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

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 I've ever met, including most of my good friends,

are scientists and engineers. Again, I love science. But science cannot flourish without

epistemic humility, without debate, both in the pages of academic journals and in the public square,

in good faith, long-form conversations. Agree or disagree, I believe Robert's voice

should be part of the debate. To call him a conspiracy theorist 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.

But I also recommend, as I say in this conversation, that people read and listen to

Vincent Reconyello from This Week in Viralogy, Dan Wilson from Debunk the Funk, and the Twitter and

Books of Paul Offit, Eric Topol, and others who are outspoken in their disagreement with Robert.

It is disagreement, not conformity, that bends the long arc of humanity toward 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 the best way to support this podcast.

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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's so many things that I love about the country on you know the landscapes and

the waterways and the people etc but on the kind of a you know the higher level you know people

argue about whether we're an exemplary nation and that term has been given a bad name particularly

by the neocons the actions the neocons in in recent decades who have turned that that phrase

into kind of a justification for forcing 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 exemplary nation in in in the sense that we

were an example of democracy all over the world when we 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

today there's probably 190 and all of them in one way or another are modeled on on the American

experience and it's kind of extraordinary because sort of our first contact with our first serious

and sustained contact with the European culture and continent was in 1608 when John Winthrop came

over with his Puritans in the Slupart Bella 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 you know all the

other nations in the world and he he warned his fellow Puritans they were you know sitting at the

at this great expanse of land he said we can't be we can't be seduced by the the lure of real

estate or by the carnal opportunities of this land we have to take this country as a gift from God

and then turn it into a an example for the rest of the world of of God's love of God's will

and and wisdom and and then you know 200 years later 250 years later they a different generation

they're mainly deists there are people who had a belief in God but not so much

a love of particularly religious cosmologies you know the afframers the constitution

believe that we were creating something that would be replicated around the world and that it was

an example it would in democracy there would be this kind of wisdom from the collective

you know that and the word wisdom means the 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

I went through was a white man and a Protestant that every immigrant group

who came after them I kind of adopted that belief and I know my family when you know

after my family came over all of my grandparents came over in 1848 during the potato famine

and they saw this country as unique in history as something that that was

uh that was part of kind of a broader spiritual mission and so I'd say that from a 30 000 foot

level that you know that's 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 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 it it it has to be accompanied by restraint if it's

going to uh live up to its promise um in self restraint what it means the capacity for human

beings to um to exercise and to fulfill their their creative energies unrestrained as much as

possible by government so this point that Hunter Stonces made is dies unless it's used

do you agree with that yeah I do agree with that and I think you know that he he was not unique

in saying that you know Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of liberty has to be uh had be

watered with the blood of each generation and what he meant by that is that it's 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 and they put it all on the

line to give us our bill of rights and that but those bill of rights the moment that we

signed them there were forces within our society um that began trying to chip away at them and that

you know 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 Stoicism 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 is an act of rebellion what do you think he means

by that I suppose the way that Camus viewed the world um and the way that the Stoics did and a

lot of the existentialists was that it was uh that it was so absurd and that the uh the the

problems in the task that were 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 you know this uh this uh impossible task

of living life was to embrace it and to enjoy it and to do our our best at it I mean to me I

you know I read Camus and the particularly the myth of Sisyphus as a um as kind of as a parable

that uh and it's the same lesson that I think he he writes about in the plague where we're all

given these insurmountable tasks in our lives but um that uh by doing our duty by being observance

uh there's we can bring meaning to a meaningless chaos and we can bring order to the universe and

you know Sisyphus was um was kind of the iconic hero of the Stoics and he was a man because he

did uh 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 it 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 absurd it was insurmountable he can never

win but the last line of that book is one of the great lines which is uh which is something to the

extent that you know I can picture Sisyphus smiling because Camus's 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 you know and the absurdity of life

and he pushed the stone up the hill and that if we do that and if you know we find ways of being

of service to others that is you know 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 um you know that those the embrace

of those tasks and they and the commitment to service resonates out from us to the rest of

humanity in 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 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 to power

and take on pulling the whole world into a global war I was born nine years after the end of World War

Two and I grew up in a generation that was you know with my parents who were fixated on that

um and you know what happened and my father at that time they you know the kind of the

resolution in the minds of most Americans and I think people around the world is that there was

there had been something wrong with the German people that you know the Germans had been particularly

susceptible to this kind of demagoguery and to following a powerful leader and and just industrializing

cruelty and and and murder and my father always differed with that my father said this is not a

German problem this could happen to all of us we're all just 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 you know our nature has to uh has to be restrained and it and that comes

through self-restraint but it also you know the beauty of our country is that we develop 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 um you know one of the other things and my father talked about from when I was little you

know he would ask us this question if you 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 hit her at risk your own life or would

you be one of the people who turned her in and of course we would all say well of course we would

hide Anne Frank and take the risk um but you know that's been something uh kind of a lesson

a challenge that has been uh 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 he was conscious

about how fragile democracy actually is um that would I be one of the ones who would resist the

totalitarianism or would I be 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 um or you know even Berlin and saw people

being shipped off to camps and just put my head down and pretend I didn't see it because talking

about it would be uh destructive to my career maybe my freedom and even my life um 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 uh

resist in that situation but the reality is most of us wouldn't and that's a good thing to think about

that uh 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 I'm gonna apply that question my uncle

and my father my uncle was asked when he first met Jackie Bouvier who later became Jackie Kennedy

she was a reporter for a newspaper and she was doing she she had a kind of column where she'd do these

these kind of um uh pithy interviews uh with with both famous people and kind of men in the street

interviews and she was interviewing him and she asked um um what she thought what he believed his

best quality was his strongest virtue and she thought that he would say courage because

he had been a war hero he had he was the only uh 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 hero

in World War II and then he had come home and he'd written a book on on moral courage among

American politicians and won the bullet surprise that book Profiles and Courage and um which was

a series of incidents where um American political leaders made decisions to to embrace principle

even though their careers were at stake and in most cases were destroyed by their choice

oh she thought he was going to say courage but he didn't he said curiosity and um 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 he 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 context and that's why he was able to

you know during the uh he was able to resist the intelligence apparatus and the military

during the pay of pigs when they said he've got it sent in the Essex the aircraft carrier and he

said no even though he'd only been in one 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 until when the the narrative was okay Khrushchev acted in a way as an aggressor to

put missiles in 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

you know the Turkish ones right on the Russian border and they then made a secret deal with

Dobran and with Ambassador Dobran and you know with Khrushchev to remove the missiles in Turkey

if he moved the Jupiter missiles from Turkey if if I so long as Khrushchev removed them from

from Cuba every there were 13 men on the executive on the end what they call the NCON Committee

which was the group of people who were deciding you know what the action was what what they were

going to do to end the Cuban Missile Crisis and virtually I and of those men 11 of them

wanted to invade and wanted to bomb and invade and it was Jack and then later on my my father

and then Bob Mackinac who were the only people who were with him

because he was able to see the world from Khrushchev's point of view of you 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 than courage on the 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

it certainly requires moral courage to 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 um 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

but I think it's important for us to move beyond these kind of comic book depictions of a you know

of this insane avaricious Russian leader who wants to you know restore the the Soviet Empire

and that that's why and it was and it made an unfolked unprovoked um 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 before Putin never came in

we were provoking Russians in this way unnecessarily and to go back that time in 1992

when the Russians moved out of when 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

oh Gorbachev 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 a 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 to

the east and James Baker who was his 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 there's a big new

Brzezinski who was kind of the father of the neocons who was a democrat at that time served in

the in the Carter administration he said he published a paper a blueprint for moving NATO right

up to the Russian border a thousand miles to the east and and taking over 14 nations

and at that time George Kennan who was the kind of the deity of American diplomats he was probably

arguably 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 the Russians to a violent response and we should be

making friends with the Russians they lost the Cold War we should be treating them the way that we

treated the our adversaries after World War II like with a Marshall plan to try to help them

incorporate into Europe and to be part of the the brotherhood of you know of man and of western

nations we shouldn't continue to be treating them as an enemy 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 east and William Burns who was then the

US ambassador to 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 the east

and we put Aegis missile systems in two nations in Romania and Poland so we did what you know

what the Russians had done to us in 1962 that would have provoked an invasion of Cuba

we put those missile systems back there and then we walk away unilaterally walk away from the two

um nuclear missile treaties the intermediate nuclear missile treaties that we had with the

Soviet Union with Russia and neither of us would put those missile systems on the borders

we walk away from that and we put Aegis missile systems which are nuclear capable they can carry

the Tomahawk missiles which have 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 or William Burns said it so now

the head of the CIA it is a red line if we go into if we bring NATO into 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 or 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 in 1963 60 years ago this month or he said or last

month 60 years ago in June June 10th 1963 he told that speech was telling the American people put

yourself in the shoes of the Russians we need to do that if we're gonna if we're gonna make peace

and he said all of us have been taught you know 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

they they 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 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

to talk to the Russians we've broken up 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 they when the Donbass 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 they the Russians

were were very worried because of the US involvement in the coup in Ukraine in 2014

and then the oppression and the you know and the killing of 14 000 ethnic Russians and Russia hasn't

that the same the same way that if Mexico would ageist missile systems from China or Russia on

our border and then killed 14 000 expats american we would go in there oh he does have a national

security interest in the Ukraine he has an interest in protecting the Russian speaking people of the

Ukraine the 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 coup by the government we put in in 2014 and and we wouldn't we sabotage

that agreement and then we now know in April of 2022 Zelensky and Putin had inked a deal already

to another peace agreement and that the United States and Boris Johnson the neocons in 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 you know this is a war that the neocons in 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 in fact they say it this is the model 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 U.S. 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 you know why are we there he said to degrade the

Russians capacity to fight anywhere to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to

elsewhere in the world that's not a humanitarian mission that's not what we were told we were

we were told this was an unprovoked invasion but and that we're there to bring a humanitarian

relief to the Ukrainians but that is the opposite that is a 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 and you

know I think that's wrong we should be talking to the Russians the way that you know Nixon talked

to Brezhnev the way that Bush talked to Gorbachev the way that my uncle talked to Khrushchev we

need to be talking with the Russians we should and and and negotiating and we need to be looking

about how do we end this and preserve peace in Europe would you as president sit 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 absolutely do you think he has been

corrupted by being in power for so long if you think of the man if you look at his mind listen

I don't know exactly um I can't say because I just I don't know enough about him or about you

know my the evidence that I've seen is that he is homicidal he kills his enemies or poisons 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 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 it's a good idea to do regime change in Russia

which has more nuclear weapons than we do um 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 that he was talking about himself and uh and he has his hand on a button that could bring

you know arm again to the entire planet so why are we messing with this it's not our job to change

that regime and and we should be making friends with the Russians we shouldn't be treating him as

an enemy now we've pushed them 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 the the polls that are coming out of Russia they show him you know the

most recent polls that I've seen show him with that 89 percent popularity that people in Russia

support the war in Ukraine and that uh and they support him as an individual so um and I understand

there's problems with polling and you know you don't know what to believe but but the polls

consistently show that and um and I you know 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're not we shouldn't be breaking

international laws you know we should actually be looking for ways to improve relationships with

Russia not to you know 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 now back to the corner yeah and I think the US can play

a really important role and a US president can play a really important role by

reassuring the Russians that we're not going to 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 President Kennedy did it is you do it one step at a time you take baby steps we

do a unilateral move to reduce our you know our our hostility and aggression and see if the Russians

reciprocate and um 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 and you know apparently there's been 350,000

Ukrainians who have died at least in this war and and there's probably been 60 or 80,000 Russians

and that should not give us any joy it should not give us any you know I saw a

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 they're you know we should have compassion for them on this war is an unnecessary war we

should settle it through negotiation through diplomacy through statecraft and not through weapons

do you think this work 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 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 you know to fill the ranks of their armies men

military aged men are trying as hard as they can to get out of the Ukraine right now to avoid going

to the front the front you know the Russians apparently have been killing Ukrainians that

at 7 to 1 ratio my son fought over there and he told me it's you know artillery 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 out outgun the NATO forces 10 to 1 in artillery

oh they're killing at a horrendous rate now you know my interpretation of what's happened so far

is that the Putin that 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 and uh 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 till now and they now have that force

and even against this small original force the Ukrainians have been uh I hope helpless

all of their offenses have died they've now killed you know the head of the Ukrainian

special forces which was the probably arguably by many accounts the best elite military unit in

all of Europe they the command common dance the commander of the that special forces group

had gave a speech about four months ago saying that 86 percent of his men are dead

or wounded and will cannot return to the front he cannot rebuild that force um the uh and you know

the the troops that are now headed that are now filling the gaps of all those 350,000 men who

have been lost are are scannily trained and they're arriving green at the front many 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 again including platoon-sized groups that are defecting to the russians and um I don't

think it's possible to win and anybody you know I saw I of course I've studied world war two history

exhaustively but I saw a um there's a new I think it's a Netflix series of documentaries

that I highly recommend to people there it's their colorized versions of the black and white

films from the battles of world war two but it's all the battles of world war two so I watched

allen grad the other night and uh you know the the willingness of the russians to um to fight on

against any kind of outs and to make huge sacrifices of russians 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 the uh that Ukraine

can can beat russia in a war it would be like Mexico beating the united states it's just it's

impossible to think that it can happen and you know russia has 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 it's a hopeless situation and we've been lied to you know we're

the the press in our country and our government are just are just you 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 the Wagner group you know

the on the progression and 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 of his men to follow him out of 20 000 and they were quickly

stopped and nobody in the russian military the oligarchy the political system nobody supported

it you know and but we're being told oh yeah it's the beginning at the end for blue Putin

he's weakened he's wounded he's on his way out and all of these things are just lies that we are

being fed so to 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 the Ukrainians are very lucky to fight to the end

and the morale there is quite high I've talked to nobody this 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 get gave them a reason and an understanding that this is what it

means to be Ukrainian and I will fight to the death to defend this land you know I would agree

with that and I should have said that myself at the beginning but you know that's one of the reason

my son went over there to fight because the you know he was inspired by the valor of the Ukrainian

people and the you know this extraordinary willingness of them and I think Putin thought it

would be much easier to sweep into Ukraine and he found you know a stone wall of of Ukrainians

whether ready to put their their lives and 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 you know I I think that the U.S. role

in this has been had you know that there were there were many opportunities to settle this war

and the Ukrainians wanted to settle it for Vladimir Zelensky when he ran in 2019 here's a guy who's a

comedian he's a he's an actor um he had no political experience and yet he won this election with 70

percent of the vote why he won on a peace platform anyone promising to sign the Minsk Accords and

yet something happened when he got in there that made him suddenly pivot and you know 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

Newell and in the White House that you know we don't want peace with Putin we want a war

do you worry about nuclear war yeah I worry about it it's uh 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 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

and yet you know we're uh 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 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

you know a quizzling on you know into the Kremlin that he would use nuclear you know torpedoes

and you know these these strategic weapons that they have and that could be the end once you do

that nobody controls the trajectory by the way you know I have 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 U2 got shut down over Cuba that you know and nobody in this

kind there's a lot of people in Washington D.C. who at that point thought that they very may 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 a war with Russia a nuclear exchange with

Russia as not only inevitable but also desirable because they wanted to do it now while we still

had a superiority can you actually go through the feelings you've had about the Cuban missile crisis

like what what are your memories of it what what are some interests you know in the middle of I was

going to school in Washington D.C. to um to sit well far to um our lady of victory which is in

Washington D.C. so we were I lived in Virginia across the atomic and we would cross the bridge

every day into D.C. and during the crisis U.S. 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 he was

staying with the ex-comp committee and sleeping there and they were up you know 24 hours they

were debating and trying to figure out what was happening and um but we had U.S. Marshals come to

our house to take us down they were going to take us down to um a white sulfur springs and uh in

southern Virginia in the in the Blue Ridge Mountains where there was a um there was an

underground city essentially a bunker that was like a city and apparently it had McDonald's in it

and a lot of other you know it had it was a full city for the U.S. government and their families

U.S. Marshals came to our house to take us down there and I was very excited about doing that

and this was at a time you know when we were doing the drills we were doing the duck and

cover drills um once a week at our school where they would tell you if they you know when the

alarms go off um then you you put your head onto the table you take the show you 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 and file in

an orderly fashion into the basement where we're going to be for the next six or eight months or

whatever but in the basement where you know we we went occasionally in those corridors

we're lined with uh freeze-dried food canisters up to this from Florida's ceiling so people were

you know we were all preparing for this and it was you know uh Bob McNamara who is my was a friend

of mine and you know it's my father one of my father's closest friend the secretary of defense

he later called mass psychosis and my father deeply regretted participating in the bomb

shelter program because he said it was part of a you know a psychological psiop trick

to treat them to teach Americans that nuclear war was acceptable that it was survivable

my father anyway when they when the marshals came to our house take me and my brother Joe away

and with we were the ones who are home at that time um my father called and he talked to us on

the phone and he said I don't want you going down there because um because if you disappear from

school people are going to panic and I need you to be a good soldier and go to school now and

and he said something to me during that period which was that if the nuclear war happened it

would be better to be among the dead than the living which I did not believe okay I mean I

I had already prepared myself for the you know for the for the dystopian future and I knew I could

I spent every day in the woods I knew that I could survive by catching crawfish and you know

cooking mud puppies and whatever I had to do but I felt like okay I can I can handle this uh

and I really wanted to see the setup down and you know this underground city but anyway that was

you know part of it for me my father was away and you know the last days of it

my father um 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 chief sent the warmongers around

to him to solve that letter and they disapproved of it they sent another letter that was extremely

belligerent and my father had the idea let's just pretend we didn't get the second letter and reply

to the first one and then he went down to do brennan and who was he met do brennan in the

justice department and do brennan was the soviet ambassador and they you know they proposed this

settlement which was a secret settlement where khrushchev would withdraw the missiles from cuba

khrushchev had put the missiles in cuba because we had put missiles you know nuclear missiles in

turkey and italy and my uncle's secret deal was that if he if khrushchev removed the

missiles from cuba within six months he would get rid of the jupiter missiles in turkey but if

khrushchev told anybody about the deal it was off so if if news got out about that secret deal

it was off but that was the actual deal and khrushchev 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 brennial question right

but it is history kind of an automatic pilot and you know human decisions and 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 a really good example of a play of a place in human history that uh 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 missile emplacements

each one of those missile emplacements had a crew of about 100 men and they were soviets

so um they were and they we didn't know whether that we we had a couple of questions that my uncle

asked ellen or asked the cia and he asked that dallas was already gone but he asked the cia and

he asked um his military brass 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 a leader in the white house who can push back on on their bureaucracies

he um and then he asked them you know are those who's manning those missile sites

and are they russians and if they're russians and we bomb them uh are they isn't it gonna force

crew chef to then go into berlin and that would be the beginning of a cascade of fact

that would you know highly likely end a nuclear confrontation and the the uh the military brass

said to my uncle oh we don't think you'll have the you know we don't think he'll have the

guts to do that so he went my uncle was like that's what you're betting on and uh you know

they all wanted him to go in they wanted him to bomb the sites and then invade cuba and he said

if we bomb those sites we're going to be killing russians and it's going to force it's going to

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 that we didn't find out until i think uh you know there was a

there was like a 30-year anniversary of the cuban missile crisis in havana and what we learned then

was that from the russians who came to that event it was like a symposium where everybody on both

sides talked about it and we learned a lot of stuff and and never nobody knew before one of the

insane things the most insane thing that we learned was that the the weapons were already the 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 club gun crew commanders so there were 60 people

who at all had authorization to fire if they felt themselves under attack

so you have to believe them at least one of them would have launched and that would have

been the beginning of the end and you know if they if anybody had launched you know 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 said he told he told

Arthur Slesinger and Kenny O'Donnell he said those guys he called them the salad brass the guys with

all of the 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 the world after that so for them you know it was there was an incentive to

to kill 130 million russians and 30 million americans by my uncle he had this correspondence

with the crew chef 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 you know Eisenhower famously said it will

it will not be a man of war it will not be a soldier who starts world war three because a guy

who's actually seen it knows how bad it is and my uncle you know had been in the heat of the south

pacific his boat had been cut into by a japanese destroyer um his and even three of his crewmen

had been killed one of them badly burned he he pulled that guy with a lanyard in his teeth

six miles to an island in the middle of the night and then they hid out there for 10 days you know

and um and you know he came back like i said he was the only president of the united states that

are in the purple heart um meanwhile crew chef had been at Stalingrad which was the worst place to

be on the planet you know probably in the 20th century other than you know and how swiss are one

of the death camps it was uh you know it was it was the most ferocious horrific war with people

starving people you know committed cannibalism uh you know eating the dogs the cats eating their

shoe leather freezing to death by the thousands etc a crew chef did not want the last thing he

wanted was a war and the last thing my uncle wanted was a war and they but the the CIA did not know

anything about crew chef and the reason for that is the there was a mullet Langley so that every

time the CIA got a spy in the Kremlin he would immediately be killed so they had no eyes in the

Kremlin you know there were literally hundreds of Russia of Russian spies who had who had defected

the united states and were in the Kremlin who were killed during that period they had no idea

anything about crew chef about how he saw the world and they saw the Kremlin itself as a monolith

you know that this uh this kind of you know the same way that we look at Putin today that you

know it's all they 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 crew chef and uh and his joint chiefs and his intelligence apparatus

and they 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 my uncle had this idea of you know being the peace president

from the beginning he told ben bradley his one of his best friends who you know was running the

publisher of the Washington Post for the editor-in-chief at that time he said um ben bradley asked him

what is what do you want in your gravestone and my uncle said he kept the peace he said the principal

job of the president of the united states is to keep the country out of war and um and so when he

first became president he he actually agreed to meet crew chef in geneva to do his summit and by the

way eisenhower had wanted to do the same thing eisenhower wanted peace but his and he was going

to meet in vienna but that peace summit was blown up he was going to try to do um you know he was

going to try to end the cold war eisenhower was in the last year of his in may of 19 sexy

but that was torpedoed by the cia during the u2 crash you know they sent a u2 over the over the

soviet union it got shot down and then they told and then alan told us told eisenhower to deny

that we had a program they didn't know that the russians had captured gary francis powers

and so one and and that blew up the peace talks between eisenhower and crew chef and so you

know the and the uh there was a lot of tension my uncle wanted to break that tension he agreed to

meet with um with crew chef in vienna early on in his term he went over there and crew chef snubbed

crew chef lectured him imperiously about the you know the the terror of american imperialism and

and rebuff any you know they did agree not to go into laos they made an agreement that kept

the united states became my uncle from sending troops to laos but um it had been a disaster vienna

so then we had a spy that used to come to our house all the time i cut george bolshekoy he was

this russian spy my my parents had met at the embassy they had gone to a party or reception

that russian embassy and he had approached them and they knew he was he was a gru agent and kgp 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 was uh he could do the russian dancing the cossack dancing

and he would do that for us and teach us that and he was and we knew he was a spy too and this

was at the time of you know the james bond films were first coming out so it was really exciting

for us have a actual russian spy in our house the state department was horrified by it but um

but anyway when khrushchev after vienna and after um the you know the big pigs on khrushchev had

second thoughts and he sent this long letter to my uncle and he didn't want to go through

his his state department or his embassy he wanted to end run them but and he was friends with bolshekoy

so he gave george the the letter and george brought it and handed it to pia salinger folded

in the new york times and he gave it to my uncle and it was this beautiful letter at which he said

you know um he 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 elections they'll never run for office how can we make how can we can we morally make a decision

that is going to eliminate life for these beautiful kids and um he had said that to to khrushchev

and khrushchev wrote in this letter back saying that he was now sitting as this dacha on the black

and um that he was thinking about what my uncle jack had said to me and he regretted very deeply

not having taken the olive leaf that jack had offered him and then he said you know it occurs to

me now that we're all on an ark 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 and immediately

after that this was you know they he sent that right after the berlin crisis in 1962 general

curtis lemay um tried to um had tried to provoke a war with a an incident at checkpoint charlie which

was the the the entrance the entrance and exit through the berlin wall in berlin and the russian

tanks had come to the wall the u.s tanks had come to the wall and there was a standoff and my uncle

had had uh sent a message to khrushchev then through do brennan saying my back is at the wall

i cannot i have no place to back to please back off and then we will back off and khrushchev took

his word act his tanks off first and then my uncle ordered lemay to back like he had lemay had

mounted bulldozer plows on the on the front of the tanks to to plow down the berlin wall

and that and the russians had come so it was just you know it was the right it was the his

generals trying to provoke a war and um but they started talking to each other and then

when he 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 there was a red phone that we knew if we picked it up khrushchev would answer

and there was another one in the white house yeah and 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

i can i you know that just understands our job look i know you know a lot about ai right

and you know how dangerous it is potentially to humanity and what opportunity is it also um

you know offers but it could kill us all i mean elon said first it's going to steal our job and

it's going to kill us right yeah and it's it's probably not hyperbole it's actually you know

if it follows the laws of biological evolution which are just the laws of mathematics that's

probably a good endpoint for it you know a potential endpoint so um we 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 and that includes russia and china and iran right now we we should be putting all the weapons

of war aside and sitting down with those guys and saying how are we doing how are we going to do this

there's much more important things to do we're going to this stuff is going to kill us if we

don't figure out how to regulate it and and leadership needs to look down the road at what

is the real risk here and the real risk is that you know AI will will you know enslave us for one

thing and you know and and then 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

or Ebola and um and you know dengue fever and you know all of these other bad things and we're

making ethnic bioweapons bioweapons that can only kill russians bioweapons that the chinese are making

that you know are can kill people who don't 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 a biological 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 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 biological weapons we need to start 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 talking about it in a government

they get fixated on these little wars and you know and uh these comic book depictions of good

versus evil and you know and we all go you know and and go off to and give them the weapons and

enrich you know the military and gosh i should have complex but we're we're on the road to

perdition if we don't end this and some of this requires to have this kind of phone that connects

khrushchev and john afghanity 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 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

intentional effects so you have to be transparent and honest about especially with AI that people

might not know what what's the worst that's going to happen once you release it out into the wild

and you have to have an honest kind of communication about how to do it so that companies are not

terrified of regulation uh overreach regulation and then uh government is not terrified of tech

companies of manipulating them in some directory in direct ways so like there's a trust that builds

versus a distrust that that seems to so basically that old phone or khrushchev can call john afghanity

as needed yeah and you know i don't think there's a listen i don't understand AI okay i do know i i

can see from all this technology how it's this kind of turn key totalitarianism that once you

put these systems in place you know they can be misused to enslave people and they can be misused

in wars and you know 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 you know we need to bring in the tech community and say

tell us what these regulations need to look like you know 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

you know that that are these existential threats to that pose existential threats to humanity

it seems like john afghanity is a singular figure in that he was able to have the humility

to reach out to khrushchev and also the the strength and integrity to resist the what did you call

him this the salad salad brass and institutions like the cia so that that makes a 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 can

that they were subsequently involved in the cover-up and and continue to be involved in the

cover-up i mean there's still 5000 documents that they won't release 60 years later

is i think so insurmountable and so you know a mountainous and overwhelming that

it's beyond any reasonable doubt including you know dozens of confessions that people who were

involved in the in the in the assassination but you know all of every kind of document and

and you know i mean it came as a surprise recently to most americans i think the release

of these documents in which the the the press the american media finally acknowledged that

yeah li harvey oswald was the cia asset that 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 in you know

with the u2 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 um to to dalis and people didn't know that even though it's been known

for decades but the it never percolated into the mainstream media because they have such a

um you know they're they have such an allergy to anything that that uh that challenges the

warren report you know when congress investigated my uncle's murder in the um in the uh in the 1970s

the church committee did 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 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 was the senator who had

of the committee um said you know straight out the cia was involved in the murder of the president

united states oh and and the if i've talked to most of the staff on that committee and they said

yeah um and the cia was stonewalling us the whole way through and the actual people that the cia

appointed george shohannadis uh who had who the cia appointed as a liaison to the committee they

brought him out of retirement he had been one of the masterminds of the assassination

oh uh there's no i mean it's impossible to even talk about a tiny the fraction of the evidence

here and what i i suggest to people there are hundreds of books written about this that you

know assemble this evidence and um mobilize the evidence the best book to me for people to read

is james douglas's book which is called the unspeakable and he douglas does this extraordinary

he's an extraordinary scholar and he does this it's an 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 um and don't take uh

don't take anybody else's word for go ahead and do the research yourself in one way to do that

is probably the most efficient way to read douglas's book because he has all the references there

so if it's true that cia had a hand in this assassination 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 who's not helping

to run my campaign was a cia you know in the clandestine services for all of her career she was

a spy and the weapons of mass destruction program in the mid-east and in china and there's 22 000

people who work for the cia probably 20 000 of those are you know are patriotic americans and

really good public servants and they're doing important work for our country but the institution

is corrupt and and because the height ranks the institution and in fact mike pompeo said something

like this to me the other day was the director of the cia he said 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 of democracy this is what he said to me so i

don't know if that's true but i know that you know that's significant he's a smart person and he

ran the agency and he was the secretary of state but it's no mystery how that happened

and 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 run a world war two

called the os s that was disbanded after the war because congress said having a secret spy agency

is incompatible with a democracy the secret spy agencies are things that like the kgb

stasi in east germany savak in iran and uh peep and chili 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 that um it's it's antithetical to democracy to have that but um in 1947 we created truman

signed it in but it was an initially and that's been our 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 of the white house so the president

can make good decisions based upon valid information evidence-based you know decision

making uh but alan dollas who was the you know essentially the first head of the agency

made a series of of legislative machinations and political machinations that gave

additional powers to the agency and opened up the uh what they called then the the plans

division which is the plans division is the dirty tricks it's the black ops fixing elections

um murdering what they call executive action which means killing foreign leaders um and you

know making small wars and uh and bribing and blackmailing people stealing elections and that

kind of thing 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 and doing it at minimal cost by um by uh changing events sort of invisibly

and so it was seductive to them but everybody you know congress when they first voted in place

congress both political parties said if we create this thing it could turn into a monster and it

could undermine our you know our values and today it's so it's so powerful and then nobody knows

what its budget is plus it has its own investment fund in cutel which has invested you know made

i think 2000 investments in silicon valley oh it has ownership of a lot of these tech companies

that you know and the a lot of the ceo's those tech companies f sign state secrecy agreements with

the cia which if they even reveal that they have signed that they can go to jail for 20 years and

have their assets removed etc oh the influence that the agency has the capacity to influence

events at every level in our country uh art is really uh frightening and then for most of its

um for most of its life the cia was banned from propagandizing americans

but we learned that they were doing it anyway so in 1973 during the church committee hearings we

learned that the cia had a program called operation mockingbird where they had at least 400

members leading members of the united states press corps on the new york times the washington post

abc cbs nbc etc who were secretly working for the agency and um and steering news coverage

uh to support cia priorities and they agreed at that time to disband operation mockingbird in 73

but there's uh there's indications they didn't do that and they still that cia today is the biggest

funder of journalism around the world oh the biggest funder is through usa id um the usa the

united states funds journalism in almost every country in the world you know it owns newspapers

that uh has journalists hundreds of thousands of journalists on its payroll they're not supposed

to be doing that in the united states but um you know in 2016 president obama changed the law to

make it legal now for the cia to propagandize 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 been formed in the

in the minds of americans and say that the cia had nothing to do with that what is the mechanism

but wish 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 stone you know editor of no rolling

stone no ish lachman has deep relationships with the intelligence community uh salon daily coasts um

but i wonder why they would do it so from my perspective it just seems like the job of a

journalist is to have an integrity where european it cannot be influenced or bought i agree with you

but i actually think that the entire field of journalism has uh has uh you know really ashamed

itself in recent years because it's become you know the the principal newspapers in this country

and the television station the legacy media have abandoned their um their traditional their

tradition of of you know which was when i was a kid listen my house was filled with the greatest

journalists alive at that time people like ben bradley like anthony lewis mary magrory

eat hamel jerry jack newfield jimmy brezlin uh and many many others and after my father after

my father died they started the rfk journalism awards to recognize integrity and courage you

know journalistic integrity and courage and for that generation of journalism they they thought

they believed that the that the function of a journalist was to maintain this posture of fear

skepticism toward any aggregation of power and including government authority you always that

people in authority lie and that we they always have to be questioned and uh and that their job

was to speak truth to power and to be guardians of the first amendment right to to uh free expression

but if you look what happened during the pandemic it was the inverse of that kind of

journalism where the uh the major press organs in this country um were instead of speaking truth

to power they were doing the opposite they were broadcasting propaganda they became propaganda

organs for the government agencies and they were actually censoring um the speech of dissent

anybody who dissented of the powerless oh and in 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 stories or facts that um

that departed from government orthodoxy so the washington post was the signature of the upi

the ap and then the four media or 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 government that departed

from government orthodoxy the way it worked is the upi the ap and the which are the news services

that provide most of the news you know news around the country and the washington post would

decide what news was permissible to print and a lot of it was about covet but also hunter

buttons laptops were you it was impermissible to suggest that those were real or that you know

they had stuff on there that was compromising and um and we you know and by the way i this what i'm

telling you know is all well documented and i'm litigating on it right now so i'm part of a lawsuit

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 substack now to um to michael share of the

washington post that outlines all this and gives all my sources um 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 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 uh there's

a lot of risk to saying untrue things but that's a 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 the the leader of

the trusted news initiative i think her name's jessica uh jennifer to see so um and i you know

you can go on our website and see her statement and she says she says the purpose of this is that

we're now 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

network 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 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 um will de-platform it or they will throttle it or they

will uh shadow ban it which destroys the economic model of those alternative competitive sources

of information so that that's true but and but the point you make is an important point um that

the journalists themselves who probably didn't know about the tni agreement certainly i'm sure they

didn't um they believe that they're doing the right thing by suppressing information that may

challenge you know government proclamations on covet but i mean there's a danger to that and the

danger is that you know once you appoint yourself an arbiter of what's true and what's not true uh

then there's really no end to the power that you have now assumed for yourself because

now your your job is no longer to inform the public your job now is to manipulate the public

and if you end up manipulating the public uh in collusion with powerful entities then you become

the instrument of authoritarian rule um rather than 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 uh

what do you are the strongest values that represent the left-wing politics uh of this country

i would say protection of the environment and the the commons you know the air the water wildlife

fisheries public lands you know the those assets they cannot be reduced to private property ownership

you know the the landscapes are purple mountain majesty uh the protection of the most vulnerable

people in our society people um who um which would include children and minorities uh the the

restoration of the middle class you know the and uh and uh protection of labor dignity uh and you

know decent pay for labor um uh bodily autonomy a woman's right to choose or an individual's right

to endure unwanted medical procedures um peace you know the democrats have always been any war

the refusal to use fear as a governing tool you know of fdr said the the only thing we have to

fear is fear itself because he recognized that uh tyrants and dictators could use fear to disable

critical thinking and and uh and overwhelm the desire for personal liberty um the uh the the

freedom of government from untoward influence by corrupt corporate power that's the end of this

corrupt merger of of the state and corporate power that is now i think dominating our democracy

split eyes and how are warned about money warned against the emergence of the military

industrial complex and then i prefer to talk about kind of the positive for a vision of

what we should be doing in our country and globally which is you know i i i see that the

corporations are commoditizing us are poisoning our children are um strip mining the wealth from

our middle class and uh and treating americas if it were business and liquidation converting assets

to cash as quickly as possible and you know and and creating or exacerbating this uh this huge

disparity in wealth in our country which is eliminating the middle class and creating you

know kind of a latin american style feudal model there's a these huge aggregations of wealth

above and widespread to 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 um and i you know i think we ought to have a foreign policy that restores our moral authority

around the world restores america as the embodiment of moral authority and which it was when my uncle

was 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 latin america and asia to think of when they think of america

to picture a man with a gun and a bayonet he wanted them to think of a peace corps volunteer

and he refused to send combat veterans abroad combat soldiers abroad he never sent a single

soldier to his death abroad um and uh in you know into combat um he sent 16 000 he resisted in in

berlin and 62 he resisted in laos uh in 61 he resisted um in in vietnam you know vietnam they

wanted him to put 250 000 troops he only put 16 000 advisors which was fewer few fewer troops

and he sent to get james meredith into the uh into the universe to ol miss in oxford mississippi

one black man he sent 16 000 and a month before he died he'd ordered them all help me actually i

think it was october 2nd of 1963 he heard that a green beret had died and he asked his aid for a

combat um for a list of combat fatalities and the aid came back and there were just 75 men

had died in vietnam at that point and he said that's too many we're gonna have no more and he

ordered he signed a national security order 263 and ordered all of those men all americans home

from vietnam by 1965 with the first thousand coming home by december 63 and then uh 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 skakel who died at the ted offensive um and we killed a million vietnamese and we got nothing for

it so america should uh be the symbol of peace and you know today my uncle you know really focused

on putting america on the side of the poor yeah instead of our tradition of you know of of

uh fortifying oligarchies that were anti-communism that was our you know our major criteria if you

said you were against communists 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 hunt us our

weapons were going to the hunt us to fight against the poor and my uncle said no you know america

should be on the side of the poor and so he launched the alliance for progress and the usa id which

were intended to bring aid to the poorest people knows and build middle classes and and take ourselves

away in fact his most his favorite trip his two favorite trips while he was present

his most favorite trip was to ireland this is incredible um 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 there were i think there were two

million people came into bogota to see him this vast crowd and they were just delirious cheering for

him and the president of columbia eris carmargo i'm said to him do you know why they love you

and my uncle said why and he said because they think you've put america on the side of the poor

against the oligarchs and you know when my uncle after he died today there are more avenues

and boulevards and hospitals and schools named after and statues named after and commemorating

and parks commemorating john canady in africa and latin america than any other president

of the united states and probably more than all the other presidents combined and it's because

you know he put america on the side of the poor and that's what we ought to be doing we ought to

be projecting mille economic power abroad the chinese have essentially stolen his playbook

and you know we've spent eight trillion dollars on the iraq war and it's aftermath of wars in

syria yemen libya you know afghanistan pakistan and what do we get for that we got nothing

for that money eight trillion dollars um we got we killed more irakis than san mussein iraq today is

is that is a mad worse much worse off than it was when sanham was there and say it's an

incoherent violent war between shia and sunni desquads 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 you know 20 or 30 years we created isis we sent two million refugees into europe

destabilizing all of the nations in europe for generations and we're now seeing these riots

in uh in france and that's a direct result from the syrian war that we created and and

that our creation of isis brexit is another you know result of that so we for eight trillion

dollars we wrecked the world and during that same period that we spent eight point one trillion

dollars the bombing bridges ports schools hospitals center the chinese spent eight point

one trillion dollars building schools ports hospitals bridges and and uh and universities

and now you know the chinese are are out competing us everywhere in the world everybody wants to

deal with the chinese because they you know they come in they they build nice things for you and they

and there's no strengths attached and they're pleasant to deal with and and you know as a result

of that brazil is switching the chinese currency um 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 you know we we don't we don't care what the united states think that's what

my mom and ben salam said he said we don't he you know they he dropped oil production in saudi

arabia in the middle of the us inflation spiral they've never done that to us before to aggravate

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 to be a bullet work

against for 20 years and two weeks after that he said 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 you know you have to

wait in lines to get through the airport um you have to you know the security state is now

then costing us 1.3 trillion dollars and america is unsafer 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

what china the policy that china has now adopted so that's uh really eloquent and clear and powerful

description of the way you see us should be doing geopolitics 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 bad mouth the left the whole time i was and i really enjoyed my my uh my talk with him

yeah but he seemed to have that agenda where he wanted me to you know say bad things about the

left and i just um you know that's not what my campaign is about i want to do the opposite

i'm not gonna bad mouth the left they try i you know i was on a show this week with

david remnick from the new yorker and he tried to get me to bad mouth donald trump and you know

and alex jones and a lot of other people just and and baiting me to do it and of course there's

a lot of bad things i could say about all those people but it doesn't you know i'm trying to find

i'm trying to find values that hold us together and we can share in common rather than to focus

constantly on these disputes and these issues then drive us apart so me sitting here bad

mouthing the left or bad mouthing the right is not going to advance the ball i 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 spirit let me ask you a difficult question then you wrote a book harshly criticizing anthony

fauci let me ask you to steal me on the case for the people who support him 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 uh sit here and speak uncharitably

by saying the guy um didn't do anything but i i don't i can't think of anything i mean if you

um if you tell me something that you think he did you know maybe there was a drug that got licensed

while he was in nih that you know benefited people that's certainly possible he was there for 50 years

and i i in terms of his um of his principal programs of the aides programs and his covet

programs and i think that the harm that he did vastly outweighed uh you know the 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 try to look inside of his head i i deal with

facts i deal with science oh and i every 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 and i do i cannot tell you what his motivations

were or i mean all of us he's done a thing a lot of things that i think are really very very bad

things for humanity a very uh deceptive but we all have this um this capacity for self-deception

as i said at the beginning of this podcast we we judge ourselves on our intentions rather than

our actions and we all have an almost infinite capacity to convince ourselves that what we're

doing is is right and um you know not everybody kind of lives an examined life and they're

examining their motivations in the way that the world might experience

their professions of goodness 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 central centralized figure that's supposed to have scientific policy no i think he was a

genuinely a bad human being and that there were many many good people in that department over the

years uh um bernice eddy 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 we're run out of that we're gonna say out of that agency but you know

people listening to this you know probably you know will in hearing me say that will think that

i'm bitter or that i i'm doctrinaire about him but you know you should really go and read my book

and i it's hard to summarize a you know i try to be really methodical to not call names to just

say what happened uh you are the bigger picture of this is you're an outspoken critic of uh

pharmaceutical companies big pharma what is the biggest problem with big pharma and how can it be

fixed well the problem could be fixed with regulation you know the problems but the

pharmaceutical industry is um is uh i mean i don't want to say because this is going to seem

extreme that a criminal enterprise but if you look at the history that is an applicable um

describe or characterization for example the the four biggest vaccine makers

is synovie murk feiser and glaxo the four companies that make all of the 72 vaccines that

are now mandated for america effectively mandated for american children collectively those companies

have paid 35 billion dollars in criminal penalties and damages in the last decade and i think

since 2000 about 79 billion so these are the most corrupt companies in the world

and the problem is that they're serial felons they you know they do this again and again and again so

they did viag you know murk did viax which viax they you know they killed people by

falsifying science and they did it they lied to the public they said this is a headache medicine

and an arthritis painkiller 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 the you know the memos from their

being 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 they pay a penalty and i think they paid

about seven billion dollars for viax but then they went right back 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

um nobody ever goes to jail so there's really no penalty that uh 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 forget what the name of it is but it shows exactly what happened and you

know they corrupted FDA they knew that this 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 so far they led this year you know those they got a whole generation addicted to oxycodone

and now you know when they got caught and they made it we made it harder to get oxycodone and now

all those addicted kids are going to fentanyl and dying and this year it killed 106 106 000

that's twice as many people who were killed during the vietnam during the 20 year vietnam war but in

one year twice many american kids and they knew it was going to happen and they did it to make money

so i don't know what you call that other than saying that's you know a criminal enterprise

was it possible to have within a capitalist system to produce medication to produce drugs at scale

in a way that is not corrupt of course it is how through a you know through a solid regulatory

regimen you know where drugs are actually tested you know i i mean the problem is not the capitalist

system the the capitalist system i you know i have great admiration for the thing that love the

capitalist system is the greatest economic engine ever devised but it has to be harnessed to a social

purpose otherwise it's going to it leads us you know down the the trail of of oligarchy

environmental destruction and you know and commoditizing poisoning and and killing human

beings that's what it will do and in the end oh you there you need a regulatory structure

that is um that is not uh corrupted by entanglements financial entanglements with the industry

and we've set this up the way that this is that the system has set up today has created this system

of regulatory capture on steroids so almost 50 percent of fda's budget comes from pharmaceutical

companies the people work at fda are you know their money is coming their salaries are coming from

pharma 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 as quickly as possible it's

called fast track approval and they pay 50 50 percent of fda's budget that goes about 45

percent it actually goes to fast track approval do you think money can buy integrity oh yeah of

course it can in the regular yeah i mean there's that's not something that is that is controversial

of course it will so and then slightly controversial to me i would like to think that science that

may not be able to buy your integrity i'm talking about population-wide i'm not talking about the

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 they

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 had

the way and the way that i can tell you that is that i've brought over 500 losses and almost all

of them involve scientific controversies and there are scientists on both sides in everyone

and when i sit when we sit in monsanto there was uh on the monsanto side there was a Yale

scientist a stanford scientist and a harvard scientist and on our side there was a Yale

stanford and harvard scientists and they were telling 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 with them my whole career

you know i think it's often Sinclair has said that it's very um difficult to persuade a man 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 the two uh the truths that

actually and worldviews that actually benefit our our salaries now NIH um NIH has probably the worst

system which is that scientists who work for NIH NIH itself which used to be the premier gold

standard scientific agency in the world everybody looked at NIH that today it's just an incubator

for pharmaceutical drugs and and you know that is that gravity of economic self-interest because

if you're um if NIH itself collects royalties they have margin rights for the patents on all

the drugs that they work on 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 four 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 and you're entitled to royalties of $150,000 a year forever from that

forever your children your children's children as long as that products on the market you can

collect royalties so you have you know the Moderna 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 uh that in

those kind of situations the regulatory function would be subsumed beneath the mercantile ambitions

of the agency itself and the individuals who stand to profit enormously from getting a drug

to market those guys are paid by us the 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 said that you're not anti-vaccine

your 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

saw I've hurting more problems than they're causing there's no vaccine that is you know

safe and effective the big words what about this whole yet can we talk about the well here's the

problem yes look yeah here's the problem the polio vaccine contained a um a virus called

semi-virus 40 sv 40 it's 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 kill 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 gonna say yes if I say if you say to me did it kill more people

that it did offer cause more deaths than ever 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 we kind of have to narrow in on is it effective

against the thing it's supposed to fight well a lot of them are let me give you an example

the most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine dip there at tetanus and pertussis

it was used in this kind of introduced in this country around 1980 that vaccine caused so many

injuries that liars which was the manufacturer was said to the Reagan administration 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 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 and it's preamble is because vaccines are unavoidably unsafe and the brucewitz

case which was a supreme court case that uphold about that bill uses 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 your question that the DTP vaccine was

discontinued in this country and it was discontinued in Europe because so many kids were being injured

by it however the WHO and Bill Gates gives it to 161 million African children every year

and um Bill Gates went to the Danish government and asked them to support this program saying

we've saved 30 million kids um from dying from diphtheria tetanus and pertussis 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 DTP vaccine for 30 years of data and they hire they retain

the best vaccine scientists in the world these kind of deities of African vaccine program Peter AAB

Sigrid Morgan sent in a bunch of others and they looked at 30 years of data for the DTP vaccine and

they came back and they were shocked by what they found they found that the vaccine was

preventing kids from getting diphtheria tetanus and pertussis 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 and they weren't dying from anything anybody ever associated with the vaccine they

were dying of anemia, heart seam, malaria, sepsis, um and mainly pulmonary and respiratory

disease pneumonia and it turns out this with the um that this is what the researchers found

who are all pro vaccine by the way they said that this vaccine is killing more children

than diphtheria tetanus and pertussis prior to the introduction of the vaccine and for 30 years

nobody ever noticed that 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 were harmless to most children but isn't that nearly impossible to prove that link

you can't prove the link usually all you can do is for any particular interest you can't

illness or death 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

in order to get approval from the FDA you have to do a placebo control trial prior to license

where you you look at health outcomes among a value among an exposed group 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 control trials prior to license or

vaccines not one of the 72 vaccines that are now mandated for our children have ever gone or gone

a placebo control trial prior to licensure so i should say that there's a bunch on that point

i've heard from a bunch of folks that disagree with you okay including polio i mean in the test

testing is a really important point before licensure placebo control randomized trials polio

received just that against the saline placebo control so it seems unclear to me i'm confused

why you say that that would they don't go through that process it seemed like a lot a lot of them do

here's the thing is that um i was saying that for many years because we couldn't find any yeah

and then in 2016 in march i met um president trump ordered dr fowchee to meet with me

dr fowchee and frances 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-licensure let's see the control and the polio may have had one post

licensing most of them haven't the polio may have i don't know but i said the our question was

prior to licensure do you ever test these and for safety and i'm and by the way

i think the polio vaccine 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 fowchee told me that he

was he said i can't find one now he had a whole tray of files there he said i can't find now and

now but i'll send you one i said just for any vaccines and we won for 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 safety trial for any of the 72

vaccines and that the letter from hhs which settled our lawsuit against them because we had a

foyer lawsuit against them is posted on chd's website so anybody can go look at it so if chd had

if if hhs had any study i assume they would have given it to us and they they can't find one

well let me zoom out because uh a lot of the details matter here pre-licensure what does

placebo control mean i just so this is uh this probably requires a rigorous analysis and actually

at this point it would be nice for me just to give a 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 hosts the debunk the

funk podcast uh vince the recon yellow who hosts this week in virology brilliant guy i've had him

on the podcast somebody you've been battling with is paul offit interesting twitter interesting books

people should read and understand and read your books as well and uh eric topol has a good twitter

and good books and even peter holt has i'll ask you about him and people should because paul offit

um uh published a no a sub stack recently debunking i think my um my uh discussion with uh

with joe rogan and um and we have published a debunk of his debunking and you know so if you

read his stuff you should read both yes you should read uh and i would love to debate any of these

guys uh so joe rogan proposed just such a debate which is quite fascinating to see how much attention

and how much funding it garnered uh the debate between you and peter holt has what do you think

peter rejected the offer i think it's i you know 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 you know all commerce

and you know uh so i you know if you're a 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 i'll be 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 uh for each of the points and by the way i've done that with

peter holt has you know i've i've actually because i had this i'm this kind of informal debate with

him several years ago with him 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 had nothing to do with for example thimeris all vaccines mercury based vaccines he sent me one

time 16 studies to to uh to rebut something i'd said about thimeris all and not one of those studies

they were all about the m mr vaccine which doesn't contain thimeris also it wasn't like a real debate

where you're you know you're you're using reason and isolating points and having a you know a

rational discourse i don't think that he i don't blame him for not debating me because i don't think

he has the the science are there aspects of all the work you've done on vaccines all the advocacy

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 you know i'm very careful for example my instagram i was taken down from for misinformation

but there was no misinformation on my instagram everything that i cited on instagram was cited

or sourced to a government database or to peer reviewed science but for example the defender which

was our our organization's newsletter we summarize scientific reports all the time that's one of

things the services that we provide but we watch the you know pub med 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 about acknowledging it 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 they're listen i've put up on my twitter account when i there's there

numerous times that i've made mistakes on twitter and i apologize for it 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

thousand words there's gonna 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 gonna change it i'm not gonna dig my feet in and say

you know i'm not gonna acknowledge this so some of the things we've been talking about you've

been uh an outspoken contrarian on some very controversial topics uh this has garnered

some fame and recognition in part for being attacked and standing strong against those attacks

if i may say for being a martyr do you worry about the 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 you know and i'm 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 um but i the only guard i have

is just 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 look bobby here's a polio um here's a safety study

on polio that was done pre-licenser and used a real salient solution i'm gonna put that on my

twitter and i'm gonna say i was wrong there 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 uh go through your diet and exercise

routine my um i do intermittent fasting so i eat between noon i start at my first meal at around noon

and then i try to stop eating at six or seven and then um i i i hike every day morning evening

in the morning i go to a meeting first thing in the morning 12 some meeting and i go hike

hurt and i hike uphill for a mile and a half up and i'll have down with my dogs and i do my

meditations and then i go to the gym and i go to the gym for 35 minutes i don't i do it

short time i've been exercising for 50 years and what i found is it's sustainable if you know if

i do just a short periods and i do four different routines at the gym and i never relax at the gym

i go in there and i have a very intense exercise so i live you know i mean i i i could tell you

what my routine is but i do i do backs one day back just one day legs and then a miscellaneous

and i do 12 my first set of everything is is i try to i try to reach failure at 12 reps

and then my fourth set of everything is a strip set um i do i take a lot of um

vitamins i i can't even listen to you here because i you know i i couldn't even remember

them all but i take a ton of left vitamins and nutrients i take i'm on an anti-aging protocol

from my doctor that includes uh uh um testosterone replacement and uh but i don't take any steroids

i don't take any anabolic steroids or anything like that and the

d r t i use is uh is bio identical to what my body produced what are your thoughts on hormone

therapy in general i talked to a lot of doctors about that stuff you know because i'm interested

in health and i you know i've heard really good things about it but i don't know i'm definitely

not an expert on it about god you wrote god talks to human beings through many vectors wise people

organize 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's god

well i mean god is incomprehensible you know i mean i guess the most philosophers would say we're

in you know we're inside the mind of god um and so it would be impossible for us sunders and you

know what actually what you know what god's form is but i mean for me i have a um let's say this i

had when i was i was raised in a very very deeply religious setting so we went to um church in the

summer oftentimes twice a day the morning mass and we went to we definitely went every sunday

and we um and i went we prayed in the morning we prayed before and after every meal we prayed

at night we set a rosary sometimes three rosaries at night and my father read us the bible um 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

oh i and i went to catholic schools i went to judgewood schools i went to the nuns um and i went

to a quaker school at one point um when i i became a drug addict when i was about 15 years old about

a year after my dad died 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 again i never you know i was always trying

to get off of drugs never able to but i never uh felt good about what i was doing and um

and when you're living against conscience you kind of push god to the peripheries of your life oh

uh i'll call me he gets recedes and gets smaller um and then when i um 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 um had a good friend who had used to take drugs

with us and he became a mooney so he he became a follower of reverend son sun 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 he was immune to it he'd

become impervious to that impulse and um i when i was in the when i first got sober i was i knew

that i did not want to be the kind of person who was you know waking up every day and white

knuckling sobriety and just you know trying to resist resist through willpower and by the way

i had um i had iron willpower as a kid i gave up candy for lenn when i was 12 and i didn't

need it again till i was in college i gave up um i gave up desserts the next year for lent

and i didn't ever eat another dessert till i was in college and i was trying to bulk up for rugby

and for sports so um 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 it was cunning

baffling baffling incomprehensible i could not understand well i couldn't just say no

and then never do it again like i did with everything else um and um so i was living against

conscience and i 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 my my myself so that i was somebody who got up every day and

just didn't want to take drugs never thought of him you know i kissed the wife and children 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'd read the lives of the saints i knew st augustine had had a very

very disillusioned youth and and you know i had this spiritual realignment transformation i knew

the same thing had happened to st paul you know at demasque as the same thing had happened in

st france the same frances also had a had a disillusioned and fun loving youth and and had

you know had this this deep spiritual realignment and i 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

that you know probably the meanness of myself at that time but i i said 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

nuisance and um and at that time i picked up a book um by carl young called synchronicity and young

he was a psychiatrist he was contemporary of freud's he was a um freud was his mentor and and

freud wanted him to be his replacement but freud was an avowed atheist and young was a deeply

spiritual man he had these very intense and genuine spiritual experiences from when he was a little

boy from at least three years old that he remembers his biography is fascinating about him because he

remembers him with such a detail and um he uh he was he had written he was always he was interesting

to 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 a branded his his form of recovery or of treatment

and he thought that he had this experiment experience that he describes in this book

where he's sitting up on the third he ran one of the biggest sanitariums in europe in zurek

and he was sitting up on the third floor of this building and he's talking to a patient

who had a who was talking describing her dream to him and the fulcrum of that dream was a scarab

beetle which was an insect that is not is very very uncommon if at all in northern europe but it's a

almond figure in the iconography of of egypt and the hieroglyphics on the on the walls of the

pyramids etc and um he and he while he was talking to her he heard this bing bing bing on the

window behind him and he didn't want to turn around to take his attention off her but finally

he does it he's in exasperation he turns around he throws up the window and his scarab beetle

flies in and lands in his hand 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 he was struck by that experience experience

which was similar to other experiences he's had like that and that's what synchronicity means to

say it's a an incident or coincidence you know and like if so if you're 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 oh and he believed it was a way that god intervened in our lives that

broke all the all the rules of nature that he had set up the rules of physics the rules of

mathematics or you know to reach in and sort of tap us on their shoulder and say i'm here

and um and so he tried to reproduce that in a clinical setting and he would put one guy in

one room and another guy in another room and have them flip guards 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 approve the existence of an unnatural 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 um even though i can't prove using empirical and scientific tools the existence of a god

i can show through anecdotal evidence having seen thousands of patients come through with

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

had claimed that he had proved the existence of a god because i would not believe that but i i was

already at a mindset where i would have done anything i could to improve my chances of never

having to take drugs again by even one percent and if believing in god was gonna help me whether

there's a god up there or not believing in one itself had 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 or 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 so that's you know what i started

doing i just started pretending there was a god 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 um you know when the alarm goes off do i lay in bed for an extra 10 minutes

with my handle and thoughts or do i jump right out of bed do i do i make my bed most important

decision of the day do i hang up the towels you know do i um do i when i go into the

closet and pull out my blue jeans and a bunch of those wire 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 job or not and so

i do i put the water in the ice tray before i put in the freezer do i put the shopping cart back

in the you know place that it's supposed to go in the parking lot of the safeway and if i make a

whole bunch of those choices right that um 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 i when i do those things

right um 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 her you know good looks or whether it's uh

you know connections or education or or family or whatever and there's always attempted

a temptation to use those to fill fulfill self-will and the challenge is how do you

use those always to serve instead god's will and you know the good of our community and that

to me is kind of the struggle and when i do that i feel i feel god's power coming through me

and that i can do things i'm much more effective as a human being at that gnawing you know uh anxiety

that i lived with for so many years and my god that i it's gone and that um i can kind of like

put down the oars and hoist the sail and you know and the wind takes me and i can i can see the

evidence of it in my life and you know the big thing for you know the temptation for me is that

um 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 surrendered then when

on my inclination is to say to god thanks god i got it from here yeah and drive the car off the cliff

again and uh so you know i had a spiritual awakening and my desire for drugs and alcohol was lifted

miraculously uh and it to me it was as much a miracle as if i had if i'd been able to walk on

water because i had tried everything earnestly sincerely 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 it was lifted effortlessly and um

you know so i saw that evidence early evidence of god in my life and i'm out of the power

and um 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

exactly with the bold it's all the same thing it's the battle to just to do the right thing

now says the fist was able to find somehow happiness yeah uh well bobby thank you for the

stroll through some of the most important moments in in recent human history and for running for

president and um thank you for talking today thank you lex thanks for listening to this conversation

with robert f kennedy junior 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 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 for

listening and hope to see you next time

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