E127: Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in conversation with the Besties

00:00:00.000 | Saks, you ready? You got your quick time going?

00:00:02.240 | Oh, let me do that real quick.

00:00:04.240 | And just a quick note, Saks, Mr. Kennedy doesn't have earpieces in, so he, we just have to be careful of the cross-talk or talking over each other.

00:00:11.600 | I'll direct questions to each person and then follow up so you can obviously just use your judgment of when to insert yourself.

00:00:17.440 | But be gentle on the insertion there because we don't want, that came out wrong.

00:00:21.440 | Just be gentle when you interrupt.

00:00:24.400 | There's your cold open.

00:00:27.280 | At least if you did it incorrectly, it'll be quick.

00:00:29.680 | Okay, here we go in three, two...

00:00:32.640 | [intro music]

00:00:49.200 | All right, everybody, welcome to the All In podcast.

00:00:52.400 | As many of you know, this podcast has gotten quite popular over the last two years, typically in the top 10 or 20 each week.

00:00:58.080 | And we talk about politics. We've got a big following in DC.

00:01:02.800 | Why are you calling me self-absorbed, Shabbat? Let me listen to how your co-host opens his show.

00:01:07.360 | Calm down, everybody.

00:01:08.080 | It's okay. Yeah, go ahead.

00:01:09.200 | And as part of that, our ongoing discussions about politics and presidential candidates has resonated in particular communities.

00:01:18.560 | And today, we are lucky enough to have one of the top presidential hopefuls in the 2024 election joining us, Robert Kennedy Jr.

00:01:28.720 | And we will be inviting all presidential candidates to come on to the All In podcast and have candid discussions that are unfiltered, the way the audience would expect them.

00:01:39.920 | We're going to play with different formats, but we decided for this first one, we've got a series of topics we'd like to cover.

00:01:46.640 | And we're going to treat it like any other All In podcast.

00:01:50.240 | With that, I'll have David Sacks, who is the most conservative of our panel, who has been also the most enthusiastic, I think, of everybody here, and one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s pursuit of the presidency of the United States.

00:02:07.440 | So with that, David, would you like to introduce our guest?

00:02:09.840 | Yeah, let me give Bobby a proper introduction here.

00:02:12.640 | So Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is entering the political arena as a candidate for the first time at the age of 69.

00:02:19.840 | But it's perhaps no exaggeration to say that he was destined for the mission he is now pursuing.

00:02:23.840 | He is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

00:02:29.280 | When Bobby was 14, his dad was running for president on a platform of civil rights, civil liberties, lifting Americans out of poverty and opposing the Vietnam War.

00:02:36.800 | He had just won the California primary when he was tragically assassinated.

00:02:40.160 | RFK Jr. graduated from Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School and became an environmental lawyer who aggressively litigated against corporate polluters and government agencies that were failing to regulate them.

00:02:51.440 | He has always put the health and safety of the American people at the forefront of his activism.

00:02:55.280 | And this has made him controversial at times as he has questioned the safety of some pharmaceutical products and also criticized COVID restrictions during the pandemic.

00:03:03.600 | For this, the mainstream media has tried to paint him as a, quote, "conspiracy theorist."

00:03:08.000 | But given that so many conspiracy theories about COVID have been vindicated, Tablet Magazine wrote, quote,

00:03:13.600 | "At this point, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy is the country's leading conspiracy theorist alone qualifies him to be president."

00:03:20.240 | But the biggest reason why I think his candidacy is so interesting and relevant is that it harkens back to a Democratic Party that believed in peace instead of war,

00:03:28.400 | free speech and civil liberties instead of censorship, building up the middle class instead of the donor class,

00:03:33.280 | and opposing corporate greed, especially in the military industrial complex, which is a message you just don't hear much anymore coming from the Democratic side of the aisle.

00:03:41.840 | So with that, Bobby Kennedy, welcome to the program.

00:03:44.560 | Thank you so much for having me.

00:03:46.400 | So maybe we could start with foreign policy, something we've discussed here, specifically the Ukraine and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and our support of that war.

00:03:56.960 | Sax, would you like to tee up a question for Mr. Kennedy?

00:04:00.880 | I think Bobby's tweets on the subject show that he has a really deep understanding of it.

00:04:05.520 | He's been saying a lot of things that I've been saying since the beginning of the war, which is not just the fact that we're risking World War III over, you know, getting involved in a country that isn't a treaty ally of the United States, it's never been a vital interest of the United States.

00:04:22.080 | But I think your critique goes deeper, because you actually understand the causes of how this war started.

00:04:28.480 | So maybe, you know, Bobby, you could speak to that.

00:04:31.120 | How did we end up in this proxy war with Russia from your standpoint?

00:04:36.160 | Well, you know, first of all, let me start by saying this.

00:04:43.760 | I supported the humanitarian aid to the Ukraine, which is what we were told initially was the mission, although I was suspicious of it.

00:04:57.360 | And my son, as I've mentioned, actually went over, left law school, did not tell us where he was going, and went over and joined the Foreign Legion and fought in the Kharkiv offensive with a special forces group.

00:05:15.200 | He was served as a machine gunner.

00:05:16.880 | He was in engagements with the Russians.

00:05:19.840 | But he feels the same way, essentially, that I do, that this is no longer a humanitarian mission.

00:05:27.200 | And all the decisions the United States has made since the start have been about prolonging the war, about maximizing the violence of the war, and being absolutely intransigent against the many opportunities to actually settle the war.

00:05:49.600 | And my understanding of the war is that not that Zelensky is pushing this war as hard as he can, but that the neocons in the White House want this war.

00:06:03.360 | They want regime change with the Russians.

00:06:05.840 | They want to exhaust the Russian armies.

00:06:07.680 | This is what Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in 2022.

00:06:11.520 | Our objective is to exhaust and degrade Russian forces so they cannot fight anywhere else in the world.

00:06:19.280 | And President Biden acknowledged that one of his objectives in the war is regime change in Russia, removing Vladimir Putin.

00:06:26.080 | Well, if those are the objectives, that is the opposite of a humanitarian mission.

00:06:31.360 | That is a mission to maximize casualties, to prolong the war.

00:06:36.400 | It's essentially a war of attrition, and that's what we're seeing.

00:06:39.280 | And the brunt of this is being paid by the flower of Ukrainian youth.

00:06:44.560 | There have been over 300,000.

00:06:47.440 | This is something that the U.S. government and the Ukrainian government have worked hard to hide, the number of casualties, which has been catastrophic.

00:06:54.480 | This is the most violent conflict since World War II that's taken place probably anywhere in the world.

00:07:00.240 | And the casualties are enormous, over 300,000 Ukrainian dead.

00:07:05.680 | The Russians are killing Ukrainian, depending on who you believe, at a ratio of five to one to eight to one,

00:07:15.200 | which is the seven to one in the recently leaked whistleblower leaked Pentagon documents.

00:07:22.560 | And the Russians cannot lose this war.

00:07:26.160 | We're being told they're losing.

00:07:27.680 | They cannot afford to lose this war.

00:07:29.840 | This is existential for them.

00:07:31.760 | And they have been building up their forces.

00:07:34.240 | They have a 10 to 1 artillery advantage on us, and this is an artillery war.

00:07:40.400 | So it's simply, and we do not have the artillery to replace what we've lost up there.

00:07:46.080 | This is a war that is proceeding in a very cataclysmic trajectory.

00:07:52.160 | And the answer to your question about how we got in this war goes back a long way.

00:08:01.440 | But I would say that the real story starts in 2014, when the U.S. government and particularly the neocons

00:08:09.520 | in the White House and elsewhere participated and supported the overthrow, violent overthrow,

00:08:17.360 | coup d'etat against the democratically elected government of the Ukraine and put in a very,

00:08:24.000 | very anti-Russian government.

00:08:25.840 | This prompted the Russians, who then believed that the U.S.

00:08:31.200 | Navy was now going to be invited into the Black Sea to have a port at Crimea.

00:08:38.800 | It prompted the Russians to preemptively invade Crimea.

00:08:43.840 | At the same time, the government that came into the Ukraine began enacting a series of laws that

00:08:53.920 | turned the Russian populations of the Donbass region into second-class citizens.

00:08:59.920 | They illegalized essentially their culture, their language, and they began ultimately

00:09:07.440 | killing them. They killed 14,000 of them. And it prompted a civil war in the country.

00:09:13.440 | And the Russian response, which was illegal, I have no sympathy toward Vladimir Putin.

00:09:23.840 | Vladimir Putin is a gangster and he's a thug. But his response in the Donbass was not irrational.

00:09:33.440 | >> So, I guess the question becomes, if you were elected president,

00:09:38.000 | would you stop sending armaments to the Ukraine?

00:09:41.920 | >> I would immediately have a ceasefire and I would settle the war. And I think it can be

00:09:51.120 | settled. I don't even know. I mean, listen, the best settlement for this war was outlined in the

00:09:57.120 | Minsk Accords in 2014. The Minsk Accords, which all the European countries agreed upon, was when

00:10:06.640 | the Russians and the Russian people in Donbass voted to leave Russia and Russia did not want

00:10:13.280 | them. Russia said, no, let's develop an accord, an agreement, which would make Donbass an autonomous

00:10:21.440 | region within the Ukraine, which would agree to not put missile systems in Ukraine, NATO missile

00:10:27.440 | systems, which would agree that Ukraine would not join NATO.

00:10:31.920 | >> If Zelensky says, no, I want to keep fighting, would you stop sending US weapons?

00:10:36.480 | >> I would settle this. I would settle this war. Ukraine cannot fight without US support.

00:10:42.320 | >> So, then at some point, you would tell Zelensky, if I'm reading into what you're

00:10:46.320 | saying correctly, hey, settle it or I'm out. >> You're on your own. Yeah.

00:10:50.240 | >> I would settle the war. Yeah. >> Do you think that we somehow

00:10:58.480 | allowed Zelensky to believe that we would allow him into NATO? Meaning, do you think that

00:11:04.720 | US foreign policy somehow almost induced this thing to happen? I just want to try to understand

00:11:11.680 | the boundaries. >> We have been doing integrative

00:11:15.520 | military exercises with the Ukrainian military. So, we were actively integrating them into NATO

00:11:22.240 | forces. There was no question that the one thing that Putin said from the outset, this is a red

00:11:29.440 | line. When my uncle was president, one of the things that he said, he said a couple of things.

00:11:35.920 | He said, number one, the principal job of a president of the United States is to keep the

00:11:40.960 | nation out of war. And he succeeded doing that during his term in office. He sent 16,000 military

00:11:47.600 | advisors to Vietnam who were not authorized to participate in combat. That didn't mean that some

00:11:54.960 | of them didn't. They were not authorized. In fact, that was fewer federal troops than he sent to get

00:12:02.160 | James Meredith into the University of Mississippi. So, he sent fewer to Vietnam and two weeks before

00:12:08.880 | he died, he signed a national security order ordering all of those troops home by 1965,

00:12:15.680 | with the first thousand to come home that month in November. And he died two weeks later.

00:12:20.960 | So, and then, of course, Johnson came in and remanded the war and sent 250,000 troops over

00:12:28.240 | there, which is what all of my uncle's military advisors wanted him to do. And he stood up to them.

00:12:34.640 | One of the other things my uncle said, and you know, the anniversary of his speech at American

00:12:39.120 | University, which is an extraordinary speech, probably one of the best in American history.

00:12:43.760 | Jeff Sachs is called the most important speech in American history. It was a speech to the

00:12:51.760 | American people. And it was, it's an extraordinary speech because if you read it, it's asking them to

00:12:57.920 | put their, themselves into the shoes of the Russians and understand that the Russians

00:13:05.200 | bore the brunt of World War II. They lost, one out of every 13 Russians died in that war.

00:13:10.800 | A third of their country was occupied and leveled to the ground. It's like, he said,

00:13:15.760 | it's as if the entire East Coast of the United States, Chicago, was put into rubble. And he

00:13:23.360 | described this in detail for the American people to say, you know, we're all people,

00:13:29.360 | we're all on an arc and we need to, we need to understand each other's motives

00:13:34.400 | and not just vilify each other. And what we're seeing now is this formulaic vilification,

00:13:41.520 | this narrative that we saw with Saddam Hussein, with, you know, Putin, with every little war that

00:13:46.560 | we want to get into, those guys are pure evil, we're pure good, and we're going to go rescue,

00:13:53.120 | you know, the damsel in distress.

00:13:54.640 | >>Corey: Just on that, could you contrast and compare just maybe the last three or four

00:13:59.200 | presidents on this very narrow dimension of that, of JFK's promise of what a president should be

00:14:05.120 | doing, Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden? How do you see the things that these guys have gotten

00:14:11.520 | right and or very wrong here on that dimension, just on that dimension?

00:14:16.000 | >>Jim: You know, I've been friends with Joe Biden for many, many years.

00:14:20.160 | Joe Biden is, you know, he's a go-to-war guy. He was one of the strongest supporters of the

00:14:25.600 | Iraq war. He's been supportive of every war that's come along. And that, you know, I think that's one

00:14:30.720 | of the reasons that, you know, some of those, that portion of the Democratic Party, which is a very,

00:14:36.560 | very powerful kind of king pickers, was very happy with him getting in offices that he never says no

00:14:44.080 | to a war. I think Trump, you know, I liked a lot of what Trump said about foreign policy, about

00:14:51.280 | disentangling us from this knee-jerk reaction of, you know, of constant wars and that the cost that

00:14:59.360 | that imposes on our country, what it's doing, it's hollowing out our middle class. But then Trump did

00:15:05.040 | a lot of things, including walking away from the, you know, from the intermediate nuclear missile

00:15:13.840 | treaty, which is, was another provocation for Russia, because that treaty, you know, we're

00:15:21.360 | putting these intermediate missile systems all along the Russian border and Romania and Poland

00:15:26.320 | and, you know, and in Ukraine. And that, those missiles can hit Cuba, I mean, can hit Moscow

00:15:36.880 | in a few minutes. So there was a very destabilizing system. We all signed it and he walked away from

00:15:44.160 | it. And I don't think that was a, I think that was another provocation. We should be deescalating

00:15:49.760 | these provocations, you know, the why it did NATO. This is what George Kennan said,

00:15:56.640 | after, after, you know, the Soviet Union collapsed. Why do we even have NATO anymore?

00:16:03.680 | Why do we have it? Why do we have it unless we're going to involve the Russians in it? Why don't we

00:16:08.880 | do a Marshall Plan for Russia? We won the war. They are the losers. They admit they're the losers.

00:16:16.560 | But they want to join the European community. Let's make that easy for them. Let's not continue

00:16:22.960 | to treat them as if they're the enemy, because that is a self fulfilling prophecy. And that,

00:16:28.960 | unfortunately, is what we did. Let's pivot then, you want to contain and you would force

00:16:34.320 | everybody to the table to a resolution, if I'm understanding correctly, you weren't explicit

00:16:39.840 | in terms of would you remove support, but I think we can infer from it, you would have

00:16:43.440 | a point at which you would stop sending armaments to Ukraine, we have tremendous

00:16:49.360 | moral pressure and economic pressure and everything else on Ukraine.

00:16:53.360 | How about this, Jason? I mean, would you be willing to take NATO expansion off the table

00:16:58.000 | if it helps resolve this conflict?

00:16:59.760 | Yeah, everybody would.

00:17:00.400 | Because Biden won't. Well, Biden won't, right?

00:17:02.320 | Yeah, no, no, it's-

00:17:03.280 | Absolutely. Why are we trying to expand? We gave our word,

00:17:06.880 | we would not expand NATO one inch to the east. And now we've gone into 13 countries. You know,

00:17:14.080 | it is a provocation.

00:17:16.560 | Let's talk about Taiwan. So, we got to stay out of wars. If Xi Jinping decides Taiwan is strategic,

00:17:26.320 | and he invades Taiwan, what would your response be? If you were elected president?

00:17:30.000 | Well, my response would be to deescalate that conflict. There's essentially a war party in

00:17:36.560 | Washington that is encouraging that conflict, that is drumming up that conflict. What I would do

00:17:45.840 | is I would deescalate it. I would stop looking at it as a threat right now and allow the Chinese

00:17:57.440 | and the Taiwanese to come to their own solution about what kind of relationship they have.

00:18:02.160 | And I think that if we stop our provocations toward the Chinese, that that would naturally

00:18:10.160 | deescalate.

00:18:11.120 | And if China decided it's strategic, and we're going in anyway,

00:18:14.800 | would you, if you were president, defend Taiwan?

00:18:17.760 | That's a question that I would not answer.

00:18:20.800 | I'm curious, why not? Why don't presidential candidates just answer that question?

00:18:26.400 | Because you're committing the country to a war in the future. That would be probably the bloodiest

00:18:33.280 | war ever fought. And it's not something that strategically, it's not good strategy to project

00:18:40.960 | your intentions. You want to leave room for negotiation, you want to leave room for all

00:18:47.840 | kinds of movements, and you want to have a debate with the American people, and with Congress.

00:18:52.160 | Biden's been clear that he would defend it, right? So that's an interesting insight right there.

00:18:57.200 | Freeberg, do you want to talk maybe a little bit about the economy and the spending that we're

00:19:02.320 | seeing?

00:19:02.720 | Yeah. So Robert, I think my biggest question, I've referenced this on the show a number of times,

00:19:08.000 | is this extraordinary concern I have about the fiscal deficit and the debt level

00:19:15.600 | of the US running deficits north of a trillion dollars a year, 33 trillion in total debt.

00:19:23.680 | Some people use the debt to GDP metric, which you know, at this point is approaching or has

00:19:29.120 | exceeded 130%. And 52 nations that have reached that level of debt to GDP, only one of them has

00:19:38.560 | not had to restructure their currency or restructure their debt payments. Obviously,

00:19:44.880 | with the debt ceiling approaching and some fiscal conservatives using this moment as a point to try

00:19:51.760 | and generate leverage, I guess my biggest question for the country now and going forward is, you

00:19:58.960 | know, do we actually have the ability to pursue all of these interests on a social geopolitical

00:20:06.160 | security agenda, and do so without having either a balanced budget or a plan that says,

00:20:16.080 | here are the boundaries and here are the boundary conditions because in the last couple of years,

00:20:19.840 | and particularly in the last five years, we've seen almost like a bipartisan,

00:20:25.920 | unmitigated spending spree that, you know, is largely driven to, you know, to do what the

00:20:32.400 | electorate wants, which is to give people stuff. And giving people stuff costs money, and that

00:20:36.800 | money has to be paid back at some point. I guess, how do you think about the importance of this?

00:20:42.400 | And how do you think about the boundary conditions that you would, you know, look to articulate and

00:20:49.680 | impose as you, you know, think about this role, with respect to the deficit spending and the debt

00:20:56.240 | levels for this country? In terms of a boundary, I, you know, I would love to hear arguments about

00:21:02.480 | that. But I, you know, I, as you say, I think the debt is now 32 trillion, the GDP, our GDP is around

00:21:11.280 | 25 trillion. So that is, that's just a really alarming ratio. If you look at why, you know,

00:21:19.760 | the primary cause are our military expenditures. We're spending 8, this year, I think, 8.4 trillion

00:21:30.240 | dollars on the military budget this year. But if you throw in the Homeland Security and all the

00:21:36.720 | surveillance and security expenditures at home, it's 1.1 trillion a year. That's 1.1 trillion a

00:21:44.400 | year that is attributable to, essentially, to our, you know, warmongering. And I don't think we can

00:21:52.320 | afford to be policemen of the world anymore. We have 800 bases around the world, we need to start

00:21:58.000 | rebuilding our middle class at home, we need to be responsible with our debt. And we need,

00:22:03.760 | my grandfather always said, we should make America too expensive to conquer, we should make fortress

00:22:11.040 | America, we should arm America to the teeth at home, so that no, so we're too expensive to

00:22:17.360 | conquer. And then we should concentrate on building up our economic power and a robust middle class.

00:22:23.360 | That's what's going to make America strong. And instead of projecting military strength abroad,

00:22:29.920 | we ought to be projecting our economic strength and a marketplace of ideas and economic power.

00:22:36.720 | Right now, we're borrowing 6 billion dollars a day, mainly from the Chinese and Japanese,

00:22:46.160 | just to serve the interests on that debt. That's not a healthy thing for America to be. And we

00:22:50.560 | got to figure out, you know, a way to impose fiscal discipline. But I can't tell you exactly

00:22:56.480 | what my boundaries would be. That's something I need to think about.

00:23:00.640 | But how do you how do you think about that?

00:23:02.320 | Like, I think non of discretionary spending,

00:23:07.600 | you know, defense is is about 800 billion, non defense is about 900 billion. And then obviously,

00:23:15.200 | there's social security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid. In order to get the budget balanced,

00:23:22.640 | you think cutting defense would be kind of the first priority, and you could kind of get there

00:23:27.120 | through, you know, that approach. But I there still seems to be a big gap to me on, you know,

00:23:32.160 | given how much we're spending on how do we actually get there? Are we ultimately going to have to kind

00:23:37.120 | of change retirement benefits, restructure, Medicare, Medicaid? Or are we going to raise

00:23:42.480 | taxes? Or are we going to do all three? To get to this point? Otherwise, we have this obviously,

00:23:46.720 | kind of never ending debt spiral that that's going to cause a massive crisis. Whether it's not this

00:23:51.600 | year, maybe it's in five years or 10 years. Right now, it's projected social security will go

00:23:56.400 | bankrupt in 2035 2034 around that range. So this is coming up fast. What are we going to be cutting

00:24:02.800 | besides defense? And are we going to be raising taxes to 70%? Do you think to kind of bridge this

00:24:08.400 | hole? I can't answer that question any better than I already have, you know, I think there

00:24:13.360 | there's, there are targets for opportunity and the in the homeland security. I think once we stop

00:24:21.360 | fighting these wars all over the world, there's a lot less need for us to have a surveillance state

00:24:26.640 | at home. So the real cost of the military is 1.1 trillion a year, not just the 800 trillion that

00:24:33.680 | shows up on the books. And I think those are targets for opportunity. And I can't you know,

00:24:39.440 | I have to I need to study more the issue about how to how to get back into a balanced budget. I you

00:24:46.640 | know, one of the things I'd say disturbs me is that I don't think we should be playing chicken

00:24:53.440 | in Congress about raising the debt ceiling. Because I think I don't think we should mess

00:25:00.320 | around with the full faith and credit of the United States, particularly at this point in time.

00:25:04.960 | One of the things that's happened in the world, Bobby said,

00:25:08.400 | there's been a couple of countries, France is probably the best example

00:25:14.720 | that had to raise the retirement age. And irrespective of the view that one has on whether

00:25:22.480 | that was right or wrong. The practical reality of doing it is just that when these initial social

00:25:29.120 | safety nets were passed, the average life expectancy of folks was 1015 years less than

00:25:35.520 | what they are today. And presumably, as we keep inventing technologies, folks are going to live to

00:25:42.240 | 80 90 100 years on average, which may seem implausible, but is likely if you look at the

00:25:47.360 | trend. I'm just curious how you think about the state of our social safety net. And what has to

00:25:56.560 | change? What would you keep the same? And what has to be totally reimagined for what the world will

00:26:02.000 | look like in 30 or 40 years, I would say it's a red line for me to touch Social Security,

00:26:08.560 | or Medicaid or Medicare, I think we need to take care of people, particularly people who have spent

00:26:13.680 | their whole life paying into a system with a promise at the end and have worked hard and

00:26:21.120 | saved and done what they were supposed to do. I don't think they, you know, it's right to pull

00:26:28.240 | the rug out from under them. But again, I, this is an issue that I need to spend more time looking at

00:26:36.880 | and studying maybe the next time I come back here on better answer for you guys.

00:26:40.960 | I think this is my concern is sorry, but Robert, the comment you just made is the same comment I

00:26:46.960 | hear from both sides of the aisle, that we can't touch Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,

00:26:52.560 | because it would be so unpopular, we wouldn't get elected. And that's ultimately kind of what

00:26:57.520 | a democracy like ours may lead to, is that folks vote and elect representatives that are going to

00:27:05.120 | create these systems that benefit them. But in aggregate, we may not be able to support those

00:27:09.920 | benefits over time and at scale. And we may be facing that moment sooner than any of us want to.

00:27:15.760 | And I think it's one of the more pressing issues and concerns, not just for the United States,

00:27:21.920 | but for the global economy, that if the US doesn't resolve this massive hole,

00:27:27.760 | talking about Social Security, for example, going bankrupt in the next 12 years, as one

00:27:34.560 | acute example of that problem set, you know, we may not be able to turn it around.

00:27:39.920 | And I mean, do you think that politics is set up to solve the structural economic problems that

00:27:47.200 | the US is now facing? Because so much of politics ends up leading towards

00:27:51.040 | what additional benefits can I provide to my, the folks that get me elected?

00:27:55.280 | Robert R. Reilly Here's the thing, is we spent $8 trillion in the war in Iraq,

00:28:02.080 | $8 trillion, and we got nothing for it.

00:28:04.480 | Yeah, that's pretty nuts. That's nuts.

00:28:06.880 | Robert R. Reilly In fact, we got worse than nothing. We

00:28:09.120 | killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein, we killed a million Iraqis, probably. We created ISIS, we

00:28:15.840 | turned Iraq into a proxy for Iran, which is exactly what we've been not trying to do for 40 years.

00:28:22.320 | And we drove 2 million refugees with the Iraq war and its aftermath, Syria and Yemen and,

00:28:28.960 | you know, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 2 million refugees in Europe, destabilized democracy in

00:28:35.040 | Europe. And we go ahead, so $8 trillion there, we spent $16 trillion on the pandemic, on the lockdown

00:28:42.640 | and again, got nothing in return. So that's $24 trillion. And now we're doing bank bailouts every,

00:28:49.840 | you know, couple of months. Silicon Valley Bank, the Fed said that it was printing $300 billion

00:28:58.160 | for that. It's made up for all of the, you know, deflationary steps that the Biden administration

00:29:07.680 | had previously taken. So you go to, you know, you go to an American who's been working their whole

00:29:15.040 | life, and has been promised at the end of the life that they're going to get a few bucks every month.

00:29:21.120 | And, you know, I have a friend who I brought to my speech with me who's, who during the same month

00:29:28.320 | that we committed another $750 million during March, we sent $750 million extra to the Ukraine.

00:29:35.840 | We cut 15 million Americans from Medicare. My friend got a call from the government

00:29:46.960 | on his cell phone, a recorded call saying that your food stamps have just been cut by 90%.

00:29:52.240 | He went from $283 a month to $25 a month. So you try to feed yourself on $25 a month.

00:30:02.640 | There are 30 million Americans who are starving right now. And that to me is unacceptable.

00:30:10.320 | And it's hard to go to people like that. People who have been honest, who played by the rules,

00:30:16.560 | who have done everything that they were supposed to do with the promise that they would be taken

00:30:21.360 | care of that their health care would be taken care of an old age. You go to those people and say,

00:30:26.720 | okay, now we're going to cut your food stamps and try to feed yourself on $25 a month,

00:30:33.440 | try to feed yourself for $25 a week. We're telling them that. And then

00:30:39.200 | and then spending 800 billion to make a plane,

00:30:43.120 | how are you going to cut the federal budget when you're sending over 100 billion to Ukraine?

00:30:46.800 | There's you can't, you have no more authority to do it.

00:30:48.800 | I want to finish up by saying, you know, you're like tinkering in the engine room when the ship

00:30:54.800 | is sinking, you know, because, you know, or switching deck chairs on the Titanic.

00:31:01.200 | Let's deal with the real problem. Let's figure out how to make this nation a nation that is

00:31:06.880 | really focused on taking care of our people inside rather than saying, okay, well, in order to pay

00:31:12.880 | for the Ukraine war, we got to screw every American on Social Security and Medicare.

00:31:18.480 | We've had, by the way, the inflation that we've created from, you know, from just printing money

00:31:26.400 | is making my friend Keith's food twice as expensive. So the cost of stables in this

00:31:32.720 | country has raised by 76% in two years. And now they're cutting his food stamps and bailing out

00:31:39.840 | the same month, $300 million, the Silicon Valley bank. We got it. I mean, it doesn't make any sense

00:31:46.720 | and having this kind of conversation, how do we screw the poor to make sure that we can, you know,

00:31:53.520 | we can milk them while we're doing all of this great, it's like this country is acting

00:31:58.480 | like the alcoholic who is behind on his mortgage and who takes the milk money and goes into the

00:32:06.480 | bar and buys rounds for strangers. You know, that's what you're dealing with.

00:32:10.400 | Paul Jay That's a pretty good analogy. Shots,

00:32:12.960 | everybody. So let me, let me ask the follow-up question on this debt ceiling fight, which is,

00:32:17.760 | which is a game of chicken and the country's economy might go off a cliff in the next month

00:32:24.320 | because Republicans and Democrats can't agree. So Biden's position is I want a clean

00:32:30.720 | debt ceiling increase, no terms on it. House Republicans have passed a debt ceiling increase,

00:32:37.120 | but it contains things like a 1% cap on spending growth. It claws back unspent COVID-19 relief

00:32:46.480 | funds, and it would halt Biden's student debt forgiveness plan. So, Robert, I guess the question

00:32:52.960 | to you would be, would you negotiate? Like, what would your posture to House Republicans be? Would

00:32:58.000 | you be willing to negotiate? Because Biden is basically saying, I will not negotiate at all.

00:33:03.120 | So negotiate or not negotiate? I guess that's my question to you.

00:33:06.400 | Robert Knapp You have to negotiate. I'm not sure if he's

00:33:08.960 | posturing or what. They have to negotiate. They have to, you know, they have to work out something

00:33:15.280 | that's good for our country. And that, you know, and they're going to, both sides are going to have

00:33:20.160 | to give up something. We have to, you know, we have to put our country first. And it's insane

00:33:26.080 | to play this game of chicken with, you know, with this, when the stakes are so high.

00:33:31.520 | Aaron Powell There's been a lot of talk,

00:33:32.720 | Robert, about the deep state, the FBI, DOJ, CIA, your family, obviously having dealt with two

00:33:40.880 | tragic assassinations, your father and your uncle, has dealt with this firsthand in terms of just

00:33:46.160 | having the CIA information about these assassinations released. I'm curious your

00:33:52.560 | position on some of the most radical proposals people have this election cycle of dismantling

00:34:00.720 | the FBI, CIA, DOJ, aka the deep state, do you believe there's a deep state? And how would you

00:34:08.800 | as president deal with this intelligence operation we have? And then also personally,

00:34:17.520 | what are your personal feelings on it?

00:34:18.960 | Robert Knapp Well, on the, you know, I have,

00:34:24.080 | I have a pretty clear idea about how I would handle the intelligence agencies. And in fact,

00:34:32.480 | my father was thinking very deeply about that at the time. My father who believed his, you know,

00:34:38.720 | first reaction when his brother was killed was that the CIA had killed him. And in fact, the

00:34:43.600 | first three calls he made on that day, and you know, I was home at the time. And John McComb,

00:34:52.320 | the CIA was right across the street from my house. And so John McComb, who's the CIA director,

00:34:57.920 | you would come to our house and swim every day after work during the spring and summertime.

00:35:02.480 | And my father called the CIA desk and talked to a desk officer and said, did your people do this?

00:35:10.240 | That was his first call. And he called Harry Ruiz, who was a Cuban, who was one of the Cubans who

00:35:17.440 | had remained friendly with my family. You know, while we were surrounded by Cubans growing up,

00:35:22.640 | because who were Bay of Pigs refugees, my father had got them freed after a year and, you know,

00:35:30.560 | in the Castro's prisons. And, and my father and mother spent a lot of time finding houses for

00:35:39.360 | them, schools, integrating them to the US military, finding jobs. And so we were all raised very,

00:35:44.720 | very closely with the Cuban community. But gradually, they turned away from my family.

00:35:50.240 | But this one Cuban who had been an engineer and fought with Castro and then turned against him

00:35:56.720 | when he became communist, was very close friends with my father. The second call that he made was

00:36:02.480 | to Harry Ruiz. And he said, did our people, meaning the CIA people do this? And, and that was,

00:36:11.440 | and so my father was thinking very, very, very carefully about how to handle the CIA. He had been,

00:36:20.960 | you know, he had been essentially managing the CIA since he came into office. And he recognized that

00:36:27.760 | the problem and, you know, as I talked about in my speech, and I think David on this show mentioned

00:36:33.680 | this, that during the Bay of Pigs invasion, my uncle realized that he had been lied to by,

00:36:40.080 | by Charles Bell and Alan Dulles and Richard Bissell, the heads of the CIA, as well as his

00:36:46.560 | Joint Chiefs. And he came out in the middle of the invasion when it turned against them. And he

00:36:52.960 | realized these, these men were being killed on the beach. And he said, I want to take the CIA and

00:36:57.600 | shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind. So he recognized that the function of

00:37:03.360 | the intelligence agencies had devolved and that they were, they had become captive of the military

00:37:09.520 | industrial complex and the military contractors. And their, their function was essentially to

00:37:16.960 | provide our nation with a constant pipeline of new wars to feed the military industrial complex

00:37:25.040 | and the growth of the surveillance state. And my father, when he ran for president,

00:37:30.240 | Pete Hamill, who was one of his favorite news men, asked him on the bus during, two weeks before he

00:37:38.240 | died, asked him what he was going to do about the CIA. And he said, what we need to do is to,

00:37:46.240 | we need to remove the espionage division, the espionage branch from the plans division.

00:37:54.400 | The plans division of the CIA is essentially the dirty tricks provision. That's the division,

00:38:00.960 | the action division. They do the assassinations, they fix elections, they do paramilitary operations,

00:38:08.560 | black ops, torture, black sites, all of that stuff. The espionage division and CIA was originally set

00:38:15.200 | up by Cuba, by Truman as an espionage agency. Espionage means information gathering and analysis.

00:38:22.400 | It's not violence. It's about information acquisition. And unfortunately, the, the,

00:38:30.080 | the clandestine action division was wagging the espionage dog. So the function of the

00:38:39.600 | espionage division was to, to, to provide new actions, things to do for the clandestine division,

00:38:45.600 | and then covering up their mistakes. So there was never any accountability. And what my father

00:38:53.440 | understood is that the espionage division should not be working for the, for the clandestine

00:38:58.400 | services. They should be overseeing them and particularly doing accountability. So, you know,

00:39:06.160 | what, if the CIA looks the way that the CIA looks at the war in Iraq is it was a success,

00:39:14.080 | because we accomplished our mission of deposing Saddam Hussein. But and you know, the CIA was

00:39:20.160 | George Kennett, who lied to President Bush and said it's a slam dunk. So they got us to go in

00:39:25.600 | there and weapons of mass destruction.

00:39:27.920 | So as president, would you rethink it? And then, just as a final question, as a final follow up

00:39:34.480 | to that, do you believe they murdered or were involved in the murder of your uncle? What have

00:39:40.240 | you come to personally?

00:39:40.960 | The CIA, yes, they were definitely involved in the murder and the, you know, and the 60 year

00:39:45.760 | cover up. They're still not releasing the, you know, the papers that legally they have to release.

00:39:50.880 | But I don't think there's any doubt if you look at this huge, you know, mountain, monumental

00:39:58.080 | mountain of evidence and confessions, and you know, so many people have confessed to their

00:40:03.120 | involvement. And you know, we understand the if you look, I mean, for anybody who has doubts about

00:40:10.240 | that, I would recommend a book by Jim Douglas called The Unspeakable, because I think he's

00:40:16.720 | done a better job than anybody else at kind of assembling and distilling all of the millions

00:40:24.160 | and millions of documents that have been released over the past 50 years. And these things, these

00:40:31.920 | revelations are released incrementally. And so nobody really takes notice of when you put them

00:40:36.560 | all together, the story is very clear.

00:40:38.400 | So you would definitely rethink the CIA, the FBI, DOJ, you know, the whole intelligence

00:40:44.000 | at a minimum, I think what you're saying as well as maybe you would also release the documents

00:40:50.080 | that maybe would at least provide some more transparency. I just wanted to build on that,

00:40:54.960 | because you had a very provocative tweet. Part of what you're talking about is accountability.

00:41:01.200 | And we need data and transparency to have that. There are people that have whistleblown,

00:41:06.240 | there are people that have leaked. And I think it's fair to say that they've all been treated

00:41:11.520 | by the security apparatus in largely the exact same way. But you tweeted recently about your

00:41:18.320 | desire to see some of those folks forgiven and pardoned. Do you want to just take a few minutes

00:41:23.440 | just to talk about some of those folks that you think has allowed us to actually see the truth,

00:41:28.800 | if we want to see it and why you think that and what you think should be done with folks like that?

00:41:32.160 | I mean, Julian Assange is an example. Julian Assange is a newspaper publisher. He published

00:41:38.240 | leaked documents. You know, why are we I mean, I if I was any newspaper publisher in this country,

00:41:44.720 | I would be worried about that. And now he can go to jail for life because he published leaked

00:41:50.720 | documents of great import to the American people of things that should not have been secret that

00:41:55.840 | we should have known about. Revelations that affect our civil rights, affect our foreign

00:42:03.520 | policy, affect things that we have a right to know about. And, you know, it's really,

00:42:08.720 | it's strange that there's any support for his imprisonment among the press. And I think the

00:42:14.480 | press is beginning to figure this out finally. The most controversial of those figures is Edwin

00:42:20.000 | Snowden. Edwin Snowden released documents that showed us that we were all being spied upon.

00:42:28.480 | And that's important for Americans to know. And in fact, it was so important that Congress passed

00:42:37.120 | laws based upon his revelations to protect the American people. So why are we punishing the

00:42:43.360 | whistleblower rather than punishing the people who were, you know, who were illegally spying on us?

00:42:49.840 | That's what we should be doing. We shouldn't be jailing dissenters in our country. We shouldn't be

00:42:55.360 | jailing whistleblowers. We should be jailing the people who break the law.

00:42:59.520 | To keep this bipartisan, do you believe the deep state is acting to subvert the Trump presidency

00:43:07.360 | and that they are framing him on these three or four indictments that they are working on,

00:43:14.640 | some that have dropped, some that haven't? Do you believe there's a deep state conspiracy against

00:43:19.360 | Trump? Because you might be facing him. I don't use the word deep state. I mean, I, you know,

00:43:23.520 | I've described how these bureaucracies function. And it's not that it's not so much a group of

00:43:33.520 | people. The kind of deep state implies there's a group of people and it's kind of, you know,

00:43:38.320 | black coats in a smoky room pulling strings. But the corruption is systemic. These, you know,

00:43:46.640 | all of these agencies are captive agencies. The CIA is ultimately working for industry,

00:43:55.200 | like the oil industry, the coal industry, and the military contractors. And they've always had that

00:44:01.040 | tie since the very beginning. You know, Alan Dulles, who had worked for Sullivan Cromwell,

00:44:06.720 | and ended up doing coup d'etats on behalf of his former clients like Texaco and United Fruit,

00:44:11.840 | Texaco and BP, and in Iran in 1953. His former client, United Fruit, when Jacob Harbanz in

00:44:21.440 | Guatemala tried to nationalize United Fruit, you know, the CIA under Dulles went over through the

00:44:28.800 | government to protect the interests of his former clients. So there's always been these ties to

00:44:33.280 | industry and the ties now, and particularly the oil industry, and the ties to the military

00:44:40.400 | industrial contractors really drive CIA action and CIA intelligence. And we have to, you know,

00:44:48.480 | you have to stop. And this is systemic in all these agencies. I mean, USDA is run by Cargill,

00:44:55.920 | Smithfield, Monsanto, Bo Pilgrim, John Tyson, EPA is run. When we sued EPA,

00:45:04.160 | we got discovery documents that showed that the head of the pesticide division, Jess Rowland,

00:45:12.000 | had been secretly working for Monsanto for a decade. And you know, sending memos back and

00:45:18.960 | forth with Monsanto directing them, you need to kill this study, you need to kill that study.

00:45:23.680 | And this, unfortunately, is not the exception. It is the rule. Most of the people who work for

00:45:28.960 | those agencies are good citizens, they're good Americans, they're honest, and they're patriots.

00:45:34.240 | But the people who tend to rise in those agencies and occupy these very, very powerful key positions

00:45:40.880 | for decades or years, like Anthony Fauci, 50 years, are people who are in the tank with industry.

00:45:48.800 | And what we need to do is unravel that across the government. And that's really what people say,

00:45:54.480 | that's the deep state that really is what it's a systemic corruption within our agencies that is

00:46:01.440 | as driven by agency capture.

00:46:03.520 | Can we actually just talk about the Coronavirus, maybe pandemic for a second, and I just want to

00:46:09.040 | tie in two concepts. Sometimes again, there's a lot of mainstream misinformation about it.

00:46:16.400 | There is a lot that came out about you, particularly as it relates to vaccines,

00:46:21.040 | I just want to give you an opportunity to set the record straight. Just on what you think happened,

00:46:25.600 | COVID, all that corruption, your thought on vaccines, the efficacy of our programs, how we

00:46:29.920 | should change what we keep the same, just maybe a chance to clear the air so that we can get some of

00:46:34.160 | the gobbledygook on the internet set straight.

00:46:36.960 | I mean, it's hard to, you know, I wrote a 250,000 paid book about it. And I've written a couple of

00:46:46.080 | books. And so it's hard to summarize, you know, what went wrong in a second. But essentially,

00:46:53.520 | we had instead of a public health response to a public health crisis, we had a militarized and

00:47:00.720 | monetized response that was the inverse of what of everything that you would want to do if you

00:47:06.800 | actually wanted to protect public health. We've known, you know, if you look at WHO protocols,

00:47:12.960 | or the CDC protocols, the EU, the NHS in Britain, all those, they all had protocols for how to

00:47:19.760 | manage the pandemic. They all said unanimously, you do not use lockdowns, mass lockdowns,

00:47:26.960 | you quarantine the sick, you protect the vulnerable, but you keep society moving,

00:47:32.480 | because the consequences of not do of shutting down society will be cataclysmic beyond anything

00:47:38.960 | that the disease is going to impose. Everybody knew that. And so, you know, we had these,

00:47:45.280 | these agencies that had drilled for years and years, this alternative, you know, militarized

00:47:53.440 | response. And instead of, you know, doing what you want to do, which is to get early treatment

00:48:00.320 | to people to have, I mean, you know, we live in the age of the internet, we should have had a

00:48:05.920 | grid that connected all 15 million frontline doctors, every country around the world,

00:48:10.720 | and figured out what are you doing that works in your country, you know, and try and then

00:48:16.160 | distilling that information and processing it and getting it to other doctors.

00:48:19.760 | Well, we knew it was working, we knew ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were working, we knew that

00:48:24.800 | since 2004. Because NIH did the study that said hydroxychloroquine obliterates coronavirus.

00:48:31.680 | We knew what would work at that time. And what was the response? They, the response was they could

00:48:38.320 | not allow early treatment to occur. Why? Because there's a little known federal law that says,

00:48:45.760 | if there is a drug that is shown effective against a target disease, it is ill, a drug that is approved

00:48:53.760 | for any purpose, it is illegal to issue an emergency use authorization for a vaccine.

00:49:01.840 | So if they had admitted that hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin worked against coronavirus,

00:49:07.440 | it would have destroyed their whole $100 billion vaccine, you know, enterprise. So they had to kill

00:49:13.920 | early treatments. And they went after stuff that they knew worked. They, this was the first

00:49:19.200 | respiratory virus in history, where people would go to the hospital, and they would test positive

00:49:25.920 | for coronavirus and be symptomatic, they were sick. And that's why they went to the hospital.

00:49:30.640 | And the hospital would say to them, there is no treatment, go home till your lips turn blue and

00:49:36.800 | you can't breathe. And come back and we will give you two things that are going to kill you,

00:49:42.080 | remdesivir and hydroxyl and ventilation. So people still look at in this country at

00:49:51.440 | antifungal era. And we were doing things a couple of miles from me in Malibu, there were police

00:49:59.680 | pulling surfers out of the surf and giving them $1,000 tickets and telling them to go home,

00:50:04.320 | getting them out of the sunshine where coronavirus doesn't spread and lock him in their home where

00:50:09.680 | it does. And every time they sent some one of these people home from the hospital sick,

00:50:14.800 | it was a super spreader event. Oh, you look at our record of coronavirus. And this is when nobody can

00:50:21.280 | explain who is, you know, defending Fauci, etc. We had the highest body count in the world by far

00:50:30.000 | from coronavirus. We have 4.2% of the world's population, we had 16% of the COVID deaths.

00:50:38.320 | How does anybody explain that? And you go to nations that didn't do what we told them.

00:50:43.600 | Nigeria, Nigeria has the highest malaria burden in the world. So everybody gets hydroxychloroquine

00:50:51.120 | once a week, they call it Sunday, Sunday, everybody in the country takes it on Sunday.

00:50:54.800 | They had the highest river blindness burden. So half the country's on ivermectin.

00:51:00.320 | Nigeria never had an epidemic. It had a death rate in Nigeria of 14 people per million population.

00:51:08.560 | Our death rate, 3000 per million population. Blacks in our countries were dying at 3.6

00:51:15.120 | times the rate of whites. Why were American blacks dying and Nigerian blacks weren't?

00:51:20.240 | And then you go to Haiti. Haiti had a, and by the way, Nigeria had 1.3% vaccination rate.

00:51:28.720 | Haiti had 1.4% vaccination rate. And they had a death rate of 15 people per million population.

00:51:37.440 | These are the countries that Tony Fauci and Bill Gates said, we got to get them vaccinated. We got

00:51:42.800 | to do whatever you can, because they're going to get totally wiped out because of their poverty.

00:51:45.920 | And guess what? They never had a pandemic. Across Africa, there was a 10% vaccination rate. And

00:51:51.680 | guess what? They had a death rate of about 340. Some people think that the death rate here was

00:51:58.640 | overstated because of incentives to do that. Do you believe that as well? Yes. So maybe part of

00:52:04.720 | that death rate is it was over-incentive, but you believe looking back on this, that Fauci,

00:52:10.000 | as well as the pharma companies, Bill Gates investments in those areas, that led us down a

00:52:16.400 | path, we'll call it the medical industrial, the pharma industrial complex. You believe the pharma

00:52:21.120 | industrial complex dictated our response to coronavirus? And then Freeberg, I'll let you jump

00:52:25.760 | in. Yeah. But you believe that, that that's the... I don't have any question. I believe this was a

00:52:35.120 | you know, it was, as I said, it was a military response. I mean, look at who was running the

00:52:43.200 | look at who is running the coronavirus response. Wouldn't you think it would be HHS? Well, when

00:52:50.640 | they had one warp speed had to present its declassify its organizational charts to show

00:52:58.400 | to the FDA committee called VRBAC when they demanded it and warp speed went in and showed

00:53:04.880 | them the organizational chart, the agency running warp speed and pandemic response was not HHS. It

00:53:15.040 | was NSA, the National Security Agency. Averill Haynes is the director of national intelligence.

00:53:21.920 | So she was running Operation Warp Speed. And who was manufacturing? It wasn't Pfizer and Moderna.

00:53:29.440 | It was 140 military contractors who, you know, who had lines ready. And you say, you know, and then,

00:53:36.880 | you know, all of this clamped down on civil rights that we saw, the censorship, the closing the

00:53:44.240 | churches, the, you know, the closing of the right to assemble, the banning of jury trials against

00:53:50.240 | pharmaceutical companies, they crushed the seventh amendment, the first amendment,

00:53:54.160 | they closed down 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation.

00:53:59.840 | They, they obliterated the fourth amendment right to, you know, to against warrantless searches and

00:54:07.360 | seizures with all these intrusive, you know, you have to show your medical records to go and get

00:54:13.760 | out of your house or to get into a public building.

00:54:16.400 | >> Freeberg, what what is correct here? Do you believe in what is incorrect about

00:54:20.080 | Roberts? What's Robert saying, if anything?

00:54:21.440 | >> Well, look, I mean, there's obviously a lot of things I could say. By the way,

00:54:24.160 | I was on the executive team at Monsanto for a couple years. So, you know, I, one thing I will

00:54:28.640 | say is I sat at the table facing the EPA and the USDA and certainly didn't feel like a very cozy

00:54:35.680 | relationship in at least what I saw in the few years I was there. It was it did feel like a

00:54:41.920 | very kind of independent regulatory and challenging, frankly, regulatory process that Monsanto had to

00:54:47.840 | manage and deal with and go through and releasing new products. You know, I don't think that this

00:54:53.520 | notion that there were kind of embedded parties that did our whims and wishes really plays true,

00:54:59.440 | at least from my experience sitting there. And I'm not a longtime Monsanto executive,

00:55:02.960 | I built a software company, sold it to Monsanto and sat on the exec team for a few years after

00:55:07.280 | the acquisition. But I guess the more kind of, I think bigger framing question for you, Robert,

00:55:15.200 | is really around vaccines in general. I think your your commentary around the COVID response,

00:55:21.040 | and, you know, the influencing forces there didn't start with COVID, right? I mean, you've been a

00:55:28.800 | kind of, you know, outspoken voice on vaccines in general for some time. Is that a fair statement?

00:55:35.520 | Because I think that that's part of the media narrative around your history and legacy,

00:55:38.800 | is that you have been kind of outspoken on vaccines and the, you know, the risks and the

00:55:44.640 | effects that you that you consider to be kind of, I don't know if it's implied or explicit with

00:55:50.640 | respect to the use and wide adoption of vaccines over time, maybe you could share a little bit

00:55:54.800 | about your broader perspective in the years leading up to COVID. And how that then kind of

00:55:58.880 | informed your point of view specifically on COVID. You know, my objective is not to vaccinate,

00:56:03.840 | I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm fully vaccinated, my kids were fully vaccinated. I wish at this point

00:56:10.480 | that I had not done that, because I know enough about them now. But my principal objective is that

00:56:16.400 | vaccines, in this, the childhood vaccines are immune from pre-licensing safety testing.

00:56:23.440 | Of the 72, when I was a kid, I got three vaccines. My children got 72 doses of 16 vaccines.

00:56:32.720 | And the vaccines are the one medical product that does not have to go through placebo-controlled

00:56:39.600 | trials where you test and expose versus unexposed population prior to licensure.

00:56:44.400 | And there's a number of historical reasons for that that come out of the kind of military

00:56:49.680 | beginnings. These vaccines were regarded as national security defense against biological

00:56:57.280 | attacks on our country. So they wanted to make sure if the Russians attacked us with anthrax

00:57:01.840 | or some other biological agent, they could quickly formulate and deploy

00:57:05.200 | a vaccine to 200 million Americans with no regulatory impediments.

00:57:09.680 | So they called them biologics rather than medicines and exempted biologics from pre-licensing safety

00:57:16.560 | trials. I've litigated on the issue. Not one of them has ever been tested pre-licensure against.

00:57:21.680 | So nobody knows what the, you know, you can say that the vaccine is effective against a target

00:57:29.120 | disease, but you can't say that it's not causing worse problems. Now I'll just summarize this story.

00:57:37.520 | In the, the vaccine schedule exploded in 1986. The vaccine industry succeeded in getting Ronald

00:57:46.080 | Reagan to sign a law. And my uncle was also, you know, a group that was pressured by Wyatt,

00:57:52.240 | which was losing $20 in downstream liabilities on every vaccine it made because it was laws

00:57:59.040 | suits for every dollar that it made. And they, and, and profits, they went to Reagan and said,

00:58:05.280 | we're going to get out of the vaccine business. And you're going to be left without a vaccine

00:58:09.680 | supply unless you give us full immunity from liability. And Reagan, you know, reluctantly

00:58:15.360 | signed that. And so today, no matter how negligent the company, no matter how grievous your injury,

00:58:21.680 | no matter how reckless their conduct, you cannot sue them. That caused a gold rush because now

00:58:26.960 | you've got a product that there's no downstream liability. You're immune from that. There's no

00:58:33.760 | upstream safety testing. So that's a $250 million saving. And there's no marketing or advertising

00:58:40.320 | costs because the federal government is going to mandate this product to 76 million American

00:58:45.760 | children, whether they like it or not. And there's no better product in the world. And so there was

00:58:50.480 | a gold rush. And instead of three vaccines, we quickly ended up with 72. And now we're going to,

00:58:56.080 | you know, toward 80 right now. And there's no end in sight. And a lot of those vaccines were

00:59:01.200 | unnecessary. They're not even for casual disease, cause disease. Here's what happened in, beginning

00:59:06.880 | in 1989. We experienced a chronic disease epidemic in this country. It is unlike anything in human

00:59:15.280 | history. We went from having 6% of Americans affected by chronic disease to 54% by 2006.

00:59:23.840 | And what do I mean by chronic disease? I mean, neurological disease that I never saw when I was

00:59:28.640 | a kid. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette's syndrome, ASD, autism, narcolepsy,

00:59:38.160 | all of these suddenly appeared. Autism rates went from one in 10,000 to one in every 34.

00:59:43.040 | 1989 was the year this began. Allergic disease, peanut allergies suddenly appeared.

00:59:51.680 | Food allergies, eczema suddenly appeared. Anaphylaxis and asthma, you know, which had

00:59:58.080 | been around, but it exploded. And then autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and juvenile

01:00:04.400 | diabetes. I never knew a kid. I had 11 siblings, about 70 cousins. I never knew anybody with any

01:00:11.760 | of these diseases. And suddenly, why do I find my kids have allergies? So then, if you look

01:00:20.880 | at the manufacturer's inserts for those 72 vaccines, there's 420 diseases that have been

01:00:30.800 | associated with the vaccines that are listed, including every one of those diseases that

01:00:36.480 | went epidemic in 1989. And this is the country which is the most heavily vaccinated, and this

01:00:43.120 | was happening here unlike any other country in the world. And so, we have, you know, and, you know,

01:00:50.240 | it's good for the pharma, because pharma now makes $60 billion on the vaccines. When I was a kid,

01:00:55.040 | they were making $250 million. Now they make $60 billion a year, plus $100 billion from COVID

01:01:00.560 | vaccine.

01:01:01.280 | Friedberg, do you believe that these vaccines are over prescribed and are part of the rise in ADHD

01:01:11.600 | and all this litany of diseases? I'm just asking Friedberg, who's our resident scientist here,

01:01:15.600 | do you believe this? You know, explicitly, as a scientist, I'm curious.

01:01:20.240 | I don't think there's direct evidence supporting that relationship. I think that there's a lot

01:01:25.040 | of environmental factors that have been driving changes in, you know, the rate of problems with

01:01:32.880 | autoimmunity. It relates to our food products, our food system. It relates to environmental

01:01:39.840 | chemistry, like Robert has talked about. Generally, I think there's a lot of environmental

01:01:43.840 | conditioning that's caused this rise in problems in human health.

01:01:48.240 | Can I interrupt for a second? Because I don't think it's solely the vaccines. Our children

01:01:52.560 | today are swimming around in a toxic soup. But there's a timeline. And actually, a toxicologist

01:01:59.360 | that I've used in many of my lawsuits, probably the most famous in the country, Phil Landrigan,

01:02:03.520 | looked at the timeline of the explosion of all these chronic diseases.

01:02:08.960 | And he said, there's only a finite number of things that have caused it. You know,

01:02:15.040 | one is glyphosate. Things that became ubiquitous in every demographic

01:02:22.160 | beginning around 1993, 1989. One of them is glyphosate, neonicotinoid,

01:02:28.880 | pesticide, PFOAs, cell phones, ultrasound, and he made the whole list. And so it's a finite number.

01:02:37.680 | And the question is, and vaccines are part of that. And you know, it is suspicious because

01:02:43.920 | the vaccines list all of these as side effects. Now, I've put together books. You know, one of

01:02:51.280 | my books on this subject, on connecting these, has 1400 references and 400 studies digested. So

01:02:59.760 | the science out there is pretty clear. But NIH refused to study these things. Because it knows

01:03:08.240 | that wherever they follow the dots, it's going to end up with a big shock. And so they simply have

01:03:15.280 | to stop studying them. And they've turned themselves into an incubator for pharmaceutical

01:03:19.040 | products. And they don't do this kind of basic research. I want to just give you guys one example.

01:03:23.920 | The most common vaccine in the world is called the DTP vaccine, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.

01:03:29.600 | We gave it in this country and beginning around '79. It was killing or causing severe brain

01:03:38.240 | injury in one out of every 300 kids who got it. UCLA study funded by NIH that found it. So they

01:03:43.840 | got rid of it. That's what caused all the lawsuits and eventually precipitated the passage of the

01:03:49.600 | vaccine. We stopped it here. They stopped in Europe. But Bill Gates and WHO are still giving

01:03:55.280 | it to 161 million African children every year. It's the most popular vaccine on earth. Bill Gates

01:04:02.240 | says publicly it saved 30 million lives. He went to the Danish government and said, "We've saved

01:04:07.920 | 30 million lives. Will you support this program?" In 2017, the Danish said, "Show me the study that

01:04:13.440 | shows that it saved all those lives." He couldn't do it. So they went down and they conducted a

01:04:19.040 | study in West Africa where the Danes operate all these health clinics. And they looked at 30 years

01:04:24.400 | of data. And as it turned out in a nation called Guinea-Bissau, half the kids in that country at

01:04:30.720 | the age two months had received the vaccine and half had not. It was a perfect natural experiment.

01:04:37.360 | And they looked at 30 years of data. And what they found was that the kids who received the

01:04:42.480 | vaccine were not dying of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. But girls who received the vaccine

01:04:47.920 | were dying at 10 times the rate of unvaccinated girls. And they were not dying of anything,

01:04:54.960 | anybody ever associated with the vaccine. They were dying of bilharzia, malaria, anemia,

01:05:01.520 | minor cuts and scrapes, and mainly pulmonary respiratory disease and pneumonia.

01:05:09.280 | And what the researchers concluded, and this was a study funded by the Danish government

01:05:14.480 | and Novo Nordisk, which is a vaccine company, and the scientists were all pro-vaccine.

01:05:19.920 | What they said is this vaccine is killing more people than the disease ever were.

01:05:25.280 | Nobody knew it because nobody associated the people who were dying because they were dying

01:05:30.480 | all these different things. How were only the unvaccinated kids? So the vaccine had saved them

01:05:37.760 | from diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, but it had ruined their immune system so that they

01:05:41.680 | could not defend themselves against other diseases. And that's the danger of not having

01:05:46.640 | placebo-controlled trials prior to introducing the product, particularly when you're going to

01:05:51.920 | mandate a product for healthy people. >> Let's, with our remaining time here,

01:05:56.720 | move on to energy and the environment. You've got an incredible track record. I remember

01:06:02.560 | growing up in New York, the amazing work you did for the Watershed Project, and I'll let you expand

01:06:08.080 | upon that in a moment. But the only confounding thing I found in your position, and I'm curious

01:06:14.640 | if it's changed or not, is that you spent decades trying to close the Indian Point nuclear power

01:06:19.680 | plant in a time when clearly nuclear power has gotten safer and is clearly, I think, the world

01:06:27.920 | believes, and certainly everybody who's on this panel believes, nuclear is a key point in the

01:06:32.480 | transition to renewables. So what is your actual position, explain it to us as basically as you

01:06:39.120 | can, on nuclear power, and do you regret or have you rethought your position on Indian Point?

01:06:46.320 | >> No, I mean, Indian Point is leaking tritium into the odds every day. I don't see how you can

01:06:54.960 | say it's safe. And they still haven't figured out what to do with the waste. They're now storing it.

01:07:00.320 | It's 18 miles from midtown Manhattan. The shack where they were storing the fuel rods

01:07:13.280 | had the structural integrity of a Kmart. A terrorist attack against it would basically

01:07:20.720 | render New York uninhabited for the next 5,000 years or so. So to put something that risky so

01:07:32.080 | close to 10 million people doesn't make any sense. Now, nuclear power, I'm all for it if they can

01:07:39.120 | ever make it safe or if they ever make it economical. And it's not me saying it's not safe,

01:07:46.000 | it's the insurance industry. They can't get an insurance policy. If they can't get an insurance

01:07:50.400 | policy, then I would say I don't want it. The American nuclear industry, I mean, you go look

01:07:56.320 | at what Fukushima, they're poisoning the Pacific every day with huge amounts of really deadly

01:08:02.960 | radiation. And now their only solution to it is to suck the water out of the groundwater and store

01:08:10.400 | it in these big tanks. And if you just go on the internet and look at a picture of the Fukushima

01:08:15.600 | water tanks and they go on to the horizon and there's no end to it. >> Robert, can I just make

01:08:19.600 | a point? The thing with nuclear that's worth separating is it's not the fundamental technology

01:08:26.640 | there that's broken in either example that you use, but it's the profit motive that caused both

01:08:32.480 | the industrial engineering of both plants to be subpar. Because Fukushima, for example,

01:08:38.240 | was engineered not to the seismic levels that you really needed. >> Or elevation.

01:08:42.080 | >> Even conceding all that. Here's what I would say is that in our country,

01:08:48.400 | nuclear is regarded as so dangerous that they can't get insurance. So the industry had to go to

01:08:57.920 | Congress in a sleazy legislative maneuver in the middle of the night and get the Price-Anderson

01:09:04.560 | Act passed so that to shift their accident burden onto the American public. So if their plant goes

01:09:11.840 | up and I was 10 miles from that plant, then I'm going to have to pay for it. So I don't think

01:09:17.120 | that's free market capitalism. I believe in free markets. And I can tell you this, there is no

01:09:23.840 | public utility on the face of the earth that will build one of those plants without massive public

01:09:30.800 | subsidies, not one. Nobody will ever do it. And then they have to store the waste for the next

01:09:37.440 | 30,000 years, which is five times the length of recorded human history. And if you tell me how

01:09:42.560 | that, you know, if they had to amortize that rate up front, there's no way anybody do it. Number two,

01:09:50.160 | or three, or four, or whatever I've gotten to, it costs now between nine and $16 billion to build a

01:09:58.640 | nuclear power plant, just the construction costs. And then you've got to get the technicians,

01:10:03.840 | and then you've got to get, you know, the waste disposal, the regular outages and all of this.

01:10:08.160 | There's no way that it could compete in a free market. I believe in free market capitalism.

01:10:14.000 | I am a radical free marketeer. I believe that our energy system should reflect the marketplace.

01:10:21.440 | And right now, you can build a solar plant for a billion dollars a gigawatt. You can build a

01:10:28.880 | wind plant for $1.2 billion a gigawatt. A coal plant will cost you about $3.5 billion a gigawatt.

01:10:36.160 | And then you have to pay for the fuel by cutting down the mountains of West Virginia,

01:10:41.200 | poisoning 22,000 miles of streams, burning, you know, putting mercury that gets into every

01:10:48.320 | freshwater fish in America, sterilizing the lakes of the Appalachians. If they had to internalize

01:10:53.760 | that cause, coal, which says is that, you know, it's for nuke, which says it's too cheap to meter,

01:11:00.720 | it turns out it's the most expensive way to boil a pot of water that's ever been defiled.

01:11:04.960 | I'm just trying to make the point that if you look at the levelized cost of energy now,

01:11:08.400 | what you're saying is exactly why solar and wind are winning. It's just so much cleaner,

01:11:12.720 | it makes so much more sense.

01:11:14.080 | There's no fuel cost. And if the impediment is distribution, is that we don't have a grid system

01:11:20.720 | that can effectively, you know, orchestrate a variable power. And that's what we've

01:11:26.240 | done. Let me provide a counter that maybe it's not about distribution, but it's about scaling

01:11:30.560 | production capacity. So, you know, if you look over nearly any historical timescale, since we've

01:11:35.760 | had industrial energy production on earth, for every 1% increase in GDP per capita, you see a

01:11:42.320 | roughly 1.2% increase in energy consumption per capita. And so if you forecast out by the end of

01:11:48.160 | the century, the GDP per capita estimates in the US and around the world, we need to increase global

01:11:55.200 | energy production by roughly, you know, anywhere from five to 10x. And, you know, the current

01:12:01.680 | system of pulling carbon out of the ground and burning it up and pulling heat energy out of it

01:12:05.760 | doesn't scale doesn't make sense, obviously, put aside the carbon effect problem. And there appears

01:12:11.120 | to be, you know, a reasonable chance of a pretty serious material shortage for renewable sources

01:12:15.920 | by the middle of next decade. So what do you think is the right answer to long range energy

01:12:20.960 | security? And what sort of technology should we be embracing? And do you think that they scale

01:12:25.360 | fast enough to kind of allow us to have our economy grow in the way that it needs to support

01:12:29.840 | the population demands over the next century?

01:12:33.840 | I mean, I'm agnostic about the energy sources, and I think you need to, you know, you have to

01:12:39.760 | be eclectic about it. And a lot of them are, are, you know, make sense locally. But we, I mean,

01:12:46.960 | we have enough energy, we have enough wind energy in North Dakota, North Dakota is the windiest place

01:12:53.200 | on earth outside of the Arctic, North Dakota, Montana, and Texas, we have enough wind energy to

01:13:00.000 | produce five times the amount of our entire grid. The problem is, the North Dakota wind farmer

01:13:07.680 | cannot get his product to market, because it dissipates in a, you know, we have an

01:13:13.360 | antiquated grid system, that simply will not efficiently move electrons across country. And

01:13:23.840 | we need a DC grid system that, you know, with off ramps in the big cities, etc, that can do that.

01:13:29.360 | In North Dakota, if you have an acre of farmland, it's worth about 300 bucks. If you put a wind

01:13:36.560 | turbine on it, it's worth about 3200 bucks. So every farmer in North Dakota wants to put wind

01:13:43.760 | turbines in their cornfields. And the problem is, they cannot get that energy to market, that is the

01:13:49.600 | only choke point. And if we and the same is true, you know, in in, in, you know, we have great solar

01:13:56.640 | power in this country. We we have, you know, we have an abundance of, of renewable energy in this

01:14:04.560 | country. And the power of the problem is, the incumbents were were, were operating on rules

01:14:11.920 | under rules that were written by the incumbents to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous,

01:14:17.680 | most toxic fields from hell rather than the cheap, clean, green, wholesome fields from heaven. And we

01:14:23.360 | ought to reverse that and make it make them all compare seems like technology and economics have

01:14:29.520 | reversed that in a way. Yeah, one last question on this. So as president, would you support

01:14:34.800 | initiatives that could advance and allow approval of safe nuclear fission production systems to be

01:14:44.240 | built here in the US? Well, I will, like, like I say, I support new and new technologies of new

01:14:52.240 | that are safe, you know, where they but but as long as they can compete in a marketplace, you

01:14:57.120 | show me and by the way, I think we should be doing science even when there's no, you know, economic

01:15:03.680 | end to it. So we should be looking at this stuff. But I would not promote new if it's not competitive

01:15:09.200 | in the marketplace. And it's, you know, and that means, you know, cleaning up your mess after

01:15:14.400 | yourself, which, you know, is a lesson we were all supposed to learn in kindergarten. They have

01:15:19.120 | to show us what they're going to do with the ways how they're going to internalize their cost,

01:15:23.360 | rather than what they're doing now, which is to externalize their cause and internalize their

01:15:27.360 | profits. Okay, we have covered a lot of territory. And I hate to get to controversial ones, like

01:15:35.520 | culture wars, but it's going to come up in the presidential election. I personally don't think

01:15:38.960 | this is what's important in the presidential election. I think the fiscal stuff, the energy

01:15:42.480 | stuff, the wars and political stuff we've discussed today are much more important. But I'm curious

01:15:49.120 | your take on the issues around Disney, DeSantis, trans, and this cohort of issues which have

01:15:58.480 | become an obsession, it seems, between certain members of certain political parties or both

01:16:04.640 | parties, the media, and certainly it's taken over a lot of discussions amongst the generation

01:16:09.440 | on social media. What's your take on all this? And when you get caught up in these debates in

01:16:15.600 | the presidential debates, about trans athletes, as but one example, do you think a trans woman who

01:16:23.440 | was a biological male should be able to be put in a female prison? Do you think they should be able

01:16:29.680 | to play on a female basketball team and change with a bunch of 15 year old girls in a high school

01:16:35.040 | locker room? I've already said first of all, I want to say this. I think that people I believe

01:16:42.640 | in bodily autonomy and that people's choices about what they want to do with their body

01:16:48.400 | should be respected and people should not be shamed. I do not believe that somebody who was

01:16:55.840 | born a biological man should be able to compete later on in life, whatever choice they made,

01:17:02.640 | on a woman's team. I have a niece who is playing softball at BC. She has worked,

01:17:11.680 | she has devoted her entire life to getting that scholarship and it's consumed her. And I've

01:17:20.160 | watched during my lifetime women's sports go from essentially non-existent to equitable,

01:17:28.000 | mainly with men's sports. And I think that's important and I don't think that women should

01:17:34.720 | lose ground in any way. So I would, you know, I've said I don't believe that that's the right thing,

01:17:43.200 | but I think everybody should be respected. Let me ask a question then about parents who

01:17:49.040 | are struggling with this issue. At what age should a doctor be allowed to perform

01:17:56.240 | gender reassignment surgery on an individual? You believe adults? So at what age should you be able

01:18:05.360 | to have gender surgery? Because this is going to come up multiple times in this debate.

01:18:11.280 | I think adults ought to have that choice. I don't think a child should have that choice,

01:18:16.800 | except with, you know, certainly not without parent parental permission. And I really don't,

01:18:24.000 | you know, I know that the, you know, and let's start by saying this, this is a difficult issue

01:18:33.760 | and it's an issue that we should not be judging people on and we should not be hating people about.

01:18:38.640 | We should be trying to solve people's problems and give people as much leeway as possible to,

01:18:47.040 | and as much respect, as much leeway to exercise their choices and much respect for those choices

01:18:53.280 | we possibly can. Within that framework, I don't believe that a child without their parental

01:19:00.400 | permission should be allowed to choose that kind of surgery because –

01:19:05.120 | What if their parents agree to it? Should a 15-year-old be able to be –

01:19:08.880 | I, that's a very difficult question and I don't feel like I'm equipped to answer it. I'm not gonna,

01:19:15.040 | you know, interfere.

01:19:17.280 | Yeah, I think this panel agrees with you. This is a very difficult issue and, you know, people

01:19:21.040 | should be – yeah.

01:19:22.000 | What do you think about things like critical race theory and maybe we can just use that as a way to

01:19:28.480 | just talk about the state of US education in general. Are we preparing our children

01:19:33.680 | for the task at hand and what is the task at hand maybe in your eyes and how does it need to change,

01:19:41.520 | if at all?

01:19:42.080 | You know, I think critical race theory as much as I understand it

01:19:48.240 | is, you know, though, listen, we should not be hiding from people. We should be honest people

01:19:53.920 | about the history in this country of genocide, of racism and those things. You know, we need to be

01:20:00.320 | honest about that with each other. Not to shame people, not to make people feel badly, not to make

01:20:06.880 | people feel guilty, but to understand the milestones that we never want to go near again and to move

01:20:14.240 | forward with those things. I, you know, in turn, I don't really understand the battle over critical

01:20:21.040 | race theory in schools, but, you know, to the extent that somebody would say that this has to,

01:20:28.240 | that that theme has to dominate all historical teaching, I would be against that. I think it's

01:20:36.320 | very, very important. You know, America, our country has done wonderful things in the world.

01:20:43.440 | We have a history of idealism. We have a history of moral authority and leadership, and we have a

01:20:47.840 | history of doing bad things too. But I think for children, for the sake of our national unity,

01:20:53.840 | for the sake of, you know, we need to instill children with a sense of optimism and hope and

01:21:00.560 | love and also a love of history. I mean, I grew up learning history and learning, you know, kind

01:21:05.600 | of the heroic aspects of history, which I now understand are not the only parts of history,

01:21:12.960 | but it's really important for children to have role models to look up to and have an

01:21:19.520 | optimistic view of our country and to have, to understand what the shared values are. And by

01:21:25.520 | values, I mean, aspirational values, you know, the things that our country is supposed to stand for

01:21:30.800 | when we are at our best.

01:21:32.960 | >>Corey: For example, Robert, in San Francisco, we canceled advanced placement classes because it

01:21:38.080 | made people feel bad. Do you think that was a good decision in the name of equity?

01:21:44.240 | >>Robert: No. We should be inspiring our children towards excellence. And we should be able to,

01:21:50.240 | as adults, give them measures of what we mean by excellence. And, you know, that inspires kids and

01:21:57.280 | inspires the best out of them. And, you know, we need to have those kind of metrics. So that doesn't

01:22:02.720 | make any sense to me.

01:22:04.080 | >>Corey: But then what's your view on, for example, just educational diversity in charter schools and

01:22:09.440 | your just position on the teachers unions?

01:22:11.360 | >>Robert: Yeah, I mean, my view is that we ought to be putting huge resources into public schools

01:22:18.400 | and making them the best schools in the world. And I think if we, you know, right now we're

01:22:25.360 | making stealth bombers for a billion dollars that cannot fly in the rain. And I think if we just cut

01:22:32.480 | production of a couple of those, we can make all our schools the best schools in the world.

01:22:36.800 | >>Corey: Do they need competition? Do you believe in vouchers and parents getting to choose which

01:22:42.000 | school they go to? Because it does seem like there's not a lot of competition and that these

01:22:46.400 | teachers unions have a stranglehold on these schools.

01:22:49.600 | >>Robert: I have to look at that issue more. I mean, my inclination is that we should be

01:22:54.160 | putting resources into making our public schools the best schools in the world.

01:22:58.000 | >>Corey: But you said you believed in free markets with regard to energy. Why not free

01:23:03.200 | markets in regard to education?

01:23:04.480 | >>Robert: It has an appeal. I need to look at that.

01:23:08.000 | >>Corey: Okay, fair enough.

01:23:08.880 | >>Ted: Yeah, let's talk about censorship. Let's talk about the media. One of the things that

01:23:11.840 | happened during the COVID pandemic is that a lot of people grew suspicious of the mainstream media,

01:23:18.160 | even more suspicious than they already had been. It seemed like the media was carrying water

01:23:23.200 | on certain issues. It was almost impossible for the media to take seriously the idea that the

01:23:28.720 | virus might've come from the Wuhan lab, for example. People who put forward that,

01:23:34.960 | I think, reasonable explanation were called conspiracy theorists. The media didn't want

01:23:40.240 | to look into why, for example, just as an example, Fauci lifted Obama's moratorium on

01:23:45.600 | gain-of-function research. Couldn't get the media to really cover whether masking toddlers

01:23:53.200 | in schools did anything positive. Then when we found out that the mRNA

01:23:58.160 | shots didn't prevent COVID the way they said, they never even really asked the CEOs of Pfizer

01:24:05.840 | and these other companies, "When did you know this? When did you know that the vaccines didn't do

01:24:10.160 | what you said they're going to do?" I remember at Davos, you had Rebel News. It was this guerrilla

01:24:15.120 | media outfit that accosted Burla, the CEO of Pfizer, out in the street. They were just asking

01:24:23.440 | him questions that the media is supposed to ask, like, "What did you know and when did you know

01:24:30.160 | it with respect to whether the vaccines prevented the spread?" You couldn't get the New York Times

01:24:36.400 | or any of the mainstream outlets to cover this at all, so it fell to this guerrilla media outfit.

01:24:41.360 | In any event, that's a long windup, but Robert, what's your take on the media? Why can't we get

01:24:47.760 | what seems to be honest media coverage? How does this fit into your theory of regulatory capture?

01:24:53.760 | Who are they carrying water for and why?

01:24:55.920 | In 2015, I wrote a book on thimerosal, and there was a documentary that came out at that time

01:25:07.760 | called Trace Amounts. It was a really good documentary on the mercury-based

01:25:14.640 | preservative that was in a lot of vaccines at that time, and it's been removed from most,

01:25:20.480 | except for the flu vaccine now. I had a very close relationship with Roger Ailes,

01:25:27.760 | who was the founder of Fox News. I had this weird relationship because when I was 19 years old,

01:25:33.760 | I spent three months in a tent with him in East Africa. When he started Fox News,

01:25:41.840 | he became like Darth Vader to me, and we were antithetical on every issue, but he was a very

01:25:48.240 | funny guy and very clever. He was also very loyal to his friends, and he would make all of the hosts

01:25:55.680 | of Fox News put me on. I was the only environmentalist who was going on Hannity and Bill

01:26:00.640 | O'Reilly and Neil Cavuto, etc., regularly, like weekly. He made them do that, but I went to him

01:26:07.200 | this movie and showed it to him, and he found it compelling. He had a relative who he believed was

01:26:16.800 | vaccine-injured, a very, very close relative. He believed what was going on and what the

01:26:25.360 | thrust of the documentary was. He said, "I cannot let you talk about this on Fox News. I'm sorry."

01:26:31.920 | It was the first time he ever told me this. He said, "If any of my hosts let you on to talk

01:26:38.000 | about this, I would have to fire them." He said, "If I didn't fire them, I'd get a call from

01:26:45.040 | Rupert within 10 minutes." He said to me at that time that 70% of the revenues on network news

01:26:55.040 | on primetime were pharmaceutical ads. He said, "Of 22 ad spaces that we sell on the network news,

01:27:07.760 | on the evening news, 17 of those are pharmaceutical. We cannot afford to offend our biggest

01:27:15.680 | funder, his advertisers." I had this interesting experience with Jake Tapper

01:27:24.880 | where when I worked on my Rolling Stone article, Deadly Immunity, which was about this secret

01:27:30.880 | meeting that took place in Simpsonwood, Georgia by CDC and all of the vaccine companies and FDA, etc.,

01:27:36.800 | where they decided to hide the autism effect from the American people. I got the transcripts from

01:27:43.280 | it published in Rolling Stone. Jake Tapper worked for 21 days with me on an exclusive

01:27:53.920 | story. He was going to add simultaneously with Rolling Stone publishing it.

01:28:00.480 | Tapper, the night before it went on, he called me in total distress. He said, "It's been pulled

01:28:07.680 | by corporate. The whole thing is gone." He said, "Never in my career has corporate killed one of

01:28:13.040 | my stories. I'm really angry." Then I called him back the next day. He's never spoken to me again.

01:28:19.600 | There are consequences for these newscasters who depart from the orthodoxy.

01:28:24.160 | If you look at Anderson Cooper, he's got now probably a $13 million a year salary.

01:28:31.360 | But if you actually do the math, probably around $10 million of that comes from Pfizer,

01:28:37.920 | which sponsors his show. He's working for them. He's not working for us.

01:28:44.160 | They know who they're working for. >> Explosive stuff. I can't disagree

01:28:50.640 | with you as having been a publisher my whole career. >> Why even have pharmaceutical ads on TV?

01:28:58.400 | Only doctors can prescribe them. >> Yeah, it was illegal prior to 1997.

01:29:04.880 | So, there's only two nations in the world that allow pharmaceutical advertising on TV. One is

01:29:10.960 | New Zealand and the other is the United States. We both have these huge pharmaceutical sales.

01:29:16.080 | We take three to four times the amount of pharmaceutical drugs as a European takes.

01:29:21.840 | We have the worst health results. We're 79th in terms of health outcomes among all nations.

01:29:32.000 | Also, pharmaceutical drugs are the third biggest killer of Americans

01:29:37.760 | after cancer and heart attacks. So, it is not helping. When FDA changed that rule,

01:29:43.280 | the AMA was against it. All the medical institutions said, "You can't do this. It

01:29:49.680 | is going to destroy health in America." But they did it. The problem is that the pharmaceutical

01:29:57.040 | companies now not only have this platform for broadcasting their product, but they also control

01:30:04.720 | content on the mass report. >> Can I ask you a question? As far as I can tell, I think the left,

01:30:09.440 | just to be blunt, hates you more than the right.

01:30:12.560 | And so, do you want to just comment on your ability to get the mainstream media to pay

01:30:22.240 | attention, particularly folks on the left, and give you the airtime so that you can get your

01:30:25.920 | message out? >> And how much the party matters in this process for you? >> I don't know that they're

01:30:30.560 | going to. I mean, it was kind of traumatic what happened this week to them, not to me, because I'm

01:30:36.720 | used to it, that ABC, a person who describes herself as the journalist journalist and gave

01:30:45.200 | me a long talk when I got to ABC, that when I got to the Green Room, that she was not somebody who

01:30:54.320 | would ever censor or cut and they're not working a cherry pick. Because I said to her, "I'm very

01:30:59.120 | uncomfortable doing a taped interview with you. I know what you guys do when I tape an interview,

01:31:04.480 | you cut it up, you cherry pick it, you dice it, and then you play things out of context."

01:31:09.840 | And she said, "You won't do that. See that from me, I'm a journalist journalist,

01:31:14.080 | I don't take orders from anybody, I do it." And then she asked me, she says, "In the interview,

01:31:21.840 | I didn't want to talk about vaccine. I'm not going around the country talking about vaccines.

01:31:26.880 | If you see my speeches, I don't mention vaccines. But if somebody asks me about vaccines, I'm going

01:31:32.640 | to tell the truth. I'm not looking to talk about them. I know a lot about them, but I'm not leading

01:31:37.040 | with that because I'm interested in a lot of other issues." So she says, "Everything you've

01:31:44.480 | said about vaccines and autism has been debunked. And vaccines, it's clear, do not cause autism.

01:31:53.520 | What do you have to say by that?" And then I said, "By who?" And then I went into a long

01:32:00.480 | diatribe where I cited the cases, the dates, the publications, and the studies that show that,

01:32:06.720 | yeah, obviously it caused autism. And she cut out that whole section. And then, and then,

01:32:14.000 | so she had her question, which stayed at the industry talking point. And then she brackets the

01:32:22.960 | other, the news report on me with something at the beginning that says, you know, he's known to

01:32:29.040 | be a chronic liar and a disinformation spreader. And then the end, she said, "We had to remove

01:32:34.640 | things he said because they were false." The whole thing was so weird that she has gotten

01:32:40.080 | criticism even from the left. Because, you know, I mean, what is a newscaster supposed to do? Are

01:32:46.400 | they supposed to manipulate public information? Is their job to protect Americans from dangerous

01:32:52.080 | thoughts? Are they audiences? Do they have such contempt for their audiences that they think that

01:32:58.080 | the audiences can't make up their own minds? And what is their whole vision about the traditional

01:33:04.240 | role of the American media as the guardians of free speech in the First Amendment in this country?

01:33:08.960 | >> You can be sure our commitment to you is to not take out one sentence of anything you said.

01:33:13.360 | >> There's some stuff I'd like you to take out. [laughter]

01:33:17.120 | >> I mean, I also found that a crazy decision for them to make. If you're, if they actually believe

01:33:24.560 | that what you're saying about vaccines, which they put on the table, is incorrect, or what you said

01:33:29.920 | about autism or COVID is incorrect, they should be trained enough to rebut it and have a thoughtful

01:33:37.760 | debate about you. >> I'll be even more blunt.

01:33:39.600 | >> And publish it. >> My short takeaway about you,

01:33:42.560 | Robert, is that you are this odd person, which is born and raised by the establishment,

01:33:49.680 | but raising a lot of very uncomfortable questions about the establishment. And I think that that's

01:33:54.960 | very complicated for people to deal with. And I don't think that folks will be very supportive

01:34:00.960 | of you in the mainstream. And I think the reason is because it'll cause them to question all these

01:34:05.760 | systems that they put a lot of trust into that they work within. And so I'm not even sure whether

01:34:12.400 | they're trying to play gotcha journalism about vaccines, or which is a much bigger thing, which

01:34:16.560 | is, here is a guy that, I do think it's very similar to Trump, that says, he came out of the

01:34:22.160 | house and told us what was happening in the house, and it actually turned out that was happening,

01:34:25.840 | the Dave Chappelle quote from Saturday Night Live. I think you're a very different person than him.

01:34:30.320 | But that comment is very much the same. I think people are attracted to the truth and the

01:34:35.520 | confirmatory evidence about when they think that there's, frankly, corruption. And when it's laid

01:34:41.280 | bare in plain English, I think it's validating for those on the outside, because we're like,

01:34:46.800 | we knew it. And then for folks on the inside, they're like, we need to bury it. And I think

01:34:50.720 | that that's what you're going to be up against this entire election cycle. So whether it's us,

01:34:55.040 | whether it's Rogan, folks that will give you the chance for you to just lay your case out

01:34:59.760 | for millions of people who can smartly and intelligently make up their decision. I think

01:35:04.880 | that's what it comes down to. So I really just want to say thank you for giving us so much time

01:35:10.720 | and just being as honest as you were and transparent as you were. Saks closing thoughts

01:35:14.800 | here with Mr. Kennedy. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I think, I think that's a great reference

01:35:20.640 | Chamath to the Chappelle quote. I think that the ABC News interview was really telling because I

01:35:28.480 | think it's one thing if they had edited the interview for time, and just cut certain things,

01:35:34.320 | but they didn't do that. They cut out your side of the conversation and then declared you guilty

01:35:40.480 | of misinformation, but not letting the audience hear what it is that you said,

01:35:45.600 | they simply declared you guilty of it. And I think, in that case, I think this is an example

01:35:50.640 | of how dissenting views are labeled as misinformation, as really a suppression tactic.

01:35:57.120 | You know, they can't prove that it was misinformation, they didn't give you the chance

01:36:01.760 | to say your your side of it. And I think this is a tactic now of the elite to declare certain

01:36:08.240 | inconvenient truths or viewpoints out of bounds. They don't want them being considered. And I

01:36:14.960 | think what's very interesting about your campaign is you are going to force I think, elites and you

01:36:21.440 | know, various kinds foreign policy elites, Henderson Cooper, political elites, media elites,

01:36:27.280 | financially consider views. Yeah. That I you know, whether you agree with them or not, I think you've

01:36:31.920 | made them in a very articulate way. And I know enough about certain of your views, like with

01:36:38.000 | respect to the origins of the Ukraine war to say, Yeah, I agree with that. I believe that's true.

01:36:42.400 | So I don't think they can dismiss you.

01:36:44.240 | Today's conspiracy theories, sacks, as we've talked about our tomorrow's Pulitzer's today's

01:36:49.040 | conspiracy theories are tomorrow's Pulitzer's go ahead, Jamal,

01:36:51.920 | I really think that this is what's going to be scary as if you're

01:36:55.680 | as its election kind of rolls forward, the contrast and compare on the democratic side

01:37:00.480 | is going to be very troublesome to the establishment. And I just encourage you to just

01:37:05.200 | just keep sticking to it and telling people what you think.

01:37:09.520 | Freeberg, any final thoughts as we wrap?

01:37:11.200 | Can I say one last thing? And I want to because this is such a great platform.

01:37:17.440 | What I've always said to people, you know, if I'm if I'm promoting misinformation,

01:37:23.440 | which I'm constantly accused of, show me what it is identify.

01:37:28.720 | Don't just say I'm an information misinformation promoter.

01:37:31.200 | Show me the piece that you don't agree with or that, you know, I made a false statement.

01:37:36.320 | I would say that I have not promoted any misinformation.

01:37:40.720 | Unless misinformation is just a euphemism for anything that departs from government orthodoxies.

01:37:48.400 | Every post I have probably the most robust fact checking operation in North America because I

01:37:55.440 | know these attacks are coming. So we have three hundred and over three hundred and twenty MD

01:37:59.680 | physicians, PhD scientists on my advisory board who see everything that goes out.

01:38:04.640 | And everything that I posted on Instagram was cited or sourced work to a government

01:38:10.320 | database or peer reviewed publication. I don't want anything. And by the way,

01:38:15.280 | that doesn't mean I won't make a mistake at some point. But guess what?

01:38:18.640 | If I made a mistake, people would point it out. And you know what I would do? I'd change it.

01:38:24.800 | And a public opinion in the face of new facts. Exactly.

01:38:28.000 | If you show me fact, that's the only thing that'll change my opinion.

01:38:32.800 | Show me facts and I will change it so fast. But, you know, you need to show me facts.

01:38:37.200 | So just on on the competition between you and Biden for this nomination, I want to say

01:38:42.640 | that the Kennedy family has been involved in public life for for decades and many Kennedys

01:38:48.400 | have served in public life. And I honestly don't remember one time with any Kennedy who served in

01:38:54.880 | public life where they've been accused of receiving money from a foreign government.

01:39:00.640 | Not once. And we're now up to 12 Bidens, I think, who've received a payment,

01:39:06.160 | you know, from foreign governments, potentially in this larger 100 Biden scandal.

01:39:11.520 | Do you have a point of view on that? I mean, the fact that it appears that 100 Biden and other

01:39:17.840 | members of the Biden family receive payments from foreign governments, is that how do you

01:39:22.160 | interpret that? Is that something that you think is fair game in this campaign to talk about?

01:39:26.800 | You know, I don't know enough about it, David, to be able to render judgment on it. I don't know

01:39:34.640 | the intricacies of those relationships. I think the optics are unfortunate. But, you know, I would

01:39:43.280 | leave it I think it is fair game for people who are looking into it to criticize and question it.

01:39:49.280 | I don't know enough about it. I'm not in the position to be able to do that.

01:39:52.800 | All right. On that, I would just like to say I grew up in a Catholic household,

01:39:59.120 | Irish Catholic in Brooklyn, on the wall in my grandmother and grandfather's

01:40:03.920 | dining room, where three people, Bobby Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Jesus Christ. It's been an

01:40:10.800 | honor to have you on the program. And thank you for giving us two hours of vibrant debate. We

01:40:15.120 | wish you well. And we'd like to have you on again. And perhaps if this platform allows

01:40:19.840 | September for debates, and they will not host you on the debates, we will here on the all in

01:40:25.040 | podcast, I'll let you go. And on behalf of all the besties, thank you for giving us two hours

01:40:30.960 | and deeply engaging on these topics.

01:40:33.360 | That's exactly why I really enjoyed it.

01:40:36.000 | All right, this I think went spectacularly well. Let's go around the horn here and get immediate

01:40:42.640 | reactions. Friedberg, I want to start with you because I think you on the science issues,

01:40:48.640 | maybe held back a little bit and let him speak.

01:40:50.960 | We didn't have much of a dialogue with him. I'd say we all kind of had a few opening statements,

01:40:56.720 | but let him kind of speak his mind. I don't know, we'll see how the episode plays with listeners.

01:41:03.120 | It was really him having a platform to speak his mind for the past, you know, two hours. And,

01:41:08.960 | you know, it's interesting. I mean, obviously, he's a candidate that's challenging the current

01:41:13.040 | sitting president for his own party's nomination. So, you know, really kind of, you know, interesting

01:41:20.480 | moment to participate in. And, you know, but we did kind of give him the platform to kind of speak

01:41:24.400 | his mind. I think my observation is this guy, Robert clearly has a very deep rooted anti

01:41:31.920 | establishment energy. And that plays through in many of his points of view, anti establishment

01:41:39.600 | kind of energy, I think manifests as both conspiracy theories, where you know, as people

01:41:47.280 | have kind of classified some of his claims, which typically, you know, involves looking at call it

01:41:54.720 | correlation or circumstance, but not necessarily having the causality or the tie to demonstrate or

01:42:00.880 | have proof of point or evidence of point. And I think that that's really where he trips me up on

01:42:07.600 | a couple of points. Personally, which ones would you say the points that trip you up most? Where

01:42:12.480 | were you like, I think the general statement that there are kind of, you know, embedded interests

01:42:19.600 | in government is a good general statement, then you start to try and tie together different kind

01:42:24.400 | of correlations or circumstances and say that's evidence it's not really it doesn't resonate true

01:42:30.240 | with me as someone who likes to kind of see empirical truth kind of be demonstrated. I think

01:42:36.320 | some of these points around, we know that pfoa is one, you know, one of these products, one of

01:42:40.640 | these chemistries he talked about that's in the environment, they're very damaging to the

01:42:44.160 | environment, they're very damaging to human health. And there are others that he makes claims around

01:42:47.760 | that don't have that same level of evidence, but they all get kind of bucketed together that

01:42:51.360 | all this stuff is bad, that all nuclear is bad, because there, you know, is a facility that was

01:42:57.680 | built in the 1950s and 1960s, that had some degree of bad engineering. And what some might argue

01:43:03.760 | isn't necessarily a major hazardous radioactive leak, but has above kind of standards of radiation

01:43:09.440 | leak, and therefore all nuclear is threatening. Those are the sorts of things that kind of trip

01:43:13.040 | me up with him. That one came up a little bit, yeah, as well. The nuclear issue, the thing that

01:43:18.560 | matters to me, this is all just bullshit talking rambling about social issues. And, you know,

01:43:23.200 | like, what the fuck are we going to do with education and wars? None of it fucking matters.

01:43:27.440 | If we cannot solve the debt and budget crisis problem in this country, we are running into

01:43:35.040 | the ground, the United States is totally just panic. I know you do. And I think the US is

01:43:40.240 | in a tight. Let's unpack that, then your key issue. So for me, this is the thing that I told

01:43:45.040 | you guys I'm focused on with every candidate is how much do you think about the prioritization

01:43:50.000 | of the fiscal the federal budget? How do you think about the debt level? And how do you think about

01:43:54.560 | the boundary conditions? And it's clear that that's not really a concrete part of his platform,

01:43:59.120 | nor is it by the way, for any other candidate that I've seen so far, I agree with you. That's

01:44:03.440 | kind of where I sit. And it's very unpopular. Chamath, let's have your response here to

01:44:07.680 | generally have your opinion. I just think that your opinion is an opinion. And you present it

01:44:12.560 | as this canonical fact. And that's what I have an issue with. I just think that's intellectually not

01:44:17.040 | accurate. So I respect the fact that you think that that's an issue. But I think there's a lot

01:44:22.800 | of smart people that would say that's not the issue that you think it is. And there are other

01:44:26.720 | issues. Where did you find yourself Chamath in this process? agreeing with him or disagreeing

01:44:33.360 | with him? All political candidates, at some point have a fork in the road, which is that they're

01:44:39.840 | going to be a truth teller of their own truth. Or they're going to be conformist to talking points,

01:44:49.440 | to try to offend the least amount of people. Okay. And the first path is much riskier.

01:44:56.640 | But it actually has much larger discontinuous outcomes, ie Trump.

01:45:01.040 | The other path is a good antidote to the first path.

01:45:05.760 | When the first path is what's in power, and you saw Biden take that path.

01:45:11.200 | So for me, I don't agree with some of the things that he said. In fact, there are things like

01:45:18.080 | nuclear, which I just think he's wrong about. Sure. But what do I appreciate is that there is

01:45:24.880 | a version of his truth that is researched and reason from his own lived experience,

01:45:32.800 | as well as history and facts. And then he's also willing to say, I just don't know enough about it.

01:45:37.840 | So let me rethink it and then come back to you. I thought the comment about, you know, school

01:45:42.160 | choice was an example. Right? And I think that that's healthy. So on balance, I would rather

01:45:49.360 | have candidates in that first bucket, which are truth tellers that have the potential to

01:45:54.800 | cause disagreement versus the placators who say nothing. And this is where I do agree with

01:46:02.560 | freeberg, whatever the issues are, that may be important. The point is placating doesn't work

01:46:08.000 | anymore. And you need some kind of confrontation on hard topics for there to be any progress now.

01:46:16.480 | And so I prefer those kinds of people that are able to draw a hard line agitators, non conforming

01:46:25.280 | personally, I'm so I've always been and I have been very anti establishment, the idea of tearing

01:46:31.440 | down all these institutions of power gives me glee. I find it gleeful. sacks. When we look at

01:46:37.600 | this, this incredible, you know, almost two hour conversation we had here, I think we did hold him

01:46:43.440 | and force him on certain issues more than you would normally get in an interview. Without being

01:46:48.560 | sensational. We didn't lead with vaccines, we didn't lead with culture wars, we talked about

01:46:53.360 | really important issues. Where did you find yourself in most agreement with him? And where

01:46:57.840 | did you find yourself in least agreement with him? Well, I want to make sure we see the forest for

01:47:01.920 | the trees here, because I think you can disagree with this or that tree, or you can get lost down

01:47:06.560 | the rabbit hole of some of these very technical scientific debates. But here's the forest is

01:47:11.920 | you've got this scion of wealth and privilege who comes from the most prominent, famous democratic

01:47:19.200 | family. And he was set in his life to go become an environmental lawyer who go fight against big

01:47:24.800 | corporate environmental polluters. And somewhere along the way, he realized it wasn't just big

01:47:30.080 | corporations was the problem. It was the agencies, the government agencies that were supposed to be

01:47:34.480 | regulating them. And he realized that there was a revolving door going on between industry and

01:47:39.680 | these agencies. And so he ended up litigating not just against big companies, but against government

01:47:44.560 | agencies. I think that's a really interesting place for a candidate to come from. And what you

01:47:51.200 | heard him say, or what what I took away from it is that he has a very sophisticated critique of

01:47:57.040 | regulatory capture. And it goes beyond just the environmental area, it goes also to big pharma,

01:48:03.360 | and it goes to the military industrial complex, when he's talking about all these unnecessary wars

01:48:09.120 | that the United States has gotten into. And who can doubt that after we spent 20 years

01:48:14.400 | and $8 trillion bogged down in forever wars in the Middle East, who can doubt

01:48:18.720 | that the military complex has played a malign role in our foreign policy. And we've got,

01:48:24.960 | you know, all these generals when they retire from the Pentagon, they go right onto the boards,

01:48:29.680 | these defense contractors. So there's enough right about his critique that I think you can't

01:48:35.040 | dismiss it. You can't just say this guy's a conspiracy theorist or a nut. He's saying too

01:48:39.600 | many things that I know to be true. And there's a lot of other areas where I don't know what the

01:48:44.800 | truth is. But he is making, I'd say sensible arguments, he's presenting data, and he's asking

01:48:50.400 | you to challenge him on the data. So in any event, I think he's got this very interesting critique of

01:48:56.000 | regulatory capture. What he's basically saying is that we have a ruling elite in this country that

01:49:02.000 | is managing the country for its own benefit, and that is screwing the middle class. And that

01:49:07.120 | critique actually is very similar to what Trump and DeSantis and people on the right are saying.

01:49:11.920 | The only difference is that I think people on the right are blaming ideology. They're saying that

01:49:16.400 | the ruling elite is following this woke ideology. What Kennedy is saying that is that the ruling

01:49:21.760 | class is following the money. But you know what, they could both be right. I think

01:49:25.920 | these critiques are very compatible. So look, you might disagree with this or that part of it. But I

01:49:31.600 | think that this overall critique the forest, you know, forget about the trees, I think this forest

01:49:36.960 | could find purchase with the electorate because I think people just feel like there's something

01:49:42.480 | true about this. What I will say is this is exactly how Trump got elected. And there was a

01:49:46.880 | great piece, I think it was in the Atlantic when he was running the first time around, that talked

01:49:52.240 | a lot about the psychology of his appeal, that he comes from wealth, he comes from the system,

01:49:58.960 | but he is the anti system system product, that he came out of this machine of wealth,

01:50:05.200 | this machine of industry, this machine of influence. And he said, this entire system

01:50:10.400 | needs to be torn down. And if by the way, the psychology that they highlighted, and it speaks

01:50:15.360 | to Trump, not necessarily to Robert, but what they highlighted was, if you look historically,

01:50:19.920 | at the rise of authoritarian regimes, coming out of democracies, it's typically the folks that are

01:50:25.760 | come from an influence of from a point of influence, and from the point of privilege

01:50:30.000 | and power, and they then decided they wanted to tear down the system that produced them.

01:50:34.480 | And you trust the bully that comes out of the machine versus the outsider who doesn't really

01:50:39.680 | know the machine and doesn't really have access. And that's partially why I think maybe he has a

01:50:44.320 | shot at being the anti Biden alternative, more so perhaps in this go around than Trump is,

01:50:50.560 | look, he's not a bully. And he's, he's not gonna tear everything down. Yeah, listen, I,

01:50:55.440 | and I've heard him on other interviews. And what he said is we need a peaceful

01:50:58.400 | revolution, we need to reorganize these government agencies. So he's not saying

01:51:02.720 | like, maybe that's why he does win over Trump, right? Maybe he becomes the less extreme. He's

01:51:06.880 | not the bully, but he's like, I know how to dismantle and you know, his ideas are quite,

01:51:12.800 | they're incredible, free speech, supporting the rule of law, burgeoning the middle class.

01:51:17.920 | I mean, these are not things that are really controversial in the end,

01:51:21.440 | and they're good morals, right? They're good values. He's very morally grounded.

01:51:25.120 | I think my concern is just the framework for how you kind of rationalize and make decisions if

01:51:31.280 | you're allowing kind of influence innuendo and correlation be kind of the driving force instead

01:51:38.000 | of having, you know, make sure you just at least gather and sort the empirical evidence to make

01:51:44.080 | those decisions. That's what he's doing. He just reached a different conclusion than you.

01:51:47.440 | Yeah, he's just exactly because he's saying that the other conclusion is just the orthodox

01:51:51.200 | conclusion, which is nothing to see here. Yeah, by the way, I'm not an orthodox guy. And I'm not

01:51:55.360 | like following. So folks have said you're pushing RFK because you think he's a weaker candidate

01:52:04.800 | against the Republicans, your response? No, I don't necessarily think he'd be a weaker candidate

01:52:09.840 | for all the reasons we're talking about. I think he'd be preferable to Biden in a lot of people's

01:52:14.160 | views. So, so look, for me, this is not like partisan. I just think he's really interesting.

01:52:19.840 | I think he is a breath of fresh air. I think there are many aspects of his critique of our system

01:52:25.920 | and the corruption of our ruling class that hit home. I think regulatory capture is a huge issue.

01:52:31.680 | I think a lot of these agencies do need to be reorganized. It is the invisible hand that we

01:52:35.600 | don't know how to quantify well in all these other discussions that we have. And he does put his

01:52:40.800 | finger on this really ugly, uncomfortable truth, which is there's a cloistered set of insiders,

01:52:46.080 | for which there's a revolving door between power and money. And that's going to be very awkward

01:52:51.760 | for a small number of people to hear that message as he gets more attention, which is probably why

01:52:58.320 | the media industrial complex will not, you know, will do his best to prevent that message from

01:53:03.120 | getting out there. The media is going to block this guy at every angle, because when you said

01:53:08.400 | podcasts could play a huge role, just like in 2016, social media broke through and played a

01:53:12.480 | huge role. I think in 2024, I think that podcast could break will decide the election, the way

01:53:18.880 | that unorthodox candidates get their message out. It could be the way all candidates get their

01:53:22.320 | message out. Because if after two hours of this, you don't want to learn more about him,

01:53:26.880 | or you're not going to consider him more fully, I think it's impossible, because he's so well

01:53:31.520 | spoken. As you said, he's got a moral compass. He's got a track record. And he's got he

01:53:35.600 | already said, what he isn't saying is he's not just throwing bombs. And there may be things that

01:53:42.640 | you can debate with him about his interpretation of what he looks at, you know, and that's very

01:53:48.800 | fair criticism, I think. But his critique is well reason. And so you have to unpack the nuances of

01:53:54.400 | it to understand why he got to it, and also to try to prove him wrong. That is very powerful,

01:53:59.600 | because it's not just him randomly screaming about how things aren't working.

01:54:04.960 | Now, and I the moments I thought were very important here, and especially for the listeners

01:54:10.240 | who are listening, who are making important decisions and want to maybe change the political

01:54:13.680 | system. There were multiple times on the issue of trans surgery, and I'm going to be very nuanced

01:54:18.800 | here. With the permission of the parents, he said, I need to do more research on it on freeberg

01:54:23.200 | challenging him about spending, spending, he said, I need to, I need to give that some more thought.

01:54:28.480 | But broadly speaking, you know, I think we can take money out of the military budget and billion

01:54:32.480 | dollar planes that don't fly in the rain. There were many moments where he conceded, I need to

01:54:36.640 | give that some more thought, I need to be thoughtful about that. That's not something that

01:54:41.120 | you typically hear. But in a platform like this, with, you know, the nuance that we've created

01:54:47.760 | on this platform, having discussions, and the audience also being nuanced and having depth,

01:54:53.280 | we know the fans of this podcast are in a lot of positions of power, I'm sure 100% or very high

01:54:58.720 | percentage of the people who listen to this podcast actually vote and are very influential within

01:55:03.440 | their own circles. I think this kind of platform, we have a very deep discussion and somebody could

01:55:08.240 | say, you know what, I need to go deeper on that and think about it. When I asked him about weapons

01:55:12.320 | in Taiwan. And then I said, Hey, why wouldn't you give an answer that you defend Taiwan, Biden gave

01:55:17.520 | it? So I don't want to tip my card, you wouldn't want to do that. That's a really good answer.

01:55:21.120 | By the way, the official the official policy of the United States towards Taiwan is strategic

01:55:25.280 | ambiguity, which means we don't say whether we'll defend it, it depends on the circumstances. And

01:55:30.400 | Biden, when he's now said multiple times that he would defend it, and his own staff walked it back,

01:55:35.360 | because they said, we're not changing strategic ambiguity. So yeah, I mean, the policy he said,

01:55:40.800 | in that case, actually is the United States policy.

01:55:43.200 | So let me ask you guys a question. If he won the democratic nomination,

01:55:47.120 | and he's up against Trump, who do you vote for?

01:55:50.480 | Obviously, RFK.

01:55:52.800 | Yeah, of course, RFK. And I think Saks would have a hard time, he won't say who he's voted

01:55:57.440 | for previously. I think Saks would vote. Saks is not going to say, are you? Are you going to say it

01:56:01.600 | or not? Saks doesn't like to say he's just Machiavellian.

01:56:04.800 | I'm reserving judgment on the general until I know who both candidates are.

01:56:07.600 | Okay, he won't even Saks won't even tell us who we voted for.

01:56:10.480 | I would love for RFK Jr. to be on the ballot and have that choice, for sure. And as possible,

01:56:16.960 | I would as possible, I would vote for him. It depends who the other person is.

01:56:20.080 | Is it really? Because you won't even tell us who you voted for, or if you voted in the last

01:56:23.760 | election? Well, that's my right, Jason, I don't have to tell you.

01:56:26.640 | I just think it's, it's intellectually dishonest, since you talk about politics so much that I do,

01:56:31.360 | I think you should tell us who you vote for.

01:56:32.640 | I talk about issues, how I decide to balance those issues, because every candidate is a complex mix

01:56:39.920 | of issues. That's ultimately my decision. Yeah, but for somebody who injects everything to not

01:56:45.600 | just inject it, I'm not the one injecting. So to follow up on the question I asked,

01:56:50.320 | I would love to see Donald Trump come on the show, and give him an opportunity to have a

01:56:55.120 | conversation and see if folks can have a different point of view coming out of that as well as Joe

01:57:01.360 | Biden, and maybe some of the other candidates running for the Republican nomination. And I

01:57:06.160 | want to see if the points of focus for us can, you know, maybe match up with one or more of these

01:57:15.200 | candidates. So far, we'll come on, right? Yeah. So Nikki Halley's in, and then Trump will do it.

01:57:23.920 | And then Biden will not trouble to it. I think we do it because he somebody would I mean, he had he

01:57:29.200 | did something with barstool, right? Jason, do you want to do you want me to do the announcement on

01:57:33.440 | the summit? Oh, please. Okay, so we are confirmed and signed on our venue. And so we are confirmed

01:57:44.960 | for all in summit 2023 in Los Angeles, September 10, through 12. Secure the bag, baby, let's go.

01:57:54.880 | We'll put out the and I think it's going to be really exciting because we'll have an opportunity

01:58:00.240 | to at this point in the year, we have a lot of time to put together a really high quality

01:58:05.760 | agenda for conversations we each want to have with really amazing people. So I'm excited about that

01:58:11.120 | we've kind of started to put together some ideas on what we want to talk about who we want to invite

01:58:15.440 | to have those conversations with us put out some invites. So very good job, by the way,

01:58:18.960 | and you'll be leading your lead. This is your AI summit. So I'm handing everything off to you. I'm

01:58:24.480 | helping with the parties basically, but you're driving. Congratulations. Your team is exceptional.

01:58:28.640 | I just want to let the audience know we're doing we're doing it together. And I'm stepping back

01:58:33.760 | and letting you drive I consider this like you're I care very deeply about content. And I want to,

01:58:38.640 | you know, make sure that an experience. Yeah, and the experience and have a chance to have

01:58:42.000 | the conversations we want to have with the folks we want to talk with. So nothing can be better

01:58:46.160 | than you building on top of the first one. And then we just keep going from there. trim off and

01:58:49.760 | sacks if they want to build on it from there. There'll be three. This is what everybody wants

01:58:53.200 | to know as tickets, there's going to be three ticket tiers, there'll still be a VIP one for

01:58:56.240 | 7500 that gets you into the dinners. Oh, sorry. Yeah, that's that's an important point. The VIP

01:59:00.800 | experience this year, we got some feedback on the last go around that we needed to make sure

01:59:05.040 | there was a degree of differentiation. So the VIP experience will include special VIP dinners,

01:59:10.320 | early access to the theater, gift bags, special sections during the parties. So hopefully it

01:59:16.240 | elevates the experience a bit for folks that are able to pay the higher ticket fee, which actually

01:59:20.720 | helps. No bottle service. I mean, bottle service, if you bring your card, but hopefully as a way to

01:59:26.240 | kind of support the overall program and keep the cost down for everyone else. And then it's a $1500

01:59:29.680 | general admission pass, which includes access to the parties. And then we'll still have the

01:59:34.240 | scholarship. Can I tell you guys a funny story? Yeah. When I joined the ownership group that

01:59:38.960 | bought the Warriors, I heard a rumor, which was that when we were competing, it was us versus

01:59:44.720 | Ellison to buy the Warriors. And Ellison had an idea. I don't know if this is true or not. This

01:59:50.320 | is what I heard that he had a he had an idea for a new stadium. And he's like, he wanted to make it

01:59:55.920 | an ultra VIP stadium. And so there's only 5000 seats. And they were like Singapore Airlines

02:00:02.800 | first class seats. Stadium to watch. But it'd be like everybody would be like up close and you

02:00:09.360 | could touch and outside they also had 1000 guillotines. So you could just Yeah. I mean,

02:00:15.280 | it's hard enough for a family to go see. I don't know if that's true or not. But I thought it was

02:00:18.240 | very funny story. It's crazy expensive. Now. It's like crazy. It's hundreds of dollars for

02:00:22.960 | no split seat for the dictator trim off poly hoppity for David Sachs who set up this episode

02:00:30.160 | and Friedberg the Sultan of science. We hope you enjoy this. It's the first of many to come. We

02:00:36.320 | will still be doing regular dockets. We might have to go to two episodes a week on weeks like this.

02:00:40.320 | Who knows? But give us your feedback. Share the show. And we'll see you all at the all in summit.

02:00:48.320 | Let your winners ride.

02:00:49.440 | Rain Man David Sachs.

02:00:52.320 | And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

02:00:59.440 | Love you. I'm the queen of Kinhwa.

02:01:01.360 | Besties are gone.

02:01:09.360 | I hope that's my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

02:01:15.920 | Oh, my. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're

02:01:21.680 | all just like this like sexual tension that they just need to release.

02:01:25.120 | Oh, you're about to be your feet.

02:01:30.720 | What did you get? Merch.

02:01:33.440 | I'm going all in.

02:01:41.360 | I'm going all in.

02:01:44.560 | Have a great day.

E127: Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in conversation with the Besties

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