All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg: E127: Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in conversation with the Besties

Sax, you ready? You got your quick time going?

Oh, let me do that real quick.

Just a quick note, Sax.

Mr. Kennedy doesn't have earpieces in,

so we just have to be careful of the

crosstalk or talking over each other.

I'll direct questions to each person,

and then follow-ups so you can obviously just use

your judgment of when to insert yourself,

but be gentle on the insertion there,

because we don't want that came out wrong.

Just be gentle when you interrupt.

God, there's your cold open.

At least if you did it incorrectly,

it'll be quick.

Okay, here we go, in three, two.

Let your winners ride.

Rainman, David, Sax.

I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going,

And it said we open sourced it to the fans,

and they've just gone crazy.

I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going,

I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going,

All right, everybody, welcome to the All In Podcast.

As many of you know, this podcast has gotten quite popular

over the last two years, typically in the top 10 or 20

each week, and we talk about politics.

We've got a big following in DC.

And why are you calling me self-absorbed, Chabot?

I mean, listen to how your co-host opens the show.

Calm down, everybody.

It's okay. Yeah, yeah.

And as part of that, our ongoing discussions

about politics and presidential candidates

has resonated in particular communities.

And today, we are lucky enough to have one of the top presidential

hopefuls in the 2024 election joining us,

Robert Kennedy Jr.

And we will be inviting all presidential candidates

to come on to the All In Podcast

and have candid discussions that are unfiltered

the way the audience would expect them.

We're going to play with different formats,

but we decided for this first one,

we've got a series of topics we'd like to cover,

and we're going to treat it like any other All In podcast.

And with that, I'll have David Sacks,

who is the most conservative of our panel,

who has been also the most enthusiastic,

I think, of everybody here,

and one of the most enthusiastic supporters

of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s pursuit

of the presidency of the United States.

So with that, David, would you like to introduce our guest?

Yeah, let me give Bobby a proper introduction here.

So Robert Francis Kennedy Jr.

is entering the political arena as a candidate

for the first time at the age of 69,

but it's perhaps no exaggeration to say

that he was destined for the mission he is now pursuing.

He is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy

and the son of Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

When Bobby was 14, his dad was running for president

on a platform of civil rights, civil liberties,

lifting Americans out of poverty

and opposing the Vietnam War.

He had just won the California primary

when he was tragically assassinated.

RFK Jr. graduated from Harvard

and the University of Virginia Law School

and became an environmental lawyer

who aggressively litigated against corporate polluters

and government agencies that were failing to regulate them.

He has always put the health and safety

of the American people at the forefront of his activism.

And this has made him controversial at times

as he has questioned the safety

of some pharmaceutical products

and also criticized COVID restrictions during the pandemic.

For this, the mainstream media has tried to paint him

as a, quote, conspiracy theorist.

But given that so many conspiracy theories

about COVID have been vindicated,

Tablet Magazine wrote, quote, at this point,

the fact that Robert F. Kennedy

is the country's leading conspiracy theorist,

alone qualifies him to be president.

But the biggest reason why I think his candidacy

is so interesting and relevant

is that it harkens back to a democratic party

that believed in peace instead of war,

free speech and civil liberties instead of censorship,

building up the middle class instead of the donor class,

and opposing corporate greed,

especially in the military industrial complex,

which is a message you just don't hear much anymore

coming from the democratic side of the aisle.

So with that, Bobby Kennedy, welcome to the program.

Thank you so much for having me.

So maybe we could start with foreign policy,

something we've discussed here,

specifically the Ukraine and Russia's invasion of Ukraine

and our support of that war.

Sax, would you like to tee up a question for Mr. Kennedy?

I think Bobby's tweets on the subject show that

he has a really deep understanding of it.

He's been saying a lot of things

that I've been saying since the beginning of the war,

which not just the fact that we're risking war or three

over getting involved in a country

that isn't a treaty ally of the United States,

it's never been a violent interest in the United States,

but I think your critique goes deeper

because you actually understand the causes

of how this war started.

So maybe, Bobby, you could speak to that.

How did we end up in this proxy war with Russia

from your standpoint?

Well, first of all, let me start by saying

this, I supported the humanitarian aid to the Ukraine,

which is what we were told initially was the mission,

although I had, I was suspicious of it.

And my son, as I've mentioned, actually went over,

left law school, did not tell us where he was going

and went over and joined the foreign legion

and fought in the Kharkiv offensive

with a special forces group.

He was served as a machine gunner.

He was in engagements with the Russians.

And, but he feels the same way, essentially,

that I do that this is no longer a humanitarian mission

and that all the decisions the United States have made

has made since the start,

has been about prolonging the war

about maximizing the violence of the war

and being absolutely in transigence

against the many opportunities to actually settle the war.

If you, and that my understanding of the war

is that not that Zelensky is pushing this war

as hard as he can, but that the neocons in the White House

want this war.

They want regime change with the Russians.

They want to exhaust the Russian armies.

This is what this fan secretary Lloyd Austin said in 2022.

Our objective is to exhaust and degrade Russian forces

so they cannot fight anywhere else in the world.

And President Biden acknowledged that one of his objectives

in the war is regime change in Russia,

removing Vladimir Putin.

Well, if those are the objectives,

that is the opposite of a humanitarian mission.

That is a mission to maximize casualties,

prolong the war.

It's essentially a war of attrition

and that's what we're seeing.

And the brunt of this is being paid

by the flower of Ukrainian youth.

There have been over 300,000.

This is something that the US government

and the Ukrainian government have worked hard to hide

number of casualties, which has been catastrophic.

This is the most violent conflict since World War II

that's taken place probably anywhere in the world.

And the casualties are enormous.

All over 300,000 Ukrainian dead.

The Russians are killing Ukrainian,

depending on who you believe,

at a ratio of five to one to eight to one,

which is the seven to one in the recently leaked,

whistleblower leaked Pentagon documents.

And the Russians cannot lose this war.

We're being told they're losing.

They cannot afford to lose this war.

This is existential for them.

And they have been building up their forces.

They have a 10 to one artillery advantage on us

and this is an artillery war.

It's simply, and we do not have the artillery

to replace what we've lost up there.

This is a war that is proceeding

in a very cataclysmic trajectory.

And the answer to your question

about how we got in this war goes back a long way.

But I would say that the real story starts in 2014,

when the US government and particularly the neocons

in the White House and elsewhere participated

and supported the overthrow,

violent overthrow, a coup d'etat

against the democratically elected government of the Ukraine

and put in a very, very anti-Russian government.

This prompted the Russians who then believed

that the US Navy was now gonna be invited into the Black Sea

to have a ported Crimea.

It prompted the Russians to preemptedly invade Crimea.

At the same time, the government that came into the Ukraine

began enacting a series of laws

that turned the Russian populations

of the Dumbass region into second-class citizens.

They illegalized essentially their culture, their language,

and they began ultimately killing them.

They killed 14,000 of them.

And it prompted a civil war in the country.

And the Russian response, which was illegal,

I have no sympathy

towards Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin is a gangster and he's a thug.

But his response in the Dumbass was not irrational.

So I guess the question becomes,

if you were elected president,

would you stop sending armaments to the Ukraine?

I would immediately have a ceasefire

and I would settle the war.

And I think it can be settled.

I don't even know.

I mean, listen, the best settlement for this war

was outlined in the Minsk Accords in 2014.

In the Minsk Accords, which all the European countries

agreed upon was when the Russians said,

and the Russian people in Dumbass voted to leave Russia

and Russia did not want them.

Russia said, no, let's develop an agreement

which would make Dumbass an autonomous region

within the Ukraine, which would agree

to not put missile systems in Ukraine,

NATO missile systems, which would agree

that Ukraine would not join NATO.

If Zelensky says, no, I want to keep fighting,

would you stop sending US weapons?

I would settle this.

I would settle this war.

Ukraine cannot fight without US support.

So then at some point you would tell Zelensky

if I'm reading into what you're saying correctly,

hey, settle it or I'm out.

I would settle the war.

Do you think that we somehow allowed Zelensky

to believe that we would allow him into NATO?

Meaning, do you think that US foreign policy

somehow almost induced this thing to happen?

I just want to try to understand the boundaries.

We have been doing integrative military exercises

with the Ukrainian military.

So we were actively integrating them into NATO forces.

There was no question that the one thing

that Putin said from the outset, this is a red line.

You know, when my uncle was president,

one of the things that he said,

he said a couple of things.

He said, number one, the principal job

of a president in the United States

is to keep the nation out of war.

And he succeeded doing that during his term in office.

He sent 16,000 military advisors to Vietnam

who were not authorized to participate in combat.

That didn't mean that some of them didn't.

They were not authorized.

And in fact, that was fewer federal troops

than he sent to get James Meredith

into the University of Mississippi.

So he sent fewer to Vietnam and two weeks before he died,

he signed a national security order

ordering all of those troops home by 1965

with the first thousand to come home that month in November.

And he died two weeks later.

So, and then of course, Johnson came in

and remanded the war and sent 250,000 troops over there,

which is what all of my uncle's military advisors

wanted him to do.

And he stood up to them.

One of the other things my uncle said,

and you know, the anniversary of his speech

at American University, which is an extraordinary speech,

probably one of the best in American history,

that Jeff Sacks has called the most important speech

in American history.

It was a speech to the American people.

And it was, it's an extraordinary speech

because if you read it, it's asking them

to put their themselves into the shoes of the Russians

and understand that the Russians bore

the brunt of World War II.

They lost one out of every 13 Russians died in that war.

A third of their country was occupied

and leveled to the ground.

It's like he said, it's as if the entire East Coast

of the United States to Chicago was put into rubble.

And he described this in detail for the American people

to say, you know, we're all people, we're all on an arc

and we need to understand each other's motives

and not just vilify each other.

And what we're seeing now is this formulae vilification,

this narrative that we saw in Saddam Hussein

was, you know, Putin with every little war

that we want to get into, those guys are pure evil,

we're pure good, and we're going to go rescue,

you know, the damsel in distress.

Just on that, could you contrast and compare

just maybe the last three or four presidents

on this very narrow dimension of that,

of JFK's promise of what a president

should be doing, Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden.

How do you see the things that these guys have gotten right

and or very wrong here on that dimension,

just on that dimension?

You know, I've been friends with Joe Biden

for many, many years.

Joe Biden is a, you know, he's a go-to-war guy.

He was one of the strongest supporters of the Iraq war.

He's been supportive of every war that's come along.

And that, you know, I think that's one of the reasons

that, you know, some of those,

that portion of the Democratic Party,

which is a very, very powerful kind of game pickers,

was very happy with him getting an office

is that he never says no to a war.

I think Trump, you know, I liked a lot of what Trump said

about foreign policy, about disentangling us

from this knee-jerk reaction of, you know, of constant wars

and that the cost that that imposes on our country,

what it's doing, it's hollowing out our middle class.

But then Trump did a lot of things,

including walking away from the, you know,

from the Intermediate Nuclear Missile Treaty,

which was another provocation for Russia,

because that treaty, you know,

we're putting these intermediate missile systems

all along the Russian border and Romania and Poland

and, you know, and in Ukraine.

And that, those missiles can hit Cuba,

I mean, can hit Moscow in a few minutes.

So there was a very destabilizing system.

We all signed it and he walked away from it.

And I don't think that was a,

I think that was another provocation.

We should be de-escalating these provocations, though.

You know, the why it did NATO,

this is what George Cannon said after, you know,

the Soviet Union collapsed.

Why do we even have NATO anymore?

Why do we have it?

Why do we have it unless we're gonna involve

the Russians in it?

Why don't we do a Marshall plan for Russia?

We won the war.

They are the losers.

They admit they're the losers,

but they wanna join the European community.

Let's make that easy for them.

Let's not continue to treat them as if they're the enemy

because that is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And that, unfortunately, is what we did.

Let's pivot, then, you wanna contain

and you would force everybody to the table

to a resolution if I'm understanding correctly.

You weren't explicit in terms of would you remove support?

But I think we can infer from it,

you would have a point at which you would stop

sending armaments to Ukraine.

We have tremendous moral pressure and economic pressure

and everything else on Ukraine.

How about this, Jason?

I mean, would you be willing to take NATO expansion

off the table if it helps resolve this conflict?

Yeah, everybody would.

Because Biden won't.

Well, Biden won't, right?

Yeah, no, no.

Absolutely, why are we trying to expand?

We gave our word and we would not expand

NATO one inch to the east.

And now we've gone into 13 countries.

It is a provocation.

Let's talk about Taiwan.

So we gotta stay out of wars if Xi Jinping decides

Taiwan is strategic and he invades Taiwan.

What would your response be if you were elected president?

Well, my response would be to de-escalate that conflict.

There's essentially a war party in Washington

that is encouraging that conflict,

that is drumming of that conflict.

What I would do is I would de-escalate it.

I would stop looking at it as a threat right now

and allow the Chinese and the Taiwanese

to come to their own solution

about what kind of relationship they have.

And I think that if we stopped our provocations

toward the Chinese, that that would naturally de-escalate.

And if China decided it's strategic

and we're going in anyway,

would you, if you were president, defend Taiwan?

That's a question that I would not answer.

I'm curious, why not?

Why don't presidential candidates

just answer that question?

Because you're committing the country

to a war in the future.

That would be probably the bloodiest war ever fought.

And it's not something that strategically,

it's not good strategy to project your intentions.

You wanna leave room for negotiation.

You wanna leave room for all kinds of movements

and you wanna have a debate with the American people

and with Congress.

And Biden's been clear that he would defend it, right?

So it's an interesting insight right there.

Freeberg, do you wanna talk maybe a little bit

about the economy and the spending that we're seeing?

Yeah, so Robert, I think my biggest question,

I've referenced this on the show a number of times,

is this extraordinary concern I have

about the fiscal deficit and the debt level of the US

running deficits north of a trillion dollars a year,

33 trillion in total debt.

Some people use the debt to GDP metric,

which at this point is approaching

or has exceeded 130%.

And 52 nations that have reached that level of debt to GDP,

only one of them has not had to restructure

their currency or restructure their debt payments.

Obviously with the debt ceiling approaching

and some fiscal conservatives using this moment

as a point to try and generate leverage.

I guess my biggest question for the country now

and going forward is, do we actually have the ability

to pursue all of these interests on a social,

a geopolitical, a security agenda and do so without having

either a balanced budget or a plan that says,

here are the boundaries and here are the boundary conditions

because in the last couple of years

and particularly in the last five years,

we've seen almost like a bipartisan,

unmitigated spending spree that is largely driven

to do what the electorate wants,

which is to give people stuff.

And giving people stuff costs money

and that money has to be paid back at some point.

I guess, how do you think about the importance of this?

And how do you think about the boundary conditions

that you would look to articulate and impose

as you think about this role with respect to the deficit

spending and the debt levels for this country?

In terms of a boundary, I would love to hear arguments

about that, but I, as you say, I think the debt is now 32

trillion, the GDP, our GDP is around 25 trillion.

So that is, that's just a really alarming ratio.

If you look at why, the primary cause

are our military expenditures.

We're spending eight this year, I think,

8.4 trillion dollars on the military budget this year.

But if you throw in the Homeland Security

and all the surveillance and security expenditures

at home, it's 1.1 trillion a year.

That's 1.1 trillion a year that is attributable to,

essentially to our warmongering.

And I don't think we can afford to be policemen

of the world anymore.

We have 800 bases around the world.

We need to start rebuilding our middle class at home.

We need to be responsible with our debt.

And we need, my grandfather always said,

we should make America too expensive to conquer.

We should make fortress America.

We should arm America to the teeth at home

so that, no, so we're too expensive to conquer.

And then we should concentrate on building up

our economic power and a robust middle class.

That's what's gonna make America strong.

And instead of projecting military strength abroad,

we ought to be projecting our economic strength

and a marketplace of ideas and economic power.

I, you know, right now we're borrowing $6 billion a day,

mainly from the Chinese and Japanese

just to serve the interests on that debt.

That's not a healthy thing for America to be.

And we gotta figure out, you know,

a way to impose fiscal discipline.

But I can't tell you exactly what my boundaries would be.

That's something I need to think about.

But how do you think about that?

Like, I think non, of discretionary spending,

you know, defense is about 800 billion,

non-defense is about 900 billion.

And then obviously there's social security benefits,

Medicare and Medicaid.

In order to get the budget balanced,

you think cutting defense would be kind of the first priority

and you could kind of get there through, you know,

that approach, but there still seems to be a big gap to me

on, you know, given how much we're spending

on how do we actually get there?

Are we ultimately gonna have to kind of change

retirement benefits, restructure Medicare, Medicaid?

Or are we gonna raise taxes?

Or are we gonna do all three to get to this point?

Otherwise we have this obviously kind of never ending

debt spiral that's gonna cause a massive crisis.

Whether it's not this year,

maybe it's in five years or 10 years.

Right now it's projected social security will go bankrupt

in 2035, 2034 around that range.

So this is coming up fast.

Where are we gonna be cutting besides defense?

And are we gonna be raising taxes to 70% do you think?

To kind of bridge this whole?

I can't answer that question any better than I already have.

You know, I think there are targets for opportunity

and the homeless security.

I think once we stop fighting these wars all over the world,

there's a lot less need for us to have a surveillance

state at home.

The real cost of the military is 1.1 trillion a year.

I'm not just the 800 trillion that shows up on the books.

And I think those are targets for opportunity.

And I can't, you know, I have to,

I need to study more the issue about how to get back

into a balanced budget.

You know, one of the things I'd say disturbs me

is that I don't think we should be playing chicken

in Congress about raising the debt ceiling.

Because I don't think we should mess around

with the full phase and credit of the United States,

particularly at this point in time.

One of the things that's happened in the world,

Bobby said, there's been a couple of countries,

France is probably the best example

that had to raise the retirement age.

And irrespective of the view that one has

on whether that was right or wrong,

the practical reality of doing it is just that

when these initial social safety nets were passed,

the average life expectancy of folks was 10, 15 years

less than what they are today.

And presumably as we keep inventing technologies,

folks are gonna live to 80, 90, 100 years on average,

which may seem implausible,

but is likely if you look at the trend.

I'm just curious how you think about the state of,

our social safety net and what has to change?

What would you keep the same?

And what has to be totally reimagined

for what the world will look like in 30 or 40 years?

I would say it's a red line for me

to touch social security or Medicare, Medicare.

I think we need to take care of people,

particularly people who have spent their whole life

paying into a system with a promise at the end

and have worked hard and saved

and done what they were supposed to do.

I don't think they, you know,

it's right to pull the rug out from under them.

But again, this is an issue that I need to spend more time

looking at and studying.

Maybe the next time I come back here,

I'll have a better answer for you guys.

I think this is my concern is, sorry, but Robert,

the comment you just made is the same comment I hear

from both sides of the aisle

that we can't touch social security, Medicare, Medicaid

because it would be so unpopular, we wouldn't get elected.

And that's ultimately kind of what a democracy

like ours may lead to, is that folks vote

and elect representatives that are gonna create

these systems that benefit them.

But in aggregate, we may not be able

to support those benefits over time and at scale.

And we may be facing that moment sooner

than any of us want to.

And I think it's one of the more pressing issues

and concerns, not just for the United States,

but for the global economy,

that if the US doesn't resolve this massive whole

talking about social security, for example,

going bankrupt in the next 12 years

as one acute example of that problem set,

you know, we may not be able to turn it around.

And I mean, do you think that politics is set up

to solve these structural economic problems

that the US is now facing?

Because so much of politics ends up leading towards

what additional benefits can I provide

to my, the folks that get me elected?

Here's the thing, is we spent $8 trillion

in the war in Iraq, $8 trillion.

And we got nothing for it.

Yeah, that's pretty nuts.

That's nuts.

In fact, we got worse than nothing.

We killed more Iraqis than Sodomuts and we killed

a million Iraqis, probably.

We created ISIS, we turned Iraq into a proxy for Iran,

which is exactly what we've been not trying to do

for 40 years.

And we drove two million refugees with the Iraq war

and its aftermath, Syria and Yemen and, you know,

Pakistan and Afghanistan, two million refugees

in Europe, destabilized democracy in Europe.

Then we go ahead, so $8 trillion there.

We spent $16 trillion on the pandemic, on the lockdown.

And again, got nothing in return.

So that's $24 trillion.

And now we're doing bank bailouts every, you know,

couple of months of the Silicon Valley bank.

The Fed said that it was printing $300 billion for that.

Made up for all of the, you know, deflationary

steps that the Biden administration had previously taken.

So you go to, you know, you go to an American

who's been working their whole life

and has been promised at the end of the life

that they're gonna get a few bucks every month.

And, you know, I have a friend who I brought to my speech

with me who's, during the same month that we committed

another 750 million during March.

We sent $750 million extra to the Ukraine.

We got 15 million Americans from Medicare.

My friend got a call from the government

on his cell phone, a recorded call saying

that your food stamps have just been cut by 90%.

He went from $283 a month to $25 a month.

So you try to feed yourself on $25 a month.

There are 30 million Americans who are starving right now.

And that to me is unacceptable.

And it's hard to go to people like that,

people who have been honest, who have played by the rules,

who have done everything that they were supposed to do

with the promise that they would be taken care of,

that their healthcare would be taken care of an old age.

You go to those people and say,

okay, now we're going to cut your food stamps

and try to feed yourself on $25 a month.

Try to feed yourself for a $25 a week.

We're telling them that.

And then,

And then spending 800 billion to make a plane.

How are you going to cut the federal budget

when you're sending over 100 billion to Ukraine?

There's, you can't, you have no more authority to do it.

I want to finish up by saying, you know,

you're like tinkering in the engine room

when the ship is sinking, you know,

because the, you know,

in order to switch deck, take chairs on the Titanic.

Let's deal with the real problem.

Let's figure out how to make this nation a nation

that is really focused on taking care of our people

inside rather than saying, okay,

well, in order to pay for the Ukraine war,

we got to screw every American

on social security and Medicare.

We've had, by the way,

the inflation that we've created from, you know,

from just printing money

is making my friend Keith's food twice expensive.

So the, the cause of stables in this country

was raised by 76% in two years.

And now they're cutting his food stamps

and bailing out the same month,

$300 million, the Silicon Valley Bank.

We got it.

I mean, it doesn't make any sense.

And having this kind of conversation,

how do we screw the poor to make sure that we can, you know,

we can milk them while we're doing all of this crazy.

It's this country is acting like the alcoholic

who is behind on his mortgage

and who takes the milk money and goes into the bar

and buys rounds for strangers.

You know, that's what you're dealing with.

That's a pretty good analogy.

Shots, everybody.

So let me ask the follow-up question

on this debt ceiling fight, which is,

which is a game of chicken.

And the country's economy might go off a cliff

in the next month because Republicans and Democrats

can't agree.

So Biden's position is,

I want a clean debt ceiling increase, no terms on it.

House Republicans have passed a debt ceiling increase,

but it contains things like a 1% cap on spending growth.

It claws back unspent COVID-19 relief funds

and it would halt Biden's student debt forgiveness plan.

So Robert, I guess the question to you would be,

would you negotiate?

Like, what would your posture to House Republicans be?

Would you be willing to negotiate?

Because Biden is basically saying,

I will not negotiate at all.

So negotiate or not negotiate.

I guess that's my question to you.

Yeah, you have to negotiate.

I'm not sure if he's posturing, you know, or what.

They have to negotiate.

They have to, you know, they have to work out something

that's good for our country.

And that, you know, and they're gonna,

both sides are gonna have to give up something.

We have to, you know, we have to put our country first.

And it's insane to play this game of chicken with a,

you know, with the, when the stakes are so high.

There's been a lot of talk, Robert,

about the deep state, the FBI, DOJ, CIA, your family,

obviously having dealt with two tragic assassinations,

your father and your uncle has dealt with this firsthand

in terms of just having the CIA information

about these assassinations released.

I'm curious your position on some of the most radical

proposals people have this election cycle

of dismantling the FBI, CIA, DOJ, AKA the deep state.

Do you believe there's a deep state?

And how would you as president deal with

this intelligence operation we have?

And then also personally,

what are your personal feelings on it?

Well, on the, you know, I have a pretty clear idea

about how I would handle the intelligence agencies.

And in fact, my father was thinking very deeply

about that at the time.

My father who believed his, you know, first reaction

when his brother was killed was that the CIA had killed him.

And in fact, the first three calls he made on that day.

And, you know, I was home at the time and John McComb,

the CIA was right across the street from my house.

And so John McComb was the CIA director.

You would come to our house and swim every day after work

during the spring and summertime.

And my father called the CIA desk and talked to a desk officer

and said, did your people do this?

That was his first call.

And he called Harry Ruiz, who was at Cuban,

who was one of the Cubans who had remained friendly

with my family, you know,

while we were surrounded by Cubans growing up

because of who were big refugees,

my father had got them freed after a year

and, you know, in the Castro's prisons.

And my father and mother spent a lot of time

finding houses for them, schools,

integrating them to the US military, finding jobs.

And so we were all raised very, very closely

with the Cuban community,

but gradually they turned away from my family.

But this one Cuban who had been an engineer

had fought with Castro and then turned against him

when he became communist was very close friends

with my father.

The second call that he made was to Harry Ruiz.

And he said, did our people,

meaning the CIA people do this.

And that was, and so my father was thinking

very, very, very carefully about how to handle the CIA.

He had been, you know,

he had been essentially managing the CIA

since he came into office.

And he recognized that the problem,

and you know, as I talked about in my speech,

and I think David on this show mentioned this,

during the Bay of Biggs invasion,

my uncle realized that he had been lied to

by Charles Cabell and Alan Dulles and Richard Bissell,

the heads of the CIA, as well as his joint chiefs.

And he came out in the middle of the invasion

when it turned against them.

And he realized these men were being killed on the beach.

And he said, I want to take the CIA

and shatter it into a thousand pieces

and scatter it to the wind.

So he recognized that the function

of the intelligence agencies had devolved

and that they had become captive

of the military industrial complex

and the military contractors and their function

was essentially to provide our nation

with a constant pipeline of new wars

to feed the military industrial complex

and the growth of the surveillance state.

And my father, when he ran for president,

Pete Hamill, who was one of his favorite newsmen,

asked him on the bus during two weeks before he died,

asked him what he was gonna do about the CIA.

And he said, what we need to do is we need to remove

the espionage division, espionage branch

from the plans division.

The plans division of the CIA

is essentially the dirty tricks provision.

That's the division, the action-private division.

They do the assassinations, they fix elections,

they do paramilitary operations, black ops, torture,

black sites, all of that stuff.

The espionage division and CIA was originally set up

by Cuba by Truman as an espionage agency.

Espionage means information gathering and analysis.

It's not violence, it's about information acquisition.

And unfortunately, the clandestine action division

was wagging the espionage dog.

So the function of the espionage division was to provide

new actions, things to do for the clandestine division,

and then covering up their mistakes.

So there was never any accountability.

And what my father understood is that the espionage division

should not be working for the clandestine services,

they should be overseeing them

and particularly doing accountability.

Oh, you know, what, if the CIA looks,

the way that the CIA looks at the war in Iraq

is it was a success because we accomplished our mission

of deposing Saddam Hussein.

But, and you know, the CIA was George Tennant

who lied to President Bush and said it's a slam dunk.

So they got us to go in there at weapons of mass destruction.

So as president, would you rethink it?

And then just as a final question,

as a final follow up to that,

do you believe they murdered

or were involved in the murder of your uncle?

What would have you come to personally?

The CIA, yes, they were definitely involved in the murder

and the, you know, and the 60 year cover up.

They're still not releasing the, you know,

the papers that legally they have to release.

But I don't think there's any doubt

if you look at this huge, you know,

mountain, monumental mountain of evidence and confessions

and, you know, so many people

who have confessed to their involvement

and, you know, we understand the, if you look,

I mean, for anybody who has doubts about that,

I would recommend a book by Jim Douglas

called The Unspeakable

because I think he's done a better job

than anybody else had kind of assembling

and distilling all of the millions and millions

of documents that have been released

over the past 50 years.

And these things, these revelations

are released incrementally.

And so nobody really takes notice of them.

But when you put them all together,

the story is very clear.

So you would definitely rethink the CIA, the FBI, DOJ,

you know, the whole intelligence operation.

I think what you're saying as well as maybe you would also

release the documents that maybe

would at least provide some more transparency.

I just wanted to build on that

because you had a very provocative tweet.

Part of what you're talking about is accountability

and we need data and transparency to have that.

There are people that have whistleblown.

There are people that have leaked.

And I think it's fair to say that they've all been treated

by the security apparatus in largely the exact same way.

But you tweeted recently about your desire

to see some of those folks forgiven and pardoned.

Do you want to just take a few minutes

just to talk about some of those folks that you think

has allowed us to actually see the truth

if we want to see it and why you think that

and what you think should be done with folks like that?

I mean, Julian Assange is an example.

Julian Assange is a newspaper publisher.

He published leaked documents.

You know, why are we?

I mean, if I was any newspaper

to the publisher in this country,

I would be worried about that.

And now he can go to jail for life

because he published leaked documents of great import

to the American people of things

that should not have been secret,

that we should have known about revelations

that affect our civil rights, affect our foreign policy,

affect things that we have a right to know about.

And you know, it's really, it's strange

that there's any support for his imprisonment

among the press.

And I think the press is beginning to figure this out finally.

The most controversial of those figures is Edwin Snowden.

But Edwin Snowden released documents

that showed us that we were all being spied upon.

And that's important for Americans to know.

And in fact, it was so important

that Congress passed laws based upon his revelations

to protect the American people.

Why are we punishing the whistleblower

rather than punishing the people who were, you know,

who were illegally spying on us?

That's what we should be doing.

We shouldn't be jailing dissenters in our country.

We shouldn't be jailing whistleblowers.

We should be jailing the people who break the law.

To keep this bipartisan, do you believe the deep state

is acting to subvert the Trump presidency

and that they are framing him on these three or four

indictments that they are working on,

some that have dropped, some that haven't?

Do you believe there's a deep state conspiracy against Trump?

Cause you might be facing him.

I don't use the word deep state.

I mean, I've described how these bureaucracies function

and it's not so much a group of people

that kind of deep state implies there's a group of people

that's kind of, you know, black coats in a smoky room,

pulling strings, but the corruption is systemic.

The, these, you know, all of these agencies

are captive agencies.

The CIA is ultimately working for a, for industry,

like the oil industry, the coal industry

and the military contractors.

And they've always had that ties since the very beginning.

You know, Alan Dulles, who had worked for Sullivan-Gromwell

and ended up doing coup d'etats on behalf of his former clients

like Texaco and United Fruit,

Texaco and BP and in Iran in 1953,

his former client, United Fruit,

when Jacob Harbens and Guatemala

tried to nationalize United Fruit.

You know, the CIA under Dulles went over through the government

to protect the interests of his former clients.

So there's always been these ties to industry

and the ties now, and particularly the oil industry

and the ties to the military industrial contractors

really drive the CIA action and CIA intelligence.

And we have to, you know, you have to stop.

And this is systemic in all these agencies.

I mean, USDA is run by Cargill, Smithfield,

Onsanto, Bo Pilgrim, John Tyson,

EPA is run.

When we sued EPA, we got discovery documents

that showed that the head of the pesticide division,

Jess Rowland, had been secretly working for Monsanto

for a decade and, you know,

sending memos back and forth with Monsanto,

directing them, you need to kill this study,

you need to kill that study.

And this, unfortunately, is not the exception.

It is the rule.

Most of the people who work for those agencies

are good citizens, they're good Americans,

they're honest and they're patriots.

But the people who tend to rise in those agencies

and occupy these very, very powerful key positions

from decades or years, like Anthony Fauci, 50 years,

are people who are in the tank with industry.

And what we need to do is unravel that across the government.

And that's really what people say, that's the deep state.

That really is what, it's a systemic corruption

within our agencies that is driven by agency capture.

Can we actually just talk about the coronavirus,

maybe pandemic for a second?

And I just want to tie in two concepts.

Sometimes, again, there's a lot of mainstream

misinformation about it.

There is a lot that came out about you,

particularly as it relates to vaccines.

I just want to give you an opportunity

to set the record straight,

just on what you think happened COVID,

all that corruption, your thought on vaccines,

the efficacy of our programs,

how we should change, what we keep the same,

just maybe a chance to clear the air

so that we can get some of the gobbledygook

on the internet set straight.

I mean, it's hard to, I wrote a 250,000 paid book about it

and I've written a couple of books

and so it's hard to summarize what went wrong

in a second, but essentially we had,

instead of a public health response

to a public health crisis,

we had a militarized and monetized response

that was the inverse of everything that you would want to do

if you actually wanted to protect public health.

We've known, if you look at WHO protocols

or the CDC protocols, the EU, the NHS in Britain,

all of those, they all had protocols

for how to manage the pandemic.

They all said unanimously,

you do not use lockdowns, mass lockdowns,

you quarantine the sick, you protect the vulnerable,

but you keep society moving

because the consequences of shutting down society

will be cataclysmic beyond anything

that the disease is gonna impose.

Everybody knew that.

And so we had these agencies that had drilled

for years and years this alternative militarized response

and instead of doing what you wanna do,

which is to get early treatment to people to have,

I mean, we live in the age of the internet,

we should have had a grid that connected

all 15 million frontline doctors

every country around the world

and figured out what are you doing

that works in your country

and then distilling that information

and processing it and getting it to other doctors.

Well, we knew what was working.

We knew I've remacted and hydroxychloroquine would work

and we knew that since 2004

because NIH did this study that said hydroxychloroquine

obliterates coronavirus.

We knew what would work at that time

and what was the response?

The response was they could not allow early treatment

to occur.

Why? Because there's a little known federal law

that says if there is a drug that is shown effective

against the target disease,

it is a drug that is approved for any purpose.

It is illegal to issue an emergency use authorization

for a vaccine.

So if they had admitted that hydroxychloroquine

or I've remacted and worked against coronavirus,

it would have destroyed their whole $100 billion vaccine

enterprise.

So they had to kill early treatments

and they went after stuff that they knew worked.

This was the first respiratory virus in history

where people would go to the hospital

and they would test positive for coronavirus

and be symptomatic.

They were sick.

And that's why they went to the hospital

and the hospital would say to them,

there is no treatment.

Go home till your lips turn blue and you can't breathe

and come back and we will give you two things

that are gonna kill you.

Desivir and hydroxychloroquine and ventilation.

So people still look at in this country

at anti-foul Giza era.

And we were doing things a couple of miles from May

in Malibu, there were police pulling surfers

out of the surf and giving them $1,000 tickets

and telling them to go home.

Getting them out of the sunshine

where coronavirus doesn't spread

and lock them in their home where it does.

And every time they sent one of these people home

from the hospital sick, it was a super spreader event.

Oh, you look at our record of coronavirus

and this is when nobody can explain

who is defending Fauci, et cetera.

We had the highest body count in the world by far

from coronavirus.

We have 4.2% of the world's population.

We had 16% of the COVID deaths.

How does anybody explain that?

And you go to nations that didn't do what we told them.

Nigeria, Nigeria has the highest malaria burden

in the world.

So everybody gets hydroxychloroquine once a week.

They call it Sunday, Sunday.

Everybody in the country takes it on Sunday.

They had the highest river blinds burden.

So half the country's on Ivermectin.

Nigeria never had an epidemic.

It had a death rate in Nigeria

of 14 people per million population.

Our death rate, 3,000 per million population.

Blacks in our countries were dying at 3.6 times

the rate of whites.

Why were American blacks dying?

Nigerian blacks weren't.

And then you go to Haiti.

Haiti had a, and by the way, Nigeria had 1.3% vaccination rate.

Haiti had a 1.4% vaccination rate.

And they had a death rate of 15 people

per million population.

And these are the countries that Tony Fauci and Bill Gates

said, we got to get them vaccinated.

We got to do whatever you can

because they're going to get totally wiped out

because of their poverty.

And guess what?

They never had a pandemic.

Across Africa, there was a 10% vaccination rate.

And guess what?

They had a death rate of about 340.

Some people think that the death rate here was overstated

because of incentives to do that.

Do you believe that as well?

Yes.

So maybe part of that death rate is it was overintended.

But you believe, looking back on this,

that Fauci, as well as the pharma companies,

Bill Gates, investments in those areas,

that led us down a path, we'll call it the medical industrial,

the pharma industrial complex.

You believe the pharma industrial complex

dictated our response to coronavirus

and then Freeburg, I'll let you jump in.

Yeah.

But you believe that, that's the...

I don't have any question about that.

I believe this was, as I said,

it was a military response.

I mean, look at who was running,

the look at who was running the coronavirus response.

Wouldn't you think it would be HHS?

Well, when Warp Speed had to present its,

declassify its organizational charts

to show to the FDA committee called VIRPAC,

when they demanded it.

And Warp Speed went in

and showed them the organizational charts.

The agency running Warp Speed and pandemic response

was not HHS, it was NSA, National Security Agency.

Avril Haines is the director of National Intelligence.

So she was running Operation Warp Speed.

And who was manufacturing?

It wasn't Pfizer and Moderna.

It was 140 military contractors

who had lines ready.

And you say, and then all of this clamped down

on civil rights that we saw, the censorship,

the closing of the churches,

the closing of the right to assemble,

the banning of jury trials against pharmaceutical companies.

They crushed the Seventh Amendment, the First Amendment.

They closed down 3.3 million businesses

with no due process, no just compensation.

They obliterated the Fourth Amendment right

to, against warrantless searches and seizures

with all these intrusive,

you had to show your medical records

to go and get out of your house

or to get into a public building.

Freeberg, what is correct here?

Do you believe in what is incorrect about Roberts?

What's Roberts saying, if anything?

Well, look, I mean, there's obviously

a lot of things I could say.

By the way, I was on the executive team at Monsanto

for a couple of years.

So, one thing I will say is I sat

at the table facing the EPA and the USDA

and certainly didn't feel like a very cozy relationship

in at least what I saw in the few years I was there.

It was, it did feel like a very kind of independent

regulatory and challenging, frankly, regulatory process

that Monsanto had to manage and deal with

and go through and releasing new products.

You know, I don't think that this notion

that there were kind of embedded parties

that did our whims and wishes really placed through,

at least from my experience sitting there.

And I'm not a longtime Monsanto executive.

I built a software company, sold it to Monsanto

and sat on the exec team for a few years

after the acquisition.

But I guess the more kind of,

I think bigger framing question for you, Robert,

is really around vaccines in general.

I think your commentary around the COVID response

and the influencing forces there

didn't start with COVID, right?

I mean, you've been a kind of outspoken voice

on vaccines in general for some time.

Is that a fair statement?

Because I think that that's part of the media narrative

around your history and legacy

is that you have been kind of outspoken on vaccines

and the risks and the effects

that you consider to be kind of,

I don't know if it's implied or explicit

with respect to the use and wide adoption

of vaccines over time.

Maybe you could share a little bit

about your broader perspective in the years

leading up to COVID and how that then kind of informed

your point of view specifically on COVID.

You know, my objective is not to vaccinate,

I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm fully vaccinated,

my kids were fully vaccinated.

I wish at this point that I had not done that

because I know enough about them now,

but my principal objective is that vaccines,

the childhood vaccines are immune

from pre-licensing safety testing.

Of the 72, when I was a kid, I got three vaccines.

My children got 72 doses of 16 vaccines.

And the vaccines are the one medical product

that does not have to go through placebo-controlled trials

where you test an exposed versus unexplosed population

prior to licensure.

And that there's a number of historical reasons for that

that come out of the kind of military

beginning as the AIDS vaccines were regarded as

national security defense against biological attacks

in our country, so they wanted to make sure

if the Russians attacked us with anthrax

or some other biological agent,

they could quickly formulate and deploy a vaccine

to 200 million Americans with no regulatory impediments.

So they called them biologics rather than medicines

and exempted biologics from pre-licensing safety trial.

And I've litigated on the issue,

not one of them has ever been tested pre-licensure against.

So nobody knows what the, you know,

you can say that the vaccine is effective

against the target disease,

but you can't say that it's not causing worse problems.

Now, I'll just summarize this story.

In the vaccine schedule exploded in 1986,

the vaccine industry succeeded in getting Ronald Reagan

to sign a law, and my uncle was also a group

that was pressured by Wyeth,

which was losing $20 in downstream liabilities

on every vaccine it made because of losses

for every dollar that it made.

And they, and they went to Reagan and said,

we're going to get out of the vaccine business

and you're going to be left without a vaccine supply

unless you give us full immunity from liability.

And Reagan reluctantly signed that.

So today, no matter how negligent the company,

no matter how grievous your injury,

no matter how reckless their conduct, you cannot sue them.

That caused a gold rush,

because now you've got a product

that there's no downstream liability.

You're immune from that.

There's no upstream safety testing.

So that's a $250 million saving.

And there's no marketing or advertising cause

because the federal government's going to mandate this product

to 76 million American children

whether they like it or not.

And there's no better product in the world.

And so there was a gold rush.

And instead of three vaccines,

we quickly ended up with 72

and now we're going to, you know, toward 80 right now.

And there's no end in sight.

And a lot of those vaccines were unnecessary.

They're not even for casual disease cause disease.

Here's what happened in night, beginning in 1989.

We experienced a chronic disease epidemic in this country.

It isn't unlike anything in history.

We went from having 6% of Americans affected

by chronic disease to 54% by 2006.

And what do I mean by chronic disease?

I mean neurological disease that I never saw

when I was a kid, ADD, ADHD, special A language,

like ticks, Tourette syndrome, ASD, autism, narcolepsy,

all of these suddenly appeared.

Autism rates went from one in 10,000 to one in every 34.

1989 was the year this began.

Allergic disease, peanut allergies suddenly appeared.

Food allergies, eczema suddenly appeared.

Anaphylaxis and asthma, you know,

which had been around, but it exploded.

And then autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis

and juvenile diabetes.

I never knew it.

I had 11 siblings, about 70 cousins.

I never knew anybody with any of these diseases.

And why do five of my kids have allergies?

So then if you look at the manufacturer's inserts

for those 72 vaccines, there's 420 diseases

that have been associated with the vaccines

that are listed, including every one of those diseases

that went epidemic in 1989.

And this is the country which is the most heavily vaccinated

and this was happening here

unlike any other country in the world.

And so we have this, you know,

and you know, it's good for the pharma.

This pharma now makes 60 billion on the vaccines.

When I was a kid, they were making 250 million.

Now they make 60 billion a year,

plus 100 billion from COVID vaccine.

Freeberg, do you believe that these vaccines

are over-prescribed and are part of the rise in ADHD

and all this litany of diseases?

I'm just asking Freeberg who's our resident scientist here.

Do you believe this, you know, explicitly as a scientist?

I'm curious.

I don't think there's direct evidence supporting

that relationship.

I think that there's a lot of environmental factors

that have been driving changes in, you know,

the rate of problems with autoimmunity.

It relates to our food product, it's our food system.

It relates to environmental chemistry.

Like Robert has talked about generally,

I think there's a lot of environmental conditioning

that's caused this rise in problems in human history.

Can I interrupt for a second?

Because I don't think it's solely the vaccines.

Our children today are swimming around in a toxic zoo.

But there's a timeline.

And actually the toxicology that I've used in many of my losses

is probably the most famous in the country, Phil Landrigan.

Looked at the timeline of the explosion

of all these chronic diseases.

And he said, there's only a finite number of things

that have caused it.

You know, one is glyphosate.

Things that became ubiquitous in every demographic,

beginning around 1993, 1989.

One of them is glyphosate, neonicotoid,

pesticides, PFOAs, cell phones, ultrasound.

And he made the whole list.

And so it's a finite number.

And the question is, and vaccines are part of that.

And you know, it is suspicious

because the vaccines list all of these side effects.

Now, I've put together books.

You know, one of my books on this subject,

on connecting these as 1400 references

and 400 studies digested.

So the science out there is pretty clear.

But NIH refused to study these things

because it knows that wherever they follow the dots,

it's going to end up with a big shock.

And so they simply have stopped studying them

and they've turned themselves into an incubator

for pharmaceutical products.

And they don't do this kind of basic research.

I want to just give you guys one example.

The most common vaccine in the world

is called the DTB vaccine, diphtheria tetanus and pertussis.

We gave it in this country and beginning around 79.

It was killing or causing severe brain injury

in one out of every 300 kids who got it.

UCLA study funded by NIH that found it.

So they got rid of it.

That's what caused all the lawsuits

that eventually precipitated the passage of the vaccine.

We stopped it here.

They stopped in Europe.

But Bill Gates and WHO are still giving it

to 161 million African children every year.

It's the most popular vaccine on earth.

Bill Gates has publicly saved 30 million lives.

He went to the Danish government and said,

we've saved 30 million lives.

Will you support this program?

In 2017, the Danish said, show me the study.

It shows that it's saved all those lives.

He couldn't do it.

So they went down and they conducted a study in West Africa

where the Danes operate all these health clinics

and they looked at 30 years of data.

And as it turned out in a nation called Guinea-Bissau,

half the kids in that country at the age of two months

had received the vaccine and half had not.

It was a perfect natural experiment.

And they looked at 30 years of data.

And what they found was that the kids who received the vaccine

were not dying of diphtheria tetanus and pertussis,

but girls who received the vaccine were dying

at 10 times the rate of unvaccinated girls.

And they were not dying of anything ever,

anybody ever associated with a vaccine.

They were dying of bilharzia, malaria, anemia,

minor cuts in scrapes,

and mainly pulmonary respiratory disease and pneumonia.

And what the researchers concluded,

and this was a study funded by the Danish government

and Novo Nordisk, which is a vaccine company.

And the scientists were all pro-vaccine.

What they said is this vaccine is killing more people

than the disease ever were.

Nobody knew it because nobody associated the people

who were dying,

because they were dying of all these different things.

How were they only the unvaccinated kids?

So the vaccine had saved them

from diphtheria tetanus and pertussis,

but it had ruined their immune system

so that they could not defend themselves

against other diseases.

And that's the danger of not having placebo-controlled

trials prior to introducing the product,

particularly when you're gonna mandate a product

for healthy people.

Let's, with our remaining time here, move on to energy.

You end the environment.

You've got an incredible track record.

I remember growing up in New York,

the amazing work you did for the Watershed Project.

And I'll let you expand upon that in a moment.

But the only confounding thing I found in your position,

and I'm curious if it's changed or not,

is that you spend decades trying to close

the Indian Point nuclear power plant

in a time when clearly nuclear power has gotten safer

and is clearly, I think the world believes,

and certainly everybody who's on this panel believes,

nuclear is a key point in the transition to renewables.

So what is your actual position, explain it to us,

as basically as you can, on nuclear power,

and do you regret,

or have you rethought your position on Indian Point?

No, I mean, Indian Point is a leaking tritium

into the, it nods every day.

I don't see how you can say it's safe.

And they still haven't figured out what to do with the ways

they're now storing it.

It's 18 miles from Midtown Manhattan.

If they, the shack where they were storing the fuel,

rods had the structural integrity of a Kmart,

terrorist attack against it would basically render New York

uninhabited for the next 5,000 years or so.

So to put something that risky so close

to 10 million people doesn't make any sense.

Now, nuclear power, I'm all for it

if they can ever make it safe,

or if they ever make it economical.

And it's not me saying it's unsafe,

it's the insurance industry.

They can't get an insurance policy.

If they can't get an insurance policy,

then I would say I don't want it.

But the nuclear, American nuclear industry,

I mean, you go look at what Fukushima,

they're poisoning the Pacific every day

with huge amounts of really deadly radiation

and they are now, their only solution to it

is to suck the water out of the groundwater

and store it in these big tanks.

And if you just go on the internet

and look at a picture of the Fukushima water tanks

and they go on to the horizon and there's no end to it.

Robert, can I just make a point?

The thing with nuclear that's worth separating is

it's not the fundamental technology there

that's broken in either example that you use,

but it's the profit and motive that caused both

the industrial engineering of both plants to be subpar.

Because Fukushima, for example, was engineered

not to the seismic levels that you really needed.

Or elevation, yeah.

Even conceding all that, here's what I would say,

is that in our country,

nuclear is regarded as so dangerous

that they can't get an insurance.

So the industry had to go to Congress

in a sleazy legislative maneuver

in the middle of the night

and get the Price Anderson Act passed.

So that to shift their accident burden

onto the American public.

So if their plant goes up

and I was 10 miles from that plant,

then I'm gonna have to pay for it.

So I don't think that's free market capitalism.

I believe in free markets.

And I can tell you this,

there is no public utility on the face of the earth

will build one of those plants

without massive public subsidies, not one.

Nobody will ever do it.

And then they have to store the waste

for the next 30,000 years,

which is five times the length of recorded human history.

And if you tell me how that,

if they had to amortize that rate up front,

there's no way anybody do it.

Number two or three or four, whatever I've gotten to,

it costs now between nine and $16 billion

to build a nuclear power plant,

just the construction costs.

And then you got to get the technicians

and then you've got to get the waste disposal

and the regular outages and all of this.

There's no way that it could compete in a free market.

I believe in free market capitalism.

I am a radical free marketeer.

I believe that our energy system

should reflect the marketplace.

And right now you can build a solar plant

for a billion dollars a gigawatt.

You can build a wind plant

for $1.2 billion a gigawatt.

A coal plant will cost you

about three and a half billion dollars a gigawatt.

And then you have to pay for the fuel,

cutting down the mountains of West Virginia,

poisoning 22,000 miles of the streams,

burning, putting mercury

that gets into every freshwater fish in America,

sterilizing the lakes of the Appalachians.

If they had to internalize that cause,

coal, which says is that,

or nuke, which says it's too cheap to meter,

it turns out it's the most expensive way

to boil a pot of water that's ever been devised.

I'm just trying to make the point

that if you look at the levelized cost of energy now,

what you're saying is exactly why solar and wind are winning.

It's just so much cleaner.

It makes so much more sense.

There's no fuel cause.

And if the impediment is distribution,

is that we don't have a grid system

that can effectively orchestrate variable power.

And that's what we...

Let me provide a counter

that maybe it's not about distribution,

but it's about scaling production capacity.

So if you look over nearly any historical time scale

since we've had industrial energy production on Earth,

for every 1% increase in GDP per capita,

you see a roughly 1.2% increase

in energy consumption per capita.

And so if you forecast out by the end of the century,

the GDP per capita estimates in the US and around the world,

we need to increase global energy production

by roughly anywhere from five to 10x.

And the current system of pulling carbon out of the ground

and burning it up and pulling heat energy out of it

doesn't scale, doesn't make sense, obviously,

put aside the carbon effect problem.

And there appears to be a reasonable chance

of a pretty serious material shortage

for renewable sources by the middle of next decade.

So what do you think is the right answer

to long range energy security

and what sort of technology should we be embracing?

And do you think that they scale fast enough

to kind of allow us to have our economy grow

in the way that it needs to to support

the population demands over the next century?

I mean, I'm agnostic about the energy source

and I think you need it.

You have to be eclectic about it

and a lot of them are, you know, make sense locally,

but we have enough wind energy in North Dakota.

North Dakota is the windiest place on Earth

outside of the Arctic.

North Dakota, Montana and Texas,

we have enough wind energy to produce five times

the amount of our entire grid.

The problem is the North Dakota wind farmer

cannot get his product to market

because it dissipates in a, you know,

we have an antiquated grid system

that simply will not efficiently move electrons

across country and we need a DC grid system

that, you know, with off ramps in the big cities, et cetera,

that can do that.

In North Dakota, if you have an acre of farmland,

it's worth about 300 bucks.

If you put a wind turbine on it,

it's worth about 3,200 bucks.

So every farmer in North Dakota

wants to put wind turbines in their cornfields.

And the problem is they cannot get that energy to market.

That is the only choke point.

And the same is true in, you know,

we have great solar power in this country.

We have an abundance of renewable energy

in this country and the problem is the incumbents

were operating on rules, under rules,

that were written by the incumbents

to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous,

most toxic fuels from hell

rather than cheap, clean, green,

wholesome fuels from heaven.

And we ought to reverse that and make them all competitive.

It seems like technology and economics

have reversed that in a way.

Yeah, one last question on this.

So as president, would you support initiatives

that could advance and allow approval

of safe nuclear fission production systems

to be built here in the US?

Well, I will, like I say, I support Nuke

and new technologies of Nuke that are safe, you know,

where they, but as long as they can compete

in a marketplace, you show me, and by the way,

I think we should be doing science

even when there's no, you know, economic end

to it, so we should be looking at this stuff.

But I would not promote Nuke

if it's not competitive in the marketplace.

And it's, you know, and that means, you know,

cleaning up your mess after yourself,

which, you know, is a lesson we were all

supposed to have learned in kindergarten.

They have to show us what they're gonna do

with the ways how they're gonna internalize their cause

rather than what they're doing now,

which is to externalize their cause

and internalize their profits.

Okay, we have covered a lot of territory

and I hate to get to controversial ones like culture wars,

but it's gonna come up in the presidential election.

I personally don't think this is what's important

in the presidential election.

I think the fiscal stuff, the energy stuff,

the wars and political stuff we've discussed today

are much more important,

but I'm curious your take on the issues around

Disney, DeSantis, Trans, and this cohort of issues

which have become an obsession, it seems,

between certain members of certain political parties

or both parties, the media,

and certainly it's taken over a lot of discussions

amongst the generation on social media.

What's your take on all this?

When you get caught up in these debates

and the presidential debates about trans athletes,

as put one example,

do you think a trans woman who was a biological male

should be able to be put in a female prison?

Do you think they should be able to play

on a female basketball team

and change with a bunch of 15-year-old girls

in a high school locker room?

I've already said, first of all, I wanna say this,

I think that people, I believe in bodily autonomy

and that people's choices about what they wanna do

with their body should be respected

and people should not be shamed.

I do not believe that somebody

who was born a biological man

should be able to compete later on in life,

whatever choice they've made on a woman's team.

I mean, I have a niece who is playing softball at BC

she has worked, she has devoted her entire life

to getting that scholarship and it's consumed her.

And I've watched during my lifetime,

women's sports go from essentially non-existent

to equitable mainly with men's sports.

And I think that's important.

And I don't think that women should lose ground

in any way.

So I've said, I don't believe that that's the right thing

but I think everybody should be respected.

Let me ask a question then

about parents who are struggling with this issue.

At what age should a doctor be allowed

to perform gender reassignment surgery on an individual?

You believe adults?

So at what age should you be able to have gender surgery?

Because this is gonna come up multiple times in this debate.

I think adults ought to have that choice.

I don't think a child should have that choice

except with, certainly not without parent parental permission.

And I really don't,

I know that the,

and let's start by saying this, this is a difficult issue.

And it's an issue that we should not be judging people on

and we should not be hating people about.

We should be trying to solve people's problems

and give people as much leeway as possible to,

and as much respect,

as much leeway to exercise their choices

and much respect to those choices we possibly can.

Within that framework, I don't believe that it's,

that a child without their parental permission

should be allowed to choose that kind of surgery because.

What if their parents agree to it?

Should a 15-year-old be able to be?

That's a very difficult question.

And I don't feel like I'm equipped to answer it.

I'm not gonna interfere.

Yeah, I think this panel agrees to this.

It's a very difficult issue and people should be.

What do you think about things like critical race theory?

And maybe we can just use that as a way

to just talk about the state of US education in general.

Are we preparing our children for the task at hand?

And what is the task at hand maybe in your eyes

and how does it need to change, if at all?

Now, you know, I think critical race theory

as much as I understand it is, you know, listen,

we should not be hiding from people.

We should be honest people about the history

in this country of genocide, of racism and those things.

You know, we need to be honest about that with each other,

not to shame people, not to make people feel badly,

not to make people feel guilty,

but to understand the milestones

that we never want to go near again

and to move forward with those things.

I, you know, in turn, I don't really understand

that the battle over critical race theory in schools,

but to the extent if somebody would say that this has to,

that that theme has to dominate all historical teaching,

I would be against that.

I think it's very, very important, you know, America,

our country has done wonderful things in the world.

We have a history of idealism,

we have a history of moral authority and leadership,

and we have a history of doing bad things too.

But I think for children,

for the sake of our national unity,

for the sake of, you know, we need to instill children,

listen, the sense of optimism and hope and love

and also a love of history.

I mean, I grew up learning history

and learning, you know, kind of the heroic aspects of history,

which I now understand are not the only parts of history,

but it's really important for children to have role models

to look up to and to have an optimistic view

of our country and to have to understand

what the shared values are and by values,

I mean aspirational values, you know,

the things that our country is supposed to stand for

when we are at our best.

For example, Robert, in San Francisco,

we canceled advanced placement classes

because it made people feel bad.

Do you think that was a good decision?

No.

In the name of equity?

No, we should be inspiring our children towards excellence,

and we should be able to, as adults,

give them measures of what we mean by excellence.

And, you know, that inspires kids

and inspires the best out of them,

and, you know, we need to have those kind of metrics,

so that doesn't make any sense to me.

And then what's your view on, for example,

just educational diversity in charter schools

and your just position on the teachers' unions?

I mean, my view is that we ought to be

putting huge resources into public schools

and making them the best schools in the world.

And I think if we, you know,

right now we're making stealth bombers for a billion dollars

that cannot fly in the rain.

And I think if we just cut production of a couple of those,

we can make all our schools the best schools in the world.

Do they need competition?

Do you believe in vouchers?

And parents getting to choose which school they go to,

because it does seem like there's not a lot of competition

and that these teachers' unions have a stranglehold

on these schools?

I have to look at that issue more.

I mean, my inclination is that we should be putting resources

into making our public schools the best schools in the world.

But you said you believed in free markets,

with regard to energy.

Why not free markets in regard to education?

Well, it has an appeal.

I need to look at it. Okay, fair enough.

Yeah, let's talk about censorship.

Let's talk about the media.

One of the things that happened during the COVID pandemic

is that a lot of people grew suspicious of the mainstream media,

even more suspicious than they already had been.

It seemed like the media was curing water on certain issues.

It was almost impossible for the media to take seriously the idea

that the virus might have come from the Wuhan lab,

for example, people who put forward that,

I think, reasonable explanation

were called conspiracy theorists.

The media didn't want to look into why, just as an example,

Fauci lifted Obama's moratorium on gain-of-function research.

Couldn't get the media to really cover whether, you know,

masking toddlers in schools did anything positive.

And then, you know, when we found out that the mRNA shots

didn't prevent COVID the way they said,

they never even really asked the CEOs of Pfizer

and these other companies, when did you know this?

When did you know that the vaccines didn't do what you said they're going to do?

And I remember at Davos, you had Rebel News,

it was this guerrilla media outfit that accosted Berla,

the CEO of Pfizer, out on the street.

And they were just asking him questions that the media is supposed to ask,

like, you know, when did you know,

what did you know and when did you know it with respect to

whether the vaccines prevented the spread?

And you couldn't get the New York Times or any of the mainstream analysts

to cover this at all.

So it felt to this guerrilla media outfit.

So any event, that's a long wind up.

But, you know, Robert, what's your take on the media?

Why can't we get what seems to be on as media coverage?

How does this fit into your theory of regulatory capture?

Who are they sort of carrying water for and why?

You know, in 2015, I wrote a book on thimerosal.

And there was a documentary that came out that time called Trace Amounts.

It was a really good documentary on the mercury-based

preservative that was in a lot of vaccines at that time.

And it's been removed from most except for the flu vaccine now.

But I took that.

I had a very close relationship with Roger Ailes,

who was the founder of Fox News.

I had this weird relationship because when I was 19 years old,

I spent three months in a tent with him in East Africa.

And we, you know, he would like when he started Fox News,

he became like Darth Vader to me.

And we were anesthetical on every issue.

But we always, he was a very funny guy and very clever.

And he was also very loyal to his friends.

And he would make all of the hosts of Fox News put me on.

So I was the only environmentalist who was going on Hannity and Bill O'Reilly

and Neil Cavuto, et cetera, regularly, like weekly.

And he made them do that.

But I went to him with this movie and showed it to him.

And he found it compelling.

And he had a relative who he believed was vaccine injured,

a very, very close relative.

And he bought, he believed what was going on

and what the documentary, you know, the thrust of the documentary was.

And he said, I cannot let you talk about this on Fox News.

I'm sorry.

It was the first time he ever saw me this.

And he said, if I let you, if any of my hosts let you on to talk about this,

I would have to fire them.

And he said, and if I didn't fire him, I'd get a call from Rupert within 10 minutes.

And he said to me at that time that 70% of the revenues for his not on network news,

prime time, were pharmaceutical ads.

And that he said of 22 ad spaces that we sell on the network news,

on the evening news, 17 of those are pharmaceutical.

We cannot afford to offend our biggest funder, his advertisers.

And, you know, I had this interesting experience with Jake Tapper,

where when I worked on my Rolling Stone article, Deadly Immunity,

which was about this secret meeting that took place in Simpsonwood, Georgia by CDC and all

of the vaccine companies and FDA, et cetera, where they decided to hide the autism effect

from the American people.

And I got the transcripts for him and published in Rolling Stone.

And Jake Tapper worked for 21 days with me on a exclusive story.

And he was going to add simultaneously with Rolling Stone publishing it.

And Tapper, the night before he went on, he called me in total distress.

And he said, it's been pulled by corporate.

The whole thing is gone.

He said, never in my career has corporate killed one of my stories.

And I'm really angry.

And then I called him back the next day.

He's never spoken to me again.

But, you know, there are consequences for these newscasters who depart from the orthodoxy.

And they know it.

You know, if you look at Anderson Cooper, he's got now probably a $13 million a year salary.

But if you actually do the math, probably around 10 million of that comes from Pfizer,

which sponsors his show.

So, you know, that's, he's working for them.

He's not working for us.

And, you know, they know who they're working for.

Explosive stuff.

And I can't disagree with you as having been a publisher of my whole career.

There is why, why even, why even have pharmaceutical ads on TV?

I mean, only doctors can prescribe them.

Yeah, it was illegal prior to 1997.

So there's only two nations in the world that allow pharmaceutical advertising on TV.

One is New Zealand and the others, the United States.

And we both have, you know, these huge pharmaceutical sales.

So we take three to four times the amount of pharmaceutical drugs as a European takes.

And we have the worst health results.

We're 79th in terms of, you know, health impacts, you know, health outcomes among all nations.

And so, you know, and also pharmaceutical drugs, the third biggest killer of Americans

after cancer and heart attacks.

So it is not helping when, when they, when FDA changed that rule, the AMA was against it.

Like all the medical institutions said, you can't do this.

It is going to destroy health in America.

And, but, you know, they did it.

And the problem is that these, that the pharmaceutical companies now know, not,

not only can, you know, I have this platform for broadcasting their product,

but they also control content on the.

And as far as I can tell, I think the left, just to be blunt, hates you more than the right.

And so do you want to just comment on your ability to get the mainstream media to pay attention,

particularly folks on the left, and give you the air time so that you can get your message up?

And how much the party matters in this process for you?

I don't know that they're going to.

I mean, it was kind of traumatic.

What happened this week to them, not to me, because I'm used to it that ABC, you know,

one of their, a person who describes herself as the journalist journalist and gave me a long

talk when I got to ABC, that when I got to the green room, that she was not somebody who would

ever censor or cut and they're not working a cherry pick.

Because I said to her, I don't, I'm very uncomfortable doing a taped interview with you.

Because I know what you guys do when I tape an interview, you cut it up, you cherry pick it,

you dice it, and you do, and you then you play things out of context.

And she said, you won't do this.

See that from me.

I'm a journalist journalist.

I don't take orders from anybody I do.

And then she asked me.

She says, you know, in the interview, I didn't want to talk about vaccine.

I'm not going around the country talking about vaccines.

If you see my speeches, I don't mention vaccines.

But if somebody asked me about vaccines, I'm going to tell the truth.

I'm not looking to talk about them.

I know a lot about them, but I'm not leading with that.

Because I'm interested in a lot of other issues.

Oh, she says, everything you've said about vaccines and autism has been debunked.

And, you know, vaccines, it's clear, do not cause autism.

What do you have to say by that?

And then I said, by who?

And then I went into a long diatribe where I cited the cases, the dates, the publications.

And the studies that show that, yeah, obviously it caused autism.

And she cut out that whole section.

And then, so she had her question, which stayed at the industry talking point.

And then she brackets the news report on me with something at the beginning that says,

you know, he's known to be a chronic liar and a disinformation spreader.

And then in the end, she said, we had to remove things he said because they were false.

The whole thing was so weird that she has gotten criticism even from the left.

Because, you know, I mean, what is the news cast are supposed to do?

Are they supposed to manipulate public information?

Is their job to protect Americans from dangerous thoughts?

Are they audiences?

Do they have such contempt for their audiences that you think that the audiences can't make

up their own minds?

And what is their whole vision about the traditional role of the American media

as the guardians of free speech in the First Amendment in this country?

You can be sure our commitment to you is to not take out one sentence of anything you said.

There's some stuff I'd like you to take out.

I mean, I also found that a crazy decision for them to make,

if they actually believe that what you're saying about vaccines, which they put on the table,

is incorrect or what you said about autism or COVID is incorrect,

they should be trained enough to rebut it and have a thoughtful debate about you.

I'll be even more blunt.

My short takeaway about you, Robert, is that you are this odd person,

which is born and raised by the establishment, but raising a lot of very uncomfortable questions

about the establishment.

And I think that that's very complicated for people to deal with.

And I don't think that folks will be very supportive of you in the mainstream.

And I think the reason is because it'll cause them to question all these systems that they put

a lot of trust into, that they work within.

And so I'm not even sure whether they're trying to play gotcha journalism about vaccines,

or which is a much bigger thing, which is here is a guy that I do think it's very similar to

Trump that says he came out of the house and told us what was happening in the house.

And it actually turned out that was happening, the Dave Chappelle quote from Saturday Night Live.

I think you're a very different person than him.

But that comment is very much the same.

I think people are attracted to the truth and the confirmatory evidence about when they think

that there's frankly corruption.

And when it's laid bare in plain English, I think it's validating for those on the outside

because we're like, we knew it.

And then for folks on the inside, they're like, we need to bury it.

And I think that that's what you're going to be up against this entire election cycle.

So whether it's us, whether it's Rogan, folks, that'll give you the chance for you to just lay

your case out for millions of people who can smartly and intelligently make up their decision.

I think that's what it comes down to.

So I really just want to say thank you for giving us so much time and just being as

honest as you were and transparent as you were.

Saks closing thoughts here with Mr. Kennedy.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I mean, I think that's a great reference, Jamath, to the Chappelle quote.

I think that the ABC News interview was really telling because I think it's one thing if they

had edited the interview for time and just cut certain things, but they didn't do that.

They cut out your side of the conversation and then declared you guilty of misinformation,

but not letting the audience hear what it is that you said.

They simply declared you guilty of it.

And I think in that case, I think this is an example of how dissenting views are labeled

as misinformation as really a suppression tactic.

You know, they can't prove that it was misinformation.

They didn't give you the chance to say your side of it.

And I think this is a tactic now of the elite to declare certain inconvenient

truths or viewpoints out of bounds.

They don't want them being considered.

And I think what's very interesting about your campaign is you are going to force, I think,

elites in various kinds, foreign policy elites.

Henderson Cooper.

Political elites.

Media elites.

Financial elites.

To consider views that, you know, whether you agree with them or not,

I think you've made them in a very articulate way.

And I know enough about certain of your views, like with respect to the origins of the Ukraine

War, to say, yeah, I agree with that.

I believe that's true.

So I don't think they can dismiss you.

Today's conspiracy theories, sacks, as we've talked about, are tomorrow's Pulitzers.

Today's conspiracy theories are tomorrow's Pulitzers.

Go ahead, Jamal.

I really think that this is what's going to be scary as if you're,

as a selection, kind of rolls forward, the contrast and compare on the democratic side

is going to be very troublesome to the establishment.

And I just encourage you to just keep sticking to it and telling people what you think.

Freyberg, any final thoughts as we wrap?

Can I say one last thing?

Yes, of course.

In my defense.

And I want it because it's such a great platform.

What I've always said to people, if I'm promoting misinformation, which I'm constantly accused of,

show me what it is.

Identify, don't just say I'm an misinformation promoter.

Show me the piece that you don't agree with or that I made a false statement.

I would say that I have not promoted any misinformation.

If, unless misinformation is just a euphemism for anything that departs from government

orthodoxies, every post, I have probably the most robust fact checking operation in North America

because I know these attacks are coming.

So we have 300 and over 320 MD physicians, PhD scientists on my advisory board who see

everything that goes out and everything that I posted on Instagram was cited or sourced

to a government-based database or peer-reviewed publication.

Well, I don't want anything.

And by the way, that doesn't mean I won't make a mistake at some point.

But guess what?

If I made a mistake, people would point it out and you know what I would do?

I'd change it and apologize.

You change your opinion in the face of new facts?

Exactly.

If you can show me facts, that's the only thing that'll change my opinion.

Show me facts and I will change it so fast.

But you need to show me facts.

So just on the competition between you and Biden for this nomination, I want to say

that the Kennedy family has been involved in public life for decades and many Kennedys

have served in public life.

And I honestly don't remember one time with any Kennedy who served in public life

where they've been accused of receiving money from a foreign government, not once.

And we're now up to 12 Bidens, I think, who've received a payment

from foreign governments, potentially in this larger Hunter Biden scandal.

Do you have a point of view on that?

I mean, the fact that it appears that Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family

receive payments from foreign governments, how do you interpret that?

Is that something that you think is fair game in this campaign to talk about?

I don't know enough about it, David, to render judgment on it.

I don't know the intricacies of those relationships.

I think the optics are unfortunate.

But I would leave it.

I think it is fair game for people who are looking into it to criticize and question it.

I don't know enough about it.

I'm not in the position to be able to do that.

All right.

On that, I would just like to say, I grew up in a Catholic household, Irish Catholic in Brooklyn,

on the wall in my grandmother and grandfather's dining room.

We're three people, Bobby Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Jesus Christ.

It's been an honor to have you on the program.

And thank you for giving us two hours of vibrant debate.

We wish you well.

And we'd like to have you on again.

And perhaps if this platform allows for debates and they will not host you on the

debates, we will.

Here on the All in Podcast, I'll let you go.

And on behalf of all the besties, thank you for giving us two hours

and deeply engaging on these topics.

That's fantastic.

Thank you.

I really enjoyed it.

All right.

This, I think, went spectacularly well.

Let's go around the horn here and get immediate reactions.

Friedberg, I want to start with you because I think you, on the science issues,

maybe held back a little bit and let him speak.

We didn't have much of a dialogue with him.

I'd say we all kind of had a few opening statements, but let him kind of speak his mind.

I don't know.

We'll see how the episode plays with listeners.

It was really him having a platform to speak his mind for the past two hours.

And it's interesting.

I mean, obviously he's a candidate that's challenging the current sitting president

for his own party's nomination.

So, you know, really kind of, you know, interesting moment to participate in.

And, you know, but we did kind of give him the platform to kind of speak his mind.

I think my observation is this guy, Robert clearly has a very deep rooted

anti-establishment energy and that plays through in many of his points of view.

Anti-establishment kind of energy, I think manifests as both conspiracy theories where,

you know, as people have kind of classified some of his claims, which typically,

you know, involves looking at, call it correlation or circumstance, but not necessarily having the

causality or the tie to demonstrate or have proof of point or evidence of point.

And I think that that's really where he trips me up on a couple of points personally.

Which ones would you say are the points that trip you up most?

Where were you like?

I think the general statement that there are kind of, you know, embedded

interests in government is a good general statement.

Then when you start to try and tie together different kind of

correlations or circumstances and say that's evidence, it's not really,

it doesn't resonate true with me as someone who likes to kind of see

empirical truth kind of be demonstrated.

I think some of these points around, we know that PFOAs, one of these products,

one of these chemistries he talked about that's in the environment,

they're very damaging to the environment, they're very damaging to human health,

and there are others that he makes claims around that don't have that same level of

evidence, but they all get kind of bucketed together that all this stuff is bad,

that all nuclear is bad because there is a facility that was built in the 1950s and 1960s

that had some degree of bad engineering, and what some might argue isn't necessarily a major

hazardous radioactive leak, but has above kind of standards of radiation leak, and therefore

all nuclear is threatening.

Those are the sorts of things that kind of trip me up with him.

That would trip me up a little bit, yeah, as well.

The nuclear issue.

The thing that matters to me, this is all just bullshit talking,

rambling about social issues and, you know, like what the fuck are we going to do with

education and wars, none of it fucking matters if we cannot solve the debt and budget crisis

problem in this country.

We are running into the ground, the United States is in a tight panic.

I know you do, and I think the U.S. is in a tight panic moment.

Let's unpack that then, your key issue.

So for me, this is the thing that I told you guys I'm focused on with every candidate,

is how much do you think about the prioritization of the fiscal, the federal budget?

How do you think about the debt level?

And how do you think about the boundary conditions?

And it's clear that that's not really a concrete part of his platform,

nor is it, by the way, for any other candidate that I've seen so far.

I agree with you that.

That's kind of where I sit.

And it's very unpopular.

Chamath, let's have your response here, too.

Well, I think it's good to have your opinion.

I just think that your opinion is an opinion.

And you present it as this canonical fact, and that's what I have an issue with.

I just think that's intellectually not accurate.

So I respect the fact that you think that that's an issue.

But I think there's a lot of smart people that would say that's not the issue that

you think it is, and there are other issues.

Where did you find yourself, Chamath, in this process agreeing with him or disagreeing with him?

All political candidates at some point have a fork in the road,

which is that they're going to be a truth teller of their own truth,

or they're going to be conformist to talking points to try to offend the least amount of people.

And the first path is much riskier, but it actually has much larger discontinuous outcomes,

i.e. Trump.

The other path is a good antidote to the first path,

when the first path is what's in power, and you saw Biden take that path.

So, for me, I don't agree with some of the things that he said.

In fact, there are things like nuclear, which I just think he's wrong about.

Sure.

But what do I appreciate is that there is a version of his truth that is researched and

reasoned from his own lived experience, as well as history and facts.

And then he's also willing to say, I just don't know enough about it, so let me rethink it and then come back to you.

I thought the comment about school choice was an example, and I think that that's healthy.

So, on balance, I would rather have candidates in that first bucket, which are truth tellers

that have the potential to cause disagreement, versus the placaters who say nothing.

And this is where I do agree with Freeberg.

Whatever the issues are that may be important, the point is, placating doesn't work anymore.

And you need some kind of confrontation on hard topics for there to be any progress now.

And so, I prefer those kinds of people that are able to draw a hard line.

Agitators, non-conformists.

And I personally, I've always been and I have been very anti-establishment.

The idea of tearing down all these institutions of power gives me glee.

I find it gleeful.

Saks, when we look at this, this incredible, you know, almost two-hour conversation we had here,

I think we did hold him and force him on certain issues more than you would normally get in an

interview without being sensational. We didn't lead with vaccines. We didn't lead with culture wars.

We talked about really important issues.

Where did you find yourself in most agreement with him?

And where did you find yourself in least agreement with him?

Well, I want to make sure we see the forest for the trees here, because I think you can

disagree with this or that tree or you can get lost down the rabbit hole of some of these very

technical scientific debates. But here's the forest is you've got this scion of wealth and

privilege who comes from the most prominent, famous, democratic family. And he was set in

his life to go become an environmental lawyer who go fight against big corporate environmental

polluters. And somewhere along the way, he realized it wasn't just big corporations

was the problem. It was the agencies, the government agencies that were supposed to be

regulating them. And he realized that there was a revolving door going on between industry

and these agencies. And so he ended up litigating not just against big companies,

but against government agencies. I think that's a really interesting place for a candidate to come

from. And what you heard him say or what I took away from it is that he has a very sophisticated

critique of regulatory capture. And it goes beyond just the environmental area. It goes also to big

pharma. And it goes to the military industrial complex. When he's talking about all these

unnecessary wars that the United States has gotten into. And who can doubt that after we spent 20

years and $8 trillion bogged down in forever wars in the Middle East, who can doubt that the

military complex has played a malign role in our foreign policy. And we've got,

you know, all these generals, when they were retired from the Pentagon,

they go right onto the boards, these defense contractors. So there's enough right about

his critique that I think you can't dismiss it. You can't just say this guy's a conspiracy theorist

or a nut. He's saying too many things that I know would be true. And there's a lot of other areas

where I don't know what the truth is, but he is making, I'd say, sensible arguments and he's

presenting data and he's asking you to challenge him on the data. So in any event, I think he's got

this very interesting critique of regulatory capture. What he's basically saying is that

we have a ruling elite in this country that is managing the country for its own benefit. And

that is screwing the middle class. And that critique actually is very similar to what Trump

and DeSantis and people on the right are saying. The only difference is that I think people on

the right are blaming ideology. They're saying that the ruling elite is following this woke

ideology. What Kennedy is saying is that the ruling class is following the money.

But you know what, I think it both be right. I think these critiques are very compatible.

So look, you might disagree with this or that part of it, but I think that this overall critique,

the forest, forget about the trees, I think this forest could find purchase with the electorate,

because I think people just feel like there's something true about this.

What I will say is this is exactly how Trump got elected. And there was a great piece,

I think it was in the Atlantic when he was running the first time around that talked a lot

about the psychology of his appeal, that he comes from wealth, he comes from the system,

but he is the anti-system system product that he came out of this machine of wealth,

this machine of industry, this machine of influence. And he said, this entire system

needs to be torn down. And by the way, the psychology that they highlighted, and it speaks

to Trump, not necessarily to Robert, but what they highlighted was if you look historically at

the rise of authoritarian regimes coming out of democracies, it's typically the folks that

have come from an influence, from a point of influence, and from the point of privilege

and power, and they then decided they wanted to tear down the system that produced them.

And you trust the bully that comes out of the machine versus the outsider who doesn't really

know the machine and doesn't really have access. And that's partially why I think maybe he has

a shot at being the anti-Biden alternative, more so perhaps in this go-around than Trump is.

Look, he's not a bully, and he's not going to tear everything down.

And I've heard him on other interviews, and what he said is we need a peaceful revolution,

we need to reorganize these government agencies. So he's not saying...

So maybe that's why he does win over Trump, right? Maybe he becomes the less extreme,

he's not the bully, but he's like, I know how to dismantle and, you know, rebuild these systems.

Quite... They're incredible. Free speech, supporting the rule of law,

burgeoning the middle class. I mean, these are not things that are really controversial in the end.

They're good morals, right? They're good values. He's very morally grounded.

I think my concern is just the framework for how you kind of rationalize and make decisions if

you're allowing kind of influence in Uendo and correlation be kind of the driving force instead

of having, you know, make sure you just at least gather and sort the empirical evidence

to make those decisions. That's what he's doing. He just reached a different conclusion than you.

Yeah, he's just exactly, because he's saying that the other conclusion is just the orthodox

conclusion, which is nothing to see here. Yeah, by the way, I'm not an orthodox guy,

and I'm not like following orthodoxy. Saksa, folks have said you're pushing RFK

because you think he's a weaker candidate against the Republicans, your response.

No, I don't necessarily think he'd be a weaker candidate. For all the reasons we're talking

about, I think he'd be preferable to Biden in a lot of people's views.

So look, for me, this is not like partisan. I just think he's really interesting. I think he

is a breath of fresh air. I think there are many aspects of his critique of our system and the

corruption of our ruling class that hit home. I think regulatory capture is a huge issue. I think

a lot of these agencies do need to be reorganized. Well, it is the invisible hand that we don't

know how to quantify well in all these other discussions that we have. And he does put his

finger on this really ugly, uncomfortable truth, which is there's a cloistered set of insiders

for which there's a revolving door between power and money. And it's going to be very awkward for

a small number of people to hear that message as he gets more attention, which is probably why

the media industrial complex will do his best to prevent that message from getting out.

The media is going to block this guy at every angle, because what you said...

But you know what? Podcasts could play a huge role. Just like in 2016, social media broke through

and played a huge role. I think in 2024, I think that podcast could break through and be the way

that unorthodox candidates get their message out. It could be the way all candidates get their

message out, because if after two hours of this, you don't want to learn more about him,

or you're not going to consider him more fully, I think it's impossible because he's

so well-spoken. As you said, he's got a moral compass. He's got a track record.

And he's got interesting thoughts. What he isn't saying is he's not just throwing bombs,

and there may be things that you can debate with him about his interpretation of what he looks at,

you know, and that's very fair criticism, I think. But his critique is well reasoned. And so you

have to unpack the nuances of it to understand why he got to it, and also to try to prove him

wrong. That is very powerful because it's not just him randomly screaming about how things aren't

working. And the moments I thought were very important here, and especially for the listeners

who are listening, who are making important decisions and want to maybe change the political

system, there were multiple times on the issue of trans-surgery, and I'm going to be very nuanced here,

with the permission of the parents, he said, I need to do more research on it. On Freeburg

challenging him about spending. He said, I need to give that some more thought, but broadly speaking,

you know, I think we can take money out of the military budget and billion-dollar planes that

don't fly in the rain. There were many moments where he conceded, I need to give that some more

thought. I need to be thoughtful about that. That's not something that you typically hear,

but in a platform like this with, you know, the nuance that we've created on this platform,

having discussions and the audience also being nuanced and having depth. We know the fans of

this podcast are in a lot of positions of power, I'm sure 100% or very high percentage of the people

who listen to this podcast actually vote and are very influential within their own circles.

I think this kind of platform, we have a very deep discussion and somebody can say,

you know what, I need to go deeper on that and think about it. When I asked him about weapons

in Taiwan and then I said, hey, why wouldn't you give an answer that you defend Taiwan? Biden gave

it. He said, well, I don't want to tip my card, you wouldn't want to do that. That's a really good

answer. By the way, the official policy of the United States towards Taiwan is strategic ambiguity,

which means we don't say whether we'll defend it. It depends on the circumstances. And Biden,

when he's now said multiple times that he would defend it and his own staff walked it back,

because they said we're not changing strategic ambiguity. So yeah, I mean, the policy he said

in that case actually is the United States policy. So let me ask you guys a question. If he won the

Democratic nomination and he's up against Trump, who do you vote for? Obviously, RFK.

Yeah, of course RFK. And I think Saks would have a hard time. He wouldn't say who he's voted for

previously. I think Saks would vote. Saks is not going to say, are you? Are you going to say no?

Saks doesn't like to say, he's just Machiavellian. I'm reserving judgment on the general until

I know who both candidates are. Saks won't even tell us who he voted for. I would love

for RFK Jr. to be on the ballot and have that choice for sure. And it's possible I would vote

for him. It depends who the other person is. Is it really? Because you wouldn't even tell us

who you voted for or if you voted in the last election. Well, that's my right, Jason. I don't

have to tell you. I just think it's intellectually dishonest since you talk about politics so much

that I do. I think you should tell us who you voted for. I talk about issues. I talk about issues.

Now I decide to balance those issues because every candidate is a complex mix of issues.

That's ultimately my decision. Yeah, but for somebody who injects politics into everything,

to not just say it. I don't inject it. I'm not the one injecting. So to follow up on the question I

asked, I would love to see Donald Trump come on the show and give him an opportunity to have a

conversation and see if folks can have a different point of view coming out of that as well as

Joe Biden and maybe some of the other candidates running for the Republican nomination. And I

want to see if the points of focus for us can maybe match up with one or more of these candidates.

So far, I'm still... Well, Nikki Halley will come on, right?

We think? Yeah. So Nikki Halley's in and then Trump will do it and then Biden will not.

Trump will do it. I think Trump would do it because he did something with Barstool, right?

Jason, do you want me to do the announcement on the summit? Oh, please.

Okay. So we are confirmed and signed on our venue. And so we are confirmed

for all-in summit 2023 in Los Angeles, September 10th through 12th.

Secure the bag, baby. Let's go. We'll put out the... And I think it's going to be

really exciting because we'll have an opportunity to, at this point in the year,

we have a lot of time to put together a really high-quality agenda for conversations we each

want to have with really amazing people. So I'm excited about that. We've kind of started to put

together some ideas on what we want to talk about, who we want to invite to have those conversations

with us, put out some invites. So very good job, by the way. And you'll be leading... This is your

AI summit. So I'm handing everything off to you. I'm helping with the parties, basically. But

you're driving. Congratulations. Your team is exceptional. I just want to let the audience know.

We're doing it together and it's going to be great. Yeah, but I'm stepping back and letting

you drive. I consider this like your... I care very deeply about content and I want to make sure that

we get a chance to have an experience and have a chance to have the conversations we want to have

with the folks we want to talk with. Nothing can be better than you building on top of the first

one and then we just keep going from there. Chamath and Sax if they want to build on it from

there. There'll be three... This is what everybody wants to know is tickets. There's going to be

three ticket tiers. There'll still be a VIP one for 7500 that gets you into the dinners. Oh, sorry.

Yeah, that's an important point. The VIP experience this year, we got some feedback on the last go

around that we needed to make sure there was a degree of differentiation. So the VIP experience

will include special VIP dinners, early access to the theater, gift bags, special sections during

the parties. So hopefully it elevates the experience a bit for folks that are able to pay the higher

ticket fee, which actually helps support the whole program. No bottle service. I mean, bottle

service, you can bring your card. But hopefully as a way to kind of support the overall program

and keep the cost down for everyone else. And then it's a $1,500 general admission pass,

which includes access to the parties. And then we'll still have the scholarship class.

Can I tell you guys a funny story? Yeah. When I joined the ownership group

that bought the Warriors, I heard a rumor, which was that when we were competing,

it was us versus Ellison to buy the Warriors. And Ellison had an idea. I don't know if this

is true or not. This is what I heard that he had an idea for a new stadium. And he's like,

he wanted to make it an ultra VIP stadium. And so there's only 5000 seats. And they were like

Singapore Airlines first class seats. So you go to the stadium to watch the team. But it'd be like

everybody would be like up close and you could touch. And outside, they also had a thousand

guillotines. So you could just, yeah. I mean, it's hard enough for a family to go see the Warriors.

I don't know if that's true or not, but I thought it was very funny story. It's crazy expensive now.

It's like crazy expensive. Hundreds of dollars for nosebleed seats.

For the dictator, Tramoff Polly Hoppitya. For David Sacks, who set up this episode. And

Friedberg, the Sultan of Science. We hope you enjoy this. It's the first of many to come.

We will still be doing regular dockets. We might have to go to two episodes a week on weeks like

this. Who knows? But give us your feedback. Share the show. And we'll see you all at the All In Summit.

Rain Man, David Sacks.

And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you, S.I.S. Queen of Kin-Wah.

Besties are gone.

This is my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

Oh, man.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless.

It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

What? You're a bee.

Bee. What? You're a bee.

We need to get merchies.

Besties are gone.

I'm going all in.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.