Lex Fridman Podcast - #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., candidate for the president of the United States, running as a Democrat. Robert is an activist, lawyer, and author who has challenged some of the world's most powerful corporations seeking to hold them accountable for the harm they may cause. I love science and engineering. These two pursuits are, to me, the most beautiful and powerful in the history of human civilization. Science is our journey, our fight for uncovering the laws of nature and leveraging them to understand the universe and to lessen the amount of suffering in the world. Some of the greatest human beings have ever met, including most of my good friends, are scientists and engineers. Again, I love science. But, science cannot flourish without epistemic humility,

Starting point is 00:00:51 without debate, both in the pages of academic journals and in the public square, in good faith long-form conversations. A grier disagree, I believe Robert's voice should be part of the debate. To call him a conspiracy theoristist and arrogantly dismiss everything he says without addressing it diminishes the public's trust in the scientific process. At the same time, dogmatic skepticism of all scientific output on controversial topics like the pandemic is equally, if not more, dishonest and destructive. I recommend that people read and listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. his arguments and his ideas,

Starting point is 00:01:33 but I also recommend, as I say in this conversation, that people read and listen to Vincent Reckanello from this week on viralogy, Dan Wilson from debunk the funk, and the Twitter and books of Paul Offit, Eric Topel, and others who are outspoken in their disagreement with Robert. It is this agreement, not conformity, that bends the long arc of humanity to a truth and wisdom. In this process of disagreement, everybody has a lesson to teach you, but we must have the humility to hear it and to learn from it. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's

Starting point is 00:02:16 the best way to support this podcast. We got House of Mekadamias for snacks, a-sleep, for naps, inside tracker for biological data, and AG1 for my go-to-daily multi-vitamin. She's wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring at electriframe.com slash hiring. And now, onto the full ad reads, as always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors I enjoy their stuff.

Starting point is 00:02:45 Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by House of Macadamias, a company that makes delicious, high quality, healthy, macadamia and not-based snacks. Every single person I have shared the snack with have deeply enjoyed it. It has been quite a few people, including guests. And they love it. And they love the variety. And each individual snack, I don't think there's been a negative response to any of the

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Starting point is 00:04:50 You know, I'm kind of torn on this, but I think I might be even a bigger fan of naps than a full night sleep. Full night sleep is like an essential foundation to life, but naps for me. Again, speaking of detours, and then we're going to know where. It's a, sometimes a stressful day feels like a high-water hell. It's a little reference to ACDC. And one of the most bad-ass songs ever written. But anyway, life sometimes feels like a high-water hell, and this is a little detour. Again, to that gas station, we meet a person that helps you escape from all the madness of this world

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Starting point is 00:06:05 Lex. This shows also brought to you by Inside Tracker, a service I used to track biological data. Obviously this episode is very much about your health. There's a lot of controversial aspects to this episode, but I think what's not discussed in this episode, and what I think is true about the future of medicine, about the future of health and diet and so on, that the decisions you make about your body should be driven by the data that comes from your body as much raw signal as possible. And that's what inside trackers, paving the way on, is getting as much bi-l possible. And that's what Insight Tracker is paving the way on,

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Starting point is 00:07:04 when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to inside tracker.com slash Lex. This show is brought to you by the thing I just drink. I thought it greens or what it's now called AG1. The name of the drink and the name of the company, AG1. It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I drink it twice a day, traveling, and they've traveled packs.

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Starting point is 00:08:38 Lex. This is the Lex Friedland podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends Here's Robert F. Kennedy Jr It's the 4th of July, Independence Day, so simple question, simple big question. What do you love about this country, the United States of America? I would say there are so many things that I love about the country on the landscapes and the waterways and the people, etc cetera, but on the kind of a, you know, the higher level, you know, people argue about whether we're an exemplary nation.

Starting point is 00:09:31 And the, that term has been given a bad name, particularly by the neocons, the actions, the neocons in recent decades, who have turned that phrase into kind of a justification, enforcing people to adopt American systems or values at the barrel of a gun. But my father and uncle used it in a very different way and they were very proud of it. I grew up very proud of this country because we were the exemplarination in the sense that we were an example of democracy all over the world. When we first launched our democracy in 1780, we were the only democracy on earth. And by the Civil War, by 1865, there were six democracies that, there's probably 190. And all of them in one way or another are modeled on the American experience. And it's kind of extraordinary because our first contact with

Starting point is 00:10:37 our first serious and contact with the European culture and continent was in 1608. One John Winthrop came over with his Puritans in the Sluper Belt, and Winthrop gave this famous speech where he said this is going to be a city on a hill. This is going to be an example for all the other nations in the world. And he warned his fellow Puritans. They were sitting at this great expansive land. He said, we can't be seduced by the lure of real estate, or by the carnal opportunities of this land.

Starting point is 00:11:22 We have to take this country as a gift from God and then turn it into an example with the rest of the world of God's love, of God's will and wisdom. And then, you know, 200 years later, 250 years later, they, a different generation, they're mainly deists, they're people who had a belief in God, but not so much a love of particularly religious cosmologies.

Starting point is 00:12:00 You know, the framers, the Constitution, believed that we were creating something that would be replicated around the world and that it was an example. In democracy, there would be this kind of wisdom from the collective, you know, that, and the word wisdom means a knowledge of God's will. And that somehow God would speak through the collective in a way that that he or she could not speak through, you know, through totalitarian regimes. And, you know, I think that that's something that even though Winthrop was a white man and a Protestant, that every immigrant group who came after them,

Starting point is 00:12:46 a kind of adoptive that belief. And I know my family, when, you know, art for my family, came up, all of my grandparents came over in 1848 during the potato famine. And they saw this country as unique in history as something that, you know, that was part of a broader spiritual mission. And so I'd say that from a 30,000 foot level, I grew up so proud of this country and believing that it was the greatest country in the world and for those reasons. Well, I immigrated to this country. And one of the things that really embodies America to me is the ideal of freedom.

Starting point is 00:13:29 Hunter Thompson said freedom is something that dies unless it's used. What does freedom mean to you? To me, freedom does not mean, you know, chaos. And it does not mean anarchy. It means that it has to be accompanied by restraint if it's going to live up to its promise in the self-restraint. What it means is the capacity for human beings to exercise and to fulfill their creative energies unrestrained as much as possible by government. So this point the hundredth house was made is dies

Starting point is 00:14:13 Unless it's used Yeah, yeah, I do that and I think you know that I mean he He was not unique in saying that you know, Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of liberty has to be Had be watered with the blood of each generation. And what he meant by that is that it's, uh, you can't live off, we can't live off the laurels of the American revolution. That, you know, we had a group, we had a generation where between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans died. They gave their lives, they gave their livelihoods, they gave their status, they gave their property, they put it all on the line to give us our bill of rights.

Starting point is 00:14:52 And that, but those bill of rights, the moment that we signed them, there were forces within our society that began trying to chip away at them and that happens in every generation and it is the obligation of every generation to safeguard and protect those freedoms. The blood of each generation. You mentioned your interest, your admiration of Albert Camus of Stolicism, perhaps your interest in existentialism. Camus said, I believe in myth of Sisyphus, the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence

Starting point is 00:15:33 is an act of rebellion. What do you think he means by that? I suppose the way that Kamu viewed the world and the way that the Stoics did and a lot of the existentialists was that it was so absurd and that the problems in the task that we're given just to live a life are so insurmountable, that the only way that we can kind of get back to the gods for giving us this impossible task of living life was to embrace it and to enjoy it and to do our best at it. To me, I read Kimu, particularly in the myth of Seasophists, as a parable, and it's the same lesson that I think he writes about in the plague, where we're all given these insurmountable tasks in our lives, but that by doing our duty,

Starting point is 00:16:40 by being of service to others, we can bring meaning to a meaningless chaos and we can bring order to the universe. And you know, Cisophis was kind of the iconic hero of the Stoics, and he was a man because he did, because he did something good, he delivered a gift to humanity. He angered the gods and they condemned him to push a rock up the hill every day and then I would roll down. Even when he got to the top, it would roll down and he'd spend the night going back down the hill to collect it and then rolling it back up the hill again. And the task was observed. It was insurmountable.

Starting point is 00:17:21 He can never win. But the last line of that book is one of the great lines, which is which is something to the extent that you know I can picture as his smiling because Camus belief was that even though he His task was insurmountable that he was a happy man and he was a happy man because he put his shoulder to the stone. He took his duty, he embraced the task and the absurdity of life, and he pushed the stone up the hill. And if we do that, and if we find ways of being service to others, that is

Starting point is 00:18:03 the ultimate. That's the key to the lock. That's the solution to the puzzle. Each individual person in that way can rebel against absurdity by discovering meaning to this whole messy thing. And we can bring meaning not only to our own lives, but we can bring meaning to the universe as well. We can bring some kind of order to life. We can bring meaning to the universe as well we can bring some kind of order to life. And you know that those the embrace of those tasks and the commitment to service. Resonates out from us to the rest of humanity and some in some way. So you mentioned the plague by Camus. There's a lot of different ways to read that book but one of them,

Starting point is 00:18:44 especially given how it was written, is that the plague symbolizes Nazi Germany and the Hitler regime. What do you learn about human nature from a figure like Adolf Hitler that he's able to captivate the minds of millions, rise the power, and take on pulling the whole world into a global war. I was born nine years after the end of World War II, and I grew up in a generation that was big, you know, with my parents who were fixated on that, fixated on that, and what happened in my father. At that time, the resolution in the minds of most Americans, and I think people around the world, was that there had been something wrong with the German people, that the Germans had been particularly susceptible to this kind of demococry and to following a powerful leader and industrializing cruelty and murder. And my father always differed with that.

Starting point is 00:20:00 My father said, this is not a German problem. This could happen to all of us. We're all just the inches away from barbarity and the thing that keeps us safe in this country are the institutions of our democracy, our constitution. It's not our nature. Our nature has to be restrained. And that comes to us as through self-restraint,

Starting point is 00:20:26 but it also, the beauty of our country is that we devise these institutions that are designed to allow us to flourish, but at the same time, not to give us enough freedom to flourish, but also create enough order to keep us from collapsing into barbarity. So, you know, one of the other things that my father talked about from when I was little, you know, he would ask us this question.

Starting point is 00:20:57 If you were the family, and Anne Frank came to your door and asked you to hide her, would you be one of the people who hid her a grist year on life? Or would you be one of the people who turned her in? And of course, we would all say, of course, we would hide Anne Frank and take the risk. But that's been something kind of a lesson, a challenge that has been, that has always been near the forefront of my mind that if a totalitarian system ever occurs in the United States, which my father thought was quite possible, he was conscious about how fragile democracy actually is. That would I be one of the ones who would resist the totalitarianism, or would I be one of the ones who would resist the totalitarianism or would I be

Starting point is 00:21:47 one of the people who went along with it, would I be one of the people who was at the train station and, you know, crack hour or, you know, even Berlin and saw people being shipped off to camps and just put my head down and pretend I didn't say it because talking about it would be destructive to my career and maybe my freedom and even my life. So, you know, that has been a challenge that my father gave to me and all of my brothers and sisters and it's something that I've never forgotten. A lot of us would like to believe we would resist in that situation, but the reality is most of us wouldn't. And that's a good thing to think about.

Starting point is 00:22:38 That human nature is such that we're selfish, even when there's an atrocity going on all around us. And we also, you know, we have the capacity to deceive ourselves. And all of us tend to kind of judge ourselves by our intentions and our actions. What have you learned about life from your father, Robert F. Kennedy? First of all, I'll say this about my uncle, because, you know, I'm going to apply that question to my uncle and my father. My uncle was asked when he first met Jackie Boothea, who later became Jackie Kennedy.

Starting point is 00:23:12 She was a reporter for a newspaper and she had a kind of column where she did these kind of pithy interviews with both famous people and kind of man in the street interviews. She was interviewing him and she asked him what he thought, what he believed as best quality was, his strongest virtue. And she thought that he would say courage because he had been a warrior hero. He was the only president who, and this one he was senator, by the way, who received the purple heart. And, you know, he had a very kind of famous story of him as a heroine with what to. And then he had come home and he ridden a book on moral courage among American politicians and one bullet surprise, that book

Starting point is 00:24:06 profiles in courage, which was a series of incidents where American political leaders made decisions to embrace principle even though their careers were at stake. And in most cases, we're just chiroid by their choice. She thought he was going to say courage, but he didn't, he said curiosity. And I think, you know, looking back at his life, that the best, that that it was true, and that was the quality that allowed him to put himself in the shoes of his adversaries. And always said that if you if the only way that we're going to have peace is if we're able to put ourselves in the shoes of our adversaries understand their behavior and their contact that contacts and that's why he was able to

Starting point is 00:25:01 you know during the uh he was able to resist the intelligence apparatus and the military during the Bay of Pigs when they said he got it sent in the Essex, the aircraft carrier, and he said no, even though he'd only been in two months in office, he was able to stand up to them because of, because he was able to put himself in the shoes of both Castro and Khrushchev and understand there's got to be another solution to this and then during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was able to do it. The narrative was, okay, Khrushchev acted in a way as an aggressor to put missiles in

Starting point is 00:25:41 our hemisphere. How dare he do that? And Jack and my father were able to say, well, wait a minute, he's doing that because we put missiles in Turkey and Italy. That were right on the Turkish ones, right on the Russian border. And they then made a secret deal with Dobranin,

Starting point is 00:26:01 with Ambassador Dobranin, and with Khrushchev, deal with Dobran and with Mr. Dobran and you know with Krushev to remove the missiles in Turkey. If he moved the Jupiter missiles from Turkey, if I so long as Krushev removed them from Cuba, every there were 13 men on the exactly, on the end, what they call the Angcon committee, which was the group of people who were deciding, you know, what the action was, what they were going to do to end the Cuban Muslim crisis. And virtually, I, and those men, men, 11 of them wanted to invade and wanted to bomb and invade. And it was Jack.

Starting point is 00:26:42 And then later on, my, my father and then Bob McNamara, who are the only people who were with him, because he was able to see the world from Kruchef's point of view. He believed that there was another solution and then he also had the moral courage. So my father, you know, to get back to your question, famously said that moral courage is the most important quality and it's more it's more rare and courage on football field or courage in battle than physical courage. It's much more difficult to come by, but it's the most important quality in a human being. And you think that kind of empathy that you refer to that requires moral courage.

Starting point is 00:27:34 It certainly requires moral courage to act on it, you know, and particularly, you know, in, you know, anytime that a nation is a war, there's kind of a momentum or an inertia that says, okay, let's not look at this from the other person's point of view. And that's the time we really need to do that. Well, if we're going to apply that style of empathy, style of curiosity to the current war in Ukraine, what is your understanding of why Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022? Vladimir Putin could have avoided the war in the Ukraine. His invasion was illegal. It was unnecessary and it was brutal.

Starting point is 00:28:14 But I think it's important for us to move beyond these kind of comic book depictions of this insane, average Russian leader who wants to restore the Soviet Empire, and that that's why, and it was, and it made it unfocused, unprovoked, invasion of the Ukraine, he was provoked, and we were provoking him, and we were provoking him for, for, since 1997, and it's not just me that's saying that I mean, when, when, and I am about four right before Putin ever came in, we were provoking Russia, the Russians in this way unnecessarily, and to go back that time in 1992, when the Russians moved out of

Starting point is 00:29:07 the Soviet Union was collapsing. The Russians moved out of East Germany, and they did that, which was a huge concession, and they had 400,000 troops in East Germany at that time, and they were facing NATO troops on the other side of the wall. O'Gorbačev made this huge concession where he said to George Bush, I'm going to move all of our troops out and you can then reunify Germany under NATO, which was hostile army to the, to the Soviet, it was created to, you know, with hostile intent toward the Soviet Union. And he said, you can take Germany, but I want your promise that you will not move NATO

Starting point is 00:29:45 to the East. And James Baker, who was a Secretary of State, famously said, I will not move NATO, we will not move NATO one inch to the East. So then five years later in 1997, the big new Brzezinski, who is kind of the father of the Neocons, who was a Democrat at that time, served in the Carter administration. He said he published a paper, a blueprint, for moving NATO right up to the Russian border,

Starting point is 00:30:17 a thousand miles to the east, and taking over 14 nations. And at that time, George Cannon, who was the kind of the deity of American diplomats, he was probably arguably the most important diplomat in American history, he was the architect of the containment policy during World War II. And he said, this is insane and it's unnecessary. And if you do this, it's going to provoke the Soviet, I mean, the Russians don't violent response.

Starting point is 00:30:51 And we should be making friends with the Russians. They lost the Cold War. We should be treating them the way that we treated our adversaries after World War II, like with a martial plan to try to help them incorporate into Europe and to be part of the brotherhood of, you know, of man and of western nations. We shouldn't continue to be treating them as nanombe and particularly surrounding them at their borders. William Perry, who was then the Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton threatened to resign. He was so upset by this plan to move NATO to the ease.

Starting point is 00:31:25 And William Burns, who was then the US ambassador of the Soviet Union, who's now at this moment the head of the CIA said at that time the same thing. If you do this, it is going to provoke the Russians toward a military response. And we moved it. We moved all around Russia. We moved to 14 nations, a thousand miles to the east, and we put Aegis missile systems in two nations and remained in Poland. So we did what the Russians had done to us in 1962 that would have provoked the invasion of Cuba.

Starting point is 00:32:01 We put those missile systems back there and then we walk away unilaterally, walk away from the two nuclear missile treaties, the intermediate nuclear missile treaties that we had with Russia. We neither of us would put those missile systems on the borders. We walk away from that and we put agents missile systems which are nuclear capable. They can carry the Tomahawk missiles, which nuclear warheads. So the last country that they didn't take was the Ukraine. And the Russians said, and in fact, Bill Perry said this, William Burns said it. So now they had a CIA. It is a red line.

Starting point is 00:32:40 If we go into, if we bring NATO and to Ukraine, that is a red line for the Russians, they cannot live with it. They cannot live with it. Russia has been invaded three times through the Ukraine. The last time it was invaded, we killed one of the Germans killed one out of every seven Russians. They destroyed my uncle described what happened to Russia in his famous American University speech in 1963. 60 years ago this month, or he's in our last month, 60 years ago in June, 10th, 1963, he told that speech was telling American people, put yourself in the shoes of the Russians. We need to do that if we're going to make peace. And he said,

Starting point is 00:33:26 all of us have been taught that we won the war, but we didn't win the war. The Russians, if anybody won the war against Hitler, it was the Russians. Their country was destroyed. All of their cities, and he said, imagine if all of the cities on the East Coast of Chicago were reduced to rubble and all of the fields burns, all of the forest burns, that's what happened to Russia. That's what they gave so that we could get rid of Adolf Hitler. And he had them put themselves in their position. And you know, today there's none of that happening. We have refused repeatedly to talk to the Russians. We've broken up.

Starting point is 00:34:06 There's two treaties, the Minsk agreements, which the Russians were willing to sign. And they said, we will stay out. The Russians didn't want the Ukraine. They showed that when the Dombass region voted 90 to 10 to leave and go to Russia. Putin said, no, we want Ukraine to stay intact, but we want you to sign a Minsk Accords to you know, the Russians were very worried because of the US involvement in the coup in Ukraine in 2014. And then the oppression and the killing of 14,000 ethnic Russians. And Russia has the same way that if Mexico would ages missile systems from China or Russia on our border and then killed 14,000 expats American, we would go in there.

Starting point is 00:35:00 He does have a national security interest in the Ukraine. He has an interest in protecting the Russian-speaking people of the Ukraine. He ethnic Russians and the Minsk Accords did that. It left Ukraine as part of Russia. It left them as a semi-autonomous region. That could continue to use their own language, which is essentially banned by the government we put in in 2014. And we sabotaged that agreement. And we now know in April of 2022, Zelensky and Putin had inked a deal already to another peace agreement. And that the United

Starting point is 00:35:43 States sent Boris Johnson, the Neocons and the White House and Boris Johnson over to the Ukraine to sabotage that agreement. So what do I think? I think this is a proxy war. I think this is a war that the Neocons and the White House wanted. They've said for two decades they wanted this war, and that they wanted to use Ukraine as a pawn in a proxy war between United States and Russia, the same as we used Afghanistan. And they, in fact, they say, this is the model.

Starting point is 00:36:16 Let's use the Afghanistan model. That was said again and again, and to get the Russians to overextend their troops and then fight them using local fighters and US weapons. And when President Biden was asked why are we in the Ukraine, he was honest. He says to depose Vladimir Putin regime change for Vladimir Putin. And when his defense secretary Lloyd Austin in April 2022 was asked why are we there? He said to degrade the Russians' capacity to fight anywhere, to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight elsewhere in the world.

Starting point is 00:36:53 That's not a humanitarian mission. That's not what we were told. We were told this was not unprovoked invasion, but, and that we're there to bring a humanitarian relief to the Ukrainians. But that is the opposite. That is war of attrition that is designed to chew up, to turn this little nation into an abattoir of death for the flower of Ukrainian youth in order to advance a geopolitical ambition of certain people within the White House.

Starting point is 00:37:22 And, you know, I think that's wrong. We should be talking to the Russians the way that, you know, Nixon talked to Braschnav, the way that Bush talked to Gorbachev, the way that my uncle talked to Kruchev, we need to be talking with the Russians we should and negotiating. And we need to be looking about how do we end this and preserve peace in Europe? Would you as president said down and have a conversation with Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky separately and together to negotiate peace? Absolutely. What about Vladimir Putin? He's been in power since 2000. So as the old adage goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts

Starting point is 00:38:06 absolutely. Do you think he has been corrupted by being a power for so long? If you think of the man, if you look at his mind, listen, I don't know exactly. I can't say because I just I don't know enough about him or about you know I might the evidence that I've seen is that he is homicidal, he kills his enemies or boisons them and you know the reaction I've seen to that to hit those accusations from him have not been to deny that but to kind of laugh it off. accusations from him have not been to deny that but to kind of laugh it off. I think he's a dangerous man and that of course, you know, there's probably corruption in his regime, but having said that, it's not our business to change the Russian government and anybody who thinks the good idea to do regime change in Russia which has more nuclear weapons than we do,

Starting point is 00:39:04 who thinks the good idea to do regime change in Russia, which has more nuclear weapons than we do, is I think irresponsible. And you know, Vladimir Putin himself has said, you know, we will not live in a world without Russia. And it was clear when he said that he was talking about himself. And he has his hand on a button that could bring, you know, Armageddon to the entire planet. So why are we messing with this? It's not our job to change that regime and we should be making friends with the Russians. We shouldn't be treating him as an enemy. Now we've pushed him into the camp with China. That's not a good thing for our country. And by the way, you know, what we're doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all. Putin now, you know, if you believe that the polls that are coming out of Russia, they show

Starting point is 00:39:56 him, you know, the most recent polls that I've seen show him with that 89% popularity that people in Russia support the war in Ukraine. And they support him as an individual. So, and I understand there's problems with polling, and you know, you don't know what to believe, but the polls consistently show that. And it's not America's business to be the policeman of the world and to be changing regimes in the world. That's illegal. We shouldn't be breaking international laws.

Starting point is 00:40:32 We should actually be looking for ways to improve relationships with Russia, not to destroy Russia, not to destroy and not to choose its leadership for them. That's up to the Russian people, not us. So step one is to sit down and empathize with the leaders of both nations to understand their history, their concerns, their hopes, just to open the door for conversation. So they're not back to the corner. And I think the US can play a really important important role and a US president can play a really important role by rubbery assuring the Russians that we're not gonna consider them an enemy anymore that we want to be friends and It doesn't mean that you have to let down your guard completely the way that you do it Which was the way present Kennedy did it is you do it one step at a time you take baby steps we do a unilateral move

Starting point is 00:41:26 reduce our you know our our hostility and aggression and see if the Russians reciprocate and and that's the way that we should be doing it and you know we should be easing our way into a positive relationship with Russia we have a lot in common with Russia and we should be friends with Russia and with the Russian people. Apparently there's been 350,000 Ukrainians who have died at least in this war. There's probably been 60 or 80,000 Russians and that should not give us any joy. It should not give us any. I saw Lindsey Graham on TV saying, you know, anything we can, something to the extent that anything we can do to kill Russians is a good use of our money, that it is not. You know, those are, those are somebody's children. There, you know, we should have compassion for them.

Starting point is 00:42:28 This war is unnecessary war. We should settle it through negotiation, through diplomacy, through statecraft, and not through weapons. Do you think this war can come to an end purely through military operations? No, I mean, I don't think there's any way in the world that the Ukrainians can be the Russians. I don't think there's any appetite in Europe. I think Europe is now, you know,

Starting point is 00:42:52 in having severe problems in Germany, Italy, France, you're seeing these riots, there's internal problems in those countries. There is no appetite in Europe for sending men to die in Ukraine. And the Ukrainians do not have anybody left. The Ukrainians are using press gangs to fill the ranks. There are army men, military men, are trying as hard as they can to get out of the Ukraine right now to avoid going to the front.

Starting point is 00:43:22 The Russians apparently have been killing Ukrainians, the seven to one ratio. My son fought over there and he told me it's not, you know, he had, he had firefights with the Russians mainly at night, but he said most of the battles were artillery wars during the day and the Russians now outgun the NATO forces, 10 to 1 in artillery. Oh, they're killing an horrendous rate. Now, my interpretation of what's happened so far is that the Putin actually went in early on with a small force because he expected to meet somebody on the other end of a negotiating table that once he went in.

Starting point is 00:44:12 And that, when that didn't happen, they did not have a large enough force to be able to mount an offensive. And so they've been building up that force up to now and they now have that force. And even against this small original force, the Ukrainians have been hopeless. All of their offenses have died. They've now killed, you know, the head of the Ukrainian Special Forces, which was probably arguably, by many accounts, the best military unit in all of Europe, the commandant, the commander of the Special Forces Group, gave a speech about four months ago saying that 86% of his men are dead or wounded and will cannot return to the front, he cannot

Starting point is 00:45:05 rebuild that force. The troops that are now filling the gaps of all those 350,000 men who have been lost are scantily trained and they're arriving green at the front. Any of them do not want to be there. Many of them are giving up and going over the Russian side. We've seen this again and again, including platoon-sized groups that are defecting to the Russians. And I don't think it's possible to win.

Starting point is 00:45:39 And anybody, you know, I saw, of course, I've studied World War II history exhaustively, but I saw a, there's a new, I think it's a Netflix series of documentaries that I highly recommend to people. They're colorized versions of the black and white films from the battles of World War II, but it's all the battles of World War II. So I watched it all in grad the other night. And the willingness of the Russians to fight against any kind of allies and to make huge

Starting point is 00:46:17 sacrifices of the Russians themselves who are making the sacrifice with their lives, the willingness of them to do that for their motherland is almost inexhaustible. It is incomprehensible to think that Ukraine can beat Russia in a war. It would be like Mexico beating the United States. It's just impossible to think that it can happen. And, you know, Russia has deployed a tiny, tiny fraction of its military so far. And, you know, now it has China with its mass production capacity, supporting its war effort. It's just, it's a hopeless situation. And we've been lied to, you know, we're the press in our country and our government are just, are just, you

Starting point is 00:47:05 know, promoting this lie that the Ukrainians are about to win and that everything's going great and that Putin's on the run and there's all this wishful thinking because of the Wagner group, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, in the Wagner group that this was an internal coup and it showed dissent and weakness of Putin and none of that is true. I was a that insurgency, which wasn't even an insurgency, only got 4,000 of his men to follow, amount of 20,000.

Starting point is 00:47:36 And they were quickly stopped in nobody in the Russian military, the oligarchy, the political system, nobody supported it, you know. And by we're being told, oh yeah, it's the beginning of the end for blue Putin. These weekend, these wounded, these on his way out and all of these things are just lies that we are being fed. So then push back on a small aspect of this, you kind of implied. So I've traveled to Ukraine. And one thing that I should say similar to the Battle of Stalingrad, it is just not, it is not only the Russians that fight to the end. I think Eukrainia is a very, you know, to fight to the end. And the morale there is quite high.

Starting point is 00:48:15 I've talked to nobody, as was a year ago in August with her son. Everybody was proud to fight and die for their country. And there's some aspect where this war unified the people to give them a reason and an understanding that this is what it means to be Ukrainian and I will fight to the death to defend Islam. I would agree with that. And I should have said that myself at the beginning. That's one of the reasons my son went over there to fight because he was inspired by the valor of the Ukrainian people and the extraordinary willingness of them.

Starting point is 00:48:49 And I think Putin thought it would be much easier to sweep into Ukraine and he found a stone wall of Ukrainians, whether it was ready to put their lives in their bodies on the line. But that, to me, makes the whole episode even more tragic is that, you know, I don't believe, I think that the US role in this has been, you know, that there were there were many opportunities to settle this war and the Ukrainians wanted, Vladimir Zelensky when he ran in 2019. Here's a guy who's a comedian. He's an actor. He had no political experience. And yet he won this election with 70% of the vote. Why, he won on a peace platform.

Starting point is 00:49:37 Anyone promising to sign the Minsk Accords. And yet something happened when he got in there that made him suddenly pivot. And I think it's a good guess what happened. I think he was, you know, he came under threat by ultra-natural and nationalist within his own administration. And the insistence of Neocons like Victoria Nuland and the White House that, you know, we don't want peace

Starting point is 00:50:05 with Putin, we want a war. Do you worry about nuclear war? Yeah, I worry about it. It seems like a silly question, but it's not. It's a serious question. Well, the reason it's not, you know, the reason it might, it's not. It's just because people seem to be in this kind of dream state about that it'll never happen.

Starting point is 00:50:29 And yet, you know, we're, it can happen very easily and it can happen at any time. And, you know, if we push the Russians too far, you know, I don't doubt that Putin, if he felt like his regime was in, you know, or his nation, was in danger that the United States was going to be able to place a quizzling into the Kremlin that he would use nuclear torpedoes. And these strategic weapons that they have, and that could be the being, once

Starting point is 00:51:09 you do that, nobody controls the trajectory. By the way, I have very strong memories of the Cuban missile crisis. And those 13 days, when we came closer to nuclear war, you know, and particularly I think it was when the YouTube got shut down over Cuba, you know, and nobody in this kind, there's a lot of people in Washington DC who at that point thought that they very well may wake up dead. That the world may end at night, 30 million Americans killed 130 million Russians This is what our military brass wanted they saw war with Russia nuclear exchange with Russia is not only Inevitable but also desirable because they wanted to do it now We still had a superiority. Can you actually go through the feelings you've had about the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Starting point is 00:52:05 Like, what are your memories of it? What are some interesting kind of... Well, I was going to school in Washington, DC to sit well for our lady of victory, which is in Washington, DC. So I lived in Virginia across the stomach and we would cross the bridge every day into DC. During the crisis, US marshals came to my house to take us, I think, around day eight. My father was spending the night at the White House. He wasn't coming home.

Starting point is 00:52:37 He was staying with the XCOM Committee and sleeping there and they were up, you know, 24 hours a day. They were debating and trying to figure out what was happening. And we had US marshals come to our house to take us down, they were going to take us down to White's Hulfer Springs. And in Southern Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where there was an underground city, essentially a bunker that was like a city. Apparently it had McDonald's in it and a lot of other, you know, it was a full city for

Starting point is 00:53:14 the US government and their families. The US Marshal's came to our house to take us down there and I was very excited about doing that. And this was at a time when we were doing the drills, we were doing the duck and cover drills once a week at our school, where they would tell you, if you know, when the alarms go off, then you put your head onto the table, you take the, I remove the sharps from your desk, put them inside your desk, you put your head onto the table, and you wait, and the initial blast will take the windows out of the school and then we all stand up and file in an orderly fashion into the basement where we're going to be for the next six or eight months or whatever.

Starting point is 00:53:54 But in the basement where, you know, we went occasionally in those corridors, we're lined with free-stried food canisters, opt to this, they have from Florida's hailing. So people were, you know, we were all preparing for this. And it was Bob McNamara, who was my friend of mine, and you know, was my father, one of my father's close friend as Secretary of Defense. He later called Mass psychosis, and my father deeply regretted participating

Starting point is 00:54:24 in the bomb shelter program because he said it was part of a psychological, a siop trick to treat them, to teach Americans that nuclear war was acceptable. That it was survivable. My father, anyway, when the Marshal came to our house, take me in my brother, Joe, away. And with the ones who are home at that time, my father called and he talked to us on the phone and he said, I don't want you going down there because if you disappear from school, people are gonna panic. And I need you to be a good soldier and go to school. And he said

Starting point is 00:55:07 something to me during that period, which was that if the nuclear were happened, it would be better to be among the dead and the living, which I did not believe. Okay, I mean, I already prepared myself for the dystopian future. And I knew I'd spend every day in the woods. I knew that I could survive by catching graffation, cooking mud puppies and whatever I had to do. But I felt like, OK, I can handle this. And I really wanted to see this add-up down in this underground city.

Starting point is 00:55:45 But anyway, that was part of it for me. My father was away in the last days of it. My father got this idea because Khrushchev had sent two letters. He sent one letter that was conciliatory. And then he sent a letter that after his joint chiefs handed the warmongers around to him to solve that letter and they disapproved of it. They sent another letter that was extremely proliferate. And my father had the idea, let's just pretend we didn't get the second letter and reply

Starting point is 00:56:18 to the first one. And then he went down to Dobrinen and who was, he met Dobrenin in the Justice Department. And Dobrenin was the Soviet ambassador and they proposed this settlement, which was a secret settlement where a cruise chef would withdraw the missiles from Cuba. Cruise chef had put the missiles in Cuba because we had put missiles, you know, nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy. My uncle's secret deal was that if Krushchev removed the missiles from Cuba within six months he would get rid of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey.

Starting point is 00:56:58 If Krushchev told anybody about the deal, it was off. If news got out about that secret deal, it was off. That was the actual deal. And Grushchev complied with it, and then my uncle complied with it. How much of that part of human history turned on the decisions of one person? I think that's one of the, you know, because that, of course, the Burennial question, right? But it is history kind of on an automatic pilot and, you know, human decisions, the decisions of leaders really only have, you know, a marginal or incremental bearing on what is going to happen anyway. But I think that is the, and historians argue about that all the time, I think that that is

Starting point is 00:57:45 a really good example of a place in human history that literally the world could have ended if we had a different leader in the White House. And the reason for that is that there were, as I recall, 64 gun emplacements, you know, missile emplacements, you know, missile emplacements. Each one of those missile emplacements had a crew of about a hundred men. And they were Soviets. They were, and we didn't know whether,

Starting point is 00:58:19 we had a couple of questions that my uncle asked, or asked the CIA and he asked a dollar source really gone but he asked the CIA and he asked his military press because they all wanted to go in. Everybody wanted to go in and my uncle said my uncle asked to see the aerial photos and he examined those personally and this why it's important to have it a leader in the White House who can push back on their bureaucracies He and then he asked them You know are those who's manning those missile sites?

Starting point is 00:58:55 Who and are they Russians and if they're Russians and we bomb them? Are they isn't it gonna forcechev to then go into Berlin? And that would be the beginning of a cascade of facts that would highly like to end a nuclear confrontation. And the military brass said to my uncle, we don't think he'll have the guts to do that. So he was, my uncle was like, that's what you're betting on. And they all wanted him to go in.

Starting point is 00:59:33 They wanted him to bomb the sides and then invade Cuba. And he said, if we bomb those sides, we're gonna be killing Russians. And it's gonna force, it's gonna provoke Russia into some response, and the obvious response is for them to go into Berlin. Oh, but the thing that we didn't know then, and we didn't find out until I think, you know, there event, it was

Starting point is 01:00:09 like a symposium where everybody on both sides talked about it and we learned a lot of stuff and nobody knew before. One of the insane things, the most insane thing that we learned was that the weapons were already, the nuclear warheads were already in place, they were ready to fire, and that the authorization to fire was made, was delegated to each of the gun crew commanders. So there were 60 people who had all had authorization to fire if they felt themselves under attack. So, you have to believe that at least one of them would have launched and that would have been the beginning of the end.

Starting point is 01:00:52 And if anybody had launched, we knew what would happen. My uncle knew what would happen because he asked again and again what's going to happen and they said 30 million Americans will be killed but we will kill 130 million Russians, so we will win. And that was a victory for them. And my uncle said later, he said, he told Arthur Saisinger and Kenny O'Donnell, he said, those guys, he called them the salad brass,

Starting point is 01:01:23 the guys with all of this stuff on their chest. And he said, he said those guys, they don't care, because they know that if it happens, that they're going to be in the charge of everything, they're the ones who are going to be running a world after that. So for them, you know, it was, there was an incentive to kill 130 million Russians and 30 million Americans by my uncle. He had this correspondence with Khrushchev. They were secretly corresponding with each other. And that is what saved the world, is that they had that both of them had been men of war.

Starting point is 01:01:57 You know, I, as in our famously said, it will not be a man of war. It will not be a soldier who starts World War III. Because a guy who's actually seen it knows how bad it is. And my uncle had been in the heat of the South Pacific. His boat had been cut into by a Japanese destroyer. His, and even three of his crewmen had been killed. One of them badly burned. He pulled that guy with a lanyard in his teeth, six miles to the Ireland in the middle

Starting point is 01:02:26 of the night and then they hit out there for 10 days, you know, and, you know, he came back, like I said, he was the only President of the United States that are in the purple heart. Meanwhile, Kruchef had been at Stolentrad, which was the worst place to be on the planet, you know, probably in the 20th century. Other than Auschwitz or one of the death camps, it was the most ferocious, horrific war with people starving, people committed cannibalism, eating the dogs, the cats, eating their shoe leather,

Starting point is 01:03:02 freezing to death by the thousands, etc. A cruise chef did not want the last thing he wanted was a warrant. The last thing my uncle wanted was a warrant. The CIA did not know anything about cruise chef. The reason for that is that there was a mole in Langley. Every time the CIA got a spy in the Kremlin, he would immediately be killed. So if they had no eyes in the Kremlin, you know, there were literally hundreds of Russian spies who had defected the United States and were in the Kremlin who were killed during that period. They had no idea anything about Kruyshaff about how he saw the world and they saw the Kremlin itself as a monolith, you know, that

Starting point is 01:03:50 it's this kind of, you know, the same way that we look at Putin today, that, you know, it's all they have this ambition of world conquest and that's it's driving them and there's nothing else they think about. They're absolutely single-minded about it. But actually there was a big division between Khrushchev and his joint chiefs and his intelligence apparatus. And they both at one point discovered they were both in the same situation. They were surrounded by spies and military personnel who were intent on going to war. And they were the two guys resisting it. So when my uncle had this idea of being the peace president from the beginning,

Starting point is 01:04:32 he told Ben Bradley, one of his best friends who was the publisher of the Washington Post for the editor in chief at that time, he said, Braely asked him, what is, what do you want in your grape zone? And my uncle said, he kept the peace. He said, the principal job of President of the United States is to keep the country out of war. And so when he first became president, he actually agreed to meet Khrushchev in Geneva to do his summit. And by the way, Eisenhower had wanted to do the same thing. Eisenhower wanted peace.

Starting point is 01:05:13 But his, and he was going to meet in Vienna. But that peace summit was blown up. He was going to try to do, you know, he was going to try to end the Cold War. Eisenhower was in the last year of his in May of 1960, but that was torpedoed by the CIA during the U-2 crash. They sent a U-2 over the Soviet Union and it got shot down and then they told, and then Alan Dulles, told Eisenhower to deny that we had a program. They didn't know that the Russians

Starting point is 01:05:46 said captured Gary Francis Powers. And so, and that blew up the peace talks between Eisenhower and Khrushchev. And so, you know, and there was a lot of tension. I don't go on to break that tension. He agreed to meet with, with Khrushchev and Vienna, early on in his term. He went over there and Khrushchev snubbed him, Khrushchev lectured him empiriously about the terror of American imperialism and rebuffed know, they did agree not to go into

Starting point is 01:06:25 Laos. They made an agreement that kept the United States, became my uncle from sending troops to Laos. But it had been a disaster, Vienna. So then we had a spy that used to come to our house all the time. I cut Georgie Bolshek away. He was this Russian spy. My parents had met at the embassy. They had gone to a party or a reception that Russian embassy and he had approached them and they knew he was a GRU agent and KGB. He was both. Oh, he used to come to our house. They really liked him. He was very attractive. He was always laughing and joking. He would do rope climbing contests with my father. He would do push-up contests with my father. He could do the Russian dancing, the Cosack dancing. And he would do that for us and teach us that. And we knew he was a spy too. And this was at the time

Starting point is 01:07:21 of, you know, the James Bond films were first coming out. So it was really exciting for us to have an actual Russian spy in our house. The State Department was horrified by it. But anyway, when Khrushchev after Vienna, and after, you know, the bigs, on Khrushchev had second thoughts. And he sent this long letter to my uncle. And he didn't want to go through his state department or his embassy, he wanted to end run them, but he was friends with Bolshevik. So he gave Georgie the letter and Georgie brought it and handed it to Pierre Salinger,

Starting point is 01:08:04 folded it in New York times and he gave it to my uncle and it was this beautiful letter which he said, you know, um, my uncle had talked to him about the children who were played, you know, we played 29 grandchildren who were playing in his yard and he's saying, what is our moral basis for making a decision that could kill these children, so they'll never write a poem, they'll never participate in election, they'll never run for office. How can we make a decision that is going to eliminate life for these beautiful kids?

Starting point is 01:08:40 And he has said that to Grushchev and Grushchev wrote in this letter back saying that he was now sitting as this dacha on the black sea. And that he was thinking about what my uncle jacket said to him at the end. And he regretted very deeply not having taken the olive leaf that jacket off for him. And then he said, you know, it occurs to me now that we're all on an arc and that there is not another one and that the entire fate of the planet. And all of its creatures and all of the children are dependent on the decisions we make and you and I have a moral obligation to go forward with each other's friends. with each other's friends. And immediately after that, he sent that right after the Berlin crisis in 1962, General Curtis Lemay tried to provoke a war with an incident at Checkpoint Charlie, which was the entrance, the entrance exit through the Berlin wall in Berlin. And the Russian tanks has come to the wall,

Starting point is 01:09:51 the US tanks have come to the wall, and there was a standoff. And my uncle had sent a message to Khrushchev then through Dobran and Sang, my back is at the wall. I have no place to back, to please back off, and then, my back is at the wall. I have no place to back to please back off and then we will back off. And Kruv Schaff took his word, act his tanks off first, and then my uncle ordered to make it back. But he and what May had mounted bulldozer plows on the front of the tanks to plow down the Berlin Wall, and the Russians had come. So it was just, you know, it was the,

Starting point is 01:10:26 it was the, his generals trying to provoke a war. And, but they started talking to each other. And then when you after he wrote that letter, they agreed that they would install a hotline. So they could talk to each other and they wouldn't have to go through intermediaries. And so, at Jack's house on the Cape, So they could talk to each other and they wouldn't have to go through intermediaries. And so at Jack's house on the Cape, there was a red phone that we knew if we picked it

Starting point is 01:10:51 up, Grusha would answer. And there was another one in the White House. And that, but they knew it was important to talk to each other, you know, and you just wish that we had that kind of leadership today. That can, you know, that just understands our job. Look, I know you know what about AI, right? And you know how dangerous it is potentially to humanity. And what opportunities it also, you know, offers. But it could kill us all.

Starting point is 01:11:22 I mean, Elon said, first, it's going to steal our job, then it's going to kill us, right? And it's probably not hyperbole. It actually, if it follows the laws of biological evolution, which are just the laws of mathematics, that's probably a good endpoint for a potential endpoint. So we need, it's going to happen, but we need to make sure it's regulated and it's regulated properly for safety in every country. And that includes Russia and China and Iran. Right now, we should be putting all the weapons for a side and sitting down with us guys

Starting point is 01:12:02 and say, how are we going to do this? There's much more important things to do. This stuff is going to kill us. We don't figure out how to regulate it. And leadership needs to look down the road at what is the real risk here. And the real risk is that AI will enslave us for one thing and destroy us and do all this other stuff. And how about biological weapons? We're now all working on these biological weapons and we're doing biological weapons from

Starting point is 01:12:36 Ebola and Dengue fever and, you know, all of these other bad things and we're making ethnic bioweapons, bioweapons that can only kill Russians. Eye weapons that the Chinese are making that, you know, can kill people who don't have Chinese genes. So all of this is now within reach. We're actively doing it. And we need to stop it. And we can easily, the biological

Starting point is 01:13:06 weapons treaty is the easiest thing in the world to do. We can verify it, we can enforce it. And everybody wants to agree to it. It's only insane people do not want to want to continue this kind of research. There's no reason to do it. So there are these existential threats to all of humanity now out there, like AI and biological weapons. We need to stop fighting each other, start competing on economic game fields, playing fields instead of military playing fields, which will be good for all of humanity, and that we need to sit down with each other and negotiate reasonable treaties on how we regulate AI and biological weapons. And nobody's talking about this in this political race right now. Nobody's

Starting point is 01:13:52 talking about it in a government. They get fixated on these little wars and these comic book depictions of good versus evil. And we you know and go off and give them the weapons and enrich you know the military and God's charge of complex but we're we're on the road to perdition if we don't end this. And some of this requires that of this kind of phone that connects Hushov and John F. Kennedy that that cuts through all the bureaucracy, to have this communication between heads of state and in the case of AI, perhaps heads of tech companies, where you can just pick up the phone

Starting point is 01:14:32 and have a conversation. Because a lot of it, a lot of the existential threats of artificial intelligence, perhaps even bio-weapons, is unintentional. It's not even strategic and intentional effects. So you have to be transparent and honest about, especially with AI, that people might not know what's the worst that's going to happen

Starting point is 01:14:52 once you release it out into the wild. And you have to have an honest communication about how to do it, so that companies are not terrified of regulation, overreach of regulation. And then government is not terrified of tech companies of manipulating them in some direct or indirect ways. So there's a trust that builds versus a distrust. That seems to be basically that old phone, or Kushchev can call John F. Kennedy, is needed. Yeah, and you know, I don't think there's a, I don't understand, hey, I, okay, I do know,

Starting point is 01:15:29 I can see from all this technology how it's this kind of turn keto-dallitarianism at once you put these systems in place, you know, they can be misused to enslave people, and they can be misused to enslave people and they can be misused in wars and to subjugate, to kill, to do all of these bad things. And I don't think there's anybody on Capitol Hill who understands this. We need to bring in the tech community and say, tell us what these regulations need to look like so that there can be freedom to innovate so that we can milk AI for all of the good things, but not, you know, fall into these traps that are going to, you know, that are these existential threats to, that pose existential threats to humanity. It seems like John F. Kennedy is a singular figure in that he was able to have the humility to reach out to Khrushchev and also the strength and integrity to resist the, what did you call

Starting point is 01:16:30 the solid, the solid brass and institutions like the CIA. So that makes it particularly tragic that he was killed to what degree was CIA involved or the various bureaucracy involved in his death. The evidence that the CIA was involved in my uncle's murder and that they were subsequently involved in the cover-up and continue to be involved in the cover-up. I mean, there's still 5,000 documents that they won't release 60 years later. Is I think so insurmountable and so, you know, mountainous and overwhelming that it's beyond any reasonable doubt, including, you know, dozens of confessions of people who were involved in the assassination, but you know, every kind of document. And you know, I mean, it came as a surprise recently to most Americans,

Starting point is 01:17:36 I think, the release of these documents in which the press, the American media finally acknowledged that, yeah, Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset, and he was recruited, you know, in 1957, he was a Marine working at the attitude, the Air Force Base, and which was the CIA Air Force Base, and, you know, with the U-2 flights, which was a CIA program, and that he was recruited by James Jesus Angleton, who was the director of counterintelligence, and then sent on a fake defection to Russia and then brought back, you know, to Dallas. And people didn't know that, to Dallas and people didn't know that, even though it's been known for decades, it never percolated into the mainstream media because they have such an allergy to anything that challenges the Warren report. And when Congress investigated my uncle's murder in the 1970s, the church committee did

Starting point is 01:18:50 and they did, you know, two and a half year investigation, and they had many, many more documents and much more testimony available to them than the Warren Commission had. And this was a decade after the Warren Commission. They came to the conclusion that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy. And there was a division where essentially one guy on that committee believed it was primarily the mafia, but Richard Schweitzer, the senator who had the committee, said straight out, the CIA was involved in the murder of the President of the United States. Oh, and if I've talked to most of the staff on that committee and they said, yeah,

Starting point is 01:19:33 and the CIA was stonewalling us the whole way through. And the actual people that the CIA appointed George Johannesies, who the CIA appointed as the liaison to the committee, they brought him out of retirement. He had been one of the masterminds of the assassination. Oh, there's no, I mean, it's impossible to even talk about a tiny, the fraction of the evidence here. What I suggest to people, there are hundreds of books written about this that assemble this evidence and mobilize the evidence, the best book to me for people to read is James Douglas's book, which is called The Unspeakable.

Starting point is 01:20:16 And Douglas does this extraordinary scholar and he does this amazing job of digesting and summarizing and mobilizing all of them, you know, the probably a million documents and, you know, the evidence from all these confessions that have come out into a coherent story. And it's riveting to read. And, you know, I recommend people who do not take my word for it, you know't take anybody else's word for go ahead and do the research yourself in one way to do that. It is probably the most efficient way to read Douglas's book because he has all the references there. So if it's true that CAA had a hand in the assassination, how is it possible for them

Starting point is 01:21:02 to have mass so much power? How is it possible for them to amass so much power? How is it possible for them to become corrupt? And is it individuals or is it the entire institution? No, it's not the entire institution. My daughter-in-law, helping to run my campaign, was a CIA, you know, in the clandestine services for all their career. She was a spy and the weapons Weapons of Mass Destruction Program

Starting point is 01:21:26 in the Middle East and in China. And there's 22,000 people who work for this CIA, probably 20,000 of those are patriotic Americans and really good public servants and they're doing important work for our country. But the institution is corrupt, and because the high ranks the institution. In fact, Mike Pompeo said something like this to me the other day, it was the director of the CIA, and when I was there, I did not do a good job of cleaning up that agency. And he said the entire upper bureaucracy of that agency are people who do not believe in the institutions of democracy. This is what he sent me.

Starting point is 01:22:10 I don't know if that is true, but I know that that's significant. He's a smart person and he ran the agency and he was the Secretary of State. It's no mystery how that happened. We know the history, the CIA was originally, first of all, there was great reluctance in 1947 that we had it, for the first time we had a secret spy agency in this country to earn a World War II, called the OSS. That was disbanded after the war because Congress said having a secret spy agency is incompatible with a democracy.

Starting point is 01:22:47 Secrets by agencies are things that like the KGB, the Stosse in Eastern, the Germanies, the Valken, Iran, and people in Chile, and whatever, you know, all over the world, they're all have to do with totalitarian governments. They're not something that you can have in that, it's anithetical to democracy to have that. But in 1947, we created Truman signed it in, but it was initially an aspean-usht agency, which means information gathering, which is important. It's to get to gather and consolidate information, many, many different sources from all over the world and then put those in reports. The White House, the president,

Starting point is 01:23:35 can make good decisions based upon valid information, evidence-based decision-making. But Alan Dulles, who was essentially the first head of the agency, made a series of legislative machinations and political machinations that gave additional powers to the agency and opened up what they called the plan division, which is the plan's division is the dirty tricks, it's the black ops fixing elections, murdering what they call executive action, which means killing foreign leaders and you know making small wars and and and bribing and blackmailing people stealing elections and that kind of thing.

Starting point is 01:24:25 And the reason at that time, you know, we were in the middle of the Cold War, and Truman and then Eisenhower did not want to go to war. They didn't want to commit troops. And it seemed to them that, you know, this was a way of kind of fighting the Cold War secretly without doing it at a minimal cost by changing events sort of invisibly. And so it was seductive to them. But everybody, you know, Congress, when they first voted and it plays, Congress, both political parties said, if we create this thing, it could turn into a monster, and it could undermine our values.

Starting point is 01:25:07 And today, it's so powerful, and nobody knows what its budget is. Plus, it has its own investment fund. Incustal, which is invested, I think, 2,000 investments in Silicon Valley. It has ownership of a lot of these tech companies and the CEOs of those tech companies have signed state secrecy agreements with the CIA, which if they even reveal that they have signed that, they can go to jail for 20 years,

Starting point is 01:25:38 and have their assets removed, et cetera. The influence that the agency has, the capacity to influence events at every level in our country, is really frightening. And then for most of its life, the CIA was banned from propagandaizing Americans. But we learned that they were doing it anyway. So in 1973, during the Church Committee hearings, we learned that the were doing it anyway. So in 1973 during the church committee hearings, we learned that the CIA had a program called Operation Mockingbird

Starting point is 01:26:11 where they had at least 400 members, leading members of the United States Press Corps. In the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, et cetera, who were secretly working for the agency and steering news coverage to support CIA priorities. And they agreed at that time to expand Operation Mockingbird in 73, but there's indications they didn't do that. And they still, the CIA today is the biggest

Starting point is 01:26:45 funder of journalism around the world. The biggest funder is through USAID. The USA, the United States fund journalism in almost every country in the world. You know, it owns newspapers, it has journalists on thousands and thousands of journalists on its payroll. They're not supposed to be doing that in the United States, but you know in 2016 President Obama changed the law to make it legal now for the CIA to propaganda as Americans and I think you know we can't look at the Ukraine war and how that was you know has been how the narrative has

Starting point is 01:27:26 been formed in the in the minds of Americans and say that the CIA and nothing to do with that. What is the mechanism by which to say influences the narrative? Do you think it's indirectly through the press indirectly through the press or directly by funding the press directly through. I mean, there's certain press organs that have been linked, you know, to the agency that the people who run those organs, things like the daily beast, now rolling, you know, editor of no rolling, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no as a deep relationship with the intelligence community, Salon, daily coasts. But I wonder why they would do it. So from my perspective, it just seems like the job of a journalist

Starting point is 01:28:12 is to have an integrity where your opinion cannot be influenced or bought. I agree with you, but I actually think that the entire field of journalism has, you know, really ashamed itself in recent years because it's become, you know, the principal newspapers in this country and the television station, the legacy media have abandoned their traditional, their tradition of, you know, which was, when I was a kid, my house was filled with the greatest journalist alive at that time, people like Ben Bradley, like Anthony Lewis, after my father died, they started the RFK journalism awards to recognize integrity and courage, you know, journalistic integrity and courage. And for that

Starting point is 01:29:13 generation of journalism, they thought they believed that the function of journalists was to maintain this posture of fear skepticism toward any aggregation of power, including government authority. You always, the people in authority lie, and they always have to be questioned. And that their job was to speak truth to power and to be guardians of the First Amendment right to free expression. But if you look what happened during the pandemic, was the inverse of that kind of journalism, where the major press organs in this country

Starting point is 01:29:54 were instead of speaking truth to the power, they were doing the opposite. They were broadcasting propaganda organs for the government agencies. And they were actually censoring the speech of a dissent, anybody who dissent of the powerless. Oh, and in fact, it was, it was an organized conspiracy, you know, and it was the name of, it was the trusted news initiative and, you know, some of the major press organs in our country signed onto it and they agreed not to print

Starting point is 01:30:26 stories or facts that departed from government orthodoxies. So the Washington Post was the signature of the UPI, the AP, and then the four social media groups, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Google all signed on to the trusted news initiative. It was started by the BBC, organized by them. And the purpose of it was to make sure nobody could print anything about that department from government or the time, since the way it worked is the UBI, the AP, and the new services that provide most of the news around the country. And the Washington Post would decide what news was permissible to print. And a lot of it was about COVID, but also on our blinds laptops, where it was the

Starting point is 01:31:17 impermissible to suggest that those were real or that, you know, they had stuff on there that was compromising. And we, you know, and by the way, this, what I'm telling you is all well documented and I'm litigating on it right now, so I'm part of a law suit against the DNI. And so I know a lot about what happened and I have all this documented. And people can go to our website. There's a letter on my substagned out to Michael share of the Washington Post that outlines all this and gives all my sources because Michael share accused me of being a conspiracy theorist when he was actually part of a conspiracy, a true conspiracy to suppress anybody who is departing from government orthodoxies by either censoring them completely or labeling them conspiracy theorists.

Starting point is 01:32:13 I mean, you can understand the intention and the action, the difference between this we talked about, you can understand the intention of such a thing being good in a time of a catastrophe in a time of a pandemic. There's a lot of risk to saying untrue things, but that's the slippery slope that leads into a place where the journalistic integrity that we talked about is completely sacrificed. And then you can deviate from truth. If you read their internal memorandum, including the statements of the leader of the Trussenism and Hitchfinger names Jessica Jennifer DeCecile, and you can go on our website and see her statement and she says, the purpose of this is that we're now,

Starting point is 01:33:01 I say, she says, when people look at us, they think we're competitors, but we're not. The real competitors are coming from all these alternative news sources now all over the NEDWOOD. And they're hurting public trust in us and they're hurting our economic model. And we have to, they have to be choked off and crushed. And the way that we're going to do that is to make an agreement with the social media sites that if we say if we label their information misinformation, the social media sites will will de-platform it or they will throttle it or they will shadow ban it, which destroys the economic model of those alternative competitive sources of information. So that's true.

Starting point is 01:33:46 But the point you make is an important point that the journalists themselves who probably didn't know about the TNI agreement, certainly I'm sure they didn't. They believe that they're doing the right thing by suppressing information that may challenge government proclamations on COVID. But I mean, there's a danger to that and the danger is that once you point yourself an arbiter of what's true and what's not true, then there's really no end to the power that you have now assumed for yourself because now your job is no longer to inform the public.

Starting point is 01:34:30 Your job now is to manipulate the public. And if you end up manipulating the public in collusion with powerful entities, then you become the instrument of authoritarian rule on the rise and the, you know, the, the opponent of it, and it becomes the inverse of journalism and a democracy. You're running for president as a Democrat. What do you are the strongest values that represent the left-wing politics of this country? left-wing politics of this country. I would say protection of the environment and the comments, you know, the air, the water, wildlife, fisheries, public lands, you know, those assets that cannot be reduced to private property ownership, you know, the landscapes are purple mountain majesty. The protection of the most vulnerable people in our society, people

Starting point is 01:35:27 who, which would include children and minorities, the restoration of the middle class, and protection dignity and you know decent pay for labor. Bodily autonomy, a woman's right to choose or an individual's right to endure unwanted medical procedures. Peace, the Democrats have always been any war. The refusal to use fear is a governing tool. Of FDR said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, because he recognized that tyrants and dictators can use fear to disable critical thinking and overwhelm the desire for personal liberty.

Starting point is 01:36:28 The freedom of government from onto Indian flowing spy corrupt corporate power, the end of this corrupt merger of the state and corporate power that is now, I think, dominating our democracy with eyes and hour warned about when you wanted against the emergence of the military and industrial complex. And then I prefer to talk about the positive for a vision of what we should be doing in

Starting point is 01:37:00 our country and globally, which is, you know, I see that the corporations are commoditizing us, are poisoning our children, are strip mining the wealth from our middle class, and treating America as if we're a business and liquidation, converting assets to cash as quickly as possible, and creating or exacerbating this, America, as if we were a business and liquidation, converting assets to cash as quickly as possible. And creating or exacerbating this huge disparity in wealth in our country, which is eliminating the middle class, and creating a Latin American style feudal model.

Starting point is 01:37:40 There's these huge aggregations of wealth above and widespread spread poverty below, and that's a configuration that is too unstable to support democracy sustainably, you know, and we're supposed to be modeling democracy, but we're losing it. And I think we ought to have a foreign policy that restores our moral authority around the world, a story of restores America as the embodiment of moral authority in which it was when my uncle is president and as a purveyor of peace rather than, you know, war like nation. My uncle said he didn't want people in Africa and land America and Asia

Starting point is 01:38:26 to think of when they think of America to picture a man with a gun and a band at. He wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer and he refused to send combat veterans to parade. I mean, the combat soldiers brought. He never sent a single soldier to his death abroad. never sent a single soldier to his death abroad. And into combat, he sent 16,000, he resisted in Berlin and 62, he resisted in Laos and 61, he resisted in Vietnam, they wanted him to put 250,000 troops, He only put 16,000 advisors, which was fewer troops. And he sent to get James Meredith into the universe, to Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi.

Starting point is 01:39:17 One black man. He sent 16,000 and a month before he died, he'd ordered them all. He actually, I think it was October 2nd, 1963. He heard that a green beret had died. And he asked his aide for a list of combat fatalities. And the aide came back and there were 75 men had died in Vietnam at that point. And he said, that's too many. We're going to have no more in the order. He signed a national security order, 263. And awarded all of those men, all Americans home from Vietnam by 1965, with the first thousand coming home by December 63.

Starting point is 01:40:01 And then in November, he of course just before that evacuation began, he was killed. And a week later, President Johnson remanded that order, and then a year after that, the Tonkin Gulf resolution, we sent 250,000, which is what they wanted my uncle to do, which he refused. And then, and it became an American war, and then Nixon, you know, topped it off at 560,000, 56,000 Americans never came home, including my cousin George Skaigle, who died at the Tate of Fans of, and we killed a million Vietnamese, and we got nothing for it. So America should be the symbol of peace. And you know, today my uncle, you know,

Starting point is 01:40:46 really focused on putting America on the side of the poor instead of our tradition of, you know, of fortifying ol' carkeys that were anti-communism. That was our major criteria if you said you were against communist. And of course, the people were with the rich people. Our aid was going to the rich people in those countries, and they were going to the military on us. Our weapons were going to the on us to fight against the poor. And my uncle said, no, America should be on the side

Starting point is 01:41:17 of the poor. And so he launched the Alliance for Progress and USAID, which were intended to bring aid to the poorest people, those and build middle classes and take ourselves away. In fact, his favorite trip, his two favorite trips while he was present, his most favorite trip was to Ireland. This is incredible. I'm emotional homecoming for all of the people of Ireland. But his second favorite trip was when he went to Columbia. He went to Latin America, but Columbia was his favorite country. And I think there were two million people came into Bogota to see this vast crowd.

Starting point is 01:42:00 And they were just delirious cheering for him. And the President of Columbia, Yeras Kammargo, I'm said to him, do you know why they love you? And my uncle said, why he said, because they think you've put America on the side of the poor against the olikarks. And you know, when my uncle, after he died, today, There are more avenues in both arts and hospitals and schools named after and statues named after and commemorating in parks, commemorating John Kennedy in Africa and Latin America than any other president in the United States and probably more than all the other presidents can buy. And it's because, you know, he put America on the side of the United States and probably more than all the other presidents come by. And it's because, you know, he put America on the side of the board and that's what we

Starting point is 01:42:48 ought to be doing. We ought to be projecting economic power in broad. The Chinese have essentially stolen his playbook. And you know, we've spent eight trillion dollars on the Iraq war and its aftermath, the wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya, you know, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And what do we get for that? We had nothing for that money, eight trillion dollars. We got, we killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. Iraq today is a, is a, is a matter worse, much worse off than it was when Saddam was there. It's an incoherent violent war between Shia and Sunni desquads.

Starting point is 01:43:28 We pushed Iraq into the embrace of Iran, which now become essentially a proxy for Iran, which is exactly the outcome that we were trying to prevent for the past 20 or 30 years. We created ISIS. We sent two million refugees into Europe destabilizing all of the nations in Europe for generations. We're now seeing these riots in France and that's a direct result from the Syrian war that we created and our creation of ISIS. Brexit is another result of that. So for $8 million, we wreck the world. During that same period, we spent $8.1 trillion. Bombing bridges, ports, schools, hospitals, the Chinese spent $8.1 trillion dollars building schools, sports, hospitals, bridges, and universities.

Starting point is 01:44:30 And now, the Chinese are out competing us everywhere in the world. Everybody wants to deal with the Chinese because they come in, they build nice things for you, and there's no strengths attached attached and they're pleasant to deal with. And, and, you know, as a result of that Brazil is switching the Chinese currency. Argentina is switching Saudi Arabia, our greatest partner that, you know, we put trillions of dollars into protecting our oil pipelines there. And now they, they're saying, we don't care what the United States think. That's what Mom and Ben Salam said. He said, he dropped oil production in Saudi Arabia in the middle of a U.S. inflation

Starting point is 01:45:22 spiral. They've never done that to us before. Agrivate the inflation spiral. And two weeks later, and then they signed a deal, a unilateral peace deal with Iran, which has been the enemy that we've been telling them to, you know, be a bulwark against for 20 years. And two weeks after that, he said,

Starting point is 01:45:41 we don't care what the United States thinks anymore. So that's what we got for spending all those trillions of dollars there. We got short-term friends. And the United States, you know, policy abroad, and we have not made ourselves safer. We've made Americans, we've put Americans in more jeopardy all over the world.

Starting point is 01:45:59 You know, you have to wait in line to get through the airport. You have to, you know, the security state is now causing us 1.3 trillion dollars. And America is unsafe and poorer than it's ever been. So, you know, we're not getting, we should be doing what President Kennedy said we ought to do and what China, the policy, the China is now adopt. So that's really eloquent and clear and powerful description of the way you see US should be doing geopolitics

Starting point is 01:46:32 and the way you see US should be taking care of the poor in this country. Let me ask you a question from Jordan Peterson that he asked when I told him that I'm speaking with you. Given everything you've said, when does the left go too far? I suppose he's referring to cultural issues, identity politics. Well, you know, Jordan trying to get me to badmouth the left all the time I was in. I really enjoyed my talk with them. But he seemed to have that agenda where he wanted me to say bad things about the left. And I just don't, you know, that's not what my campaign is about.

Starting point is 01:47:17 I want to do the opposite. I'm not going to bad mouth the left. They try. I was on the show this week with David Remnik from the New Yorker, and he tried to get me to badmouth Donald Trump and Alex Jones and a lot of other people just and baiting me to do it. And of course, there's a lot of bad things I can say about all those people, but it doesn't, I'm trying to find values that hold us together and we can share in common

Starting point is 01:47:48 rather than to focus constantly on these disputes and these issues than drive us apart. So me sitting here, bad mouthing the left or bad mouthing the right is not going to advance the ball. I really want to figure out ways that, you know, what do these groups hold in common that we can all, you know, have a shared vision of what we want this country to look like? Well, that's music to my ears. But in that spare, let me ask you a difficult question then. You wrote a book, harshly criticizing Anthony Fauci. Let me ask you to steal man the case for the people who support him.

Starting point is 01:48:26 What is the biggest positive thing you think Anthony Fauci did for the world? What is good that he has done for the world, especially during this pandemic? You know, I don't want to sit here and speak uncharacterly by saying the guy didn't do anything, but I can't think of anything. If you tell me something that you think he did, maybe there was a drug that got licensed while he was at NIH that benefited people, that's certainly possible.

Starting point is 01:49:00 He was there for 50 years. And I, in terms of his, of his principal programs of the AIDS programs and his COVID programs, and I think that the harm that he did vastly outweigh, you know, the benefits. Do you think he believes he's doing good for the world? I don't know what he believes. In fact, in that book, which is, I think, 250,000 words, I never tried to look inside of his head. I did, I deal with facts, I deal with science. And every factual assertion in that book is cited in source to government databases or peer reviewed publications. And I don't, I try not to speculate about things that I don't know about or I can't prove.

Starting point is 01:49:45 And I cannot tell you what his motivations were. I mean, all of us, he's done a thing, a lot of things that I think aren't really very, very bad things, very humanity, very deceptive. We all have this capacity for self-deception, as I said at the beginning of this podcast, we judge ourselves on our intentions rather than on our actions, and we all have an almost infinite capacity to convince ourselves that what we're doing is right. And not everybody kind of lives an examined life and it is examining their motivations in the way that the world might experience their professions of goodness.

Starting point is 01:50:32 Let me ask about the difficulty of the job he had. Do you think it's possible to do that kind of job well? Or is it also a fundamental flaw of the job of being the centralized figure that's supposed to know scientific policy. No, I think he was a genuinely bad human being and that there were many, many good people in that department over the years. Bernice Eddie is a really good example. John Anthony Morris, many people whose careers he destroyed because they were trying to tell the truth. One after the other, the greatest scientists in the history of NIH were run out of that or going to say out of that agency. But you know, people listening to this, you know, probably, you know,

Starting point is 01:51:22 and hearing me say that will think that I'm bitter or that I'm doctrinaire about him, but, you know, you should really go and read my book. And it's hard to summarize a, you know, I tried to be really methodical, not call names to just say what happened. You are the bigger picture of this, is you're an Osbok and critic of pharmaceutical companies big farmer. What is the biggest problem with big farmer and how can it be fixed? Well, the problem could be fixed with regulation, you know, on the problems, but The pharmaceutical industry is, I mean, I don't want to say because this is going to seem extreme, that a criminal enterprise.

Starting point is 01:52:14 But if you look at the history, that is an applicable discrepac characterization. For example, the four biggest vaccine makers, Senofi, Merck, Pfizer, and Blackstone, four companies that make all of the 72 vaccines that are now mandated for a million, effectively mandated for American children. Collectively, those companies have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties and damages in the last decade. And I think since 2000, about 79 billion.

Starting point is 01:52:51 So these are the most corrupt companies in the world. And the problem is that they're serial felons. They do this again and again and again. So they did fire, you know, merc, did fire ox, which fire ox, they killed people by falsifying science. And they did it. They lied to the public. They said, this is a heading medicine

Starting point is 01:53:17 and an arthritis pain killer. But they didn't tell people that it also gave you heart attacks. And they knew, you know, we've found when we sue them, pain killer, but they didn't tell people that it also gave you heart attacks. And they knew, you know, we've found when we sued them, the memos from their bean counters saying, we're going to kill this many people, but we're still going to make money. So they make those calculations and those calculations are made very, very regularly. And then, you know, when they, when they get caught, they pay a penalty, and I think they paid about seven billion dollars for Vioxx. But then they went right back

Starting point is 01:53:54 that same year that they paid that penalty. They went back into the same thing again with Gardasil and with a whole lot of other drugs. So the way that the system is set up, the way that it's sold to doctors, the way that nobody ever goes to jail. So there's really no penalty that it all becomes part of the cost of doing business. And you know, you can see other businesses that if they're not, if they don't, if there's no penalty, if there's no real, but I mean, these look, these are the companies that gave us the opioid epidemic, right? So they knew what was going to happen and we, you know, you go and see there's a documentary I forgot the name of it is, but it shows exactly what happened.

Starting point is 01:54:40 And you know, they corrupted FDA. They knew that this, that, that oxycodone was addictive. They got FDA to tell doctors that it wasn't addictive. They pressured FDA to lie and they got their way and they've so far they live this year. You know those, they got a whole generation of addicted to oxycodone and now, you know, when they got caught and they made it, we made it harder addicted tooxycodone and now when they got caught and they made it

Starting point is 01:55:05 we made it harder to get oxycodone and now all those addicted kids are going to fend on dying and this year it killed 166,000. That's twice as many people who were killed during the 20 year being no more but in one year twice as many American kids, and they knew it was gonna happen. And they did it to make money. So I don't know why you call that. Other than saying that's, you know, a criminal enterprise. Who is it possible to have within a capitalist system

Starting point is 01:55:38 to produce medication, to produce drugs at scale in a way that is not corrupt? Of course it is. How? Through a solid regulatory regimen, where drugs are actually tested, the problem is not the capitalist system. The capitalist system, I have great admiration for that. Love for the capitalist system is the greatest economic engine ever devised.

Starting point is 01:56:06 But it has to be harness to a social purpose. Otherwise, it leads us down the trail of oligarchy and environmental destruction and commoditizing poisoning and killing human beings. That's what it will do in the end. Oh, you need a regulatory structure that is not corrupted by in tanglement, financial in tangaments with the industry. And we've set this up the way that the system is that up to A has created this system of regulatory capture on steroids. So almost 50%

Starting point is 01:56:56 of FDA's budget comes from pharmaceutical companies. The people who work at FDA are, you know, their money is coming, their salaries are coming from farm out, half their salaries. So they're, you know, they know who their bosses are. And that means getting those drugs done, getting them out the door and approved this quickly is possible. It's called fast track approval. And they pay 50, 50% of FDA's budget goes about 45% actually goes to fast-track approval. Do you think money can buy integrity? Oh, yeah, of course it can.

Starting point is 01:57:28 And the right, right? Yeah, I mean, that's not something that is controversial. Of course, it will. So, and then, and, That's why the controversial to me, I would like to think that science that will be. I'm not be able to buy your integral. I'm talking about population wide.

Starting point is 01:57:44 I'm not talking about individual. But I'd like to believe that scientists, I mean, in general, career of a scientist is not a very high-paying job. I'd like to believe that people that go into science that work at FDA, that work at NIH, are doing it for a reason that's not even correlated with money really. Yeah. And I think probably that's why they go in there. But scientists are corruptible. And you know, I, the way, the way that I can tell you that is that I've brought over 500 losses and almost all of them involved scientific controversies. And there are scientists on both sides in everyone. And when I said, when we sued Monsanto, there was on the Monsanto side, there was a Yale scientist, a Stanford scientist,

Starting point is 01:58:31 and a Harvard scientist, and on our side, there was a Yale Stanford and Harvard scientist, and they were telling us, saying exactly the opposite things. In fact, there's a word for those kind of scientists who take money for their opinion, and the word is by institutes, and they are very, very common, and you know, and I've been dealing with them with my whole career. You know, I think it's often clear is that it's very difficult to persuade them and of a fact if the existence of that fact will diminish his salary, and I think that's true for all of us, if they, you know, we find a way of reconciling ourselves the things that are,

Starting point is 01:59:13 the truths that actually end worldviews, that actually benefit our salaries. Now, NIH, NIH has probably the worst system, which is that science is a work for NIH. NIH itself, which used to be the premier gold standard scientific agency in the world. Everybody looked at NIH said, today it's just an incubator for pharmaceutical drugs. And, you know, that is that gravity of economic self-interest. Because if NIH itself collects royalties, they have margin rights for the patents on all the drugs that they work on.

Starting point is 01:59:55 So with the Moderna vaccine, which they promoted incessantly and aggressively, NIH on 50% of that vaccine is making billions and billions of dollars on it. And there are at least four scientists that we know of, and probably at least six, at NIH, who themselves have margin rights for those patents. So if you are a scientist who work at NIH, you work on a new drug, you then get margin rights in your entitled to royalties of $150,000 a year forever from that forever your children your children children as long as that Products on the market you can collect royalties

Starting point is 02:00:32 So you have you know the maternity vaccine is paying for the top people at NIH You know some of the top regulators It's paying for their boats. It's paying for their mortgages, it's paying for their children's education, and you know, you have to expect that the that in those kind of the agency itself and the individuals who stand to profit enormously from getting a drug to market. Those guys are paid by us at taxpayer to find problems with those drugs before they get to market. But if you know that drug is going to pay for your mortgage, you may overlook a little problem. And that we're even a very big one. And that's the problem. You've talked about that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer. And you've

Starting point is 02:01:32 said that you're not anti-vaccine, you're pro-safe vaccine. Difficult question. Can you name any vaccines that you think are good? I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably so I've heard more problems than they're causing. There's no vaccine that is safe and effective. The big words. What about the poll? Can we talk about the poll? Here's the problem.

Starting point is 02:02:03 Yeah, here's the problem. The pulley of vaccine contained a virus called semi virus 40 as V 40. It's one of the most carcinogenic materials that is not demand. In fact, it's used now by scientists around the world to induce tumors and rats and guinea pigs and labs. But it was in that vaccine, 98 million people who got that vaccine and my generation got it. And now you've had this explosion of soft tissue cancers in our generation that killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did. So if you say to me, did the, you know, polio vaccine was effective against polio. I'm going to say yes. If I say, if you said to me, did it kill more people that it did it, it caused more deaths than I've heard,

Starting point is 02:02:50 I would say, I don't know because we don't have the data on that. So, but let's talk, well, you know, so I have to narrow in on, is it effective against the thing that's supposed to fight? Well, a lot of them are, and let me give you an example. The most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine to their attentiveness and pertusses. It was used in this country around 1980. That vaccine caused so many entries that I, which was the manufacturer, was said to the Reagan administration,

Starting point is 02:03:20 we are now paying $20 in downstream liabilities for every dollar that we're making in profits, and we are getting out of the business unless you give us permanent immunity from liability. So the vaccine companies then were given, and by the way, Reagan said at that time, why don't you just make the vaccine safe? And why is that because vaccines are inherently unsafe? They said unavoidably unsafe, you cannot make them safe. And so when Reagan wrote the bill and passed it, the bill says in its preamble because vaccines are unavoidably unsafe. And the Bruce Whitt's case, which is

Starting point is 02:04:00 a Supreme Court case that upholds that bill. Use that same language vaccines cannot be made safe. They're unavoidably unsafe. So this is what the law says. Now, I just want to finish this story because this illustrates very well your question. The DTP vaccine was discontinued in this country and it was discontinued in Europe because that so many kids were being injured.

Starting point is 02:04:24 But however, the WHO and Bill Gates gives it to 161 million African children every year. Bill Gates went to the Danish government and asked them to support this program saying we've saved 30 million kids from dying from the area of tennis in Brutus. The Danish government said, can you show us the data? And he couldn't. So the Danish government paid for a big study with Novo Nordisk, which is a Scandinavian vaccine company in West Africa. And they went to West Africa and they looked at the DPV vaccine for 30 years of data.

Starting point is 02:05:06 And they they hire they retain the best vaccine scientists in the world. These kind of deities of African vaccine program, Peter A.B. Sigrid Morgan sent in a bunch of others and they looked at 30 years of data for the DPV vaccine and they came back and they were shocked by what they found. They found that the vaccine was preventing kids from getting the hypotheria tetanus to petuses, but the girls who got that vaccine were 10 times more likely to die over the next six months than children who didn't. Why is that?

Starting point is 02:05:38 And they weren't dying from anything anybody ever associated with the vaccine. They were dying of anemia, heart, sea, malaria, sepsis, and mainly pulmonary and respiratory disease, pneumonia. And it turns out this is what the research has found. Who are all pro-vaccine, by the way? He said that this vaccine is killing more children than if their attentiveness and perturbed prior to the introduction of the vaccine. And for 30 years, nobody ever noticed it. The vaccine was providing protection against those target illnesses, but it had ruined the children's immune systems. And they could not defend themselves against random infections that

Starting point is 02:06:22 were harmless to most children. But isn't that nearly impossible to prove that link? You can't prove the link. All you can do is for any particular interest, you can't prove the link, but you can show statistically that there is that if you get that vaccine, you're more likely to die over the next six months than if you don't. And those studies, unfortunately, are not done for any other vaccines. So for every other medicine,

Starting point is 02:06:50 in order to get approval from the FDA, you have to do a placebo control trial prior to the light sensor, where you look at health outcomes among a vag, among an exposed group, a group that gets it, and compare those to a similarly situated group that gets a placebo. The only medical intervention that does not receive, that does not undergo placebo controlled trials prior to Lycis or vaccines, not one of the 72 vaccines that are now mandated for our children, have ever gone, undergone a placebo controlled trial prior

Starting point is 02:07:25 to licensure. So I should say that there is a bunch on that point. I've heard from a bunch of folks that disagree with you, including polio. I mean, in the test testing is a really important point before licensure placebo controlled randomized trials, polio received just that against the saline placebo control. So it seems unclear to me. I'm confused why you say that they don't go through that process. It seems like a lot of them do.

Starting point is 02:07:58 Here's the thing. Is that I was saying that for many years because we couldn't find any. Yeah. And then in 2016 in March, I met President Trump ordered Dr. Fauci to meet with me and Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins. And I said to them during that meeting, you have been saying that I'm not telling the truth when I said not one of these has undergone a prior pre-licenser,

Starting point is 02:08:27 let's see if it control. And the poll you may have had one post-license, I say most of them haven't. The poll you may have, I don't know. But I said the arch-wish, and I was prior to licensor deaverts these, and for safety. And by the way, I think the poly of

Starting point is 02:08:47 Accine did undergo a saline placebo trial prior to licensure, but not for safety, only for efficacy. So I'm talking about safety trials now. I'm a little bit more. I've found she told me that he would he said, I can't find one now. He had a whole tray of files there. He said, I can't find one now but I'll send you one. I said, just for any vaccines and we want any of the 72 vaccines. He never did. So we sued the HHS and after a year of stonewalling us, HHS came back and they gave us a letter saying we have no pre-licensing safe drought for any of the 72 vaccines and that the letter from HHS which settled our lawsuit against them because we had a FOIA lawsuit against them

Starting point is 02:09:42 is posted on CHD's website so So anybody can go look at it. So if CHD, if HHS had any study, I assume they would have given it to us and they can't find one. Well, let me zoom out because a lot of the details matter here, pre-licensure, what does placebo control mean? So this is, this probably requires a rigorous analysis.

Starting point is 02:10:08 And actually, at this point, it would be nice for me just to give the shout out to other people, much smarter than me, that people should follow along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Use their mind, learn and think. So one really awesome creator, I really recommend him is Dr. Dan Wilson. He hosted the debunk the funk podcast. Vince the Reckan yellow who hosted this week in virology, brilliant guy I've had him on the podcast. Somebody you've been battling with is Paul off it.

Starting point is 02:10:39 Interesting Twitter, interesting books, people should read and understand and read your books as well. And Eric Topel has a good Twitter and good books. And even Peter Holt has, I'll ask you Rogan. And we have published a debunk of his debunking. So you read his stuff, you should read both. Yes. You should read. And I would love to debate any of these guys. So Joe Rogan proposed just such a debate, which is quite fascinating to see how much attention and how much funding it garnered. The debate between you and Peter Holtas, what do you think Peter rejected the offer?

Starting point is 02:11:39 I think it's, I say, again, I'm not going to look into his head. But what I will say is if you're a scientist and you're making public recommendations based upon what you say is evidence-based science, you ought to be able to defend that. You ought to be able to defend it in a public forum and you ought to be able to defend it against all commerce. And you know, so I, you know, if your scientist science is based on is rooted in logic and reason, and if you can't use logic and reason to defend your position. And by the way, I know almost all the studies of being, you know, I've written books on them and we've made a big effort to assemble all the studies on both sides. And so I'm prepared to talk about those studies and I'm prepared to submit them in advance, you know, and for each of the points. And by the way, I've done that

Starting point is 02:12:38 with Peter Hotez. You know, I've actually, because I had this kind of informal debate with them several years ago with them with a referee at that time and We were debating not only by phone but by email and on those emails every point that he would make I would cite science and he could never come back with science. He could never come back with publications He would give publications that we had nothing to do with, for example, if I'm aerosol in vaccines, mercury-based vaccines, he sent me one time 16 studies to to to rebut something I'd said about the I'm aerosol and not one of those studies. They were all about the MMR vaccine, which doesn't contain thymarys also. It wasn't like a real debate where you're using reason and isolating points and having a rational discourse. I don't think that he, I don't

Starting point is 02:13:35 blame him for not debating me because I don't think he has the science. Are there aspects of all the work you've done of vaccines, all the advocates you've done that you found out that you were not correct on, that you were wrong on it, that you've changed your mind on? Yeah, there are many times over time that I, you know, I found that I've made mistakes and we correct those mistakes. You know, I run a big organization and I do a lot of tweets. I'm very careful, for example, my Instagram.

Starting point is 02:14:12 I was taken down for misinformation, but there was no misinformation on my Instagram. Everything that I cited on Instagram was cited or as to a government database or to peer-reviewed science. to a government database or to peer-reviewed sites. But for example, the defender, which was our organizations newsletter, we summarize scientific reports all the time. That's one of the things the services that we provide. We watch the PubMed and we watch the peer-reviewed publications and we summarize them when they come out. We have made mistakes. When we make mistakes, we are rigorous of out-ecknowledging it,

Starting point is 02:14:45 apologizing for it, and changing it. That's what we do. I think we have one of the most robust fact-checking operations anywhere in journalism today. We actually do real science, and you know, listen, I've put up on my Twitter account and there's numerous times that I've made mistakes on Twitter and I apologize for it.

Starting point is 02:15:09 And people say to me, you know, oh, that's weird. I've never seen anybody apologize on Twitter. And I think it's really important at the only, of course, human beings make mistakes. My book is, you know, 230 or 40, 50,000 words, there's going to be a mistake in there. But you know, what I say at the beginning of the book, if you see a mistake in here, please notify me. I give a way that people can notify me. And if somebody points out a mistake, I'm going to change it. I'm not going to dig my feet in and say, you know, I'm not going to acknowledge this. So some of the things we've been talking about, you've, you've been an outspoken contrarian and some very controversial topics. This has garnered some fame and recognition, in part for being attacked and

Starting point is 02:15:59 standing strong against those attacks. If I may say for being a martyr, do you worry about this drug of martyrdom that might cloud your judgment? First of all, yeah, I don't consider myself a martyr and I've never considered myself a victim. I make choices about my life and I'm content with those choices and peaceful with them. I'm not trying to be a martyr or a hero or anything else. I'm doing what I think is right because I want to be peaceful inside of myself. But the only guard I have is you know, fact-based reality. If you show me a scientific study that shows that I'm wrong. For example, if you come back and say,

Starting point is 02:16:46 look, Bobby, here's a polio. Here's a safety study on polio that was done pre-licens, and used a real saline solution. I'm going to put that on my Twitter, and I'm going to say I was wrong. Here is one out there. So, you know, but that's all I can do. All right, I have to ask, you are in great shape. Can you go through your diet and exercise routine?

Starting point is 02:17:14 My, I do intermittent fasting. So I eat between, I start at my first meal at around noon. And then I try to stop eating at six or seven. And then I hike every day, morning, evening. And the morning, I go to a meeting, first thing in the morning, 12th of a meeting, and then I go hike, and I up hill, her mile and a half up, and I'll have down with my dogs, I do my meditations.

Starting point is 02:17:48 And then I go to the gym, and I go to the gym for 35 minutes. I do it short time, I've been exercising for 50 years. And what I found is it's sustainable, if I do just a short periods. And I do four different routines of the gym. And I never were to relax at the gym. I go in there and I have a very intense exercise.

Starting point is 02:18:12 I could tell you what my routine is, but I do. I do backs one day, just one day, legs and then a miscellaneous. And I do 12. My first set of everything is I try to reach failure at 12 reps. And then my fourth set of everything is a strip set. I do, I take a lot of vitamins. I can't even listen to you here, because I couldn't even remember them all, but I take a ton of

Starting point is 02:18:45 of vitamins and nutrients. I'm on an anti-aging protocol from my doctor and includes testosterone replacement. But I don't take any steroids. I don't take any antibiotic steroids or anything like that. And the DRT I use is bioidentical to what my body produced. What are your thoughts on hormone therapy in general? I've talked with a lot of doctors about that stuff, you know, because I'm interested in health. And, you know, I've heard really good things about it, but I don't know.

Starting point is 02:19:26 I'm definitely not an expert on it. About God, you wrote, God talks to human beings through many vectors, wise people, organized religion, the great books of religions, through art, music, and poetry, but nowhere with such detail and grace and joy as through creation. When we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine. What is your relationship and what is your understanding of God? Who is God? Well, I mean, God is incomprehensible. I guess the most philosophers would say we're inside the mind of God, and so it would be impossible for us to understand what God's form is.

Starting point is 02:20:15 But for me, let's say this, I had when I was raised in a very, very deeply religious setting. So we went to church in the summer, often times twice a day, morning mass, and we went to, we definitely went every Sunday, and I went, we prayed in the morning, we prayed before and after every meal, we prayed at night, we said, Rosary, sometimes three Rosaries a night, and my father read us the Bible, whenever he was home, he would read us, you know, we'd all get in the bed and he'd read us the Bible stories. I went to Catholic schools, I went to Jesuit schools, I went to the nuns, and I went to a Quaker school one point. When I became a drug addict, when I was 15 years old,

Starting point is 02:21:14 about a year after my dad died, and I was addicted to drugs for 14 years, during that time when you're an addict, you're living against conscience. And when you're living, I was always trying to get off of drugs, never able to, when I never felt good about what I was doing. And when you're living against conscience, you kind of push God to the peripheries of your life. Oh, call me, he receives and gets smaller.

Starting point is 02:21:47 And then when I got sober, I knew that I had a couple of experiences. One is that I had a friend of my brother. It's one of my brothers who died of this disease of addiction. I'm a good friend who had used to take drugs with us and he became a moonie. So he became a follower of Reverend Son, Son of Young Moon. And he's at that point his compulsion, he had the same kind of compulsion that I had and yet it was completely removed from him. And so, and he used to come and hang out with us, but he would not want to take drugs, even if I was taken right in front of him. He was immune to it. He'd become impervious to that impulse. When I first got sober, I knew that I did not want to be the kind of person who was waking up every day in white, nockling sobriety and just trying to resist through

Starting point is 02:22:59 willpower. By the way, I had iron willpower as a kid. I gave up candy for land when I was 12 and I didn't need it again until I was in college. I gave up desserts the next year for land and I didn't ever ate another dessert until I was in college and I was trying to bulk up for rugby and for sports. So I felt like I could do anything with my willpower, but somehow this particular thing, you know, the addiction was completely impervious to it. And I was cunning, baffling, baffling, incomprehensible. I could not understand why I couldn't just say no, and then never do it again, like I did with everything else. And so I was living against conscience.

Starting point is 02:23:48 And I thought about this guy and I, you know, reflecting my own prejudices at that time in my life, I was, I said to myself, I didn't want to be, I didn't want to be like a drug addict who was wanting a drug all the time and just not being able to do it. I wanted to completely realign myself so that I was somebody who got up every day and just didn't want to take drugs, never thought of them, you know, kiss the wife and children

Starting point is 02:24:20 and went to work and was never thought about drugs the whole day. And I knew that people throughout history had done that. You know, I read the lives of the saints. I knew Saint Augustine had met a very, very disillute youth. And then, you know, I had this spiritual realignment transformation. I knew the same thing had happened to Saint Paul, you know, at Damascus. The same thing had happened to Saint Francis. The same Francis also had a disillusion and fun loving youth and had, you know,

Starting point is 02:24:48 had this deep spiritual realignment. And I knew that that happened to people throughout history. And I thought that's what I needed, you know, something like that. I had the example of this random mind. And I used to think about him, and I would think this again reflects the bias and the meanness of myself at that time, but I'd rather be dead than be a mooney. But I wish I somehow could distill that power that he got without becoming a religious

Starting point is 02:25:22 nuisance. And at that time, I picked up a book by Carl Young called the Synchronicity. And Young, he was a psychiatrist, he was contemporary of Freud, he was a, Freud was his mentor and Freud wanted him to be his replacement, but Freud was not about atheists. And Young was a deeply spiritual man. He had these very intense and genuine spiritual experiences when he was a little boy from

Starting point is 02:25:49 the last three years, all that he remembers, his biography is fascinating about him, because he remembers him with such an detail. And he was, he had written, he was always, he was any interested in me because he was very faithful scientist and I consider myself a science-based person from when I was little. And yet he had this spiritual dimension to him, which infused all of his thinking and really I think made him, you know, it is branded his form of recovery or of treatment. And he thought that he had this experience that he describes in this book where he's sitting up on the third, and one of the biggest sanitariums in Europe in Zurich. And he was sitting up on the third floor of this building. And he's talking to a patient who was describing her dream to him. And the

Starting point is 02:26:49 full room of that dream was a scarab beetle, which was an insect that is very, very uncommon if at all in northern Europe. But it's a almond figure and the iconography of Egypt and the hieroglyphics on the walls of the pyramids, etc. And while he was talking to her, he heard this being, being, being on the wind up behind him. And he didn't want to turn around to take his attention off her, but finally he does it. In his aspiration, he turns around, he throws up the window and his carbiet of flies in his hands. And he shows it to the woman and he says, this is what he was thinking of. This is what you were dreaming about. And he was struck by that experience, which was similar to other experiences.

Starting point is 02:27:36 He had like that. And that's what synchronous he means. It's an incident of coincidence. You know, and like if you're talking with somebody about somebody that you haven't thought about in 20 years, and that person calls on the phone, that's synchronicity, and he believed it was a way that God intervened in our lives that broke all the rules of nature, that he had set up the rules of physics, the rules of nature that he had set up, the rules of physics, the rules of mathematics, you know, to reach in and sort of tap us on their shoulders and say, I'm here. And so he tried to reproduce that in a clinical setting. And he would put one guy in one room and

Starting point is 02:28:19 another guy in another room in an atom flip cards and then guess what the other guy had flipped. And he believed that if he could beat the laws of chance, laws of mathematics, then he would have proved the existence of a natural law, a supernatural law. And that was the first step to proving the existence of a God. He never succeeds in doing it, but he says in the book, even though I can't prove using empirical and scientific tools, the existence of a a God I can show through anecdotal evidence and having seen Thousands of patients come through this institution that people who believe in God get better faster and that the recovery is more enduring than people who don't And for me hearing that was more impactful than if he

Starting point is 02:29:02 had claimed that he had proved the existence proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved

Starting point is 02:29:12 he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had proved he had he had was going to help me whether there's a god up there or not believing in one itself At the power to help me I was going to do that. So then the question is how do you start believing in something that you can't see or smell or hear or touch your taste or acquire with your senses and Young provides the formula for that and he says he says act as if he fake it to you make it and

Starting point is 02:29:43 So that's you know what I started doing. I just started pretending there was a guy watching me all the time and kind of life was a series of tests and each there was a bunch of moral decisions that I had to make every day and each one, you know, these were all just little things that I did, but each one now for me at a moral dimension, like when I, you know, when the alarm goes off, do I lay in bed for an extra 10 minutes with my insulin thoughts, or do I jump right out of bed? Do I make my bed most important decision of the day? Do I hang up the towels? You know, do I, do I, when I go into the closet and pull out my blue jeans and a bunch of those wire

Starting point is 02:30:25 hangers fall on the ground, do I shut the door and say I'm too much I'm too important to do that that somebody else's job or not. And so I put the water in the ice tray before I put in the freezer, like with their shopping cart back in the you know place and that it's supposed to go in the parking lot of the safe way. And if I make a whole bunch of those choices right, that I maintain myself in a posture of surrender, which keeps me open to the power of to my higher power, like to my God. And when that when I do those things right, when I, you know, so much about addiction is about abuse of power, you know, abuse of all of us have some power, whether it's, you know, good looks or whether it's,

Starting point is 02:31:15 you know, connections, education or family or whatever. And there's always a temptation to use those to fill a self-will. And the challenge is how do you use those always to serve and to set God's will and the good of our community. And that, to me, is kind of the struggle. And when I do that, I feel God's power coming through me and that I can do things I'm much more effective as the human being at that knowing anxiety that I lived with for so many years and my God that I it's gone and that I can kind of like

Starting point is 02:32:02 put down the ores and hoist the sale and the wind takes me. And I can see the evidence of it in my life. And the big thing for temptation for me is that when all these good things start happening in my life and the cash and prizes start flowing in. You know, how do I maintain that posture of surrender? How do I stay as surrender then when I'm my inclination is to say to God, thank God I got it from here. Yeah. And drive the car off the cliff again. And so, you know, I had a spiritual awakening and my desire for drugs and alcohol was lifted

Starting point is 02:32:44 miraculously. And to me, it was as much miracle as if I had been able to walk on water. Because I had tried everything earnestly and honestly for a decade to try to stop. And I could not do it under my own power. And then all of a sudden, I was lifted effortlessly. And you know, so I saw that evidence, early evidence, I've got in my life, and I'm not the power. And I see it now, you know, every day of my life. So adding that moral dimension to all of your actions is how you're able to win that Kamu battle against the absurd. It's place with the bowl is all the same thing. It's the battle to just to do the right thing.

Starting point is 02:33:31 And now, Sessifus was able to find somehow happiness. Well, Bobby, thank you for the stroll through some of the most important moments in recent human history and for running for president. And thank you for talking today. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from John F. Kennedy.

Starting point is 02:33:59 Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Instead, let us accept our own responsibility for the future. Thank you.

Lex Fridman Podcast - #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning

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