, but in the U.N., each country gets one vote. And that's true whether you're Nauru, which is the smallest population of the 193 with 12,000

people or China or now actually yeah I should say up to date India which is now the most populous country both China and India 1.4 billion people so they each get one vote now this also has its problem obviously in terms of is that the right mode of representation of people around the world so I've been donating I'd say most of my time in the last 25 years to the UN. I am fully aware of all of the difficulties, contradictions and so on. But I love the idea that 8 billion people through 193 representative national governments talk to each other at least. I love the idea of the UN to the UN, Security Council and I testified a couple of times in the UN Security Council in the last two years.

And I love the idea that in a civilized way, no one shooting at each other in the room, you know, except through their verbal statements, they're actually talking. Does it work great? No, obviously, it does not work great. Could it be reformed? Absolutely. Again, we could have days of discussion of what to do. But what else are we going to do? But to try to make it work and to understand that it's only the second attempt in the 300,000 years of our species to actually have global governance. Yeah.

And okay, well, that's, I suppose, puts it in perspective and explains why it's, why maybe new forms are required at some point. But you might say it's like democracy, the worst form of government, except for the rest. But it also needs to be fixed. And this is part of the job of the 21st century. I'm itching to get to recent affairs, but I can't resist maybe because of my train with No Jomsky early on. When you say, okay, Roosevelt, I mean, given the makeup, especially the P5, would you not say that the desire was not to have a world government, but to divvy up the world for U.S. and for major power control? And, and, and, and, you know,

UN was a sort of a legitimizing force to allow the U.S. to appear to have international goals when really it was trying to control its hegemony. I'm going to be the devil's advocate and say that. No, I think at the time, Roosevelt, by the way, was really unusual in American leaders. He really was actually an anti-imperialist, and he really believed in economic rights. and he believed in human rights, and he was really an extraordinarily decent, unbelievably shrewd and effective and clever politician. So I really like him from everything I've studied over the last 50 years, I like him. Complicated personality also, by the way, but I like him a lot. And I don't think that it was it was not to divvy up the world.

He was no fan of the British Empire, which was the dominant empire up until the end of World War II. The United States became the dominant empire afterwards. But at a practical level, it definitely, it was not actually to give control to the five. It was to give control to the one. The United States was going to largely run the show. Exactly. Yes. But had it been Roosevelt, it actually would have.

have run the show in a quite decent way. It would have decolonized the world, it would have made for good neighbors in Latin America, would have done things that Roosevelt truly believed in. He submitted in 1944 to the U.S. Congress an economic bill of rights. His wife, after Roosevelt's death, Eleanor Roosevelt, presided over the promulgation and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That was not a game. That was not a PR. stunt, that was a very deeply moving, important step in our global evolution as humanity to say that there are basic rights for all people as individuals around the world and their human dignity. So now, has the UN served all these high purposes?

Not quite. But at the same time, the bodies that are. that have been created by the UN, UNESCO for education, science and culture, for ITU, for international telecommunications, WHO for the World Health Organization, and many, many others are actually led, you know, people say by international bureaucrats, but they're led by people who really believe

in the international mission. They're multi-cultural, multinational, and above any other institution I know, they take a global perspective, which is very hard because if you're in the U.S., you're almost bound, compelled to take a national perspective. Even if you're in a university, our universities are funded by the Defense Department. They're funded by the State Department. They're funded by government grants. My colleagues are often aghast at what I say because I don't take the U.S. government line. Partly, I'm not dependent on it, thank God. But, you know, I find in the U.N., the ethos really is different because people come from different countries.

Now, the U.S. still, you know, has its hand on things through its share of the budget and so forth. but truly among all of our imperfect institutions, if you want to hear an international point of view, not just a national government point of view, the UN is you're going to hear it much more in the UN than typically you'd even hear in an East Coast University of the United States. Okay, absolutely. No doubt about that.

The universities are, yeah, are not, yeah, okay, we won't get into that. But, and so this is a great segue, because people might imagine based on your comments about Roosevelt and the fact that you have been a quote unquote insider in many ways that you cue the insider line. And we're going to spend the next few minutes and not anywhere near as much as I'd like making it clear that you're not. We're going to talk about, I looked just at random at nine pieces you've written and we won't get through all nine, unfortunately. but they deal with Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, the CIA, U.S. foreign policy, in a way which in almost every way radically differs from the party line of what you'd hear in either mainstream media or in the U.S. government or in many other places. So let's talk about some things. and as I say, people should be prepared for arguments and discussions that are going to upset a lot of people,

but it's important to have them. And I'm always impressed that you have the courage to state them. The first one is a framework, one you wrote in November 30th, early on, relatively early on after October 7th, a framework for peace in Israel and Palestine, where you argued right off that the only way to end this was to well-competent. Palestine as a U.N. member state. This might shock some people, that the first thing you do after what many people, you would, what many people claim is an unprovoked, or at least certainly an unacceptable and horrific act of terrorism to recognize Palestine as a UN member state.

with pre with pre-1967 borders and and why don't you just spend a few minutes talking about that yeah i think that there are two overarching issues i would say about all of my views one is that any event is not really an event it's part of a dynamic process so you can never say well things started on October 7, Hamas made an attack, or that Putin unprovoked attacked Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. So whenever you see in the media, which you see all the time, unprovoked, it's phony. As a physicist, you would say, you know, the world is governed by dynamical processes. they could have some uncertainties in them in the wave equation or in Newtonian mechanics. We thought we were able to predict everything about the future from knowing the current state.

But in any event, there are dynamics. And that is true. So never look at a snapshot. Always look at the dynamics. The second thing is there are two versions of the world, if I could. simplify a little bit. The United States policy truly is that the U.S. should run the show. This is actually formal doctrine. If you read formal, boring doctrine, like the security strategy or defense strategy of the United States or in the academic world,

the grand strategy in the international relations literature of the United States. is to be the predominant power, or sometimes called the hegemon, or sometimes called the unipolar country. I really disagree with that philosophically because we are 4.1% of the world population. Who the hell gave 4.1% of the world population the right to run the other 95.9% of the world population. That's absurd. So these are the two. predicates of almost everything I do, which is say, what are the dynamics here? So how do you help to move a more complex, multidimensional dynamic system, if you were, if you want to put it that way?

And second, don't take the U.S. line, take a global perspective, take a shared perspective. So when it comes to Israel and Palestine, there are two peoples, millions of each on a common land. There is a long history of controversy about that going back to the Balfour Declaration. There are heated ideological arguments on both sides. There are both sides saying the other doesn't belong here at all. And this is fraught with all of the heat, emotion, deep of religious beliefs and many other things that are part of this conflict. But it also has meant perpetual war and perpetual cycles of war. And it has also meant, in my experience, in my view, tremendous suffering of the Palestinian people

relative to the suffering of the Israeli Jewish people because Israel, quote, won. And it has had the United States at its back. And the Palestinian people have suffered tremendously in this. Since 1967, after the six-day war, Israel has occupied. tied the West Bank and Gaza and part of the Golan Heights and so on. And I first went to Israel in 1972 in about the same, it was the same summer vacation after high school that I visited my East German pen pal. And I went to Israel for the first time.

And I was told a phrase called facts on the ground, that we are going to put settlements into these occupied, conquered lands to make facts on the ground so that we'll always control those places. I was kind of innocent then. I didn't really understand the significance of it, but 52 years later, I mean, I came to understand much sooner than that, that this is going to be a recipe for profound unhappiness, injustice, and violence, and it has been. So I believe that those facts on the ground weren't quite.

so factual or clever as they said there are now hundreds of thousands of uh israeli settlers in the west bank seven hundred yeah and depending on where you draw lines and how you count a couple hundred thousand in uh in east jerusalem in some sense or in the environment of east jerusalem another five hundred thousand away from uh jerusalem but and that has created a lot of zealotry uh as well because a lot of these settlers have a religious deep embedded. Yeah, exactly. And so they believe, well, God gave us this land and it's ours and there's nothing more to say about it.

So to my mind, we've got to end this cycle of violence before it ends up killing everybody, including everybody in an escalating global war. And the way to do it is to divide the territory. according to international law that has been promulgated for the last 57 years since the Six-Day War. And by international law, I mean votes of the UN Security Council principally. Because that has said we need two states. It should be on the borders of the 4th of June, 1967. And it seems to me that this is what bargaining theory calls the focal point for the

bargain. It's the only one that has a plausibility that can actually reach an outcome short of all-out war. And so there are people who say, well, we should have one state, or we should have a binational state, or we should have a democratic state. There are others who say there should be no Israel wipe it off the map. There are those that say there should be no Palestine, wipe it off the map. I believe that the way to get this cycle of extreme violence and cruelty over is to implement international law. And I think it's going to happen, actually, that Palestine will be become the 194th member of the United Nations. The U.S. is going to fight against this. But in the end, I don't think the U.S. can block this from happening. Israel, of course, is aghast at it.

Yeah. But so what? You say Israel is aghast. I think it's important to point out the government of Israel is aghast. Yeah, let me put it that way. I'm not sure the public is. No, right. I agree with you.

I agree completely with you. Now, I want to get to, well, some key points which you make, which I think are interesting, counter the general narrative. But one point I do want to say, people would counter you to say Israel isn't occupying Gaza because Israel moved itself in 2005 or so willingly. And it occupies the West Bank, but not Gaza. Would you at least agree with that or no? No, not at all.

You know, if you have a prison and the guards guard, the inmates going in and out of their cells, but they don't live inside the cells, I would say they're still occupying the prison. And so that's what Gaza is. Let me let your resolution, which you recommended, it has five bits, and I want to go over them briefly. I just wish we had more time.

But anyway, the immediate establishment of Palestine is a 194th U.N. member state with June 4th borders, with capital east Jerusalem, and control over Islamic holy sites. An immediate release of all hostages, permanent ceasefire by all parties, and flow of humanitarian aid under UN supervision. A peacekeeping force in Palestine drawn largely

from Arab nations and operating under the mandate of the UN Security Council, the immediate disarmament and demobilization of Hamas and other militias by the peacekeeping forces as part of the peace. Diplomatic relations established between Israel and all Arab states in conjunction with UN membership in the state of Palestine. Well, that sounds good, but there's a few questions. I mean, how realistic... Again, I'm going to try and take the devil's advocacy, which I may or may not agree with,

but it's worth questioning. in terms of, you know, nowhere there's a statement of guarantee of sort of Israeli security. And some people would argue that, I mean, some of the Israeli people say we cannot stop fighting because the goal is to always destroy Israel. And of course, that's clearly Hamas's goal. How could one be, if one did this, the big problem with this, some people might argue for a ceasefire, is that Hamas and others are going to try and use that to rearm and then attack Israel. And so while this sounds, I agree, it's probably the only plausible long-term solution,

how can you address concerns about security and about the trustworthiness of such an agreement? Well, first of all, agreements always need to be implementable, monitorable, and no agreement is a 100% secure. And by the way, there is no perfect security in this world or in this universe. And so Israel doesn't get perfect security when the rest of us live under insecurity of many kinds. Everybody faces, I think it's the second law of thermodynamics. everybody faces insecurity. We all face entropy. We all face, yes, we all face all of the uncertainties and principles of degradation. You have to keep building in order to keep order. So this is the first point.

The second point is that this is a political process, mostly among nation states, in my opinion, which is we need the major countries to operate responsibly. under the UN Charter. And that means Saudi Arabia needs to sign on. Iran needs to sign on. Egypt needs to sign on. Jordan needs to sign on. UAE needs to sign on.

Qatar needs to sign on. Now, I talk to those diplomats all the time. They will sign on, actually. Iran will sign on. Iran has signed on repeatedly to what's called the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 and to the Arab. Arab Islamic Declaration in Riyadh in November 2023.

Unfortunately, the New York Times doesn't carry these stories, by the way. So if you get your news from the New York Times, you're not getting your news. Listen to Lawrence Krause instead. You'll get much better news. Or Jeffrey Sachs is probably better. But anyway, yeah, no, okay. And one of the things you bring out in that regard,

and by the way, I should say, you're writing, it's really the failure of journalism of late in the last. bunch of mainstream journalism has really been a problem. But again, we don't have time for that. But some people would argue that, and that hardliners, Israel will argue, yeah, peace, but after we destroy Hamas, Hamas is a threat to the Israeli nation. And we'll first, so first destroy Hamas and kill everyone and then negotiate.

Now, I will say that that's kind of a policy that in general hasn't worked. well, I mean, I was sympathetic to it because those people are crazy. But there's two points that one that you haven't raised, the one that occurred to me, is that that was the same argument that we sort of applied in Afghanistan and Iraq. And all it did was result in massive destruction and death of the population and never solved the problem. Iraq and in Afghanistan never solved the problem to claim you're going to destroy the terrorists, then everything will go away.

That's the first question. But the other thing you point out is that Hamas really has never had the capability of destroying the Israeli nation. In fact, killed very few people per year compared to to some extent you would argue Israel attacks on Palestine. So maybe you could comment on both those. Well, just on the second point, the UN data, which I trust, shows that the civil, civilian deaths from Palestinian attacks, civilian Israeli deaths, I should say from Palestinian attacks, averaged six per year between 2007 and 2021. Now, six per year, you could say is sad, but unfortunately in my neighborhood in New York, it's a greater number, no doubt. You know, we

have shootings on both ends of our block, stabbings, other things. come on real life let's get real. Hamas does not have an air force. Hamas does not have tanks. Hamas does not have anything that truly threatens Israel. Do I believe in manning a border with Gaza? Yes, I do. Do I think that Israel let its guard down on October 7? Absolutely. So, but does Hamas? Mast threaten Israel? No. By the way, does Iran threaten Israel? Yes. Of course it does. That's true of countries around the world. We're all threatened. We have nuclear-armed countries. Iran's not nuclear-armed. It could be at some point. It could be because we may let them. Yeah.

There's no security in that way other than diplomacy. The idea that you eradicate all your foes is some kind of. of a comic book description of the world, which is, yeah, in fact, it does not exist. It does not exist. And one of your wonderful articles is diplomacy is the only way to solve problems. And it's sort of out of the, you point out, there's diplomacy has disappeared when comes to U.S. Russia relations, U.S. China relations. And, you know, I was just, I was just actually listening and I'm going to have a podcast with someone who involved in supercommunication, who points out that negotiations, something that doesn't,

certainly one of the people, at least, and maybe both people who are running for president, don't seem to get. That negotiations, in the end, have to be win-win. They can't be win-lose. That you don't go to a negotiation to get what you want

and the other person loses everything. It never works. It never works. You know, one of the great lines of the late Shimon Peres in Israeli leader was you don't make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies, so you don't negotiate with your friends, you negotiate with your enemies. That's the whole point, you know, to find the mutual accommodation

so that both sides survive. That's not so hard, but when you actually watch the diplomacy now as I do hour by hour, the U.S. line is our friends and allies, our friends and allies, that's who we talk to our friends and allies. Well, talk to the other side, damn it. Come on. Well, let me, let me. That's what the issue is. That's all sensible. And we, and again, I'm sorry cutting in, but we don't have much time. Otherwise, I'd let you on because, but the, but you have said something that, you know, people, you, you have used the word apartheid and genocide when you talk about Israel. And, and, and I know I've heard people like, I, Douglas Murray recently saying, you know, look, there's a war, and Israel is not,

genocide is an interesting thing. Are you systematically trying to destroy a population? And the argument is war. And certainly, for example, in the U.S. war in Iraq, for many, many more, what, half a million to a million people were killed versus 30,000. I never heard the term genocide applied there. Maybe it should have been, but it wasn't. What's the difference?

Why are you willing to use that word? Well, the difference is it's not just me, by the way, there's a case before the International Court of Justice brought by South Africa. And the long part of the brief of South Africa, which people can find online, is the intent. Because under the 1948 genocide convention, the question of intent is crucial. And Israeli leaders like Bizzalel Smotrich or Itimar Ben-Gavir, who are two cabinet ministers of great importance in the current government of Netanyahu are so vulgar in their statements and in what they've said that you look at it and say, oh, my God, the intent is there. Now, shame on them. I think when they speak Hebrew to their followers, they don't think anyone's listening. But in this day, everyone's got a mobile phone. Everyone's taping and posting everything. So we're hearing all of this stuff. We didn't hear in Iraq statements by the U.S. as much as I hated that war, so don't get me wrong.

I thought that war was so stupid, misguided and on a phony print. But actually, Cheney did not say, as far as, I know, we need to kill every one of those Iraqis or we need to push the Iraqis out of Iraq. You know, Iraq is ours given to us by God. He might have said the latter. I'm not sure. I know. He may have said the oil was ours. I don't think he said it was given to us by God. But in any event, he did not say the things that the Israeli leaders, I think not realizing the whole world is listening, have said. to their followers. So this is the intent question. But the question is on the troops on the ground are not, are they intentionally murdering and killing Palestinians? The leaders are nuts, a lot of them,

we'll agree with that. Yeah, the leaders have sent, the leaders have sent the soldiers in. In the recent times, when seeing the public in Israel, finally, or maybe not finally, but effectively mobilizing against their leaders, right? Yeah. The leaders have sent the Israeli defense forces into Gaza and have given an assignment and mission, which is horrific and I believe in violation of the 1948 genocide convention. For example, the starvation of hundreds of thousands of people is not a

rhetorical flourish it's an immediate reality okay you don't starve hundreds of thousands of people you don't under any circumstances any form of war and not be subject to the genocide convention so the the leaders are giving orders and the leaders need to change their orders and right now I believe that Israel is extremely vulnerable, I think likely it will be found in violation of the genocide convention. In fact, yeah, one of the things we don't have time for is you basically said one of your articles is saving Israel by ending its war in Gaza. It's the only way to save Israel you think is ultimately ending that. And I hope that's the case. But that allows me a segment. I mean,

in 10 minutes, I want to talk about it's not a fair. I want to talk about two things you meant. One is the other, the other boiling brew is Ukraine. Yeah. And then the other thing is a remarkable, remarkable piece by you on U.S. foreign policies, a scam built on corruption. Let's go to Ukraine and then let's go to foreign policy in general and the corruption of the, also you talk about the CIA.

And there are facts in there that are remarkable and damning. It's really, really compelling reading. and I recommend people read it. But look, one of the things you said about Ukraine is something, again, I actually posted one of your pieces on my substack site because it seems to me so eminently reasonable, and I can't understand why people don't recognize. There's no way to win.

There's no way that Ukraine is going to defeat Russia in the sense of, I mean, there's no way that war is going to end. That's correct. It's just going and going, unless there are some discussions. But you do point out two things, one, which a lot of people, of course, disagree with, but that Russia was provoked, at least, by the U.S. reneging on its agreements regarding NATO, which it clearly did. And the other two, and three things, which I think are worth raising in the public's recognition.

Renegging on NATO, the overthrow, the coup in 2014, and the U.S. efforts to sabotage agreements that would have produced a diplomatic end of the war. So why don't you spend four or five minutes talking about that? Yeah, I think the main thing, and all of these points are related, the CIA, the U.S., foreign policy, and Ukraine. If people want to understand this war, just read one article,

read Big New Brzynski's article in Foreign Affairs, in 1997 called Eurasia strategy. Brzynski, of course, was very senior international strategist for the US and Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor. Very clever. I liked him very much personally, and he helped very much on Poland's,

Poland's transformation. So I appreciated him very much, very smart, by the way. But his view was, we need to corner Russia and weaken Russia and make Russia a second rate or third rate power, or Russia maybe will fall apart, like the Soviet Union fell apart. And I think it was Brzynski's Polish fervor also with its anti-Russian history. that helped animate those views. But 1997, he spelled it all out. NATO's going to expand. NATO is going to expand into the Black Sea.

Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a great power. And he spelled that out also in a book called the Global Chessboard the same year. This is it. This has been playing out now for a quarter century. And for Russia, well, that's an existential threat. It would be like China declaring some clever Chinese analysts saying, well, China needs to contain the U.S., which is obviously anti-China. So we're going to put bases in Mexico, Venezuela, the Bahamas, throughout the Caribbean region, Canada, and so forth, and we'll tell the U.S. we're peace-loving and not to worry about it, but that's what we're going to do.

Now, that's what we did vis-a-vis Russia. Russia said, no, please don't do that. Don't surround us, so we don't want you all over our territory. And they kept saying that. And the Europeans, I know, because they told me, he said, you know, your guy, George W. Bush, Yeah, he's a little out of control. We don't need this NATO push in 2008 to Ukraine. This is going to go badly. Someone today sent me from an advisor of Jacques Chirac, some advice to Chirac in 2006, I think it is, where Chirac says, we don't really want a war with Russia over this. So we walked into this.

We thought we could do this without Russia objecting, or if they objected, so what? Or if they actually tried to resist, we would always win. We're the United States, were the greatest power in the world. Russia's a pipsqueak, Russia's a gas station with nuclear weapons, as the phrase went. And basically, we walked into this. And for Russia, this was an existential threat. We don't want to be surrounded by the United States. And by the way, it wasn't just Ukraine.

It's also the country of Georgia. Look at a map. How the hell could anyone say that that's a North Atlantic country or that's a country that's going to shape the security of the North Atlantic states? That is a country that happens to be on the eastern border of the Black Sea, part of America's idea of surrounding Russia in the Black Sea. sea. And note, one of the reasons why the Black Sea counts so much is that Russia has had its naval fleet in Sabastopol since 1783. And so the Black Sea's not just some incidental beachfront

for Russia. It's absolutely fundamental. We walked into this when the Ukraine government said, maybe this is, we don't want this. This is going to get us into a mess. We overthrew that government. government in 2014. Something is very important. You never hear about that. Of course you don't hear about it. And so all of this has a history of recklessness of, of upping the ante, of playing a weak hand. And the hand is weak for a reason that Obama did recognize, and I give him credit for this,

he recognized back in 2015 to use the expression actually or an expression like it, escalatory dominance, that they could keep raising the stakes up to nuclear war. And in the end, we can't trump that. For us, it's, you know, this is a good geopolitical play. If we get away with it and get NATO there, great, it's great, but it's not existential for us. The U.S. doesn't depend on Ukraine being in NATO or the U.S. having bases there, but for Russia, it's existential. And Obama realized, well, they've got nukes. They're going to play their existential hand, where for us, it's a matter of convenience. I think most of the American strategists are stupid, by the way. I mean it in an intellectual sense. They don't think ahead. I'm, by the way, extremely unimpressed with

most of our generals. Of course, I'm not talking about their military insights. I'm talking about their diplomatic ideas because generals don't their job is not diplomacy. Their job is to fight a battle. Maybe they know something about that so though sometimes you wonder. But when you put generals out in front of our policies, policies, this is an absolutely wrongheaded approach. It's not their job. We have a general as a general as a member of the cabinet right now. It's not their job. They don't get this stuff. Their job is weapons procurement or some strategy on a battlefield. What, look, okay, why don't you just one minute talk about that? You talked, mentioned 2014, but I think it's important people to know that there was willingness to have a diplomatic solution early on in the in the conflict with Ukraine and which the U.S. scuttled. Russia wanted to have diplomacy for 30 years. That I know for sure. I know it firsthand.

for sure. And we always said, no, we're the United States. We don't need to talk with you. Yeah. This is the basic idea. And then when Russia and Ukraine actually negotiated an end to the war, two months after it started, in Ankara, Turkey with Turkish mediation, the U.S. stopped it. Give me a break. I'm telling you, they're not clever, these people. They're playing a lousy hand the wrong way. They keep raising the stakes. It's obvious that this isn't going to work. I've written about it for years that it's just going to fail, aside from whatever

ones. It's hard. Whether it's going to, yeah, I mean, how it's going to fail is unusual. But just looking at this saying, how could this, how could this conflict ever end except for diplomacy? Yes. It just seems impossible. This statement that we got to keep army.

but if we're fighting, all it does is kill more people. And in the end, if it's going to end in any other way than Armageddon, it's got to end by people talking. I mean, I just don't see, if you asked a six-year-old, in fact, Trump said to me, if you ask a five-year-old something, it's obvious to them, then it probably is true. And it's, you know, and it's amazing how our leaders, you know, how we hear the opposite when, you know.

I sometimes say, and I'm always corrected by my wife when I say it, I say they act like children. And my wife says, no, the children act better. Because these people are operating on a news cycle and spin. They are not thinking what is the, what we call it subgame perfection in game theory. How's this going to play out? You talk about game theory and I wish we had time to talk with that. because that negotiation is a big question of game theory and how to when no one can win, how to how to ultimately have a game end effectively.

Well, one thing I'll say about game theory that I think is scientifically interesting and valid. Most game theory, what's called non-cooperative game theory, is you don't talk to the other side in game theory. There is no communication. And the famous prisoners dilemma where you show that the two sides end up in a non-cooperative mode, even though cooperation would be better for them, is this formalization where the story is that the prisoners are locked by their interrogators in separate rooms so that they're not allowed to communicate. But in our world, I keep saying to the White House, damn it, use my Zoom if you want, but call people. You know, don't think you're locked in a separate room because we can talk with each other.

The one cooperative games actually only you're right, only work without communication. And the communication defaces that. Let me end with a question related to one of your U.S. policies, scambelt and corruption, something that would amaze me. U.S. military-linked outlays in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion or roughly $12,000 per household. Ultimately, the argument there, which is not new, is that foreign policy. is really not being based on logic or altruism, as often is dead, or even necessarily

effective self-interest of the country. It's based on self-interest of people who are making a lot of money. So, Ukraine, there is a rational argument for sending weapons to Ukraine if the people controlling that discussion of the people who are making money by the sale of weapons. Coming back to something in Eisenhower, you know, was the, I think he was the first person to use the word military industrial complex. It's not new. 1961 farewell address. Yeah.

And so are we seeing, is that at the root of this problem ultimately? Yes. Our problem started in 1947 with the National Security Act, which turned the U.S. into a security state, meaning that it is a state dominated by security considerations, the military secrecy, the CIA as an operative secret army, and what happened over time, a network of 800 overseas military bases in 80 countries.

You know, you've got a lot of hardware all over the world. You've got a lot of military personnel. all over the world. This is a huge lucrative enterprise. And it is, you know, it's about a trillion dollars in direct military Pentagon outlays. And you add in the CIA, you add in homeland security, you add in veterans, costs which are enormous. That's, if you want, you can attribute a piece of the debt to all of these wars and the debt service, a trillion to a trillion and a half dollars, 1.5 trillion is a reasonable expression of this.

Boy, that's a hell of a lot of money. And it funds so many university institutes. It funds so many think tanks. It funds so many individuals. It advertises so much in the mainstream media. This is America's big business. It's not the only one. The racket, as you point out, it's a racket.

It's a racket. And we got a lot of spokesmen for it. And a lot of, as I say, the universities are deeply implicated, unfortunately because they got a lot of money from this. And you look at where we get our information. Check out the donor box. Check out your donors in Congress on open secrets.org. and you can begin to see how this racket works. Well, look, you know, we've touched on the surface of so many things.

I hope we can do this again sometime. We are going to generate, this is going to generate a lot of discussion, and I'm sure, I'm sure hate mail for me, but these are discussions that need to happen. And I have to say, you know, we've only been able to scratch the surface, and I hope I haven't been able to maybe I have illuminate a little bit your intellectual depth and breath. I will tell people for, if you really want to understand how amazing the intellect of Jeffrey Sachs is, teach him physics and discover how you wish he was one of your students, because I've been there. And Jeffrey, I really mean, you know, there are few people that

inspire me intellectually as much as you in terms of your incredible interest and enthusiasm at questioning, and it's an inspiration. And I, well, I feel the same way about you, and we're going to continue the discussion. Okay, and good luck to you. And thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. I mean, I have nothing to do today except maybe fix a doc, but you have to go help the world. So you go do that. And thanks for taking a little bit of time and discussing some topics with me. It's really great to be with you. Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the

cosmos, by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century, and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsproject Foundation.org.