This Past Weekend with Theo Von - #639 - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

00:00:00.000 I want to tell you about my favorite sweatshirt. It's a hoodie, actually. This is it. It's from

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00:00:38.300 an XL. This is big on me. That's how I like it. I like room in case I want to invite somebody in here

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00:00:48.700 Theo when you go to American-Giant.com. American-Giant.com, code Theo. Yep, so just grateful to turn you on to

00:01:00.160 a company that I really enjoy and a company that is distinctively American. Just wanted to let you

00:01:07.040 know our episodes are now available in video on Spotify as well. Today's guest is the Secretary for

00:01:15.220 Health and Human Services for the U.S. Government. He's an attorney. He's an environmentalist. And he's

00:01:22.160 my friend. I'm so thankful that he is joining us. Today's guest is Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

00:01:30.840 here. Good to see you, bro. Yes, good to see you. Secretary. Secretary now. You can still call me

00:01:54.380 Bobby. Okay, cool. I know each other from, can I say where we know each other? Yeah, sure.

00:02:01.640 We've been in recovery for, together for years. You for almost over 40 years, right? Yeah, 40,

00:02:08.320 43 years. Wow. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah, that's where we met each other. Like 7 a.m. meetings

00:02:16.500 above the bank over there. That was a good meeting. They shut those down during COVID. I know. That

00:02:21.180 was heartbreaking. That was almost heartbreaking. We still did live meetings every day during COVID.

00:02:25.040 But we moved from the bank. There was about 15 of us who moved from the bank. And we got

00:02:31.140 into the Palisades Playhouse, which now has burned down during the fire. But it was kind

00:02:38.080 of a pirate group. And, you know, I mean, for me, I, you know what, I said this when I, when

00:02:46.180 we came in and I said, I don't care what happens. I'm going to a meeting every day. Yeah. And

00:02:51.120 I said, I said, I'm not scared of a germ. You know, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet

00:02:56.040 seats. And I know this disease will kill me. Right. If I don't, if I don't treat it, which 0.59

00:03:04.120 means going, for me, going to meetings every day, it's, it's just bad for my life. So for

00:03:12.780 me, it was, it's, it was survival. And then, you know, that the opportunity to help another

00:03:19.300 alcoholic, that's the secret sauce of the meetings. And that's what keeps us all sober and keeps

00:03:27.120 us, you know, from, from self-will. Yeah. Well, yeah, you get reminded. I mean, I go

00:03:37.000 to meetings and I get reminded that other people like, I hate to say exist, but like just that

00:03:42.740 other people are just that I'm not alone. I think, you know, I get like, I see face. I'm

00:03:49.180 like, oh yeah, I care about this person. They care about me. It's like, for some reason in

00:03:52.960 my, in my addiction, it's like, there's a part of me that forgets that people care about

00:03:58.760 me and that I care about them. And so, but when I go to meetings, it's like an immediate,

00:04:03.640 it immediately fills that whole backlog in, you know, but I have to go and kind of recharge

00:04:08.100 that battery a lot. Um, you, uh, welcome to Tennessee. Thank you. Yeah. I saw you were

00:04:14.560 with Kid Rock. Yeah. Pretty cool, dude. That fricking, he used to say he used to have cocaine

00:04:19.800 and oysters. I'm like, that's a meal. That's a meal, dude. That's an aphrodisiac. I think 0.90

00:04:26.160 I'm saving a seat for him still. Oh yeah. Yeah. He's one of a kind, man. His brother

00:04:31.380 only has one leg too. You know that? I met his brother, Bill. I think he got the vaccine,

00:04:35.880 but that's just me. But anyway, he had two a few years ago. That's all I'm saying.

00:04:40.900 But he lost his leg when he was a kid at around the same time, my cousin, daddy lost his

00:04:46.180 leg. And both of them became, um, uh, ski racers. So they were the top. I think Ted,

00:04:54.080 my cousin, Teddy was the number two, uh, uh, slalom skier for on one leg. And he was also

00:05:01.120 very proficient. So they became friends. So that was interesting.

00:05:05.700 So he knows your cousin. Yeah. He grew up with him and they were in like a special division

00:05:10.460 or no, just normal division. What are they called? The Paralympics? Paralympics. I didn't

00:05:15.480 know Billy was a Paralympian. I know he's a great golfer. I mean, they're just so, they're

00:05:20.420 hilarious. How does he golf? Cause he doesn't, his, his leg is cut off so high. He can't really

00:05:25.520 use a prosthetic. He, I mean, I don't know. They had it. Uh, I know a, a lawnmower. Somebody

00:05:31.880 hit him with a lawnmower. Look at that right there. Yeah. Wow. His father ran him over with

00:05:36.120 the tractor. Yeah. Oh, and just put him in time out, but yeah, he's phenomenal. And he

00:05:42.980 has the best, he has the best sense of humor. You know, I'm just joking. Uh, I know both

00:05:47.420 those guys super well and, uh, they've been great like neighbors in, uh, in Nashville and,

00:05:52.760 um, kid rock Bobby. He's done a lot of nice stuff for me over the years and stuff like that

00:05:57.760 and includes me in things. And we were just texting the other day. He's got a big heart,

00:06:02.100 you know? Yeah. Well, he spoke very highly of you. He's a nice guy. I saw

00:06:06.080 you were with Bill Lee too, our governor. Yeah. Yeah. I met him at the, he did a, uh,

00:06:12.700 fireside chat with me about a year ago at the governor's conference. And I really,

00:06:17.280 we, uh, we really bonded. He's a, he's a good guy and he works with both sides on the legislature.

00:06:23.080 He's got, um, a great relationship and he's done a bunch of good stuff in this state. He's

00:06:29.040 gotten, you know, he's on top of fluoride. They got really good

00:06:33.540 SNAP waiver. So I think they've got probably one of the best SNAP waiver. The SNAP waiver is the

00:06:40.360 food stamp waiver. So you can't spend food stamp dollars on, uh, sodas or candy, but they also

00:06:48.780 have sugar content and they have, uh, uh, corn syrup content. Oh, here in Tennessee. Yeah. So I think

00:06:57.420 they're the only state that has that now. And they've also banned food dyes. They banned a couple

00:07:02.380 of them and they're going to ban the rest of them now. And what are we finding out with food dyes?

00:07:06.240 Like the food dyes we've now, you know, we've told the companies they got to get rid of all of them.

00:07:11.920 There's nine of them. And the worst four, we already banned the other five. I think by the end of this

00:07:18.780 year, everybody should have stopped using them. And then we rapid, uh, approved for new vegetable dyes

00:07:26.240 so that they can replace them with, you know, something healthy. So we did that through FDA.

00:07:32.240 We're working with the industry to make sure that they can do it, but they've been very,

00:07:36.840 very cooperative. Most of them, about 40% of the industry, you know, came to us, including the

00:07:42.720 entire ice cream industry came to us and said, we want to do this, but you know, help us. So we, um,

00:07:50.340 we're working very closely with them and they're all getting rid of it. I mean, we should have gotten

00:07:55.000 rid of it a long time ago that Europeans don't allow it. Canada doesn't allow it. Uh, other 0.99

00:08:00.220 countries, uh, you can buy fruit loops in this country that are just loaded with chemicals

00:08:05.360 and you can buy same company makes fruit loops for Canada and Mexico that don't have the chemicals.

00:08:12.060 Yeah. Well, yeah, there was a kid on, on, there was a kid on Tik TOK and he was eating fruit

00:08:15.360 loops and then his poop was glowing in the dark. You see that? I'm like, dang, that thing

00:08:20.980 will swim upstream. That's crazy. I mean, but yeah, that is, yeah, some of it definitely

00:08:25.240 seems bonkers. And what did you say about fluoride? Uh, Tennessee has a law that has to,

00:08:30.460 where the water district has to inform the public about it. And fluoride is crazy because

00:08:36.660 we know it reduces IQ. There is no question. The national toxicology program has done a

00:08:42.500 meta-analysis and they can, you know, it's dose related. So every milligram of fluoride

00:08:49.380 that you had reduce your IQ more. And, um, and it doesn't work systemically. You know,

00:08:55.900 it was put in, in the forties and because it does help with tooth decay, but the effect

00:09:01.880 is all topical. And back then they didn't have fluoride toothpaste. They didn't have fluoride

00:09:06.960 mouthwash. Now we do. Uh, the parents can get the fluoride for their kids and they don't,

00:09:13.300 when you put it in systematically, it destroys your bone mass and destroys your thyroid.

00:09:19.240 It's horrible for us. It's horrible. And it destroys IQs. I mean, if you have kids,

00:09:25.540 would you rather have cavities or, or, you know, lower IQ? Yeah. I'd rather have them have cavities. 0.52

00:09:31.220 I'd rather have holes in their teeth and holes in their ideas or whatever. 0.99

00:09:33.740 Right. But, uh, European nations have banned it and there has been no increase in cavities. So,

00:09:40.240 you know, uh, it doesn't make any sense for us to be putting it in.

00:09:44.840 Um, and yeah, this is the bill known as the Tennessee fluoride free water act prohibits

00:09:48.820 public water systems in Tennessee from adding fluoride or any fluoride containing compounds

00:09:52.640 of drinking water intended for human consumption and bands of sale of bottled water with added

00:09:56.540 fluoride. So we don't have fluoride in our water here.

00:09:58.540 Well, there is natural fluoride in a lot of water. It's just, it comes from the geology.

00:10:03.880 So we're not adding more.

00:10:05.600 Right. We're not adding it.

00:10:07.800 Nice dude. Yeah. Because what, yeah. What if you're trying to think of something and you have

00:10:11.200 two sips of water and then you're like, God, I can't even, I'm screwed. Your parents send you

00:10:16.220 to take a test. They give you a bottle of water and you're like, God, I don't have a chance now.

00:10:19.580 Um, but thank you. Thank you for, for leading the charge on a lot of these things. Thank you

00:10:24.480 for caring about a lot of these things. I think I just want to say that I know that you do care

00:10:27.760 about so many of these things. Um, I did see there's a, there's a Tennessee farm bill and there's

00:10:32.180 a lot of stuff you want to talk about too, and we'll get into some of it for sure. Um, but this

00:10:36.000 is what I was talking about here. This bill, it's that yeah. Farm bill 809. The bill is sponsored

00:10:41.160 by representative rusty grills would limit lawsuits. If a user gets sick from a pesticide under

00:10:49.400 the proposed legislation, as long as a product label was approved by the environmental protection

00:10:53.720 agency, a person wouldn't be allowed to sue over the labeling. So actually Sean Ryan, uh,

00:11:02.860 the podcaster and John Rich, the musician, they shared this online and on the day that it was

00:11:09.500 going up for vote, I believe. Yeah. Right here. Tennessee state politicians side with foreign

00:11:14.300 pesticide companies over people dying of cancer. Ryan posted on X alongside a video speaking

00:11:19.180 out against the bill as did musician John Rich after the pushback representative grills

00:11:24.120 took the bill off notice, which at least delayed the vote. It's unclear why that decision was

00:11:29.740 made or whether grills has plans to bring the bill back to this legislative session and bring

00:11:34.640 up a, just, just so we know who's doing this, bring up a picture of a Mr. Grills. Oh, there

00:11:40.840 you go. Well, I mean, look, if you're a farmer and you get sick from using a pesticide that

00:11:48.240 you didn't know would make you sick, that you wouldn't have recourse against a pesticide company

00:11:53.440 that did know that they caused illness. Cause these companies knew that these caused illnesses.

00:11:58.400 Well, yeah. Yeah. Evidence from lawsuits, internal documents, and independent reports

00:12:03.280 indicates that Monsanto had information suggesting potential risks to human health

00:12:08.380 from some of its pesticides yet worked for years to downplay or obscure those risks

00:12:13.460 in public and regulatory arenas. I mean, that's just wild.

00:12:17.280 The reason they're doing this is because of my lawsuits against Monsanto.

00:12:21.200 Right. I remember you had that huge settlement against them a long time ago, right?

00:12:23.880 Yeah. I think it was, uh, 20, uh, maybe 2019, uh, we finally settled it, but I did three of the

00:12:32.400 trials in San Francisco. And the first one we won, I think 289 million for, you know, people who got

00:12:41.200 not a Hodgkin's lymphoma from using Roundup. And then the second one, we won 89 million. The third

00:12:48.420 one we asked for a billion dollars from the jury was a couple that had both got it simultaneously.

00:12:53.060 They were home gardeners and their dog also got it at the same time. They had a Labrador retriever

00:13:00.040 and the dog died. Both the couples were sick. We asked the jury for a billion dollars and they

00:13:07.580 gave us 2.2 billion. And they did that because we were able to show them documents that showed

00:13:14.520 Monsanto knew of the danger and then worked with corrupt officials, a guy called Jess Rowland

00:13:20.980 inside of, uh, EPA, who was the head of the pesticide division. And that, um, they had deliberately

00:13:29.400 concealed the science, fixed the science. Uh, and now the, the big study that they used to prove

00:13:36.780 safety has now been retracted. Yeah. Yeah. I think I saw an article about that. Like they'd,

00:13:41.780 they'd found emails that they were like, um, that it was kind of ghost written or something from the

00:13:46.060 Yeah. It was ghost written. And also the head of the pesticide division, they, they asked him,

00:13:51.760 the Monsanto asked him secretly. And now we have these emails to kill a study by another agency called

00:13:59.260 ATSDR. And, uh, he said, I can't kill it. It's, that's not my agency. I can kill them in EPA, but not

00:14:06.780 outside. And they said, you got to do it. We can't have this study go forward. And he said, okay, 1.00

00:14:14.320 I'm going to do it. But if, if I succeed, you've got to give me a gold medal. And we had all of that

00:14:19.500 and we were able to show it to the jury and they were angry. And that's why they gave us that huge

00:14:24.920 judgment. A gold medal in what? Just anything? A gold medal for, you know, killing a study that

00:14:30.940 showed that it caused cancer. That showed that it grew tumors. That's insane that it's at a contest

00:14:36.500 level now that, that it's, that, that things like that are so like prolific that now it's like

00:14:41.620 there's awards for it. You know, it seems baffling. Um, there's been a ton of lawsuits about this,

00:14:46.600 right? Like about pesticides causing, uh, diseases and, uh, sickness in people, right?

00:14:52.140 Um, or about this glyphosate, I think it's called. Yeah. Glyphosate. There's been a ton of lawsuits,

00:14:56.300 but they still don't have to take this product off of the shelf. So that's the craziest thing to me.

00:15:00.060 Is that right? Well, you know, the, it's a problem because you have, um, all the row croppers 0.84

00:15:07.320 are dependent on it right now. And there's other technology that is, uh, that is emerging right

00:15:15.160 now that actually, you know, I looked at one yesterday. It's a tractor attachment that uses

00:15:21.740 lasers to kill weeds. And that, you know, if they can make that affordable, particularly for smaller

00:15:28.220 farmers, that will be the answer. Cause you'll be able to, they can, they can kill bugs and they can

00:15:33.140 kill weeds. You program this thing and it zaps the weeds with a laser. It makes it all the cells

00:15:40.340 explode and it destroys them. And, um, so that, you know, we, there's a future that we can now see

00:15:47.680 the light at the end of the tunnel there. But right now, if you band glyphosate outright, it would put

00:15:53.700 out of business 80% of our farmers. Got it. Wow. So we're kind of dependent upon something that we

00:15:58.780 know makes us sick. Yeah, we are. And, you know, we're trying, we're doing a lot of work

00:16:04.340 in the HHS, look for other alternatives and to find a, um, you know, find an off ramp because the

00:16:12.600 farmers don't want to be using chemicals anyway. They're very expensive. They know, you know,

00:16:17.380 they have some of the highest cancer rates of any profession, uh, and farmers care about their land.

00:16:23.940 They want to leave it for their kids. It also destroys the microbiome and the soil and that

00:16:28.720 causes erosion. And so it's not a, you know, it's not a good long-term solution. Um, you know,

00:16:36.220 the issue is how do you transition off of it without putting farmers out of business? Right.

00:16:41.260 Here's that laser. Wow. That's unbelievable. Laser weeding robot kills a hundred thousand weeds per hour.

00:16:47.440 Yeah. And it also kills insects. You can program it to kill, you know, certain insects.

00:16:53.940 And, you know, that machine looks, that machine probably costs a million dollars. So, um,

00:17:00.140 but if you could have a couple of those running at night through your farm, that'd be sick.

00:17:03.560 Well, yeah, it would be, it's a lot better than using chemical pesticides. So this is going to be,

00:17:09.380 you know, the future, but we're not there yet. We're not there yet. Wow. It's just wild that we

00:17:15.280 get stuck into something that makes us sick and we don't have a, you know, it's like, I don't know.

00:17:19.220 It just feels like such a conundrum. It must be like that for you guys a lot where you're like,

00:17:22.780 this is just kind of where we are, you know? Um, the, for the agricultural community has been

00:17:28.460 very, very supportive of the Maha agenda and, um, they're helping us transition away from ultra

00:17:34.960 processed foods, which is really the biggest issue. That's what's causing all these chronic

00:17:39.680 disease and kids and farmers are going out of business. You know, farmers usually lose money

00:17:44.980 seven out of 10 years. Even when they're making money, they're making, you know, a lot of them are

00:17:50.360 just making, uh, for their work hours, minimum wage. And there, and we're having a hard time finding

00:17:58.040 young people who will go into farming. So that is a crisis that, you know, we need to, uh, we need to

00:18:05.200 keep into consideration. And, uh, you know, you have people at USDA finally who are, you know,

00:18:13.120 really intent on solving this problem, but nobody wants any farmers going out of business.

00:18:17.980 Got it. Whenever you became secretary, did it feel like you like, um, now that now you're like on the

00:18:24.840 inside? Like, did it, does it feel like you go behind this curtain and now you get to see this?

00:18:29.020 Yeah. It does? Yeah. Do you have to sign an NDA to have the job? No, no. And I mean,

00:18:35.480 we're doing the opposite of that. We're going to be, you know, this is the most transparent, um,

00:18:41.820 uh, administration in history. I mean, there's no president who's done ever done three or four

00:18:47.680 press conference a day. Like president Trump does asking it, answering any question people

00:18:52.100 fire. He's a machine. But we, I don't know how many press conferences president Biden did

00:18:57.500 in his entire administration. He doesn't know,

00:19:00.680 but it's a lot less than president Trump does in a month. Yeah. Oh, for sure. And then, you know,

00:19:08.720 we're, um, we are right now using AI to, um, to revolutionize the freedom of information laws

00:19:19.220 so that people aren't going to be able to get freedom of information requests immediately.

00:19:23.260 Like what do you mean a freedom of information requests?

00:19:25.000 Yeah. So if somebody wants a document from the government, now it could take six months,

00:19:29.380 two years, and we're going to make it so that they can get it instantaneously and that all of

00:19:35.360 our documents are going to be public except those that are, uh, shielded under the statute for,

00:19:41.580 you know, for one reason or another. And the, the big, um, issue that, you know, the big problem

00:19:49.220 that we're dealing with is that, uh, there is, you know, that there, there are names and privacy

00:19:55.000 issues and you have to redact those legally. We have to do that and we have to make sure we don't

00:20:00.980 make any mistakes. So the AI is, you know, that's what we're working out now.

00:20:05.660 Whenever, when you got in office, there was, you guys did like a big cut down of like a lot of the

00:20:10.180 divisions and stuff like that. What was, I think you went from 20 something to 15, maybe 20.

00:20:15.120 We, we had 82,000 employees and 20,000 of them left and they left.

00:20:20.940 20,000 of them left. Or did you guys make like cuts? Cause I just knew that you guys made like a

00:20:24.180 bunch of cuts that were buyouts so that people who are at the end of their career could retire early.

00:20:30.020 Um, there were rifts where people were like, people who were very new were let go. And it was about

00:20:38.040 reducing the workforce, but it was reducing the bureaucracy. We weren't reducing,

00:20:42.560 we weren't getting rid of, um, of research or anything like that. We didn't touch that except

00:20:50.760 if there were certain categories of research like DEI research, or there were other categories that

00:20:57.340 were just, it was not real science and it was not science. You know, we're, we're changing the

00:21:04.200 trajectory so that the purpose of NIA, the focus of NIH is going to be figuring out why we're also

00:21:12.280 sick. You know, why is this chronic disease happening? What are the exposures that are causing

00:21:17.240 it? What are the alternatives? How do we end it? And so we're shifting the focus, but we're,

00:21:24.560 are the amount that we're spending on research is the same that we spent, you know, in 2020, 2019.

00:21:30.920 Well, was there like a recalibrating there? Cause like I had a friend, Heather, who was working at 0.84

00:21:34.580 UCLA. She was a researcher there. And she said that like a lot of the, during like the doge period and

00:21:39.060 stuff, a lot of their grants got cut and there was like a, like a kind of a, I don't know if it's

00:21:42.700 called a moratorium or like a pause. It was a pause and every administration does that.

00:21:48.280 You need to do a review and make sure that they're, uh, that, that those research projects are not,

00:21:54.840 you know, torturing beagles or, you know, or doing DEI or, um, and how do you decide that? Is it,

00:22:04.100 do you decide or is it like, Oh, we go through every single grant. We had, you know, big teams

00:22:09.780 going through those grants. And then with, there's tremendous, there's tremendous ways. We had

00:22:15.700 40 communications departments. We had 40 different, um, uh, divisions studying addiction. And so

00:22:25.720 we consolidated those. So there wasn't, you know, you have 10 people doing the same job and not talking

00:22:33.320 to each other with computers that are internet that are not interoperable. Oh, it's the government.

00:22:38.060 Yeah. And we're changing that now so that, you know, we consolidate it and we're making it more

00:22:43.880 streamlined and efficient, but it's so that we can do the job better. So we can do better research.

00:22:51.100 And then the research, you know, was never replicated. And which means that that's part of

00:22:58.960 science. And if somebody does a paper that makes a scientific hypothesis, you don't just accept that

00:23:05.500 you get somebody to replicate it and see if they come up with the same result. And that was not

00:23:11.440 happening. There was no, virtually no money spent on replication. And because of that, there was huge

00:23:17.100 incentives to cheat because scientists, if they have a hypothesis and they do, they get a grant,

00:23:25.200 maybe hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of dollars to prove that hypothesis. And then they,

00:23:31.180 once they prove it, they get it published and that's how they advance their careers. Well, if

00:23:37.560 they fail to prove it, if the science says what you were thinking is not true, then they can't get

00:23:45.400 published. You should publish that too, because that's science, you know, but it doesn't get published.

00:23:51.820 So their careers are, you know, and endangered. It's hard for them to get the next grant.

00:23:57.360 And so a lot of them had this incentive to cheat.

00:24:00.520 Ah, so they have to win if they get it, if they prove it.

00:24:03.280 Yeah, if the hypothesis is a null hypothesis, they don't get, you know, their whole future

00:24:08.440 goes into the toilet, potentially. And so because they knew that study was never going to be

00:24:17.420 replicated. Nobody was going to check on them. It was an incentive for them to cheat.

00:24:23.040 And that must've been a pipeline just for companies then to just get it like, get like,

00:24:27.880 well, it was also a lopsided science or solo sided science that wasn't, um,

00:24:34.120 Yeah. I mean, I'll give you an example. There was a study done about 20 years ago on amyloid

00:24:40.120 plaque and that as the cause of Alzheimer's. And that study came up and said, yeah, it's the cause of

00:24:46.740 Alzheimer's. Well, then we spent billions of dollars doing six or 800 studies that followed

00:24:53.520 that. And they all were, as it turned out, they were all cheating. And, you know, the ones that

00:25:01.080 were, uh, many of them were cheat, cheating, but all of them were kind of confirmatory. And all of

00:25:07.220 their hypothesis about what's caused Alzheimer's was ignored, put on their shelf. You couldn't get

00:25:13.000 money for it because they said, we already know the answer. And then there were drugs developed,

00:25:18.100 et cetera. And, um, and the, in the end, you know, we came in and this scandal was brewing.

00:25:28.500 The head of Stanford university medical school had to resign the Dean.

00:25:33.020 Because they knew what was going on because he was involved in publishing some of these

00:25:37.220 fraudulent studies. And, um, um, but they did it for 20 years because nobody ever had to

00:25:43.360 really replicate those original studies. And that happens all the time. And you go down

00:25:48.440 these scientific dead ends. And, uh, and so now what Jay wants to do is suspend 20% of

00:25:54.240 our budget on replications. Every study gets replicated. And we know Jay Bhattachara, who is

00:26:00.040 the, and he was one of the guys who was censored during COVID. He was one of the top, um, statisticians

00:26:08.320 at Stanford. And he, and a lot of other ones were, you know, were censored, were lost their

00:26:14.540 jobs. Marty McCary, who you know, also. Yeah, I love his book. One of his books I read. He was

00:26:21.120 also censored. Um, Oz was censored and they're now running the agency. So these are people who

00:26:28.100 want to do real science and not politicize it to depoliticize the science. And we had 10

00:26:34.180 people doing, you know, these pure administrative jobs. And now we're, we've, we've cut that down

00:26:39.760 to five, you know? So, uh, all the cuts that we did were meant to streamline the agency so

00:26:47.080 that there's more money for research. Got it. Like after the pauses on the grants and, uh,

00:26:51.760 and some of those things are you, the grants were, were, were renewed. Most of the ones

00:26:57.620 are the ones that you guys seem that you guys thought were viable. Yeah. On almost all of

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00:29:19.920 slash T-H-E-O. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. I saw you, uh, in your speech that you gave 0.98

00:29:29.740 yesterday here in Tennessee saying that like, there's all kinds of, there's all kinds of

00:29:33.820 temptation to cheat if you know you're not going to get caught. Yeah. Well, that is true in every

00:29:37.880 system. Yeah. Have you seen a lot of that? Like, um, I mean, the amyloid black is a really good 1.00

00:29:43.500 example. Yeah. We see it everywhere. We, we see it everywhere in medicine. It's everywhere.

00:29:50.700 And the journals are utterly corrupt because they're owned by the pharmaceutical companies.

00:29:55.480 And so people read a journal and they think, oh, this is science. But even, you know, Marsha

00:30:00.900 Engel, the one that ran the New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years has said, you can't

00:30:06.920 believe anything in the journals anymore, but they're just propaganda vessels for the pharmaceutical

00:30:11.380 company. Richard Horton, who were in Lancet, who still runs it, says the same thing at the,

00:30:17.540 uh, you know, the journals. And those are the people running them?

00:30:20.140 Well, what happens is they make huge amounts of money and they make money from advertising,

00:30:26.020 which is paid for pharmaceutical companies and through a scheme called preprints where

00:30:32.560 the pharmaceutical company lands the story. They pay for the journal about a drug that they're

00:30:38.520 trying to promote. They, um, they pay the journal to print the story and then they get a preprint.

00:30:46.420 So it's a very neat looking, you know, copy of their article with the cover sheet of the New

00:30:53.460 England Journal of Medicine on it. And then they distribute that to their pharmaceutical reps

00:30:58.740 who are like, you know, former Playboy models who go out and talk to the doctors and they give

00:31:04.120 that to the doctors and say, this drug works, you know, do you want to have lunch? Yeah. And the

00:31:09.280 doctors then start prescribing the drug and they think, oh, well, it's legitimate because it was in

00:31:13.380 the New England Journal of Medicine, but it is not, it's, you know, you can't believe what's in those

00:31:18.760 journals because it's all propaganda for, for pharma. So how do we get away from that? Like how,

00:31:26.020 what are you guys doing to combat this or to, to, to change this or can this change or is it just

00:31:29.980 awareness and then people have to take the responsibility? No, I mean, what we're doing is

00:31:34.360 open source journals. We're going to have our own journals that, you know, that, um, people can open

00:31:41.480 source and publish, but you'll have the peer review published with it. So before you publish,

00:31:47.860 you give it, you give that publication to a panel of experts who then read it themselves and

00:31:53.360 criticize it. And the peer review now is secret. And, um, and then there is no raw data published,

00:32:01.580 so nobody can go in and replicate it. So to the extent possible, sometimes you, you can't,

00:32:07.120 you have to buy the raw data and it's very expensive or inaccessible. So you can't publish

00:32:12.880 it. Um, but you can publish the peer review, which is what we're doing. And so everybody will be able

00:32:19.720 to say if they have 10 peer reviewers and they all say this article sucks, it's got all these holes in 0.94

00:32:26.560 it. Then the public will be able to read that and doctors will be able to read it and the regulators

00:32:31.820 will be able to read it. And, um, so it's basically open source. It's, you know, it's crowdsourcing

00:32:39.360 essentially. And it, you know, that's how you get credibility in science. Science doesn't come from

00:32:45.980 consensus. It comes from debate. And, you know, you, that's why you remember when they were telling us

00:32:52.860 during COVID, oh, trust the experts. That's not a thing in science. Trusting the experts is the

00:32:58.940 opposite of science. It's not a function of science or democracy. It's a feature of religion

00:33:04.100 and it's a feature of totalitarianism. And in science, you always question the expert.

00:33:10.660 Yeah, you can't, there's not an expert in science because it's like an evolving thing, right?

00:33:14.160 Well, you know, when I did the Monsanto cases, I was part of a, you know, big team.

00:33:19.300 Um, uh, we had, and Cheryl came to my, to my, uh, trial, you know, a couple of days, she sat through 0.53

00:33:28.160 and watched us try the case. And Monsanto had experts from Stanford, Yale, and Harvard,

00:33:37.040 three big experts. And they testified. And Cheryl said to me at the end of the second day, she said,

00:33:43.660 why are you guys even here? These guys are, you know, this science is very clear that Monsanto,

00:33:49.040 that Roundup doesn't cause cancer. And I said, just wait. And then our experts went on and they

00:33:55.200 were from Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. And they said the opposite and were much more convincing

00:34:00.460 and the juries were convinced. And so there's experts on both sides of every debate. And a lot

00:34:05.960 of them are paid to be experts. They're hired guns, they're mercenaries. And, uh, we call them

00:34:11.800 biostitutes, the one that, uh, that worked for industry, the ones that work for industry.

00:34:17.040 Biostitutes, that's great. Uh, but, you know, so there's experts have their own bias. We all

00:34:22.060 have biases. Everybody's got a bias. What you want to do when you're, you know, when you're

00:34:27.660 dealing with science, you want to expose those biases. You want to admit them and acknowledge

00:34:31.720 them. And then you want to, the science to be able to stand on its own. And that would,

00:34:37.860 that's the only way really to depoliticize it as best we can.

00:34:41.220 Right. What were some of the biggest cases of fraud? Like when you got in there and got

00:34:45.640 behind the curtain and see like, you know, like the NIH, the EPA, like, just see what's

00:34:50.980 going on back there. What were some of the biggest cases of fraud that you kind of found?

00:34:54.360 I mean, the biggest cases are what were, we got, between Medicaid and Medicare, there's

00:34:59.880 about a hundred billion stolen every year. And a lot of it is, um, like what's happening

00:35:06.540 in Minnesota with the Somali community and what's happening now, even worse in California. 1.00

00:35:13.540 Uh, but you know, one of the problems is that that's a systemic problem is that, um, Medicaid

00:35:22.600 and Medicare now won't, no longer, it used to be that they, that they paid for your medical

00:35:29.900 treatment, your doctor's visit. But now they pay for the person who takes you to the doctor

00:35:38.060 and they pay for home care and they pay for, um, you know, a person to come in and pay your

00:35:45.500 bills. Right. So there, there's, there's all kinds of opportunities for fraud. And a doctor

00:35:52.440 recently, you know, Oz told me this, told Oz, he said, and there was a doctor in California

00:35:59.660 that he visited and the doctor had a patient who was a heroin addict. Heroin addict was

00:36:05.500 coming to see him four times a month for some kind of a treatment. And one day he looked,

00:36:11.180 the doctor looked out the door and saw his ex-wife waiting for him in the car. And the doctor said,

00:36:17.680 oh, are you back together with your ex-wife? And he said, no, I hate her guts. And he said, 0.99

00:36:21.840 but she drives me because she gets paid $600 every time she drives me. Wow. And he said,

00:36:27.840 that'll put you back together with your ex. We make $3,000 a month, you know, with her driving

00:36:32.780 me this and then I drive her to hers. Wow. And so there's all kinds of those opportunities for

00:36:38.820 fraud. And, you know, we found a hotel that had literally every room and it was the headquarters

00:36:49.140 for a nursing group. Where was that located? It was in California. God. And, you know,

00:36:56.460 so they're all just PO boxes. They're not actually doing any nursing care. No, they're just collecting

00:37:03.460 money. And as we now know, a lot of the money that was, you know, was, was going into the Somali

00:37:09.140 community for autism care. There were these phony autism care houses. Yeah. And a lot of it was

00:37:15.840 ending up with Al-Shabaab in, in Somalia. So hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars

00:37:22.480 were being stolen, shipped to Somalia to, um, to fund a terrorist group. And, but that's happening

00:37:30.400 every day. Now we have the ability to catch them. How, how are you able to adjust that sort of thing

00:37:36.020 now? Like, like what makes it different now? Because first of all, under the Biden administration,

00:37:40.860 I don't want to get super partisan. Yeah. Um, but the Biden administration turned a blind eye to all

00:37:48.940 the fraud. It was mainly going to blue states and it was an economic generator. There's money pouring

00:37:56.400 into the blue states and, um, they, they just said, we're going to, we know a lot of it's stolen and

00:38:03.760 illegal, but we're going to let it happen because it's coming to us. It's coming to our state.

00:38:09.480 And so what we've done now is with Medicare, we control Medicare. The states control a lot of

00:38:16.580 Medicaid. So it's harder, a little harder for us to detect fraud there. We've started out with

00:38:22.440 Medicare. We're using AI and we're using AI, which can detect the fraud. You know, it can detect,

00:38:29.380 it can tell us whether this guy who is, who we're paying has been convicted of fraud before

00:38:35.360 and we shouldn't be paying them again. And it will be telling, telling us every aspect of his business

00:38:43.420 that we need to know to, to understand whether it's fraudulent. So we're going to save just this

00:38:48.880 year, tens of billions of dollars in eliminating fraud in Medicaid. And if they used to pay it

00:38:55.920 under the Biden administration, the system was called pay and chase. So if they sent in a fraudulent

00:39:03.180 invoice, we, even if we knew it was, the HHS knew it was fraudulent, they would pay it. And then they

00:39:09.880 would put the inspector general to go claw it back. And of course it wasn't there, but they, so they

00:39:15.120 never covered anything. Oh, I see. Now we're not going to pay them anymore. If they're fraudulent,

00:39:20.540 they're going to get, they're not going to get a check. We're going to save tens of billions of

00:39:25.760 dollars just this year. And we're going to save hundreds of billions over, you know, annually from

00:39:30.400 now on. And that's because the AI is keeping track of that? The AI can spot the fraud. Got it.

00:39:35.540 And, and with Medicare, with Medicaid, which is, you know, a joint state federal program,

00:39:44.240 it's a little, we don't control the rails and the states control them. And so we need state

00:39:51.160 cooperation and the red states are cooperating with us, but the blue states still won't cooperate. So

00:39:57.240 that's going to take some time. And then there's categories that are much easier for us to control,

00:40:04.000 like medical devices. We can do that quickly on our own, but there's other categories that are

00:40:09.380 going to be much more difficult, but we will get it done within the next three years.

00:40:14.080 Whenever, uh, Doge happened, right? When Doge occurred, when Elon was in or he was involved

00:40:19.520 or hypothetically involved, that's what it seemed like just like to the regular person.

00:40:22.400 He was definitely involved.

00:40:23.920 He was involved. Was that successful? Was that real? Like, what was the outcomes of that? Like,

00:40:28.520 did that seem like a, were you guys working together with that? Like, what was that all

00:40:34.200 about?

00:40:35.280 I, you know, I think even Elon has said that, um, there would have been better ways to do

00:40:41.100 it. And that we, you know, going after the systemic, what we're doing now, this is the,

00:40:47.740 you know, the, these large thefts, you can cut a couple of thousand people. And over the long

00:40:53.600 run, it's just, you know, drops of water in the ocean. Yeah. Oh, that's not going to save us huge

00:41:00.340 amounts of money over the longterm. But what we're doing now is going to. The things you were

00:41:05.440 just talking about, you mean? Yeah. That's going to help a lot. Yeah. Is Doge still active? Is that

00:41:11.040 program still active? What were the outcomes of that? Well, the outcomes were that a lot of,

00:41:16.120 you know, I cut my workforce by 20%, but you know, in truth, some of the, um, some of those

00:41:26.080 were very good cuts. It would, uh, I think we all agree, including Elon, that it would have been

00:41:31.880 better to do targeted cuts, you know, cut the people who were actually, um, causing the problem

00:41:38.900 and then keep the people, a lot of the new workers who, you know, who were only there for a couple of

00:41:44.260 months, um, that, that it might've been better to keep some of those people and change the culture.

00:41:51.760 I see. So yeah. Instead of more of like a mowing, more of like a pruning kind of thing, you mean?

00:41:56.760 Yeah. Do you think America is sicker than ever these days? It is sicker. We're the sickest country

00:42:04.540 in the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world. And that's one of the reasons

00:42:09.640 during COVID, we had, um, 19% of the COVID deaths in our country, and we only have 4.2% of the world's

00:42:18.060 population. And, um, so the question is, why did America do worse than any country in the world?

00:42:25.420 And COVID was it mismanaging? Part of it was that, but the big part, and this is what CDC says,

00:42:31.140 we're the sickest country in the world, that the average American who died from COVID

00:42:35.020 had 3.8 chronic diseases. And that's really what was killing them. It was very hard to die from COVID

00:42:43.440 if you were healthy. And, um, and so, you know, we need to get Americans healthy. We need to end the

00:42:50.140 chronic disease epidemic right now. We spend two to three times on our healthcare per capita,

00:42:57.700 what they spend in Europe. And yet we have the worst health outcomes in the world. We're 79.

00:43:02.660 Bring that up. Bring up a capita chart if you can.

00:43:06.620 We have the, you know, we've dropped behind Europe by, uh, by six years in lifespan, 10 years in some

00:43:15.240 cases. And yet our health outcomes are worse. We have the highest maternal immunity, highest maternal

00:43:22.080 mortality. That means women dying in childbirth in the developed world. We have the highest infant

00:43:27.120 mortality. How could that be with the United States? And a lot of it is because of chronic

00:43:32.500 disease. And then, you know, our diabetes rates. When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see

00:43:39.220 one case of diabetes over, juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50 year career. Today, 38% of American teens

00:43:48.220 is diabetic or pre-diabetic. God, it's unknown. Autism rates have gone from less than one in 10,000 in

00:43:56.440 1970 to one in 31 today. Oh yeah. You can throw a rock and hit an autistic kid anywhere. 1.00

00:44:03.720 And California is one in every 19 kids, one in every 12.5 boys. And so there's the cause to our

00:44:10.700 country. 77% of American kids can't qualify for military service. How many percent?

00:44:16.660 77% cannot get into the military because of all the reason. No. What? That is the truth.

00:44:23.940 Yeah. And. Oh my God, bro. That's insane. Yeah. That should get people's attention.

00:44:31.240 Bring that up. Is that true? Let me see if that's true. Bobby probably just uploaded this stat on the

00:44:37.040 internet from his phone a second ago, but still that's okay. That's how it works. 77% of American

00:44:42.620 youth can't qualify for military service. Yeah. And why? Because they have chronic disease.

00:44:49.520 They have asthma. They have diabetes. They have, you know, they're obese. One of those. But

00:44:58.040 when my uncle was present, I was a 10 year old kid. We spend zero on chronic disease in this

00:45:04.680 country. Zero. Today we spend 4.3 trillion a year. And it's about 40 cents out of every

00:45:12.580 tax dollar that is paid by you to the federal government. It's now going to treat chronic

00:45:18.560 disease. And it's, uh, it's unsustainable and it's getting worse every year.

00:45:23.780 And who's, is it, is it, do you find that it falls more on it's the responsibility of the

00:45:29.120 individual? We're not taking care of ourselves or is it that we have a health, a system that

00:45:34.820 is allowing, uh, I don't want to just say foods and drugs, but allowing things into us that

00:45:41.980 is not maintaining our natural health. I mean, individuals have a responsibility, but the

00:45:49.520 obesity, when, when I was a kid, 5% of kids, children were obese. Yeah. You had one kind

00:45:54.480 of fat kid in your class. Yeah. And today it's, uh, you know, 15% it's going overweight is 0.97

00:46:01.700 40%. Uh, adults it's even higher. We should just have a thick military then I think. But

00:46:07.580 people did not get, Americans did not get obese because they're indolent or lazy or they don't

00:46:15.080 want to do exercise. They got that way cause they're being mass poisoned and they're being

00:46:20.340 mass poisoned because the government lied to them and it lied about the food. So, um, now

00:46:26.700 70% of the food that our kids eat is ultra processed food and it's just poison. It's not

00:46:33.340 food. It's just poison. And which agencies allowed that? I mean, the EPA puts labels like

00:46:37.660 the FDA. Yeah. So do you feel like that's been one of the most compromised agencies?

00:46:42.120 Yeah. It was owned by big pharma and big food and we're, you know, Marty McCary has changed

00:46:47.540 that now. So how do we know that that's changed? Like how do we as like a... Look at the food

00:46:52.760 pyramid and the, you know, the food pyramid. When I came into office, we were supposed to

00:46:58.560 publish, it was in January of last year. Oh yeah. The last food pyramid I saw had vapes

00:47:04.760 on it. So it was getting pretty bad. We're doing vapes now. You mean the food pyramid?

00:47:08.920 Oh, the last one. Yeah. That's funny. I was like, this is getting bad. Uh, uh, the food pyramid.

00:47:16.180 So when I came in, we were, uh, the, the Biden administration had prepared new dietary guidelines

00:47:23.180 and they, they were 453 pages long and they were completely driven by the same mercantile

00:47:31.700 impulses that put fruit loops at the top of the food pyramid. How do you put fruit loops,

00:47:37.620 which is not a food at the top of the food pyramid? It's just poison. Yeah. And that, but it was

00:47:43.540 all driven by the commercial interests of the companies that controlled FDA. So when we came

00:47:50.800 in, we, we went, we got the best nutritionists from the best universities in our country. We

00:47:56.620 basically locked them in a room. We, we thought it would take a month, but it took about 11

00:48:01.380 months as they fought over every single item on this in the food pyramid. It took them 11

00:48:07.360 months to put this together? Yeah. Because you have to go over to science, you know, what is

00:48:11.580 broccoli? How does it relate to how much protein should you eat? How much saturated fat should

00:48:17.820 you eat? What's optimal? And so they had to go through tens of thousands of scientific papers

00:48:23.960 to make sure that every recommendation that we made is based solidly on a foundation of gold

00:48:31.380 standard science. So for this, this, so this, for them to create the food pyramid, it took 11 months.

00:48:35.940 Yeah. And then we flipped it over. So we flipped it over because the category of food that you should

00:48:43.380 eat, you know, most is a broad category. It includes vegetables. It includes proteins, you know,

00:48:50.560 salmon and steak and, and most of this is for children, right? Well, no, this is good for

00:48:57.040 everybody. I mean, most diabetes. I remember from like when I was a kid, you know, you would see it,

00:49:02.140 you know? Yeah. Right. But I guess that's the first point you learn about it. That's, and that's

00:49:06.480 why we're all so screwed up. But the, you know, most diabetes can be cured through diet. And the

00:49:16.560 doctors don't know this because they don't take, most of them aren't taking nutrition in medical

00:49:20.240 school. And we're now requiring, or we're working with the medical, with the accreditors and with the

00:49:26.640 testing, the people who do the MCAT to make sure there's tests on nutrition. We're working with

00:49:32.400 all the medical colleges to make sure that now doctors are going to have 40 hours of nutrition

00:49:39.740 in school. 80% of doctors say they do not feel competent to give nutrition advice. So what are

00:49:48.020 they learning? They're learning pharmacology, right? They're learning the pill. Let everybody get sick

00:49:53.460 from eating the food and then tell them the pill that will treat that sickness. Yeah. At that point,

00:49:57.700 you're just a drug dealer. And you can get rid of the diagnosis. Not only that, but now, you know,

00:50:03.220 there's, there's really clear science that you can get rid of mental health diagnoses. That food can

00:50:08.840 cure mental health problems. There's a doctor at Harvard, Dr. Pollan, who is, who has cured

00:50:15.960 schizophrenia with dietary changes, with keto diets. There's a paper that-

00:50:21.660 Is that true? Go ahead and look it up. Cure schizophrenia with keto diets? Yeah. Well,

00:50:27.620 I definitely noticed that when I'm fasting, I get, I'm pretty smart. Yeah. You get smarter,

00:50:33.780 right? Yeah. Preliminary clinical findings, including case reports, and small traits suggest

00:50:38.180 that ketogenic therapy may improve positive and negative symptoms, cognitive performance outcomes,

00:50:42.640 and individual schizophrenia spectrum disorders. I mean, I believe that so much of this is true,

00:50:47.060 just that like, that so much of it is how we are operating. Um, it just feels like we've been stuck

00:50:54.440 in such a place where you have a, like, you have, you have a food industry that doesn't care if you're

00:50:59.940 healthy. And then you have a healthcare industry that doesn't care if you get well. Everybody's

00:51:04.840 making money from us being sick. And I, I'll say one other thing about this. There are all these,

00:51:10.800 there are dozens and dozens of studies and you can look them up of their case controlled studies of

00:51:16.920 juvenile detention facilities and prisons where they change, for example, in one wing, the diet to

00:51:24.260 real food and they leave the other diet in there. And that the disciplinary, the fighting, the violence

00:51:31.120 drops precipitously. The use of restraints in one juvenile detention facility dropped by 75%.

00:51:38.120 Usually the violence, uh, uh, drops by 40 or 50%. And you know, people, it caused depression. It caused

00:51:47.460 anxiety. These foods, you know, if your kid has anxiety, look at what they're eating and you can

00:51:53.700 change that in many cases by changing their diet and getting them to eat real food. Yeah. How, how do

00:52:00.280 you get the everyday person then to adjust their psychology or like their thought, like about taking more of

00:52:07.360 an interest in themselves, you know, cause I think it used to be, you trusted the commercials. You're

00:52:11.720 like, this is great for, you know, it was like, and you believed that, you know? Yeah. I mean, the way to

00:52:17.740 change human behavior is one, get information out there. That's real information. The other thing that

00:52:22.840 you have to do is you have to change the economic incentives. And, um, right now we have perverse

00:52:30.440 incentives that reimbursed doctors that, you know, that insurers, pharmaceutical companies,

00:52:36.760 the doctors, the hospitals are more making more money. If you're sick, the rehab would drug rehabs.

00:52:43.320 If you come back, if you come back, if you relapse, they make more money, right?

00:52:48.800 They shouldn't be paid that way. The insurance company should pay them one lump sum and then follow

00:52:53.960 that addict for the next two years. And every time he comes back, you got to treat them for free

00:52:58.920 and that will incentivize them to do better treatment. Yeah. To do treatment that works.

00:53:04.240 And the ones that can't do that will fail. And the ones that can do it, that get better and better

00:53:08.300 at it will do it. You change the economic incentives, you'll change human behavior. And then you have to

00:53:14.040 get the information to the individual. And that's what we're doing. We're doing, we've, um,

00:53:19.680 Matt, we've convened the 400 top tech companies before this administration. You could not get

00:53:26.820 your own health records. So you own your health records, but you couldn't see them. You can't

00:53:33.040 get ahold of them. What do you mean? Why not? Because they would information block you. They

00:53:36.920 would make sure you couldn't get them. And now we've got them all to agree. They're going to stop

00:53:40.880 the information blocking. Oh, your medical records will be on your cell phone. And that is great for

00:53:46.880 you. Because if you live in Nashville and you travel to Los Angeles, you get hit by a car.

00:53:53.600 You don't want to spend an hour in the emergency room with a clipboard making out, you know, one

00:53:57.780 of those forms. Yeah. You hand your cell phone to the doctor. He puts it in AI and he knows what

00:54:05.240 your blood type is, what your allergies are, what your contraindications, you know, previous

00:54:09.740 treatments, et cetera. Yeah. It is ridiculous. You have to do that all the time. Right. So what

00:54:15.240 President Trump said to me is he said, I want to make every American the CEO of their own health,

00:54:22.080 that they're in charge of it. And then we're doing, you know, we've got, now we've changed

00:54:26.980 the prior authorization. We've got 80% of the insurance industry together to eliminate all

00:54:33.720 unnecessary prior authorization, which is going to change the experience that every American has

00:54:40.480 with the healthcare system. As when you go to a doctor, he says, you need a knee surgery.

00:54:46.760 You may wait six months for your insurance company to approve it. You can't do anything

00:54:52.940 about it. And now we, by the end of this year, you will know at the point of care, that means

00:55:00.700 before you leave your doctor's office, you'll know whether your insurance company will cover

00:55:04.620 that. And, um, that's going to dramatically change it. We were also, but does that make

00:55:10.020 it any more likely that they're going to cover it or does it just make it that you're going

00:55:13.420 to know? It makes it so that you'll know. And so the doctor will know there before you

00:55:17.040 leave. Got it. And the doctor can change the prescription or whatever you need to do.

00:55:23.240 You'll at least know, and you won't be, you know, sitting at home. And then the other-

00:55:26.660 And that's actually going to happen?

00:55:27.720 That's happening. Yeah. And then, uh, the other thing that we're doing is we're doing

00:55:33.620 price transparency so that every hospital will have to publish its prices for every procedure.

00:55:40.640 How are the patients? Are you familiar with them?

00:55:42.000 Exactly. And that's to make you the CEO of your own health.

00:55:45.760 They already are supposed to do that, right?

00:55:47.180 It was a law that Trump passed in his first term, but Biden never enforced it. So none of

00:55:51.420 the hospitals do it. We've now passed new regulations that is going to punish them,

00:55:57.040 draconian way if they don't do it. So they're all going to be doing it by the end of this year.

00:56:01.280 Are they going to try to find a way to skirt around that though, I wonder? Like, are they-

00:56:03.980 Well, there, it's, no, and it's so screwed up because if you go buy an automobile and the

00:56:10.600 guy tells you, yeah, but I'm not going to tell you the price until after you bought it. 0.90

00:56:13.880 Yeah, it's insane.

00:56:14.420 You'd be, you know, and right now, if you're pregnant in this country, you could go nine months

00:56:21.080 on the phone every day trying to figure out what the childbirth is going to cost you in your

00:56:25.700 local hospital and not be able to do it. And we are bound to go online with a system that

00:56:32.300 will make all procedures visible to every patient. So I actually looked at the mock-up

00:56:37.340 two days ago for New York and it shows a map of Manhattan and a mile around Manhattan and

00:56:48.300 there's 30 hospitals and it shows the price of childbirth at every hospital.

00:56:53.780 The lowest one is $1,300. The highest is $22,000. And it's everything in between $9,000, $5,000, $3,000.

00:57:01.520 You can look and see.

00:57:02.780 You can look and see.

00:57:03.940 You'll be able to go to a menu online.

00:57:05.340 Yeah, it's like Gas Buddy when you're looking for a gas station, but you're going to be able

00:57:09.260 to do that.

00:57:09.700 Yeah, a clean bathroom or whatever, that clean bathroom, that one's crazy. And they lie on

00:57:14.480 there. And some of them are at rest areas too. And I, yeah, I got accosted by a guy who

00:57:19.360 was in a, I guess he was like an Easter, but he was like an Easter bunny, like impersonator

00:57:22.760 or whatever. Anyway, whatever. Good to be here today. So you're telling me that that's

00:57:29.120 going to be a real thing. That's going to be available to us on our phone. So say if

00:57:32.220 you, I need to get an MRI, I can look online.

00:57:34.660 You can look and find. And right now there's no way that you can figure out the price of

00:57:39.440 an MRI.

00:57:39.760 And they'll lie to you. And, but if you, but if you call them and say, okay, I'm not going

00:57:42.760 to come, I've had experiences where they will call you back and then we'll offer you a lower

00:57:48.760 right. Yes.

00:57:49.760 But they're all playing that game and now they're not going to be able to do it anymore.

00:57:52.760 How soon is that going to be released?

00:57:54.160 It's going to be released very, very soon in the next couple of months. All the hospitals

00:57:58.480 now have to come online and start reporting. And the ones that don't do it immediately,

00:58:03.640 we are going to have very, very high fines for them. So there's going to be big incentive

00:58:08.000 for them to start reporting, but it also is going to drive down prices because why is there

00:58:14.200 that absurd differential between 1,300 and 22,000?

00:58:17.920 It's just because we don't know.

00:58:19.200 Because we don't know. So there's no market. So they do whatever the hell they want. And

00:58:24.280 now there's going to be competition because people will be having to shop.

00:58:28.960 But won't there be lobbyists that are, aren't there lobbyists just fighting you? I mean,

00:58:32.240 right here it says, here's compiled a list of example of hospitals and childbirth costs

00:58:35.340 in Nashville based on available self-pay cash bundles. Ascension St. Thomas is 4,800 to

00:58:41.200 7,800. National general is 10,000 to 15,000.

00:58:45.200 Yeah. I mean, why is there that?

00:58:46.960 Yeah.

00:58:47.200 That's just chaos.

00:58:48.240 That's chaos.

00:58:48.620 There's no market there.

00:58:51.080 Yeah. But I mean, it's unbelievable. And this happens at every single, it can be something

00:58:55.920 as small as getting like an aspirin when you're in the hospital. It can be anything where

00:59:00.020 they just bill you later and like, oh, it's a $70 aspirin.

00:59:02.480 Or they'll say to you, you know, if you want, you can spend an extra day here.

00:59:06.220 Right. 0.97

00:59:06.460 You look sick. You look like you could use the rest. And you'll say, I'll do that. 0.96

00:59:11.080 And then you get a $100,000 bill.

00:59:12.980 That's crazy. Yeah. And they only have fluorescent lights.

00:59:16.440 You could have gone to the Four Seasons.

00:59:18.920 For, yeah, for four years at that rate. So that's, so that's actually going to come into

00:59:25.100 play.

00:59:25.580 Yeah, that will be in play.

00:59:26.920 And what's that going to be called? How will we access it?

00:59:29.200 It's called Price Transparency. I think we're calling it Trump-parency.

00:59:36.980 Really?

00:59:37.580 No.

00:59:37.960 Oh. I mean, if Trump named it, he would. I mean, he would name it that in a heartbeat,

00:59:43.180 you know? Oh, that's hilarious, though. Trump-parency, dude. Oh, it's opaque.

00:59:50.640 What does opaque mean, actually? Look it up. I don't know if I'll land it.

00:59:53.400 Opaque.

00:59:54.640 Yeah.

00:59:55.240 So did I land that right or not? It was somewhere in the middle there.

00:59:57.260 It's halfway transparent.

00:59:58.540 Yeah, there you go. Hey.

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01:02:47.620 you. This is a paid advertisement. That's see, that's one of the most important things. That's

01:02:54.120 something that, that, uh, that we've been talking about in here for probably like a year and a half

01:02:57.460 now, two years is the price transparency, power to the patients. That's one of the groups that's

01:03:01.520 like helping to push that. I know, um, who are the people that are lobbying so hard for these things

01:03:06.900 not to happen? Well, there were a lot of people in the agency who were, you know, obstructing any kind

01:03:14.360 of change. And, you know, part of the challenge of running an agency, this size is to, is to change

01:03:23.540 that, you know, the institutional culture. And, you know, it's, you're only bringing in, there's

01:03:31.120 82,000 people. We only have 250 political appointees. So they have to be good leaders. They have to

01:03:39.120 be able to work with the bureaucracy. You need the bureaucracy. A lot of these people are very

01:03:44.480 gifted. They're idealistic. They want to do a good job. The leadership has been very bad for so long

01:03:50.800 that, um, it's, you know, it's not allowed them to do what they want. And, uh, and, you know, we need

01:03:59.220 to reignite that feeling of idealism. Do you feel good about it? Yeah, I think we're doing a really

01:04:05.800 good job. I mean, I think we've done more this year than any health secretary has done in history

01:04:12.820 that HHS has done in a single year at any time. And I think we're dramatically, uh, changing the, um,

01:04:22.860 the relationship between Americans and their healthcare system. But, you know, it's like turning

01:04:27.240 a, a giant oil tank or you have to keep hitting it and hitting with the tugboat in the bow.

01:04:32.840 And then ultimately it will start to turn. And then, you know, you hit that, um, you hit it just

01:04:40.120 enough times that don't flip them flip fast. And things change. I know before you leave you had,

01:04:45.560 there's a lot of like, uh, stuff that's focused around addiction, right? Um, what do you want to

01:04:50.120 say about, uh, where do you think that we're headed with that? Some of the new things that you guys are

01:04:54.440 going to try to implement, like with, with part of your new program, like what are some of the new

01:04:58.060 implementations or some of the new focuses that you want to have people look at when they look at

01:05:02.100 addiction? Yeah. I mean, the, the, the problem with addiction is that the costs of the addict,

01:05:10.320 you know, we at, at, at HHS, we're the fiduciary, the medical costs of the addict. So we can look

01:05:19.520 and say, okay, if we can cure you from addiction, you know, I have a cousin who, you know, Patrick

01:05:25.920 Kennedy and who was in Congress, but he did, he had 17 rehabs and he was telling me during that

01:05:32.580 period of his life, he was at the emergency room every two weeks and he had, oh, he had an

01:05:38.880 irritated bowel syndrome and he had contusions and he had all of these, you know, other illnesses that

01:05:46.320 he didn't even associate with addiction, but they were all associated with. And you know that,

01:05:50.760 you know, so, and he said in 15 years that he's been sober, he's never been to the emergency room

01:05:56.820 once. And so HHS is able to look at those costs and those trajectories and all those collateral

01:06:03.640 damage in the healthcare system. The addict's costing elsewhere, a lot more money with law enforcement,

01:06:11.720 with broken families, with, you know, lost jobs and inefficiencies. And those aren't internalized

01:06:17.780 anywhere. And what we're trying to do is bring together all of the agencies, the VA, Labor,

01:06:24.880 HUD, and HHS, all the agencies of HHS together to look at that addict and then follow him over,

01:06:34.640 have somebody responsible for following him over the lifespan of his addiction. And nobody does that.

01:06:42.080 And so now it's the same problem that we have with the healthcare system is that it's everybody's

01:06:48.400 financial benefit to keep that addict sick because everybody's making money from him. And so, you don't

01:06:57.000 have anybody who's accountable for the outcome. And what you need to do is, you know, we're doing

01:07:02.580 these pilot programs called street and eight different locales to figure out how to do this,

01:07:07.260 to bring all the agencies together, do early interventions, confront the addict on the street,

01:07:14.100 get them out of crisis, into treatment, out of treatment, into, you know, rehab, out of rehab,

01:07:21.180 into sober housing, long-term care, help them find a job and to stabilize their lives and have one

01:07:28.520 person who's responsible for that whole trajectory.

01:07:30.700 Amen. Yeah. Because when it goes piecemeal like that, it's just like, it's easy for people to just-

01:07:36.240 I hand them off. And then everybody checks the boxes.

01:07:38.740 Yeah. And everybody-

01:07:39.600 I found him a house. Okay. He's still shooting up. He's pulling the copper wad, you know,

01:07:44.880 piping out to pay for his dad. That's not my business.

01:07:48.240 Yeah.

01:07:48.900 That's law enforcement. That's somebody else.

01:07:51.840 Well, thank you. I just, I think it's amazing that you care so much about that. And yeah,

01:07:56.460 I just, yeah, for the chance that people can get well and change their lives. Before you go,

01:08:00.440 Bobby, you and I have been friends and I've always trusted you and I've always, you know,

01:08:04.420 I'll believe in you and I just know you as a person. And I know, um, this is a guy at certain

01:08:09.200 points in your life. I think you just have to make sure he's like, this is a guy I believe in,

01:08:11.920 right? Like for as much as you can believe in a human being, you know, like acceptable levels.

01:08:16.560 Um, who are some other, uh, like congressmen and senators on either side of the aisle that you

01:08:22.740 believe that we can, that regular people like me can trust?

01:08:27.860 People that I, there's, there's a ton of Congress people who are incredible and

01:08:33.060 there are actually too many to, to even name, to start naming because there's so many good ones.

01:08:39.240 But in the Senate, Ron Johnson, who you know, is fantastic. Roger Marshall from Kansas is fantastic.

01:08:46.580 Um, Mark, Wayne Mullins, um, uh, the president isn't crazy about Rand Paul, but Rand Paul has been

01:08:54.880 really, really good on a lot of my issues. Um, and you know, there's a lot of other ones too. So,

01:09:02.300 you know, what about Senator Hawley? Have you, are you familiar with him?

01:09:06.760 Yeah. Yeah. And he's great. Um, you know, I've had tremendous support from the Senate,

01:09:13.040 from the Republicans and the Democrats who've been my friend of my whole lifetime are, you know,

01:09:18.680 it's just so tribal now that, um, people, you know, are not able to follow their conscience.

01:09:27.960 They need to, they need to, uh, ask their handlers, all that. Well, they need to be part of the,

01:09:34.940 you know, the, the clash of tribal narratives. And, you know, my family is the same way. Um,

01:09:42.040 you know, I lost a lot of family and a lot of friends and, you know, my, the democratic senators

01:09:47.400 were all my friends. Bernie was my friend, et cetera. But now, um, they are, you know,

01:09:55.480 they're just locked in. If you're, if you have anything to do with Trump, you're, you know,

01:10:00.480 you're demonized and vilified. And like president Trump says, he said, if I cured cancer, they'd still

01:10:07.540 find something wrong with me. And I think that's true that we're not, you know, we're,

01:10:12.580 we're locked in this very, very polarized space and is not good for our country. Um, when my uncle

01:10:19.860 was in there, everything he did was bipartisan. He was there for 50 years and, you know, he did,

01:10:26.960 he had more legislation under his name than any Senator in history. And it's because he was able

01:10:32.800 to work across the aisles, but no matter who you are now, you can't work across the aisle. So we're

01:10:38.040 locked in this deadlock and it's very, it's, um, it's troubling. Um, but you know, that it's just

01:10:46.300 the reality of where we are. Whenever you kind of got behind the curtain, was there any more

01:10:51.140 information for you there about, um, any of the assassination attempts that had happened with your

01:10:55.660 family or anything like that? No, I mean my, like, did they give you any more like unredacted

01:10:59.680 statement? Like, was there anything like that? No, I mean, the president Trump has ordered all

01:11:05.200 that stuff to be released. And in fact, there was some stuff that I asked him not to release

01:11:11.580 and he said, no, I'm releasing all of it. And I, the reason I didn't want to release this

01:11:15.620 because there was, um, there was information in some of the telegrams, um, that could have

01:11:25.540 jeopardized a, um, uh, people who were still alive on a completely different issue. But it seemed to

01:11:35.520 me that it was, you know, that it's, it was worth withholding a couple of these documents. The

01:11:42.180 reason I knew a lot about it is because my daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, who ran my 0.93

01:11:48.800 campaign is now the deputy director of, of national intelligence. And she's the chief of, uh, national

01:11:56.100 intelligence at OMB. And she was given the responsibility, uh, by president Trump of, um,

01:12:04.120 of releasing all the JFK files. And she's been thinking about this for years. She was in the CIA.

01:12:11.180 Um, that's wild. She, uh, I met her. Yeah, you've met her. Um, but, but so no,

01:12:17.920 nobody slipped to a napkin and was like, no, it wasn't like that. Not, not on that issue.

01:12:24.980 Got it. And then napkins slipped to me on other issues, but not on that one.

01:12:29.280 Before you go. And thanks so much, man. I appreciate it. And it's great to see you.

01:12:32.380 You look great. And, uh, I'm so proud of you, you know, I mean, I know you don't care about

01:12:36.240 that maybe, or you do. I don't know. It doesn't matter. I shouldn't have said that. I'm just

01:12:40.140 like, yeah, you just, Oh, you're, Oh, you always remind me of like a, just to be resilient.

01:12:44.780 So thank you. Um, that's what I meant to say. Um, yeah. If you had just like, if you had one

01:12:52.980 thing to just tell just people, like, what would you tell them? I mean, I'd say eat real food.

01:12:59.940 If it comes in a package, you probably should leave it in the package, but you know, if it comes

01:13:04.740 from the ground, if it comes from the water, if it comes from the air, you know, that's going to be

01:13:11.100 good for you. And, and food is medicine and, uh, you can heal yourself with a good diet.

01:13:18.120 Amen. Cool, man. Thanks so much for hanging out, dude. And congratulations. And, uh, yeah,

01:13:23.120 keep fighting for us. We appreciate it.

01:13:25.740 Thank you. Great to see you.

01:13:27.800 You too, bud.

01:13:28.260 Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must

01:13:34.600 be cornerstone. Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind. I found I can

01:13:45.240 feel it in my bones, but it's gonna take...

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This Past Weekend with Theo Von - February 12, 2026

#639 - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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