Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning

00:00:00.000 | It's not our business to change the Russian government.

00:00:03.680 | And anybody who thinks it's a good idea to do regime change in Russia, which has more

00:00:08.240 | nuclear weapons than we do, is, I think, irresponsible.

00:00:14.560 | And Vladimir Putin himself has said, "We will not live in a world without Russia."

00:00:21.120 | And it was clear when he said that that he was talking about himself.

00:00:26.800 | And he has his hand on a button that could bring, you know, Armageddon to the entire planet.

00:00:32.960 | So why are we messing with this?

00:00:34.800 | It's not our job to change that regime.

00:00:36.960 | And we should be making friends with the Russians.

00:00:40.720 | We shouldn't be treating them as an enemy.

00:00:42.480 | Now we've pushed them into the camp with China.

00:00:44.480 | That's not a good thing for our country.

00:00:47.360 | And by the way, you know, what we're doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all.

00:00:56.160 | The following is a conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,

00:00:59.840 | candidate for the President of the United States, running as a Democrat.

00:01:04.240 | Robert is an activist, lawyer, and author who has challenged some of the world's most

00:01:08.800 | powerful corporations, seeking to hold them accountable for the harm they may cause.

00:01:13.040 | I love science and engineering.

00:01:16.320 | These two pursuits are, to me, the most beautiful and powerful in the history of human civilization.

00:01:22.480 | Science is our journey, our fight for uncovering the laws of nature and leveraging them to

00:01:28.960 | understand the universe and to lessen the amount of suffering in the world.

00:01:32.560 | Some of the greatest human beings I've ever met, including most of my good friends,

00:01:38.400 | are scientists and engineers.

00:01:40.240 | Again, I love science.

00:01:42.800 | But science cannot flourish without epistemic humility, without debate,

00:01:48.800 | both in the pages of academic journals and in the public square,

00:01:52.560 | in good faith, long-form conversations.

00:01:55.680 | Agree or disagree, I believe Robert's voice should be part of the debate.

00:02:00.320 | To call him a conspiracy theorist and arrogantly dismiss everything he says

00:02:05.760 | without addressing it diminishes the public's trust in the scientific process.

00:02:10.320 | At the same time, dogmatic skepticism of all scientific output on controversial

00:02:16.320 | topics like the pandemic is equally, if not more, dishonest and destructive.

00:02:21.360 | I recommend that people read and listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his arguments and his ideas.

00:02:28.480 | But I also recommend, as I say in this conversation, that people read and listen to

00:02:34.320 | Vincent Recaniello from This Week in Virology, Dan Wilson from Debunk the Funk,

00:02:39.920 | and the Twitter and books of Paul Offit, Eric Topol, and others who are outspoken

00:02:47.440 | in their disagreement with Robert.

00:02:49.120 | It is disagreement, not conformity, that bends the long arc of humanity toward truth and wisdom.

00:02:56.560 | In this process of disagreement, everybody has a lesson to teach you,

00:03:01.680 | but we must have the humility to hear it and to learn from it.

00:03:08.160 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:03:10.000 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:03:13.120 | And now, dear friends, here's Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

00:03:17.200 | It's the Fourth of July, Independence Day, so simple question, simple big question.

00:03:23.280 | What do you love about this country, the United States of America?

00:03:26.800 | I would say, well, there's so many things that I love about the country.

00:03:30.320 | You know, the landscapes and the waterways and the people, etc., but on the kind of a,

00:03:37.760 | you know, the higher level, you know, people argue about whether we're an exemplary nation.

00:03:42.480 | And that term has been given a bad name, particularly by the neocons, the actions,

00:03:50.880 | the neocons in recent decades who have turned that phrase into kind of a justification

00:04:00.080 | for forcing people to adopt American systems or values at the barrel of a gun.

00:04:07.440 | But my father and uncle used it in a very different way, and they were very proud of it.

00:04:11.520 | I grew up very proud of this country because we were the exemplary nation in the sense that we

00:04:18.080 | were an example of democracy all over the world.

00:04:21.600 | When we first launched our democracy in 1780, we were the only democracy on earth.

00:04:29.200 | And by the Civil War, by 1865, there were six democracies.

00:04:35.360 | Today, there's probably 190.

00:04:38.000 | And all of them, in one way or another, are modeled on the American experience.

00:04:44.080 | And it's kind of extraordinary because sort of our first contact with, our first serious and

00:04:51.440 | sustained contact with the European culture and continent was in 1608 when John Winthrop

00:05:01.120 | came over with his Puritans in the Slough Barbella, and Winthrop gave this famous speech

00:05:06.800 | where he said, "This is going to be a city on a hill.

00:05:10.320 | This is going to be an example for all the other nations in the world."

00:05:14.800 | And he warned his fellow Puritans.

00:05:17.680 | They were sitting at this great expanse of land, and he said, "We can't be seduced by

00:05:30.320 | the lure of real estate or by the carnal opportunities of this land.

00:05:34.560 | We have to take this country as a gift from God and then turn it into an example

00:05:42.480 | for the rest of the world of God's love, of God's will and wisdom."

00:05:50.400 | And then 200 years later, 250 years later, a different generation, they were mainly deists,

00:05:59.840 | or people who had a belief in God, but not so much a love of particularly religious cosmologies.

00:06:12.320 | You know, the framers of the Constitution believed that we were creating something that would be

00:06:20.240 | replicated around the world, and that it was an example.

00:06:24.480 | In democracy, there would be this kind of wisdom from the collective, you know,

00:06:30.560 | that—and the word "wisdom" means a knowledge of God's will—and that somehow God would speak

00:06:36.800 | through the collective in a way that he or she could not speak through totalitarian regimes.

00:06:45.360 | And, you know, I think that that's something that even though

00:06:52.480 | Winthrop was a white man and a Protestant, that every immigrant group who came after them

00:06:58.800 | kind of adopted that belief.

00:07:00.960 | And I know my family, when, you know, art from my family came over, all of my grandparents came

00:07:05.600 | over in 1848 during the Potato Famine, and they saw this country as unique in history, as something

00:07:12.720 | that, you know, that was part of kind of a broader spiritual mission.

00:07:19.760 | And so I'd say that from a 30,000-foot level, you know, that's—I grew up so proud of this country

00:07:30.320 | and believing that it was the greatest country in the world, and for those reasons.

00:07:33.760 | - Well, I immigrated to this country, and one of the things that really embodies America to me

00:07:39.680 | is the ideal of freedom.

00:07:41.760 | Hunter Thompson said, "Freedom is something that dies unless it's used."

00:07:45.440 | What does freedom mean to you?

00:07:47.440 | - To me, freedom does not mean, you know, chaos, and it does not mean anarchy.

00:07:53.120 | It means that it has to be accompanied by restraint if it's going to live up to its promise

00:08:01.840 | and self-restraint.

00:08:04.000 | What it means is the capacity for human beings to exercise and to fulfill their creative energies

00:08:17.520 | unrestrained as much as possible by government.

00:08:20.400 | - So this point that Hunter S. Thompson made is "dies unless it's used."

00:08:24.640 | Do you agree with that?

00:08:26.160 | - Yeah, I do agree with that.

00:08:27.920 | And I think, you know, he was not unique in saying that.

00:08:32.720 | You know, Thomas Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty had to be watered with the blood

00:08:38.080 | of each generation, and what he meant by that is that you can't live off—we can't live off

00:08:45.200 | the laurels of the American Revolution.

00:08:47.120 | That, you know, we had a group, we had a generation where between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans died.

00:08:54.640 | They gave their lives, they gave their livelihoods, they gave their status, they gave their

00:09:00.560 | property, and they put it all on the line to give us our Bill of Rights.

00:09:04.720 | And that—but those Bill of Rights, the moment that we signed them, there were forces within

00:09:11.120 | our society that began trying to chip away at them.

00:09:16.080 | And that, you know, happens in every generation, and it is the obligation of every generation

00:09:22.560 | to safeguard and protect those freedoms.

00:09:25.680 | - The blood of each generation.

00:09:28.000 | You mentioned your interest, your admiration of Albert Camus, of Stoicism, perhaps your

00:09:34.080 | interest in existentialism.

00:09:36.400 | Camus said, I believe in myth of Sisyphus, "The only way to deal with an unfree world

00:09:42.160 | is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

00:09:47.040 | What do you think he means by that?

00:09:48.240 | - I suppose the way that Camus viewed the world and the way that the Stoics did and

00:09:55.920 | a lot of the existentialists was that it was so absurd and that the problems and the tasks

00:10:05.200 | that were given just to live a life are so insurmountable that the only way that we can

00:10:11.040 | kind of get back the gods for giving us this, you know, this impossible task of living life

00:10:21.520 | was to embrace it and to enjoy it and to do our best at it.

00:10:27.120 | I mean, to me, I, you know, I read Camus and particularly the myth of Sisyphus as a, as

00:10:34.800 | kind of a, as a parable that, and it's the same lesson that I think he writes about in

00:10:42.080 | "The Plague" where we're all given these insurmountable tasks in our lives, but that

00:10:50.000 | by doing our duty, by being of service to others, we can bring meaning to a meaningless

00:10:58.160 | chaos and we can bring order to the universe.

00:11:01.440 | And, you know, Sisyphus was kind of the iconic hero of the Stoics, and he was a man, because

00:11:10.560 | he did, because he did something good, he delivered a gift to humanity, he angered the

00:11:17.360 | gods and they condemned him to push a rock up the hill every day and then it would roll

00:11:22.640 | down, when he got to the top, it would roll down and he'd spend the night going back down

00:11:26.960 | the hill to collect it and then rolling it back up the hill again.

00:11:30.320 | And the task was absurd, it was insurmountable, he could never win, but the last line of that

00:11:36.560 | book is one of the great lines, which is, which is something to the extent that, you

00:11:42.160 | know, I can picture Sisyphus smiling, because Camus' belief was that even though he, his

00:11:50.480 | task was insurmountable, that he was a happy man, and he was a happy man because he put

00:11:55.600 | his shoulder to the stone, he took his duty, he embraced the task and the, you know, and

00:12:02.960 | the absurdity of life and he pushed the stone up the hill.

00:12:07.920 | And that if we do that, and if, you know, we find ways of being of service to others,

00:12:13.040 | that is, you know, the ultimate, that's the key to the lock, that's the solution to the

00:12:19.280 | puzzle.

00:12:19.840 | Each individual person in that way can rebel against absurdity by discovering meaning to

00:12:25.600 | this whole messy thing.

00:12:27.200 | And we can bring meaning not only to our own lives, but we can bring meaning to the universe

00:12:33.200 | as well, we can bring some kind of order to life, and, you know, that, those, the embrace

00:12:40.640 | of those tasks and the commitment to service resonates out from us to the rest of humanity

00:12:47.840 | in some way.

00:12:50.240 | - So you mentioned "The Plague" by Camus.

00:12:53.200 | There's a lot of different ways to read that book, but one of them, especially given how

00:12:57.680 | it was written, is that the plague symbolizes Nazi Germany and the Hitler regime.

00:13:06.880 | What do you learn about human nature from a figure like Adolf Hitler, that he's able

00:13:15.120 | to captivate the minds of millions, rise to power, and take on pulling the whole world

00:13:22.320 | into a global war?

00:13:23.280 | - I was born nine years after the end of World War II, and I grew up in a generation that

00:13:30.400 | was, you know, with my parents who were fixated on that, on, you know, what happened, and

00:13:37.360 | my father.

00:13:39.520 | At that time, the, you know, the kind of the resolution in the minds of most Americans,

00:13:44.960 | and I think people around the world, is that there was, there had been something wrong

00:13:49.920 | with the German people, that, you know, the Germans had been particularly susceptible

00:13:55.440 | to this kind of demagoguery and to following a powerful leader and to industrializing cruelty

00:14:04.960 | and murder.

00:14:09.360 | And my father always differed with that.

00:14:12.400 | My father said, "This is not a German problem.

00:14:15.200 | This could happen to all of us.

00:14:17.840 | We're all just inches away from barbarity, and the thing that keeps us safe in this country

00:14:23.360 | are the institutions of our democracy, our constitution.

00:14:26.640 | It's not our nature.

00:14:28.880 | Our nature has to be restrained, and that comes through self-restraint, but it also

00:14:40.240 | you know, the beauty of our country is that we develop, we devise these institutions that

00:14:45.440 | are designed to allow us to flourish, but at the same time not to give us enough freedom

00:14:53.040 | to flourish, but also create enough order to keep us from collapsing into barbarity.

00:15:00.400 | So, you know, one of the other things that my father talked about from when I was little,

00:15:06.880 | you know, he would ask us this question, "If you were the family and Anne Frank came

00:15:14.880 | to your door and asked you to hide her, would you be one of the people who hit her and risk

00:15:19.760 | your own life, or would you be one of the people who turned her in?"

00:15:23.360 | And of course, we would all say, "Well, of course, we would hide Anne Frank and take

00:15:28.720 | the risk."

00:15:30.560 | But, you know, that's been something, kind of a lesson, a challenge that has been, that

00:15:37.680 | has always been near the forefront of my mind, that if a totalitarian system ever occurs

00:15:44.400 | in the United States, which my father thought was quite possible, he was conscious about

00:15:49.440 | how fragile democracy actually is, that would I be one of the ones who would resist the

00:15:57.280 | totalitarianism, or would I be one of the people who went along with it?

00:16:02.800 | Would I be one of the people who was at the train station in, you know, Krakow, or, you

00:16:11.520 | know, even Berlin, and saw people being shipped off to camps, and just put my head down and

00:16:20.400 | pretend I didn't see it, because talking about it would be destructive to my career

00:16:26.160 | and maybe my freedom and even my life.

00:16:28.240 | So, you know, that has been a challenge that my father gave to me and all of my brothers

00:16:34.400 | and sisters, and it's something that I've never forgotten.

00:16:39.200 | >> A lot of us would like to believe we would resist in that situation, but the reality

00:16:46.160 | is most of us wouldn't, and that's a good thing to think about, that human nature is

00:16:51.840 | such that we're selfish, even when there's an atrocity going on all around us.

00:16:56.720 | >> And we also, you know, we have the capacity to deceive ourselves, and all of us tend to

00:17:02.960 | kind of judge ourselves by our intentions and our actions.

00:17:06.400 | >> What have you learned about life from your father, Robert F. Kennedy?

00:17:11.680 | >> First of all, I'll say this about my uncle, because, you know, I'm going to apply that

00:17:16.480 | question to my uncle and my father.

00:17:17.920 | My uncle was asked when he first met Jackie Bouvier, who later became Jackie Kennedy,

00:17:23.680 | she was a reporter for a newspaper, and she was doing, she had a kind of column where

00:17:30.400 | she'd do these kind of pithy interviews with both famous people and kind of men in the

00:17:39.600 | street interviews.

00:17:41.680 | And she was interviewing him, and she asked him what he thought, what he believed his

00:17:48.320 | best quality was, his strongest virtue, and she thought that he would say courage, because

00:17:53.520 | he had been a war hero.

00:17:56.400 | He was the only president who, and this is when he was senator, by the way, who received

00:18:03.680 | the Purple Heart, and, you know, he had a very kind of famous story of him as a hero

00:18:10.480 | in World War II, and then he had come home and he had written a book on moral courage

00:18:14.240 | among American politicians, and won the Pulitzer Prize.

00:18:17.040 | That book, "Profiles in Courage," which was a series of incidents where American

00:18:25.360 | political leaders made decisions to embrace principle, even though their careers were

00:18:32.800 | at stake, and in most cases were destroyed by their choice.

00:18:37.760 | She thought he was going to say courage, but he didn't.

00:18:40.320 | He said curiosity.

00:18:41.680 | And I think, you know, looking back at his life, that the best, that that, it was true,

00:18:49.200 | and that was the quality that allowed him to put himself in the shoes of his adversaries.

00:18:56.080 | And he always said that if you, if the only way that we're going to have peace is if

00:19:01.280 | we're able to put ourselves in the shoes of our adversaries, understand their behavior

00:19:06.160 | and their context, and that's why he was able to, you know, during the, he was able

00:19:16.400 | to resist the intelligence apparatus and the military during the Bay of Pigs when they

00:19:22.160 | said, "You've got to send in the S-6, the aircraft carrier," and he said no, even

00:19:26.400 | though he'd only been in two months in office, he was able to stand up to them because

00:19:33.280 | he was able to put himself in the shoes of both Castro and Khrushchev and understand

00:19:38.560 | there's got to be another solution to this.

00:19:40.480 | And then during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was able to, and the narrative was, okay,

00:19:47.840 | Khrushchev acted in a way as an aggressor to put missiles in our hemisphere.

00:19:54.960 | How dare he do that?

00:19:56.320 | And Jack and my father were able to say, "Well, wait a minute.

00:20:01.200 | He's doing that because we put missiles in Turkey and Italy that were right on, you

00:20:06.800 | know, the Turkish ones right on the Russian border."

00:20:08.960 | And they then made a secret deal with Dobrynin, with Ambassador Dobrynin and, you know, with

00:20:15.920 | Khrushchev to remove the missiles in Turkey, if he moved the Jupiter missiles from Turkey

00:20:27.760 | so long as Khrushchev removed them from Cuba.

00:20:31.760 | There were 13 men on the executive, on the end, what they call the ENCOD committee, which

00:20:38.160 | was the group of people who were deciding, you know, what the action was, what they were

00:20:42.960 | going to do to end the Cuban Missile Crisis.

00:20:45.360 | And virtually, and of those men, 11 of them wanted to invade and wanted to bomb and invade.

00:20:53.440 | And it was Jack and then later on my father and then Bob McNamara, who were the only people

00:21:00.080 | who were with him, because he was able to see the world from Khrushchev's point of

00:21:05.600 | view, he believed that there was another solution.

00:21:09.680 | And then he also had the moral courage.

00:21:11.680 | So my father, you know, to get back to your question, famously said that moral courage

00:21:20.240 | is the most important quality and it's more rare than courage on the football field

00:21:26.400 | or courage in battle than physical courage.

00:21:28.640 | It's much more difficult to come by, but it's the most important quality in a human

00:21:32.640 | being.

00:21:33.280 | And you think that kind of empathy that you referred to, that requires moral courage?

00:21:37.120 | It certainly requires moral courage to act on it, you know, and particularly, you know,

00:21:46.320 | in, you know, anytime that a nation is at war, there's kind of a momentum or an inertia

00:21:53.760 | that says, okay, let's not look at this from the other person's point of view.

00:21:57.520 | And that's the time we really need to do that.

00:22:02.400 | - Well, if you're going to apply that style of empathy, style of curiosity to the current

00:22:09.120 | war in Ukraine, what is your understanding of why Russia invaded Ukraine in February

00:22:14.720 | 2022?

00:22:15.360 | - Vladimir Putin could have avoided the war in the Ukraine.

00:22:19.440 | His invasion was illegal.

00:22:22.080 | It was unnecessary and it was brutal.

00:22:24.560 | But I think it's important for us to move beyond these kind of comic book depictions

00:22:36.320 | of this insane, avaricious Russian leader who wants to restore the Soviet empire.

00:22:46.000 | And that that's why, and it was, and who made it an un-provoked invasion of the Ukraine.

00:22:54.800 | He was provoked and we were provoking him, and we were provoking him for, since 1997.

00:23:03.040 | And it's not just me that's saying that.

00:23:04.880 | I mean, when, and before Putin ever came in, we were provoking Russians in this way unnecessarily.

00:23:13.840 | And to go back to that time in 1992, when the Russians moved out of, when the Soviet

00:23:20.240 | Union was collapsing, the Russians moved out of East Germany and they did that, which was

00:23:26.480 | a huge concession to them.

00:23:27.600 | They had 400,000 troops in East Germany at that time, and they were facing NATO troops

00:23:31.840 | on the other side of the wall.

00:23:32.960 | So Gorbachev made this huge concession where he said to George Bush, "I'm going to

00:23:39.840 | move all of our troops out and you can then reunify Germany under NATO," which was a

00:23:44.880 | hostile army to the, to the Soviet, it was created to, you know, with hostile intent

00:23:51.360 | toward the Soviet Union.

00:23:52.560 | And he said, "You can take Germany, but I want your promise that you will not move

00:23:58.080 | NATO to the East."

00:23:59.040 | And James Baker, who was his Secretary of State, famously said, "I will not move

00:24:04.240 | NATO, we will not move NATO one inch to the East."

00:24:07.440 | So then five years later in 1997, this is a big Nobrizinski, who was kind of the father

00:24:13.760 | of the neocons, who was a Democrat at that time, served in the Carter administration.

00:24:21.600 | He said, he published a paper, a blueprint for moving NATO right up to the Russian

00:24:28.800 | border, a thousand miles to the East, and taking over 14 nations.

00:24:34.880 | And at that time, George Kennan, who was the, kind of the deity of American diplomats, he

00:24:42.240 | was probably, arguably, arguably the most important diplomat in American history.

00:24:48.080 | He was the architect of the containment policy during World War II.

00:24:52.560 | And he said, "This is insane, and it's unnecessary.

00:24:57.440 | And if you do this, it's going to provoke the Soviet, I mean, the Russians to a violent

00:25:03.280 | response.

00:25:04.080 | And we should be making friends with the Russians.

00:25:06.080 | They lost the Cold War.

00:25:07.360 | We should be treating them the way that we treated our adversaries after World War II,

00:25:12.720 | like with a Marshall Plan to try to help them incorporate into Europe and to be part of

00:25:17.280 | the brotherhood of, you know, of man and of Western nations.

00:25:20.800 | We shouldn't continue to be treating them as an enemy, and particularly surrounding

00:25:24.640 | them at their borders."

00:25:25.520 | William Perry, who was then the Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton, threatened

00:25:33.360 | to resign.

00:25:34.160 | He was so upset by this plan to move NATO to the East.

00:25:37.120 | And William Burns, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who's now,

00:25:42.720 | at this moment, the head of the CIA, said at that time the same thing.

00:25:47.680 | "If you do this, it is going to provoke the Russians toward a military response."

00:25:52.240 | And we moved it.

00:25:55.680 | We moved all around Russia.

00:25:57.280 | We moved to 14 nations, 1,000 miles to the East, and we put Aegis missile systems in

00:26:03.200 | two nations, in Romania and Poland.

00:26:04.880 | So we did what, you know, what the Russians had done to us in 1962 that would have provoked

00:26:11.680 | an invasion of Cuba.

00:26:13.840 | We put those missile systems back there, and then we walk away unilaterally, walk away

00:26:19.120 | from the two nuclear missile treaties, the intermediate nuclear missile treaties that

00:26:23.760 | we had with the Soviet Union, with Russia, when neither of us would put those missile

00:26:29.200 | systems on the borders.

00:26:30.240 | We walk away from that, and we put Aegis missile systems, which are nuclear-capable.

00:26:35.280 | They can carry the Tomahawk missiles, which have nuclear warheads.

00:26:39.360 | So the last country that they didn't take was the Ukraine, and the Russians said, and

00:26:45.360 | in fact Bill Perry said this, or William Byrne said it, so now the head of the CIA, "It

00:26:51.760 | is a red line.

00:26:53.200 | If we go into, if we bring NATO into Ukraine, that is a red line for the Russians.

00:26:57.600 | They cannot live with it.

00:26:59.200 | They cannot live with it.

00:27:00.400 | Russia has been invaded three times through the Ukraine.

00:27:04.800 | The last time it was invaded, we killed, or the Germans killed one out of every seven

00:27:09.120 | Russians.

00:27:09.600 | They destroyed my uncle described what happened to Russia in his famous American University

00:27:16.800 | speech in 1963, 60 years ago this month, or he said, or last month, 60 years ago in June,

00:27:26.400 | June 10th, 1963.

00:27:28.000 | He told, that speech was telling the American people, "Put yourself in the shoes of the

00:27:33.600 | Russians."

00:27:35.040 | We need to do that if we're going to make peace.

00:27:37.680 | And he said, "All of us have been taught that we won the war, but we didn't win the

00:27:43.200 | war.

00:27:43.520 | The Russians, if anybody won the war against Hitler, it was the Russians.

00:27:47.120 | Their country was destroyed.

00:27:49.520 | All of their cities," and he said, "Imagine if all of the cities on the east coast of

00:27:56.960 | Chicago were reduced to rubble, and all of the fields burned, all of the forests burned.

00:28:02.080 | That's what happened to Russia.

00:28:03.840 | That's what they gave so that we could get rid of Adolf Hitler."

00:28:07.600 | And he had them put themselves in their position.

00:28:11.200 | And today, there's none of that happening.

00:28:13.360 | We have refused repeatedly to talk to the Russians.

00:28:17.280 | We've broken up, there's two treaties, the Minsk Agreements, which the Russians were

00:28:22.640 | willing to sign, and they said, "We will stay out."

00:28:25.440 | The Russians didn't want the Ukraine.

00:28:27.360 | They showed that when the Donbas region voted 90 to 10 to leave and go to Russia, Putin

00:28:36.080 | said, "No, we want Ukraine to stay intact, but we want you to sign the Minsk Accords."

00:28:41.680 | The Russians were very worried because of the U.S. involvement in the coup in Ukraine

00:28:48.960 | in 2014.

00:28:51.600 | And then the oppression and the killing of 14,000 ethnic Russians.

00:28:58.000 | And Russia hasn't met the same way that if Mexico put Aegis missile systems from China

00:29:05.920 | or Russia on our border and then killed 14,000 expats American, we would go in there.

00:29:12.240 | He does have a national security interest in the Ukraine.

00:29:18.800 | He has an interest in protecting the Russian-speaking people of the Ukraine, the ethnic Russians.

00:29:24.960 | And the Minsk Accords did that.

00:29:27.520 | It left Ukraine as part of Russia.

00:29:29.600 | It left them as a semi-autonomous region that could continue to use their own language,

00:29:34.880 | which is essentially banned by the coup, by the government we put in in 2014.

00:29:39.600 | And we sabotaged that agreement.

00:29:45.040 | And we now know in April of 2022, Zelensky and Putin had inked a deal already to another

00:29:53.840 | peace agreement, and that the United States sent Boris Johnson, the neocons in the White

00:29:59.280 | House, sent Boris Johnson over to the Ukraine to sabotage that agreement.

00:30:03.520 | So what do I think?

00:30:06.000 | I think this is a proxy war.

00:30:07.520 | I think this is a war that the neocons in the White House wanted.

00:30:12.320 | They've said for two decades they wanted this war, and that they wanted to use Ukraine

00:30:18.640 | as a pawn in a proxy war between the United States and Russia, the same as we used Afghanistan.

00:30:24.880 | And in fact, they say it, this is the model.

00:30:28.240 | Let's use the Afghanistan model.

00:30:29.920 | That was said again and again, and to get the Russians to overextend their troops and

00:30:35.200 | then fight them using local fighters and U.S. weapons.

00:30:40.720 | And when President Biden was asked, why are we in the Ukraine, he was honest.

00:30:44.960 | He says to depose Vladimir Putin, regime change for Vladimir Putin.

00:30:49.360 | And when his defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022 was asked, you know, why are

00:30:56.080 | we there, he said to degrade the Russians' capacity to fight anywhere, to exhaust the

00:31:01.680 | Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight elsewhere in the world.

00:31:04.480 | That's not a humanitarian mission.

00:31:07.680 | That's not what we were told.

00:31:10.160 | We were told this was an unprovoked invasion, but, and that we're there to bring humanitarian

00:31:17.040 | relief to the Ukrainians.

00:31:18.480 | But that is the opposite.

00:31:19.920 | That is a war of attrition that is designed to chew up, to turn this little nation into

00:31:25.760 | an abattoir of death for the flower of Ukrainian youth in order to advance a geopolitical ambition

00:31:32.720 | of certain people within the White House.

00:31:34.880 | And, you know, I think that's wrong.

00:31:38.800 | We should be talking to the Russians the way that, you know, Nixon talked to Brezhnev,

00:31:43.120 | the way that Bush talked to Gorbachev, the way that my uncle talked to Khrushchev.

00:31:49.440 | We need to be talking with the Russians, we should, and negotiating.

00:31:53.920 | And we need to be looking about how do we end this and preserve peace in Europe.

00:31:58.080 | - Would you, as president, sit down and have a conversation with Vladimir Putin

00:32:02.880 | and Vladimir Zelensky separately and together to negotiate peace?

00:32:07.440 | - Absolutely.

00:32:08.480 | - What about Vladimir Putin?

00:32:10.800 | He's been in power since 2000.

00:32:13.760 | So as the old adage goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

00:32:19.200 | Do you think he has been corrupted by being in power for so long?

00:32:24.720 | If you think of the man, if you look at his mind?

00:32:27.280 | - Listen, I don't know exactly.

00:32:30.080 | I can't say because I just, I don't know enough about him or about, you know,

00:32:37.280 | I, my, the evidence that I've seen is that he is homicidal.

00:32:44.400 | He kills his enemies or poisons them.

00:32:47.120 | And, you know, the reaction I've seen to that, to those accusations from him,

00:32:54.000 | have not been to deny that, but to kind of laugh it off.

00:32:57.360 | I think he's a dangerous man and that, of course, you know,

00:33:01.520 | there's probably corruption in his regime.

00:33:04.880 | But having said that, it's not our business to change the Russian government.

00:33:11.360 | And anybody who thinks it's a good idea to do regime change in Russia,

00:33:15.200 | which has more nuclear weapons than we do, is, I think, irresponsible.

00:33:22.320 | And, you know, Vladimir Putin himself has said, you know,

00:33:26.080 | we will not live in a world without Russia.

00:33:28.720 | And it was clear when he said that, that he was talking about himself.

00:33:33.680 | And he has his hand on a button that could bring, you know, Armageddon to the entire planet.

00:33:40.640 | So why are we messing with this?

00:33:42.480 | It's not our job to change that regime.

00:33:44.640 | And we should be making friends with the Russians.

00:33:48.400 | We shouldn't be treating them as an enemy.

00:33:50.160 | Now we've pushed them into the camp with China.

00:33:52.160 | That's not a good thing for our country.

00:33:54.960 | And by the way, you know, what we're doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all.

00:34:01.840 | Putin now, you know, if you believe the polls that are coming out of Russia,

00:34:07.520 | they show him, you know, the most recent polls that I've seen,

00:34:11.760 | show him with that 89% popularity that people in Russia support the war in Ukraine.

00:34:18.800 | And that, and they support him as an individual.

00:34:23.120 | So, and I understand there's problems with polling and, you know,

00:34:27.760 | you don't know what to believe, but the polls consistently show that.

00:34:32.080 | And, and I, you know, it's not America's business to be the policeman of the world

00:34:38.000 | and to be changing regimes in the world.

00:34:39.600 | That's illegal or not.

00:34:41.120 | We shouldn't be breaking international laws.

00:34:43.360 | You know, we should actually be looking for ways to improve relationships with Russia,

00:34:51.840 | not to, you know, not to destroy Russia, not to destroy and not to choose its leadership for them.

00:34:57.600 | That's up to the Russian people, not us.

00:34:59.920 | So step one is to sit down and empathize with the leaders of both nations to understand

00:35:05.360 | their history, their concerns, their hopes,

00:35:07.200 | just to open the door for conversation.

00:35:10.960 | So they're not back to the corner.

00:35:12.720 | And I think the U.S. can play a really important role.

00:35:17.520 | And a U.S. president can play a really important role by

00:35:20.960 | reassuring the Russians that we're not going to consider them an enemy anymore,

00:35:24.640 | that we want to be friends.

00:35:26.720 | And it doesn't mean that you have to let down your guard completely.

00:35:30.400 | The way that you do it, which was the way President Kennedy did it,

00:35:33.440 | is you do it one step at a time.

00:35:34.960 | You take baby steps.

00:35:36.080 | We do a unilateral move to reduce our, you know, our hostility and aggression

00:35:44.800 | and see if the Russians reciprocate.

00:35:47.120 | And that's the way that we should be doing it.

00:35:50.240 | And, you know, we should be easing our way into a positive relationship with Russia.

00:35:56.400 | We have a lot in common with Russia, and we should be friends with Russia

00:36:00.160 | and with the Russian people.

00:36:01.360 | And, you know, apparently there's been 350,000 Ukrainians

00:36:05.920 | who have died, at least, in this war.

00:36:09.440 | And there's probably been 60 or 80,000 Russians.

00:36:16.240 | And that should not give us any joy.

00:36:18.480 | It should not give us any, you know, I saw Lindsey Graham on TV saying,

00:36:24.960 | you know, anything we can, something to the extent that anything we can do to kill Russians

00:36:30.000 | is a good use of our money.

00:36:31.280 | That, it is not.

00:36:32.160 | You know, those are somebody's children.

00:36:36.240 | They're, you know, we should have compassion for them.

00:36:40.320 | This war is an unnecessary war.

00:36:43.120 | We should settle it through negotiation, through diplomacy, through statecraft,

00:36:47.360 | and not through weapons.

00:36:50.000 | Do you think this war can come to an end purely through military operations?

00:36:55.600 | No, I mean, I don't think there's any way in the world that the Ukrainians can beat the Russians.

00:37:00.080 | I don't think there's any appetite in Europe.

00:37:02.240 | I think Europe is now, you know, having severe problems in Germany, Italy, France.

00:37:08.560 | You're seeing these riots.

00:37:09.680 | There's internal problems in those countries.

00:37:11.680 | There is no appetite in Europe for sending men to die in Ukraine.

00:37:19.440 | And the Ukrainians do not have anybody left.

00:37:21.920 | The Ukrainians are using press gangs to, you know, to fill the ranks of their armies.

00:37:27.520 | Men, military-age men, are trying as hard as they can to get out of the Ukraine right now,

00:37:33.760 | to avoid going to the front.

00:37:35.120 | The front, you know, the Russians apparently have been killing Ukrainians at a seven to one ratio.

00:37:41.040 | My son fought over there, and he told me it's, you know, artillery.

00:37:45.920 | He had firefights with the Russians, mainly at night, but he said most of the battles were

00:37:54.080 | artillery wars during the day, and the Russians now outgun the NATO forces ten to one in artillery.

00:38:03.120 | Oh, they're killing at a horrendous rate.

00:38:06.800 | Now, you know, my interpretation of what's happened so far is that Putin actually went in early on

00:38:15.200 | with a small force because he expected to meet somebody on the other end of a negotiating table

00:38:20.240 | that once he went in, and that when that didn't happen, they did not have a large enough force

00:38:29.280 | to be able to mount an offensive.

00:38:31.920 | And so they've been building up that force up till now, and they now have that force.

00:38:36.560 | And even against this small original force, the Ukrainians have been helpless.

00:38:43.520 | All of their offenses have died.

00:38:45.360 | They've now killed, you know, the head of the Ukrainian Special Forces, which was probably,

00:38:52.240 | arguably, by many accounts, the best elite military unit in all of Europe.

00:38:59.680 | The commandant, the commander of that Special Forces group, gave a speech about four months

00:39:11.200 | ago saying that 86 percent of his men are dead or wounded and cannot return to the front.

00:39:16.640 | He cannot rebuild that force.

00:39:18.160 | And, you know, the troops that are now headed, that are now filling the gaps of all those

00:39:27.120 | 350,000 men who've been lost are scantily trained, and they're arriving green at the front.

00:39:35.920 | Many of them do not want to be there.

00:39:39.200 | Many of them are giving up and going over the Russian side.

00:39:42.400 | We've seen this again and again, including platoon-sized groups that are defecting to

00:39:46.800 | the Russians.

00:39:47.440 | And I don't think it's possible to win.

00:39:51.520 | And anybody, you know, I saw, of course, I've studied World War II history exhaustively,

00:39:58.960 | but I saw a, there's a new, I think it's a Netflix series of documentaries that I highly

00:40:06.160 | recommend to people.

00:40:07.680 | They're colorized versions of the black and white films from the battles of World War

00:40:14.400 | II, but it's all the battles of World War II.

00:40:16.160 | So I watched Stalingrad the other night, and, you know, the willingness of the Russians

00:40:23.280 | to fight on against any kind of allies and to make huge sacrifices of Russians, the Russians

00:40:33.760 | themselves, who are making the sacrifice with their lives, the willingness of them to do

00:40:37.520 | that for their motherland is almost inexhaustible.

00:40:40.560 | It is incomprehensible to think that Ukraine can beat Russia in a war.

00:40:48.240 | It would be like Mexico beating the United States.

00:40:50.960 | It's just, it's impossible to think that it can happen.

00:40:54.480 | And, you know, Russia has deployed a tiny, tiny fraction of its military so far.

00:41:01.040 | And, you know, now it has China with its mass production capacity supporting its war effort.

00:41:08.000 | It's just, it's a, it's a hopeless situation.

00:41:11.680 | And we've been lied to, you know, we're the press in our country and our government are

00:41:16.640 | just, are just, you know, promoting this lie that the Ukrainians are about to win and that

00:41:22.160 | everything's going great and that Putin's on the run.

00:41:25.920 | And there's all this wishful thinking because of the, the Wagner group, you know, the, the

00:41:31.760 | Rogozhin and the Wagner group that this was an internal coup and it showed dissent and

00:41:36.720 | weakness of Putin.

00:41:37.600 | And none of that is true.

00:41:39.040 | I was a, that insurgency, which wasn't even an insurgency, only got 4,000 of his, of his

00:41:46.480 | men to follow him out of 20,000.

00:41:48.240 | And they were quickly stopped and nobody in the Russian military, the oligarchy, the political

00:41:53.840 | system, nobody supported it, you know, and by we're being told, oh yeah, it's the beginning

00:41:58.320 | at the end for Putin.

00:41:59.760 | He's weakened, he's wounded, he's on his way out.

00:42:03.360 | And all of these things are just lies that we are being fed.

00:42:06.560 | - So to push back on a small aspect of this that you kind of implied, so I've traveled

00:42:11.600 | to Ukraine and one thing that I should say, similar to the battle of Stalingrad, it is

00:42:18.160 | just not, it is not only the Russians that fight to the end.

00:42:21.680 | I think the Ukrainians are very willing to fight to the end and the morale there is quite

00:42:27.120 | high.

00:42:28.320 | I've talked to nobody, this was a year ago in August with Herson, everybody was proud

00:42:34.560 | to fight and die for their country.

00:42:36.160 | And there's some aspect where this war unified the people to get, gave them a reason and

00:42:41.760 | an understanding that this is what it means to be Ukrainian and I will fight to the death

00:42:45.760 | to defend this land.

00:42:46.640 | - I would agree with that and I should have said that myself at the beginning.

00:42:51.520 | That's one of the reasons my son went over there to fight because he was inspired by

00:42:57.680 | the valor of the Ukrainian people and this extraordinary willingness of them.

00:43:02.080 | And I think Putin thought it would be much easier to sweep into Ukraine and he found

00:43:06.480 | a stone wall of Ukrainians where they're ready to put their lives and their bodies

00:43:12.560 | on the line.

00:43:12.960 | But that to me makes the whole episode even more tragic is that I don't believe, I think

00:43:22.160 | that the US role in this has been, that there were many opportunities to settle this war

00:43:32.320 | and the Ukrainians wanted to settle it.

00:43:34.080 | Vladimir Zelensky when he ran in 2019, here's a guy who's a comedian, he's an actor.

00:43:42.640 | He had no political experience and yet he won this election with 70% of the vote.

00:43:46.800 | Why?

00:43:47.200 | He won on a peace platform and he won promising to sign the Minsk Accords and yet something

00:43:54.240 | happened when he got in there that made him suddenly pivot.

00:43:57.680 | And I think it's a good guess what happened.

00:44:02.000 | I think he was, he came under threat by ultra-nationalist nationalists within his own administration

00:44:10.400 | and the insistence of neocons like Victoria Nuland in the White House that, you know,

00:44:15.920 | we don't want peace with Putin, we want a war.

00:44:19.040 | Do you worry about a nuclear war?

00:44:21.920 | Yeah, I worry about it.

00:44:23.760 | It seems like a silly question but it's not.

00:44:27.200 | It's a serious question.

00:44:29.360 | Well, the reason it's not, you know, the reason it might, it's not, it's just because people

00:44:36.400 | seem to be in this kind of dream state about that it'll never happen and yet, you know,

00:44:42.800 | it can happen very easily and it can happen at any time.

00:44:47.680 | And, you know, if we push the Russians too far, you know, I don't doubt that Putin, if he felt

00:44:54.880 | like his regime was in, you know, or his nation was in danger, that the United States was going

00:45:02.160 | to be able to place, you know, a quizzling on, you know, into the Kremlin that he would use nuclear,

00:45:11.920 | you know, torpedoes and, you know, these strategic weapons that they have and that could be the

00:45:20.640 | be it.

00:45:21.120 | Once you do that, nobody controls the trajectory.

00:45:24.320 | By the way, you know, I have very strong memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis and those 13

00:45:31.920 | days when we came closer to nuclear war, you know, and particularly I think it was when the U-2 got

00:45:38.720 | shot down over Cuba, you know, and nobody in this country, there's a lot of people in Washington,

00:45:46.000 | D.C. who at that point thought that they very well may wake up dead, that the world may end

00:45:54.400 | at night.

00:45:55.120 | 30 million Americans killed, 130 million Russians.

00:45:59.200 | This is what our military brass wanted.

00:46:01.680 | They saw a war with Russia, a nuclear exchange with Russia as not only inevitable but also

00:46:07.840 | desirable because they wanted to do it now while we still had superiority.

00:46:14.000 | Can you actually go through the feelings you've had about the Cuban Missile Crisis?

00:46:17.840 | Like what are your memories of it?

00:46:19.440 | What are some interesting kind of--

00:46:20.720 | You know, in the middle of, I was going to school in Washington, D.C. to Sidwell, or to

00:46:28.320 | Our Lady of Victory, which is in Washington, D.C.

00:46:31.680 | So we were, I lived in Virginia across the Potomac and we would cross the bridge every

00:46:36.160 | day into D.C.

00:46:37.120 | And during the crisis, U.S. Marshals came to my house to take us, I think around day

00:46:44.800 | eight.

00:46:45.300 | My father was spending the night at the White House.

00:46:48.320 | He wasn't coming home.

00:46:49.520 | He was staying with the ex-com committee and sleeping there and they were up, you know,

00:46:53.760 | 24 hours a day.

00:46:54.960 | They were debating and trying to figure out what was happening.

00:46:58.240 | And, but we had U.S. Marshals come to our house to take us down.

00:47:03.520 | They were going to take us down to White Sulphur Springs in southern Virginia in the Blue Ridge

00:47:13.200 | Mountains where there was a, there was an underground city, essentially a bunker that

00:47:19.920 | was like a city and apparently it had McDonald's in it and a lot of other, you know, it was

00:47:25.040 | a full city for the U.S. government and their families.

00:47:28.080 | U.S. Marshals came to our house to take us down there and I was very excited about doing

00:47:34.000 | that.

00:47:34.240 | And this was at a time, you know, when we were doing the drills, we were doing the

00:47:38.000 | duck and cover drills once a week at our school where they would tell you if they, you know,

00:47:44.480 | when the alarms go off, then you put your head onto the table, you take the, remove

00:47:50.560 | the sharps from your desk, put them inside your desk, you put your head onto the table

00:47:55.840 | and you wait and the initial blast will take the windows out of the school and then we

00:48:00.320 | all stand up and file in an orderly fashion into the basement where we're going to be

00:48:05.200 | for the next six or eight months or whatever.

00:48:07.040 | But in the basement where, you know, we went occasionally in those corridors were lined

00:48:14.160 | with freeze-dried food canisters up to the ceiling, from floor to ceiling.

00:48:18.240 | So people were, you know, we were all preparing for this and it was, you know, Bob Magnum

00:48:23.840 | Arrow, who was my, was a friend of mine and, you know, was my father, one of my father's

00:48:28.240 | close friends, the Secretary of Defense, he later called it mass psychosis.

00:48:33.920 | And my father deeply regretted participating in the bomb shelter program because he said

00:48:39.360 | it was part of a, you know, a psychological psy-op trick to treat, to teach Americans

00:48:46.720 | that nuclear war was acceptable, that it was survivable.

00:48:50.720 | But my father, anyway, when the, when the Marshals came to our house to take me and

00:48:55.360 | my brother Joe away, and we were the ones who were home at that time, my father called

00:49:02.800 | and he talked to us on the phone and he said, "I don't want you going down there because,

00:49:08.560 | because if you disappear from school, people are going to panic.

00:49:15.760 | And I need you to be a good soldier and go to school."

00:49:18.400 | And he said something to me during that period, which was that if a nuclear war happened,

00:49:25.600 | it would be better to be among the dead than the living, which I did not believe.

00:49:30.720 | Okay, I mean, I had already prepared myself for the, you know, for the dystopian future.

00:49:36.480 | And I knew I could, I spent every day in the woods, I knew that I could survive by catching

00:49:42.320 | crawfish and, you know, cooking mud puppies and do whatever I had to do.

00:49:47.200 | But I felt like, okay, I can, I can handle this.

00:49:50.720 | And I really wanted to see this set up down in, you know, this underground city.

00:49:57.040 | But anyway, that was, you know, part of it for me.

00:50:01.520 | My father was away and, you know, the last days of it,

00:50:04.240 | my father got this idea because Khrushchev had sent two letters.

00:50:10.560 | He sent one letter that was conciliatory.

00:50:12.960 | And then he sent a letter that after his joint chiefs and the warmongers around him

00:50:19.840 | to solve that letter, and they disapproved of it, they sent another letter that was extremely

00:50:23.280 | belligerent.

00:50:23.840 | And my father had the idea, let's just pretend we didn't get the second letter and reply to

00:50:30.720 | the first one.

00:50:31.360 | And then he went down to Dobrynin, and who was, he met Dobrynin in the Justice Department.

00:50:40.400 | And Dobrynin was the Soviet ambassador.

00:50:43.280 | And they, you know, they proposed this settlement, which was a secret settlement

00:50:47.840 | where Khrushchev would withdraw the missiles from Cuba.

00:50:52.720 | Khrushchev had put the missiles in Cuba because we had put missiles, you know, nuclear missiles

00:50:57.200 | in Turkey and Italy.

00:50:59.760 | And my uncle's secret deal was that if he, if Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba,

00:51:06.320 | within six months he would get rid of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey.

00:51:10.320 | But if Khrushchev told anybody about the deal, it was off.

00:51:13.840 | So if news got out about that secret deal, it was off.

00:51:19.680 | But that was the actual deal.

00:51:21.680 | And Khrushchev complied with it, and then my uncle complied with it.

00:51:25.040 | - How much of that part of human history turned on the decisions of one person?

00:51:29.840 | - I think that's one of the, you know, 'cause that, of course, the perennial question, right?

00:51:35.840 | But it is history kind of on an automatic pilot, and, you know, human decisions,

00:51:43.440 | decisions of leaders really only have, you know, a marginal or incremental bearing on what

00:51:50.720 | is gonna happen anyway.

00:51:51.760 | But I think that is the, and historians argue about that all the time.

00:51:55.920 | I think that that is a really good example of a place in human history that literally

00:52:04.720 | the world could have ended if we had a different leader in the White House.

00:52:08.480 | And the reason for that is that there were, as I recall, 64 gun emplacements, you know,

00:52:15.520 | missile emplacements.

00:52:17.920 | Each one of those missile emplacements had a crew of about 100 men, and they were Soviets.

00:52:24.880 | So they were, and they, we didn't know whether, we had a couple of questions that my uncle

00:52:34.320 | asked, or asked the CIA, and he asked, Dulles was already gone, but he asked the CIA, and he asked

00:52:42.640 | his military brass, 'cause they all wanted to go in.

00:52:46.320 | Everybody wanted to go in, and my uncle said, my uncle asked to see the aerial photos,

00:52:50.960 | and he examined those personally.

00:52:53.520 | And that's why it's important to have a leader in the White House who can push back on their

00:52:57.680 | bureaucracies.

00:53:01.360 | And then he asked them, you know, are those, who's manning those missile sites?

00:53:07.120 | And are they Russians?

00:53:09.360 | And if they're Russians and we bomb them,

00:53:11.600 | are they, isn't it gonna force Khrushchev to then go into Berlin?

00:53:18.640 | And that would be the beginning of a cascade of facts that would, you know, highly likely

00:53:25.520 | end in nuclear confrontation.

00:53:28.480 | And the military brass said to my uncle, oh, we don't think he'll have the, you know, we

00:53:34.240 | don't think he'll have the guts to do that.

00:53:37.200 | So he was, my uncle was like, that's what you're betting on?

00:53:41.840 | And, you know, they all wanted him to go in.

00:53:45.520 | They wanted him to bomb the sites and then invade Cuba.

00:53:48.320 | And he said, if we bomb those sites, we're gonna be killing Russians, and it's gonna

00:53:53.920 | force, it's gonna provoke Russia into some response.

00:53:57.440 | And the obvious response is for them to go into Berlin.

00:54:00.080 | Oh, but the thing that we didn't know then, and we didn't find out until I think, you

00:54:08.080 | know, there was a, it was like a 30-year anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Havana.

00:54:13.280 | And what we learned then was that from the Russians who came to that event, it was like

00:54:22.400 | a symposium where everybody on both sides talked about it.

00:54:25.760 | And we learned a lot of stuff that nobody knew before.

00:54:29.040 | One of the insane things, the most insane thing that we learned was that the weapons

00:54:35.520 | were already, the nuclear warheads were already in place.

00:54:39.120 | They were ready to fire.

00:54:40.320 | And that the authorization to fire was made, was delegated to each of the gun crew commanders.

00:54:51.680 | So there were 60 people who had all had authorization to fire if they felt themselves under attack.

00:54:58.080 | So you have to believe that at least one of them would have launched, and that would

00:55:03.440 | have been the beginning of the end.

00:55:04.960 | And, you know, if anybody had launched, you know, we knew what would happen.

00:55:10.080 | My uncle knew what would happen, because he asked again and again, what's gonna happen?

00:55:15.440 | And they said, 30 million Americans will be killed, but we will kill 130 million Russians,

00:55:23.600 | so we will win.

00:55:24.480 | And that was a victory for them.

00:55:27.440 | And my uncle said, later said, he told Arthur Schlesinger and Kenny O'Donnell, he said,

00:55:34.160 | "Those guys," he called them the salad brass, the guys with all of this stuff on their chest.

00:55:39.440 | And he said, "Those guys, they don't care, because they know that if it happens, that

00:55:46.160 | they're gonna be in the charge of everything.

00:55:48.080 | They're the ones who are gonna be running the world after that."

00:55:50.960 | So for them, you know, it was, there was an incentive to kill 130 million Russians and

00:55:56.000 | 30 million Americans, but my uncle, he had this correspondence with Khrushchev.

00:56:00.400 | They were secretly corresponding with each other.

00:56:04.160 | And that is what saved the world, is that they had, that both of them had been men of war.

00:56:09.680 | You know, Eisenhower famously said, "It will not be a man of war, it will not be a soldier

00:56:15.680 | who starts World War III, because a guy who's actually seen it knows how bad it is."

00:56:20.320 | And my uncle, you know, had been in the heat of the South Pacific.

00:56:23.840 | His boat had been cut in two by a Japanese destroyer.

00:56:28.080 | His, many of his, three of his crewmen had been killed, one of them badly burned.

00:56:32.960 | He pulled that guy with a lanyard in his teeth, six miles to an island in the middle of the

00:56:38.800 | night, and then they hid out there for 10 days, you know, and, and, you know, he came back,

00:56:44.640 | like I said, he was the only president of the United States that earned the Purple Heart.

00:56:48.880 | Meanwhile, Khrushchev had been at Stalingrad, which was the worst place to be on the planet,

00:56:56.080 | you know, probably in the 20th century, other than, you know, in Auschwitz or one of the death

00:57:01.280 | camps. It was, you know, it was, it was the most ferocious, horrific war with people starving,

00:57:08.880 | people, you know, committed cannibalism, you know, eating the dogs, the cats, eating their

00:57:13.680 | shoe leather, freezing to death by the thousands, etc. Khrushchev did not want, the last thing he

00:57:21.360 | wanted was a war, and the last thing my uncle wanted was a war, and they, but the CIA did not

00:57:26.400 | know anything about Khrushchev, and the reason for that is the, there was a mole at Langley,

00:57:33.120 | so that every time the CIA got a spy in the Kremlin, he would immediately be killed.

00:57:42.000 | So, they had no eyes in the Kremlin, you know, there were literally hundreds of Russian,

00:57:47.600 | of Russian spies who had, who were, who had defected to the United States and were in the

00:57:52.800 | Kremlin who were killed during that period. They had no idea anything about Khrushchev,

00:57:58.320 | about how he saw the world, and they saw the Kremlin itself as a monolith, you know, that it is

00:58:02.880 | kind of, you know, the same way that we look at Putin today, that, you know, it's all, they have

00:58:10.160 | this ambition of world conquest, and that's, it's driving them, and there's nothing else they think

00:58:14.880 | about, they're absolutely single-minded about it. But actually, there was a big division

00:58:21.680 | between Khrushchev and his Joint Chiefs, and his intelligence apparatus, and they both at one point

00:58:28.720 | discovered they were both in the same situation. They were surrounded by spies and military

00:58:33.920 | personnel who were intent on going to war, and they were the two guys resisting it. So, when my

00:58:38.800 | uncle, my uncle had this idea of, you know, being the peace president from the beginning, he told

00:58:46.160 | Ben Bradley, his, one of his best friends, who, you know, was the publisher of the Washington Post,

00:58:51.040 | or the editor-in-chief at that time, he said, Ben Bradley asked him, "What is, what do you want on

00:58:58.720 | your gravestone?" And my uncle said, "He kept the peace." He said, "The principal job of the

00:59:05.040 | president of the United States is to keep the country out of war." And so, when he first became

00:59:13.200 | president, he anxiously agreed to meet Khrushchev in Geneva to do his summit. And by the way,

00:59:21.920 | Eisenhower had wanted to do the same thing. Eisenhower wanted peace, but his, and he was

00:59:27.600 | going to meet in Vienna. But that peace summit was blown up. He was going to try to do, you know,

00:59:34.720 | he was going to try to end the Cold War. Eisenhower was in the last year of his, in May of 1960.

00:59:42.560 | But that was torpedoed by the CIA during the U-2 crash. You know, they sent a U-2 over the,

00:59:49.920 | over the Soviet Union, it got shot down, and then they told, and then Alan Dulles

00:59:54.160 | told Eisenhower to deny that we had a program. They didn't know that the Russians had captured

00:59:59.440 | Gary Francis Powers. And so, when, and that blew up the peace talks between Eisenhower and Khrushchev.

01:00:07.520 | And so, you know, and the, there was a lot of tension. My uncle wanted to break that tension.

01:00:15.120 | He agreed to meet with Khrushchev in Vienna early on in his term. He went over there and

01:00:23.040 | Khrushchev snubbed him. Khrushchev lectured him imperiously about the, you know, the terror of

01:00:32.080 | American imperialism and rebuffed any, you know, they did agree not to go into Laos. They made an

01:00:39.280 | agreement that kept the United States, kept my uncle from sending troops to Laos. But it had

01:00:46.080 | been a disaster, Vienna. So then we had a spy that used to come to our house all the time,

01:00:52.960 | a guy called Georgi Bolshevoy. He was this Russian spy my parents had met at the embassy.

01:01:01.280 | They had gone to a party or a reception at the Russian embassy and he had approached them and

01:01:06.000 | they knew he was a, he was a GRU agent and KGB. He was both. Oh, he used to come to our house.

01:01:13.520 | They really liked him. He was very attractive. He was always laughing and joking. He would do rope

01:01:19.520 | climbing contests with my father. He would do pushup contests with my father. He was,

01:01:24.400 | he could do the Russian dancing, the Cossack dancing. And he would do that for us and teach

01:01:30.560 | us that. And we knew he was a spy too. And this was at the time of, you know, the James Bond films

01:01:35.840 | were first coming out. So it was really exciting for us to have an actual Russian spy in our house.

01:01:40.720 | The state department was horrified by it. But anyway, when Khrushchev, after Vienna

01:01:48.160 | and after, you know, the bigs, Khrushchev had second thoughts. And he sent this long letter

01:01:58.720 | to my uncle and he didn't want to go through his state department or his embassy. He wanted to

01:02:07.040 | enron them. And he was friends with Bolshevik. So he gave Georgie the letter and Georgie brought

01:02:15.040 | it and handed it to Pierre Salinger, folded in the New York Times. And he gave it to my uncle.

01:02:21.200 | And it was this beautiful letter, which he said, you know, my uncle had talked to him about the

01:02:28.080 | children who were played, you know, we played 29 grandchildren who were playing in his yard. And

01:02:32.640 | he's saying, what is our moral basis for making a decision that could kill these children so they'll

01:02:38.160 | never write a poem, they'll never participate in an election, they'll never run for office?

01:02:43.120 | How can we make, how can we morally make a decision that is going to eliminate

01:02:49.040 | life for these beautiful kids? And he had said that to Khrushchev. And Khrushchev wrote them

01:02:56.960 | this letter back saying that he was now sitting as this dacha on the Black Sea. And that he was

01:03:04.880 | thinking about what my uncle Jack had said to him at Vienna. And he regretted very deeply not having

01:03:10.160 | taken the olive leaf that Jack had offered him. And then he said, you know, it occurs to me now

01:03:16.320 | that we're all on an arc and that there is not another one. And that the entire fate of the

01:03:23.040 | planet and all of its creatures and all of the children are dependent on the decisions we make.

01:03:29.200 | And you and I have a moral obligation to go forward with each other as friends. And immediately after

01:03:35.920 | that, this was, you know, he said that right after the Berlin crisis in 1962, General Curtis LeMay

01:03:43.840 | tried to, had tried to provoke a war with an incident at Checkpoint Charlie, which was

01:03:52.480 | the entrance and exit through the Berlin Wall in Berlin. And the Russian tanks had come to the

01:04:03.040 | wall, the US tanks had come to the wall, and there was a standoff. And my uncle had sent a message to

01:04:11.280 | Khrushchev then through Dobrynin saying, "My back is at the wall. I cannot, I have no place to back,

01:04:17.040 | to please back off. And then we will back off." And Khrushchev took his word,

01:04:21.760 | backed his tanks off first. And then my uncle ordered LeMay to back, he had, LeMay had mounted

01:04:30.000 | bulldozer plows on the front of the tanks to plow down the Berlin Wall. And that, and the Russians

01:04:36.800 | had come, so it was just, you know, it was the, it was his generals trying to provoke a war.

01:04:41.200 | And, but they started talking to each other then. And then when he, after he wrote that letter,

01:04:49.040 | they agreed that they would install a hotline so they could talk to each other and they wouldn't

01:04:54.560 | have to go through intermediaries. And so at Jack's house in the Cape, there was a red phone

01:05:02.320 | that we knew if we picked it up, Khrushchev would answer. And there was another one in the White

01:05:07.920 | House. And that, but they knew it was important to talk to each other, you know, and you just

01:05:14.080 | wish that we had that kind of leadership today. That can, you know, that just understands our job.

01:05:21.040 | Look, I know you know a lot about AI, right? And you know how dangerous it is potentially

01:05:27.440 | to humanity and what opportunities it also, you know, offers. But it could kill us all. I mean,

01:05:35.280 | Elon said, first it's going to steal our job, then it's going to kill us, right?

01:05:38.800 | Yeah.

01:05:39.760 | And it's probably not hyperbole. It actually, you know, if it follows the laws of biological

01:05:45.360 | evolution, which are just the laws of mathematics, that's probably a good end point for it,

01:05:50.080 | you know, a potential end point. So we need, it's going to happen, but we need to make sure

01:05:59.360 | it's regulated and it's regulated properly for safety in every country. And that includes Russia

01:06:07.600 | and China and Iran. Right now, we should be putting all the weapons of war aside and sitting

01:06:14.080 | down with those guys and say, how are we going to do this? There's much more important things to do

01:06:20.320 | we're going to, this stuff is going to kill us if we don't figure out how to regulate it.

01:06:24.240 | And leadership needs to look down the road at what is the real risk here. And the real risk

01:06:31.840 | is that, you know, AI will, you know, enslave us for one thing and, you know, and then destroy us

01:06:40.960 | and do all this other stuff. And how about biological weapons? We're now all working on

01:06:45.680 | these biological weapons and we're doing biological weapons from Ebola and, you know, dengue fever and,

01:06:53.920 | you know, all of these other bad things. And we're making ethnic bioweapons,

01:06:58.880 | bioweapons that can only kill Russians, bioweapons that the Chinese are making that, you know,

01:07:05.680 | can kill people who don't have Chinese genes. So all of this is now within reach, we're actively

01:07:13.680 | doing it and we need to stop it. And we can easily, a biological weapons treaty is the easiest thing

01:07:20.800 | in the world to do. We can verify it, we can enforce it and everybody wants to agree to it.

01:07:27.360 | It's only insane people do not want to continue this kind of research. There's no reason to do it.

01:07:33.040 | So there are these existential threats to all of humanity now out there, like AI and biological

01:07:39.440 | weapons. We need to stop fighting each other, start competing on economic game fields,

01:07:47.360 | playing fields instead of military playing fields, which will be good for all of humanity. And that

01:07:52.880 | we need to sit down with each other and negotiate reasonable treaties on how we regulate AI and

01:07:59.920 | biological weapons. And nobody's talking about this in this political race right now. Nobody's

01:08:04.880 | talking about it in a government. They get fixated on these little wars and, you know,

01:08:10.240 | and these comic book depictions of good versus evil and, you know, and we all go, you know,

01:08:16.400 | and go off and give them the weapons and enrich, you know, the military and

01:08:22.800 | complex, but we're on the road to perdition if we don't end this.

01:08:28.640 | - And some of this requires to have this kind of phone that connects Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy

01:08:35.040 | that cuts through all the bureaucracy to have this communication between heads of state and in the

01:08:40.800 | case of AI, perhaps heads of tech companies, where you can just pick up the phone and have a

01:08:45.360 | conversation. Because a lot of it, a lot of the existential threats of artificial intelligence,

01:08:50.880 | perhaps even bioweapons is unintentional. It's not even strategic intentional effects. So you have

01:08:57.600 | to be transparent and honest about, especially with AI, that people might not know what's the

01:09:03.920 | worst that's going to happen once you release it out into the wild. And you have to have an honest

01:09:07.920 | communication about how to do it so that companies are not terrified of regulation,

01:09:12.720 | overreach regulation, and then government is not terrified of tech companies, of manipulating them

01:09:21.840 | in some direct or indirect ways. So like there's a trust that builds versus a distrust.

01:09:26.720 | So basically that old phone where Khrushchev can call John F. Kennedy is needed.

01:09:33.840 | - Yeah, and you know, I don't think, listen, I don't understand AI, okay? I do know, I can see

01:09:42.240 | from all this technology how it's this kind of turnkey totalitarianism that once you put these

01:09:50.000 | systems in place, they can be misused to enslave people and they can be misused in wars and to

01:09:59.520 | subjugate, to kill, to do all of these bad things. And I don't think there's anybody on Capitol Hill

01:10:06.240 | who understands this. We need to bring in the tech community and say, tell us what these regulations

01:10:12.640 | need to look like, so that there can be freedom to innovate, so that we can milk AI for all of

01:10:20.160 | the good things, but not fall into these traps that are gonna, that are these existential threats

01:10:27.360 | to, that pose existential threats to humanity. - It seems like John F. Kennedy is a singular

01:10:33.680 | figure in that he was able to have the humility to reach out to Khrushchev and also the strength

01:10:39.760 | and integrity to resist the, what did you call them, the salad brass and institutions like the

01:10:46.880 | CIA. So that makes it particularly tragic that he was killed. To what degree was CIA involved

01:10:55.760 | or the various bureaucracy involved in his death? - The evidence that the CIA was involved in my

01:11:05.040 | uncle's murder and that they were subsequently involved in the coverup and continue to be

01:11:12.720 | involved in the coverup. I mean, there's still 5,000 documents that they won't release 60 years

01:11:18.240 | later, is I think so insurmountable and so mountainous and overwhelming that it's beyond

01:11:28.960 | any reasonable doubt, including dozens of confessions of people who were involved in the

01:11:35.600 | assassination, but every kind of document. And I mean, it came as a surprise recently to most

01:11:48.400 | Americans, I think, the release of these documents in which the press, the American media finally

01:11:57.120 | acknowledged that, yeah, Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset and he was recruited in 1957. He was a

01:12:07.200 | Marine working at the Atatuzi Air Force Base, which was the CIA Air Force Base with the U-2

01:12:15.120 | flights, which was a CIA program. And that he was recruited by James Jesus Angleton,

01:12:22.320 | who was the director of counterintelligence and then sent on a fake defection to Russia

01:12:29.360 | and then brought back to Dallas. And people didn't know that, even though it's been known

01:12:37.680 | for decades, it never percolated into the mainstream media because they have such an

01:12:47.200 | allergy to anything that challenges the Warren Report.

01:12:52.240 | When Congress investigated my uncle's murder in the 1970s, the Church Committee did, and they did

01:13:04.080 | two and a half year investigation, and they had many, many more documents and much more testimony

01:13:09.440 | available to them than the Warren Commission had. And this was a decade after the Warren

01:13:16.160 | Commission, they came to the conclusion that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy.

01:13:19.920 | And there was a division where essentially one guy on that committee believed it was

01:13:27.280 | primarily the mafia. But Richard Schweitzer, the senator who was head of the committee,

01:13:32.320 | said straight out the CIA was involved in the murder of the President of the United States.

01:13:41.680 | I've talked to most of the staff on that committee, and they said, "Yeah,

01:13:44.800 | and the CIA was stonewalling us the whole way through."

01:13:48.080 | And the actual people that the CIA appointed, George Johannides, who the CIA appointed as

01:13:55.440 | a liaison to the committee, they brought him out of retirement. He had been one of the masterminds

01:14:00.320 | of the assassination. I mean, it's impossible to even talk about a tiny fraction of the evidence

01:14:11.200 | here. What I suggest to people, there are hundreds of books written about this that assemble this

01:14:17.920 | evidence and mobilize the evidence. The best book to me for people to read is James Douglas's book,

01:14:25.440 | which is called The Unspeakable. And Douglas does this extraordinary, he's an extraordinary scholar,

01:14:31.840 | and he does this amazing job of digesting and summarizing and mobilizing all of the

01:14:41.040 | probably a million documents and the evidence from all these confessions that have come out

01:14:46.240 | into a coherent story. And it's riveting to read, and I recommend people who do not take my word for

01:14:54.960 | it, and don't take anybody else's word for it. Go ahead and do the research yourself. And one way

01:15:02.000 | to do that is probably the most efficient way is to read Douglas's book, because he has all

01:15:07.200 | the references there. - So if it's true that CIA had a hand in this assassination, how is it possible

01:15:14.320 | for them to amass so much power? How is it possible for them to become corrupt? And is it

01:15:19.120 | individuals, or is it the entire institution? - No, it's not the entire institution. My daughter-in-law,

01:15:25.120 | who's helping to run my campaign, was a CIA, you know, in the clandestine services

01:15:34.560 | for all of her career. She was a spy in the weapons of mass destruction program in the

01:15:39.280 | Mideast and in China. And there's 22,000 people who work for the CIA. Probably 20,000 of those

01:15:46.480 | are patriotic Americans and really good public servants, and they're doing important work for

01:15:52.640 | our country. But the institution is corrupt, and because the higher ranks of the institution.

01:16:01.040 | And in fact, Mike Pompeo said something like this to me the other day. He was the director of the

01:16:06.080 | CIA. He said, "When I was there, I did not do a good job of cleaning up that agency." And he said,

01:16:11.040 | "The entire upper bureaucracy of that agency are people who do not believe in the institutions of

01:16:18.400 | democracy." This is what he said to me. So I don't know if that's true, but I know that, you know,

01:16:25.520 | that's significant. He's a smart person, and he ran the agency, and he was the Secretary of State.

01:16:31.280 | But it's no mystery how that happened. We know the history. The CIA was originally,

01:16:38.400 | first of all, there was great reluctance in 1947. We had, for the first time, we had a secret

01:16:44.560 | spy agency in this country during World War II called the OSS. That was disbanded after the war,

01:16:51.760 | because Congress said, "Having a secret spy agency is incompatible with a democracy."

01:16:58.720 | The secret spy agencies are things like the KGB, the Stasi in East Germany, the SAVAK in Iran,

01:17:05.600 | and PEEP in Chile, whatever, you know, all over the world. They all have to do with totalitarian

01:17:12.080 | governments. They're not something that you can have. It's antithetical to democracy to have that.

01:17:22.320 | In 1947, we created it. Truman signed it in, but it was initially an espionage agency,

01:17:31.920 | which means information gathering, which is important. It's to gather and consolidate

01:17:38.560 | information from many, many different sources from all over the world and then put those in reports

01:17:44.800 | so the White House, the president, can make good decisions based upon

01:17:50.880 | valid information, evidence-based decision making. But Alan Dulles, who was essentially the first

01:18:00.720 | head of the agency, made a series of legislative machinations and political machinations that gave

01:18:09.600 | additional powers to the agency and opened up what they called then the plans division,

01:18:15.600 | which is the plans division is the dirty tricks, it's the black ops, fixing elections,

01:18:21.040 | murdering what they call executive action, which means killing foreign leaders and, you know,

01:18:30.000 | making small wars and bribing and blackmailing people, stealing elections, that kind of thing.

01:18:38.480 | The reason at that time, you know, we were in the middle of the Cold War,

01:18:41.760 | and Truman and Eisenhower did not want to go to war, they didn't want to commit troops.

01:18:48.160 | And it seemed to them that, you know, this was a way of kind of fighting the Cold War secretly

01:18:55.920 | without and doing it at minimal cost by changing events sort of invisibly.

01:19:06.720 | And so it was seductive to them. But everybody, you know, Congress, when they first voted in place,

01:19:12.240 | Congress, both political parties said, if we create this thing, it could turn into a monster,

01:19:17.520 | and it could undermine our, you know, our values. And today, it's so powerful,

01:19:22.560 | and nobody knows what its budget is. Plus, it has its own investment fund,

01:19:27.280 | In-Q-Tel, which has invested, you know, made, I think, 2000 investments in Silicon Valley.

01:19:34.240 | Oh, it has ownership of a lot of these tech companies, and, you know, and the, a lot of the

01:19:40.080 | CEOs of those tech companies have signed state secrecy agreements with the CIA, which if they

01:19:45.920 | even reveal that they have signed that, they can go to jail for 20 years and have their assets

01:19:51.920 | removed, etc. The influence that the agency has, the capacity to influence events at every level

01:19:58.400 | in our country, is really frightening. And then for most of its, for most of its life, the CIA was

01:20:09.200 | banned from propagandizing Americans. But we learned that they were doing it anyway. So in 1973,

01:20:16.320 | during the Church Committee hearings, we learned that the CIA had a program called Operation

01:20:22.560 | Mockingbird, where they had at least 400 members, leading members of the United States Press Corps,

01:20:29.200 | and the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc., who were secretly working for the

01:20:37.920 | agency and steering news coverage to support CIA priorities. And they agreed at that time to disband

01:20:49.600 | Operation Mockingbird in '73. But there's, there's indications they didn't do that. And they still,

01:20:56.640 | the CIA today is the biggest funder of journalism around the world. The biggest funder is through

01:21:03.920 | USAID. The USA, the United States funds journalism in almost every country in the world. You know,

01:21:11.520 | it owns newspapers, it has journalists, hundreds of thousands of journalists on its payroll.

01:21:18.480 | They're not supposed to be doing that in the United States. But, you know, in 2016,

01:21:24.160 | President Obama changed the law to make it legal now for the CIA to propagandize Americans. And I

01:21:31.520 | think, you know, we can't look at the Ukraine war and how that was, you know, has been, how the

01:21:37.840 | narrative has been formed in the, in the minds of Americans, and say that the CIA had nothing to do

01:21:45.600 | with that. What is the mechanism by which the CIA influences the narrative? Do you think it's

01:21:50.560 | indirectly? Through the press. Indirectly through the press or directly by funding the press?

01:21:55.680 | Directly through, I mean, there's certain press organs that have been linked, you know,

01:22:02.080 | to the agency that the people who run those organs, things like the Daily Beast, now Rolling Stone,

01:22:08.640 | you know, editor of Rolling Stone, Noah Schlachman, has deep relationships with the

01:22:14.000 | intelligence community, Salon, Daily Kos. But I wonder why they would do it. So from my perspective,

01:22:22.480 | it just seems like the job of a journalist is to have an integrity where your opinion cannot be

01:22:27.120 | influenced or bought. I agree with you. But I actually think that the entire field of journalism

01:22:34.000 | has, you know, really ashamed itself in recent years because it's become, you know, the principal

01:22:44.960 | newspapers in this country and the television station, the legacy media have abandoned their

01:22:51.840 | traditional, their tradition of, you know, which was when I was a kid, listen, my house was filled

01:22:59.680 | with the greatest journalists alive at that time. People like Ben Bradley, like Anthony Lewis,

01:23:04.480 | Mary McClory, Pete Hamill, Jack Newfield, Jimmy Breslin, and many, many others. And after my

01:23:14.160 | father, after my father died, they started the RFK Journalism Awards to recognize integrity and

01:23:22.800 | courage, you know, journalistic integrity and courage. And for that generation of journalism,

01:23:28.480 | they thought, they believed that the function of a journalist was to maintain this posture of

01:23:36.880 | fear, skepticism toward any aggregation of power, including government authority.

01:23:41.840 | That you always, that people in authority lie and that they always have to be questioned. And that

01:23:48.640 | their job was to speak truth to power and to be guardians of the First Amendment right to

01:23:55.040 | free expression. But if you look what happened during the pandemic,

01:23:58.720 | it was the inverse of that kind of journalism where the major press organs in this country

01:24:05.840 | were, instead of speaking truth to power, they were doing the opposite. They were broadcasting

01:24:11.760 | propaganda. They became propaganda organs for the government agencies. And they were actually

01:24:18.400 | censoring the speech of anybody who dissents of the powerless. And in fact, it was an organized

01:24:26.720 | conspiracy. And it was the name of, it was the Trusted News Initiative. And some of the major

01:24:33.120 | press organs in our country signed onto it and they agreed not to print stories or facts that

01:24:40.640 | departed from government orthodoxy. So the Washington Post was the signature, the UPI,

01:24:47.040 | the AP, and then the four media or the four social media groups, Microsoft, Twitter,

01:24:54.320 | Facebook, and Google all signed onto the Trusted News Initiative. It was started by the BBC,

01:25:01.680 | organized by them. And the purpose of it was to make sure nobody could print anything about

01:25:07.760 | government that departed from government orthodoxy. The way it worked is the UPI and the AP,

01:25:14.160 | which are the news services that provide most of the news around the country,

01:25:18.880 | and the Washington Post would decide what news was permissible to print.

01:25:23.600 | And a lot of it was about COVID, but also on Biden's laptops, where it was impermissible

01:25:31.120 | to suggest that those were real or that they had stuff on there that was compromising.

01:25:39.520 | And by the way, what I'm telling you now is all well documented and I'm litigating on it right

01:25:47.360 | now. So I'm part of a lawsuit against the DNI. And so I know a lot about what happened and I

01:25:53.200 | have all this documented and people can go to our website. There's a letter on my sub stack now to

01:25:59.680 | Michael Scherer of the Washington Post that outlines all this and gives all my sources.

01:26:07.360 | Because Michael Scherer accused me of being a conspiracy theorist when he was actually part

01:26:12.080 | of a conspiracy, a true conspiracy, to suppress anybody who was departing from government

01:26:19.920 | orthodoxies by either censoring them completely or labeling them conspiracy theorists.

01:26:25.440 | I mean, you can understand the intention and the action, the difference between this,

01:26:32.320 | we talked about. You can understand the intention of such a thing,

01:26:35.120 | being good, that in a time of a catastrophe, in a time of a pandemic, there's a lot of risk to saying

01:26:41.840 | untrue things. But that's a slippery slope that leads into a place where the journalistic

01:26:50.240 | integrity that we talked about is completely sacrificed. And then you can deviate from truth.

01:26:54.800 | If you read their internal memorandum, including the statements of the leader of the

01:27:00.400 | Trusted News Initiative, I think her name's Jennifer Cecil. And you can go on our website

01:27:08.960 | and see her statement. She says, "The purpose of this is that we're now," she says, "When people

01:27:17.200 | look at us, they think we're competitors, but we're not. The real competitors are coming from

01:27:21.680 | all these alternative news sources now all over the network. And they're hurting public trust in

01:27:28.160 | us, and they're hurting our economic model. And they have to be choked off and crushed.

01:27:32.800 | And the way that we're going to do that is to make an agreement with the social media sites that if

01:27:39.840 | we label their information misinformation, the social media sites will de-platform it,

01:27:46.800 | or they will throttle it, or they will shadow ban it, which destroys the economic model of those

01:27:53.920 | alternative competitive sources of information." So that's true. But the point you make is an

01:28:00.320 | important point, that the journalists themselves, who probably didn't know about the TNI agreement,

01:28:08.640 | certainly I'm sure they didn't, they believe that they're doing the right thing by suppressing

01:28:14.640 | information that may challenge government proclamations on COVID. But I mean, there's

01:28:20.960 | a danger to that. And the danger is that once you appoint yourself an arbiter of what's true

01:28:28.080 | and what's not true, then there's really no end to the power that you have now assumed for yourself.

01:28:36.880 | Because now your job is no longer to inform the public. Your job now is to manipulate the public.

01:28:45.840 | And if you end up manipulating the public in collusion with powerful entities, then you become

01:28:52.560 | the instrument of authoritarian rule rather than the opponent of it. And it becomes the inverse of

01:29:01.920 | journalism in a democracy. You're running for president as a Democrat. What to you are the

01:29:09.600 | strongest values that represent the left-wing politics of this country?

01:29:15.920 | I would say protection of the environment and the commons, the air, the water, wildlife,

01:29:23.840 | fisheries, public lands, those assets that cannot be reduced to private property ownership,

01:29:29.760 | the landscapes, our Purple Mountain majesty, the protection of the most vulnerable people

01:29:37.040 | in our society, people who, which would include children and minorities, the restoration of the

01:29:47.520 | middle class, and protection of labor, dignity, and decent pay for labor, bodily autonomy,

01:30:03.040 | a woman's right to choose, or an individual's right to endure unwanted medical procedures,

01:30:10.000 | peace. You know, the Democrats have always been anti-war. The refusal to use fear as a governing

01:30:18.560 | tool. FDR said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself because he recognized that

01:30:27.200 | tyrants and dictators could use fear to disable critical thinking and

01:30:31.680 | overwhelm the desire for personal liberty. The freedom of government from untoward influence

01:30:47.440 | by corrupt corporate power. The end of this corrupt merger of state and corporate power that

01:30:55.920 | is now, I think, dominating our democracy. What Eisenhower warned about when he warned

01:31:03.680 | against the emergence of the military-industrial complex. And then I prefer to talk about kind of

01:31:09.200 | the positive vision of what we should be doing in our country and globally, which is, you know,

01:31:16.400 | I see that the corporations are commoditizing us, are poisoning our children, are

01:31:22.880 | strip mining the wealth from our middle class, and treating America as if it were a business

01:31:33.600 | in liquidation, converting assets to cash as quickly as possible, and creating or exacerbating

01:31:41.760 | this huge disparity in wealth in our country, which is eliminating the middle class

01:31:47.840 | and creating, you know, kind of a Latin American-style feudal model. There's

01:31:53.360 | these huge aggregations of wealth above and widespread poverty below,

01:31:59.440 | and that's a configuration that is too unstable to support democracy sustainably,

01:32:05.920 | you know, and we're supposed to be modeling democracy, but we're losing it.

01:32:10.240 | And, you know, I think we ought to have a foreign policy that restores our moral authority around

01:32:17.520 | the world, restores America as the embodiment of moral authority, which it was when my uncle was

01:32:25.760 | president, and as a purveyor of peace rather than, you know, a war-like nation. My uncle said he

01:32:34.720 | didn't want people in Africa and Latin America and Asia to think of, when they think of America,

01:32:41.200 | to picture a man with a gun and a bayonet. He wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer,

01:32:46.640 | and he refused to send combat veterans abroad, combat soldiers abroad. He never

01:32:53.040 | sent a single soldier to his death abroad, and, you know, into combat. He sent 16,000. He resisted

01:33:03.840 | in Berlin in '62. He resisted in Laos in '61. He resisted in Vietnam. You know, in Vietnam,

01:33:15.040 | they wanted him to put 250,000 troops. He only put 16,000 advisors, which was fewer troops,

01:33:21.680 | and he sent to get James Meredith into the universe, to Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi,

01:33:30.480 | one Black man. He sent 16,000, and a month before he died, he ordered them all home. He actually,

01:33:36.480 | I think it was October 2nd of 1963, he heard that a Green Beret had died, and he asked his aide for a

01:33:46.480 | combat, for a list of combat fatalities, and the aide came back, and there were 75 men had died

01:33:52.560 | in Vietnam at that point, and he said, "That's too many. We're going to have no more." And he

01:33:57.520 | ordered, he signed a national security order, 263, and ordered all of those men, all Americans,

01:34:05.040 | home from Vietnam by 1965, with the first thousand coming home by December '63.

01:34:12.000 | And then in November, he, of course, just before that evacuation began, he was killed. And a week

01:34:20.560 | later, President Johnson remanded that order, and then a year after that, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution

01:34:27.520 | we sent 250,000, which is what they wanted my uncle to do, which he refused,

01:34:31.920 | and then, and it became an American war. And then Nixon, you know, topped it off at 560,000.

01:34:38.400 | 56,000 Americans never came home, including my cousin, George Skakel, who died at the Tet Offensive,

01:34:45.280 | and we killed a million Vietnamese, and we got nothing for it.

01:34:50.640 | So America should be the symbol of peace.

01:34:55.040 | And, you know, today, my uncle, you know, really focused on putting America on the side of the poor

01:35:01.520 | instead of our tradition of, you know, of fortifying oligarchies that were anti-communism.

01:35:10.640 | That was our, you know, our major criteria. If you said you were against communists, and of course

01:35:14.960 | the people were, were the rich people. Our aid was going to the rich people in those countries,

01:35:19.760 | and they were going to the military juntas, our weapons were going to the juntas to fight against

01:35:24.560 | the poor. And my uncle said, no, you know, America should be on the side of the poor. And so he

01:35:31.120 | launched the Alliance for Progress and USAID, which were intended to bring aid to the poorest

01:35:38.080 | people in those and build middle classes and, and take ourselves away. In fact, his most,

01:35:45.200 | his favorite trip, his two favorite trips while he was president, his most favorite trip was to

01:35:51.840 | Ireland. Just incredible emotional homecoming for all of the people of Ireland. But his second

01:36:00.960 | favorite trip was when he went to Colombia. He went to Latin America, but Colombia was his favorite

01:36:05.840 | country. And I think there were 2 million people came into Bogota to see him, this vast crowd,

01:36:12.880 | and they were just delirious cheering for him. And the president of Colombia, Jerez Carmargo,

01:36:20.000 | said to him, do you know why they love you? And my uncle said, why? And he said,

01:36:24.480 | because they think you've put America on the side of the poor against the oligarchs.

01:36:29.520 | And, you know, when my uncle, after he died, today, there are more avenues and boulevards

01:36:39.760 | and hospitals and schools named and statues named after and commemorating in parks,

01:36:47.040 | commemorating John Kennedy in Africa and Latin America than any other president in the United

01:36:53.200 | States, and probably more than all the other presidents combined. And it's because, you know,

01:36:57.840 | he put America on the side of the poor, and that's what we ought to be doing. We ought to be projecting

01:37:02.720 | economic power abroad. The Chinese have essentially stolen his playbook. And, you know,

01:37:10.880 | we've spent $8 trillion on the Iraq war and its aftermath, the wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya,

01:37:17.520 | you know, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And what do we get for that? We got nothing for that money,

01:37:23.840 | $8 trillion. We got, we killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. Iraq today is a much worse off

01:37:33.760 | than it was when Saddam was there. It's an incoherent, violent war between Shia and Sunni

01:37:40.000 | death squads. We pushed Iraq into the embrace of Iran, which has now become essentially a proxy

01:37:46.640 | for Iran, which is exactly the outcome that we were trying to prevent for the past, you know,

01:37:51.280 | 20 or 30 years. We created ISIS. We sent 2 million refugees into Europe, destabilizing all of the

01:38:03.360 | nations in Europe for generations. And we're now seeing these riots in France, and that's a direct

01:38:10.240 | result from the Syrian war that we created and our creation of ISIS. Brexit is another, you know,

01:38:18.960 | result of that. So we, for $8 trillion, we wrecked the world. And during that same period that we

01:38:27.040 | spent $8.1 trillion bombing bridges, ports, schools, hospitals, the Chinese spent $8.1 trillion

01:38:35.760 | building schools, ports, hospitals, bridges, and universities. And now, you know, the Chinese are

01:38:44.720 | out-competing us everywhere in the world. Everybody wants to deal with the Chinese because they,

01:38:50.160 | you know, they come in, they build nice things for you, and there's no strings attached,

01:38:56.320 | and they're pleasant to deal with. And, you know, as a result of that, Brazil is switching

01:39:02.480 | the Chinese currency. Argentina is switching. Saudi Arabia, our greatest partner, you know,

01:39:09.200 | we put trillions of dollars into protecting our oil pipelines there, and now they're saying,

01:39:14.960 | you know, we don't care what the United States thinks. That's what Amin bin Salim said.

01:39:22.080 | He said, we don't, you know, he dropped oil production in Saudi Arabia in the middle of a U.S.

01:39:31.520 | inflation spiral. They've never done that to us before, to aggravate the inflation spiral.

01:39:38.800 | And two weeks later, and then they signed a deal, a unilateral peace deal with Iran,

01:39:45.040 | which has been the enemy that we've been telling them to, you know,

01:39:48.880 | be a bulwark against for 20 years. And two weeks after that, he said, we don't care what the United

01:39:54.640 | States thinks anymore. So that's what we got for spending all those trillions of dollars there. We

01:39:59.280 | got short-term friends. And the United States, you know, policy abroad, and we have not made

01:40:05.280 | ourselves safer. We've made Americans, we've put Americans in more jeopardy all over the world.

01:40:10.960 | You know, you have to wait in lines to get through the airport. You have to, you know,

01:40:17.040 | the security state is now costing us $1.3 trillion. And America is unsafer and poorer

01:40:25.280 | than it's ever been. So, you know, we're not getting, we should be doing what President

01:40:30.560 | Kennedy said we ought to do and what China, the policy that China has now adopted.

01:40:37.520 | So that's a really eloquent and clear and powerful description of the way you see U.S.

01:40:43.520 | should be doing geopolitics and the way you see U.S. should be taking care of the poor in this

01:40:48.080 | country. Let me ask you a question from Jordan Peterson that he asked when I told him that I'm

01:40:55.760 | speaking with you. Given everything you've said, when does the left go too far? I suppose he's

01:41:04.560 | referring to cultural issues, identity politics. Well, you know, Jordan trying

01:41:13.280 | to get me to bad mouth the left the whole time I was in. I really enjoyed my talk with him.

01:41:20.080 | But he seemed to have that agenda where he wanted me to, you know, say bad things about the left.

01:41:25.840 | And I just don't, you know, that's not what my campaign is about. I want to do the opposite.

01:41:31.200 | Oh, I'm not going to bad mouth the left. They try, you know, I was on a show this week with

01:41:38.800 | David Remnick from The New Yorker, and he tried to get me to bad mouth Donald Trump and, you know,

01:41:44.240 | and Alex Jones and a lot of other people just and baiting me to do it. And of course,

01:41:49.840 | there's a lot of bad things I could say about all those people, but it doesn't, you know,

01:41:54.000 | I'm trying to find, I'm trying to find values that hold us together, that we can share in common

01:42:01.280 | rather than to focus constantly on these disputes and these issues that drive us apart. So me

01:42:08.160 | sitting here bad mouthing the left or bad mouthing the right is not going to advance the ball. I

01:42:14.240 | really want to figure out ways that, you know, what do these groups hold in common that we can all,

01:42:20.400 | you know, have a shared vision of what we want this country to look like.

01:42:25.040 | Well, that's music to my ears. But in that spirit, let me ask you a difficult question then.

01:42:30.560 | You wrote a book harshly criticizing Anthony Fauci. Let me ask you to steel man the case for

01:42:37.600 | the people who support him. What is the biggest positive thing you think Anthony Fauci did

01:42:42.960 | for the world? What is good that he has done for the world, especially during this pandemic?

01:42:48.160 | You know, I don't want to sit here and speak on Charlie by saying the guy

01:42:53.840 | didn't do anything, but I, I don't, I can't think of anything. I mean, if you,

01:43:03.120 | if you tell me something that you think he did, you know, maybe there was a drug that got licensed

01:43:08.560 | while he was at NIH that, you know, benefited people. That's certainly possible. He was there

01:43:13.360 | for 50 years. And I, I, in terms of his, um, of his principal programs of the AIDS programs and

01:43:22.640 | his COVID programs. And I think that the harm that he did vastly outweigh the, you know, the,

01:43:28.560 | the benefits. Do you think he believes he's doing good for the world? I don't know what he believes

01:43:32.880 | in fact, in that book, which is I think 250,000 words, I never tried to look inside of his head.

01:43:41.120 | I did. I deal with facts. I deal with science. So, and I have every, every factual assertion

01:43:46.560 | in that book is cited in sores to government databases or peer reviewed publications.

01:43:52.160 | And I don't, I try not to speculate about things that I don't know about, or I can't prove. And I

01:43:58.720 | do, I cannot tell you what his motivations were. I mean, all of us, he's done a thing, a lot of

01:44:05.920 | things that I think are really very, very bad things for humanity, very deceptive. But we all

01:44:13.440 | have this, this capacity for self-deception. As I said at the beginning of this podcast, we,

01:44:18.720 | we judge ourselves on our intentions rather than our actions. And we all

01:44:24.080 | have an almost infinite capacity to convince ourselves that what we're doing is, is right.

01:44:30.880 | And you know, not everybody kind of lives an examined life and is examining their motivations

01:44:38.800 | and the way that the world might experience their professions of goodness.

01:44:43.680 | Let me ask about the difficulty of the job he had. Do you think it's possible to do that kind

01:44:49.520 | of job well, or is it also a fundamental flaw of the job of being the central centralized figure

01:44:56.000 | that's supposed to have scientific policy? No, I think he was a genuinely bad human being

01:45:02.240 | and that there were many, many good people in that department over the years.

01:45:08.160 | Bernice Eddy is a really good example. John Anthony Morris, many people whose careers he

01:45:16.640 | destroyed because they were trying to tell the truth. One after the other, the greatest scientists

01:45:22.560 | in the history of NIH were run out of that organization, out of that agency. But you know,

01:45:29.360 | people listening to this, you know, probably, you know, will, in hearing me say that, will think

01:45:37.360 | that I'm bitter or that I, I'm doctrinaire about him. But you know, you should really go and read

01:45:44.240 | my book. And I, it's hard to summarize a, you know, I tried to be really methodical

01:45:49.920 | to not call names, to just say what happened. You are, the bigger picture of this is you're

01:45:58.560 | an outspoken critic of pharmaceutical companies, Big Pharma. What is the biggest problem with Big

01:46:05.040 | Pharma and how can it be fixed? Well, the problem could be fixed through regulation, you know,

01:46:10.960 | the problems, but the pharmaceutical industry is, is, I mean, I don't want to say because this is

01:46:23.440 | going to seem extreme that a criminal enterprise, but if you look at the history, that is an

01:46:29.600 | applicable descriptor or characterization. For example, the four biggest vaccine makers,

01:46:38.000 | Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer, and Glaxo, four companies that make all of the 72 vaccines that are now

01:46:46.240 | mandated for America, effectively mandated for American children. Collectively, those companies

01:46:52.960 | have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties and damages in the last decade. And I think

01:47:01.760 | since 2000, about 79 billion. So, these are the most corrupt companies in the world.

01:47:07.520 | And the problem is that they're serial felons. They, you know, they do this again and again

01:47:15.280 | and again. So, they did, you know, Merck did Vioxx, which, Vioxx, they, you know, they killed

01:47:23.360 | people by falsifying science. And they did it, they lied to the public. They said, this is a

01:47:29.040 | headache medicine and an arthritis painkiller. But they didn't tell people that it also gave

01:47:36.000 | you heart attacks. And they knew, you know, we've found when we sued them, you know, the memos from

01:47:42.960 | their bean counters saying, we're going to kill this many people, but we're still going to make

01:47:47.600 | money. So, they make those calculations and those calculations are made very, very regularly.

01:47:54.000 | And then, you know, when they get caught, they pay a penalty. And I think they paid about $7

01:48:01.680 | billion for Vioxx. But then they went right back that same year that they paid that penalty,

01:48:08.560 | they went back into the same thing again with Gardasil and with a whole lot of other

01:48:13.680 | drugs. So, the way that the system is set up, the way that it's sold to doctors, the way that

01:48:22.160 | nobody ever goes to jail. So, there's really no penalty that it all becomes part of the cost of

01:48:29.120 | doing business. And, you know, you can see other businesses that if they're not, if they don't,

01:48:35.200 | if there's no penalty, if there's no real, I mean, look, these are the companies that gave us the

01:48:40.560 | opioid epidemic, right? So, they knew what was going to happen. And we, you know, you go and

01:48:46.560 | see there's a documentary, I forget what the name of it is, but it shows exactly what happened. And,

01:48:53.040 | you know, they corrupted FDA. They knew that oxycodone was addictive. They got FDA to tell

01:49:01.200 | doctors that it wasn't addictive. They pressured FDA to lie and they got their way. And they've,

01:49:08.880 | so far, they've had this year, you know, those, they got a whole generation addicted to oxycodone.

01:49:14.800 | And now, you know, when they got caught and they made it, we made it harder to get oxycodone. And

01:49:19.600 | now all those addicted kids are going to fentanyl and dying. And this year it killed 106,000.

01:49:27.840 | That's twice as many people who were killed during the 20-year Vietnam War, but in one year,

01:49:35.200 | twice as many American kids. And they knew it was going to happen. And they did it to make money.

01:49:41.920 | So I don't know what you call that other than saying that's, you know, a criminal enterprise.

01:49:46.640 | - Or is it possible to have, within a capitalist system, to produce medication,

01:49:52.480 | to produce drugs at scale in a way that is not corrupt?

01:49:55.600 | - Of course it is.

01:49:57.440 | - How?

01:49:58.160 | - Through, you know, through a solid regulatory regimen, you know, where drugs are actually tested.

01:50:05.840 | You know, I mean, the problem is not the capitalist system. The capitalist system, I, you know, I

01:50:12.560 | have great admiration for the thing that love for the capitalist system is the greatest economic

01:50:17.040 | engine ever devised. But it has to be harnessed to a social purpose. Otherwise it's going to,

01:50:24.560 | it leads us, you know, down the trail of oligarchy, environmental destruction, and, you know, and

01:50:33.360 | commoditizing, poisoning, and killing human beings. That's what it will do in the end.

01:50:39.200 | You need a regulatory structure that is not corrupted by entanglements, financial entanglements

01:50:53.520 | with the industry. And we've set this up the way that this is, that the system is set up today

01:51:00.960 | has created this system of regulatory capture on steroids. So almost 50% of FDA's budget comes from

01:51:09.920 | pharmaceutical companies. The people who work at FDA are, you know, their money is coming,

01:51:16.080 | their salaries are coming from pharma, half their salaries. So they're, you know, they know who their

01:51:21.600 | bosses are. And that means getting those drugs done, getting them out the door and approved as

01:51:27.280 | quickly as possible. It's called fast track approval. And they pay 50% of FDA's budget.

01:51:32.640 | It goes about 45% actually goes to fast track approval.

01:51:37.840 | Do you think money can buy integrity?

01:51:39.920 | Oh yeah, of course it can. Yeah, I mean, there's, that's not something that is controversial. Of

01:51:47.200 | course it will. So, and then-

01:51:49.760 | It's slightly controversial to me. I would like to think that scientists that work at FDA-

01:51:52.880 | Well, it may not be able to buy your integrity. I'm talking about population-wide. I'm not

01:51:56.640 | talking about the individual.

01:51:58.160 | But I'd like to believe that scientists, I mean, in general, a career of a scientist is not a very

01:52:05.760 | high paying job. I'd like to believe that people that go into science that work at FDA, that work

01:52:11.440 | at NIH are doing it for a reason that's not even correlated with money really.

01:52:17.200 | Yeah. And I think probably that's why they go in there, but scientists are corruptible. And,

01:52:22.720 | you know, the way that I can tell you that is that I've brought over 500 lawsuits and almost

01:52:30.400 | all of them involve scientific controversies. And there are scientists on both sides in every one.

01:52:35.600 | When we sued Monsanto, there was on the Monsanto side, there was a Yale scientist,

01:52:42.160 | a Stanford scientist, and a Harvard scientist. And on our side, there was a Yale, Stanford,

01:52:46.480 | and Harvard scientist. And they were saying exactly the opposite things.

01:52:51.440 | In fact, there's a word for those kind of scientists who take money for their opinion,

01:52:56.000 | and the word is by "ostitutes." And they are very, very common. And, you know, and I've been

01:53:02.800 | dealing with them my whole career. You know, I think it was Upton Sinclair who said that it's

01:53:08.640 | very difficult to persuade a man of a fact if the existence of that fact will diminish his salary.

01:53:16.720 | And I think that's true for all of us. If they, you know, we find a way of reconciling ourselves

01:53:22.000 | to things that are, to truths that actually, and worldviews, that actually benefit our salaries.

01:53:32.320 | Now, NIH, NIH has probably the worst system, which is that scientists who work for NIH,

01:53:41.040 | NIH itself, which used to be the premier gold standard scientific agency in the world,

01:53:46.320 | everybody looked at NIH, that today it's just an incubator for pharmaceutical drugs. And, you know,

01:53:54.240 | that is that gravity of economic self-interest. Because if you're, if NIH itself collects

01:54:02.560 | royalties, they have margin rights for the patents on all the drugs that they work on.

01:54:08.160 | So, with the Moderna vaccine, which they promoted incessantly and aggressively,

01:54:12.480 | NIH owned 50% of that vaccine and is making billions and billions of dollars on it.

01:54:17.760 | And there are four, at least four scientists that we know of, and probably at least six

01:54:23.280 | at NIH who themselves have margin rights for those patents. So, if you are a scientist who

01:54:29.600 | work at NIH, you work on a new drug, you then get margin rights and you're entitled to royalties

01:54:35.360 | of $150,000 a year forever from that, forever. Your children, your children's children, as long

01:54:41.120 | as that product's on the market, you can collect royalties. So, you have, you know, the Moderna

01:54:47.440 | vaccine is paying for the top people at NIH, you know, some of the top regulators, it's paying

01:54:54.560 | for their boats, it's paying for their mortgages, it's paying for their children's education.

01:55:00.000 | And, you know, you have to expect that in those kinds of situations, the regulatory function would

01:55:10.560 | be subsumed beneath the mercantile ambitions of the agency itself and the individuals who stand

01:55:19.360 | to profit enormously from getting a drug to market. Those guys are paid by us, the taxpayer,

01:55:25.680 | to find problems with those drugs before they get to market. But if you know that drug is going to

01:55:30.800 | pay for your mortgage, you may overlook a little problem, and that worry even a very big one,

01:55:36.400 | and that's the problem. - You've talked about that the media

01:55:40.480 | slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer, and you've said that you're not anti-vaccine,

01:55:46.800 | you're pro-safe vaccine. Difficult question. Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?

01:55:53.840 | - I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably

01:55:58.480 | averting more problems than they're causing. There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and

01:56:07.680 | effective. - Those are big words.

01:56:10.400 | - Those are big words. - What about the polio?

01:56:11.840 | Can we talk about the polio? - Here's the problem.

01:56:14.880 | - Yes. - Yeah, here's the problem.

01:56:18.000 | The polio vaccine contained a virus called simian virus 40, SV40. It's one of the most

01:56:26.640 | carcinogenic materials that is known to man. In fact, it's used now by scientists around

01:56:32.160 | the world to induce tumors in rats and guinea pigs in labs. But it was in that vaccine,

01:56:38.480 | 98 million people who got that vaccine in my generation got it, and now you've had this

01:56:43.120 | explosion of soft tissue cancers in our generation that kill many, many, many, many, many more people

01:56:49.040 | than polio ever did. So if you say to me, did the polio vaccine, was it effective against polio?

01:56:55.120 | I'm gonna say yes. If you say to me, did it kill more people, did it cause more deaths than I've

01:57:02.000 | heard? I would say, I don't know, because we don't have the data on that. So--

01:57:06.240 | - But let's talk, well, you know, we kind of have to narrow in on, is it effective against the thing

01:57:11.440 | it's supposed to fight? - Oh, well, a lot of them are. And let me give you an example.

01:57:14.640 | The most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.

01:57:20.240 | It was used in this, introduced in this country around 1980. That vaccine caused so many injuries

01:57:28.000 | that Wyatt, which was the manufacturer, was said to the Reagan administration, we are now paying

01:57:34.160 | $20 in downstream liabilities for every dollar that we're making in profits, and we are getting

01:57:40.480 | out of the business unless you give us permanent immunity from liability. So the vaccine companies

01:57:46.960 | then were given, and by the way, Reagan said at that time, why don't you just make the vaccine safe?

01:57:52.640 | And Wyatt said, because vaccines are inherently unsafe, they said unavoidably unsafe,

01:57:59.920 | you cannot make them safe. And so when Reagan wrote the bill and passed it, the bill says

01:58:06.640 | in its preambles, because vaccines are unavoidably unsafe. And the Brucewitz case, which was a

01:58:12.560 | Supreme Court case that upheld that bill, used that same language, vaccines cannot be made safe,

01:58:18.640 | they're unavoidably unsafe. So this is what the law says. Now, I just want to finish this story,

01:58:23.680 | because this illustrates very well your question. The DTP vaccine was discontinued in this country,

01:58:31.760 | and it was discontinued in Europe, because so many kids were being injured by it. However,

01:58:38.640 | the WHO and Bill Gates gives it to 161 million African children every year.

01:58:44.240 | And Bill Gates went to the Danish government and asked them to support this program, saying we've

01:58:53.280 | saved 30 million kids from dying from diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. The Danish government

01:58:59.920 | said, can you show us the data? And he couldn't. So the Danish government paid for a big study

01:59:06.240 | with Novo Nordisk, which is a Scandinavian vaccine company in West Africa. And they went to West

01:59:13.760 | Africa, and they looked at the DTP vaccine for 30 years of data. And they hired, they retained the

01:59:20.640 | best vaccine scientists in the world, these kind of deities of African vaccine program, Peter AAB,

01:59:25.920 | Sigrid Morgensen, and a bunch of others. And they looked at 30 years of data for the DTP vaccine,

01:59:32.160 | and they came back, and they were shocked by what they found. They found that the vaccine was

01:59:37.760 | preventing kids from getting diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. But the girls who got that vaccine

01:59:43.120 | were 10 times more likely to die over the next six months than children who didn't. Why is that?

01:59:50.160 | And they weren't dying from anything, anybody ever associated with the vaccine. They were dying of

01:59:54.800 | anemia, heart disease, malaria, sepsis, and mainly pulmonary and respiratory disease, pneumonia.

02:00:02.720 | And it turns out this is what the researchers found, who were all pro-vaccine, by the way,

02:00:13.280 | they said that this vaccine is killing more children than diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis

02:00:20.640 | prior to the introduction of the vaccine. And for 30 years, nobody ever noticed it.

02:00:24.800 | The vaccine was providing protection against those target illnesses, but it had ruined the

02:00:29.920 | children's immune systems, and they could not defend themselves against random infections that

02:00:34.880 | were harmless to most children. - But isn't that nearly impossible to

02:00:38.560 | prove that link? - You can't prove the link. All you can do is,

02:00:42.560 | for any particular interest, you can't. Illness or death, you can't prove the link. But you can

02:00:48.400 | show statistically that if you get that vaccine, you're more likely to die over the next six months

02:00:54.960 | than if you don't. And those studies, unfortunately, are not done for any other vaccines.

02:00:59.520 | So for every other medicine, in order to get approval from the FDA, you have to do a placebo

02:01:05.760 | control trial prior to licensure, where you look at health outcomes among an exposed group,

02:01:13.680 | a group that gets it, and compare those to a similarly situated group that gets a placebo.

02:01:20.160 | The only medical intervention that does not undergo placebo control trials prior to licensure

02:01:29.120 | are vaccines. Not one of the 72 vaccines that are now mandated for our children have ever undergone

02:01:35.360 | a placebo control trial prior to licensure. - So I should say that there's a bunch, on that point,

02:01:42.000 | I've heard from a bunch of folks that disagree with you, including polio. I mean,

02:01:46.000 | testing is a really important point. Before licensure, placebo control, randomized trials,

02:01:52.160 | polio received just that against the saline placebo control.

02:02:00.080 | So it seems unclear to me, I'm confused why you say that they don't go through that process. It

02:02:07.120 | seems like a lot of them do. - Here's the thing, is that I was saying that for many years, 'cause

02:02:15.840 | we couldn't find any. And then in 2016, in March, I met, President Trump ordered Dr. Fauci to meet

02:02:24.160 | with me, and Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins, and I said to them during that meeting, "You have been

02:02:33.280 | saying that I'm not telling the truth when I said not one of these has undergone a prior, pre-licensure

02:02:39.520 | placebo control. And the polio may have had one post-licensure, most of them haven't.

02:02:45.120 | The polio may have, I don't know. But I said, our question was, prior to licensure, do you ever

02:02:53.120 | test these for safety? And by the way, I think the polio vaccine did undergo a saline placebo

02:03:04.400 | trial prior to licensure, but not for safety, only for efficacy. So I'm talking about safety trials.

02:03:14.000 | Now, Fauci told me that he said, "I can't find one now." He had a whole tray of files there.

02:03:22.800 | He said, "I can't find one now, but I'll send you one." I said, "Just for any vaccines, send me one,

02:03:28.480 | for any of the 72 vaccines." He never did. So we sued the HHS. And after a year of stonewalling us,

02:03:36.960 | HHS came back and they gave us a letter saying we have no pre-licensing safety trial for any of the

02:03:44.320 | 72 vaccines. And that letter from HHS, which settled our lawsuit against them, because we

02:03:52.080 | had a FOIA lawsuit against them, is posted on CHD's website. So anybody can go look at it.

02:03:58.480 | So if HHS had any study, I assume they would have given it to us and they can't find one.

02:04:06.960 | Well, let me zoom out because a lot of the details matter here. Pre-licensure,

02:04:12.480 | what does placebo-controlled mean? So this probably requires a rigorous analysis. And

02:04:20.800 | actually at this point, it would be nice for me just to give the shout out to other people,

02:04:26.160 | much smarter than me, that people should follow along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

02:04:32.160 | Use their mind, learn, and think. So one really awesome creator, I really recommend him,

02:04:38.720 | is Dr. Dan Wilson. He hosts the Debunk the Funk podcast. Vincent Recaniello, who hosts This Week

02:04:45.680 | in Virology, brilliant guy, I've had him on the podcast. Somebody you've been battling with

02:04:50.160 | is Paul Offit. Interesting Twitter, interesting books, people should read and understand and read

02:04:56.480 | your books as well. And Eric Topol has a good Twitter and good books, and even Peter Hotez,

02:05:02.080 | I'll ask you about him. And people should, because Paul Offit

02:05:09.600 | published a sub-stack recently debunking, I think, my discussion with Joe Rogan.

02:05:20.560 | And we have published a debunk of his debunking. So if you read his stuff, you should read both.

02:05:30.000 | Read both, yes.

02:05:30.960 | You should read. And I would love to debate any of these guys.

02:05:37.600 | So Joe Rogan proposed just such a debate, which is quite fascinating to see how much attention

02:05:43.280 | and how much funding it garnered, the debate between you and Peter Hotez. Why do you think

02:05:49.280 | Peter rejected the offer?

02:05:50.560 | I think it's, you know, again, I'm not going to look into his head,

02:05:55.360 | but what I will say is if you're a scientist and you're making public recommendations based upon

02:06:02.880 | what you say is evidence-based science, you ought to be able to defend that. You ought to be able

02:06:08.640 | to defend it in a public forum, and you ought to be able to defend it against all commerce.

02:06:13.280 | And, you know, so I, you know, if you're a scientist, science is based on,

02:06:21.040 | is rooted in logic and reason. And if you can't use logic and reason to defend your position,

02:06:28.640 | and by the way, I know almost all of the studies. I've written books on them, and

02:06:35.280 | we've made a big effort to assemble all the studies on both sides.

02:06:39.600 | And so I'm prepared to talk about those studies, and I'm prepared to submit them in advance,

02:06:45.200 | you know, and for each of the points. And by the way, I've done that with Peter Hotez.

02:06:52.000 | You know, I've actually, because I had this kind of informal debate with him,

02:06:58.480 | several years ago with a referee at that time, and we were debating not only by phone, but by email.

02:07:07.040 | And on those emails, every point that he would make, I would cite science, and he could never

02:07:11.920 | come back with science. He could never come back with publications. He would give publications

02:07:17.840 | that had nothing to do with, for example, thimerosal vaccines, mercury-based vaccines.

02:07:22.880 | He sent me one time 16 studies to rebut something I'd said about thimerosal, and not one of those

02:07:30.320 | studies, they were all about the MMR vaccine, which doesn't contain thimerosal. So it wasn't

02:07:35.440 | like a real debate where you're, you know, you're using reason and isolating points and having a,

02:07:42.880 | you know, a rational discourse. I don't think that he, I don't blame him for not debating me,

02:07:49.360 | because I don't think he has the science. - Are there aspects of all the work you've

02:07:57.520 | done on vaccines, all the advocacy you've done, that you found out that you were not correct on,

02:08:03.280 | that you were wrong on, that you've changed your mind on?

02:08:07.200 | - Yeah, there are many times over time that I, you know, I found that I've made mistakes,

02:08:14.560 | and we correct those mistakes. You know, I run a big organization, and I do a lot of tweets. You

02:08:21.040 | know, I'm very careful. For example, my Instagram, I was taken down for misinformation, but there was

02:08:27.520 | no misinformation on my Instagram. Everything that I cited on Instagram was cited or sourced

02:08:32.400 | to a government database or to peer-reviewed science. But for example, The Defender, which was

02:08:39.680 | our organization's newsletter, we summarize scientific reports all the time. That's one

02:08:46.320 | of the things, the services that we provide. We watch the, you know, PubMed, and we watch the

02:08:51.760 | peer-reviewed publications, and we summarize them when they come out. We have made mistakes. When we

02:08:57.440 | make a mistake, we are rigorous about acknowledging it, apologizing for it, and changing it. That's

02:09:03.360 | what we do. I think we have one of the most robust fact-checking operations anywhere in journalism

02:09:08.320 | today. We actually do real science, and you know, there—listen, I've put up on my Twitter account,

02:09:15.680 | and there are numerous times that I've made mistakes on Twitter, and I apologize for it.

02:09:20.880 | And people say to me, you know, "Oh, that's weird. I've never seen anybody apologize on Twitter."

02:09:27.680 | And I think it's really important, of course, human beings make mistakes. My book is, you know,

02:09:34.560 | 230,000, or 40,000, or 50,000 words. There's going to be a mistake in there. But you know,

02:09:40.960 | what I say at the beginning of the book, if you see a mistake in here, please notify me. I give

02:09:45.920 | a way that people can notify me. And if somebody points out a mistake, I'm going to change it. I'm

02:09:51.440 | not going to dig my feet in and say, you know, I'm not going to acknowledge this.

02:09:56.240 | So some of the things we've been talking about, you've been an outspoken contrarian on some

02:10:02.480 | very controversial topics. This has garnered some fame and recognition,

02:10:09.680 | in part for being attacked and standing strong against those attacks. If I may say,

02:10:15.680 | for being a martyr, do you worry about this drug of martyrdom that might cloud your judgment?

02:10:22.000 | First of all, yeah, I don't consider myself a martyr, and I've never considered myself a

02:10:27.040 | victim. I make choices about my life, and I, you know, and I'm content with those choices and

02:10:32.560 | peaceful with them. I'm not trying to be a martyr or a hero or anything else. I'm doing what I think

02:10:38.640 | is right, because I want to be peaceful inside of myself. But the only guard I have is, you know,

02:10:48.720 | fact-based reality. If you show me a scientific study that shows that I'm wrong, for example,

02:10:57.520 | if you come back and say, look, Bobby, here's a polio, here's a safety study on polio that was

02:11:05.680 | done pre-licensure and used a real salient solution, I'm going to put that on my Twitter,

02:11:10.800 | and I'm going to say I was wrong. There is one out there. So, you know, but that's all I can do.

02:11:17.600 | All right, I have to ask, you are in great shape. Can you go through your diet and exercise routine?

02:11:23.600 | I do intermittent fasting. So, I eat between, I start at my first meal at around noon,

02:11:34.560 | and then I try to stop eating at six or seven. And then I hike every day.

02:11:45.600 | Morning, evening?

02:11:47.440 | In the morning. I go to a meeting first thing in the morning, 12-7 meeting, and I go hike,

02:11:53.200 | and I hike uphill for a mile and a half up and a mile and a half down with my dogs,

02:11:58.480 | and I do my meditations. And then I go to the gym, and I go to the gym for 35 minutes.

02:12:04.800 | I don't, I do it short time. I've been exercising for 50 years, and what I found is it's sustainable

02:12:13.520 | if I do just the short periods. And I do four different routines at the gym,

02:12:18.880 | and I never relax at the gym. I go in there, and I have a very intense exercise. I could tell you

02:12:26.960 | what my routine is, but I do backs one day, chest one day, legs, and then a miscellaneous. And I do

02:12:36.000 | 12. My first set of everything is I try to reach failure at 12 reps, and then my fourth set of

02:12:44.560 | everything is a strip set. I do, I take a lot of vitamins. I can't even list them to you here,

02:12:53.600 | because I, you know, I couldn't even remember them all, but I take a ton of vitamins and nutrients.

02:13:01.600 | I'm on an anti-aging protocol from my doctor that includes testosterone replacement,

02:13:11.120 | but I don't take any steroids. I don't take any anabolic steroids or anything like that. And the

02:13:19.120 | DRT I use is bio-identical to what my body produced.

02:13:24.960 | - What are your thoughts on hormone therapy in general?

02:13:27.840 | - I talk to a lot of doctors about that stuff, you know, because I'm interested in health.

02:13:33.600 | And I, you know, I've heard really good things about it, but I don't know.

02:13:38.640 | I'm definitely not an expert on it.

02:13:40.720 | - "About God," you wrote, "God talks to human beings through many vectors, wise people,

02:13:47.840 | organized religion, the great books of religions, through art, music, and poetry,

02:13:53.040 | but nowhere with such detail and grace and joy as through creation. When we destroy nature,

02:13:58.400 | we diminish our capacity to sense the divine. What is your relationship,

02:14:02.800 | and what is your understanding of God? Who is God?"

02:14:05.680 | - Well, I mean, God is incomprehensible, you know? I mean, I guess most philosophers would say we're,

02:14:15.520 | you know, we're inside the mind of God, and so it would be impossible for us Sunders,

02:14:22.640 | and, you know, what actually what, you know, what God's form is. But I mean, for me, I have a,

02:14:29.680 | let's say this, I had, when I was, I was raised in a very, very deeply religious setting.

02:14:41.120 | So we went to church in the summer, oftentimes twice a day,

02:14:49.280 | morning mass, and we went to, we definitely went every Sunday, and I went,

02:14:56.400 | we prayed in the morning, we prayed before and after every meal, we prayed at night, we said a

02:15:02.960 | rosary, sometimes three rosaries a night, and my father read us the Bible whenever he was home. He

02:15:10.640 | would read us, you know, we'd all get in the bed, and he'd read us the Bible stories. And I went to

02:15:16.000 | Catholic schools, I went to Jesuit schools, I went to the nuns, and I went to a Quaker school at one

02:15:21.280 | point. When I, I became a drug addict when I was about 15 years old, about a year after my dad

02:15:28.240 | died, and I was addicted to drugs for 14 years. During that time, when you're an addict, you're

02:15:33.680 | living against conscience, and when you're living, and I never, you know, I was always trying to get

02:15:39.120 | off of drugs, never able to, but I never felt good about what I was doing. And when you're living

02:15:48.240 | against conscience, you kind of push God to the peripheries of your life. So I'll call me He,

02:15:57.360 | gets, recedes and gets smaller. And then when I, when I got sober,

02:16:06.160 | I knew that I had a couple of experiences. One is that I had a friend of my brother's,

02:16:14.080 | one of my brothers who died of this disease of addiction, had a good friend who had used to

02:16:21.440 | take drugs with us, and he became a Mooney, so he became a follower of Reverend Sun, Sun Young Moon,

02:16:30.080 | and he, at that point, his compulsion, he had the same kind of compulsion that I had,

02:16:37.200 | and yet it was completely removed from him. And so, and he used to come and hang out with us,

02:16:44.080 | but he would not want to take drugs, even if I was taking them right in front of him. He was,

02:16:49.920 | he was immune to it. He'd become impervious to that impulse. And I, when I was in the,

02:16:58.080 | when I first got sober, I was, I knew that I did not want to be the kind of person who was,

02:17:05.440 | you know, waking up every day in white-knuckling sobriety and just, you know, trying to resist,

02:17:11.040 | resist through willpower. And by the way, I had, I had iron willpower as a kid. I gave up candy

02:17:17.920 | for Lent when I was 12, and I didn't eat it again until I was in college. I gave up, I gave up

02:17:24.240 | desserts the next year for Lent, and I didn't ever eat another dessert until I was in college,

02:17:28.880 | and I was trying to bulk up for rugby and for sports. So, I felt like I could do anything with

02:17:35.840 | my willpower, but somehow, this particular thing, you know, the addiction, was completely impervious

02:17:44.480 | to it. And it was cunning, baffling, incomprehensible. I could not understand why I

02:17:50.960 | couldn't just say no and then never do it again, like I did with everything else.

02:17:55.120 | And so, I was living against conscience, and I thought about this guy, and I, you know,

02:18:05.120 | reflecting my own prejudices at that time in my life, I said to myself, I didn't want to be,

02:18:12.240 | I didn't want to be like a drug addict who was wanting a drug all the time and just not being

02:18:17.680 | able to do it. I wanted to completely realign my, my, myself so that I was somebody who got

02:18:26.880 | up every day and just didn't want to take drugs, never thought of them, you know, kissed the wife

02:18:32.000 | and children and went to work and was never thought about drugs the whole day. And I knew that people

02:18:38.800 | throughout history had done that. You know, I'd read the lives of the Saints. I knew St. Augustine

02:18:43.200 | had met a very, very dissolute youth, and, you know, had this spiritual realignment transformation.

02:18:50.160 | I knew the same thing had happened to St. Paul, you know, at Damascus. The same thing had happened

02:18:54.320 | to St. Francis. St. Francis also had a, had a dissolute and fun-loving youth and had, you know,

02:19:01.120 | had this deep spiritual realignment. And I knew that that had happened to people throughout history,

02:19:07.760 | and I thought that's what I needed, you know, something like that. I had the example of this

02:19:13.680 | friend of mine, and I used to think about him, and I would think, and this again reflects the

02:19:19.360 | bias and the, you know, probably the meanness of myself at that time, but I said I'd rather be dead

02:19:25.280 | than be a Mooney. But I wish I somehow could distill that power that he got without becoming

02:19:34.320 | a religious nuisance. And at that time, I picked up a book by Carl Jung called "Synchronicity."

02:19:43.360 | And Jung, he was a psychiatrist. He was a contemporary of Freud's. He was a,

02:19:48.640 | Freud was his mentor, and Freud wanted him to be his replacement, but Freud was an avowed atheist.

02:19:55.120 | And Jung was a deeply spiritual man. He had these very intense and genuine spiritual experiences

02:20:01.120 | from when he was a little boy, from when he was three years old, that he remembers. His biography

02:20:04.880 | is fascinating about him because he remembers them with such detail. And he had written,

02:20:14.480 | he was always, he was interesting to me because he was a very faithful scientist, and I considered

02:20:19.200 | myself a science-based person from when I was little. And yet, he had this spiritual dimension

02:20:25.280 | to him which infused all of his thinking and really, I think, made him, you know, it is,

02:20:30.720 | branded his form of recovery or of treatment. And he thought that he had this experience that

02:20:42.160 | he describes in this book where he's sitting up on the third, he ran one of the biggest sanitariums

02:20:47.520 | in Europe, in Zurich, and he was sitting up on the third floor of this building,

02:20:53.920 | and he's talking to a patient who was describing her dream to him, and the fulcrum of that dream

02:21:03.200 | was a scarab beetle, which was an insect that is very, very uncommon, if at all, in Northern Europe,

02:21:11.200 | but it's a common figure in the iconography of Egypt and the hieroglyphics on the walls of the

02:21:18.320 | pyramids, etc. And while he was talking to her, he heard this "bing, bing, bing" on the window

02:21:27.360 | behind him, and he didn't want to turn around to take his attention off her, but finally he does

02:21:32.000 | it. In exasperation, he turns around, he throws up the window, and a scarab beetle flies in and

02:21:37.440 | lands in his hand, and he shows it to the woman, and he says, "Is this what you were thinking of?

02:21:42.000 | Is this what you were dreaming about?" And he was struck by that experience, which was similar to

02:21:48.080 | other experiences he's had like that, and that's what synchronicity means. It's an incident,

02:21:54.400 | a coincidence, you know? And like, if you're talking with somebody that you haven't thought

02:22:02.960 | about in 20 years, and that person calls on the phone, that's synchronicity. And he believed it

02:22:09.120 | was a way that God intervened in our lives that broke all the rules of nature that he had set up,

02:22:15.520 | the rules of physics, the rules of mathematics, you know, to reach in and sort of tap us on the

02:22:21.760 | shoulder and say, "I'm here." And so he tried to reproduce that in a clinical setting,

02:22:29.440 | and he would put one guy in one room and another guy in another room and have them flip cards and

02:22:34.000 | guess what the other guy had flipped. And he believed that if he could beat the laws of chance,

02:22:39.040 | laws of mathematics, that he would approve the existence of an unnatural law, a supernatural

02:22:44.960 | law, and that was the first step to proving the existence of a God. He never succeeds in doing it,

02:22:50.480 | but he says in the book, "Even though I can't prove using empirical and scientific tools the

02:22:55.920 | existence of a God, I can show through anecdotal evidence, having seen thousands of patients come

02:23:03.120 | through this institution, that people who believe in God get better faster and that the recovery is

02:23:08.080 | more enduring than people who don't." And for me, hearing that was more impactful than if he

02:23:14.480 | had claimed that he had proved the existence of a God, because I would not believe that.

02:23:20.160 | But I was already at a mindset where I would have done anything I could to improve my chances of

02:23:26.640 | never having to take drugs again by even 1%. And if believing in God was going to help me,

02:23:33.600 | whether there's a God up there or not, believing in one itself had the power to help me, I was

02:23:39.920 | going to do that. So then the question is, how do you start believing in something that you can't

02:23:44.080 | see or smell or hear or touch or taste or acquire with your senses? And Jung provides the formula

02:23:51.520 | for that, and he says, "Act as if. You fake it till you make it." And so that's what I started

02:23:57.680 | doing. I just started pretending there was a God watching me all the time, and life was a series

02:24:03.680 | of tests, and there was a bunch of moral decisions that I had to make every day. And each one,

02:24:10.000 | these were all just little things that I did, but each one now, for me, had a moral dimension.

02:24:15.600 | When the alarm goes off, do I lay in bed for an extra 10 minutes with my indolent thoughts,

02:24:21.440 | or do I jump right out of bed? Do I make my most important decision of the day? Do I hang up the

02:24:29.280 | towels? When I go into the closet and pull out my blue jeans and a bunch of those wire hangers

02:24:38.400 | fall on the ground, do I shut the door and say, "I'm too important to do that, that somebody else's

02:24:44.240 | job," or not? And so, do I put the water in the ice tray before I put it in the freezer? Do I put

02:24:51.040 | the shopping cart back in the place that it's supposed to go, in the parking lot of the Safeway?

02:24:57.200 | And if I make a whole bunch of those choices right,

02:25:02.000 | that I maintain myself in a posture of surrender, which keeps me open to the power of, to my higher

02:25:10.560 | power, to my God. And when I do those things right, when I, you know, so much about addiction

02:25:18.400 | is about abuse of power, abuse of, all of us have some power, whether it's our good looks, or whether

02:25:26.240 | it's, you know, connections, or education, or family, or whatever. And there's always a temptation

02:25:36.240 | to use those to fulfill self-will. And the challenge is, how do you use those always to

02:25:43.040 | serve instead God's will and, you know, the good of our community? And that, to me, is kind of the

02:25:50.400 | struggle. And when I do that, I feel God's power coming through me, and that I can do things. I'm

02:26:00.240 | much more effective as a human being. That gnawing, you know, anxiety that I lived with for so many

02:26:09.040 | years, and my God, that, it's gone. And that I can kind of, like, put down the oars and hoist the

02:26:17.600 | sail, and you know, and the wind takes me. And I can see the evidence of it in my life.

02:26:23.760 | And you know, the big thing, the temptation for me is that when all these good things start

02:26:32.960 | happening in my life, and the cash and prizes start flowing in, you know, how do I maintain

02:26:38.960 | that posture of surrender? How do I stay surrendered then when my inclination is to say to God,

02:26:44.480 | "Thanks, God, I got it from here," and drive the car off the cliff again? And so, you know,

02:26:51.280 | I had a spiritual awakening, and my desire for drugs and alcohol was lifted miraculously.

02:26:57.440 | And to me, it was as much a miracle as if I'd been able to walk on water. Because I had tried

02:27:05.360 | everything earnestly, sincerely, and honestly for a decade to try to stop, and I could not do it

02:27:11.760 | under my own power. And then all of a sudden, it was lifted effortlessly. And you know, so I saw

02:27:18.160 | that evidence, early evidence of God in my life, and of the power. And I see it now, you know,

02:27:27.760 | every day of my life. - So adding that

02:27:30.640 | moral dimension to all of your actions is how you were able to win that Camus battle against

02:27:36.160 | the absurd. - Exactly.

02:27:38.480 | - Sisyphus with the bull. - It's all the same thing.

02:27:40.800 | It's the battle to just do the right thing. - And now Sisyphus was able to find somehow

02:27:45.920 | happiness. - Yeah.

02:27:46.640 | - (laughs) Well, Bobby, thank you for the stroll through some of the most important moments in

02:27:52.160 | recent human history, and for running for president. And thank you for talking today.

02:27:58.640 | - Thank you, Lex. - Thanks for listening to this

02:28:02.000 | conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the

02:28:07.120 | description. And now let me leave you with some words from John F. Kennedy. "Let us not seek the

02:28:13.040 | Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame

02:28:18.880 | for the past. Instead, let us accept our own responsibility for the future." Thank you for

02:28:25.840 | listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:28:28.800 | (upbeat music)

02:28:29.700 | (upbeat music)

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02:28:32.220 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

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

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