Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
What did you think of Elon's first lawsuit, and then he dropped it, and then he refiled? Where do you think he's coming from?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But why do you think he would have dropped it and then refiled? Where do you think that comes from? Is there new information, do you think?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Before we move to politics, I just wanted to actually ask you about inflection. So is it still running? Yeah. And so what basically happened, there was like some transfer payment from Microsoft and a couple of the people like, and then it seems like whatever that deal was, a little bit seems to have been copied by Google when they did this character AI thing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
So just trying to get a sense from you, are these deals to structurally avoid FTC scrutiny in terms of the building blocks of it? Or how did you think about it? And what is the pattern and the trend on these things?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I'm sorry, Pi is the inflection AI product.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Reid, were you surprised that then the first target where there was like some successful antitrust pushback was against Google versus Apple? And then second, do you think that there's a chance, like a meaningful chance that the government tries to break Google up? Or do you think it looks something maybe more similar to what happened to Microsoft?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, exactly. Reid, I have a question. A few weeks ago, you said something to the effect very publicly that you had had a one hour or multi hour lunch with Biden. And he just seemed like super on his game. And then he was kind of dumped. Was that just a moment in time where he was really great with you?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Or how do you reconcile that with Pelosi and all of these other folks and what happened to Biden?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Do you think that they should have run an open primary after that? And would Kamala have won an open primary?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Do you want to address that, Reid? Because I think there was a rumor that you were funding some of these lawsuits to keep him off the ballot or whatever. Have you spent any money to try to impact RFK one way or the other?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Reid, I have a question for you. It's more of a statement, actually. Maybe I'd just love to get your reaction. One of the most divisive issues that we have right now is people's position on October 7th, Israel, Palestine. There is a sense that there's a growing kind of like virulent strain of anti-Semitism in America. A lot of people point to the extreme left as where that's really gestating.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
There was thoughts that Josh Shapiro would have been an exceptional candidate, but one of the large reasons why he was not really meaningfully considered was his religion.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I just want you to comment on the broad issue and whether you see it in the Democratic Party, whether you see it in the Republican Party, whether you see it at all, just give us a sense of where we stand culturally on this issue.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I think I'm going to try to keep my hair long. Let's see what happens.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I'll tell you why. I think that both the Republicans and the Democrats have realized that there's actually very little difference on a lot of the major things that they actually talk about. So what they're both being forced to do is realize that because the centrality of a bunch of the things they say are the same, they each have to go to their flanks to get the N plus one vote.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And so Kamala goes to the left and spouts all this stuff that seems Marxist or socialist or communist because she has to get those people to vote for her. Ultimately, I think what ends up happening is most of the stuff in the middle has a decent chance of happening. The stuff at the fringes, I think they get put up, sacks almost as like a sacrificial lamb.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A good example, I think, is like all of this stuff that's happening with the student loan reform. A half a trillion dollar plan, it gets shot down by the Supreme Court. This new plan, another hundred billion dollars. not even being heard yet by the Supreme Court. So I think they know this. I mean, it's not like the Biden administration is dumb. The Trump administration is not dumb either.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
but I do have some mineral oil.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Let me just move to one thing. So, Reid, I think this has been an amazingly robust conversation. And I think you, as always, as long as I've known you now for 20 years, have been really intellectually honest. I want to ask you a favor, which is, can you stay for 10 extra minutes and talk with us to Bobby Kennedy?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And the reason I want you to do that is I think that there is a bunch of misinformation. I asked you about these things. I think it's important to hear maybe from Bobby and just for him to know what you said, because I do think it's important to hear it from the horse's mouth. Can you just give us like five, 10 minutes so that we can do that? Because I think it would be an important thing to do.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
So when is that? No, just right now. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
So, Jason, I, you know, I'm not actually, I haven't actually terminated my campaign yet. I suspended it. We've taken ourselves, or we're trying to take ourselves off the ballot in about 11 states. So we'll remain on the ballot in 39 states. And all red, all blue states will be on the ballot
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
in the states where we felt we were going to hurt President Trump with a polling show that we're getting off there, mainly the battleground states. Ironically now, the same people who've been trying to get me off the ballot for a year or since October, are now fighting to keep me on the ballot in those states. So that's one of the sort of ironies.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
You know, it became clear about two months ago when it became clear that I was not gonna be allowed on the debating stage. And I pretty much had a shutout in the mainstream media. The mainstream media, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, in 16 or 17 months, I had only two live interviews. Ross Perot, during his 10-month campaign, had 34 interviews.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And then, you know, all of them were very, very much aligned with the Democratic National Committee. And so when they did mention my name, which was pretty often, it was accompanied by a lot of defamations and pejoratives and slander. mischaracterizations, et cetera. I never really had a chance to reach those audiences. The audiences that I was reaching, I was dominating in.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I was beating all the candidates on independence, which is now the largest demographic. I was beating them among young people, so your audience was supporting me. The audiences that were listening to long-form interviews, I was dominating.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But in the older audiences, which is a critical baby boomers, people who really should have been for me because they are people who, from my generation, who remember the Kennedy administration, they were part of Camelot. They also, I was very, very popular with them for many years when I was the environmental champion alone.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And I should have had good inroads, but I was never able to communicate with them. Because they watch, they get their news from the mainstream media. And if you're living in that information ecosystem, you're going to have a very, very low opinion of me. I mean, if I was getting my information from those networks, I wouldn't vote for myself.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And President Trump reached out to me through this guy, Cali Mains, who's a food advocate, a safe food advocate, about three hours after the shooting in Butler. I got a call from him. And he asked me if I was still interested in the, specifically in the VP slot. And I said, no, which I would not have taken the vice president slot.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And he said, would I talk to, be willing to talk to the administration, to President Trump, rather. And at first I said, no. And I talked with some of my family members, including my kids. And I then sent Kelly Means a note saying, you know, I'm interested in talking. And I got a call almost immediately from President Trump. I spent about 30 minutes on the phone with him.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And we met the next day in Minneapolis. And then we met again more recently. We had continuing talks with him. And we met again more recently for a very, very intensive and long meeting at Mar-a-Lago with some of his family members. And during those meetings, during the first meeting,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
We talked about the idea of having a unity ticket where I would remain on the ballot, where we would ally ourselves on certain critical issues, but we would be able to continue to criticize each other on the issues that we did not align on. And President Trump was very happy with that arrangement.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And the issues, the critical issues on which we agreed, and I was really stunned to see the level of his commitment to those issues was one. And there are three issues that really got me into the presidential campaign. One was ending the war in Ukraine. The second issue is ending the censorship issue.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And the third issue, and most important to me, was addressing the childhood chronic disease epidemic and these connected issues about soil health and the corruption in our regulatory agencies by USDA and FDA, NIH, CDC, and HHS, which have become sock puppets. for the big pharmaceutical, big ag, big food processing industries that they're supposed to be regulating.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
He was very, very much aligned on those issues and it gave us essentially a beachhead in which to construct this, an alliance.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Bobby, let me ask you a question. I just want to go back a little bit because I just want to make sure I heard it properly. When Cali called you Was it to be the VP on the Trump ticket? And did you, was that asked and did you consider it? And why did you say no to that but then said yes to this?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Well, I had no interest in being a vice president. If you're a vice president, it's a, you know, I grew up in politics and vice president is the worst job in Washington. You have no budget. You have no staff except what, your budget actually all comes through the White House. If you do something that offends the president, he can literally, you know, he can take away your plane.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Every day I've showered since I've gotten back.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
He can take away your staff. And the only thing you really have is the Naval Observatory, which is the official residence of the vice president. And he can essentially put you under house arrest. And, you know, I have very strong views on issues. And I, you know, I felt like if I took that job, I'd be on house arrest probably on day three. So, you know, I was never interested in that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Sorry, Bobby, keep going.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, it was a very hard-wrenched decision. But, you know, my whole kind of journey was over the past 17 months was just kind of a series of very, very difficult transitions, you know, away from the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was... My family is one of the central pillars of the Democratic Party.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
My family has been in the Democratic Party since 1848, since my great-grandparents came over. My great-grandfather, Honey Fitz, was the first Irish Catholic mayor of Boston. His contemporary, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, was a state senator and political boss in Massachusetts. My grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, was FDR's treasurer. He was the first head of the SEC.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
He was the ambassador to the Court of St. James, deeply, deeply immersed in Democratic Party politics. All of my uncles, Joe Kennedy, who was a delegate to the 1940 convention, who spoke there, a featured speaker, and then was killed in World War II. My uncle John Kennedy was the first Irish Catholic president of the United States.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
My other uncle, Ted Kennedy, who was one of the longest, I think the second or third longest serving member of the United States Senate, his name on more bills than any other senator in United States history. And then, of course, my father, who was attorney general and A sort of walk away from that party was, you know, I guess it was very, very difficult for me.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And I was actually the last person in my campaign to understand the necessity of that. The Democratic Party was not going to allow me to compete fairly. They had rigged the system against us in ways that were really quite extraordinary. They had just walked away from democracy. They were canceling primaries. They had
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
They had chosen their candidate and it was going to be President Biden and I was really a nuisance to them. And so my voice was not allowed out there. And so that was difficult. And then leaving, you know, I declared independence in October. And joining Trump, President Trump, I burned a lot of bridges. I burned my boats, let me put it that way.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Well, you know, I do want to say that I feel like I didn't really leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me and left the ruins of the infrastructure that I think my uncle and father had, that had made them Democrats. If you went down a list of all of the priorities that Robert Kennedy, that John Kennedy had, I would check every box. They were anti-war, they were anti-censorship.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
They were against the corporate control of our country. This corrupt merger of state and corporate power that now has emerged as a dominant governing model in our country. The Democratic Party has changed demographically. When I grew up in a Democratic Party that was the party of the working class in our country, that was a party of Small businesses, that was the party of the poor.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In the last election, President Biden got roughly half of the country voting for him, but that half controlled 70% of GDP. And President Trump got about half the country voting for him, and that half represents about 30% of GDP. So we've had this inversion where the Democratic Party has become the party of wealth, of elites, and I would say very insular elites.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And the Republican Party is now the party of the poor, the working class. And it's been, you know, for me to watch that, I've been on the front lines. of watching it. And, you know, the values that held the Democratic Party together are no longer there. It's held together by a sense of tribalism and a great, great sense of what I would say orchestrated fear of Donald Trump.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
You don't have the sea to use as a natural, you know, disinfectant and deodorant.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It's the only value that really dominates any discussion If I talk about censorship to a Democrat, they'll say, yes, but Donald Trump is going to become a dictator. If you talk about children's health, they'll say, never mind that. Donald Trump is the only thing we can worry about. If you talk about the history of the Democratic Party's opposition to war, they'll say, forget all that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The only thing we can focus on is Donald Trump. That's a very, very dismaying and, I would say, dangerous form of orchestrated tribalism. And one of the other features of the Democratic Party is this need to control, this mistrust of the plebiscite, mistrust of the demos. You know, demos is a Greek word for people, and the Democratic Party doesn't trust the people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
That's why they have to get rid of elections. That's why they had to get me off the ballot. Oh, my God. I did something everybody said, all the pundits said could never be done. So I got on the ballot in every state. I got a million people that signed their signatures petitioning me on the ballot. And the Democratic Party's strategy, rather than to use the $3 billion it had,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
amplify a message and inspire people and talk about a vision and the virtues of its candidates. Instead, use that money to try to get me off the ballot, to get Cornell OS, to get Jill Stein, to use the courts, to use the enforcement agencies, including the Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI. to try to rig the election.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And it ultimately comes down to this mistrust of the people, which we're seeing now all over. We're seeing the kind of two big forces emerge. One is a populist force and the other is a force of control, of ironclad control. We saw Europe has already fallen. You saw the arrest of Pavel Durov last week, which was extraordinary.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The arrest of the guy who founded Telegram because he was hosting political dissent. And, you know, the European Commission is already openly censoring content. So they did not need to arrest him. They can take off whatever they want. They went through the trouble of actually, and probably with U.S. encouragement, you know, catching him when he happened to land for a refueling stop in France.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
France has this extraordinary tradition of free speech that, you know, began with the French Revolution. And then again in the 1880s, they passed all these incredible laws. their commitment to free speech is as robust as that in the United States. And yet now, you know, and two weeks before that, you had this crazy European commissioner, Thierry Breton,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
saying that ordering, ordering Elon Musk to not interview Donald Trump, a former president of the United States, the nominee of one of the two major political parties, and the world is not allowed to hear his point of view. It's extraordinary. That is what's coming to this country, and you can already, and a Democratic Party,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is that the party of control, and it's the party of not trusting the people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Let's, Bobby, let's talk about something then. Let's assume that this election goes in the direction of now your preferred direction, which is Donald Trump wins. What role would you play? And what is your agenda? What is it that you want to accomplish? And explain, make America healthy again in that context, maybe.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I mean, it's the three issues ending censorship, and that's pretty easy to do. You can do it with a series of executive orders ending the Ukraine war, which is complex, but I think can be done very, very quickly. And then, you know, the food issue. Now, it's food, it's medicines, it's corruption in the regulatory agencies.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But would you be a secretary in that administration? Would you be a special advisor?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
There is no, you know, there is no deal in terms of me getting a particular post. Oh, there's just an understanding that there would be some kind of co-governance. And The Trump people have already demonstrated their good faith by inviting me to be on the transition team as one of the co-chairs.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And they've done something really wonderful, which is to bring Tulsi Gabbard in, who shares a lot of my views on this issue as the other co-chair. And I think that's a signal that they're sending that they are sincere about this. I'm making a commitment to these issues.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I mean, the big problem is you can't really trust the government to tell you the truth. The agencies are all compromised. They all have very, very bad conflicts. Almost all the people, for example, on the on the food recommendation committees at FDA are people who are part of the food industry. And the same is true on the pharmaceutical side.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The people who are making decisions about what's good for you are actually people who are making huge amounts of profit on those recommendations. And so you can't really trust that the recommendations are are in your best interest. And what we know is that there is no more profitable, there's no bigger profit center or industry in this country than a sick child.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And a sick child is a lifetime customer, a lifetime consumer of very, very expensive products. And you have this alliance between a food industry and a pharmaceutical industry. to keep our children sick, get them addicted. In the 70s and 80s, the tobacco industry was under attack, and the two biggest tobacco companies went out and bought all the big food companies.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, and Kraft. You had Philip Morris buy Kraft. And they took a lot of the scientists from the tobacco industry who are experts on making products addictive, and they put them to work on making food addictive, on making ultra-processed food. So adding ingredients that make food, that destroy the satiability of food so that food doesn't fill you up, so you're always craving more food.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And those products, many of them are products, you know, we have almost a thousand chemicals in our foods that are banned in Europe and banned in other countries. And those products are products that have been introduced by chemists. That did not exist before and the body does not handle them well. And, you know, we're seeing this explosion in chronic disease.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease. You know what the budget was for chronic disease when my uncle was president? Zero. There wasn't any drugs for it. There was no expenditures on chronic disease. Today, it's $4.3 trillion. It's five times our military budget.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And the people who are making money are the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, which actually you would think insurance companies would want people to be, well, they actually make more money if they're sick. The hospital is the medical cartel. The people we trust to make advice to us about our health are actually compromised. And that's the difficult part.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
You've got to unravel that corporate capture.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Exfoliant also.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I think what Bobby says rings true in the way that I live my life and I just see it demonstrated on my own body. You're right, Jason. My wife's Italian. She runs an Italian company. She works Italian and American hours for 10 months out of the year. And for those 10 weeks, we go there and we flip schedule. But when I'm there, I'm consuming Italian produce that isn't packed in plastic.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I go to a local fruit store. I go to the local fish vendor. And my body changes. And I know that because the people that see me when I get back, they always comment, oh, did you lose weight? Oh, do you look thinner or this or that? And what's interesting is I actually do a body composition before I leave and after. I've done this for seven years now.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And I can tell you that my weight doesn't change that much, but my body composition is completely different. And I don't know what it is except the things that I'm putting in my body that's different. And so I see it and I'm running an A-B test every day.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The fish is outrageous. But there are ways to eat at a materially lower price than there is here. And the access to the ultra-processed food is different there. You can't get the stuff. And when you do find that stuff, it doesn't have the same glycemic and metabolic load on your body.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, and this goes to David's point that we need to have cheap food and that that is kind of an outcome that is an admirable or virtuous outcome. The problem is that food isn't cheap. It's cheap on the shelf, but it imposes costs on the rest of us that were the externalities that we're paying elsewhere. So when I was a kid,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in his lifetime. Over a 40- or 50-year career, one case. It was essentially non-existent disease. Today, one out of every three children who walks through his office door is diabetic or pre-diabetic. When I was a kid, the autism rates were between 1 and 1,500. to 1 in 10,000 Americans.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And that is still true in my generation, 70-year-old men. In my kids' generation, according to CDC, it's 1 out of every 34 kids. Some states, like California, it's 1 out of every 22. 77% of Americans are now, or 74% of adults are obese. Half our kids, obesity... When, you know, 100 years ago, if you were obese, you could get a job in the circus. It was so unusual.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
So we're now, and who's making a profit now? Ozempic. Ozempic's not going to. You can, obesity is absolutely, and diabetes are absolutely treatable by good food. That's the cause. Now, Ozempic is a good profit center for pharma. There's a bill now which has been paid for by the company that makes it, which is the biggest company in Europe, Novo Nordisk.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In Denmark, where that company is, they do not recommend it. The treatment of diabetes, the standard of care, is diet and exercise. But that company's entire value is based upon the projections of what it's going to sell in the United States. And that company is pouring tens of millions of dollars into lobbying to pass this bill that will make Medicare pay for it for every American who's obese.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
That could be 74% of people are now eligible. I think it's $1,500 a week. The cost of that will be $3 trillion a year. If you took $3 trillion a year, a tiny fraction of that, you could buy organic food, three meals a day for every human being in the United States. So wouldn't that be a better expenditure of our money?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And, you know, what I would say is the food producers, it's not a conspiracy, it's just... people following perverse incentives. And there are conspiracies.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I mean, when I sued Monsanto, we got emails that showed that the head of the pesticide division, Jess Rowland, for a decade at EPA was secretly working for Monsanto the entire time, sabotaging studies, creating false science to hide the carcinogenic nature of Roundup. So there are those kind of instances throughout the federal government, but mainly it's just perverse incentives.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Almost close to 100% of our agricultural subsidies go to processed food. I mean, go to commodity agriculture, which is the feedstock for processed food.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
oh and then if you look at mostly mostly for mostly for me if the industry controls through lobbying and through you know all these other mechanisms for corporate capture controls the expenditures in the food stamp program so seventy percent of the food stamp program goes for processed food ten percent goes for sugar drinks like coca-cola which are just diabetes machines.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
So why are we poisoning poor kids in this country? The school lunch program, the same thing, almost 80%, I think 77% of food, the lunch program is terrible foods that are actually poisoning our children. And don't we care enough about our kids to say, we want to care about them, we want to make sure that they're not sick, They are the most precious things in our country.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Shouldn't that be the focus? And whatever we're doing to make them so sick, When I was a kid, 6% of American kids had chronic disease. Today, 60%. Is that not an alarm? Is that not something that we should all be concerned about?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Bobby, can you comment on when people talk about revamping the food supply, one of the things that sometimes is not allowed to be said is that focusing on organic food and produce can exclude certain communities. And so there's like this DEI filter that preferring that is almost racist in some way. Like, can you just comment on that whole vein of thinking and your thought on that?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I think feeding people poisonous food is racist. By the way, the NAACP gets huge amounts of money every year from the food industry. It may be one of the biggest. I think Coca-Cola is the biggest supporter of NAACP. A lot of the NGOs that are supposed to be
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Concern about the disproportionate impact on minority communities of federal policies have actually been bought off and bought into the process. And, you know, a lot of times those are the voices you hear saying this is racist. What's really racist is poisoning black Americans because these are communities that are food deserts.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The school lunch program, oftentimes in those communities, the biggest access that they have to food, and we're giving them poison food. Many of these communities have no grocery stores. They definitely don't have Whole Foods. They don't have access to those kinds of foods. Shouldn't we have national policies that... then make sure our people are healthy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And, you know, they use, of course, market dynamics, but also supports. We're giving billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies for farmers to addict farmers to growing commodity agriculture, which is bad food. It's low in nutrients. It's high in chemicals. It's high in pesticides. And, you know, we need to change these perverse incentives so that and feed America.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
You know, how can anybody argue with this? How can anybody say that we should not have healthy children, that we should be giving people food that is hurting them? It's just it doesn't make any sense.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Well, let me react to the last thing you said about President Trump. I think if President Trump wins, that people are gonna see a very different President Trump than they did during the first term. I think he's changed as a person, and I've known him for 30 years. I've sued him, I've litigated against him, and had a friendship with him even when I was litigating against him.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and by the way, successfully against him. But I think he is, he's focused on his legacy. He said many interesting things to me about what he did wrong the last time and about how He had no idea he was going to win. He had no idea how to govern. And people descended on him the day that he got elected and said, you got to appoint this guy, appoint this guy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And he said, I appointed a lot of people I shouldn't have appointed. I know who they are now. He also said something interesting to me. He said, the Democrats, one of the big sort of fulcrums of their terror of Trump is that He's going to implement this Heritage Foundation, you know, blueprint, which is called Project 2025.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And he brought this issue up to me and he said, you know, they're always telling me I'm for Project 2025. I never read Project 2025 until they started accusing me of it. He said, that was written by a right-wing asshole, is what he said. He said, there are left-wing assholes, and there are right-wing assholes, and it was a right-wing asshole who wrote that thing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And then he started going through it. So, you know, I think there's a lot. And I think he's interested in his legacy now. He wants to leave behind... some accomplishments. And he wants to make our country better. And I think he's, you know, he's listening to a wider range of voices and he's preparing to govern right now.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And, you know, I'm going to be on the transition committee picking the people who are going to govern Tulsi's gonna be, there's gonna be a wide diversity of stakeholders, but he's listening to more than just that kind of narrow right-wing band that people are terrified of.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Can I respond to the other part of David's question? Sure. I think, to me, the most troubling thing about what's happening now, you've had two Democratic candidates who've not been able to give unscripted interviews, which is extraordinary.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
My father and uncle were so proud of the United States, our capacity to engage in debate, to defend who we were in the world, to defend a vision of our country, to articulate it to the rest of the world, to be the leaders of the free world. and have a command of the facts and of knowledge and to be eloquent. And how can you be a leader in the world?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
What does the rest of the world think of us right now? I mean, what could they possibly think? We have two Democratic Party candidates who are not able to explain themselves in an interview. Bill Maris said the other day something really, I think, poignant, which is if you want the job of handling the nuclear code, you've got to do an interview first.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And how can you go 30, 39 days without talking to the press, without being able to defend your record, to explain who you are to the American people? And if you talk to Democrats about this, And you can get past the anger and past the vitriol and this kind of wall of tribal resistance to any new knowledge coming in or any contrary facts.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
What they'll say is, well, we're not really voting for Kamala. We're voting for the apparatus. And you ask the next question. Yeah. Has that apparatus served you? Has the open border served you? Has the $35 trillion debt served you? Has the endless wars served you? Has the destruction of the American middle class? Highest inflation rate in a generation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Has any of that actually, you know, has that apparatus produced something for the United States that you're so proud of that you want to blindly vote without knowing who you're voting for?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I walked here, but I had it totally unbuttoned and I thought this is completely inappropriate for Menlo Park in August. So I buttoned two buttons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
But 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, you know, and the absurdity of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And he pushed the stone up the hill. And that if we do that, and if, you know, we find ways of being of service to others, that is, you know, the ultimate, that's the key to the lock. That's the solution to the puzzle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I was born nine years after the end of World War II, and I grew up in a generation that was, you know, with my parents who were fixated on that, on, you know, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
That the Germans had been particularly susceptible to this kind of demagoguery and to following a powerful leader and to industrializing cruelty and violence. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 is 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Anne Frank came to your door and asked you to hide her, would you be one of the people who hit her and risked 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 that's been something, kind of a lesson, a challenge that has always been near the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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... Who went along with it? Would I be one of the people who was at the train station in Krakow or even Berlin and saw people being shipped off to camps?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
First of all, I'll say this about my uncle because, you know, I'm going to apply that question to my uncle and my father. My uncle was asked when he first met Jackie Bouvier, who later became Jackie Kennedy, she was a reporter for a newspaper and she had a kind of column where she'd do these kind of pithy interviews with both famous people and kind of men in the street interviews.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And she was interviewing him, and she asked him what he believed his best quality was, his strongest virtue. And she thought that he would say courage because he had been a war hero. He was the only president who—and this one, he was senator, by the way—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
She thought he was going to say courage, but he didn't. He said curiosity. And I think, you know, looking back at his life, that the best, that that was true, and that was the quality that allowed him to put himself in the shoes of his adversaries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 in the military
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 two months in office. He was able to stand up to them because he was able to put himself in the shoes of both Castro and Khrushchev and understand there's got to be another solution to this. And then during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was able to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And they then made a secret deal with Dobrin and with Ambassador Dobrin and with Khrushchev to remove the missiles in Turkey. If he moved the Jupiter missiles from Turkey, so long as Khrushchev removed them from Cuba. There were 13 men on the executive, on the end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
they call the ancon committee which was the group of people who were deciding you know what the action was what what they were going to do to end the cuban missile crisis and virtually i and of those men 11 of them wanted to invade and wanted to bomb and invade and it was jack and then later on
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
famously said that moral courage is the most important quality, and it's more rare than courage on a 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And that that's why, and it was, and who made it an unfoked, 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 ever came in, we were provoking Russians in this way unnecessarily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And to go back that time in 1992, when the Russians moved out, 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. Gorbachev made this huge concession where he said to George Bush,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I'm going to move all of our troops out, and you can then reunify Germany under NATO, which was a hostile army to the 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 this. I will not move NATO.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 said he published a paper, a blueprint paper. for moving NATO right up to the Russian border, a thousand miles to the east, and taking over 14 nations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 It's insane and it's unnecessary. And if you do this, it's going to provoke the Russians to a violent response.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 afterwards. World War II, like with a Marshall Plan to try to help them incorporate into Europe and to be part of the brotherhood of, you know, of man and of Western nations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, who is now, at this moment, said at that time the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
If you do this, it is going to provoke the Russians toward a military response. And we moved all around Russia. We moved to 14 nations, 1,000 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
We put those missile systems back there, and then we walk away unilaterally, walk away from the two nuclear missile treaties, the intermediate nuclear missile treaties that we had with Russia. when 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
They can carry the Tomahawk missiles, which have nuclear warheads. So the last country that they didn't take was the Ukraine. And the Russians said, and in fact, Bill Perry said this, or William Burns said it, so now they had a 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Russia has been invaded three times through the Ukraine. The last time it was invaded, we killed, or the Germans killed one out of every seven Russians. They destroyed, my uncle described what happened to Russia in his famous American University speech in 1963, 60 years ago this month.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
or last month, 60 years ago in June, June 10th, 1963, he told, that speech was telling the American people, put yourself in the shoes of the Russians. We need to do that if we're going to 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And, you know, today there's none of that happening. We have refused repeatedly to talk to the Russians. We've broken up their 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 Donbass region voted 90 to 10 against
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
to leave and go to Russia, Putin said, no, w we want Ukraine to stay intact, but we want you to sign a Minsk accords to, to, you know, they, the Russians were, were very worried because of the us involvement in the coup in Ukraine in 2014. And then the oppression and the, and the, you know, and the killing of 14,000 ethnic Russians and Russia hasn't had the same re the same way that if Mexico
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
put Aegis missile systems from China or Russia on our border, and then killed 14,000 expats American, we would go in there. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Zelensky and Putin had inked a deal already to another peace agreement, and that the United States sent 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 war that the neocons in the White House wanted. They've said for two decades they wanted this war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And that they wanted to use Ukraine as a pawn in a proxy war between United States and Russia, the same as we used Afghanistan. And in fact, they say it, this is the model. Let's use the Afghanistan model. That was said again and again. And to get the Russians to overextend their troops and then fight them using local fighters and U.S. weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
That's not a humanitarian mission. That's not what we were told. We were told this was an unprovoked invasion. But... and that we're there to bring a humanitarian relief to the Ukrainians. But that is the opposite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
That is a war of attrition that is designed to chew up, to turn this little nation into an abattoir of death for the flower of Ukrainian youth in order to advance a geopolitical ambition of certain people within the White House. And, you know, I think that's wrong. We should be talking to the Russians the way that, you know, Nixon talked to Brezhnev
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 laugh it off. I think he's a dangerous man in that, of course, there's probably corruption in his regime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 Vladimir Putin himself has
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
russia and it was clear when he said that that he was talking about himself and uh and he has his hand on a button that could bring you know armageddon to the entire planet so why are we messing with this it's not our job to change that regime and and we should be making friends with the russians we shouldn't be treating 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 the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 an 89% popularity that people in Russia support the war in Ukraine, and they support him as an individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And I understand there's problems with polling and you don't know what to believe, but the polls consistently show that. And it's not America's business to be the policeman of the world and to be changing regimes in the world. That's illegal. We shouldn't be breaking international laws.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And I think the U.S. can play a really important role, and a U.S. president can play a really important role by reassuring the Russians that we're not going to consider them an enemy anymore, that we want to be friends. And it doesn't mean that you have to let down your guard completely. The way that you do it, which was the way President Kennedy did it, is you do it one step at a time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
You take baby steps. We do a unilateral move. reduce our hostility and aggression, and see if the Russians reciprocate. And that's the way that we should be doing it. And 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 apparently there's been 350,000 Ukrainians
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, anything we can, something to the extent that anything we can do to kill Russians is a good use of our money. It is not. You know, those are somebody's children,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
men to die in ukraine and the ukrainians do not have anybody left the ukrainians are using press gangs to uh 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
My son fought over there, and he told me, he had firefights with the Russians, mainly at night, but he said most of the battles were artillery wars during the day, and the Russians now outgun the NATO forces 10 to 1 in artillery. They're killing at a horrendous rate. Now, my interpretation of what's happened so far is that the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 to now, and they now have that force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And even against this small original force, the Ukrainians have been helpless. All of their offenses have died. They've now killed 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,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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. The troops that are now filling the gaps of all those 350,000 men who have been lost are scantily trained, and they're arriving green at the front. Many of them do not want to be there. Many of them are giving up and going over the Russian side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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. And, you know, the willingness of the Russians to fight on against any kind of odds and to make huge sacrifices. The Russians themselves were making the sacrifice with their lives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 impossible to think that it can happen. And, you know, Russia has deployed weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
a tiny, tiny fraction of its military so far, and now it has China with its mass production capacity supporting its war effort. It's a hopeless situation, and we've been lied to. The press in our country and our government are just promoting this lie that the Ukrainians are about to win and that everything's going great and that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 insurgency, which wasn't even an insurgency, he only got 4,000 of his men to follow him out of 20,000.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And they were quickly stopped, and nobody in the Russian military, the oligarchy, the political system, nobody supported it. And 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
You know, I would agree with that and I should have I said that myself at the beginning. That's one of the reasons my son went over there to fight, because he was inspired by the valor of the Ukrainian people and this extraordinary willingness of them. And I think Putin thought it would be much easier to sweep into Ukraine, and he found a stone wall of Ukrainians ready to put their...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 U.S. role in this has been, you know, that there were many opportunities to settle this war, and the Ukrainians wanted to settle it. Vladimir Zelensky, when he ran in 2019, here's a guy who's a comedian now, He's an actor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I think he was, you know, he came under threat by ultra-naturalist 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Yeah, I worry about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Well, the reason it's not, you know, the reason it might, it's not, it's just because people seem to be in this kind of dream state about that it'll never happen. And yet, you know, we're... It can happen very easily, and it can happen at any time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
If we push the Russians too far, I don't doubt that Putin, if he felt like his regime or his nation was in danger, that the United States was going to be able to place a quizzling into the Kremlin, that he would use nuclear torpedoes. And, you know, these strategic weapons that they have, and that could be the beginning. Once you do that, nobody controls the trajectory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 had – 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
30 million Americans killed 130 million Russians. This is what our military brass wanted. They saw a war with Russia, a nuclear exchange with Russia as not only inevitable, but also desirable because they wanted to do it now. We still had a superiority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
What are some interesting kind of... I was going to school in Washington, D.C. to our Lady of Victory, which is in Washington, D.C. I lived in Virginia across the Potomac, and we would cross the bridge every day into D.C. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
He was staying with the ex-com committee and sleeping there, and they were up 24 hours a day. They were debating and trying to figure out what was happening. And 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 a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
where they would tell you when the alarms go off, then you put your head onto the table, you remove the sharps from your desk, put them inside your desk, you put your head onto the table, and you wait, and the initial blast will take the windows out of the school, and then we all stand up and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 as 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 psychological psyop trick to teach Americans that nuclear war was acceptable, that it was survivable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
My father, anyway, when the marshals came to our house to 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 going to panic. And I need you to be a good soldier and go to school.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And he said something to me during that period, which was that if the nuclear war happened, it would 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 puppies and they'll do whatever I had to do. But I felt like, okay, I can handle this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And I really wanted to see the setup 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
He sent one letter that was conciliatory, and then he sent a letter that after his Joint Chiefs and the warmongers around him saw 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,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
He met Dobrynin in the Justice Department, and Dobrynin was the Soviet ambassador, and they proposed this settlement, which was a secret settlement. Wow. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And my uncle's secret deal was that 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. Mm-hmm. So if news got out about that secret deal, it was off. But that was the actual deal. And Khrushchev complied with it, and then my uncle complied with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I think that's one of the, you know, because that, of course, is the perennial question, right? But it is history kind of on an automatic pilot and, you know, human decisions, decisions of leaders really only have, you know, a marginal or incremental bearing on what is going to happen anyway. But I think that is the—and historians argue about that all the time—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, missile emplacements. Each one of those missile emplacements had a crew of about 100 men, and they were Soviets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Oh, they were, and we didn't know whether, we had a couple of questions that my uncle asked 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 going to force Khrushchev to then go into Berlin?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And that would be the beginning of a cascade of fact that would highly like to end a nuclear confrontation. And the military perhaps 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And he said, if we bomb those sites, we're going to be killing Russians. And it's going to force, it's going to provoke Russia into some response. And the obvious response is for them to go into Berlin. But the thing that we didn't know then, that we didn't find out until, I think, It was like a 30-year anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Havana.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 that 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And that the authorization to fire was made, was delegated to each of the gun crew commanders. So there were 60 people who at all had authorization to fire if they felt themselves under attack. So you have to believe that at least one of them would have launched, and that would have been the beginning of the end. And if anybody had launched, we knew what would happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
My uncle knew what would happen, because he asked again and again, what's going to happen? And they said, 30 million Americans will be killed, but we will kill 130 million Russians, so we will win. And that was a victory for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And my uncle 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 going to be in the charge of everything. They're the ones who are going to be running the world after that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So for them, there was an incentive to kill 130 million Russians and 30 million Americans by my uncle. He had this correspondence with Khrushchev. They were secretly corresponding with each other. And that is what saved the world, is that both of them had been men of war. Eisenhower famously said, it will not be a man of war
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
There 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, you know, had been in the heat of the South Pacific. His boat had been cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. Three of his crewmen had been killed, one of them badly burned. He pulled that guy with a lanyard in his teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
six miles to the island in the middle of the night and then they hit out there for ten days you know and uh... and you know he came back like i said he was the only uh... president united states that are in the purple heart uh... meanwhile khrushchev had been at stalingrad which was the worst place to be on the planet you know probably in the twentieth century others and you know and al schwitzer one of the death camps
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
It was the most ferocious, horrific war with people starving. People committed cannibalism, eating the dogs, the cats, eating their shoe leather, freezing to death by the thousands, etc. Khrushchev did not want... The last thing he wanted was a war. And the last thing my uncle wanted was a war. But the CIA did not know anything about Khrushchev. And the reason for that is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 to the United States and were in the Kremlin who were killed during that period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 it's... It's kind of the same way that we look at Putin today. They have this ambition of world conquest, and 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 going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 do you want on your gravestone? And my uncle said, he kept the peace.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
He said, the principal job of a 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 a summit. And by the way, Eisenhower had wanted to do the same thing. Eisenhower wanted peace, and he was going to meet in Vienna. But that peace summit was blown up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
He was going to try to end the Cold War. Eisenhower was in the last year of his—in May of 1960. But that was torpedoed by the CIA during the U-2 crash. You know, they sent a U-2 over the Soviet Union. It got shot down, and then they told—and then Alan Dulles told Eisenhower to deny that we had a program. They didn't know that the Russians had captured Gary Francis Powers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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... with Khrushchev in Vienna early on in his term, he went over there and Khrushchev snubbed him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Khrushchev, uh, lectured him imperiously about the, you know, the, the terror of American imperialism and, and rebuffed any, you know, they did agree not to go into Laos. They made an agreement that kept the United States, kept my uncle from sending troops to Laos. But, um, It had been a disaster, Vienna.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So then we had a spy that used to come to our house all the time, a guy called Georgi Bolshagoi. 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 Russian. Oh, he used to come to our house. They really liked him. He was very attractive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
He was always laughing and joking. He would do rope climbing contests with my father. He would do push-up contests with my father. He could do the Russian dancing, the 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 en-run them. And he was friends with Bolshevik.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So he gave Georgie the letter. And Georgie brought it and handed it to Pierre Salinger, folded it in the New York Times. And he gave it to my uncle. And it was this beautiful letter in which he said, you know... My uncle had talked to him about the children who were played. You know, we played 29 grandchildren who were playing in his yard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 an election, they'll never run for office? How can we morally make a decision that is going to eliminate life for these beautiful kids? And he had said that to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And Khrushchev wrote them 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And then he said, you know, it occurs to me now that we're all on an arc and that there is not another one and that the entire fate of the planet And all of its creatures and all of the children are dependent on the decisions we make. And you and I have a moral obligation to go forward with each other as friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 U.S. tanks had come to the wall, and there was a standoff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
act his tanks off first and then my uncle ordered lemay to back back he had lemay had mounted bulldozer plows on the 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 right it was his generals trying to provoke a war and um But they started talking to each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
But they knew it was important to talk to each other. And you just wish that we had that kind of leadership today 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 offers. But It could kill us all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I mean, Elon said, first it's going to steal our job, then it's going to kill us, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And it's probably not hyperbole. Actually, you know, if it follows the laws of biological evolution, which are just the laws of mathematics, that's probably a good endpoint for it, you know, a potential endpoint. So we need—it's going to happen, but we need to make sure it's regulated, and it's regulated properly for safety. In every country. And that includes Russia and China and Iran.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Right now, we should be putting all the weapons of war aside and sitting down with those guys and say, how are we going to do this? There's much more important things to do. This stuff is going to kill us if we don't figure out how to regulate it. And leadership needs to look down the road at what is the real risk here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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. A biological weapons treaty is the easiest thing in the world to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
We can verify it, we can enforce it, and everybody wants to agree to it. Only insane people do not want to continue this kind of research. There's no reason to do it. So there are these existential threats to all of humanity now out there, like AI and biological weapons. We need to stop fighting each other, start competing on economic game fields,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
They get fixated on these little wars and these comic book depictions of good versus evil, and we all go, you know, and go off and give them the weapons and enrich the military and constitutional complex, but we're on the road to perdition if we don't end this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, you know, they can be misused to enslave people. And they can be misused in wars and, you know, to subjugate, to kill, to do all of these bad things. And I don't think there's anybody –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
who understands this. You know, we need to bring in the tech community and say, tell us what these regulations need to look like, you know, so that there can be freedom to innovate, so that we can milk AI for all of the good things, but not, you know, fall into these traps that are going to, you know, that are these existential threats to, that pose existential threats to humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
including dozens of confessions of people who were involved in the assassination, but every kind of document. 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, yes, Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset. He was recruited, you know, in 19...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
57, he was a Marine working at the Atasui Air Force Base, which was the CIA Air Force Base, with the U-2 flights, which was a CIA program. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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. When Congress investigated my uncle's murder,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
In the 1970s, the church committee did, and they did a 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
believed it was primarily the mafia. But Richard Schweitzer, the senator who headed the committee, said, you know, 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 the whole way through.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And the actual people that the CIA appointed, George Johannes, 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. I mean, it's impossible to even talk about a tiny fraction of the evidence here. What I suggest to people, there are hundreds of books written about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 is an extraordinary scholar, and he does this
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
just an 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 that we had, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Secret spy agencies are things like the KGB, Stasi in East Germany, SAVAK 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. It's antithetical to democracy to have that. But in 1947, we created it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 from many, many different sources from all over the world and then put those in reports so the White House, so the president can make good decisions based upon valid information, evidence-based decision-making.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 then the Plans Division, which is the Plans Division is the dirty tricks, it's the black ops, fixing elections, etc.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
murdering what they call executive action, which means killing foreign leaders and, you know, making small wars and bribing and blackmailing people, stealing elections and that kind of thing. And the reason at that time, you know, we were in the middle of the Cold War and Truman and then Eisenhower did not want to go to war. They didn't want to commit troops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And it seemed to them that, you know, this was a way of kind of fighting the Cold War secretly without and doing it at minimal cost by changing events sort of invisibly. And so it was seductive to them. But everybody, you know, Congress, when they first voted it in place, Congress, both political parties said,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
If we create this thing, it could turn into a monster and it could undermine our values. And today, it's so powerful and nobody knows what its budget is. Plus, it has its own investment fund. In-Q-Tel, which has invested, you know, made, I think, 2,000 investments in Silicon Valley.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Oh, it has ownership of a lot of these tech companies that, you know, 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, etc.,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
where they had at least 400 members, leading members of the United States Press Corps, the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc., 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 1973 But there's indications they didn't do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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... how the narrative has been formed in the minds of Americans and say that the CIA had nothing to do with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Through the press.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Directly through... I mean, there are certain press organs that have been linked, you know, to the agency that the people who run those organs, things like the Daily Beast, now Rolling Stone, you know, editor of Rolling Stone, Noah Schlackman, has deep relationships with the intelligence community, Salon, Daily Kos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I agree with you. But I actually think that the entire field of journalism has... because it's become, you know, the principal newspapers in this country and the television station, the legacy media have abandoned their traditional, their tradition of, you know, which was when I was a kid, listen, my house was filled with the greatest journalists alive at that time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
People like Ben Bradley, like Anthony Lewis, Mary McGrory, Pete Hamill, Jerry, Jack Newfield, Jimmy Breslin, uh and many many others and after my father after my father died they started the rfk journalism awards to recognize integrity and courage you know journalistic integrity and courage and for that generation of journalism they they thought they believed that the that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
the function of a journalist was to maintain this posture of fear, skepticism toward any aggregation of power, including government authority. You always, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
But if you look what happened during the pandemic, it 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
They became propaganda organs for the government agencies, and they were actually censoring the speech of anybody who dissents of the powerless people. 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 on to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And they agreed not to print stories or facts that departed from government orthodoxy. So the Washington Post was the signature of the UPI newspaper. the AP and then the four media or the four social media groups, Microsoft, Twitter. Facebook and Google all signed on to the Trusted News Initiative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
It was started by the BBC, organized by them, and the purpose of it was to make sure nobody could print anything about government that departed from governmental orthodoxy. The way it worked is the UPI, the AP, 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And a lot of it was about COVID, but also Hunter Biden's laptops. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And people can go to our website. There's a letter on my Substack now to Michael Scher of the Washington Post that outlines all this and gives all my sources. Because Michael Scher accused me of being a conspiracy theorist when he was actually part of a conspiracy, a true conspiracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
to suppress anybody who is departing from government orthodoxies by either censoring them completely or labeling them conspiracy theorists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I would say, well, there's so many things that I love about the country. You know, the landscapes and the waterways and the people, et cetera, but on the kind of a... You know, the higher level, you know, people argue about whether we're an exemplary nation. And that term has been given a bad name, particularly by the neocons, the actions of the neocons in recent decades who...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
If you read their internal memorandum, including the statements of the leader of the Trusted News Initiative, I think her name's Jennifer Cecil, And you can go on our website and see her statement, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
make an agreement with the social media sites that if we label their information misinformation, the social media sites will deplatform 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,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, you know, journalism in a democracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I would say protection of the environment and the commons, the air, the water, wildlife, fisheries, public lands. Those assets, they cannot be reduced to private property ownership. The landscapes, our Purple Mountain Majesty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
the protection of the most vulnerable people in our society, people who, which would include children and minorities, the restoration of the middle class, you know, and protection of labor, dignity, and, you know, decent pay for labor, bodily autonomy, a woman's right to choose or an individual's right to endure unwanted medical procedures. Peace.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
You know, 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 could use fear to disable critical thinking and overwhelm the desire for personal liberty. The freedom of government from untoward influence by corrupt corporate power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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. against the emergence of the military industrial complex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And then I prefer to talk about kind of the positive vision of what we should be doing in our country and globally, which is, you know, I see that the corporations are commoditizing us, are poisoning our children, are, um, strip mining the wealth from our middle class. And, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
America as if it were a business in 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 poverty below the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, which it was when my uncle was president, and as a purveyor of peace rather than a war-like nation. My uncle said he didn't want people in Africa and Latin America and Asia to think of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 soldiers abroad. He never sent a single soldier to his death abroad into combat. He sent 16,000. He resisted in Berlin in 62. He resisted in Laos in 61. He resisted in In Vietnam, they wanted him to put 250,000 troops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, he ordered them all home. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 going to 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 1963.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Today, my uncle really focused on putting America on the side of the poor instead of our tradition of fortifying oligarchies that were anti-communism. That was our major criteria. If you said you were against communism, of course the people were. We're the rich people. Our aid was going to the rich people in those countries, and they were going to the military to hunt us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Our weapons were going to 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 sort of our first contact with – our first serious and sustained contact –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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. But his second favorite trip was when he went to Colombia. He went to Latin America, but Colombia was his favorite country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And I think there were two million people came into Bogota to see him, this vast crowd, and they were just delirious, cheering for him. And the president of Colombia, Jerez 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,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
There are more avenues and boulevards and hospitals and schools and statues named after and commemorating in parks, commemorating John Kennedy in Africa and Latin America than any other president in the United States, and probably more than all the other presidents combined. And it's because he put America on the side of the poor, and that's what we ought to be doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
We ought to be projecting economic power abroad The Chinese have essentially stolen his playbook. And 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 killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Iraq today is 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. It's now become essentially a proxy for Iran, which is exactly the outcome that we were trying to prevent for the past 20 or 30 years. We created ISIS. We sent 2 million refugees into Europe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
destabilizing all of the nations in Europe for generations. And we're now seeing these riots in France, and that's a direct result from the Syrian war that we created and our creation of ISIS. Brexit is another result of that. So for $8 trillion, we wrecked the world. And during that same period that we spent $8.1 trillion, bombing bridges, ports, schools, hospitals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
The Chinese spent $8.1 trillion building schools, ports, hospitals, bridges, and universities. And now the Chinese are out-competing us everywhere in the world. Everybody wants to deal with the Chinese because they come in, they build nice things for you, and there's no strings attached, and they're pleasant to deal with. And as a result of that, Brazil is switching to the Chinese currency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Argentina is switching. Saudi Arabia, our greatest partner, we put trillions of dollars into protecting our oil pipelines there, and now they're saying, we don't care what the United States thinks. That's what Mohammed bin Salim said. He said, we don't... He dropped... oil production in Saudi Arabia in the middle of a US inflation spiral.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 be a bulwark against for 20 years. And two weeks after that, he said, we don't care what the United States thinks anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
With the European culture and continent was in 1608 when John Winthrop came over with his Puritans in the Sloop Arbella and Winthrop gave this famous speech where he said, this is going to be a city on a hill. This is going to be an example for Europe. all the other nations in the world. And he warned his fellow Puritans. They were sitting at this great expanse of land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Well, you know, Jordan's trying to get me to badmouth 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. And I just don't, you know, that's not what my campaign is about. I want to do the opposite. I'm not going to badmouth the left.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I was on a show this week with David Remnick from The New Yorker, and he tried to get me to badmouth Donald Trump and Alex Jones and a lot of other people, and baiting me to do it. And of course, there's a lot of bad things I could say about all those people, but I'm trying to find values that hold us together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
You know, I don't want to sit here and speak uncharitably by saying the guy... didn't do anything, but I can't think of anything. I mean, if you tell me something that you think he did, maybe there was a drug that got licensed while he was at NIH that benefited people, that's certainly possible. He was there for 50 years. In terms of his principal programs of the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
AIDS programs and his COVID programs. And I think that the harm that he did vastly outweighed the benefits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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. And every factual assertion in that book is... cited in source to government databases or peer-reviewed publications. And I try not to speculate about things that I don't know about or I can't prove.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And 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 do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
have an almost infinite capacity to convince ourselves that what we're doing is right. Not everybody kind of lives an examined life, that the world might experience their professions of goodness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
But, you know, people listening to this, you know, probably, you know, in hearing me say that will think that I'm bitter or that I'm doctrinaire about him. But, you know, you should really go and read my book. And it's hard to summarize a, you know, I tried to be really methodical and not call names, to just say what happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, you know, 200 years later, 250 years later, They are a different generation. They're mainly deists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Well, the problem could be fixed through regulation, you know, the problems, but the pharmaceutical industry is, is I mean, I don't want to say, because this is going to seem extreme, that a criminal enterprise, but if you look at the history, that is an applicable characterization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
For example, the four biggest vaccine makers, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer, and Glaxo, four companies that make all of the 72 vaccines that are now 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And the problem is that they're serial felons. They do this again and again and again. So They did Vioxx, you know, Merck did Vioxx, which Vioxx, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And they knew, you know, we found when we sued them, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
But then they went right back that same year that they paid that penalty. They went back and did 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, I mean, look, these are the companies that gave us the opioid epidemic, right? So They knew what was going to happen. And you go and see, there's a documentary, I forget what the name of it is, but it shows exactly what happened. And they corrupted FDA.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 so far, they led this year. They got a whole generation addicted to oxycodone, and now when they got caught, we made it harder to get oxycodone, and now all those addicted kids are going to fentanyl and dying. And this year, it killed 106,000 kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 a criminal enterprise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Of course it is. How? Through a solid regulatory regimen where drugs are actually tested. I mean, the problem is... Not the capitalist system. The capitalist system, I have great admiration for the thing that love the capitalist system. It's the greatest economic engine ever devised. But it has to be harnessed to a social purpose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Otherwise, it leads us down the trail of oligarchy, environmental destruction, and commoditizing capitalism. 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 today, has created this system of regulatory capture on steroids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So almost 50% of FDA's budget comes from pharmaceutical companies. The people who work at FDA, their money is coming, their salaries are coming from pharma, half their salaries. They know who their bosses are, and that means getting those drugs done, getting them out the door and approved as quickly as possible. It's called fast-track approval, and they pay 50% of FDA's budget.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
About 45% actually goes to fast-track approval.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Oh, yeah, of course it can. That's not something that is controversial, of course. It will...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I'm talking about population-wide. I'm not talking about the individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
They're people who had a belief in God, but not so much a love of particularly religious cosmologies. You know, the Ephraimers, the Constitution... believe that we were creating something that would be replicated around the world and that it was an example. In democracy, there would be this kind of wisdom from the collective. And the word wisdom means a knowledge of God's will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And I think probably that's why they go in there. But scientists are corruptible. And 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 we sued Monsanto, on the Monsanto side, there was a Yale scientist, a Stanford scientist, and a Harvard scientist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And on our side, there was a Yale, Stanford, and Harvard scientist, and they were 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 I've been dealing with them my whole career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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. We find a way of reconciling ourselves to truths and worldviews actually benefit our salaries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Now, 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 and said, today it's just an incubator for pharmaceutical drugs. And the That is that gravity of economic self-interest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Because if NIH itself collects royalties, they have margin rights for the patents on all the drugs that they work on. So with the Moderna vaccine, which they promoted incessantly and aggressively— NIH on 50% of that vaccine is making billions and billions of dollars on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And there are at least four scientists that we know of, and probably at least six at NIH who themselves have margin rights for those patents. So if you are a scientist who work at NIH, you work on a new drug, You then get margin rights and you're entitled to royalties of $150,000 a year forever from that, forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Your children, your children's children, as long as that product's on the market, you can collect royalties. So you have, you know, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And, you know, you have to expect that in those kind of situations, the regulatory function would be subsumed beneath the mercantile ambitions of the agency itself and the individuals who stand to profit enormously from getting a drug to market. Those guys are paid by us, the taxpayer, to find problems with those drugs before they get to market.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
But if you know that drug is going to pay for your mortgage, you may overlook a little problem, or even a very big one. And that's the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Yeah, here's the problem. The polio vaccine contained a virus called semivirus 40, SV40. It's one of the most carcinogenic materials that is 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
of soft tissue cancers in our generation that kill many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did. So if you say to me, did the 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 ever? I would say, I don't know, because we don't have the data on that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
that Wyeth, which was the manufacturer, said to the Reagan administration, we are now paying $20 in downstream liabilities for every dollar that we're making in profits, and we are getting out of the business unless you give us permanent immunity from liability. So the vaccine companies then were given, and by the way, Reagan said at that time, why don't you just make the vaccine safe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And that somehow God would speak through the collective in a way that... 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And why is that? Because vaccines are inherently unsafe. They said unavoidably unsafe. You cannot make them safe. And so when Reagan wrote the bill and passed it, the bill says in its preambles, because vaccines are unavoidably unsafe. And the Brucewitz case, which was a Supreme Court case that upheld that bill, uses that same language. Vaccines cannot be made safe. They're unavoidably unsafe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So this is what the law says. Now, I just want to finish this story because this illustrates very well your question. The DDP 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And they went to West Africa and they looked at the DPV 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
They found that the vaccine was perfect. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
They were dying of anemia, bilharzia, malaria, sepsis, and mainly pulmonary and respiratory disease, pneumonia. And it turns out this is what the researchers found, who were all pro-vaccine, by the way. They said that this vaccine is killing more children and diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis prior to the introduction of the vaccine. And for 30 years, nobody ever noticed it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So for every other medicine, in order to get approval from the FDA, you have to do a placebo-controlled trial prior to licensor, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
The only medical intervention that does not receive, that does not undergo placebo-controlled trials prior to lysis 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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-licenser placebo control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And I know my family, when my family came over, all of my grandparents came over in 1848 during the potato famine, And they saw this country as unique in history, as something that was part of kind of a broader spiritual mission. And so I'd say that from a 30,000-foot level, I grew up so proud of this country and believing that it was the greatest country in the world and for those reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 that one now, but I'll send you one. I said, just for any vaccine, send me one, for any of the 72 vaccines. He never did. So we sued the HHS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 CHD, if, if, HHS had any study.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I assume they would have given it to us, and they can't find one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And people should. Because Paul Offit published a sub-stack 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Again, I'm not going to look into his head, but what I will say is if you're a scientist and you're making public recommendations based upon what you say is evidence-based science, you ought to be able to defend that. You ought to be able to defend it in a public forum, and you ought to be able to defend it against, you know, all comers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And, you know, so, you know, if you're a scientist, science is based on, is rooted in logic and reason. And if you can't use logic and reason to defend your position, and by the way, I know almost all of the studies. You know, I've written books on them, and We've made a big effort to assemble all the studies on both sides.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And so I'm prepared to talk about those studies, and I'm prepared to submit them in advance 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 earlier, several years ago with a referee at that time. And we were debating not only by phone, but by email.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 vaccines, mercury-based vaccines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 blame him for not debating me because I don't think he has the science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Yeah, there are many times over time that I, you know, I found that I've made mistakes and we correct those mistakes. You know, I run a big organization and I do a lot of tweets. You know, I'm very careful. For example, my Instagram, I was taken down for misinformation, but there was no misinformation on my Instagram ad. source to a government database or to peer-reviewed science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 PubMed and we watch the peer-reviewed publications and we summarize them when they come out. We have made mistakes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
When we make a mistake, 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. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And people say to me, oh, that's weird. I've never seen anybody apologize on Twitter, but I think it's really important. Of course, human beings make mistakes. My book is 230,000 or 40,000 or 50,000 words. There's going to be a mistake in there. But 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And if somebody points out a mistake, I'm going to change it. I'm not going to dig my feet in and say, I'm not going to acknowledge this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 and 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
First of all, yeah, I don't consider myself a martyr, and I've never considered myself a victim. I make choices about my life, and I'm content with those choices and peaceful with them. I'm not trying to be a martyr or a hero or anything else. I'm doing what I think is right because I want to be peaceful inside of myself. But the only guard I have is fact-based reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
If you show me a scientific study that shows that I'm wrong, for example, if you come back and say, look, Bobby, here's a polio, here's a safety study on polio that was done pre-licensure and used a real salient solution. I'm going to put that on my Twitter and I'm going to say I was wrong. There is one out there. So, you know, but that's all I can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I do intermittent fasting. So I eat between, I start at my first meal around noon, and then I try to stop eating at six or seven. Mm-hmm. 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 I go hike. And I hike uphill for a mile and a half up and a mile and a half down with my dogs. And I do my meditations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And then I go to the gym. And I go to the gym for 35 minutes. I do it short time. I've been exercising for 50 years. And what I found is it's sustainable if I do just 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 could tell you what my routine is, but I do backs one day, back just one day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 take a lot of vitamins. I can't even list them 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 my body produced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I talk to a lot of doctors about that stuff, you know, because I'm interested in health. And, you know, I've heard really good things about it, but I don't know. I'm definitely not an expert on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Well, I mean, God is incomprehensible. You know, I mean, I guess most philosophers would say we're, you know, we're inside the mind of God. And so it would be impossible for us to understand, you know, what actually, you know, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So we went to church in the summer, oftentimes twice a day, morning mass. And we definitely went to And we prayed in the morning. We prayed before and after every meal. We prayed at night. We said a rosary, sometimes three rosaries a night. And my father read us the Bible whenever he was home. He would read us. We'd all get in the bed, and he'd read us the Bible stories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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... 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, um, And when you're living against conscience, you kind of push God to the peripheries of your life. I'll call me he. It recedes and gets smaller. And then when I got sober, I knew that. I had a couple of experiences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 Mooney. So he became a follower of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And he, at that point, his compulsion, he had the same kind of compulsion that I had, and yet it was completely removed from him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And he used to come and hang out with us, but he would not want to take drugs, even if I was taking them right in front of him. He was immune to it. He'd become impervious to that impulse. And when I first got sober, I was...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And I think, you know, he... 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 we can't live off the laurels of the American Revolution. We had a generation where between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans died.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I knew that I did not want to be the kind of person who was, you know, waking up every day in white-knuckling sobriety and just, you know, 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 desserts the next year for Lent, and I never
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, incomprehensible. I could not understand why I couldn't just say no and then never do it again like I did with everything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And so I was living against conscience. And I thought about this guy. And reflecting my own prejudices at that time in my life, I said to myself, I didn't want to be like a drug addict who was wanting a drug all the time and just not being able to do it. I wanted to completely realign my prejudice. myself, so that I was somebody who got up every day and just didn't want to take drugs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 met a very, very dissolute youth. And, you know, I had this spiritual realignment transformation. I knew the same thing had happened to St.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And I used to think about him, and I would think this, again, reflects the bias and probably the meanness of myself at that time. But I said, I'd rather be dead than be a Mooney. But I wish I somehow could distill that power that he got without becoming a religious nuisance. And at that time, I picked up a book by Carl Jung called Synchronicity. And Jung, he was a psychiatrist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
He was a contemporary of Freud's. 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 from when he was a little boy, from when he was three years old, that he remembers. His biography is fascinating about him because he remembers them with such detail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And he was interesting to me because he was a very faithful scientist, and I considered 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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... And while he was talking to her, he heard this bing, bing, bing on the window behind him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 that began trying to chip away at them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And he didn't want to turn around to take his attention off her, but finally he does it. In exasperation, 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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 a It's an incident, a coincidence. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, you know, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, laws of mathematics, that he would have proved 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And for me, hearing that was more impactful than if he had claimed that he had proved the existence of 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And if believing in God was going to help me, whether there's a God up there or not, believing in one itself had the power to help me, I was going to do that. So then the question is, how do you start believing in something that you can't see or smell or hear or touch or taste or acquire with your senses? And Jung provides the formula for that. And he says, act as if.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
You fake it till you make it. And so that's, you know, what I started doing. I just started pretending there was a God watching me all the time. And kind of life was a series of tests. And there was a bunch of moral decisions that I had to make every day. And each one, you know, these were all just little things that I did. But each one now for me had a moral dimension. Like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
in bed for an extra 10 minutes with my indolent thoughts or do i jump right out of bed do i do i make my bed most important decision of the day do i hang up the towels you know do i um Do I, when I go into the closet and pull out my blue jeans and a bunch of those wire hangers fall on the ground, do I shut the door and say, I'm too important to do that, that's somebody else's job or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, to my God.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And that happens in every generation, and it is the obligation of every generation to safeguard and protect those freedoms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And when I do those things right, when I, you know, so much about addiction is about abuse of power, abuse of power. all of us have some power, whether it's, you know, good looks or whether it's, you know, connections or education or family or whatever. And there's always a temptation to use those to fulfill self-will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And the challenge is how do you use those always to serve instead God's will and, you know, the good of our community. And that to me, is kind of the struggle. And when I do that, I feel God's power coming through me and that I can do things. I'm much more effective as a human being. That gnawing, you know, anxiety that I lived with for so many years and my God, it's gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And that I can kind of like put down the oars and hoist the sail and, you know, and the wind takes me and I can see the evidence of it in my life. And the big 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
How do I stay surrendered then when my inclination is to say to God, thanks, God, I got it from here, and drive the car off the cliff again? 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 had been able to walk on water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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, you know, so I saw that evidence, early evidence of God in my life and of the power of And I see it now, you know, every day of my life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
It's the battle to just do the right thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Thank you, Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
That the only way that we can kind of get back the gods for giving us this, you know, 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... You know, I read Camus, particularly in the Myth of Sisyphus, as a parable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
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.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mysterious "Drones" Spread, Media Malpractice, and How Medical Journals Became Captured, with Hugh Hewitt and Dr. Aseem Malhotra | Ep. 964
They are presenting themselves to medical professionals as an arbiter of truth and as a neutral referee and a reliable referee of the truth. And they know that those medical professionals are relying on journal articles to treat patients. And that if they tell a lie, if they're committing fraud, that they can injure and kill people.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Mysterious "Drones" Spread, Media Malpractice, and How Medical Journals Became Captured, with Hugh Hewitt and Dr. Aseem Malhotra | Ep. 964
So, you know, I believe they can be prosecuted and not only can they be prosecuted for those injuries, but they can be prosecuted on the racketeering statutes or promoting fraud. So I will, I'm going to do that as soon as I get in there.