It's not our business to change the Russian government.
And anybody who thinks it's a good idea
to do regime change in Russia, which
has more nuclear weapons than we do, is, I think,
irresponsible.
And Vladimir Putin himself has said,
we will not live in a world without Russia.
And it was clear when he said that that he
was talking about himself.
And he has his hand on a button that could bring Armageddon
to the entire planet.
So why are we messing with this?
It's not our job to change that regime.
And we should be making fair friends with the Russians.
We shouldn't be treating them as an enemy.
Now we've pushed them into the camp with China.
That's not a good thing for our country.
And by the way, what we're doing now
does not appear to be weakening Putin at all.
The following is a conversation with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,
candidate for the President of the United States,
running as a Democrat.
Robert is an activist, lawyer, and author
who has challenged some of the world's most
powerful corporations, seeking to hold them accountable
for the harm they may cause.
I love science and engineering.
These two pursuits are, to me, the most beautiful and powerful
in the history of human civilization.
Science is our journey, our fight
for uncovering the laws of nature
and leveraging them to understand the universe
and to lessen the amount of suffering in the world.
Some of the greatest human beings I've ever met,
including most of my good friends,
are scientists and engineers.
Again, I love science.
But science cannot flourish without epistemic humility,
without debate, both in the pages of academic journals
and in the public square,
in good faith, long-form conversations.
Agree or disagree, I believe Robert's voice
should be part of the debate.
To call him a conspiracy theorist
and arrogantly dismiss everything he says
without addressing it diminishes the public's trust
in the scientific process.
At the same time, dogmatic skepticism
of all scientific output on controversial topics
like the pandemic is equally, if not more,
dishonest and destructive.
I recommend that people read
and listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
his arguments and his ideas.
But I also recommend, as I say in this conversation,
that people read and listen to Vincent Recanello
from This Week in Virology,
Dan Wilson from Debunk the Funk,
and the Twitter and books of Paul Offit, Eric Topol,
and others who are outspoken
in their disagreement with Robert.
It is disagreement, not conformity,
that bends the long arc of humanity toward truth and wisdom.
In this process of disagreement,
everybody has a lesson to teach you,
but we must have the humility to hear it
and to learn from it.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It's the 4th of July, Independence Day,
so simple question, simple big question.
What do you love about this country,
the United States of America?
I would say, well, there's so many things
that I love about the country.
On the landscapes and the waterways
and the people, et cetera,
but on the higher level,
people argue about whether we're an exemplary nation.
And that term has been given a bad name,
particularly by the Neocons,
the actions of the Neocons in recent decades
who have turned that phrase
into kind of a justification
for forcing people to adopt American systems
or values at the barrel of a gun.
But my father and uncle used it in a very different way,
and they were very proud of it.
I grew up very proud of this country
because we were the exemplary nation
in the sense that we were an example
of democracy all over the world.
When we first launched our democracy in 1780,
we were the only democracy on earth.
And by the Civil War, by 1865,
there were six democracies.
Today, there's probably 190.
And all of them, in one way or another,
are modeled on the American experience.
And it's kind of extraordinary
because our first contact with,
our first serious and sustained contact
with the European culture and continent was in 1608,
when John Winthrop came over
with his Puritans in the Sloop Art Bella.
And Winthrop gave this famous speech
where he said, this is gonna be a city on a hill.
This is gonna be an example
for all the other nations in the world.
And he warned his fellow Puritans.
They were sitting at this great expanse of land,
and he said, we can't be seduced
by the lure of real estate
or by the carnal opportunities of this land.
We have to take this country as a gift from God
and then turn it into an example
for the rest of the world of God's love,
of God's will and wisdom.
And then 200 years later, or 250 years later,
they, a different generation, they were mainly deists.
There are people who had a belief in God,
but not so much a love
of particularly religious cosmologies.
You know, the framers, the Constitution,
believed that we were creating something
that would be replicated around the world
and that it was an example.
It would, in democracy,
there would be this kind of wisdom from the collective.
And the word wisdom means a knowledge of God's will,
and that somehow God would speak through the collective
in a way that he or she could not speak
through totalitarian regimes.
And I think that that's something
that even though Winthrop was a white man and a Protestant,
that every immigrant group who came after them
kind of adopted that belief.
And I know my family, when my family came over,
all of my grandparents came over in 1848
during the Potato Fam,
and they saw this country as unique in history
as something that was part of
kind of a broader spiritual mission.
So I'd say that from a 30,000-foot level,
I grew up so proud of this country
and believing that it was the greatest country in the world
and for those reasons.
Well, I immigrated to this country,
and one of the things that really embodies America to me
is the ideal of freedom.
Hunter Thompson said,
"'Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.'"
What does freedom mean to you?
To me, freedom does not mean chaos,
and it does not mean anarchy.
It means that it has to be accompanied by restraint
if it's going to live up to its promise in self-restraint.
What it means is the capacity for human beings to exercise
and to fulfill their creative energies
unrestrained as much as possible by government.
So this point that Hunter Thompson has made is,
dies unless it's used.
Do you agree with that?
Yeah, I do agree with that.
And he was not unique in saying that.
Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of liberty
had to be watered with the blood of each generation,
and what he meant by that is that you can't live off,
we can't live off the laurels of the American Revolution.
That we had a group, we had a generation
where between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans died.
They gave their lives, they gave their livelihoods,
they gave their status, they gave their property,
and they put it all on the line
to give us our Bill of Rights.
But those Bill of Rights, the moment that we signed them,
there were forces within our society
that began trying to chip away at them.
And that happens in every generation,
and it is the obligation of every generation
to safeguard and protect those freedoms.
The blood of each generation.
You mentioned your interest,
your admiration of Albert Camus, of stoicism,
perhaps your interest in existentialism.
Camus said, I believe in myth of Sisyphus,
the only way to deal with an unfree world
is to become so absolutely free
that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
What do you think he means by that?
I suppose the way that Camus viewed the world
and the way that the Stoics did
and a lot of the existentialists
was that it was so absurd
and that the problems and the tasks
that were given just to live a life are so insurmountable,
that the only way that we can kind of get back the gods
for giving us this impossible task of living life
was to embrace it and to enjoy it and to do our best at it.
I mean, to me, I read Camus,
particularly in the myth of Sisyphus,
as kind of a parable that,
and it's the same lesson that I think he writes about
in The Plague, where we're all given
these insurmountable tasks in our lives,
but that by doing our duty, by being of service to others,
we can bring meaning to a meaningless chaos
and we can bring order to the universe.
And Sisyphus was kind of the iconic hero
of the Stoics, and he was a man
because he did something good.
He delivered a gift to humanity.
He angered the gods and they condemned him
to push a rock up the hill every day
and then it would roll down.
When he got to the top, it would roll down
and he'd spend the night going back down the hill
to collect it and then rolling it back up the hill again.
And the task was absurd.
It was insurmountable.
He could never win.
The last line of that book is one of the great lines,
which is something to the extent
that I can picture Sisyphus smiling,
because Camus' belief was that even though
his task was insurmountable, that he was a happy man.
And he was a happy man
because he put his shoulder to the stone.
He took his duty.
He embraced the task and the absurdity of life
and he pushed the stone up the hill.
And that if we do that and if we find ways
of being of service to others, that is the ultimate.
That's the key to the lock.
That's the solution to the puzzle.
Each individual person in that way
can rebel against absurdity by discovering meaning
to this whole messy thing.
And we can bring meaning not only to our own lives,
but we can bring meaning to the universe as well.
We can bring some kind of order to life.
The embrace of those tasks and the commitment to service
resonates out from us to the rest of humanity in some way.
So you mentioned The Plague by Camus.
There's a lot of different ways to read that book,
but one of them, especially given how it was written,
is that The Plague symbolizes Nazi Germany.
And the Hitler regime.
What do you learn about human nature
from a figure like Adolf Hitler?
That he's able to captivate the minds of millions,
rise to power, and take on,
pull in the whole world into a global war.
I was born nine years after the end of World War II.
And I grew up in a generation that was,
with my parents who were fixated on that.
On what happened.
And my father, at that time,
the resolution in the minds of most Americans,
and I think people around the world,
is that there had been something wrong
with the German people.
The Germans had been particularly susceptible
to this kind of demagoguery
and to following a powerful leader
and to industrializing cruelty and murder.
And my father always differed with that.
My father said, this is not a German problem.
This could happen to all of us.
We're all just inches away from barbarity.
And the thing that keeps us safe in this country
are the institutions of our democracy, our constitution.
It's not our nature.
Our nature has to be restrained.
And that comes through self-restraint,
but it also, you know, the beauty of our country
is that we devise these institutions
that are designed to allow us to flourish,
but at the same time not to give us enough freedom
to flourish, but also create enough order
to keep us from collapsing into barbarity.
So, you know, one of the other things
that my father talked about from when I was little,
you know, he would ask us this question.
If you were the family,
and Anne Frank came to your door and asked you to hide her,
would you be one of the people who hit her
at risk of your own life,
or would you be one of the people who turned her in?
And of course, we would all say,
of course, we would hide Anne Frank and take the risk.
But, you know, that's been something,
kind of a lesson, a challenge that has been,
that has always been near the forefront of my mind,
that if a totalitarian system ever occurs
in the United States,
which my father thought was quite possible,
he was conscious about how fragile democracy actually is,
that would I be one of the ones
who would resist the totalitarianism,
or would I be one of the people who went along with it?
Would I be one of the people who was at the train station
in, you know, Krakauer, or, you know, even Berlin,
and saw people being shipped off to camps,
and just put my head down and pretend I didn't see it,
because talking about it would be destructive to my career,
and maybe my freedom, and even my life.
So, you know, that has been a challenge
that my father gave to me,
and all of my brothers and sisters,
and it's something that I've never forgotten.
A lot of us would like to believe
who would resist in that situation,
but the reality is most of us wouldn't.
And that's a good thing to think about,
that human nature is such that we're selfish,
even when there's an atrocity going on all around us.
And we also, you know,
we have the capacity to deceive ourselves,
and all of us tend to kind of judge ourselves
by our intentions and our actions.
What have you learned about life from your father,
Robert F. Kennedy?
First of all, I'll say this about my uncle,
because, you know, I'm gonna apply that question
to my uncle and my father.
My uncle was asked when he first met Jackie Bouvier,
who later became Jackie Kennedy,
she was a reporter for a newspaper,
and she was doing, she had a kind of column
where she'd do these kind of pithy interviews
with both famous people
and kind of man in the street interviews.
And she was interviewing him,
and she asked him what he believed his best quality was,
this is his strongest virtue.
And she thought that he would take courage,
because he had been a war hero.
He was the only president who,
and this one he was senator, by the way,
who received the Purple Heart.
And, you know, he had a very kind of famous story
of him as a hero in World War II.
And then he had come home,
and he had written a book on moral courage
among American politicians and won the Pulitzer Prize.
That book, Profiles in Courage,
which was a series of incidents
where American political leaders
made decisions to embrace principle,
even though their careers were at stake,
and in most cases were destroyed by their choice.
She thought he was gonna say courage,
but he didn't, he just had curiosity.
And I think, you know, looking back at his life,
that the best, that that, it was true,
and that was the quality that allowed him
to put himself in the shoes of his adversaries.
And he always said that if you,
if the only way that we're gonna have peace
is if we're able to put ourselves in the shoes
of our adversaries, understand their behavior
and their context, that context.
And that's why he was able to,
you know, during the, he was able to resist
the intelligence apparatus and the military
during the Bay of Pigs, when they said,
you've got to send in the Essex, the aircraft carrier.
And he said, no, even though he'd only been
in two months in office, he was able to stand up to them
because of, because he was able to put himself
in the shoes of both Castro and Khrushchev.
And understand there's gotta be another solution to this.
And then during the Cuban Missile Crisis,
he was able to, the narrative was, okay,
Khrushchev acted in a way as an aggressor
to put missiles in our hemisphere.
How dare he do that?
And Jack and my father were able to say,
well, wait a minute, he's doing that
because we put missiles in Turkey and Italy
that were right on, you know,
the Turkish ones right on the Russian border.
And they then made a secret deal with Dobrynin,
with Ambassador Dobrynin and, you know, with Khrushchev
to remove the missiles in Turkey,
if he moved the Jupiter missiles from Turkey,
if, so long as Khrushchev removed them from Cuba.
Every, there were 13 men on the executive,
on the end, what they call the Hancock Committee,
which was the group of people who were deciding,
you know, what the action was,
what they were gonna do to end the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And virtually, and of those men,
11 of them wanted to invade and wanted to bomb and invade.
And it was Jack, and then later on my father
and Bob McNamara, who were the only people
who were with him, because he was able
to see the world from Khrushchev's point of view.
He believed that there was another solution.
And then he also had the moral courage.
So my father, you know, to get back to your question,
famously said that moral courage
is the most important quality,
and it's more rare and courage on the football field
or courage in battle than physical courage.
It's much more difficult to come by,
but it's the most important quality in a human being.
And you think that kind of empathy that you referred to,
that requires moral courage?
It certainly requires moral courage to act on it.
You know, and particularly, you know,
in, you know, any time that a nation is at war,
there's kind of a momentum or an inertia that says,
okay, let's not look at this
from the other person's point of view.
And that's the time we really need to do that.
Well, if we can apply that style of empathy,
style of curiosity to the current war in Ukraine,
what is your understanding of why Russia invaded Ukraine
in February, 2022?
Vladimir Putin could have avoided the war in the Ukraine.
His invasion was illegal.
It was unnecessary and it was brutal.
But I think it's important for us
to move beyond these kind of comic book depictions
of a, you know, of this insane avaricious Russian leader
who wants to restore the Soviet empire.
And that that's why, and it was,
who made an unfolked, unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine,
he was provoked and we were provoking him
and we were provoking him since 1997.
And it's not just me that's saying that.
I mean, when, and before Putin never came in,
we were provoking Russians in this way unnecessarily.
And to go back to that time in 1992,
when the Russians moved out of,
when the Soviet Union was collapsing,
the Russians moved out of East Germany and they did that,
which was a huge concession to them.
They had 400,000 troops in East Germany at that time,
and they were facing NATO troops
on the other side of the wall.
Ogorbachev made this huge concession
where he said to George Bush,
I'm gonna move all of our troops out
and you can then reunify Germany under NATO,
which was a hostile army to the Soviet.
It was created with hostile intent toward the Soviet Union.
And he said, you can take Germany,
but I want your promise
that you will not move NATO to the East.
And James Baker, who was the Secretary of State,
famously said, I will not move NATO,
we will not move NATO one inch to the East.
So then five years later in 1997,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was kind of the father
of the Neocons, who was a Democrat at that time,
served in the Carter administration,
he published a paper, a blueprint,
for moving NATO right up to the Russian border,
a thousand miles to the East and taking over 14 nations.
And at that time, George Kennan,
who was kind of the deity of American diplomats,
he was probably arguably the most important diplomat
in American history, he was the architect
of the containment policy during World War II.
And he said, this is insane and it's unnecessary.
And if you do this, it's gonna provoke the Soviet,
the Russians to a violent response.
And we should be making friends with the Russians,
they lost the Cold War.
We should be treating them the way
that we treated our adversaries after World War II,
like with a Marshall plan to try to help them
incorporate into Europe and to be part of the brotherhood
of man and of Western nations.
We shouldn't continue to be treating them as an enemy
and particularly surrounding them at their borders.
William Perry, who was then the Secretary of Defense
under Bill Clinton threatened to resign.
He was so upset by this plan to move NATO to the East.
And William Burns, who was then the US Ambassador
to the Soviet Union, who's now at this moment,
the head of the CIA said at that time the same thing.
If you do this, it is going to provoke the Russians
toward a military response.
And we moved it, we moved all around Russia,
we moved to 14 nations, a thousand miles to the East,
and we put Aegis missile systems
in two nations in Romania and Poland.
So we did what the Russians had done to us in 1962
that would have provoked the invasion of Cuba.
We put those missile systems back there
and then we walk away unilaterally,
walk away from the two nuclear missile treaties,
the intermediate nuclear missile treaties
that we had with the Soviet Union, with Russia.
And neither of us would put those missile systems
on the borders.
We walk away from that and we put Aegis missile systems,
which are nuclear capable,
they can carry the Tomahawk missiles,
which have nuclear warheads.
So the last country that they didn't take was the Ukraine.
And the Russians said, and in fact, Bill Perry said this,
or William Burns said it, this was now the head of the CIA.
It is a red line.
If we go into, if we bring NATO into Ukraine,
that is a red line for the Russians.
They cannot live with it, they cannot live with it.
Russia has been invaded three times through the Ukraine.
The last time it was invaded, we killed,
or the Germans killed one out of every seven Russians.
They destroyed, my uncle described what had happened
to Russia in his famous American University speech in 1963.
60 years ago this month, or he's,
or last month 60 years ago on June 10th, 1963,
he told, that speech was telling American people,
put yourself in the shoes of the Russians.
We need to do that if we're gonna make peace.
And he said, all of us have been taught,
you know, that we won the war, but we didn't win the war.
The Russians, if anybody won the war against Hitler,
it was the Russians.
Their country was destroyed.
They, all of their cities, and he said,
imagine if all of the cities on the east coast of Chicago
were reduced to rubble, and all of the fields burned,
all of the forests burned, that's what happened to Russia.
That's what they gave so that we could get rid
of Adolf Hitler.
And he had them put themselves in their position.
And you know, today there's none of that happening.
We have refused repeatedly to talk to the Russians.
We've broken up, there's two treaties,
the Minsk agreements, which the Russians were willing
to sign, and they said, we will stay out.
The Russians didn't want the Ukraine.
They showed that when the Donbas region voted 90 to 10
to leave and go to Russia, Putin said, no,
we want Ukraine to stay intact,
but we want you to sign Minsk accords to, you know,
the Russians were very worried
because of the US involvement in the coup in Ukraine
in 2014, and then the oppression,
and the, you know, and the killing
of 14,000 ethnic Russians.
And Russia hasn't, the same way that if Mexico
would age its missile systems from China or Russia
on our border and killed 14,000 expats American,
we would go in there.
Oh, he does have a national security interest in the Ukraine.
He has an interest in protecting
the Russian-speaking people of the Ukraine,
the ethnic Russians, and the Minsk accords did that.
It left Ukraine as part of Russia.
It left them as a semi-autonomous region
that could continue to use their own language,
which is essentially banned by the coup,
by the government we put in in 2014.
And we sabotaged that agreement.
And we now know in April of 2022,
Zelensky and Putin had inked a deal already
to another peace agreement,
and that the United States and Boris Johnson,
the Neocons in the White House sent Boris Johnson
over to the Ukraine to sabotage that agreement.
So what do I think?
I think this is a proxy war.
I think this is a, you know, this is a war
that the Neocons in the White House wanted.
They've said for two decades they wanted this war,
and that they wanted to use Ukraine as a pawn
in a proxy war between United States and Russia,
the same as we used Afghanistan.
And in fact, they say it, this is the model.
Let's use the Afghanistan model.
That was said again and again,
and to get the Russians to overextend their troops
and then fight them using local fighters and US weapons.
And when President Biden was asked,
why are we in the Ukraine, he was honest.
He says to depose Vladimir Putin regime,
change for Vladimir Putin.
And when his defense secretary Lloyd Austin
in April, 2022 was asked, you know, why are we there?
He said, to degrade the Russians capacity
to fight anywhere, to exhaust the Russian army
and degrade its capacity to fight elsewhere in the world.
That's not a humanitarian mission.
That's not what we were told.
We were told this was an unprovoked invasion,
and that we're there to bring a humanitarian relief
to the Ukrainians.
But that is the opposite.
That is a war of attrition that is designed to chew up,
to turn this little nation into an abattoir of death
for the flower of Ukrainian youth
in order to advance a geopolitical ambition
of certain people within the White House.
And I think that's wrong.
We should be talking to the Russians
the way that, you know, Nixon talked to Brezhnev,
the way that Bush talked to Gorbachev,
the way that my uncle talked to Khrushchev.
We need to be talking with the Russians, we should,
and negotiating, and we need to be looking about
how do we end this and preserve peace in Europe?
Would you, as president, sit down and have a conversation
with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky
separately and together to negotiate peace?
Absolutely.
What about Vladimir Putin?
He's been in power since 2000.
So as the old adage goes, power corrupts,
and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Do you think he has been corrupted
by being in power for so long?
If you think of the man, if you look at his mind.
Listen, I don't know exactly,
I can't say because I just, I don't know enough about him
or about, you know, the evidence that I've seen
is that he is homicidal.
He kills his enemies or poisons them.
And, you know, the reaction I've seen to that,
to those accusations from him have not been to deny that,
but to kind of laugh it off.
I think he's a dangerous man and that, of course,
you know, there's probably corruption in his regime.
But having said that, it's not our business
to change the Russian government.
And anybody who thinks it's a good idea
to do regime change in Russia,
which has more nuclear weapons than we do,
is, I think, irresponsible.
And, you know, Vladimir Putin himself has said,
you know, we will not live in a world without Russia.
And it was clear when he said that
that he was talking about himself.
And he has his hand on a button
that could bring, you know, Armageddon to the entire planet.
So why are we messing with this?
It's not our job to change that regime.
And we should be making fair friends with the Russians.
We shouldn't be treating them as an enemy.
Now we've pushed them into the camp with China.
That's not a good thing for our country.
And by the way, you know, what we're doing now
does not appear to be weakening Putin at all.
Putin now, you know, if you believe the polls
that are coming out of Russia,
they show him, you know, the most recent polls
that I've seen, show him with that 89% popularity
that people in Russia support the war in Ukraine.
And they support him as an individual.
And I understand there's problems with polling
and, you know, you don't know what to believe,
but the polls consistently show that.
And, you know, it's not America's business
to be the policemen of the world
and to be changing regimes in the world.
That's illegal.
We shouldn't be breaking international laws.
You know, we should actually be looking for ways
to improve relationships with Russia,
not to, you know, not to destroy Russia,
not to destroy and not to choose its leadership for them.
That's up to the Russian people, not us.
So step one is to sit down and empathize
with the leaders of both nations
to understand their history, their concerns, their hopes,
just to open the door for conversation
so they're not back to the corner.
Yeah, and I think the US can play a really important role
and a US president can play a really important role
by reassuring the Russians
that we're not gonna consider them an enemy anymore,
that we wanna be friends.
And it doesn't mean
that you have to let down your guard completely
the way that you do it,
which was the way President Kennedy did it,
is you do it one step at a time.
You take baby steps.
We do a unilateral move
to reduce our hostility and aggression
and see if the Russians reciprocate.
And that's the way that we should be doing it.
And, you know, we should be easing our way
into a positive relationship with Russia.
We have a lot in common with Russia
and we should be friends with Russia
and with the Russian people.
And, you know, apparently there's been 350,000 Ukrainians
who have died at least in this war.
And there's probably been 60 or 80,000 Russians
and that should not give us any joy.
It should not give us any, you know,
I saw Lindsey Graham on TV saying, you know,
something to the extent that anything we can do
to kill Russians is a good use of our money,
that it is not.
You know, those are somebody's children.
We should have compassion for them.
This war is an unnecessary war.
We should settle it through negotiation,
through diplomacy, through statecraft,
and not through weapons.
Do you think this war can come to an end
purely through military operations?
No, I mean, I don't think there's any way in the world
that the Ukrainians can beat the Russians.
I don't think there's any appetite in Europe.
I think Europe is now, you know,
in having severe problems in Germany, Italy, France.
You're seeing these riots.
There's internal problems in those countries.
There is no appetite in Europe
for sending men to die in Ukraine.
And the Ukrainians do not have anybody left.
The Ukrainians are using press gangs
to, you know, to fill the ranks of their armies.
Men, military-age men, are trying as hard as they can
to get out of the Ukraine right now
to avoid going to the front.
The front, you know, the Russians apparently
have been killing Ukrainians at a seven-to-one ratio.
My son fought over there, and he told me,
it's not, you know, until he had,
he had firefights with the Russians, mainly at night,
but he said most of the battles
were artillery wars during the day.
And the Russians now outgun the NATO forces,
10 to one, in artillery.
Oh, they're killing at a horrendous rate.
Now, you know, my interpretation of what's happened so far
is that Putin actually went in early on
with a small force because he expected to meet somebody
on the other end of a negotiating table
that once he went in, and when that didn't happen,
they did not have a large enough force
to be able to mount an offensive.
And so they've been building up that force up till now,
and they now have that force.
And even against this small original force,
the Ukrainians have been helpless.
All of their offenses have died.
They've now killed, you know,
the head of the Ukrainian special forces,
which was probably, arguably, by many accounts,
the best elite military unit in all of Europe.
The commandant, the commander of that special forces group
gave a speech about four months ago
saying that 86% of his men are dead or wounded
and cannot return to the front.
He cannot rebuild that force.
And, you know, the troops that are now headed,
that are now filling the gaps
of all those 350,000 men who've been lost
are scantily trained,
and they're arriving green at the front.
Many of them do not want to be there.
Many of them are giving up and going over the Russian side.
We've seen this again and again and again,
including platoon-sized groups
that are defecting to the Russians.
And I don't think it's possible to win.
And anybody, you know, I saw,
of course, I've studied World War II history exhaustively,
but I saw a, there's a new,
I think it's a Netflix series of documentaries
that I highly recommend to people.
They're colorized versions of the black and white films
from the battles of World War II,
but it's all the battles of World War II.
So I watched Stalingrad the other night,
and, you know, the willingness of the Russians
to fight on against any kind of allies
and to make huge sacrifices of Russians,
the Russians themselves,
who were making the sacrifice with their lives,
the willingness of them to do that for their motherland
is almost inexhaustible.
It is incomprehensible to think
that Ukraine can beat Russia in a war.
It would be like Mexico beating the United States.
It's just, it's impossible to think that it can happen.
And, you know, Russia has deployed
a tiny, tiny fraction of its military so far.
And, you know, now it has China
with its mass production capacity supporting its war effort.
It's just, it's a hopeless situation.
And we've been lied to.
You know, we're, the press in our country
and our government are just, you know,
promoting this lie that the Ukrainians are about to win
and that everything's going great
and that Putin's on the run
and there's all this wishful thinking
because of the Wagner group, you know,
the Rogozhin and the Wagner group,
that this was an internal coup
and it showed dissent and weakness of Putin
and none of that is true.
That was a, that insurgency,
which wasn't even an insurgency,
he only got 4,000 of his men to follow him out of 20,000.
And they were quickly stopped
and nobody in the Russian military, the oligarchy,
the political system, nobody supported it, you know,
and by we're being told, oh yeah,
it's the beginning of the end for Putin.
He's weakened, he's wounded, he's on his way out
and all of these things are just lies
that we are being fed.
So to push back on a small aspect of this
that you kind of implied, so I've traveled to Ukraine
and one thing that I should say,
similar to the Battle of Stalingrad,
it is just not, it is not only the Russians
that fight to the end.
I think the Ukrainians are very lucky to fight to the end
and the morale there is quite high.
I've talked to nobody, this was a year ago in August
with Herson, everybody was proud to fight
and die for their country
and there's some aspect where this war unified the people,
gave them a reason and an understanding
that this is what it means to be Ukrainian
and I will fight to the death to defend this land.
You know, I would agree with that
and I should have said that myself at the beginning.
You know, that's one of the reasons
my son went over there to fight
because he was inspired by the valor of the Ukrainian people
and this extraordinary willingness of them
and I think Putin thought it would be much easier
to sweep into Ukraine and he found, you know,
a stone wall of Ukrainians
whether ready to put their lives and their bodies on the line
but that to me makes the whole episode even more tragic
is that, you know, I don't believe,
you know, I think that the US role in this
has been, you know, that there were many opportunities
to settle this war and the Ukrainians wanted to settle it
but Vladimir Zelensky when he ran in 2019,
here's a guy who's a comedian, he's an actor,
he had no political experience
and yet he won this election with 70% of the vote.
Why?
He won on a peace platform
and he won promising to sign the Minsk Accords
and yet something happened when he got in there
that made him suddenly pivot
and, you know, I think it's a good guess what happened.
I think he was, you know, he came under threat
by ultra natural and nationalists
within his own administration
and the insistence of Neocons like Victoria Nuland
in the White House that, you know,
we don't want peace with Putin, we want a war.
Do you worry about a nuclear war?
Yeah, I worry about it.
It seems like a silly question but it's not.
It's a serious question.
Well, the reason it's not, you know,
the reason it might, it's not is just because people seem
to be in this kind of dream state
about that it'll never happen
and yet, you know, it can happen very easily
and it can happen at any time
and, you know, if we push the Russians too far,
you know, I don't doubt that Putin,
if he felt like his regime or his nation
was in danger that the United States
was gonna be able to place, you know,
a quisling on, you know, into the Kremlin
that he would use nuclear, you know, torpedoes
and, you know, these strategic weapons that they have
and that could be the, once you do that,
nobody controls the trajectory.
By the way, you know, I have very strong memories
of the Cuban Missile Crisis and those 13 days
when we came closer to nuclear war, you know,
and particularly I think it was when the U-2
got shot down over Cuba, you know,
and nobody in this, there's a lot of people
in Washington, D.C. who at that point thought
that they very well may wake up dead,
that the world may end at night.
30 million Americans killed 130 million Russians.
This is what our military brass wanted.
They saw war with Russia, nuclear exchange with Russia
as not only inevitable but also desirable
because they wanted to do it now.
We still had a superiority.
Can you actually go through the feelings you've had
about the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Like, what are your memories of it?
What are some interesting kind of-
Well, you know, in the middle of,
I was going to school in Washington, D.C.
to sit well for, to Our Lady of Victory,
which is in Washington, D.C.
So we were, I lived in Virginia across the Potomac
and we would cross the bridge every day into D.C.
And during the crisis, U.S. Marshals came to my house
to take us, I think around day eight.
My father was spending the night at the White House.
He wasn't coming home.
He was staying with the ex-com committee
and sleeping there and they were up, you know,
24 hours a day.
They were debating and trying to figure out
what was happening.
But we had U.S. Marshals come to our house
to take us down.
They were going to take us down to White Sulphur Springs
in Southern Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains
where there was an underground city, essentially,
a bunker that was like a city.
And apparently it had McDonald's in it
and a lot of other, you know, it was a full city
for the U.S. government and their families.
U.S. Marshals came to our house to take us down there
and I was very excited about doing that.
And this was at a time, you know,
when we were doing the drills,
we were doing the duck and cover drills
once a week at our school,
where they would tell you if they, you know,
when the alarms go off,
then you put your head under the table,
you remove the sharps from your desk,
put them inside your desk,
you put your head under the table and you wait
and the initial blast will take the windows out
of the school and then we all stand up
and file in an orderly fashion into the basement
where we're going to be for the next six or eight months
or whatever, but in the basement where, you know,
we went occasionally in those corridors,
we're lined with freeze dried food canisters
up to the ceiling, from floor to ceiling.
So people were, you know, we were all preparing for this
and it was, you know, Bob McNamara,
who was a friend of mine and, you know, was my father,
one of my father's closest friends,
the Secretary of Defense, he later called it mass psychosis
and my father deeply regretted participating
in the bomb shelter program because he said
it was part of a, you know, a psychological psyop trick
to teach Americans that nuclear war was acceptable,
that it was survivable.
My father, anyway, when the marshals came to our house,
take me and my brother Joe away
and we were the ones who were home at that time,
my father called and he talked to us on the phone
and he said, I don't want you going down there
because if you disappear from school,
people are gonna panic
and I need you to be a good soldier
and go to the school and he said something to me
during that period, which was that
if the nuclear war happened, it would be better
to be among the dead than the living,
which I did not believe, okay?
I mean, I had already prepared myself
for the, you know, for the dystopian future
and I knew I could, I spent every day in the woods,
I knew that I could survive by catching crawfish
and, you know, cooking mud puppies
and I would do whatever I had to do
but I felt like, okay, I can handle this
and I really wanted to see the set up
down in, you know, this underground city
but anyway, that was, you know, part of it for me.
My father was away and, you know, the last days of it,
my father got this idea because Khrushchev
had sent two letters.
He sent one letter that was conciliatory
and then he sent a letter that after his joint chiefs
and the warmongers around him to solve that letter
and they disapproved of it, they sent another letter
that was extremely belligerent
and my father had the idea,
let's just pretend we didn't get the second letter
and reply to the first one
and then he went down to Dobrynin
and who was, he met Dobrynin in the justice department
and Dobrynin was the Soviet ambassador
and they, you know, they proposed this settlement
which was a secret settlement
where Khrushchev would withdraw the missiles from Cuba.
Khrushchev had put the missiles in Cuba
because we had put missiles, you know, nuclear missiles
in Turkey and Italy and my uncle's secret deal
was that if he, if Khrushchev removed the missiles
from Cuba, within six months,
he would get rid of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey
but if Khrushchev told anybody about the deal, it was off.
So if news got out about that secret deal, it was off.
That was the actual deal and Khrushchev complied with it
and then my uncle complied with it.
How much of that part of human history
turned on the decisions of one person?
I think that's one of the, you know,
because that of course is the perennial question, right?
But it is history kind of an automatic pilot
and, you know, human decisions and the decisions of leaders
really only have, you know, marginal or incremental bearing
on what is going to happen anyway
but I think that is the,
and historians argue about that all the time.
I think that that is a really good example
of a place in human history
that literally the world could have ended
if we had a different leader in the White House
and the reason for that is that there were,
as I recall, 64 gun emplacements,
you know, missile emplacements.
Each one of those missile emplacements
had a crew of about 100 men and they were Soviets.
So they were, and they, we didn't know whether,
we had a couple of questions that my uncle asked,
Alan, or asked the CIA and he asked,
Dulles was already gone, but he asked the CIA
and he asked his military brass
because they all wanted to go in.
Everybody wanted to go in and my uncle said,
my uncle asked to see the aerial photos
and he examined those personally
and that's why it's important to have a leader
in the White House who can push back on their bureaucracies
and then he asked them, you know,
who's manning those missile sites and are they Russians?
And if they're Russians and we bomb them,
isn't it gonna force Khrushchev to then go into Berlin?
And that would be the beginning of a cascade effect
and I would highly like to end a nuclear confrontation.
And the military brass said to my uncle,
oh, we don't think he'll have the guts to do that.
So my uncle was like, that's what you're betting on?
And they all wanted him to go in.
They wanted him to bomb the sites and then invade Cuba.
And he said, if we bomb those sites,
we're gonna be killing Russians
and it's gonna force, it's gonna provoke Russia
into some response and the obvious response
is for them to go into Berlin.
But the thing that we didn't know then
and we didn't find out until I think, you know,
there was like a 30 year anniversary
of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Havana.
And what we learned then was that from the Russians
who came to that event, it was like a symposium
where everybody on both sides talked about it
and we learned a lot of stuff and nobody knew before.
One of the insane things, the most insane thing
that we learned was that the weapons were already,
the nuclear warheads were already in place,
they were ready to fire and that the authorization to fire
was made, was delegated to each of the gun crew commanders.
So there were 60 people who had all had authorization
to fire if they felt themselves under attack.
So you have to believe them,
at least one of them would have launched
and that would have been the beginning of the end.
And you know, if anybody had launched, you know,
we knew what would happen, my uncle knew what would happen
because he asked again and again, what's gonna happen?
And they said, 30 million Americans will be killed
but we will kill 130 million Russians, so we will win.
And that was a victory for them.
And my uncle said, later said,
he told Arthur Schlesinger and Kenny O'Donnell,
he said, those guys, he called them the salad brass,
the guys with all of this stuff on their chest.
And he said, those guys, they don't care
because they know that if it happens,
that they're gonna be in the charge of everything.
They're the ones who are gonna be running
the world after that.
So for them, you know, there was an incentive
to kill 130 million Russians and 30 million Americans
but my uncle, he had this correspondence with Khrushchev,
they were secretly corresponding with each other.
And that is what saved the world,
is that they had, that both of them had been men of war.
Eisenhower famously said, it will not be a man of war,
it will not be a soldier who starts World War III
because a guy who's actually seen it knows how bad it is.
And my uncle had been in the heat of the South Pacific.
His boat had been cut in two by a Japanese destroyer.
And even three of his crewmen had been killed,
one of them badly burned.
He pulled that guy with a lanyard in his teeth
six miles to an island in the middle of the night
and then they hid out there for 10 days, you know.
And, you know, he came back, like I said,
he was the only president of the United States
that earned the Purple Heart.
Meanwhile, Khrushchev had been at Stalingrad,
which was the worst place to be on the planet,
you know, probably in the 20th century.
Other than, you know, in Auschwitz,
in one of the death camps, it was, you know,
it was the most ferocious, horrific war
with people starving, people, you know,
committing cannibalism, you know, eating the dogs,
the cats, eating their shoe leather,
freezing to death by the thousands, et cetera.
Khrushchev did not want, the last thing he wanted was a war
and the last thing my uncle wanted was a war.
And they, but the CIA did not know anything about Khrushchev
and the reason for that is there was a mole at Langley
so that every time the CIA got a spy in the Kremlin,
he would immediately be killed.
So they had no eyes in the Kremlin.
You know, there were literally hundreds of Russian spies
who had defected the United States and were in the Kremlin
who were killed during that period.
They had no idea anything about Khrushchev,
about how he saw the world
and they saw the Kremlin itself as a monolith, you know,
that this kind of, you know,
the same way that we look at Putin today,
that, you know, it's all,
they have this ambition of world conquest
and that's, it's driving them
and there's nothing else they think about.
They're absolutely single-minded about it.
But actually there was a big division between Khrushchev
and his joint chiefs and his intelligence apparatus
and they both at one point discovered
they were both in the same situation.
They were surrounded by spies and military personnel
who were intent on going to war
and they were the two guys resisting it.
So when my uncle, my uncle had this idea of, you know,
being the peace president from the beginning,
he told Ben Bradley, one of his best friends,
who, you know, was the publisher of the Washington Post
or the editor-in-chief at that time,
he said, Ben Bradley asked him,
what is, what do you want on your gravestone?
And my uncle said, he kept the peace.
He said, the principal job of the president
of the United States is to keep the country out of war.
And so when he first became president,
he anxiously agreed to meet Khrushchev in Geneva
to do his summit.
And by the way, Eisenhower had wanted to do the same thing.
Eisenhower wanted peace, but his,
and he was gonna meet in Vienna,
but that peace summit was blown up.
He was gonna try to do, you know,
he was gonna try to end the Cold War.
Eisenhower was in the last year of his, in May of 1960,
but that was torpedoed by the CIA during the U2 crash.
You know, they sent a U2 over the Soviet Union.
It got shot down, and then they told,
and then Allen told us, told Eisenhower
to deny that we had a program.
They didn't know that the Russians
had captured Gary Francis Powers.
And so when, and that blew up the peace talks
between Eisenhower and Khrushchev.
And so, you know, there was a lot of tension.
My uncle wanted to break that tension.
He agreed to meet with Khrushchev in Vienna
early on in his term.
He went over there, and Khrushchev snubbed him.
Khrushchev lectured him imperiously about the,
you know, the terror of American imperialism
and rebuffed any, you know,
they did agree not to go into Laos.
They made an agreement that kept the United States,
became my uncle, from sending troops to Laos.
But it had been a disaster in Vienna.
So then we had a spy that used to come
to our house all the time.
A guy called Georgy Bolshagoit.
He was this Russian spy my parents had met at the embassy.
They had gone to a party or a reception
at the Russian embassy, and he had approached them.
And they knew he was a GRU agent.
And KGB, he was both.
Oh, he used to come to our house.
I really liked him.
He was very attractive.
He was always laughing and joking.
He would do rope climbing contests with my father.
He would do pushup contests with my father.
He could do the Russian dancing, the Cossack dancing.
And he would do that for us and teach us that.
And we knew he was a spy too.
And this was at the time of, you know,
the James Bond films were first coming out.
So it was really exciting for us
to have an actual Russian spy in our house.
The State Department was horrified by it.
But anyway, when Khrushchev, after Vienna,
and after the pigs, Khrushchev had second thoughts.
And he sent this long letter to my uncle.
And he didn't want to go through his State Department
or his embassy.
He wanted to end run them.
And he was friends with Bolshagoit.
He gave Georgie the letter and Georgie brought it
and handed it to Pierre Salinger,
folded in the New York Times.
And he gave it to my uncle.
And it was this beautiful letter, which he said,
my uncle had talked to him about the children
who were played, you know,
we played 29 grandchildren who were playing in his yard.
And he's saying, what is our moral basis
for making a decision that could kill these children
so they'll never write a poem,
they'll never participate in election,
they'll never run for office?
How can we make, how can we morally make a decision
that is going to eliminate life for these beautiful kids?
And he had said that to Khrushchev.
And Khrushchev wrote in this letter back saying
that he was now sitting as this dacha on the Black Sea.
And that he was thinking about what my uncle Jack had said
to him at Vienna.
And he regretted very deeply
not having taken the olive leaf
that Jack had offered him.
And then he said, you know,
it occurs to me now that we're all on an ark
and that there is not another one.
And that the entire fate of the planet
and all of its creatures and all of the children
are dependent on the decisions we make.
And you and I have a moral obligation
to go forward with each other as friends.
And immediately after that, this was, you know,
he said that right after the Berlin crisis in 1962,
General Curtis LeMay tried to,
had tried to provoke a war
with an incident at Checkpoint Charlie,
which was the entrance and exit
through the Berlin Wall in Berlin.
And the Russian tanks had come to the wall,
the US tanks had come to the wall,
and there was a standoff.
And my uncle had sent a message to Khrushchev
then through Dobrynin saying,
my back is at the wall, I cannot,
I have no place to back, to please back off,
and then we will back off.
And Khrushchev took his word,
act his tanks off first,
and then my uncle ordered LeMay to back,
he had, LeMay had mounted bulldozer plows
on the front of the tanks to plow down the Berlin Wall.
And that, and the Russians had come.
So it was just, you know, it was the,
it was his generals trying to provoke a war.
And, but they started talking to each other.
And then after he wrote that letter,
they agreed that they would install a hotline
so they could talk to each other
and they wouldn't have to go through intermediaries.
And so at Jack's house on the Cape,
there was a red phone that we knew
if we picked it up, Khrushchev would answer.
And there was another one in the White House.
And, but they knew it was important to talk to each other,
you know, and you just wish that we had
that kind of leadership today.
I can, I, you know, that just understands our job.
Look, I know you know a lot about AI, right?
And you know how dangerous it is potentially to humanity
and what opportunities it also, you know, offers.
But it could kill us all.
I mean, Elon said, first it's gonna steal our job,
then it's gonna kill us, right?
And it's probably not hyperbole.
It actually, you know, if it follows the laws
of biological evolution,
which are just the laws of mathematics,
that's probably a good end point for it.
You know, a potential end point.
So we need, it's gonna happen,
but we need to make sure it's regulated
and it's regulated properly for safety in every country.
And that includes Russia and China and Iran.
Right now, we should be putting all the weapons of war aside
and sitting down with those guys and say,
how are we doing, how are we gonna do this?
There's much more important things to do.
We're gonna, this stuff is gonna kill us
if we don't figure out how to regulate it.
And leadership needs to look down the road
what is the real risk here?
And the real risk is that AI will enslave us,
for one thing, and then destroy us
and do all this other stuff.
And how about biological weapons?
We're now all working on these biological weapons
and we're doing biological weapons
from Ebola and dengue fever
and all of these other bad things.
And we're making ethnic bioweapons,
bioweapons that can only kill Russians,
bioweapons that the Chinese are making
that can kill people who don't have Chinese genes.
So all of this is now within reach.
We're actively doing it and we need to stop it.
And we can easily, a biological weapons treaty
is the easiest thing in the world to do.
We can verify it, we can enforce it,
and everybody wants to agree to it.
Only insane people do not wanna continue
this kind of research, there's no reason to do it.
So there are these existential threats
to all of humanity now out there
like AI and biological weapons.
We need to stop fighting each other,
start competing on economic game fields,
playing fields instead of military playing fields,
which will be good for all of humanity.
And that we need to sit down with each other
and negotiate reasonable treaties
on how we regulate AI and biological weapons.
And nobody's talking about this
in this political race right now.
Nobody's talking about it in a government.
They get fixated on these little wars
and these comic book depictions of good versus evil.
And we all go, ooh, ah, and go off
and give them the weapons and enrich
the military industrial complex,
but we're on the road to perdition if we don't end this.
And some of this requires to have this kind of phone
that connects Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy
that cuts through all the bureaucracy
to have this communication between heads of state
and, in the case of AI, perhaps heads of tech companies
where you can just pick up the phone
and have a conversation.
Because a lot of the existential threats
of artificial intelligence,
perhaps even bioweapons, is unintentional.
It's not even strategic intentional effects.
So you have to be transparent and honest about,
especially with AI, that people might not know
what's the worst that's going to happen
once you release it out into the wild.
And you have to have an honest communication
about how to do it so that companies
are not terrified of regulation, overreach of regulation.
And then government is not terrified of tech companies
of manipulating them in some direct or indirect ways.
So there's a trust that builds versus a distrust.
Basically that old phone where Khrushchev can call
John F. Kennedy is needed.
Yeah, and you know, I don't think,
listen, I don't understand AI, okay?
I do know, I can see from all this technology
how it's this kind of turnkey totalitarianism
that once you put these systems in place,
they can be misused to enslave people
and they can be misused in wars
and to subjugate, to kill, to do all of these bad things.
And I don't think there's anybody on Capitol Hill
who understands this.
We need to bring in the tech community and say,
tell us what these regulations need to look like
so that there can be freedom to innovate
so that we can milk AI for all of the good things,
but not fall into these traps
that pose existential threats to humanity.
It seems like John F. Kennedy is a singular figure
in that he was able to have the humility
to reach out to Khrushchev
and also the strength and integrity
to resist the, what did you call them,
the salad brass and institutions like the CIA.
So that makes it particularly tragic that he was killed.
To what degree was the CIA involved
or the various bureaucracy involved in his death?
The evidence that the CIA was involved
in my uncle's murder
and that they were subsequently involved in the cover-up
and continue to be involved in the cover-up.
I mean, there's still 5,000 documents
that they won't release 60 years later
is, I think, so insurmountable
and so mountainous and overwhelming
that it's beyond any reasonable doubt,
including dozens of confessions
of people who were involved in the assassination,
but every kind of document.
I mean, it came as a surprise recently to most Americans,
I think, the release of these documents
in which the press, the American media,
finally acknowledged that, yeah,
Lee Harvey Oswald was the CIA asset
and he was recruited in 1957.
He was a Marine working at the Atatouille Air Force Base,
which was the CIA Air Force Base with the U-2 flights,
which was a CIA program,
and that he was recruited by James Jesus Angleton,
who was the director of counterintelligence,
and then sent on a fake defection to Russia
and then brought back to Dallas.
And people didn't know that.
Even though it's been known for decades,
it never percolated into the mainstream media
because they have such an allergy to anything
that challenges the Warren Report.
And when Congress investigated my uncle's murder
in the 1970s,
the Church Committee did,
and they did two and a half year investigation,
and they had many, many more documents
and much more testimony available to them
than the Warren Commission had.
And this was a decade after the Warren Commission.
They came to the conclusion
that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy.
And there was a division where essentially one guy
on that committee believed it was primarily the mafia,
but Richard Schweitzer,
the senator who headed the committee,
said straight out the CIA was involved in the murder
of the President of the United States.
Oh, and I've talked to most of the staff on that committee,
and they said, yeah.
And the CIA was stonewalling us all the way through.
And the actual people that the CIA appointed,
George Chohannides, who the CIA appointed
as a liaison to the committee,
they brought him out of retirement.
He had been one of the masterminds of the assassination.
Oh, there's no, I mean, it's impossible to even talk
about a tiny, the fraction of the evidence here.
What I suggest to people,
there are hundreds of books written about this
that assemble this evidence and mobilize the evidence.
The best book to me for people to read
is James Douglas's book, which is called The Unspeakable.
And Douglas does this extraordinary,
he's an extraordinary scholar,
and he does this amazing job of digesting and summarizing
and mobilizing all of the, you know,
probably a million documents and, you know,
the evidence from all these confessions
that have come out into a coherent story.
And it's riveting to read.
And, you know, I recommend people
who do not take my word for it, you know,
and don't take anybody else's word for it.
Go ahead and do the research yourself.
And one way to do that is probably the most efficient way
is to read Douglas's book
because he has all the references there.
So if it's true that CIA had a hand in this assassination,
how is it possible for them to amass so much power?
How is it possible for them to become corrupt
and is it individuals or is it the entire institution?
No, it's not the entire institution.
My daughter-in-law, who's helping to run my campaign,
was a CIA, you know, in the clandestine services
for all of her career.
She was a spy in the weapons of mass destruction program
in the Mideast and in China.
And there's 22,000 people who work for the CIA.
Probably 20,000 of those are, you know,
are patriotic Americans and really good public servants
and they're doing important work for our country.
But the institution is corrupt
and because the higher ranks of the institution.
And in fact, Mike Pompeo said something like this to me
the other day.
He was the director of the CIA.
He said, when I was there,
I did not do a good job of cleaning up that agency.
And he said, the entire upper bureaucracy of that agency
are people who do not believe
in the institutions of democracy.
This is what he said to me.
So I don't know if that's true,
but I know that, you know, that's significant.
He's a smart person and he ran the agency
and he was the secretary of state.
But it's no mystery how that happened.
We know the history.
The CIA was originally,
first of all, there was great reluctance in 1947.
For the first time, we had a secret spy agency
in this country during World War II called the OSS.
That was disbanded after the war
because Congress said having a secret spy agency
is incompatible with a democracy.
Secret spy agencies are things that like the KGB,
the Stasi in East Germany,
Sivak in Iran and Peep in Chile, whatever,
all over the world,
they all have to do with totalitarian governments.
They're not something that you can have,
that it's antithetical to democracy to have that.
But in 1947, we created, Truman signed it in,
but it was initially an espionage agency,
which means information gathering, which is important.
It's to gather and consolidate information,
many, many different sources from all over the world
and then put those in reports.
The White House or the president can make good decisions
based upon valid information,
evidence-based decision-making.
But Alan Dulles, who was essentially
the first head of the agency,
made a series of legislative machinations
and political machinations
that gave additional powers to the agency
and opened up what they called the plans division,
which is the plans division is the dirty tricks,
it's the black ops fixing elections,
murdering what they call executive action,
which means killing foreign leaders
and making small wars and bribing and blackmailing people,
stealing elections and that kind of thing.
And the reason at that time,
we were in the middle of the Cold War
and Truman and Eisenhower did not want to go to war,
they didn't want to commit troops.
And it seemed to them that this was a way
of kind of fighting the Cold War secretly without
and doing it at minimal cost by changing events
sort of invisibly.
And so it was seductive to them.
But everybody, Congress, when they first voted it in place,
Congress, both political parties said,
if we create this thing, it could turn into a monster
and it could undermine our values.
And today it's so powerful
and then nobody knows what its budget is.
Plus, it has its own investment fund in Qatar,
which has invested, made I think 2000 investments
in Silicon Valley.
Oh, it has ownership of a lot of these tech companies
and a lot of the CEOs of those tech companies
have signed state secrecy agreements with the CIA,
which if they even reveal that they have signed that,
they can go to jail for 20 years
and have their assets removed, et cetera.
The influence that the agency has,
the capacity to influence events
at every level in our country is really frightening.
And then for most of its life,
the CIA was banned from propagandizing Americans.
But we learned that they were doing it anyway.
So in 1973, during the church committee hearings,
we learned that the CIA had a program
called Operation Mockingbird,
where they had at least 400 members,
leading members of the United States Press Corps
and the New York Times, the Washington Post,
ABC, CBS, NBC, et cetera,
who were secretly working for the agency
and steering news coverage to support CIA priorities.
And they agreed at that time
to disband Operation Mockingbird in 73.
But there's indications they didn't do that.
And they still, the CIA today
is the biggest funder of journalism around the world.
The biggest funder is through USAID.
The USA, the United States funds journalism
in almost every country in the world.
It owns newspapers.
It has thousands and thousands of journalists
on its payroll.
They're not supposed to be doing that in the United States,
but in 2016, President Obama changed the law
to make it legal now for the CIA to propagandize Americans.
And I think we can't look at the Ukraine war
and how that was,
how the narrative has been formed
in the minds of Americans
and say that the CIA had nothing to do with that.
What is the mechanism by which the CIA
influences the narrative?
Do you think it's indirectly?
Through the press.
Indirectly through the press
or directly by funding the press?
Directly through,
I mean, there's certain press organs
that have been linked to the agency
that the people who run those organs,
things like the Daily Beast,
now Rolling Stone,
editor of now Rolling Stone, Noah Schlechtman,
has deep relationships with the intelligence community,
Salon, Daily Kos.
But I wonder why they would do it.
So from my perspective,
it just seems like the job of a journalist
is to have an integrity where your opinion
cannot be influenced or bought.
I agree with you,
but I actually think that the entire field of journalism
has really ashamed itself in recent years
because it's become,
the principal newspapers in this country
and the television station,
the legacy media,
have abandoned their traditional,
their tradition of,
which was when I was a kid,
my house was filled with the greatest journalists alive
at that time.
People like Ben Bradley,
like Anthony Lewis,
Mary McRory,
Pete Hamill,
Jerry, Jack Newfield,
Jimmy Breslin,
and many, many others.
And after my father died,
they started the RFK Journalism Awards
to recognize integrity and courage,
journalistic integrity and courage.
And for that generation of journalism,
they believed that the function of a journalist
was to maintain this posture of fierce skepticism
toward any aggregation of power,
including government authority.
That people in authority lie
and they always have to be questioned.
And that their job was to speak truth to power
and to be guardians of the First Amendment,
right to free expression.
But if you look what happened during the pandemic,
was the inverse of that kind of journalism
where the major press organs in this country
were instead of speaking truth to power,
they were doing the opposite.
They were broadcasting propaganda.
They became propaganda organs for the government agencies.
And they were actually censoring the speech of dissent,
anybody who dissents, of the powerless.
And in fact, it was an organized conspiracy.
And the name of it was the Trusted News Initiative.
And some of the major press organs in our country
signed onto it.
And they agreed not to print stories or facts
that departed from governmental orthodoxy.
So the Washington Post was the signature,
the UPI, the AP, and then the four social media groups,
Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Google,
all signed onto the Trusted News Initiative.
It was started by the BBC, organized by them.
And the purpose of it was to make sure
nobody could print anything that departed
from governmental orthodoxy.
The way it worked is the UPI, the AP,
and which are the news services
that provide most of the news around the country.
And the Washington Post would decide
what news was permissible to print.
And a lot of it was about COVID,
but also Hunter Bunn's laptops,
where it was impermissible to suggest that those were real
or that they had stuff on there that was compromising.
And by the way, what I'm telling you is all well documented
and I'm litigating on it right now.
So I'm part of a lawsuit against the DNI.
And so I know a lot about what happened
and I have all this documented.
And people can go to our website.
There's a letter on my sub stack now
to Michael Share of the Washington Post
that outlines all this and gives all my sources.
Because Michael Share accused me
of being a conspiracy theorist
when he was actually part of a conspiracy,
a true conspiracy to suppress anybody
who was departing from governmental orthodoxies
by either censoring them completely
or labeling them conspiracy theorists.
I mean, you can understand the intention and the action,
the difference between, as we talked about,
you can understand the intention of such a thing,
being good in a time of a catastrophe,
in a time of a pandemic,
there's a lot of risk to saying untrue things,
but that's a slippery slope that leads into a place
where the journalistic integrity that we talked about
is completely sacrificed.
And then you can deviate from truth.
If you read their internal memorandum,
including the statements of the leader
of the trusted news initiative,
I think her name's Jessica, Jennifer Cecil,
and you can go on our website and see her,
say, and she says, the purpose of this is that we're now,
she says, when people look at us,
they think we're competitors, but we're not.
The real competitors are coming
from all these alternative news sources
now all over the network.
And they're hurting public trust in us
and they're hurting our economic model.
And they have to be choked off and crushed.
And the way that we're going to do that
is to make an agreement with the social media sites
that if we say, if we label their information,
misinformation, the social media sites will de-platform it
or they will throttle it, or they will shadow ban it,
which destroys the economic model
of those alternative competitive sources of information.
So that's true, but the point you make
is an important point, that the journalists themselves,
who probably didn't know about the TNI agreement,
certainly, I'm sure they didn't,
they believe that they're doing the right thing
by suppressing information that may challenge
government proclamations on COVID.
But I mean, there's a danger to that.
And the danger is that once you appoint yourself an arbiter
of what's true and what's not true,
then there's really no end to the power
that you have now assumed for yourself,
because now your job is no longer to inform the public.
Your job now is to manipulate the public.
And if you end up manipulating the public in collusion
with powerful entities, then you become the instrument
of authoritarian rule rather than the opponent of it.
And it becomes the inverse of journalism and a democracy.
You're running for president as a Democrat.
What to you are the strongest values
that represent the left-wing politics of this country?
I would say protection of the environment and the commons,
the air, the water, wildlife, fisheries, public lands,
those assets that cannot be reduced
in private property ownership,
the landscapes, our Purple Mountain majesty,
the protection of the most vulnerable people in our society,
people which would include children and minorities,
the restoration of the middle class and protection of labor,
dignity, and decent pay for labor.
And bodily autonomy, a woman's right to choose
or an individual's right to endure
unwanted medical procedures.
Peace, the Democrats have always been anti-war.
The refusal to use fear as a governing tool.
FDR said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,
because he recognized that tyrants and dictators
can use fear to disable critical thinking
and overwhelm the desire for personal liberty.
The freedom of government from untoward influence
by corrupt corporate power,
the end of this corrupt merger of state and corporate power
that is now, I think, dominating our democracy.
That's what Eisenhower warned about
when he warned against the emergence
of the military industrial complex.
And then I prefer to talk about the positive vision
of what we should be doing in our country and globally,
which is, I see that the corporations are commoditizing us,
are poisoning our children,
are strip mining the wealth from our middle class,
and treating America as if it were business liquidation,
converting assets to cash as quickly as possible,
and creating or exacerbating this huge disparity
in wealth in our country,
which is eliminating the middle class,
and creating kind of a Latin American style feudal model.
There's these huge aggregations of wealth above
and widespread to spread poverty below.
And that's a configuration that is too unstable
to support democracy sustainably.
And we're supposed to be modeling democracy,
but we're losing it.
And I think we ought to have a foreign policy
that restores our moral authority around the world,
restores America as the embodiment of moral authority,
in which it was when my uncle was president,
and as a purveyor of peace,
rather than a warlike nation.
My uncle said he didn't want people in Africa
and Latin America and Asia
to think of, when they think of America,
to picture a man with a gun and a bayonet.
He wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer.
And he refused to send combat veterans abroad,
combat soldiers abroad.
He never sent a single soldier to his death abroad
and into combat.
He sent 16,000.
He resisted in Berlin in 62.
He resisted in Laos in 61.
He resisted in Vietnam.
Vietnam, they wanted him to put 250,000 troops.
He only put 16,000 advisors, which was fewer troops.
And he sent to get James Meredith into the universe,
to Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, one black man.
He sent 16,000, and a month before he died,
ordered them all home.
He actually, I think it was October 2nd of 1963,
he heard that a Green Beret had died.
And he asked his aide for a list of combat fatalities.
And the aide came back, and there was 75 men had died
in Vietnam at that point.
And he said, that's too many.
We're gonna have no more.
And he ordered, he signed a national security order, 263,
and ordered all of those men, all Americans,
home from Vietnam by 1965,
with the first 1,000 coming home by December, 63.
And then in November, he, of course,
just before that evacuation began, he was killed.
And a week later, President Johnson remanded that order.
And then a year after that, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution,
we sent 250,000, which is what they wanted my uncle to do,
which he refused, and it became an American war.
And then Nixon topped it off at 560,000.
56,000 Americans never came home,
including my cousin, George Skakel,
who died at the Tet Offensive.
And we killed a million Vietnamese,
and we got nothing for it.
So America should be the symbol of peace.
And you know, today, my uncle really focused
on putting America on the side of the poor
instead of our tradition of, you know,
of fortifying oligarchies that were anti-communism.
That was our, you know, our major criteria.
If you said you were against communists,
and of course, the people were, or were the rich people.
Our aid was going to the rich people in those countries,
and they were going to the military to hunt us.
Our weapons were going to the hunt us
to fight against the poor.
And my uncle said, no, you know,
America should be on the side of the poor.
And so he launched the Alliance for Progress,
and the USAID, which were intended to bring aid
to the poorest people in those,
and build middle classes, and take ourselves away.
In fact, his most, his favorite trip,
his two favorite trips while he was president,
his most favorite trip was to Ireland.
This incredible emotional homecoming
for all of the people of Ireland.
And his second favorite trip was when he went to Colombia.
He went to Latin America,
but Colombia was his favorite country.
And there were, I think there were 2 million people
came into Bogota to see him, this vast crowd,
and they were just delirious, cheering for him.
And the president of Colombia, Yeras Carmargo,
said to him, do you know why they love you?
And my uncle said, why?
And he said, because they think you've put America
on the side of the poor against the oligarchs.
And you know, when my uncle, after he died,
today, there are more avenues, and boulevards,
and hospitals, and schools, and statues,
named after him, commemorating in parks,
commemorating John Kennedy in Africa and Latin America,
than any other president in the United States,
and probably more than all the other presidents combined.
And it's because, you know,
he put America on the side of the poor,
and that's what we ought to be doing.
We ought to be projecting economic power abroad.
The Chinese have essentially stolen his playbook.
And you know, we've spent $8 trillion on the Iraq war
and its aftermath, the wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya,
Afghanistan, Pakistan.
And what do we get for that?
We got nothing for that money, $8 trillion.
We got, we killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein.
Iraq today is a much worse off
than it was when Saddam was there, I'd say.
It's an incoherent, violent war
between Shia and Sunni death squads.
We pushed Iraq into the embrace of Iran,
which has now become essentially a proxy for Iran,
which is exactly the outcome that we were trying to prevent
for the past, you know, 20 or 30 years.
We created ISIS.
We sent 2 million refugees into Europe,
destabilizing all of the nations in Europe for generations.
We're now seeing these riots in France,
and that's a direct result from the Syrian war
that we created and our creation of ISIS.
Brexit is another, you know, result of that.
So we, for $8 trillion, we wrecked the world.
And during that same period that we spent $8.1 trillion,
bombing bridges, ports, schools, hospitals,
the Chinese spent $8.1 trillion building schools,
ports, hospitals, bridges, and universities.
And now, you know, the Chinese are out-competing us
everywhere in the world.
Everybody wants to deal with the Chinese
because they, you know, they come in,
they build nice things for you,
and they, and there's no strings attached,
and they're pleasant to deal with.
And, you know, as a result of that,
Brazil is switching the Chinese currency.
Argentina is switching.
Saudi Arabia, our greatest partner,
you know, we put trillions of dollars
into protecting our oil pipelines there,
and now they're saying, you know,
we don't care what the United States think.
That's what my mom in bin Salman said.
He said, we don't, you know,
they, he dropped oil production in Saudi Arabia
in the middle of a U.S. inflation spiral.
They've never done that to us before,
to aggravate the inflation spiral.
And two weeks later, and then they signed a deal,
a unilateral peace deal with Iran,
which has been the enemy that we've been telling them to,
you know, to be a bulwark against for 20 years.
And two weeks after that, he said,
we don't care what the United States thinks anymore.
So that's what we got
for spending all those trillions of dollars there.
We got short-term friends.
And the United States, you know, policy abroad,
and we have not made ourselves safer.
We've made Americans,
we've put Americans in more jeopardy all over the world.
You know, you have to wait in lines
to get through the airport.
You have to, you know, the security state
is now costing us $1.3 trillion.
And America is unsafer and poorer than it's ever been.
So, you know, we're not getting,
we should be doing what President Kennedy said we ought to do
and what China, the policy that China has now adopted.
So that's a really eloquent and clear
and powerful description of the way you see
the U.S. should be doing geopolitics
and the way you see U.S. should be taking care
of the poor in this country.
Let me ask you a question from Jordan Peterson
that he asked when I told him that I'm speaking with you.
Given everything you've said,
when does the left go too far?
I suppose he's referring to cultural issues,
identity politics.
Well, you know, Jordan trying to get me
to bad mouth the left the whole time I was in.
I really enjoyed my talk with him.
But he seemed to have that agenda
where he wanted me to say bad things about the left.
I just, you know, that's not what my campaign is about.
I want to do the opposite.
I'm not going to bad mouth the left.
They try, you know, I was on a show this week
with David Remnick from the New Yorker
and he tried to get me to bad mouth Donald Trump
and, you know, and Alex Jones and a lot of other people
just invading me to do it.
And of course, there's a lot of bad things
I could say about all those people, but it doesn't,
you know, I'm trying to find values that hold us together
and we can share in common rather than to focus constantly
on these disputes and these issues that drive us apart.
So me sitting here bad mouthing the left
or bad mouthing the right is not going to advance the ball.
I really want to figure out ways that, you know,
what do these groups hold in common that we can all,
you know, have a shared vision
of what we want this country to look like.
Well, that's music to my ears.
But in that spirit,
let me ask you a difficult question then.
You wrote a book harshly criticizing Anthony Fauci.
Let me ask you to steel man the case
for the people who support him.
What is the biggest positive thing you think
Anthony Fauci did for the world?
What is good that he has done for the world,
especially during this pandemic?
You know, I don't want to sit here and speak uncharitably
by saying the guy didn't do anything,
but I don't, I can't think of anything.
I mean, if you tell me something
that you think he did, you know,
maybe there was a drug that got licensed
while he was at NIH that, you know,
benefited people, that's certainly possible.
He was there for 50 years.
And I, in terms of his, of his principal programs,
of the AIDS programs and his COVID programs,
and I think that the harm that he did
vastly outweigh the, you know, the benefits.
Do you think he believes he's doing good for the world?
I don't know what he believes.
In fact, in that book, which is, I think, 250,000 words,
I never try to look inside of his head.
I deal with facts, I deal with science.
Oh, and every factual assertion in that book
is cited and sourced to government databases
or peer-reviewed publications.
And I don't, I try not to speculate about things
that I don't know about or I can't prove.
And I do, I cannot tell you what his motivations were.
I mean, all of us, he's done a lot of things
that I think are really very, very bad things
for humanity and very deceptive.
But we all have this capacity for self-deception.
As I said at the beginning of this podcast,
we judge ourselves on our intentions rather than our actions
and we all have an almost infinite capacity
to convince ourselves that what we're doing is right.
And, you know, not everybody kind of lives an examined life
and is examining their motivations
in the way that the world might experience
their professions of goodness.
Let me ask about the difficulty of the job he had.
Do you think it's possible to do that kind of job well?
Or is it also a fundamental flaw of the job
of being the centralized figure
that's supposed to have the scientific capacity?
No, I think he was a genuinely bad human being
and that there were many, many good people
in that department over the years.
Bernice Eddy is a really good example.
John Anthony Morris, many people whose careers he destroyed
because they were trying to tell the truth.
One after the other, the greatest scientists
in the history of NIH were run out of that agency.
But, you know, people listening to this,
probably will, in hearing me say that,
will think that I'm bitter or that I'm doctrinaire about him,
but you should really go and read my book.
And it's hard to summarize a,
you know, I tried to be really methodical
to not call names, to just say what happened.
You are, the bigger picture of this
is you're an outspoken critic
of pharmaceutical companies, Big Pharma.
What is the biggest problem with Big Pharma
and how can it be fixed?
The problem could be fixed through regulation,
you know, the problems.
But the pharmaceutical industry is,
I mean, I don't want to say,
because this is gonna seem extreme,
a criminal enterprise, but if you look at the history,
that is an applicable, or characterization.
For example, the four biggest vaccine makers,
Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer, and Glaxo,
four companies that make all of the 72 vaccines
that are now mandated for America,
effectively mandated for American children.
Collectively, those companies have paid $35 billion
in criminal penalties and damages in the last decade.
And I think since 2000, about 79 billion.
So these are the most corrupt companies in the world.
And the problem is that they're serial felons.
They, you know, they do this again and again and again.
So they did Vioxx, you know, Merck did Vioxx,
which Vioxx, they, you know,
they killed people by falsifying science.
And they did it, they lied to the public.
They said, this is a headache medicine
and an arthritis painkiller,
but they didn't tell people
that it also gave you heart attacks.
And they knew, you know, we've found when we sued them,
the, you know, the memos from their bean counters saying,
we're going to kill this many people,
but we're still going to make money.
So they make those calculations
and those calculations are made very, very regularly.
And then, you know, when they get caught,
they pay a penalty.
And I think they paid about $7 billion for Vioxx,
but then they went right back that same year
that they paid that penalty.
They went back into the same thing again with Gardasil
and with a whole lot of other drugs.
So the way that this system is set up,
the way that it's sold to doctors,
the way that nobody ever goes to jail.
So there's really no penalty that it all becomes part
of the cost of doing business.
And, you know, you can see other businesses
that if they're not, if they don't,
if there's no penalty, if there's no real,
but I mean, look, these are the companies
that gave us the opioid epidemic, right?
So they knew what was going to happen.
And we, you know, you go and see, there's a documentary,
I forget what the name of it is,
but it shows exactly what happened.
And, you know, they corrupted FDA.
They knew that Oxycodone was addictive.
They got FDA to tell doctors that it wasn't addictive.
They pressured FDA to lie and they got their way.
And they've so far, they led this year, you know, those,
they got a whole generation addicted to Oxycodone.
And now, you know, when they got caught and they made it,
we made it harder to get Oxycodone.
And now all those addicted kids are going to vent,
no one dying.
And this year it killed 106,000.
That's twice as many people who were killed
during the 20 year Vietnam War,
but in one year, twice as many American kids.
And they knew it was going to happen.
And they did it to make money.
So I don't know what you call that other than saying
that's, you know, a criminal enterprise.
Who is it possible to have within a capitalist system
to produce medication, to produce drugs at scale
in a way that is not corrupt?
Yeah, of course it is.
How?
Through, you know, through a solid regulatory regimen,
you know, where drugs are actually tested.
You know, I mean, the problem is not the capitalist system.
The capitalist system, you know, I have great admiration
for the love for the capitalist system.
It's the greatest economic engine ever devised.
But it has to be harnessed to a social purpose.
Otherwise it's going to, it leads us, you know,
down the trail of oligarchy, environmental destruction,
and, you know, and commoditizing, poisoning,
and killing human beings.
That's what it will do in the end.
You need a regulatory structure that is not corrupted
by entanglements, financial entanglements with the industry.
And we've set this up the way that the system is set up
that has created this system
of regulatory capture on steroids.
So almost 50% of FDA's budget
comes from pharmaceutical companies.
The people who work at FDA are, you know,
their money is coming,
their salaries are coming from pharma, half their salaries.
So they're, you know, they know who their bosses are.
And that means getting those drugs done,
getting them out the door and approved as quickly
as possible.
Fast-track approval.
And they pay 50% of FDA's budget goes,
about 45% actually goes to fast-track approval.
Do you think money can buy integrity?
Oh yeah, of course it can.
And the rate, yeah, I mean, there's,
that's not something that is, that is controversial.
Of course it will.
So, and then-
It's slightly controversial to me.
I would like to think that scientists that work at FDA-
It may not be able to buy your integrity.
I'm talking about population-wide.
I'm not talking about the individual.
But I'd like to believe that scientists, I mean,
in general, a career of a scientist
is not a very high-paying job.
I'd like to believe that people that go into science
that work at FDA, that work at NIH,
are doing it for a reason that's not even correlated
with money, really.
Yeah.
And I think probably that's why they go in there.
But scientists are corruptible.
And, you know, the way that I can tell you that
is that I've brought over 500 lawsuits,
and almost all of them involve scientific controversies.
And there are scientists on both sides in every one.
When I, when we sued Monsanto, there was,
on the Monsanto side, there was a Yale scientist,
a Stanford scientist, and a Harvard scientist.
And on RSI, there was a Yale, Stanford, and Harvard scientist
and they were telling, saying exactly the opposite things.
In fact, there's a word for those kind of scientists
who take money for their opinion.
And the word is biostitutes.
And they are very, very common.
And, you know, and I've been dealing with them
my whole career.
You know, I think it was Upton Sinclair who said
that it's very difficult to persuade a man of a fact
if the existence of that fact will diminish his salary.
And I think that's true for all of us.
If they, you know, we find a way of reconciling ourselves,
the things that are, the truths that actually,
and worldviews that actually benefit our salaries.
Now, NIH, NIH has probably the worst system,
which is that scientists who work for NIH,
NIH itself, which used to be the premier gold standard
scientific agency in the world.
Everybody looked at NIH that today it's just an incubator
for pharmaceutical drugs.
And, you know, that is that gravity
of economic self-interest.
Because if you're, if NIH itself collects royalties,
they have margin rights for the patents
on all the drugs that they work on.
So with the Moderna vaccine,
which they promoted incessantly and aggressively,
NIH owned 50% of that vaccine
and is making billions and billions of dollars on it.
And there are four, at least four scientists
that we know of, and probably at least six at NIH,
who themselves have margin rights for those patents.
So if you are a scientist who work at NIH,
you work on a new drug, you then get margin rights
and you're entitled to royalties of $150,000 a year forever
from that, forever.
Your children, your children's children,
as long as that product's on the market,
you can collect royalties.
So you have, you know, the Moderna vaccine
is paying for the top people at NIH.
You know, some of the top regulators,
it's paying for their boats,
it's paying for their mortgages,
it's paying for their children's education.
And, you know, you have to expect
that in those kinds of situations,
the regulatory function would be subsumed
beneath the mercantile ambitions of the agency itself
and the individuals who stand to profit enormously
from getting a drug to market.
Those guys are paid by us, the taxpayer,
to find problems with those drugs before they get to market.
But if you know that drug is gonna pay for your mortgage,
you may overlook a little problem.
And we're even a very big one.
And that's the problem.
You've talked about that the media slanders you
by calling you an anti-vaxxer.
And you've said that you're not anti-vaccine,
you're pro-safe vaccine.
Difficult question.
Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?
I think some of the live virus vaccines
are probably averting more problems than they're causing.
There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.
Those are big words.
What about the polio?
Can we talk about the polio?
Here's the problem.
Yes.
Here's the problem.
The polio vaccine contained a virus
called simianvirus-40, SV40.
It's one of the most carcinogenic materials
that it's known to man.
In fact, it's used now by scientists around the world
to induce tumors in rats and guinea pigs in labs.
But it was in that vaccine,
98 million people who got that vaccine
in my generation got it.
And now you've had this explosion of soft tissue cancers
in our generation that kill many, many, many, many,
many more people than polio ever did.
So if you say to me that the polio vaccine
was effective against polio, I'm going to say yes.
If you say to me, did it kill more people,
did it cause more deaths than I've ever heard?
I would say, I don't know,
because we don't have the data on that.
But let's talk, well, you know,
so we kind of have to narrow in on,
is it effective against the thing it's supposed to fight?
Oh, well, a lot of them are.
Let me give you an example.
The most popular vaccine in the world
is the DTP vaccine, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.
It was introduced in this country around 1980.
That vaccine caused so many injuries
that Lyas, which was the manufacturer,
was said to the Reagan administration,
we are now paying $20 in downstream liabilities
for every dollar that we're making in profits.
And we are getting out of the business
unless you give us permanent immunity from liability.
The vaccine companies then were given,
and by the way, Reagan said at that time,
why don't you just make the vaccine safe?
And Lyas said, because vaccines are inherently,
they said, unavoidably unsafe, you cannot make them safe.
And so when Reagan wrote the bill and passed it,
the bill says in its preambles,
because vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.
And the Brucewitz case, which was a Supreme Court case
that upheld that bill, used that same language,
vaccines cannot be made safe, they're unavoidably unsafe.
So this is what the law says.
Now, I just want to finish this story
because this illustrates very well your question.
The DTP vaccine was discontinued in this country,
and it was discontinued in Europe
because so many kids were being injured by it.
However, the WHO and Bill Gates
gives it to 161 million African children every year.
And Bill Gates went to the Danish government
and asked them to support this program,
saying we've saved 30 million kids
from dying from diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.
The Danish government said, can you show us the data?
And he couldn't.
So the Danish government paid for a big study
with Novo Nordisk,
which is a Scandinavian vaccine company in West Africa.
And they went to West Africa
and they looked at the DTP vaccine for 30 years of data.
And they hired, they retained
the best vaccine scientists in the world,
these kind of deities of African vaccine program,
Peter AAB, Sigrid Morgensen, and a bunch of others.
And they looked at 30 years of data for the DTP vaccine,
and they came back and they were shocked by what they found.
They found that the vaccine was preventing kids
from getting diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.
But the girls who got that vaccine
were 10 times more likely to die
over the next six months than children who didn't.
Why is that?
And they weren't dying from anything
anybody ever associated with the vaccine.
They were dying of anemia, bile heartsia, malaria, sepsis,
and mainly pulmonary and respiratory disease, pneumonia.
And it turns out that this is what the researchers found,
who were all pro-vaccine, by the way,
they said that this vaccine is killing more children
than diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis
prior to the introduction of the vaccine.
And for 30 years, nobody ever noticed it.
The vaccine was providing protection
against those target illnesses,
but it had ruined the children's immune systems
and they could not defend themselves
against random infections
that were harmless to most children.
But isn't it nearly impossible to prove that link?
Isn't it? You can't prove the link.
All you can do is, for any particular interest,
you can't illness or death, you can't prove the link,
but you can show statistically that there is,
that if you get that vaccine,
you're more likely to die over the next six months
than if you don't.
And those studies, unfortunately,
are not done for any other vaccines.
So for every other medicine,
in order to get approval from the FDA,
you have to do a placebo-controlled trial
prior to licensure where you look at health outcomes
among an exposed group, a group that gets it,
and compare those to a similarly situated group
that gets a placebo.
The only medical intervention that does not receive,
that does not undergo placebo-controlled trials
prior to licensure are vaccines.
Not one of the 72 vaccines that are now mandated
for our children have ever undergone
a placebo-controlled trial prior to licensure.
So I should say that there's a bunch, on that point,
I've heard from a bunch of folks that disagree with you.
Okay. Including polio.
I mean, and the testing is a really important point.
Before licensure, placebo-controlled, randomized trials,
polio received just that
against the saline placebo control.
So it seems unclear to me, I'm confused why you say
that they don't go through that process.
It seems like a lot of them do.
Here's the thing, is that I was saying that for many years
because we couldn't find any.
And then in 2016, in March, I met President Trump,
ordered Dr. Fauci to meet with me.
And Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins,
and I said to them during that meeting,
you have been saying that I'm not telling the truth
when I said not one of these has undergone
a prior pre-licensure placebo control.
And the polio may have had one post-licensing.
Most of them haven't.
The polio may have, I don't know.
But I said, our question was prior to licensure,
do you ever test these?
And for safety.
And by the way, I think the polio vaccine
did undergo a saline placebo trial prior to licensure,
but not for safety, only for efficacy.
So I'm talking about safety trials.
Now, Fauci told me that he said, I can't find one now.
He had a whole tray of files there.
He said, I can't find one now, but I'll send you one.
I said, just for any vaccines,
and we won for any of the 72 vaccines.
He never did.
So we sued the HHS.
And after a year of stonewalling us, HHS came back
and they gave us a letter saying,
we have no pre-licensing safety trial
for any of the 72 vaccines.
And that letter from HHS,
which settled our lawsuit against them,
because we had a FOIA lawsuit against them,
is posted on CHD's website.
So anybody can go look at it.
So if HHS had any study,
I assume they would have given it to us.
And they can't find one.
Well, let me zoom out,
because a lot of the details matter here.
Pre-licensure, what does placebo-controlled mean?
This probably requires a rigorous analysis.
At this point, it would be nice for me
just to give a shout out to other people,
much smarter than me, that people should follow,
along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Use their mind, learn, and think.
So one really awesome creator,
I really recommend him, is Dr. Dan Wilson.
He hosts the Debunk the Funk podcast.
Vincent Recaniello, who hosts This Week in Virology,
brilliant guy, I've had him on the podcast.
Somebody you've been battling with is Paul Offit.
Interesting Twitter, interesting books.
People should read and understand
and read your books as well.
And Eric Topol has a good Twitter and good books.
And even Peter Hotez, I'll ask you about him.
And people should, because Paul Offit
published a substack recently debunking,
I think my discussion with Joe Rogan.
And we have published a debunk of his debunking.
So if you read his stuff, you should read.
Read both, yes.
You should read.
And I would love to debate any of these guys.
So Joe Rogan proposed just such a debate,
which is quite fascinating to see how much attention
and how much funding it garnered,
the debate between you and Peter Hotez.
Why do you think Peter rejected the offer?
I think it's, again, I'm not gonna look into his head,
but what I will say is if you're a scientist
and you're making public recommendations
based upon what you say is evidence-based science,
you ought to be able to defend that.
You ought to be able to defend it in a public forum
and you ought to be able to defend it against all commerce.
And so if you're a scientist,
science is based on, is rooted in logic and reason.
And if you can't use logic and reason
to defend your position, and by the way,
I know almost all of the studies.
I've written books on them and we've made a big effort
to assemble all the studies on both sides.
And so I'm prepared to talk about those studies
and I'm prepared to submit them in advance
and for each of the points.
And by the way, I've done that with Peter Hotez.
I've actually, because I had this kind of informal debate
with him several years ago with a referee at that time,
and we were debating not only by phone, but by email.
And on those emails, every point that he would make,
I would cite science.
And he could never come back with science.
He could never come back with publications.
He would give publications that had nothing to do with,
for example, thimerosal and vaccines,
mercury-based vaccines.
He sent me one time, 16 studies to rebut something
I'd said about thimerosal and not one of those studies,
they were all about the MMR vaccine,
which doesn't contain thimerosal.
So it wasn't like a real debate where you're,
you're using reason and isolating points
and having a rational discourse.
I don't think that he,
I don't blame him for not debating me
because I don't think he has the science.
Are there aspects of all the work you've done on vaccines,
all the advocacy you've done that you found out
that you were not correct on,
that you were wrong on it,
that you've changed your mind on?
Yeah, there are many times over time that I,
you know, I've found that I've made mistakes
and we correct those mistakes.
You know, I run a big organization and I do a lot of tweets.
You know, I'm very careful.
For example, my Instagram,
I was taken down for misinformation,
but there was no misinformation on my Instagram.
Everything that I cited on Instagram was cited
or sourced to a government database
or to peer-reviewed science.
But for example, The Defender,
which was our organization's newsletter,
we summarize scientific reports all the time.
That's one of the things, the services that we provide.
We watch the, you know, PubMed
and we watch the peer-reviewed publications
and we summarize them when they come out.
We have made mistakes.
When we make mistakes,
we are rigorous about acknowledging it,
apologizing for it, and changing it.
That's what we do.
I think we have one of the most robust fact-checking
operations anywhere in journalism today.
We actually do real science.
And you know, listen, I've put up on my Twitter account
and there are numerous times that I've made mistakes
on Twitter and I apologize for it.
And people say to me, you know, oh, that's weird.
I've never seen anybody apologize on Twitter.
And I think it's really important
at the only, of course, human beings make mistakes.
My book is, you know, 230 or 40, 50,000 words.
There's gonna be a mistake in there.
But you know, what I say at the beginning of the book,
if you see a mistake in here, please notify me.
I give a way that people can notify me.
And if somebody points out a mistake, I'm gonna change it.
I'm not gonna dig my feet in and say, you know,
I'm not gonna acknowledge this.
So some of the things we've been talking about,
you've been an outspoken contrarian
on some very controversial topics.
This has garnered some fame and recognition
in part for being attacked and standing strong
against those attacks, if I may say, for being a martyr.
Do you worry about this drug of martyrdom
that might cloud your judgment?
First of all, yeah, I don't consider myself a martyr
and I've never considered myself a victim.
I make choices about my life and I, you know,
and I'm content with those choices and peaceful with them.
I'm not trying to be a martyr or a hero or anything else.
I'm doing what I think is right
because I want to be peaceful inside of myself.
But the only guard I have is just, you know,
fact-based reality.
If you show me a scientific study,
it shows that I'm wrong.
For example, if you come back and say,
look, Bobby, here's a polio,
here's a safety study on polio that was done pre-licensure
and used a real saline solution.
I'm gonna put that on my Twitter
and I'm gonna say I was wrong.
There is one out there.
So, you know, but that's all I can do.
All right, I have to ask, you are in great shape.
Can you go through your diet and exercise routine?
I do intermittent fasting, so I eat between noon.
I start at my first meal at around noon
and then I try to stop eating at six or seven.
And then I hike every day.
Morning, evening.
In the morning.
I go to a meeting first thing in the morning,
12-7 meeting, and then I go hike and I hike uphill
a mile and a half up and a mile and a half down
with my dogs and I do my meditations.
And then I go to the gym
and I go to the gym for 35 minutes.
I don't, I do it short time.
I've been exercising for 50 years.
And what I've found is it's sustainable
if I do just the short periods.
And I do four different routines at the gym.
And I never relax at the gym.
I go in there and I have a very intense exercise.
I live, I mean, I could tell you what my routine is,
but I do backs one day, back just one day,
legs and then a miscellaneous.
And I do 12.
My first set of everything is I try to reach failure
at 12 reps.
And then my fourth set of everything is a strip set.
I do, I take a lot of vitamins.
I can't even listen to you here
because I couldn't even remember them all,
but I take a ton of vitamins and nutrients.
I'm on an anti-aging protocol from my doctor
that includes testosterone replacement.
But I don't take any steroids.
I don't take any anabolic steroids or anything like that.
And the DRT I use is bio identical to what I do.
What my body produced.
What are your thoughts on hormone therapy in general?
I talked to a lot of doctors about that stuff,
cause I'm interested in health.
And I've heard really good things about it,
but I don't know.
I'm definitely not an expert on it.
About God, you wrote,
God talks to human beings through many vectors,
wise people, organized religion,
the great books of religions,
through art, music and poetry,
but nowhere was such detailing grace and joy
as through creation.
When we destroy nature,
we diminish our capacity to sense the divine.
What is your relationship
and what is your understanding of God?
Who is God?
Well, I mean, God is incomprehensible.
You know, I mean, I guess most philosophers would say,
we're inside the mind of God.
So it would be impossible for us to understand
actually what God's form is.
But I mean, for me, I have a,
let's say this,
I was raised in a very, very deeply religious setting.
So we went to church in the summer,
oftentimes twice a day,
the morning mass.
And we went to,
we definitely went every Sunday.
And I went,
we prayed in the morning,
we prayed before and after every meal,
we prayed at night,
we sent a rosary,
sometimes three rosaries a night.
And my father read us the Bible whenever he was home.
He would read us, you know,
we'd all get in the bed
and he'd read us the Bible stories.
And I went to Catholic schools,
I went to Jesuit schools,
I went to the nuns,
and I went to a Quaker school at one point.
When I became a drug addict
when I was about 15 years old,
about a year after my dad died,
I was addicted to drugs for 14 years.
During that time, when you're an addict,
you're living against conscience.
And when you're living,
and I never, you know,
I was always trying to get off of drugs,
never able to,
but I never felt good about what I was doing.
And when you're living against conscience,
you kind of push God to the peripheries of your life.
Oh, call me He,
gets, recedes and gets smaller.
And then when I,
when I got sober,
I knew that I had a couple of experiences.
One is that I had a friend of my brother's,
one of my brothers who died of this disease of addiction,
had a good friend who had used to take drugs with us,
and he became a moonie.
So he became a follower of Reverend Sun, Young Moon.
And he's, at that point, his compulsion,
he had the same kind of compulsion that I had,
and yet it was completely removed from him.
And so, and he used to come and hang out with us,
but he would not want to take drugs,
even if I was taken right in front of him.
He was immune to it.
He'd become impervious to that impulse.
And when I was in the,
when I first got sober,
I was, I knew that I did not want to be the kind of person
who was waking up every day in white knuckling sobriety
and just trying to resist through willpower.
And by the way, I had iron willpower as a kid.
I gave up candy for Lent when I was 12,
and I didn't eat it again until I was in college.
I gave up, I gave up desserts the next year for Lent,
and I didn't ever eat another dessert till I was in college,
and I was trying to bulk up for rugby and for sports.
So I felt like I could do anything with my willpower,
but somehow this particular thing, you know,
the addiction was completely impervious to it.
And it was cunning, baffling, baffling, incomprehensible.
I could not understand why I couldn't just say no
and then never do it again,
like I did with everything else.
And so I was living against conscience,
and I thought about this guy,
and I, you know, reflecting my own prejudices
at that time in my life, I said to myself,
I didn't want to be,
I didn't want to be like a drug addict
who was wanting a drug all the time
and just not being able to do it.
I wanted to completely realign myself
so that I was somebody who got up every day
and just didn't want to take drugs, never thought of them.
You know, I kissed the wife and children and went to work
and was never thought about drugs the whole day.
And I knew that people throughout history had done that.
You know, I'd read the lives of the saints.
I knew St. Augustine had had a very, very dissolute youth.
And I had this spiritual realignment transformation.
I knew the same thing had happened to St. Paul,
you know, Damascus.
The same thing had happened to St. Francis.
St. Francis also had a dissolute and fun-loving youth
and had this deep spiritual realignment.
And I knew that that happened to people throughout history.
And I thought that's what I needed,
you know, something like that.
I had the example of this friend of mine,
and I used to think about him,
and I would think, and this, again, reflects the bias
and, you know, probably the meanness of myself at that time.
But I said, I'd rather be dead than be a moonie.
But I wish I somehow could distill that power that he got
without becoming a religious nuisance.
And at that time, I picked up a book by Carl Jung
called Synchronicity.
And Jung, he was a psychiatrist.
He was a contemporary of Freud's.
He was a, Freud was his mentor,
and Freud wanted him to be his replacement.
But Freud was an avowed atheist.
And Jung was a deeply spiritual man.
He had these very intense and genuine spiritual experiences
when he was a little boy from at least three years old
that he remembers.
Biography is fascinating about him
because he remembers them with such a detail.
And he was, he had written, he was always,
he was interesting to me
because he was a very faithful scientist,
and I consider myself a science-based person
from when I was little.
And yet, he had this spiritual dimension to him
which infused all of his thinking
and really, I think, made him, you know,
it branded his form of recovery or of treatment.
And he thought that, he had this experience
that he describes in this book
where he's sitting up on the third,
he ran one of the biggest sanitariums in Europe in Zurich.
And he was sitting up on the third floor of this building.
And he's talking to a patient who was describing her dream
to him.
And the fulcrum of that dream was a scarab beetle,
which was an insect that is very, very uncommon,
if at all, in Northern Europe,
but it's an almond figure in the iconography of Egypt
and the hieroglyphics on the walls of the pyramids, et cetera.
And while he was talking to her,
he heard this bing, bing, bing on the window behind him.
And he didn't want to turn around
to take his attention off her,
but finally he does it.
In his aspiration, he turns around,
he throws up the window,
and a scarab beetle flies in and lands in his hand.
And he shows it to the woman,
and he says, is this what you were thinking of?
Is this what you were dreaming about?
And he was struck by that experience,
which was similar to other experiences he's had like that.
And that's what synchronicity means.
It's an incident, a coincidence, you know?
And like if you're talking with somebody
about somebody that you haven't thought about in 20 years,
and that person calls on the phone, that's synchronicity.
Oh, and he believed it was a way
that God intervened in our lives
that broke all the rules of nature that he had set up,
the rules of physics, the rules of mathematics,
to reach in and sort of tap us on the shoulder
and say, I'm here.
And so he tried to reproduce that in a clinical setting.
And he would put one guy in one room
and another guy in another room
and have them flip cards
and guess what the other guy had flipped.
And he believed that if he could beat the laws of chance,
the laws of mathematics,
that he would approve the existence of an unnatural law,
a supernatural law,
and that was the first step to proving
the existence of a god.
He never succeeds in doing it,
but he says in the book,
even though I can't prove using empirical
and scientific tools the existence of a god,
I can show through anecdotal evidence,
having seen thousands of patients
come through this institution,
that people who believe in God get better faster
and that the recovery is more enduring
than people who don't.
And for me, hearing that was more impactful
than if he had claimed that he had proved the existence
of a god, because I would not believe that.
But I was already at a mindset
where I would have done anything I could
to improve my chances of never having to take drugs again
by even 1%.
And if believing in God was gonna help me,
whether there's a god up there or not,
believing in one itself had the power to help me,
I was gonna do that.
So then the question is,
how do you start believing in something
that you can't see or smell or hear or touch or taste
or acquire with your senses?
And Jung provides the formula for that.
And he says, act as if, you fake it till you make it.
And so that's what I started doing.
I just started pretending there was a god
watching me all the time and kind of,
life was a series of tests.
And there was a bunch of moral decisions
that I had to make every day.
And each one, these were all just little things that I did,
but each one now for me had a moral dimension.
Like when the alarm goes off,
do I lay in bed for an extra 10 minutes
with my handle and thoughts,
or do I jump right out of bed?
Do I make my bed?
Most important decision of the day.
Do I hang up the towels?
When I go into the closet and pull out my blue jeans
and a bunch of those wire hangers fall on the ground,
do I shut the door and say,
I'm too important to do that,
that's somebody else's job or not?
And so do I put the water in the ice tray
before I put it in the freezer?
Do I put the shopping cart back in the place
that it's supposed to go in the parking lot of the Safeway?
And if I make a whole bunch of those choices right,
that I maintain myself in a posture of surrender,
which keeps me open to the power of, to my higher power,
like to my God.
And when I do those things right,
when I, so much about addiction is about abuse of power,
abuse of, all of us have some power,
whether it's good looks or whether it's connections
or education or family or whatever.
And there's always a temptation to use those
to fulfill self-will.
And the challenge is how do you use those
always to serve instead God's will
and the good of our community.
And that to me is kind of the struggle.
And when I do that, I feel God's power coming through me
and that I can do things,
I'm much more effective as a human being.
That gnawing anxiety that I lived with for so many years
and my God, it's gone.
And that I can kind of like put down the oars
and hoist the sail and the wind takes me
and I can see the evidence of it in my life.
And the big thing, the temptation for me is that
when all these good things start happening in my life
and the cash and prizes start flowing in,
how do I maintain that posture of surrender?
How do I surrender that?
One of my inclination is to say to God, thanks God,
I got it from here and drive the car off the cliff again.
And so I had a spiritual awakening
and my desire for drugs and alcohol was lifted miraculously.
And to me, it was as much a miracle
as if I'd been able to walk on water.
Because I had tried everything earnestly, sincerely
and honestly for a decade to try to stop
and I could not do it under my own power.
And then all of a sudden it was lifted effortlessly.
And so I saw that evidence, early evidence of God in my life
and of the power and I see it now every day of my life.
So adding that moral dimension to all of your actions
is how you were able to win that Camus battle
against the absurd, Sisyphus with the bowl.
It's all the same thing, it's the battle
to just to do the right thing.
And now Sisyphus was able to find somehow happiness.
Yeah.
Well, Bobby, thank you for the stroll
through some of the most important moments
in recent human history and for running for president.
And thank you for talking today.
Thank you, Lex.
Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words
from John F. Kennedy.
Let us not seek the Republican answer
or the Democratic answer, but the right answer.
Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past.
Instead, let us accept our own responsibility
for the future.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Thank you.