Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not just known for his storied lineage, but for his own advocacy of indigenous land rights, and the environment, public health, and political commentary. A lawyer by training, Kennedy has been at the forefront of the environmental movement, and has worked on issues related to vaccines through his organization, Children s Health Defense. Now, Kennedy is making waves as a presidential candidate, first running as a Democrat in the primaries, then shifting his bid as an independent, and now shifting to run as an unapologetic third party candidate. Join us as we explore these critical issues with Kennedy Jr., seeking insights into his campaign, and what it represents for the future of American politics. In this episode, we delve into Kennedy s vision for America and his hope for the Democratic Party, discussing a range of topics from chronic disease, AI, culture, and entitlements to foreign policy, and his position on abortion. Featuring an exclusive interview with the Kennedy s oldest son, Robert F. Jr., who was born into the Kennedy dynasty on January 17th, 1954, and grew up in a large Irish Catholic family. This episode is brought to you by the Kennedy Center for American History, a production of Gimlet Media. To find a list of our sponsors and show related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. Our ad music is available wherever you get your favorite MP3 player, and we'll be working on our next episode of the show on the road this fall. Thank you for listening to our new episode of This episode of Mythology! Subscribe to Mythology? Subscribe to Our New Epidemic? Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and more about our new episodes? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on Audible Subscribe on Podulium Connect with Spare Cash App Subscribe on your favorite streaming platform Subscribe to our podcast app Subscribe on PODCAST - use the RSS or Stitcher Subscribe on Spare Card? Learn more on our new podcast, Like What We're listening to Yours Truly Subscribe and Share our podcast on iTunes Connect with a Podcast? and Subscribe on Social Media Links? We'll be giving away a discount code: Subscribe & Share Us On Gratuity and more! Share Us a Review on iTunes - click here to our Podcasts & Shout Out to Our Podcasts? Learn More about our Sponsorships? If you're a Friend?
00:00:53.000is not just known for his storied lineage, but for his own advocacy of indigenous land rights and the environment, public health and political commentary.
00:01:00.000A lawyer by training, Kennedy has been at the forefront of the environmental movement and has worked on issues related to vaccines through his organization, Children's Health Defense.
00:01:08.000Born into the Kennedy dynasty on January 17, 1954, RFK Jr.
00:01:12.000is the third of 11 children of the late Democratic Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy.
00:01:17.000RFK Jr.' early life was marked by personal and family tragedy,
00:01:21.000including the assassinations of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and
00:01:24.000his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He's overcome personal struggles,
00:01:27.000including a battle with drug addiction and legal issues. However, Kennedy's resilience
00:01:31.000is evident carving out his path and pursuing education at once prestigious
00:01:34.000institutions like Harvard University and the University of Virginia, before
00:01:38.000dedicating his career to environmental advocacy and legal practice. Kennedy is known
00:01:43.000His work has set environmental legal standards that continue to influence policy and advocacy.
00:01:48.000This commitment to environmental causes led him to prominent roles, including serving as senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of the board for the Waterkeeper Alliance.
00:01:59.000is making waves as a candidate in this presidential race.
00:02:02.000First running as a Democrat in the primaries, then shifting his bid in October 23 to run as an independent, polling data as recently as April 10, 2024, placed him at 8.5% against incumbent President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, with Trump in the lead at 41.9% and Biden at 40.3%.
00:02:17.000This would make him the single most successful third-party candidate since Ross Perot.
00:02:22.000Today, we delve into RFK Jr.' 's vision for America and his hope for the Democratic Party, discussing a range of topics from chronic disease to AI, culture and entitlements to foreign policy, and his position on abortion.
00:02:33.000Join us as we explore these critical issues with Robert F.
00:02:36.000Kennedy Jr., seeking insights into his campaign and what it represents
00:03:40.000Well, their eldest son was Joe Kennedy, who was killed during World War II.
00:03:44.000Their eldest daughter was Kathleen, who was killed in an airplane crash immediately after the war.
00:03:53.000Joe Kennedy was kind of the big hope for my grandfather.
00:03:57.000He was his golden child, and he really never recovered from that death.
00:04:05.000His next child was John Kennedy, who became the first Irish Catholic president of the United States.
00:04:13.000My father was his brother's campaign manager and his attorney general.
00:04:22.000Later, after my uncle was killed in 1963, my father ran for Senate, became senator from New York, and was killed running for president in 1968 in Los Angeles.
00:04:33.000My other uncle, Ted Kennedy, was one of the longest-serving members of the United States Senate.
00:04:41.000He was in the Senate for over 50 years.
00:04:43.000He has more legislation with his name on it than any senator in history.
00:04:50.000My aunt, Eunice Schreiber, was the founder of Special Olympics, and so we were raised kind of in a milieu of public service and politics, and it was all around us.
00:05:03.000I was at the convention in 1960 as a six-year-old boy, and we had front-row seats on everything that happened during that Camelot period.
00:05:18.000I became, after my dad's death in 68, I was, my mom had 11 kids, so I had 10 siblings.
00:05:32.000And my family was, at that point, after my dad was killed, it was very chaotic.
00:05:38.000I began a 14-year experiment with drugs that turned into an addiction to heroin.
00:05:44.000I got sober in 1928 and then became one of the, I would say, the leading environmental lawyers and activists in the country.
00:05:54.000I founded or co-founded a group that became Waterkeeper Alliance that became the biggest water protection group in the world.
00:06:06.000against polluters. And in I think around 2015 or 2016 I started another group
00:06:17.000called Children's Health Defense that focuses on on children and public health.
00:06:22.000So you know looking at you know the history of your family obviously it's
00:06:27.000intertwined intimately with with Democratic Party politics.
00:06:51.000You know, the reason I ran is because I saw the Democratic Party, my country, but also the Democratic Party, departing from a lot of the values that I was raised with.
00:07:01.000People call it Kennedy Democrat Party.
00:07:04.000I think if my father, my uncle, if you outlined There are top 20 policy priorities that I would check the box for each one of them.
00:07:16.000And, you know, I'm kind of a traditional Kennedy Democrat, traditional liberal.
00:07:45.000I think particularly reducing the toxic exposures to our children Improving the sustainability of our soils, protecting water, clean air, all of those issues are Purple Mountain's majesty.
00:08:03.000Those were the centerpieces of my career.
00:08:18.000And the party has, I think particularly since the Citizens United case in 2008, the party has become the party not of the middle class, which it was when I was growing up.
00:08:33.000It was the cops and the firefighters, factory workers, but it has become the party of Wall Street and the party of pharma and the party of the military industrial complex.
00:08:46.000And when I ran, you know, I was really, I would say, triggered to run during COVID when we saw the censorship happen and Democratic politicians sign on to censorship of speech in this country for the first time in our history.
00:09:02.000And the support of the Democratic Party for the war in Ukraine, which I see as a contrived war, And that really prompted me to run.
00:09:22.000But I ran as a Democrat and my intention was to try to call the Democratic Party back to its core values.
00:09:34.000What I found was, and my campaign manager during the outset of the campaign was Dennis Kucinich, who's run for president a couple times himself and was kind of the conscience of the Democratic Party, a core figure and beloved figure for his integrity, for his courage.
00:09:56.000And he said from the beginning, they're not going to let you run in this party and you're going to have to leave.
00:10:01.000And I was the last person in my campaign to believe that.
00:10:04.000But the Democratic Party began taking all kinds of steps to make sure that no matter, even if I won the primaries, that I still could not win the nomination.
00:10:26.000That any candidate who stepped into the state of New Hampshire during the election could not, that all of those, all of the delegates that that candidate won in New Hampshire would go to President Biden.
00:10:40.000And there were a number of sort of transparent efforts to fix the election that came from the Democratic Party.
00:10:52.000That prompted me ultimately to make the decision that if I wanted to make a serious run that I had to leave the party.
00:11:00.000So I declared independent, I forget, maybe three months, four months ago.
00:11:06.000And I've been running as an independent ever since.
00:11:08.000So, you know, that answers why you're not backing President Biden.
00:11:11.000But, you know, many of the issues on which you disagree with President Biden have a lot of crossover with President Trump, who obviously is running on the other side of the aisle.
00:11:17.000So, you know, you're in a strange position where Democrats are suggesting that you're a President Trump plant in order to take votes away from Biden.
00:11:24.000Some members of the Trump camp are claiming you're a Biden plant in order to take away votes from President Trump.
00:11:30.000Why not support President Trump as an alternative to President Biden?
00:13:03.000The service on that debt is now larger than our defense budget, and our defense budget is larger Then the next 10 defense budgets for the next 10 countries in the world all put together.
00:13:17.000So that is, and you know, President Trump and President Biden are largely responsible individually for that debt.
00:13:25.000President Trump ran up the biggest debt in history.
00:13:30.000He put a trillion dollars on that number.
00:13:35.000And that is more than all the presidents in 283 years of history before him.
00:13:43.000And President Biden put almost that much on it.
00:13:49.000Within five years, 50 cents out of every dollar that is collected in taxes is going to go to servicing the debt.
00:13:57.000Within 10 years, and particularly if interest rates rise, Within 10 years, 100% of every dollar collected in taxes will go to servicing the debt.
00:14:10.000This is really an existential crisis for our country, and you don't hear President Biden or President Trump ever talk about it, and they have no solutions for it.
00:14:20.000I wanted to ask you about what your solutions are to that, because we can talk about the defense budget, but the reality is two-thirds of the American budget is entitlement programs that nobody wants to touch.
00:14:30.000Well, the biggest cost is our medical costs, and the medical costs are preventable.
00:14:39.000And, you know, this goes to another issue, which neither of them ever talk about, which I believe is the biggest issue, which is the chronic disease, even bigger than the budget.
00:14:48.000which is existential, which is the chronic disease epidemic.
00:14:52.000When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease.
00:15:23.000But a lot of it was also because we have the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world.
00:15:28.000The CDC says that the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.
00:15:35.000Now, you take these practices individually.
00:15:39.000Juvenile diabetes, when I was a kid, A typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in his lifetime, his entire career, his 40-year career.
00:15:51.000Today, one out of every three children who walk into his office is pre-diabetic or diabetic.
00:15:56.000The cost of diabetes now in this country is higher than the defense budget.
00:16:02.000One disease, and that doesn't even include Alzheimer's, which we now know, which has now been reclassified as type 3 diabetes.
00:16:13.000Alzheimer's coming from the same cause that's causing the diabetes, which is food.
00:17:33.000Nobody's talking about this and explaining why the neurological disorders, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette's syndrome.
00:17:42.000Narcolepsy, ASD, autism, these are diseases that I never heard of when I was a kid.
00:17:52.000They were unknown to any except for esoteric specialties in the medical profession.
00:18:01.000The autoimmune diseases that suddenly exploded.
00:18:05.000I mean, the great bulk of my followers are young people, and I do selfie lines after every speech, and one at a time they come up to me and say, I have POTS, I have, you know, ADHD, I have all these autoimmune diseases.
00:18:21.000And rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile diabetes, lupus, Crohn's disease, things that we never heard of when I was a kid, and suddenly they're exploded.
00:18:30.000And then all of these other, you know, the autoimmune and the allergic diseases and neurological diseases and obesity.
00:18:43.00013% of kids are obese, today it's almost 50%.
00:18:47.000So, you know, and that, this is killing us as a country in so many ways.
00:18:52.000Not only national security and our ability to find people who will actually defend this, who are in shape enough to defend this country, but the cost of it is 4.3 trillion a year.
00:19:05.000So it is five times our defense budget.
00:19:09.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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00:20:16.000I think even if, you know, it ought to be fixable through regulation, but politically that, because of the control that the food industry and the, you know, big ag The food industry and, you know, the big companies that own them all, like BlackRock and the State Street Vanguard, which own both the food processors that are poisoning us and the pharmaceutical companies that are making a killing on the disease.
00:20:43.000They all want to keep us sick from just a pure financial incentive.
00:20:49.000And it's hard because they own Congress.
00:22:24.000What I'm going to do as soon as I get in there, I'm going to go down to NIH, and I'm going to say, you know, NIH, when I was a kid, NIH was 10 minutes from my home, and I used to go there because I had friends who were scientists there.
00:22:40.000I was fascinated by science when I was a kid, and I would go look at the rats and the mice and the guinea pigs and the monkeys.
00:22:54.000At that time in the history, NIH was the gold standard scientific agency in the world.
00:23:00.000There were, in fact, a lot of these new countries.
00:23:04.000After World War II, 122 new countries were formed.
00:23:07.000And a lot of those were new democracies that were modeled on the US.
00:23:13.000But they didn't have the budget to have their own scientific agency.
00:23:16.000So they would say in their constitutions, Um, anything approved by FDA or NIH is approved in our country.
00:23:25.000So the whole world was relying on our science and with good reason.
00:23:29.000We had gold standard science at that time.
00:23:32.000And in 1980, we passed a law called the Bayh-Dole Act.
00:23:38.000And that law allowed NIH scientists and NIH as an agency to collect royalties on any new drug that it helped develop, including the scientists who worked on that drug.
00:23:49.000So, for example, the Moderna vaccine, there are between four and six individuals at NIH who will get $150,000 a year as long, forever, as long as that mRNA technology is on the market.
00:24:10.000So if you're a regulator working for these agencies, and you're making royalties, and you're paying for your mortgage, and your boat, and your alimony, and your kid's education, based upon the performance of that drug in the marketplace, because you helped develop it, it tends to subvert the regulatory function of the agency, because you have the regulators who are supposed to be looking for problems in that drug, who are instead I'm making sure they don't see any problems.
00:24:41.000So, assuming that you can go in and clean out NIH and restore... I'll summarize this.
00:24:48.000What I'm going to do is I'm going to redirect the science away.
00:24:53.000NIH has now become the primary incubator for new pharmaceutical products.
00:24:57.000And then it spends a lot of its time studying infectious disease, doing gain-of-function studies, and we see where that ends up, etc.
00:25:06.000What I'm going to say to them is, look, we're going to mainly give infectious disease and drug development a little bit of a break for a couple of years, and we're going to find out what's causing the chronic disease epidemic in this country.
00:25:20.000And we're going to start doing studies on all of these injuries and linking them.
00:25:27.000We know there's an environmental toxin.
00:25:29.000You know, genes do not cause epidemics.
00:25:33.000They can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin.
00:25:36.000And there's a famous toxicologist called Phil Landrigan who looked at this issue and he said, you know, this problem began in 1989.
00:25:46.000In fact, EPA, Congress said to EPA, why here did the autism epidemic begin?
00:25:51.000And EPA came back and said, it's a red line, 1989.
00:25:54.000Well, a lot of these diseases exploded in 1989.
00:25:57.000So Phil Landrigan said, let's look at what it could be.
00:26:03.000And he said, you need a toxic exposure that became ubiquitous in 1989.
00:26:10.000It affected every demographic from Cubans in Key Biscayne to Inuit in Alaska.
00:26:15.000And that it has other characteristics.
00:26:17.000Neurological injuries affect boys at a 4 to 1 ratio to girls.
00:26:21.000So there's other kind of signals that you can look for.
00:26:25.000So he went through all of the exposures that began that year.
00:26:30.000I mean, all of the exposures that followed that approximate timeline.
00:26:37.000And he came down with about 13 things, and they're, you know, it's predictable things.
00:26:42.000It's glyphosate, it's, you know, fluoride.
00:26:51.000Neonicotinoid pesticides, atrazine, aspartame, you know, the food sweetener.
00:27:00.000High fructose corn syrup, cell phone radiation, PFOAs, PFASs, this is a class of what they call forever chemicals.
00:27:11.000I've litigated a lot on it and they are, you know, they're in all of our, put around that timeline in all of our children's pajamas, furniture, et cetera.
00:27:20.000And so Landrigan came down with this list and said, it's gotta be one of these things.
00:27:27.000But NIH won't let anybody do it, and what I'm going to do is do it.
00:27:32.000Once you figure it out, and once you have a threshold of scientific studies, of high-quality scientific studies, animal studies, bench studies, clinical studies, observational studies, epidemiological studies, then you pass a threshold, a legal threshold called DALBERT.
00:27:54.000In the federal courts, and there is an analogous threshold in the state courts, that threshold says until you have a certain critical mass of science, you cannot bring to a jury any claim that a certain exposure caused a certain injury.
00:28:11.000Once you have about 15 or 20 really good studies, then you set the lawyers loose.
00:28:17.000And if you have, you know, 15 studies that say high fructose corn syrup is one of the major causes of the diabetes epidemic, And you have lawyers who can step in and say, I'm representing 10,000 kids who have juvenile diabetes and shouldn't, and we can litigate them.
00:28:35.000Now, people said to me, before we did the Monsanto cases, they said, you can never regulate glyphosate out of existence.
00:29:23.000Monsanto also agreed to remove glyphosate from all gardening products.
00:29:28.000So you can get them to do it if you have the science out there.
00:29:32.000So obviously this is an issue on which you're really passionate.
00:29:34.000Another sort of existential issue or something you've discussed in existential terms, unless I'm wrong and I don't want to put words in your mouth, is climate change.
00:29:42.000So what are your opinions on climate change?
00:29:45.000Let me just finish what I was saying because there are a number of existential issues which are One of those is polarization in our country.
00:29:55.000And, you know, there's this toxic polarization that has us at all each other's throats.
00:30:00.000And nobody can really say, particularly with the social media algorithms feeding on that and driving us further and further apart.
00:30:08.000You know, we have not been so divided since the American Civil War.
00:30:14.000The state of our soils is another existential issue that we're going to hit a wall with just in soil productivity, but a lot of other.
00:30:25.000These are all issues that are ultimately the result of a corrupted system, a merger of state and corporate power, that no matter who the president is, These, that capture, that corruption virus system is going to spit out bad policies on this issue.
00:30:44.000Keep running up the debt, keep destroying our soil, keep poisoning our children, keep the chronic disease epidemic and no way to solve it.
00:30:53.000That's why you can vote for Trump and Biden.
00:30:56.000you're going to get more of the same. We already knew they were both at four years in there and
00:31:00.000they didn't change any of these things. They're not able to avert this train that's coming
00:31:06.000at us from all these different directions. They won't even talk about it because those policies
00:31:11.000are the products of a corrupt system and I have the capacity to fix that system.
00:31:17.000So when you look at that system, I mean, obviously you're looking at a variety of areas in the Congress, but it seems like the vast majority of rulemaking and corruption that happens is actually not, I think, the kind of baseline theory that members of Congress are getting paid off as much as it is that you have a gigantic regulatory state where regulatory capture is really easy.
00:31:34.000The Congress people aren't even reading the bills.
00:31:35.000I mean, it's agencies Or committees that are largely having these things written by outside lawyers or by outside forces.
00:31:42.000So you become president of the United States.
00:31:44.000What do you do about the size and scope of the executive branch?
00:34:14.000When I sued Monsanto, when we sued Monsanto, we got discovery documents that showed that the head of the pesticide division at EPA for over a decade was a guy called Jess Rowland.
00:34:32.000Who was secretly working for Monsanto the entire time, and he was taking his orders from the highest officials of Monsanto to kill studies, to fix studies, to hire these, bring in these phonies, mercenary scientists, we call them by ostitutes, to ghostwrite studies, and that he was the one that kept those studies.
00:34:54.000His job was to make sure no study got done that would look at the links between Glyphosate and cancer.
00:35:02.000I can tell you who those individuals are at CDC.
00:35:21.000He's confronted by this big bureaucracy.
00:35:24.000And at every level of these, you know, some of these are 60,000 people working for these agencies.
00:35:30.000And at all sort of higher levels of that bureaucracy you have individuals who are capable of committing civil disobedience that will turn off the lights some will flood the streets and that will embarrass the
00:35:52.000But I know how. I know exactly what to do.
00:35:54.000And I know how to do it at a granular level.
00:35:57.000And President Trump said he was going to drain the swamp.
00:36:00.000And he brings John Bolton in to run the NSA.
00:36:07.000That is like putting a swamp creature in charge of draining the swamp.
00:36:13.000He brought Scott Gottlieb, and Alex Azar, a pharmaceutical lobbyist.
00:36:19.000Scott Gottlieb is a business partner of Pfizer.
00:36:22.000President Trump appoints him to run the FDA, and Scott Gottlieb gets in there and does a $100 billion favor for Pfizer.
00:36:30.000When it comes to the regulatory capture, I think that even President Trump would admit at this point that he would have to do a much better job in his second term with regard to staffing.
00:36:40.000But why do you give him a second term if he's messed it up so badly the first time?
00:36:45.000He said he was going to do that the first time.
00:36:48.000If I had been president, I would have done it.
00:36:51.000And even when he knew what was wrong, he said, well, I'll never lock down this country.
00:38:26.000Up to 600 on each gun crew, 64 gun crews.
00:38:31.000My uncle said, if we bomb them and kill all those Russians, Isn't Khrushchev going to have to come to Berlin?
00:38:39.000And they said to him, we don't think he has the guts to do that.
00:38:43.000My uncle said, I'm not going to take that risk.
00:38:47.000He asked them for the aerial photos and he examined them himself.
00:38:52.000He went granular, and then the last day, after the 13th day, this is the 13th most dangerous day in history.
00:38:58.000There are many times during that period that many of those people believe that they may wake up dead the next morning, because a nuclear exchange would wipe out the East Coast.
00:39:08.000The last day my uncle took a vote, and he already knew what he was going to do with the embargo.
00:39:14.000He said, he took a vote, he said, this is the final vote, and they voted eight to six to invade.
00:39:26.000So what he was saying is, I'm listening to you, you're experts, I value your advice, but I'm going to make up my own mind about what's best for this country.
00:39:37.000Unfortunately, President Trump has shown that he doesn't have that capacity.
00:39:42.000Well, when it comes to deregulation and regulatory policy, that's one aspect of being president, obviously, and it's a very important aspect of being president.
00:39:47.000When it comes to general policy, that's another aspect.
00:39:50.000And so I want to talk about some of your kind of general political policies, not just the implementation side, but with regard to, say, things like climate change or tax policy.
00:39:59.000So you're the President of the United States.
00:40:01.000What does America's tax policy look like?
00:40:03.000Because the reality is that Well, we're talking about solving health problems that down the road will have an impact on Medicaid or Medicare spending.
00:40:10.000The reality is that the tax burden on the United States is actually more progressive than it is in virtually any other country.
00:40:16.000It is very stacked on the top, much more than Europe.
00:40:19.000Europe actually has a much significantly higher tax base.
00:40:23.000The highest rate kicks in much lower in terms of income in Europe.
00:40:27.000Unless you mean to Radically increased taxes on the middle class, for example.
00:40:33.000There is no way to continue to sustain the kind of spending that we're doing on into the future.
00:40:38.000There are really only two things that can be done.
00:40:39.000One is a massively booming economy, and the other is to raise the tax rates.
00:40:43.000When you look at the state of the American economy, what are the chief issues for you?
00:40:46.000What does a good tax policy look like?
00:40:50.000Well, first of all, I think we can cut a lot of costs.
00:42:26.000What they want... China wants economic domination in the world, and it's doing that by adopting the policy that my uncle John Kennedy thought that we should adopt, which is not to reject military power, but which is counterproductive.
00:45:39.000To be fair, BlackRock did not invade Ukraine.
00:45:42.000I mean, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the question that I would ask is when it comes to Ukraine— But why did we feel like—that war, in my view, is a war about the expansion of NATO, our right to expand NATO into Ukraine, and was something that we promised that we would never do.
00:46:59.000Let's assume this is about fear of Ukraine joining NATO.
00:47:02.000So first of all, Zelensky himself, when he was a comedian, made all sorts of shorts about
00:47:06.000the fact that NATO actually kept flirting with Ukraine.
00:47:09.000I agree the West's policy with regards to NATO and Ukraine was flirtatious, but it never reached the point of consummation, which is one of the big complaints in Ukraine, was sort of that Zelensky, believe it or not, before the war was actually sort of the left-wing peacenik version of the leadership in Ukraine.
00:47:23.000He was hit from the right before he actually was elected president of Ukraine.
00:47:27.000But even assuming all this, and I'll assume your case for the sake of argument, Right now, Russia has obvious control of huge sections of the Donbass.
00:47:39.000Is it in America's interest to withdraw aid to the point where Ukraine itself is in danger of Russian ingestion?
00:47:48.000Gorbachev, as you point out, Zelensky ran in 2019 on the Minsk Accords saying that he promised he was a peacenik and that he would sign the Minsk Accords.
00:48:00.000The Minsk Accords basically had three demands from the Russians that everybody agreed to.
00:48:07.000The UK agreed, Germany agreed, France agreed.
00:48:10.000Three things that Putin wanted, and it's what not only Putin, but the entire Kremlin leadership and generation of leader back to 1992, not beginning with Putin, they wanted a guarantee of neutrality for Ukraine, which means keeping NATO out.
00:48:28.000They wanted a, you know, a denazification of the government that we put in place in 2014 when we helped overthrow the elected government of the Ukraine.
00:48:40.000The CIA and Victoria Nuland helped overthrow them.
00:48:45.000And brought in five ministers who are, you know, calling them ultra-nationalists is a polite description.
00:48:52.000And you well know the Nazi history in Ukraine.
00:49:01.000And these five ministers who were legacies of Stephen Bonder, et cetera.
00:49:06.000And the last thing that he wanted was that protection for the ethnic Russian population of Donbass and Lugansk.
00:49:19.000Who were being brutalized, 14,000 have been killed.
00:49:23.000And the first thing that got, when we put the new government in in 2014,
00:49:27.000one of the first things it did was to get rid of the Russian language.
00:49:31.000Used, half the people- There's no question that, first of all, the Minsk Accords
00:49:35.000were extremely poorly written and violated extraordinarily on both sides of that
00:49:41.000Including by the Russians, Little Green Men in Donbass and Crimea.
00:49:44.000But again, this doesn't answer the question as to whether the United States, I don't really care about the internal politics of Ukraine nearly at all.
00:49:49.000The question is, is it in the interest of the United States at this point, given the fact that Vladimir Putin has not really gotten back to the off-ramp that I was pushing for, and I think you were both, we were both pushing for, I think in the middle of 2022.
00:50:00.000So it's Henry Kissinger, this sort of off-ramp, let's get out of this war as fast as possible, negotiated settlement, That's just not true.
00:50:07.000the wayside and so now we're in 2024 still discussing the war. Putin has not offered
00:50:11.000any sort of material off-ramp at this point to Zelensky and Zelensky has not opted to take
00:50:16.000any off-ramp. So what is in America's interest? If we if we use that it's not true.
00:50:20.000It's just not true. First of all the Minsk Accords, although you know you can complain about
00:50:28.000some of the language, it was agreed upon by France, by Germany, by the UK, and Zelensky campaigned in
00:50:38.0002019 on the promise that he was going to sign it and ratify it before the Parliament.
00:50:46.000He was then, when he got in, he pivoted.
00:50:50.000The suspicion is that he pivoted for two reasons.
00:50:52.000One, his life was threatened by the ultra-rightists in his own government.
00:50:56.000And two, Victoria Nuland from the State Department said, we don't want peace with the Russians.
00:51:02.000In April of 2022, and that was what prompted the invasion of Crimea, which, by the way, my uncle, you know, was going to invade Cuba in 1962.
00:51:16.000Because the Russians put missiles there.
00:51:19.000And the Russians put missiles in Cuba because we had put Jupiter missiles in Turkey.
00:51:26.000Everybody knew that neither of our powers wanted nuclear missiles within range of our capital.
00:51:35.000And not only did we put missiles in Romania and Poland, Aegis Missile Systems, which are Tomahawk missiles, which are nuclear-ready Lockheed missiles, 12 minutes from the Kremlin, able to decapitate the entire Kremlin leadership, 12 minutes.
00:51:53.000Not only did we do that, President Trump and his predecessor walked away from our two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with the Soviet Union, with Russia.
00:52:04.000So we said to Russia, we're unilaterally walking away from these nuke treaties and we're putting nukes in your backyard.
00:53:05.000What now we know from Naftali Bennett, from Erdogan, from the Ukrainian negotiators, is that everybody, and from Putin himself, she talked about in the Tucker interview, is that everybody agreed to it.
00:55:37.000Not having life insurance, which you might need if you actually put an ejector seat on a helicopter.
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00:56:40.000And what I had said is that Russia is very aggressive on the world stage.
00:56:43.000China's obviously an aggressive player, not just with regard to its economy, but Taiwan obviously feels threatened.
00:56:48.000That's a very difficult place for the United States to defend.
00:56:51.000We do require a significantly more powerful Navy to maintain the seaways and waterways
00:56:56.000that allow for a free global market to occur.
00:56:59.000I mean, we're watching right now as a bunch of ragtag hoothies hold up half the shipping in the planet in the Red Sea
00:57:04.000because the American Navy has been unable or unwilling under President Biden to actually make sure
00:57:08.000that there's freedom of the seas in the Red Sea.
00:57:10.000When you look at the terror tentacles of Iran, It's not that we should have bases we are unwilling to defend in places like Jordan or Syria.
00:57:19.000It is to say that a muscular American presence on the world stage has been a guarantor of world peace in a way that a reticent America and an isolationist-minded America would not be.
00:57:30.000Somebody's going to fill the gap, in other words.
00:57:33.000I don't want to repeat what I said about the cause of American military Muscle flexing.
00:57:40.000We're broad, but, you know, it cost us eight trillion dollars and we're worse off.
01:00:08.000And modern warfare with battleships and with, you know, the domination by aircraft carrier, as we just talked about, is now a strategy that's very, very dubious military strategy.
01:00:23.000There are other reasons that China does not want a war about this.
01:00:26.000Number one, the Taiwanese don't want MC plants are going to do every if the second that China
01:00:36.000looks like it's going to they're going to do everything in their power to get to the United
01:01:48.000China dies in a week without Mideast oil.
01:01:52.000We don't need to control the South China Sea to dominate China.
01:02:01.000They can't get the oil to China without the shipping lanes open.
01:02:05.000And we are able to close those shipping lanes so we can literally strangle China.
01:02:10.000That doesn't require naval power, by the way.
01:02:12.000But what I would say is what we should be thinking of Instead of a hot war with China, let's fight the war that China wants, which is by projecting economic power.
01:02:23.000China, during the last 20 years that we've spent on bombing bridges, ports, schools, churches, universities, mosques, etc.
01:02:33.000$8 trillion we've spent on that enterprise.
01:02:36.000The Chinese spent $8 trillion building ports, building roads, building schools, universities.
01:02:43.000With their Belt and Road program, 15 years ago, we were the largest creditor in every country in Latin America.
01:02:49.000Today, China is on virtually all of them.
01:02:59.000And we've left behind all these kind of resentments, and they're embracing the Chinese.
01:03:06.000My uncle, President Kennedy, never sent a combat troop abroad to die, and he was begged to in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie twice in Cuba, called a traitor in the State Department for not sending 250,000 troops to Vietnam.
01:03:25.000They want it, and he refused to do it.
01:03:30.000He said, no, we need to be projecting economic power abroad.
01:03:33.000I don't want African children, when they hear of the United States of America, to think of a man in a military uniform with a gun.
01:03:41.000I want them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer.
01:03:43.000I want them to think of the Alliance for Progress.
01:03:45.000want them to think of USAID, where we were and running the oligarchs in these countries
01:03:50.000and the military juntas, and bringing economic development directly to the poor to try to
01:03:56.000build a middle class, which is the foundation stone for stable democracies in those countries
01:04:01.000as a counter to the promises of communism.
01:05:03.000And by the way, that's the same budget that Eisenhower had during the height of the Cold War when we were, you know, had an existential threat from the Soviet Union.
01:05:14.000And that's what we were also promised to cut down.
01:05:18.000In 1992, when the walls came down in Europe, and, you know, there was all kinds of convocations about the peace dividend, how do we, where do we cut the, to achieve those things, how big should our military?
01:05:34.000The promise then was that we were going to cut it from 600 billion to 200 billion, and that we could do all those things.
01:05:43.000But, you know, what our true military costs, although the actual Pentagon spending is $940 billion, the truth, if you look at the National Security costs and then the foreign aid costs, which is just, we give money to Ukraine or Israel or wherever, and then they, under contract, have to buy our weapons.
01:06:05.000The whole cost of that is $1.3 trillion.
01:06:09.000So, you know, we need to cut We need to cut back.
01:06:13.000My biggest savings are going to come from ending the chronic disease epidemic.
01:06:17.000But also, the GAO does a study every year on the most wasteful Government programs.
01:06:37.000So those reports are this thick and they're all brought to some shelf in the Library of Congress and they're put there and that's, you know, the bureaucrats have done their job and identify them.
01:06:50.000I'm going to go through those and I'm going to use AI.
01:06:54.000To identify waste, and I'm going to have a transparent system, a budgetary system, blockchain budgetary system, so that every American can see every expenditure that we have on the budget, everything.
01:07:08.000And I'm going to use that system to identify waste and gut it.
01:07:11.000And, you know, I'm going to take the worst of all those programs and put them in a single and I'm going to send it to Congress like we did with the
01:07:22.000base closure commission for an up or down vote, right?
01:07:25.000And stuff that nobody can defend, I'm going to send it for an up or down vote so they
01:08:42.000We took people's paychecks for 40 years and then we said to them, when you reach the age
01:08:48.000of 65, you're going to get that money.
01:08:52.000So I don't think that the United States should break its promise to those people.
01:08:57.000So I'm going to look, and I'll tell you what, a lot of the budgetary stuff is
01:09:08.000We can't even comprehend it now because of what AI is going to do to our economy.
01:09:16.000And, you know, if we don't manage it very, very carefully, and that's another reason that I think that, you know, is an argument for me becoming president, because I don't think President Biden or That's going to change our country.
01:09:35.000And the promise of AI to solve a lot of our most intractable problems,
01:09:41.000but also this terrible peril from AI, its capacity to alter our realities and to enforce
01:09:49.000compliance and to control our behavior,
01:10:28.000I don't think they are thinking about this.
01:10:31.000And I think we need the smartest people in the country because we also don't want to lose the, you know, you can't regulate it in ways that punish it because we want to be the hub of it in this country.
01:10:50.000And so in order to do that, we need kind of entrepreneurial freedom to experiment.
01:10:55.000And at the same time, We want to make sure that we regulate it in ways that don't get out of control, that we have agreements with the Russians, the Chinese, people we're fighting wars with right now.
01:11:05.000You know, we're all... This is the war of our life.
01:11:08.000It's the war of survival, like Elon Musk.
01:11:10.000At first, it's going to take our jobs, then it's going to kill us.
01:11:15.000I saw today that Elon and somebody else had a statement that said, By 2030, AI is going to be smarter than all the human beings in the world combined, and it's already lying to us.
01:11:33.000It's already doing some really scary stuff, and I just don't think any of this Goes into Biden's head.
01:11:42.000I don't think that President Trump is really capable of looking at this thoughtfully and saying, you know, OK, I'm going to bring in people who I don't like, I don't agree with.
01:11:54.000And because I need them to solve this problem, we need to bring in the smartest people in the country and including, you know, people that we don't like.
01:12:05.000There are a couple of things that are crossing streams here that are really interesting.
01:12:08.000So when you talk about AI, obviously there's the economic aspects, which are fascinating, and you have the techno-optimists, and you have the techno-pessimists, and all of this.
01:12:16.000What's more interesting to me is sort of the social aspect that you're pointing out, which is how AI is going to mess with our entire perception of the world.
01:12:22.000We can already see this in miniature, and it doesn't feel like in miniature since the
01:12:26.000rise of the smartphone, since the rise of social media, which has driven, as you mentioned
01:12:29.000right at the top, this extraordinary level of political polarization in the country,
01:12:34.000people hating each other who have never met each other and will never meet each other.
01:12:38.000As a religious person, I know you're a religious person also, the sort of death of church,
01:12:44.000the death of community in the United States, that seems to be one of the giant creeping
01:12:49.000problems that everyone is ignoring, is the fact that we do, in fact, need people to go
01:13:08.000Well, you know, what you said is controversial and I tend to sort of visually agree with it, but I also, you know, churches don't necessarily bring people together, they also divide people.
01:13:22.000But I think the underlying The underlying assertion that you just made hits it right in the center of this problem.
01:13:35.000How do we use these technologies to build communities rather than fragment them?
01:13:41.000And right now, our experience with this technology is total fragmentation, and dissolution, and atomization.
01:13:49.000We have a whole generation of kids who are growing up lonely, and dispirited, and disconnected,
01:14:32.000And I think a lot of that may be from, you know, the toxicity in the environment, but a lot of it is also just from, you know, spending so much of your childhood on video games and, you know, Swipe Right.
01:14:45.000You know, one of the, I talk about this, one of the sort of encouraging things that I see
01:14:58.000I always make fun of my kids because they have no attention.
01:15:01.000They have the attention of a cricket because they're used to getting instantaneous simulation.
01:15:07.000When I was a kid, I'd go out on the side of a hill and I'd sit there for hours and wait for a snake to move
01:15:17.000or watch a hawk or watch the cloud go overhead.
01:15:20.000My kids, there's no way they could do that.
01:15:23.000You know, they need simulation constantly.
01:15:27.000One of the encouraging things that I see is that what they do with podcasts is they listen to you, they listen to Jordan Peterson.
01:15:36.000Listen to Joe Rogan and it's like they're really smart, you know, and they're getting this very high level of information because they're hearing these, you know, very energetic debates, very intelligent debates among super smart people.
01:15:50.000And, you know, what we have to figure out is how that is the good part of technology, right?
01:15:59.000How do you make people smarter, more engaged?
01:16:03.000And the bad part is this part that's just driving us all apart, and the algorithms prey on that.
01:16:10.000As you know, the algorithms, what they, you know, inadvertently, the algorithms are designed to keep eyeballs on the site.
01:16:19.000But as it turns out, this part of human nature, our hardwiring, is we will pay more attention to something if it is reinforcing our already held worldview.
01:16:31.000So if you're a Republican and you ask a question of Google, you're going to get a slightly different answer than a Democrat.
01:16:38.000You're going to get an answer that, you know, or images or whatever, that reinforces your existing biases.
01:16:46.000And that means that we're systematically, by this, you know, through this incredible mechanism of subtle control, but overwhelming control, being driven further and further apart than our poured on our biases, our prejudices, our hatreds.
01:17:04.000And so to me, that's why during this campaign, Ben, I've really tried to...
01:17:14.000It's just that this campaign is really an experiment.
01:17:16.000Is there a way to find a middle ground, to find landscapes where Americans can talk to each other again, where we can find brotherhood and sisterhood with each other?
01:17:26.000And what I find, and so I avoid the culture war issues.
01:17:29.000I try not to talk about them, you know, and I try to talk about the things that hold us all
01:18:07.000When you come right down to it, for the Sinaloa drug cartel to be running U.S.
01:18:11.000border policy, you know, if you frame that issue in a certain way, which is, I hate immigrants, you're going to get division.
01:18:18.000But if you frame it in a way that, do you think this is right?
01:18:22.000If you want to talk about the environment, And you want a fist fight, talk about climate.
01:18:28.000But if you want to get people together, talk about toxicity, talk about clean water, talk about clean air, about the destruction of the Appalachians, about all of these other issues that, you know, when I was fighting the lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, we had Hell's Angels standing shoulder-to-shoulder with, you know, with urban blacks, because everybody wanted clean water.
01:18:53.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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01:19:57.000You mentioned, you know, the hot-button issues, and we really haven't spent a lot of time on them, specifically because I want to talk about the things that you're most passionate about and that you're most interested in with your campaign.
01:20:05.000But these hot-button issues obviously do divide Americans.
01:20:08.000You become president of the United States, you're going to have to decide what to do on issues like what sort of legislation you sign on, say, abortions.
01:20:23.000I grew up in a family where there are both pro-life and pro-choice people in my family, a deeply Catholic family, and so I think we should be able to talk about these issues without, you know, hating each other.
01:20:39.000I've been a medical freedom advocate for my entire career.
01:20:43.000I think people should have bodily autonomy.
01:20:46.000I don't trust government to make decisions about what we should be doing with our own bodies.
01:20:52.000I think that the only solution for me is that a woman has to make that choice for herself.
01:21:00.000I believe that every abortion is a tragedy at one level or another,
01:21:07.000and that we should do everything we can as a society to try to make sure women have other choices.
01:21:14.000And particularly, you know, I don't think, I don't like federal policy that channels women
01:21:22.000I think if a woman, you know, I talked to some mothers in the last couple of weeks in Atlanta, Georgia, in this facility where I've been repeatedly back to, called Angie's House.
01:21:36.000And it's run by Angela Stanton King, who's kind of a relative of Martin Luther King's family.
01:21:45.000She had a baby when she was in prison.
01:21:48.000She was literally handcuffed to a bed, and everybody was telling her to get an abortion.
01:22:04.000And Angie now takes care of women who People are being pressured to have abortions because they don't have the money to take care of the baby.
01:22:16.000I don't think that that should ever be a reason in this country for a woman not carrying her child to terms.
01:22:22.000This is a place where obviously you're going to bump heads and I'm not sure there's a way around it in the sense that a pro-lifer looks at a position like a woman ought to have bodily autonomy and they say that's completely missing the point.
01:22:31.000We're not talking about the woman's bodily autonomy, we're talking about the baby's bodily autonomy.
01:22:35.000Which is obviously not only the pro-life position, but the position of many mainstream religions, including the Catholic Church.
01:22:41.000And so when you look at pro-lifers who say, okay, well, I understand that you believe it's a tragedy, but along those same baseline biological lines, it's not just a tragedy, it's a crime against the child, because the child has an independent interest.
01:22:58.000I say that I understand that position, and I don't agree with it.
01:23:03.000I think that the solution of having the state come in and dictate choices that the woman is making, that's not a good solution to me.
01:23:18.000To have a bureaucrat making these These very, very difficult moral choices.
01:23:21.000I think that choice should be between the woman, her pastor, her spiritual advisors, the people who she consults in her life, and that it's a very, very difficult decision.
01:23:35.000So you don't believe that the child has an independent right to life, for example, at any point during the pregnancy?
01:26:49.000I mean, you're talking about community.
01:26:52.000We need to reestablish the ownership society here, because that's the only way America survives.
01:26:59.000If you own a home, you care about your community.
01:27:02.000You care about the police, the firefighters, you show up at the PTA meeting, you care about the transportation, you care about the appearance of your property, and you care about your neighbors.
01:27:13.000If you, you know, once you become a renter, which is what BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard want us all, you know, this is the new oligarch, this feudal oligarchy of, you know, controlling the land base.
01:27:27.000We go from being citizens to being the subjects.
01:27:29.000And the main thing is that if you own property, you have equity, which means you can Entrepreneurial impulses.
01:27:46.000So if you decide, I want to build a yoga studio, or a bowling alley, or a juice bar, or you know, whatever, you can borrow on your house, you can beg your house on it, and then you can go to the bank and get that money, and you can, and that's why, one of the reasons that our country exploded.
01:28:04.000The American middle class after World War II became the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind.
01:28:09.000And a large part of that, you know, of course we had destroyed the industrial base of Europe and we owned everything.
01:28:15.000But also we put that, we spent that money wisely in making sure every veteran got into a house, every member of that generation basically.
01:28:24.000was able to own a home and you had this ferment of entrepreneurial energy, what Franklin Roosevelt called America's industrial genius that was released.
01:28:34.000And, you know, when I was in 1960, when I was a kid, we owned half the wealth on the face of the earth.
01:30:05.000The Australians did it with this superannuation program that gives everybody a little piece of the stock market, you know, and they have to hold it.
01:30:15.000And they choose which investments to make.
01:30:19.000So you're educating an entire generation.
01:30:27.000I want to do everything I can to do it.
01:30:30.000The other thing, we have terrible soils in this country, but we have the most imaginative farmers and regenerative agriculture.
01:30:38.000We have the worst health in the world in this country, but we have the best doctors, these integrative medicine and allopathic, integrative medicine, functional medicine doctors.
01:30:47.000We're doing all this breakthrough science, the very, very new, exciting technology, and when you unify it with AI, The potential is extraordinary.
01:30:57.000So I think there's a tremendous reason to hope in this country if we have the right leadership.
01:31:03.000And the reason I'm running is because I just don't believe that President Biden, who I've known for many years and like personally, that he has any capacity to even see over the horizon and see which direction and provide the kind of leadership that we're going to need to make this transition.
01:31:24.000Listen, President Trump, President Biden both had a chance.
01:31:28.000If you want more of the same, you know what you're going to get if you elect them.
01:31:32.000You're going to get more polarization.
01:31:34.000You're going to get more, you know, more debt.
01:31:37.000The more chronic disease, if you want more of that, then you should vote for them.
01:31:41.000If you want something completely different, if you want this country to live up to its idealism, to have people listen, to have a president who actually wants to build communities, who wants to bring us together, actually, Then you'll be supporting me.
01:33:23.000He didn't have, you know, every power structure was against him.
01:33:27.000The liberal media from the New York Times and the Village Voice were all horrified, appalled by his running.
01:33:34.000The labor unions who, he had run my uncle's campaign in 60, so eight years earlier, and he had all the labor unions.
01:33:42.000This time, The only unions, all the unions were against him, except for the UAW and for the United Farm Workers, Cesar Chavez Union.
01:33:52.000He had all the big city mayors against him.
01:33:55.000You know, they had all been for him in 1960.
01:33:57.000Mayor Daley was, you know, angry and threatening.
01:34:03.000So my father really didn't have any of the, and all of the New Frontier people who he had brought into office, We're all working for Johnson.