Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #388
- It's not our business to
change the Russian government. And anybody who thinks it's a
good idea to do regime change, in Russia, which has more
nuclear weapons than we do, is, I think, irresponsible. And, you know, Vladimir
Putin himself has had, you know, we will not live
in a world without Russia. And it was clear when he said that, that he was talking about himself, and he has his hand on a button
that could bring, you know, Armageddon to the entire planet. So why are we messing with this? It's not our job to change that regime. And, we should be making
friends with the Russians. We shouldn't be treating him as an enemy. Now, we've pushed him
into the camp with China. That's not a good thing for our country. And by the way, you know, what we're doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all. - The following is a conversation
with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Candidate for the President
of the United States, running as a Democrat. Robert is an activist, lawyer and author, who has challenged some of
the world's most powerful corporations seeking to
hold them accountable, for the harm they may cause. I love science and engineering. These two pursuits are, to me, the most beautiful and powerful, in the history of human civilization. Science is our journey, our fight, for uncovering the laws of
nature and leveraging them, to understand the universe and to lessen the amount of suffering in the world. Some of the greatest human
beings I've ever met, including most of my good friends, are scientists and engineers. Again, I love science, but science cannot
flourish without epistemic, humility without debate,
both in the pages of academic journals and in the public square. In good faith, long form conversations. Agree or disagree, I
believe Robert's voice should be part of the debate. To call him a conspiracy theorist, and arrogantly dismiss everything he says, without addressing it,
diminishes the public's trust, in the scientific process. At the same time, dogmatic skepticism of all scientific output
on controversial topics, like the pandemic is equally, if not more, dishonest and destructive. I recommend that people read and listen, to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His arguments and his ideas. But I also recommend, as I
say in this conversation, that people read and listen
to Vincent Racaniello, from "This Week in Virology," Dan Wilson from "Debunk The Funk," and the Twitter and books
of Paul Offit, Eric Topol, and others who are outspoken, in their disagreement with Robert. It is disagreement, not conformity, that bends the long arc of
humanity toward truth and wisdom. In this process of disagreement, everybody has a lesson to teach you, but we must have the humility to hear it, and to learn from it. This is "The Lex Fridman
Podcast," to support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It's the 4th of July Independence Day. So simple question, simple, big question. What do you love about this country, the United States of America? - I would say, well, there's so many things that
I love about the country on, you know, the landscapes and
the waterways and the people, et cetera, but on the kind of a, you know, the higher level, people argue about whether
we're an exemplary nation. And, that term has been given a bad name, particularly by the neocons,
the actions, the neocons, in recent decades who have turned that, that phrase into kind of a justification, for forcing people to adopt
American systems or values, at the barrel of a gun. But my father and uncle used
it in a very different way, and they were very proud of it. I grew up very proud of
this country because, we were the exemplary nation, in the sense that we were an example, of democracy all over the world. When we first launched
our democracy in 1780, we were the only democracy on Earth. And by the Civil War, by 1865,
there were six democracies. Today there's probably
190 and all of them, in one way or another, are modeled, on the American experience. And it's kind of
extraordinary because sort of, our first contact with, our first serious and sustained contact, with the European culture and continent, was in 1608 when John Winthrop came over, with his puritans in the Arbella, and Winthrop gave this
famous speech where he said, "this is a gonna be a city on a hill. This is gonna be an example for, you know, all the other nations in the world." And he warned that his fellow puritans, they were, you know, sitting at the, this great expanse of land. And he said, "we can't be, we can't be seduced, by the lure of real estate, or by the carnal
opportunities of this land. We have to take this
country as a gift from God, and then turn it into an example, for the rest of the world of God's love, of God's will, and wisdom." And 200 years later, 250 years later, a different generation. They're mainly deists. They are people who had a belief in God, but not so much a love, of particularly religious cosmologies. You know, the framers, the Constitution, believe that we were creating something, that would be replicated around the world. And that it was an example. It would, in democracy,
there would be this kind of wisdom from the collective, you know, and the word wisdom means
a knowledge of God's will. And that somehow God would
speak through the collective, in a way that, that he or
she could not speak through, you know, through totalitarian regimes. And, you know, I think
that that's something, that even though Winthrop was
a white man and a Protestant, that every immigrant
group who came after them, kind of adopted that belief. And I know my family when, you know, my family came over, all of
my grandparents came over, in 1848 during the potato famine. And, they saw this country
is unique in history, is something that, you know, that was part of kind of a
broader spiritual mission. And so, I'd say that from
a 30,000 foot level that, I grew up so proud of this
country and believing that it was the greatest country in the
world, and for those reasons. - Well, I immigrated to this country. And one of the things that really embodies America to me is the ideal of freedom. Hunter S. Thompson said, "freedom is something that
dies unless it's used." What does freedom mean to you? - To me, freedom does not
mean, you know, chaos. And it does not mean anarchy. It means that, it has to be accompanied by restraint. If it's going to live up to its promise, in the self-restraint, what it means is the
capacity for human beings, to exercise and to fulfill their, their creative energies unrestrained, as much as possible by government. - So this point that Hunter
S. Thompson has made, it "dies unless it's used." Do you agree with that? - Yeah, I do agree with that. And you know, he was not
unique in saying that, you know, Thomas Jefferson
said that the Tree of Liberty had to be watered with the
blood of each generation. And what he meant by that is that, you can't live off, we can't live off the laurels of the American Revolution. That, you know, we had a group, we had a generation where between 25,000, and 70,000 Americans died. They gave their lives, they
gave their livelihoods, they gave their status,
they gave their property, and they put it all on the line, to give us our bill of rights and that. But those Bill of Rights, the moment that we signed them, there were forces within our society, that began trying to chip away at them. And that, you know, happens
in every generation. And it is the obligation
of every generation, to safeguard and protect those freedoms. - The blood of each generation. You mentioned your interest, your admiration of
Albert Camus of stoicism, perhaps your interest in existentialism. Camus said, I believe,
in "Myth of Sisyphus," "the only way to deal
with an unfree world, is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is
an act of rebellion." What do you think he means by that? - I suppose the way that
Camus viewed the world, and the way that the stoics did, and a lot of the existentialists was, that it was so absurd and that, the problems and the
tasks that were given, just to live a life are so insurmountable, that the only way that we can
kind of get back at the gods for giving us this, you know, this impossible task of living life, was to embrace it and to enjoy it, and to do our best at it. I mean, to me, you know, I read Camus, and particularly in
the "Myth of Sisyphus," kind of as a parable that, and it's the same lesson that I think, he writes about in "The Plague," where we're all given
these insurmountable tasks, in our lives, but that by doing our duty, by being of service to others, we can bring meaning
to a meaningless chaos, and we can bring order to the universe. And, you know, Sisyphus, was kind of the iconic hero of the stoics. And he was a man because he did, because he did something good. He delivered a gift to humanity. He angered the gods,
and they condemned him, to push a rock up the hill every day. And then it would roll down. When he got to the top,
it would roll down, and he'd spend the night
going back down the hill, to collect it and then rolling it back, back up the hill again. And the task was absurd,
it was insurmountable. He could never win. But the last line of that book
is one of the great lines, which is something to the
extent that, you know, "I can picture Sisyphus smiling." Because Camus' belief
was that even though, his task was insurmountable,
that he was a happy man, and he was a happy man because he put his shoulder to the stone. He took his duty, he embraced the task, and the absurdity of life, and he pushed the stone up the hill. And that if we do that, and if, you know, we find ways of being
of service to others, that is, you know, the ultimate,
that's the key to the lock. That's the solution to the puzzle. - Each individual person in
that way can rebel against absurdity by discovering meaning
to this whole messy thing. - And we can bring meaning
not only to our own lives, but we can bring meaning
to the universe as well. We can bring some kind of order to life. And, you know, the embrace of those tasks, and the commitment to service
resonates out from us, to the rest of humanity in some way. - So you mentioned "The Plague," by Camus. There's a lot of different
ways to read that book, but one of them, especially
given how it was written, is that the plague
symbolizes Nazi Germany, and the Hitler regime. What do you learn about human nature, from a figure like Adolf Hitler? That he's able to captivate
the minds of millions, rise to power and take on, pull in the whole world into a global war? - I was born nine years after
the end of World War II, and I grew up in a generation
that was, you know, with my parents who were fixated on that, on what happened. And my father at that time, you know, the resolution in the
minds of most Americans, and I think people around
the world is that there was, there had been something
wrong with the German people, that, you know, the Germans had been particularly susceptible to
this kind of demagoguery, and to following a powerful leader, and just industrializing
cruelty, and murder. And my father always differed with that. My father said, this is
not a German problem. This could happen to all of us, we're all just inches away from barbarity. And the thing that keeps
us safe in this country, are the institutions of our
democracy, our constitution. It's not our nature, you
know, our nature has to, has to be restrained and that
comes through self-restraint. But it also, you know,
the beauty of our country, is that we develop, we
devise these institutions, that are designed to allow us to flourish, but at the same time, not to give us enough freedom to flourish,
but also create enough order, to keep us from collapsing into barbarity. So, you know, one of the
other things that my father talked about from when
I was little, you know, he would ask us this question. If you were the family and
Anne Frank came to your door, and asked you to hide her, would you be one of
the people who hid her? Like, risk your own life, or would you be one of the
people who turned her in? And of course we would all say, well, of course we would hide Anne
Frank and take the risk. But, you know, that's been something, kind of a lesson, a
challenge that has been, that has always been near
the forefront of my mind, that if a totalitarian system ever occurs, in the United States, which my father thought
was quite possible. He was conscious about how
fragile democracy actually is. That would I be one of
the ones who would resist, the totalitarianism or would
I be one of the people, who went along with it? Would I be one of the people
who was at the train station, and, you know, in Kraków or, even Berlin and saw people
being shipped off to camps, and just put my head down
and pretend I didn't see it, because talking about
it would be destructive to my career and maybe my
freedom and even my life. So, you know, that has been
a challenge that my father gave to me and all of
my brothers and sisters. And it's something that
I've never forgotten. - A lot of us would like
to believe we would resist, in that situation, but the
reality is most of us wouldn't. And that's a good thing to think about, that human nature is
such that we're selfish, even when there's an atrocity
going on all around us. - And we also, you know, we have the capacity to deceive ourselves, and all of us tend to
kind of judge ourselves, by our intentions and our actions. - What have you learned about life, from your father, Robert F. Kennedy? - First of all, I'll
say this about my uncle, 'cause you know, I'm
gonna apply that question to my uncle and my father, my uncle was asked when he
first met Jackie Bouvier, who later became Jackie Kennedy. She was a reporter for a
newspaper, and she was doing, she had a kind of column where she'd do, these kind of pithy interviews
with both famous people, and kind of man in the street interviews. And she was interviewing
him and she asked him, she thought what he believed
his best quality was, his strongest virtue. And she thought that he would say courage, because he had been a war hero. He was the only president who, and this when he was senator, by the way, who received the Purple Heart. And you know, he had a
very kind of famous story, of him as a hero in World War II. And then he had come home
and he had written a book, on moral courage among
American politicians, and won the Pulitzer Prize, that book "Profiles and Courage." And which was a series of incidents, where American political
leaders made decisions, to embrace principle,
even though their careers were at stake and in most cases, were destroyed by their choice. She thought he was gonna
say courage, but he didn't. He said curiosity. And I think, you know,
looking back at his life, that the best, that it was true, and that was the quality that allowed him, to put himself in the
shoes of his adversaries. And he always said that if you, if the only way that
we're gonna have peace, is if we're able to put ourselves, in the shoes of our adversaries, understand their behavior
and that context. And that's why he was able
to, you know, during the, he was able to resist the
intelligence apparatus, and the military during the
Bay of Pigs, when they said, you've gotta send in the
Essex, the aircraft carrier. And he said, no, even though
he'd only been in month, two months in office, he was able to stand up to them, because he was able to
put himself in the shoes, of both Castro and
Khrushchev and understand, there's gotta be another solution to this. And then during the Cuban missile crisis, he was able to endure
one, the narrative was, okay, Khrushchev acted in a way, as an aggressor to put
missiles in our hemisphere. How dare he do that? And Jack and my father were able to say, well, wait a minute, he's doing that, because we put missiles
in Turkey and Italy, that were right on, you know, and the Turkish ones, right
on the Russian border. And they then made a
secret deal with Dobrynin, with Ambassador Dobrynin, and, you know, with Khrushchev, to remove
the missiles, in Turkey, if he moved the Jupiter
missiles from Turkey, so long as Khrushchev
removed them, from Cuba, there were 13 men on the end, what they call the End CON Committee, which was the group of
people who were deciding, you know, what the action was, what they were gonna do to
end the Cuban missile crisis. And virtually I, and of those men, 11 of them wanted to invade
and wanted to bomb and invade. And it was Jack, and
then later on, my father, and Bob McNamara, who
were the only people, who were with him. Because he was able to see the world, from Khrushchev's point of view, he believed that there
was another solution. And then he also had the moral courage. So my father, you know, to
get back to your question, famously said that moral courage, is the most important
quality, and it's more rare, than courage on the football field, or courage in battle
than physical courage. It's much more difficult to come by, but it's the most important
quality in a human being. - And you think that kind of empathy, that you referred to, that
requires moral courage. - It certainly requires
moral courage, to act on it, you know, and particularly, any time that a nation is at war, there's kind of a momentum
or an inertia that says, okay, let's not look at this, from the other person's point of view. And that's the time we
really need to do that. - Well, if we can apply
that style of empathy, style of curiosity to the
current war in Ukraine, what is your understanding of why Russia, invaded Ukraine in February, 2022? - Vladimir Putin could have
avoided the war in the Ukraine. His invasion was illegal,
it was unnecessary, and it was brutal. But I think it's important for us, to move beyond these kind
of comic book depictions. Of this insane,
avaricious, Russian leader, who wants to, you know,
restore the Soviet Empire. And that, that's why, and
who made a unprovoked, unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine. He was provoked and we were provoking him, and we were provoking him, since 1997. And it's not just me
that's saying that, I mean, before Russia, before Putin never came in, we were provoking Russia, Russians, in this way unnecessarily. And to go back that time in 1992, when the Russians moved out of, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, the Russians moved out of East Germany, and they did that, which was
a huge concession to them. They had 400,000 troops in
East Germany at that time, and they were facing NATO troops, on the other side of the wall. So Gorbachev made this huge concession, where he said to George Bush, "I'm gonna move all of our troops out, and you can then reunify
Germany under NATO," which was a hostile army to the Soviet. It was created to, you know, with hostile intent
toward the Soviet Union. And he said, "you can take
Germany, but I want your promise that you will not move NATO, to the east." And James Baker, who was
his secretary of State, famously said, "I will not move NATO. We will not move NATO
one inch to the East." So then five years later in
1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was kind of the father of the neocons, who was a Democrat at that time, served in the Carter administration. He said, he published
a paper, a blueprint, for moving NATO right up
to the Russian border, a thousand miles to the East, and taking over 14 nations. And at that time, George Kennon, who was the kind of the
deity of American diplomats, he was probably, arguably
the most important diplomat in American history. He was the architect of the containment policy during World War II. And he said, "this is
insane and it's unnecessary. And if you do this, it's
gonna provoke the Soviet, I mean, the Russians
to a violent response. And we should be making
friends with the Russians. They lost the Cold War. We should be treating 'em
the way that we treated our adversaries after World War II, like with a Marshall Plan to
try to help them incorporate, into Europe and to be part
of the brotherhood of, you know, of man and of western nations. We shouldn't continue to be
treating him as an enemy, and particularly surrounding
them at their borders." William Perry, who was then, the Secretary of defense
under Bill Clinton, threatened to resign. He was so upset by this plan
to move NATO to the east. And William Burns, who was
then the US Ambassador, of the Soviet Union, who
is now at this moment, the head of the CIA, said
at the time, the same thing. "If you do this, it is going to provoke the Russians toward a military response." And we moved it, we
moved all around Russia, we moved to 14 nations a
thousand miles to the East, and we put Asia's missile
systems in two nations, in Romania and Poland,
so we did what, you know, what the Russians had done to
us in 1962 that had provoked, would've provoked an invasion of Cuba. We put those missile systems back there, and then we'd walk away,
unilaterally walk away, from the two nuclear missile treaties, the intermediate nuclear missile treaties, that we had with this Soviet, with Russia. And, neither of us would put on those missile systems on the borders. We walk away from that and we
put Asia's missile systems, which are nuclear capable. They can carry the tomahawk missiles, which have nuclear warheads. So the last country that they
didn't take was the Ukraine. And the Russians said, and
in fact Bill Perry said this, or William Burns said, it is now the head of the CIA. It is a red line, if we go, if we bring NATO into Ukraine, that is a red line for the Russians. They cannot live with it,
they cannot live with it. Russia has been invaded three
times through the Ukraine. The last time it was invaded, we killed, or the Germans killed one
out of every seven Russians. They destroyed, my uncle
described what happened to Russia, in his famous American
university speech, in 1963, 60 years ago this month, or last month, 60 years ago, in June, June 10th, 1963. He told, that speech was
telling American people, put yourself in the shoes of the Russians. We need to do that if we're gonna, if we're gonna make peace. And he said, "all of us
have been taught, you know, that we won the war, but
we didn't win the war. The Russians, if anybody
won the war against Hitler, it was the Russians, their
country was destroyed. All of their cities." And he said, "imagine if all of the cities
from the east coast of Chicago were reduced to rubble and
all of the fields, burned, all of the forests, burned. That's what happened to
Russia, that's what they gave. So that we could get rid of Adolf Hitler." And he had them put
themselves in their position. And you know, today, there's
none of that happening. We have refused repeatedly,
to talk to the Russians. We've broken up, there's two treaties, the Minsk agreements, which the Russians were willing to sign, and
they said, "we will stay out." The Russians didn't want the Ukraine. They showed that, when the Donbas, when they voted 90 to 10
to leave and go to Russia, Putin said, "no, we want
Ukraine to stay intact, but we want you to sign a Minsk accords," to, you know, the Russians
were very worried, because of the US involvement in the coup, in Ukraine in 2014. And then the oppression, you know, and the killing of 14,000 ethnic Russians. And Russia hasn't had, the same way, that if Mexico, with
Asia's missile systems, from China or Russia on our border, and then killed 14,000 expats American, we would go in there. Oh, he does have a national security interest in the Ukraine. He has an interest in protecting the Russian speaking
people of the Ukraine, the ethnic Russians. And the Minsk accords did that. It left Ukraine as part of Russia. It left them as a semi-autonomous region, that could continued to
use their own language, which is essentially banned by the coup, by the government we put in, in 2014. And, we wouldn't, we
sabotaged that agreement. And, we now know in April of 2022, Zelensky and Putin had
inked a deal already, to another peace agreement. And that the United
States and Boris Johnson, the neocons in the White
House and Boris Johnson, over to the Ukraine to
sabotage that agreement. So what do I think? I think this is a proxy war. I think this is a, you know, this is a war that the neocons
in the White House wanted. They've said for two decades
they wanted this war, and that they wanted to
use Ukraine as a pawn, in a proxy war between
United States and Russia, the same as we used Afghanistan. And in fact, they say
it, this is the model, let's use the Afghanistan model, that was said again and again, and to get the Russians to
overextend their troops, and then fight them using
local fighters and US weapons. And when President Biden was asked, "why are we in the Ukraine?" He was honest, he says,
"to depose Vladimir Putin, regime change for Vladimir Putin." And when his defense
secretary Lloyd Austin, in April, 2022 was asked,
you know, "why are we there?" He said, "to degrade the Russians capacity to fight anywhere, to
exhaust the Russian army, and degrade its capacity to
fight elsewhere in the world." That's not a humanitarian mission. That's not what we were told. We were told this was
an unprovoked invasion, and that we're there to
bring a humanitarian relief to the Ukrainians, but
that is the opposite. That is a war of attrition
that is designed to chew up, to turn this little nation
into an abattoir of death, for the flower of Ukrainian youth, in order to advance a
geopolitical ambition, of certain people within the White House. And I, you know, I think that's wrong. We should be talking to the
Russians the way that, you know, Nixon talked to Brezhnev, the way that Bush talked to Gorbachev, the way that my uncle
talked to Khrushchev. We need to be talked with the Russians, we should, and negotiating. And we need to be looking about, how do we end this and
preserve peace in Europe. - Would you as president sit down, and have a conversation
with Vladimir Putin, and Vladimir Zelensky separately, and together, to negotiate peace? - Absolutely, absolutely. - What about Vladimir Putin? He's been in power since 2000. So as the old adage goes, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts, absolutely." Do you think he has been corrupted, by being in power for so long? If you think of the man,
if you look at his mind. - Listen, I don't know exactly. I can't say because I just, I don't know enough about
him or about, you know, the evidence that I've seen
is that he is homicidal, he kills his enemies, or poisons them. And you know, the reaction
I've seen to that, to those accusations from him
have not been to deny that. But to kind of laugh it off, I think he's a dangerous man. And that of course, you know, there's probably corruption in his regime. But having said that, it's not our business, to
change the Russian government. And anybody who thinks it's a good idea, to do regime change in Russia, which has more nuclear weapons than we do, is, I think, irresponsible. And you know, Vladimir Putin
himself has said, you know, "we will not live in a
world without Russia." And it was clear when he said that, that he was talking about himself, and he has his hand on a
button that could bring, you know, Armageddon to the entire planet. So why are we messing with this? It's not our job to change that regime. And, we should be making
friends with the Russians. We shouldn't be treating him as an enemy. Now we've pushed him
into the camp with China. That's not a good thing for our country. And by the way, you know,
what we're doing now, does not appear to be
weakening Putin at all. Putin now, you know, if
you believe the polls, that are coming out of Russia,
they show him, you know, the most recent polls
that I've seen show him, with an 89% popularity
that people in Russia, support the war in Ukraine and that, and they support him as an individual. So, and I understand there's
problems with polling, you know, you don't know what to believe, but the polls consistently show that. And, you know, it's
not America's business, to be the policeman of the world, and to be changing regimes
in the world, that's illegal. We shouldn't be breaking
international laws. You know, we should actually be looking for ways to improve
relationships with Russia. Not to, you know, not to destroy Russia, not to destroy and not to
choose its leadership for them. That's up to the Russian people, not us. - So step one is to
sit down and empathize, with the leaders of both
nations to understand their history, their
concerns, their hopes. Just to open the door for conversation, so they're not backed into the corner. - Yeah, and I think the US can
play a really important role, and a US president can play
a really important role, by reassuring the Russians, that we're not gonna consider
them an enemy anymore, that we wanna be friends. And it doesn't mean that you
have to let down your guard, completely, the way that you do it, which was the way
President Kennedy did it, is you do it one step at a time. You take baby steps, we
do a unilateral move, reduce our, you know, our
hostility and aggression, and see if the Russians reciprocate. And, that's the way that
we should be doing it. And you know, we should be easing our way, into a positive relationship with Russia. We have a lot in common with Russia, and we should be friends with Russia, and with the Russian people. And you know, apparently
there's been 350,000 Ukrainians, who have died, at least in this war. And there's probably been
60 or 80,000 Russians. And that should not give us any joy. It should not give us any, you know, I saw Lindsey Graham
on TV saying, you know, something to the extent that,
"anything we can do to kill Russians is a good use of our money." It is not, you know, those
are somebody's children. They're, you know, we should
have compassion for them. This war is an unnecessary war. We should settle it through
negotiation, through diplomacy, through state graft,
and not through weapons. - Do you think this
war can come to an end, purely through military operations? - No, I mean, no, I don't think
there's any way in the world that the Ukrainians can beat the Russians. I don't think there's
any appetite in Europe. I think Europe is now, you know, in having severe problems
in Germany, Italy, France, you're seeing these riots, there's internal problems
in those countries. There is no appetite in Europe, for sending men to die in Ukraine. And the Ukrainians do
not have anybody left. The Ukrainians are using
press gangs, you know, to fill the ranks, their armies, men, military aged men are
trying as hard as they can, to get outta the Ukraine right now, to avoid going to the front, the Russians apparently have
been killing Ukrainians, at a seven to one ratio. My son fought over there
and he told me it's, he had firefights with the
Russians, mainly at night. But he said most of the battles, were artillery wars during the day. And the Russians now
outgun the NATO forces, 10 to one in artillery. Oh, they're killing at a horrendous rate. Now, you know, my interpretation
of what's happened so far, is that, Putin actually went in early on, with a small force because he expected to meet somebody on the other end of a negotiating table
that once he went in, and when that didn't happen, they did not have a large enough force, to be able to mount an offensive. And so they've been building
up that force up till now, and they now have that force. And even against this
small original force, the Ukrainians have been helpless. All of their offenses have died. They've now killed, you know, the head of the Ukrainian special forces, which was the, probably,
arguably, by many accounts, the best elite military
unit in all of Europe, the commander of that
Special Forces group, had gave a speech about four months ago, saying that 86% of his
men are dead or wounded, and cannot return to the front. He cannot rebuild that force. And the troops that are now headed, that are now filling the gaps
of all those 350,000 men, who have been lost are scantily trained, and they're arriving green at the front. Many of them do not wanna be there. Many of them are giving up and
going over the Russian side. We've seen this again and again and again, including platoon size groups, that are defecting to the Russians. And I don't think it's possible to win. And anybody, (laughs) you know, I saw, of course I've studied World
War II history exhaustively, but I saw a, there's a new, I
think it's a Netflix series, of documentaries that I highly
recommend to people there. They're colorized versions
of the black and white, films from the battles of World War II but it's all the battles of World War II. So I watched all of that the
other night, and you know, the willingness of the
Russians to fight on, against any kind of, and
to make huge sacrifices, of Russians, the Russians themselves, who were making the
sacrifice with their lives, the willingness of them to do that, for their motherland is
almost inexhaustible. It is incomprehensible
to think that Ukraine, can beat Russia in a war. It would be like Mexico
beating the United States. It's just impossible to
think that it can happen. And, you know, Russia has deployed a tiny, tiny fraction of its military so far. And you know, now it has China, with its mass production capacity, supporting its war effort. It's a hopeless situation,
and we've been lied to, you know, the press in our
country and our government, are just, you know, promoting this lie, that the Ukrainians are about to win, and that everything's going great. And that Putin's on the
run, and there's all this wishful thinking because of
the Wagner Group, you know- - [Lex] Prigozhin.
- Prigozhin, and the Wagner Group, that
this was an internal coup, and it showed dissent
and weakness of Putin. And none of that is true. That insurgency, which
wasn't even an insurgency. He only got 4,000 of his men
to follow him out of 20,000. And they were quickly stopped. And nobody in the Russian
military, the oligarchy, the political system, nobody
supported it, you know, and but we're being told, "oh yeah, it's the beginning at the end for Putin. He's weakened, he's wounded,
he's on his way out," and all of these things are
just lies that we are being fed. - So to pushback on a
small aspect of this, that you kind of implied. So I've traveled to Ukraine and
one thing that I should say, similar to the Battle of
Stalingrad, it is just not, it is not only the Russians
that fight to the end. I think Ukrainian is a very,
like to fight to the end. And the morale there is quite high. I've talked to nobody,
this was a year ago, in August, in Kherson,
everybody was proud, to fight and die for their country. And there's some aspect where this war unified the people, gave them a reason, and an understanding that
this is what it means, to be Ukrainian and I
will fight to the death, to defend this land. - Yeah, you know, I would agree with that, and I should have said that
myself at the beginning, that's one of the reasons
my son went over there, to fight because, you know,
he was inspired by the valor, of the Ukrainian people and, you know, this extraordinary willingness of them. And I think Putin thought
it would be much easier, to sweep into Ukraine,
and he found, you know, a stone wall of Ukrainians, ready to put their lives and their bodies on the line. But that to me makes the whole
episode even more tragic, is that, you know, I don't believe, I think that the US role in this has been, you know, that there
were many opportunities, to settle this war. And the Ukrainians wanted to settle it. Vladimir Zelensky when he ran in 2019. Here's a guy who's a
comedian, he's an actor. He had no political experience, and yet he won this election
with 70% of the vote, why? He won on a peace platform, and he won promising to
sign the Minsk accords. And yet something happened
when he got in there, that made him suddenly
pivot, and, you know, I think it's a good guess what happened. I think he was, you know,
he came under threat, by ultra nationalists within
his own administration, and the insistence of neocons
like Victoria Newland, in the White House, that, you know, we don't want peace with
Putin, we want a war. - Do you worry about nuclear war? - [Robert] Yeah, I worry about it. - [Lex] It seems like a
silly question, but it's not, it's a serious question. - Well, the reason it's not, you know, the reason it's not, is because people seem to be in this kind of dream state about
that it'll never happen. And yet, you know, it can happen very easily and
it can happen at any time. And, you know, if we push
the Russians too far, you know, I don't doubt that Putin, if he felt like his regime was in, or his nation was in danger, that the United States was
gonna be able to place, you know, a Quisling on, you know, into the Kremlin that
he would use nuclear, you know, torpedoes. And these strategic
weapons that they have. And that could be it, once you do that, nobody controls the trajectory. By the way, you know, I
have very strong memories, of the Cuban Missile
Crisis and those 13 days, when we came closer to
nuclear war, you know, and particularly I think it
was when the U2 got shot down, over Cuba, you know, and
nobody in this country, there's a lot of people in
Washington DC who at that point, thought that they very
may well may wake up dead, that the world may end at night. 30 million Americans killed
130 million Russians. This is what our military brass wanted. They saw a war with Russia. Nuclear exchange with Russia
is not only inevitable, but also desirable because
they wanted to do it now, while we still had a superiority. - Can you actually go
through the feelings, you've had about the Cuban Missile Crisis? Like what are your memories of it? What are some interesting kind of- - Well, you know, in the middle, I was going to school in Washington, DC, to sit, to our Lady of Victory, which is in Washington DC. So we were, I lived in
Virginia across Potomac, and we would cross the
bridge every day into DC, and during the crisis, US
Marshals came to my house, to take us, I think around day eight. My father was spending the
night at the White House. He wasn't coming home, he was staying with the EXCOM
committee and sleeping there. And they were up, you
know, 24 hours a day. They were debating and
trying to figure out, what was happening. But we had US marshals come
to our house to take us down. They were gonna take us down
to White Sulfur Springs, in Southern Virginia, in
the Blue Ridge Mountains, where there was an underground city, essentially a bunker that was like a city. And apparently it had McDonald's in it, and a lot of other, you know, it was a full city for the US
government and their families. US Marshals came to our
house to take us down there. And I was very excited about doing that. And this was at a time, you know, when we were doing the drills, we were doing the duck and
cover drills once a week, at our school where they would tell you, when the alarms go off, then you put your head onto the table, you take, remove the
sharps from your desk, put them inside your desk, you put your head onto
the table and you wait. And the initial blast,
will take the windows, out of the school and
then we all stand up, and file in an orderly
fashion into the basement, where we're gonna be for the next six or eight months or whatever. But in the basement where, you know, we went occasionally in those corridors. were lined with freeze
dried food canisters up to, from floor to ceiling,
so people were, you know, we were all preparing for this. And it was, you know, Bob McNamara, who was a friend of mine
and you know, was my father, one of my father's close
friends as Secretary of Defense. He later called it mass psychosis. And my father deeply
regretted participating in the bomb shelter
program because he said, "it was part of a
psychological psyop trick, to teach Americans, that nuclear war was acceptable,
that it was survivable." And my father, anyway, when
the marshals came to our house, take me and my brother Joe away, and we were the ones who
were home at that time, my father called and he
talked to us on the phone, and he said, "I don't
want you going down there, because if you disappear from school, people are gonna panic. And I need you to be a good
soldier and go to school." And he said something to
me during that period, which was that, "if a nuclear were happen, it would be better to be among the dead, than the living," which
I did not believe, okay. I mean, I had already prepared myself, for the dystopian future. And I knew I could, I spent
every day in the woods. I knew that I could survive
by catching crawfish, and, you know, cooking mud puppies, and do whatever I had to do. But I felt like, okay,
I could handle this. And I really wanted to see this set up, down in, you know, this underground city. But anyway, that was, you
know, part of it for me. My father was away, and you
know, the last days of it, my father got this idea, because Khrushchev had sent two letters. He sent one letter that was conciliatory, and then he sent a letter
that after his joint chiefs, and the war mongers around him, saw that letter and
they disapproved of it. They sent another letter that
was extremely belligerent. And my father had the
idea, let's just pretend, we didn't get the second letter
and reply to the first one. And then he went down
to Dobrynin and who was, he met Dobrynin in the Justice Department, and Dobrynin was the Soviet ambassador. And they, you know, they
proposed this settlement, which was a secret settlement. Eric Khrushchev would withdraw
the missiles from Cuba. Khrushchev had put the missiles in Cuba, 'cause we had put missiles,
you know, nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy. And my uncle's secret deal was that if he, if Khrushchev removed
the missiles from Cuba, within six months, he would get rid of the
Jupiter missiles in Turkey. But if Khrushchev told anybody
about the deal, it was off. So, if news got out about
that secret deal, it was off, that was the actual deal and
Khrushchev complied with it, and then my uncle complied with it. - How much of that part of human history, turned on the decisions of one person? - I think that's one of the, you know, 'cause that of course is the
perennial question, right? Is history kind of, an automatic pilot and,
you know, human decisions, the decisions of leaders
really only have, you know, a marginal or incremental bearing, on what is gonna happen, anyway. But I think that is, and historians argue
about that all the time. I think that that is
a really good example, of a place in human history that, literally the world could have ended, if we had a different
leader in the White House. And the reason for that is
that there were, as I recall, 64 gun emplacements, you
know, missile emplacements. Each one of those missile
emplacements had a crew, of about a hundred men
and they were Soviets. So they were, we didn't know whether, we had a couple of questions
that my uncle asked, Alan, or asked the CIA. And he asked, Dulles was already gone. But he asked the CIA and he
asked his military brass, 'cause they all wanted to go
in, everybody wanted to go in. And my uncle said, my uncle
asked to see the aerial photos. And he examined those personally, and that's why it's
important to have a leader, in the White House who can push
back on their bureaucracies. And then he asked them, you know, "who's manning those missile sites? And are they Russians? And if they're Russians and we bomb them, isn't it gonna force Khrushchev
to then go into Berlin?" And that would be the
beginning of a cascade effect, that would, you know, highly likely, to have a nuclear confrontation. And the military brass said to my uncle, "oh, we don't think he'll
have the guts to do that." So he was, my uncle was like, "that's what you're betting on?" And you know, they all
wanted him to go in, they wanted him to bomb the
sites and then invade Cuba. And he said, "if we bomb those sites, we're gonna be killing
Russians and it's gonna force, it's gonna provoke Russia
into some response. And the obvious response is
for them to go into Berlin." Oh, but the thing that
we didn't know then, that we didn't find out
until, I think, you know, it was like a 30 year anniversary, of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Havana. And what we learned then was that, from the Russians, who came to that event, it was like a symposium where everybody on both sides talked about it. And we learned a lot of stuff that never, nobody knew before. One of the insane things,
the most insane thing, that we learned was that
the weapons were already, the nuclear warheads
were already in place. They were ready to fire. And that the authorization to fire, was made, was delegated, to
each of the gun crew commanders. So there were 60 people who
had all had authorization, to fire if they felt
themselves under attack. So you have to believe, that at least one of
them, would've launched, and that would've been
the beginning of the end. And, you know, if anybody had launched, you know, we knew what would happen. My uncle knew what would happen, 'cause he asked again and
again, "what's gonna happen?" And they said, "30 million
Americans will be killed, but we will kill 130 million
Russians, so we will win." And that was a victory for them. And my uncle said later said, he told Arthur Schlesinger
and Kenny O'Donnell, he said, those guys, he called 'em the salad brass, the guys with all of this
stuff on their chest. And he said, "those guys, they don't care, 'cause they
know that if it happens, that they're gonna be in
the charge of everything, they're the ones who are gonna be running the world after that." So for them, you know, it
was, there was an incentive, to kill 130 million Russians,
and 30 million Americans. But my uncle, he had this correspondence, with the Khrushchev. They were secretly
corresponding with each other. And that is what saved the world, is that they had, that both
of them had been men of war. You know, Eisenhower famously said, "it will not be a man of war. It will not be a soldier,
who starts World War III," 'cause a guy who's actually
seen it, knows how bad it is. And my uncle, you know, had been in the heat of the South Pacific, his boat would've been cut
into by a Japanese destroyer. Many of three of his
crewmen have been killed. One of 'em badly burned. He pulled that guy with
a lanyard in his teeth, six miles to an island in
the middle of the night. And then they hid out there for 10 days. You know, and he came back, like I said, he was the only president
of the United States, that earned in the Purple Heart. Meanwhile, Khrushchev
had been at Stalingrad, which was the worst place to
be on the planet, you know, probably in the 20th century,
other than, you know, in Auschwitz or one of the death camps. It was, you know, it
was the most ferocious, horrific war with people starving people, committed cannibalism,
you know, eating the dogs, the cats, eating their shoe leather, or easing to death by
the thousands, et cetera. Khrushchev did not want, the
last thing he wanted was a war. And the last thing my
uncle wanted was war. But the CIA did not know
anything about Khrushchev. And the reason for that, is there was a mole at Langley, so that every time the CIA
got a spy in the Kremlin, he would immediately be killed. So they had no eyes in the Kremlin. You know, there were literally hundreds, of Russians spies who had, who had defected the United
States and were in the Kremlin, who were killed during that period. They had no idea anything
about Khrushchev, about how he saw the world. And they saw the Kremlin
itself as a monolith. You know, that this kind of, you know, the same way that we look at Putin today, they have this ambition of world conquest, and it's driving them, and there's nothing else they think about. They're absolutely single-minded about it. But actually there was a big
division between Khrushchev, and his joint chiefs and
his intelligence apparatus. And they both at one point discovered, they were both in the same situation. They were surrounded by
spies and military personnel, who were intent on going to war. And they were the two guys resisting it. So when my uncle had
this idea of, you know, being the peace president
from the beginning, he told Ben Bradley, one
of his best friends who, you know, was the publisher
of the Washington Post, the editor-in-chief at that time. He said, Ben Bradley asked him, "what do you want on your gravestone?" And my uncle said, "he kept the peace." He said, "the principle
job of the president of the United States is to keep
the country out of war." And, so when he first became president, he actually agreed to
meet Khrushchev in Geneva, to do his summit, and by the way, Eisenhower wanted to do the same thing. Eisenhower wanted peace, and he was gonna meet in Vienna. But that peace summit was blown up. He was gonna try to do, you know, he was gonna try to end the Cold War. Eisenhower was in the last
year of his, in May of 1968. But that was torpedoed by
the CIA, during the U2 crash. You know, they sent a U2
over the Soviet Union. It got shot down, and then they told, and then Alan Dulles, told Eisenhower, to deny that we had a program. They didn't know that the Russians had captured Gary Francis Powers. And that blew up the peace talks, between Eisenhower and Khrushchev. And so, you know, there
was a lot of tension. My uncle wanted to break that tension. He agreed to meet, with
Khrushchev in Vienna, early on in his term. He went over there and
Khrushchev snubbed him. Khrushchev lectured him, imperiously, about the terror of American imperialism, and rebuffed any, you know, they did agree not to go into Laos. They made an agreement that
kept the United States, kept my uncle from sending troops to Laos, but it had been a disaster, Vienna. So then we had a spy that
used to come to our house, all the time, a guy
called Georgi Bolshakov, and he was this Russian spy. My parents had met at the embassy. They had gone to a party or a reception, at the Russian Embassy. And he had approached them, and they knew he was GRU agent and KGB. He was both, oh, he used
to come to our house. They really liked him,
he was very attractive. He was always laughing and joking. He would do rope climbing
contests with my father. He would do pushup
contests with my father. He could do the Russian
dancing, the Cossacks dancing. And he would do that for
us and teach us that. And we knew he was a spy too. And this was at the time of, you know, the James Bond films
were first coming out. So it was really exciting for us, to have a actual Russian spy in our house. (Lex laughs) The State Department was horrified by it. - [Lex] Yeah. - But anyway, when
Khrushchev, after Vienna, and after, you know, the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev had second thoughts
and he sent this long letter, to my uncle, and he
didn't wanna go through his state department or his embassy. He wanted to Enron them, and
he was friends with Bolshakov, so he gave Georgi the letter,
and Georgi brought it, and handed it to Pierre Salinger, folded in the New York Times. And he gave it to my uncle. And it was this beautiful
letter, which he said, you know, my uncle had talked to
him about the children, who were played, you know, how we played, 29 grandchildren, who were playing in his yard. And he's saying, "what is our moral basis, for making a decision that
could kill these children? So they'll never write a poem, they'll never participate in election, they'll never run for office. How can we morally make a decision, that is going to eliminate
life for these beautiful kids?" And he had said that to Khrushchev. And Khrushchev wrote
them this letter back, saying that he was now
sitting at this dacha, on the Black Sea. And that he was thinking about, what my Uncle Jack had
said to him at Vienna. And he regretted very
deeply, not having taken the olive leaf that Jack
had all offered him. And then he said, you
know, "it occurs to me now, that we're all on an ark, and that there is not another one. And that the entire fate of the planet, and all of it's creatures
and all of the children, are dependent on the decisions we make. And you and I have a moral obligation, to go forward with each other as friends." And immediately after
that, this was, you know, he sent that right after
the Berlin crisis in 1962, General Curtis LeMay tried to, had tried to provoke a war, with an incident at Checkpoint Charlie, which was the May, the entrance. The entrance exit, through
the Berlin Wall, in Berlin. And the Russian tanks
had come to the wall, the US tanks had come to the
wall, and there was a standoff. And my uncle, had sent
a message to Khrushchev, and through Dobrynin saying,
"my back is at the wall. I cannot, I have no place
to back, please back off. And then we will back off." And Khrushchev took his word,
backed his tanks off first, and then my uncle ordered LeMay to back. He had, LeMay had mounted bulldozer plows, on the front of the tanks to
plow down the Berlin wall. And the Russians had come. So it was just, you know, it was his generals
trying to provoke a war. But they started talking
to each other then. And then after he wrote that letter, they agreed that they
would install a hotline, so they could talk to each other, and they wouldn't have to
go through intermediaries. And so at Jack's house on the Cape, there was a red phone that
we knew if we picked it up, Khrushchev would answer. And there was another
one in the White House. - [Lex] Yeah. - But they knew it was
important to talk to each other, you know, and you just wish, that we had that kind of leadership today, that can I, you know, that
just understands our job. Look, I know you know
a lot about AI, right? And you know, how dangerous
it is potentially, to humanity and what opportunities, it also, you know, offers. But it could kill us all. I mean, Elon said, "first
is gonna steal our job, then it's gonna kill us, right?" - [Lex] Yeah. - And it's probably not hyperbole. It actually, you know, if it follows the laws of biological evolution, which are just the laws of mathematics, that's probably a good endpoint for it. You know, a potential endpoint. So it's gonna happen,
but we need to make sure it's regulated and it's
regulated properly, for safety in every country. And, that includes Russia
and China and Iran. Right now, we should be putting
all the weapons of war aside and sitting down with
those guys and saying, "how are we doing? How are we gonna do this?" There's much more important things to do. This stuff is gonna kill us, if we don't figure out how to regulate it. And leadership needs to
look down the road at what, what is the real risk here? And the real risk is
that, you know, AI will, enslave us for one thing, you know, and then destroy us and
do all this other stuff. And how about biological weapons? We're now all working on
these biological weapons, and we're doing biological
weapons from Ebola, you know, dengue fever and, you know, all of these other bad things. And we're making ethnic bio weapons, bio weapons that can only kill Russians, bio weapons that the Chinese
are making that, you know, can kill people who
don't have Chinese genes. So all of this is now within
reach, we're actively doing it, and we need to stop it. And we can easily, a
biological weapons treaty, is the easiest thing in the world to do. We can verify it, we can enforce it, and everybody wants to agree to it. Only insane people do not wanna, wanna continue this kind of research. There's no reason to do it. So there are these existential
threats to all of humanity, now out there, like AI and
political, biological weapons. We need to star stop fighting each other, start competing on economic game fields, playing fields, instead of
military playing fields, which will be good for all of humanity. And that we need to sit
down with each other, and negotiate reasonable
treaties on how we regulate AI, and biological weapons. And nobody's talking about this, in this political race right now. Nobody's talking about it in a government. They get fixated on these
little wars, you know, and these comic book
depictions of good versus evil, you know, and we all go, you know, hoorah, and go off to and give them
the weapons and enrich, you know, the military and Joshua complex, but we're on the road to
perdition if we don't end this. - And some of this requires
to have this kind of, phone that connects Khrushchev
and John F. Kennedy, that cuts through all the bureaucracy. - [Robert] Yeah. - To have this communication, between heads of state
and in the case of AI, perhaps heads of tech companies, where you can just pick up the phone, and have a conversation.
- [Robert] Yes. - Because a lot of it, a lot of the existential threats
of artificial intelligence, perhaps even bio weapons,
is unintentional. It's not even strategic
intentional effects. So you have to be
transparent and honest about, especially with AI, that
people might not know, what's the worst that's going to happen, once you release it out into the wild. And you have to have an
honest communication, about how to do it so that
companies are not terrified of regulation, overreach of regulation. And then government is not
terrified of tech companies, of manipulating them in some
direct or indirect ways. So like, there's a trust that
builds, versus a distrust. That seems to, so
basically, that old phone, where Khrushchev can call
John F. Kennedy is needed. - Yeah, and you know,
I don't think there's, listen, I don't understand AI, okay. I do know, I can see
from all this technology, how it's this kind of key totalitarianism, that once you put these
systems in place, you know, they can be misused to enslave people, and they can be misused in wars and, to subjugate, to kill, to
do all of these bad things. And I don't think there's anybody, on Capitol Hill who understands this. You know, we need to bring in
the tech community and say, "tell us what these
regulations need to look like," you know, so that there
can be freedom to innovate, so that we can milk AI for
all of the good things, but not, you know, fall into
these traps that are gonna, you know, that are these
existential threats, that pose existential threats to humanity. - It seems like John F.
Kennedy is a singular figure, in that he was able to have
the humility to reach out to Khrushchev and also the strength, and integrity to resist
the, what did you call 'em? The salad brass and
institutions like the CIA. So that makes it particularly
tragic that he was killed. To what degree was CIA involved, or the various bureaucracy,
involved in his death? - The evidence that the CIA was involved in my uncle's murder, and that they were subsequently
involved in the coverup, and continue to be involved
in the coverup, I mean, there's still 5,000 documents
that they won't release, you know, 60 years later is, I think, so insurmountable. And so, you know, mountainous
and overwhelming that I, it's beyond any reasonable
doubt, including, you know, dozens of confessions of
people who were involved, in the assassination. But, you know, every kind of document, it came as a surprise
recently, to most Americans. I think the release of
these documents in which, the press, the American media, finally acknowledged that, yeah, Lee Harvey Oswald was the CIA asset, that he was recruited, you know, in 1957, he was Marine working at
the Tsui Air Force base, which was the CIA Air
Force base in, you know, with the U2 flights,
which was a CIA program. And that he was recruited
by James Jesus Angleton, who was the director
of counterintelligence, and then sent on a fake
defection to Russia, and then brought back,
you know, to Dallas. And people didn't know that even though, it's been known for decades. It never percolated into
the mainstream media, because they have such a, they have such an allergy to anything, that challenges the Warren Report. You know, when Congress
investigated my uncle's murder, in the 1970s, the church committee did, and they did, you know, two
and a half year investigation, and they had many, many more documents, and much more testimony available, to them than the Warren Commission had. And this was a decade after
the Warren Commission. They came to the conclusion, that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy. And there was a division
where, essentially, one guy on that committee believed, it was primarily the mafia. But Richard Schweitzer, who was the senator head
of the committee, said, straight out, "the CIA
was involved in the murder of the President of the United States." So, and I've talked to most of
the staff on that committee, and they said, "yeah, and the CIA was stonewalling us
the whole way through." And the actual people
that the CIA appointed, George Johan, who the CIA
appointed as a liaison, to the committee, they
brought him out of retirement. He had been one of the
masterminds of the assassination. Oh, there's no, I mean, it's
impossible to even talk about, a tiny, the fraction of the evidence here. What I suggest to people, there are hundreds of
books written about this, that, you know, assemble this evidence, and mobilize the evidence. The best book to me for people to read, is James Douglass's book, which
is called "The Unspeakable." And he, Douglass does this extraordinary, he is an extraordinary scholar, and he does this just an
amazing job of digesting, and summarizing and
mobilizing all of them. You know, the probably a
million documents and you know, the evidence from all these
confessions that have come out, into a coherent story,
and it's riveting to read. And, you know, I recommend
people who do not take my word for it, you know, and don't
take anybody else's word, go ahead and do the research yourself. And one way to do that is, is probably the most efficient way, is to read Douglass's book. Because he has all the references there. - So if it's true that CIA had
a hand in this assassination, how is it possible for them
to amass so much power? How is it possible for
them to become corrupt? And is it individuals or is
it the entire institution? - No, it's not the entire institution. My daughter-in-law who's
helping to run my campaign, was a CIA, you know, in
the Clandestine services, for all her career. She was at Spy and Weapons
of Mass Destruction program, in the Mid East and in China. And there's 22,000 people
who worked for the CIA. Probably 20,000 of those are, you know, are patriotic Americans and
really good public servants, and they're doing important
work for our country. But the institution is corrupt, and because the higher ranks
the institution, and in fact, Mike Pompeo said something
like this to me the other day, who was the director of the CIA. He said, "when I was there, I did not do a good job of
cleaning up that agency." And he said, "the entire
upper bureaucracy, of that agency are
people who do not believe in the institutions of democracy." This is what he said to me. So I don't know if that's
true, but I know that, you know, that's significant. He's a smart person and he ran the agency, and he was the Secretary of State. But it's no mystery how that happened. We know the history. The CIA was originally, first of all, there was great reluctance
in 1947 that we had, for the first time we
had a secret spy agency, in this country during
World War II called the OSS. That was disbanded after the
war because Congress said, "having a secret spy agency, is incompatible with a democracy." Secret spy agencies are
things that like the KGB the Stasi, East Germany,
Slovakia and Iran, and Peep and Chile and whatever, you know, all over the world, they're all have to do with
totalitarian governments. They're not something
that you can have that, it's antithetical to
democracy to have that. But... In 1947, we created, Truman signed it in, but it was initially, an espionage agency, which means information
gathering, which is important. It's to gather and consolidate
information from many, many different sources
from all over the world. And then put those in reports, of the White House so the President, can make good decisions
based upon valid information, evidence-based, you know, decision making. But Alan Dulles, who was the, essentially the first head of the agency, made a series of legislative machinations, and political imaginations
that gave additional powers, to the agency and opened up the, what they called then, the plans division, which is, the plans division
is the dirty tricks. It's the black ops fixing elections, murdering, what they
call executive action, which means killing foreign
leaders and, you know, making small wars and bribing, and blackmailing people
stealing elections, and that kind of thing. And the reason at that time, you know, we were in the middle of
the Cold War and Truman, and then Eisenhower did
not wanna go to war. They didn't wanna commit troops. And it seemed to them that, you know, this was a way of kind of
fighting the Cold War secretly, without, and doing it at minimal cost, by changing events sort of invisibly. And so it was seductive to
them, but everybody, you know, Congress, when they
first voted it in place, Congress, both political parties said, "if we create this thing, it
could turn into a monster, and it could undermine our values." And today they, it's so powerful, and then nobody knows what its budget is. Plus it has its own
investment fund, In-Q-Tel, which has invested, you know, made I think, 2,000
investments in Silicon Valley. So it has ownership of a
lot of these tech companies, that, you know, a lot of the
CEOs of those tech companies, have signed state secrecy
agreements with the CIA, which if they even reveal
that they have signed that, they can go to jail for 20 years, and have their assets removed, et cetera. The influence that the agency has, the capacity to influence
events at every level, in our country, is really frightening. And then, for most of its life, the CIA was banned from
propagandizing Americans, but we learned that they
were doing it anyway. So in 1973, during the
church committee hearings, we learned that the CIA had a program, called Operation Mockingbird, where they had at least 400 members, leading members of the
United States Press Corps, on the New York Times,
the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, et cetera, who were secretly working for the agency, and steering news coverage
to support CIA priorities. And they agreed at that time, to disband Operation Mockingbird in '73. But there's indications
they didn't do that. And they still, the CIA today, is the biggest funder of
journalism around the world. The biggest funder is through USAID, the USA, the United
States funds journalism, in almost every country in the world. You know, it owns newspapers,
it has journalists on it, thousands and thousands of
journalists on its payroll. They're not supposed to be
doing that in the United States. But, you know, in 2016,
President Obama changed the law, to make it legal now for the
CIA to propagandize Americans. And I think, you know, we
can't look at the Ukraine war, and how that was, you know, has been how the
narrative has been formed, in the minds of Americans, and say that the CIA had
nothing to do with that. - Well, what is the
mechanism by which the CIA, influences the narrative, do you think? It's indirectly? - [Robert] Through the press. - Indirectly through the press, or directly by funding the press? - Directly through, I mean, there's certain press organs
that have been linked, you know, to the agency that the people who run those organs,
things like the Daily Beast, now Rolling Stone, you know,
editor of Rolling Stone, Noah Shachtman has deep relationships, with the intelligence
community Salon, Daily Coasts. - But I wonder why they would do it. So from my perspective,
it just seems like the job of a journalist is to have an integrity, where your opinion cannot
be influenced or bought. - I agree with you, but I actually think, that the entire field of
journalism has, you know, really ashamed itself
in recent years because, it's become, the principle of
newspapers in this country, and the television
station, the legacy media, have abandoned their traditional, their tradition of, which
was when I was a kid, my house was filled with the
greatest journalists alive, at that time, people like Ben
Bradley, like Anthony Lewis, Mary McLeod, Pete Hamill, Jack Newfield, Jimmy Breslin, and many, many others. And, after my father died, they started the RFK Journalism Awards, to recognize integrity
and courage, you know, journalistic integrity and courage. And for that generation of journalism, they thought, they believed, that the function of journalists, was to maintain this posture of fear, skepticism toward any
aggregation of power, and including government
authority, that you always, that people in authority lie, and they always have to be questioned. And that their job was
to speak truth to power, and to be guardians of
the First Amendment right, to the free expression. But if you look, what
happened during the pandemic, was the inverse of that
kind of journalism where, the major press organs
in this country were, instead of speaking truth to power, they were doing the opposite. They were broadcasting propaganda. They became propaganda organs
for the government agencies. And they were actually
censoring the speech of dissent, anybody who dissents of the powerless. Oh, and in fact, it was
an organized conspiracy, you know, the name of it was
the Trusted News Initiative. And, some of the major
press organs in our country, signed onto it, and they
agreed not to print stories, or facts that departed
from government orthodoxy. So the Washington Post was
a signature of the UPI, the AP and then the four media, or the four social media groups, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Google, all signed on to the
Trusted News Initiative. It was started by the
BBC, organized by them. And the purpose of it
was to make sure nobody could print anything about government, that departed from government orthodox, and the way it worked
is the UPI and the AP, which are the news services
that provide most of the news, you know, news around the country. And the Washington Post would decide, what news was permissible to print. And a lot of it was about COVID, but also Hunter Biden's laptops. Where it was the impermissible to suggest, that those were real or that, you know, they had stuff on there
that was compromising. And, you know, and by the way, what I'm telling you
is all well documented, and I'm litigating on it right now, so I'm part of a lawsuit against the DNI. And so I know a lot about what happened, and I have all this documented, and people can go to our website. There's a letter on my Substack now, to Michael Cher of the
Washington Post that outlines all this and gives all my sources, because Michael Cher accused me, of being a conspiracy theorist, when he was actually part of a conspiracy, a true conspiracy, to suppress anybody, who was departing from
government orthodoxies, by either censoring them completely, or labeling them conspiracy theorists. - I mean, you can understand
the intention and the action, the difference between,
as we talked about, you can understand the intention
of such a thing being good, that in a time of a catastrophe
and a time of a pandemic, there's a lot of risk
to saying untrue things. But that's a slippery
slope that leads into- - [Robert] Yeah. - A place where the
journalistic integrity, that we talked about is
completely sacrificed. And then you can deviate from truth. - If you read their internal memorandum, including the statements of the leader, of the Trusted News Initiative, I think her name's Jennifer Cecil, you know, you can go on our
website and see her statement. And she says, "the purpose
of this is that we're now," actually, she says,
"when people look at us, they think we're
competitors, but we're not. The real competitors are
coming from all these, alternative news sources
now all over the network, and they're hurting public trust in us, and they're hurting our economic model. And they have to be
choked off and crushed. And the way that we're gonna
do that is to make an agreement with the social media
sites that if we say, if we label their
information misinformation, the social media sites will deplatform it, or they will throttle it,
or they will shadow ban it," which destroys the economic model, of those alternative competitive
sources of information. So that's true. But the point you make
is an important point, that the journalists themselves, who probably didn't know
about the TNI agreement, certainly, I'm sure they didn't, they believe that they're
doing the right thing, by suppressing information
that may challenge, you know, government
proclamations on COVID. But I mean, there's a danger to that. And the danger is that, you know, once you appoint yourself an arbiter, of what's true and what's not true, then there's really no end
to the power that you have now assumed for yourself. Because now, your job is no
longer to inform the public. Your job now is to manipulate the public. And if you end up manipulating the public, in collusion with powerful entities, then you become the instrument
of authoritarian rule, rather than the, you
know, the opponent of it. And it becomes the inverse of
journalism and a democracy. - You're running for
president as a Democrat. What to you are the strongest
values that represent the left wing politics of this country? - I would say protection
of the environment, and the commons, you know,
the air, the water, wildlife, fisheries, public lands,
you know, those assets, they cannot be reduced to
private property, ownership. You know, the landscapes,
our Purple Mountain Majesty, the protection of the most
vulnerable people in our society. People who, which would include
children and minorities, the restoration of the
middle class, you know, and protection of labor, dignity, and decent pay for labor. Bodily autonomy, a
woman's right to choose, or an individual's right to endure, unwanted medical procedures. Peace. You know, the Democrats
have always been anti-war. That the refusal to use
fear is a governing tool. FDR said, "the only thing we
have to fear is fear itself." 'Cause he recognized that
tyrants and dictators, could use fear to disable
critical thinking, and overwhelm the desire
for personal liberty. The freedom of government
from untoward influence, by corrupt corporate power, is the end of this corrupt merger, of state and corporate
power that is now, I think, dominating our democracy. What Eisenhower warned about, when he warned against the emergence, of the military industrial complex. And then I prefer to talk about kind of, the positive revision of
what we should be doing, in our country and globally,
which is, you know, I see that the corporations
are commoditizing us, or poisoning our children, or strip mining the wealth
from our middle class, and treating America as if it
were business and liquidation, converting assets to cash
as quickly as possible. And, you know, and creating
or exacerbating this, this huge disparity in
wealth in our country, which is eliminating the
middle class and creating, you know, kind of a Latin
American style feudal model. There's these huge
aggregations of wealth above, and widespread poverty below. And that's a configuration
that is too unstable, to support democracy sustainably. You know, and we're supposed
to be modeling democracy, but we're losing it. And I think we have ought
to have a foreign policy, that restores our moral
authority around the world. Restores America as the
embodiment of moral authority, in which it was when
my uncle was president. And as a purveyor of peace rather than, you know, a war like nation. My uncle said he didn't
want people in Africa, and Latin America and Asia, when they think of
America to picture a man, with a gun and a bayonet. He wanted them to think of
a Peace Corps volunteer. And he refused to send
combat veterans abroad, combat soldiers abroad. He never sent a single
soldier to his death abroad. And in, you know, into combat. He sent 16,000, he
resisted, in Berlin in '62. He resisted in Laos. In '61, he resisted in Vietnam, you know, Vietnam, they wanted him
to put 250,000 troops. He only put 16,000 advisors, which was fewer troops. And he sent to get James Meredith, into Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. One Black man, he sent 16,000
and a month before he died, he'd ordered them all home. He actually, I think it
was October 2nd, 1963, he heard that a Green Beret had died. And he asked his aid for a combat, for a list of combat fatalities. And the aid came back
and there was 75 men, had died in Vietnam at that point. And he said, "that's too many. We're gonna have no more." And he ordered, he signed
a national security order, 263, and ordered all of those men, all Americans home from Vietnam by 1965, with the first thousand
coming home by December '63. And then in November, he, of course, just before that evacuation
began, he was killed. And a week later, President
Johnson remanded that order. And then a year after that,
the Tonkin Gulf resolution, we sent 250,000, which is what they wanted my uncle to do, which he refused. And then, and it became an American war. And then Nixon, you know,
topped it off at 560,000, 56,000 Americans never came home, including my cousin George Skagel, who died at the Ted Offensive. And we killed a million Vietnamese, and we got nothing for it. - So America should be
the symbol of peace. - And you know, today, my uncle, you know, really focused on putting
America on the side of the poor. - [Lex] Yeah. - Instead of our tradition of, you know, of fortifying oligarchies
that were anti-communism. That was our major criteria, if you said you were against communists, and of course the people
were the rich people. Our aid was going to the rich
people in those countries, and they were going to the military juntas our weapons were going to the juntas, to fight against the poor. And my uncle said, "no, you know, America should be on
the side of the poor." And so he launched the Alliance
for Progress and USAID, which were intended to bring
aid to the poorest people in those and build middle classes, and take ourselves away. In fact, his most, his favorite trip, his two favorite trips
while he was president, his most favorite trip was to Ireland, this incredible emotional homecoming, for all of the people of Ireland. But his second favorite trip
was when he went to Columbia, he went to Latin America, but Columbia was his favorite country. And there were, I think
there were 2 million people, came into Bogota to see
him, this vast crowd. And they were just
delirious, cheering for him. And the president of Columbia,
Alberto Lleras Camargo, said to him, "do you
know why they love you?" And my uncle said, "why?" And he said, "'cause they
think you've put America, on the side of the poor,
against the oligarchs." And you know, when my
uncle, after he died, today, there are more
avenues and boulevards, and hospitals and schools named, and statues, named after
and commemorating in parks, commemorating John Kennedy
in Africa and Latin America, than any other president
in the United States, and probably more than all
the other presidents combined. And it's because, you know, he put America on the side of the poor. And that's what we ought to be doing. We ought to be projecting
economic power abroad, the Chinese have essentially
stolen his playbook. And you know, we've spent
$8 trillion on the Iraq war, in its aftermath of wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya, you know, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and what do we get for that? We got nothing, for that money. $8 trillion we got, we killed more Iraqis, than Saddam Hussein. Iraq today is much worse off, than it was when Saddam was there. It's an incoherent violent war, between Shia and Sunni death squads. We pushed Iraq into the embrace of Iran. It's now become essentially
a proxy for Iran, which is exactly the outcome, that we were trying to prevent
for the past, you know, 20 or 30 years, we created ISIS, we sent 2 million refugees into Europe, destabilizing all of the nations
in Europe for generations. And we're now seeing
these riots, in France. And that's a direct result
from the Syrian war, that we created, and our creation of ISIS. Brexit is another, you
know, result of that. So we, for $8 trillion,
we wrecked the world. And during that same period
that we spent $8.1 trillion, bombing bridges, ports,
schools, hospitals, that the Chinese spent $8.1
trillion building schools, ports, hospitals,
bridges, and universities. And now, you know, the Chinese, are out competing us
everywhere in the world. Everybody wants to deal
with the Chinese because, they, you know, they come in, they build nice things for you, and there's no strengths attached, and they're pleasant to deal with. And, you know, as a result of that, Brazil is switching to Chinese currency, Argentina is switching, Saudi Arabia, our greatest partner that,
you know, we put trillions of dollars into protecting
our oil pipelines there. And now they're saying, you know, "we don't care what the
United States think." That's what Mohammed bin Salman said. He said, "we don't," you know, he dropped oil production in Saudi Arabia, in the middle of a US inflation spiral. They've never done that to us before, to aggravate the inflation spiral. And two weeks later, and
then they signed a deal, a unilateral peace deal with Iran, which has been the enemy that
we've been telling them to, you know, to be a bulwark
against for 20 years. And two weeks after that, he said, "we don't care what the
United States thinks anymore." So that's what we got for spending all those trillions of dollars there. We got short term friends and
the United States, you know, policy abroad, and we have
not made ourselves safer. We've made Americans, we've
put Americans in more jeopardy, all over the world. You know, you have to wait
in lines to get through the airport and you have to, you know, the security state is now
costing us $1.3 trillion, and America is unsafer and
poorer than it's ever been. So, you know, we're not getting, we should be doing what President Kennedy said we ought to do. And what China, the policy
that China has now adopted. - So that's a really eloquent
and clear and powerful, description of the way
you see US should be doing geopolitics and the way you see, US should be taking care of
the poor in this country. Let me ask you a question
from Jordan Peterson, that he asked when I told him
that I'm speaking with you, given everything you've said, "when does the left go too far?" I suppose he's referring
to cultural issues, identity politics. - Well, you know, Jordan trying to get me, to badmouth the left the
whole time, I was in, (laughs) I really enjoyed my talk with him. - [Lex] Yeah. - But he seemed to have that
agenda where he wanted me to, you know, say bad things about the left. And I just, you know, that's
not what my campaign is about. I wanna do the opposite. Oh, I'm not gonna badmouth the left. They try, you know, I was on shows this
week with David Remnick, from the New Yorker, and he tried to get me to badmouth Donald Trump, you know, and Alex Jones
and a lot of other people, and baiting me to do it. And of course there's a lot
of bad things I could say, about all those people,
but it doesn't, you know, I'm trying to find, I'm trying to find values
that hold us together, that we can share in common rather than to focus constantly on these disputes, and these issues that drive us apart. So me sitting here badmouthing the left, or badmouthing the right is
not gonna advance the ball. I really wanna figure
out ways that, you know, what do these groups hold
in common that we can all, you know, have a shared vision of what we want this country to look like. - Well, that's music to my ears. But in that spirit, let me ask you a difficult question then. You wrote a book harshly
criticizing Anthony Fauci. Let me ask you, to steelman the case, for the people who support him. What is the biggest positive thing, you think Anthony Fauci did for the world? What is good that he
has done for the world, especially during this pandemic? - You know, I don't want to
sit here and speak unfairly, by saying the guy didn't do anything, but I don't, I can't think of anything. I mean, if you tell me
something that you think he did, you know, maybe there was
a drug that got licensed, while he was at NIH that,
you know, benefited people. That's certainly possible. He was there for 50 years and, in terms of of his principal programs, of the AIDS programs
and his COVID programs, and I think that the harm
that he did vastly outweighs you know, the benefits. - Do you think he believes
he's doing good for the world? - I don't know what he believes. In fact, in that book, which
is I think 250,000 words, I never try to look inside of his head. I deal with facts, I deal with science. So, and every factual
assertion in that book, is cited and source to
government databases, or peer reviewed publications. And, I don't, I try not
to speculate about things, that I don't know about or I can't prove. And I cannot tell you
what his motivations were, or I mean, all of us. He's done a thing. A lot of things that I
think are really very, very bad things for
humanity, very deceptive. But we all have this
capacity for self deception. As I said, at the
beginning of this podcast, we judge ourselves on our intentions, rather than our actions. And we all have an
almost infinite capacity, to convince ourselves that
what we're doing is right. And, you know, not
everybody kind of lives, an examined life and is
examining their motivations, and the way that the
world might experience their professions of goodness. - Let me ask about the
difficulty of the job he had. Do you think it's possible
to do that kind of job well, or is it also a fundamental
flaw of the job, of being the centralized figure, that's supposed to a scientific policy? - No, no. I think he was a genuinely,
a bad human being. And that there were
many, many good people, in that department over the years. Bernice Eddie is a really good example. John Anthony Morris,
many people whose careers he destroyed because they
were trying to tell the truth. One after the other. The greatest scientists
in the history of NIH, were run out of that
organization, out of that agency. But, you know, people listening to this, probably, you know, will,
in hearing me say that, will think that I'm bitter or that, I'm doctrinaire about him, but you know, you should really go and read my book. And it's hard to summarize a, you know, I tried to be really
methodical to not call names, to tell, to just say what happened. - You are, the bigger picture of this is, you're an outspoken critic, of pharmaceutical companies, big pharma. What is the biggest
problem with big pharma, and how can it be fixed? - Well, the problem could
be fixed with regulation, you know, the problems, but the pharmaceutical industry is, I mean, I don't wanna say, because this is gonna seem
extreme, a criminal enterprise, but if you look at the
history that is an applicable, characterization, for example, the four biggest vaccine makers, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer, and Glaxo, four companies that make
all of the 72 vaccines, that are now mandated,
effectively mandated, for American children. Collectively, those companies
have paid $35 billion, in criminal penalties and
damages in the last decade. And I think since 2,000, about 79 billion. So these are the most corrupt
companies in the world. And the problem is that
they're serial felons. They, you know, they do this
again and again and again. So they did Vioxx, you
know, Merck did Vioxx, which Vioxx, they killed
people by falsifying science. And they did it, they lied to the public. They said, this is a headache medicine, and a arthritis painkiller. But they didn't tell people that, it also gave you heart attacks. And they knew, you know,
we've found when we sued them, you know, the memos from
their bean counters saying, "we're gonna kill this many people, but we're still going to make money." So they make those calculations, and those calculations are
made very, very regularly. And then, you know, when they get caught, they pay a penalty. And I think they paid
about $7 billion for Vioxx, but then they went right
back that same year, that they paid that penalty, they went back into the same
thing again with Gardasil, and with a whole lot of other drugs. So the way that the system is set up, the way that it's sold to doctors, the way that, nobody ever goes to jail. So there's really no penalty that, it all becomes part of the
cost of doing business. And you know, you can see other businesses
that if they're not, if there's no penalty, if there's no real, I mean these, look, these are the companies, that gave us the opioid epidemic, right? So they knew what was gonna
happen and we, you know, you go and see, there's a documentary, I forget what the name of it is, but it shows exactly what happened. And, you know, they corrupted FDA, they knew that this, that
oxycodone was addictive. They got FDA to tell doctors
that it wasn't addictive. They pressured FDA to lie. And they got their way. And they've, so far they
led this year, you know, they got a whole generation
addicted to oxycodone. And now, you know, when they
got caught and they made it, we made it harder to get oxycodone. And now all those addicted kids, are going to fentanyl and dying. And this year it killed 106,000. That's twice as many
people who were killed, during the 20 year Vietnam War. But in one year, twice many American kids. And they knew it was gonna happen, and they did it to make money. So I don't know what you
call that, other than saying, that's, you know, a criminal enterprise. - Or is it possible to have,
within a capitalist system, to produce medication, to produce drugs at scale in a way that is not corrupt? - Of course it is. - [Lex] How? - Through, you know, through
a solid regulatory regimen, you know, where drugs are actually tested. You know, I mean the problem
is, not the capitalist system, the capitalist system, you know, I have great admiration for that. Love the capitalist system, it's the greatest economic
engine ever devised. But it has to be harnessed
to a social purpose. Otherwise it's gonna,
it leads us, you know, down the trail of oligarchy
environmental destruction, you know, and commoditizing, poisoning, and killing human beings. That's what it will do, in the end. You need a regulatory structure, that is not corrupted by entanglements, financial entanglements with the industry. And we've set this up,
the way that this is, that the system is set up today, has created this system of
regulatory capture on steroids. So almost 50% of FDA's budget, comes from pharmaceutical companies. The people who work at FDA are, you know, their money is coming,
their salaries are coming, from pharma, half their salaries. So they're, you know, they know who their bosses are, and that means getting those drugs done, getting them out the door and approved, as quickly as possible, it's
called fast track approval. And they pay 50% of FDA's budget, goes about 45% actually
goes to fast track approval. - Do you think money can buy integrity? - Oh yeah, of course it can. In the reg, yeah, I mean, that's not something
that is controversial. Of course it will. So, and then- - Slightly controversial to me, I would like to think
that science that will- - Well it may not be able
to buy your integrity. I'm talking about population wide, I'm not talking about the individual. - But I'd like to believe that scientists, I mean, in general, a
career of a scientist, is not a very high paying job. I'd like to believe that
people that go into science, that work at FDA, that work at NIH, are doing it for a reason, that's not even correlated
with money, really. - Yeah, and I think probably
that's why they go in there. But scientists are
corruptible and, you know, and the way that I can tell you that, is that I've brought over 500 losses, and almost all of 'em involve
scientific controversies. And there are scientists
on both sides, in everyone. When we sued Monsanto, there was, on the Monsanto side,
there was a Yale scientist, a Stanford scientist,
and a Harvard scientist. And on our side there
was a Yale, Stanford, and Harvard scientists. And they were telling, saying
exactly the opposite things. In fact, there's a word for
those kind of scientists, who take money, for their opinion, and the word is biostitutes. And they are very, very common. And, you know, and I've
been dealing 'em with them, my whole career, you know, I think it was Upton Sinclair that said, "that it's very difficult
to persuade a man of a fact, if the existence of that fact
will diminish his salary." And I think that's true for all of us. If they, you know, we find a
way of reconciling ourselves, the things that are, to truths, actually, and worldviews that actually
benefit our salaries. Now, NIH has probably the worst system, which is that scientists who work for NIH, NIH itself, which used to be the premier gold standard scientific
agency in the world, everybody looked at NIH and that. Today it's just an incubator
for pharmaceutical drugs. And, you know, that is
that gravity of economic self-interest because if you're, if NIH itself collects royalties, they have margin rights for the patents, on all the drugs that they work on. So with the Moderna vaccine, which they promoted
incessantly and aggressively, NIH own 50% of that vaccine, is making billions and
billions of dollars on it. And there are four, at
least four scientists, that we know of, and
probably at least six at NIH, who themselves have margining
rights for those patents. So if you are a scientist who work at NIH, you work on a new drug,
you then get margin rights, and you're entitled to
royalties of $150,000 a year, forever from that, forever. Your children, your children's children, as long as that product's on the market, you can collect royalties. So you have, you know, the
Moderna vaccine is paying for the top people at NIH, you know, some of the top regulators,
it's paying for their boats, it's paying for their mortgages, it's paying for their
children's education. And you know, you have to expect that, that in those kind of situations, the regulatory function would be subsumed, beneath the mercantile
ambitions of the agency itself. And the individuals who
stand to profit enormously, from getting a drug to market. Those guys are paid by us, the taxpayer, to find problems with those
drugs before they get to market. But if you know that drug is
gonna pay for your mortgage, you may overlook a little
problem, or even a very big one. And that's the problem. - You've talked about
that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer, and you've said that
you're not anti-vaccine, you're pro safe vaccine. Difficult question. Can you name any vaccines
that you think are good? - I think some of the live virus vaccines, are probably, averting more
problems than they're causing. There's no vaccine that is,
you know, safe and effective. In fact- - Those are big words,
what about the polio? - [Robert] Those are big words. - Can we talk about the p- - [Robert] Well, here's the problem. - Yes. - Here's the problem. The polio vaccine contained a, a virus called Simian virus 40, SV40. It's one of the most
carcinogenic materials, that is known to man. In fact, it's used now by
scientists around the world, to induce tumors and rats
and Guinea pigs and labs. But it was in that vaccine, 98 million people who got that vaccine. And my generation got it. And now you've had this
explosion of soft tissue cancers, in our generation that
killed many, many, many, many, many more people
than polio ever did. So if you say to me, did the, you know, the polio vaccine was
effective against polio? I'm gonna say yes. And if you say to me, did
it kill more people than, did it cause more deaths than averted? I would say, I don't know, because we don't have
the data on that, so. - But let's talk, well, you know, we kinda have to narrow
in on, is it effective, against the thing it's supposed to fight? - Oh, well, a lot of them are,
let me give you an example. The most popular vaccine in the world, is the DTP vaccine diphtheria,
pertussis, and tetanus. It was used in this, introduced
in this country around 1980. That vaccine caused so many injuries, (indistinct) which was the manufacturer, said to the Reagan administration, "we are now paying $20 in
downstream liabilities, for every dollar that
we're making in profits, and we are getting out of the business, unless you give us permanent
immunity from liability." So the vaccine companies then were given, and by the way, Reagan said at that time, "why don't you just
make the vaccine safe?" And why is that? Because vaccines are inherently unsafe. They said unavoidably unsafe,
you cannot make them safe. And so when Reagan wrote
the bill and passed it, the bill says in its preambles, "because vaccines are unavoidably unsafe." And the Bruce Woods case, which
was the Supreme Court case, that upheld that bill
uses that same language, vaccines cannot be made safe. They're unavoidably unsafe,
so this is what the law says. Now, I just wanna finish this story, 'cause this illustrates
very well, your question. The DTP vaccine was
discontinued in this country, and it was discontinued in Europe, 'cause the so many kids
were being injured by it. However, the WHO and Bill Gates gives it to 161 million African
children every year. And Bill Gates went to
the Danish government, and asked them to support
this program saying, "we've saved 30 million kids, from dying from diphtheria,
tetanus, and pertussis." The Danish government said,
"can you show us the data?" And he couldn't. So the Danish government
paid for a big study, with Novo Nordisk, which is a Scandinavian vaccine company in West Africa. And they went to West Africa
and they looked at the DTP vaccine for 30 years
of data and they hire, they retained the best vaccine
scientists in the world, these kind of deities of
African vaccine program, Peter Abbey, Sigrid Morganson
and a bunch of others. And they looked at 30 years
of data for the DTP vaccine. And they came back and they
were shocked by what they found. They found that the vaccine
was preventing kids, from getting diphtheria,
tetanus, and pertussis. But the girls who got that vaccine, were 10 times more likely to
die over the next six months, than children who didn't. Why is that? And they weren't dying from anything, anybody ever associated with the vaccine. They were dying of anemia,
bilharzia, malaria, sepsis, and mainly pulmonary and
respiratory disease, pneumonia. And it turns out this, this is what the researchers found, who were all pro-vaccine by the way. They said that this vaccine
is killing more children, than diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, prior to the introduction of the vaccine. And for 30 years nobody ever noticed it. The vaccine was providing protection, against those target illnesses, but it had ruined the
children's immune systems. And they could not defend
themselves against random infections that were
harmless to most children. - But isn't it nearly impossible, to prove that link, isn't it? - You can't prove the link, all you can do is for
any particular interest, you can't, illness or death,
you can't prove the link. But you can show statistically, that there is, that if
you get that vaccine, you're more likely to die, over the next six months
than if you don't. And those studies unfortunately, are not done for any other vaccines. So for every other medicine, in order to get approval from the FDA, you have to do a placebo
control trial prior to licenser, where you look at health outcomes, among an exposed group,
a group that gets it, and compare those to a similarly situated group that gets a placebo. The only medical intervention
that does not receive, that does not undergo
placebo controlled trials, prior to licenser, are vaccines. Not one of the 72 vaccines
that are now mandated, for our children have ever undergone, a placebo controlled
trial prior to licenser. - So I should say that there's
a bunch, on that point, I've heard from a bunch of
folks that disagree with you. - Okay.
- [Lex] Including polio. I mean, and that test testing
is a really important point. Before licensure, placebo
control randomized trials, polio, received just that, against the saline placebo control. So, it seems unclear to me. I'm confused why you say that, that they don't go through that process. It seems like a lot of them do. - Here's the thing is that, I was saying that for many years, 'cause we couldn't find any. - [Lex] Yeah.
- And then in 2016, in March, I met President Trump, ordered Dr. Fauci to meet with me, and Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins. And I said to them, during that meeting, "you have been saying that
I'm not telling the truth, when I said not one of these has undergone a prior pre-licensing placebo control." And the polio may have
had one, post licensing. Most of 'em haven't. The polio may have, I don't know. But I said, "our question
was prior to licenser, do you ever test these?" And for honor, for safety, and by the way, I think the polio vaccine did undergo, a saline placebo trial, prior licensure, but not for safety, only for efficacy. So I'm talking about safety trials, now. Fauci told me that, he said,
"I can't find one now," he had a whole tray of files there. He said, "I can't find now one
now, but I'll send you one." I said, "just for any vaccines, send me one, for any of the 72 vaccines." He never did. So we sued the HHS and after
a year of stonewalling us, HHS came back and they gave us a letter, saying we have no
pre-licensing safety trial, for any of the 72 vaccines. And that the letter from HHS, which settled our lawsuit
against them 'cause we had a FOIA lawsuit against them, is
posted on CHD's website. So anybody can go look at it. So if CHD had, if HHS had any study, I assume they would've given it to us, and they can't find one. - Well, let me zoom out because, a lot of the details matter here. Pre-licensure, what does
placebo controlled mean? So this is, this probably requires, a rigorous analysis. And actually at this point, it would be nice for me
just to give the shout out, to other people much smarter than me, that people should follow along
with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Use their mind, learn and think. So one really awesome creator,
I really recommend him, is Dr. Dan Wilson. He hosts the "Debunk the Funk" podcast. Vincent Racaniello, who hosts
"This Week in Virology." Brilliant guy, I've
had him on the podcast. Somebody you've been
battling with, is Paul Offit. Interesting Twitter, interesting books. People should read, understand,
and read your books as well. And Eric Topol has a good
Twitter and good books. And even Peter Hotez,
I'll ask you about him. - And people should, because Paul Offit, had published a Substack
recently debunking, I think, my discussion with Joe Rogan, and we have published a
debunk of his debunking, and you know, so if you read his stuff, you should read-
- [Lex] Read both. - Yes, you should read... And I would love to
debate any of these guys. - So, Joe Rogan proposed
just such a debate, which is quite fascinating to see how much attention and how much
funding it garnered, the debate between you and Peter Hotez. Why do you think Peter rejected the offer? - I think it's, you know, again, I'm not gonna look into his
head, but what I will say is, if you're a scientist
and you're making public recommendations based upon what you say is evidence-based science. You ought to be able to defend that. You ought to be able to
defend it in a public forum, and you ought to be able to defend it. against all, you know, all comers. And, you know, so you know,
if you're a scientist, science is based on, is
rooted in logic and reason. And if you can't use
logic and reason to defend your position, and by the way, I know almost all of
the studies, you know, I've written books on them
and we've made a big effort, to assemble all of the
studies on both sides. And so I'm prepared to
talk about those studies, and I'm prepared to
submit them in advance. You know, and for each of
the points, and by the way, I've done that with Peter Hotez. You know, I've actually,
because I had this, this kind of informal debate
with him several years ago, with him, with a referee at that time. And we were debating not only by phone, but by email and on those emails. Every point that he would
make, I would cite science, and he could never come back with science. He could never come
back with publications. He would give publications
that had nothing to do with, for example, Thimerosal and vaccines, mercury based vaccines. He sent me one time, 16
studies to rebut something I'd said about Thimerosal. And not one of those studies, they were all about the MMR vaccine, which doesn't contain Thimerosal. So it wasn't like a real
debate where you're, you know, you're using
reason and isolating points, and having a, you know,
a rational discourse. I don't think that he, I don't blame him for not debating me, because I don't think he has the science. - Are there aspects of all the
work you've done on vaccines, all the advocacy you've done, that you found out that
you were not correct on, that you were wrong on, that
you've changed your mind on? - Yeah, there are many times, over a time that I, you know, I found that I've made mistakes, and we correct those mistakes. You know, I run a big organization
and I do a lot of tweets, you know, I'm very careful. For example, my Instagram, I was taken down from for misinformation, but there was no
misinformation on my Instagram. Everything that I cited on
Instagram was cited or sourced, to a government database or
to peer reviewed science. But for example, The Defender, which was our organization's newsletter, we summarized scientific
reports all the time. That's one of the things,
the services that we provide. So we watch the, you know, PubMed, and we watch the peer
reviewed publications, and we summarize them when they come out. We have made mistakes. When we make mistake, we are rigorous, about acknowledging it, apologizing
for it, and changing it. That's what we do. I think we have one of the most robust fact checking operations
anywhere in journalism today. We actually do real science. And you know, there, listen, I've put up on my Twitter
account, there are numerous times that I've made mistakes on
Twitter and I apologize for it. And people say to me, you
know, "oh, that's weird. I've never seen anybody
apologize on Twitter." But I think it's really
important at the only, of course, human beings make mistakes. My book is, you know,
230 or 40, 50,000 words. There's gonna be a mistake in there. But you know what I say at
the beginning of the book, if you see a mistake in
here, please notify me. I give a way that people can notify me. And if somebody points out a
mistake, I'm gonna change it. I'm not gonna dig my feet
in and say, you know, I'm not gonna acknowledge this. - So some of the things
we've been talking about, you've been an outspoken contrarian, on some very controversial topics. This has garnered some
fame and recognition, in part for being attacked
and standing strong, against those attacks, if I
may say, for being a martyr. Do you worry about this drug of martyrdom, that might cloud your judgment? - First of all, yeah. I don't consider myself a martyr, and I have never
considered myself a victim. I make choices about my life. And I'm content with those
choices and peaceful with them. I'm not trying to be a martyr
or a hero or anything else. I'm doing what I think is right, 'cause I wanna be
peaceful inside of myself. But, the only guard I have is just, you know, fact-based reality. If you show me a scientific
study that shows that I'm wrong, for example, if you come back and say, "look, Bobby, here's a polio, here's a safety study on polio
that was done pre-licensing, and use an a real saline solution," I'm gonna put that on my Twitter, and I'm gonna say I was wrong. There is one out there. So, you know, but that's all I can do. - All right, I have to ask,
you are in great shape. Can you go through your
diet and exercise routine? - I do intermittent fasting. So I eat between noon. I start at my first meal at around noon, and then I try to stop
eating at six or seven. And then I hike every day. - [Lex] Morning, evening? - In the morning. I go to a meeting, first
thing in the morning, 12 seven meeting. And then I go hike for, and
I hike uphill for a mile, and a half up and a mile
half down with my dogs. And I do my meditations. And then I go to the gym and I
go to the gym for 35 minutes. I do it short time. I've been exercising for 50 years. And what I've found is it's sustainable. If, you know, if I do
just a short periods, and I do four different
routines at the gym, and I never relax at the gym, I go in there and I have
a very intense exercise. And I live, you know, I mean, I could tell you what my routine is, but I do backs one day, chest one day, legs and then
a miscellaneous, and I do 12. My first set of everything
is, is I try to, I try to reach failure at 12 reps. And then my fourth set of
everything is a strip set. I do, I take a lot of vitamins. I can't even list them to you here, 'cause I couldn't even
remember 'em at all. But I take a ton of
vitamins and nutrients. I take, I'm on an anti-aging protocol, from my doctor that includes
testosterone replacement. But I don't take any steroids. I don't take any anabolic
steroids or anything like that. And the DRTI use is bioidentical
to what my body produced. - What are your thoughts on
hormone therapy in general? - I talk to a lot of doctors
about that stuff, you know, 'cause I'm interested
in health and, you know, I've heard really good things
about it, but I don't know, I'm definitely not an expert on it. - About God, you wrote, "God talks to human beings
through many vectors, wise people, organized religion, the great books of religions, through art, music, and poetry. But nowhere with such
detailing grace and joy, as through creation,
when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity
to sense the divine." What is your relationship, and what is your understanding
of God, who's God? - Well, I mean, God is
incomprehensible, you know, I mean, I guess the most
philosophers would say we're, you know, we're inside the mind of God. And so it would be impossible
for us to understand, you know, what actually, you know, what God's form is. But I mean, for me, I
have a, let's say this. I was raised in a very, very
deeply religious setting. So we went to church in the
summer, oftentimes twice a day, morning mass, and we went to, we definitely went every Sunday. And I went, we prayed in the morning, we prayed before and after
every meal, we prayed at night, we said a rosary, sometimes
three rosaries a night. And my father read us the Bible. Whenever he was a home, he
would read us, you know, we'd all get in the bed and
he'd read us the Bible stories. And I went to Catholic schools,
I went to Jesuit schools, I went to the nuns and I
went to a Quaker school, at one point. I became a drug addict when
I was about 15 years old, about a year after my dad died. And I was addicted to drugs for 14 years. During that time, when you're an addict, you're living against conscience. And when you're living, and I never, you know, I was always
trying to get off of drugs, never able to, but I never felt
good about what I was doing. And when you're living against conscious, you kind of push God to the
peripheries of your life. So I'll call him he,
recedes and gets smaller. And then when I, when I got sober, I knew that I had a couple of experiences. One is that I had a friend of my brothers, one of my brothers who died
of this disease of addiction, had a good friend who had
used to take drugs with us. And he became a moonie. So, he became a follower
of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And he's at that point, his compulsion. He had the same kind of
compulsion that I had, and yet it was completely
removed from him. And so, and he used to
come and hang out with us, but he would not wanna take drugs. Even if I was taken right in front of him, he was immune to it, he'd become
impervious to that impulse. And, when I first got sober, I knew that I did not wanna be the kind of person who was, you know, waking up every day in white
knuckling sobriety and just, you know, trying to resist,
resist through willpower. And by the way, I had
iron willpower as a kid. I gave up candy for Lent when I was 12. And I didn't eat it again
until I was in college. I gave up desserts the next year for Lent. And I didn't ever ate another
dessert till I was in college. And I was trying to bulk up
for rugby and for sports. So I felt like I could do
anything with my willpower. But somehow this
particular thing, you know, the addiction, I was
completely impervious to it. And it was cunning, baffling,
baffling, incomprehensible. I could not understand why
I couldn't just say no, and then never do it again like
I did with everything else. And so I was living against conscience, and I thought about this
guy and I, you know, reflecting my own prejudices
at that time in my life, I said to myself, I didn't wanna be, I didn't wanna be like a drug addict, who was wanting a drug all the time, and just not being able to do it. I wanted to completely realign myself, so that I was somebody
who got up every day, and just didn't wanna take
drugs, never thought of them, you know, kissed the wife and
children, and went to work, and never thought about
drugs the whole day. And I knew that people
throughout history had done that. You know, I'd read the
lives of the saints. I knew St. Augustine had had a very, very dissolute youth and, you know, had the spiritual
realignment transformation. I knew the same thing had happened, to the St. Paul, you know, at Damascus. The same thing had happened. St. Francis, St. Francis also had a
dissolute and fun loving youth, and had this deep spiritual realignment. And I knew that that happened
to people throughout history, and I thought that's what I needed. You know, something like that. I had the example of this friend of mine, and I used to think about him. And I would think this again reflects, the bias and the, you know, probably the meanness
of myself at that time. But I said, I'd rather
be dead than be a moonie. But I wish I somehow
could distill that power, that he got without becoming
a religious nuisance. And at that time I picked
up a book by Carl Jung, called "Synchronicity." And Jung, he was a psychiatrist, he was contemporary of
Freud's, Freud was his mentor. And, Freud wanted him
to be his replacement. But Freud was atheist and Jung
was a deeply spiritual man. He had these very intense and genuine, spiritual experiences from
when he was a little boy, from really was three years old, that he remembers biography is fascinating about him 'cause he remembers
him with such a detail. And he had written, he was always, he was in interesting to me, because he was very faithful scientist. And I considered myself
a science-based person, from when I was little. And yet he had this
spiritual dimension to him, which infused all of
his thinking and really, I think made him, you know, branded his form of
recovery or of treatment. And he thought that he had
this experiment experience, that he describes in this book, where he's sitting up on the third, he ran one of the biggest
sanitariums in Europe in Zurich. And he was sitting up on the
third floor of this building, and he's talking to a patient, who was talking describing
her dream to him. And the fulcrum of that
dream was a scarab beetle, which was an insect that is not, is very, very uncommon, if at
all in northern Europe, but it's a common figure
in the iconography, of Egypt and the hieroglyphics, on the walls of the pyramids, et cetera. And he, while he was talking to her, he heard this bing, bing,
bing on the window behind him, and he didn't want to turn around, to take his attention off her. But finally he does it. He, in exasperation, he turns around, he throws up the window and
his scarab beetle flies in, lands in his head and he
shows it to the woman. And he says, "is this
what you were thinking of? Is this what you were dreaming about?" And he was struck by that experience, which was similar to other
experiences he's had like that. And that's what synchronicity means. It's an incident or coincidence, you know? And like if you're talking with somebody, about somebody that you haven't
thought about in 20 years, and that person calls on the
phone, that's synchronicity. Oh, and he believed it was a way that God intervened in our lives that broke all the rules of nature
that he had set up, the rules of physics,
the rules of mathematics, or, you know, to reach
in and sort of tap us on the shoulder and say, I'm here. And, so he tried to reproduce
that in a clinical setting, and he would put one guy in one room, and another guy in another
room and have them flip cards. And guess what the other guy had flipped. And he believed that if he could beat the laws of chance, laws of mathematics, that he would approve the existence, of an unnatural law, a supernatural law. And that was the first step, to proving the existence of a God. He never succeeds in doing it. But he says in the book,
"even though I can't prove using empirical and scientific tools, the existence of a God, I can show through anecdotal evidence, having seen thousands of patients come through this institution, that people who believe
in God get better faster, and that the recovery is more enduring, than people who don't." And for me, hearing
that was more impactful, than if he had claimed that he had proved the existence of a God. Because I wouldn't have believed that. But, I was already at a
mindset where I would've done anything I could to improve my chances, of never having to take
drugs again by even 1%. And if believing in God was gonna help me, whether there's a god up there or not, believing in one's self
had the power to help me, I was gonna do that. So then the question is, how do you start believing in something, that you can't see or
smell or hear or touch. or taste or acquire with your senses? And Jung provides the formula for that. And he says, "act as if, you
fake it till you make it." And so that's, you know,
what I started doing, I just started pretending there was a God, watching me all the time. And kind of, life was a series of tests, and each, there was a
bunch of moral decisions, that I had to make every day. And each one, you know, these were all just
little things that I did. But each one now for me
had a moral dimension. Like when I, you know,
when the alarm goes off, do I lay in bed for an extra 10 minutes, with my indolent thoughts or
do I jump right outta bed? Do I make my bed, most
important decision of the day? Do I hang up the towels? You know, do I, when I go into the closet, and pull out my blue
jeans, and a bunch of those wire hangers fall on the ground, do I shut the door and say, "too much, I'm too important to do that. That's somebody else's job," or not. And so, do I put the
water in the ice tray, before I put in the freezer? Do I put the shopping cart
back in the, you know, place that it's supposed to go, in the parking lot of the Safeway? And if I make a whole bunch
of those choices right, that I maintain myself in
a posture of surrender, which keeps me open to the
power, to my higher power, to my God, and when I, when
I do those things right, when I, you know, so much about addiction, is about abuse of power, you know, abuse of, all of us have some power, whether it's our, you know, good looks, or whether it's, you know,
connections or education, or family or whatever. And there's always a
temptation to use those to fill, fulfill self will. And the challenge is how
do you use those always, to serve instead, God's will and the, you know, the good of our community. And that to me is kind of the struggle. And, when I do that, I feel, I feel God's power coming through me, and that I can do things. I'm much more effective as a human being. That that gnawing, you know,
anxiety that I lived with, for so many years in my gut, it's gone. And that I can kind of
like put down the oars, and hoist the sail and you
know, and the wind takes me, and I can see the
evidence of it in my life. And you know, the big thing, temptation for me is that, when all these good things
start happening in my life, and the cash and prizes
start flowing in, you know, how do I maintain that
posture of surrender? How do I stay surrender
then when my inclination, is to say to God, "thanks
God, I got it from here." - [Lex] Yeah. - And drive the car off the cliff again. And so, you know, I had
a spiritual awakening, and my desire for drugs and
alcohol was lifted miraculously. And it, to me, it was as
much a miracle as if I had, if I'd been able to walk on water. 'Cause I had tried everything earnestly, sincerely and honestly for
a decade to try to stop it, and I could not do it
on under my own power. And then all of a sudden
it was lifted effortlessly, and you know, so I saw that evidence, early evidence of God in my life, of the power and and I see it now, you know, every day in my life. - So adding that moral dimension, to all of your actions
is how you were able to win that Camus battle
against the absurd. - [Robert] Exactly. - Sisyphus with the boulder. - It's all the same thing. It's the battle to just
to do the right thing. - Now Sisyphus was able
to find somehow happiness. - [Robert] Yeah. (Lex laughs) - Well, Bobby, thank you for the stroll, through some of the
most important moments, in recent human history and
for running for president. And thank you for talking today. - Thank you Lex. - Thanks for listening
to this conversation, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words, from John F. Kennedy. "Let us not seek the Republican answer, or the Democratic answer,
but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix
the blame for the past. Instead, let us accept our own responsibility for the future." Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.