It's Not Our Business to Change the Russian Government

We must accept that it is not our responsibility to change the government in Russia, which possesses more nuclear weapons than we do. This stance may seem counterintuitive, especially given the current tensions between our nations. However, considering the implications of such an action would be irresponsible and reckless.

Vladimir Putin's assertion that "we will not live in a world without Russia" was clear evidence of his true intentions. By making this statement, he emphasized his own significance and the potential catastrophic consequences of his actions. This raises a crucial question: why are we meddling with a situation that could lead to global Armageddon? Our involvement would be detrimental to our nation's well-being.

Moreover, by pushing Russia into an alliance with China, we compromise our country's interests. We must reevaluate our approach and refrain from treating Russia as an enemy. This is not only counterproductive but also jeopardizes the safety of our nation.

We Should Be Making Friends with the Russians

It is crucial to recognize that our current actions do not appear to be weakening Vladimir Putin or his regime. Instead, we should focus on establishing a rapport with Russia. By doing so, we can create an environment conducive to cooperation and mutual understanding.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Views on Science and Engineering

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Democratic candidate for president, is not only a passionate advocate for science and engineering but also a seasoned activist, lawyer, and author. As someone who has challenged powerful corporations in the past, he brings a unique perspective to the table.

Kennedy's love for science and engineering stems from his belief that these pursuits are among the most beautiful and powerful aspects of human civilization. Science is not only a means of understanding the universe but also a tool to alleviate suffering and improve the human condition. Kennedy has had the privilege of interacting with some of the greatest minds in science, including many of his good friends.

However, Kennedy emphasizes that science cannot flourish without certain fundamental principles. Epistemic humility, or the acknowledgment of our own limitations, is essential for scientific progress. Furthermore, open debate and discussion are necessary to refine our understanding of the world and to address controversies such as those surrounding vaccines.

Kennedy's concerns about dogmatic skepticism and its potential to undermine trust in the scientific process are well-founded. It is equally important to recognize that an overzealous rejection of scientific evidence can be just as damaging, if not more so. Kennedy advocates for a balanced approach, one that values both critical thinking and open-mindedness.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Voice Should Be Part of the Debate

Kennedy's views on various topics, including vaccines and their safety, have sparked controversy in the past. However, he believes that his opinions and ideas should be part of the public discourse. He argues that dismissing his perspectives without engaging with them would diminish the public's trust in the scientific process.

Conversely, Kennedy warns against dogmatic skepticism, which can lead to a narrow-minded approach to scientific inquiry. This approach not only stifles intellectual growth but also hinders our ability to address pressing issues like pandemics. By embracing Kennedy's voice and engaging with his arguments, we can foster a more inclusive and nuanced discussion.

Conclusion

The conversation between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vincent Racaniello highlights the importance of engaging with diverse perspectives on scientific topics. While Kennedy advocates for open-mindedness and critical thinking, he also emphasizes the need for epistemic humility. By embracing both skepticism and debate, we can refine our understanding of the world and address complex issues like pandemics more effectively.

Ultimately, it is crucial to recognize that science is a journey, not a destination. We must continue to explore, question, and learn from one another to create a better world for all.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en- It's not our business tochange the Russian government.And anybody who thinks it's agood idea to do regime change,in Russia, which has morenuclear weapons than we do,is, I think, irresponsible.And, you know, VladimirPutin himself has had,you know, we will not livein a world without Russia.And it was clear when he said that,that he was talking about himself,and he has his hand on a buttonthat could bring, you know,Armageddon to the entire planet.So why are we messing with this?It's not our job to change that regime.And, we should be makingfriends with the Russians.We shouldn't be treating him as an enemy.Now, we've pushed himinto the camp with China.That's not a good thing for our country.And by the way, you know,what we're doing now does not appearto be weakening Putin at all.- The following is a conversationwith Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Candidate for the Presidentof the United States,running as a Democrat.Robert is an activist, lawyer and author,who has challenged some ofthe world's most powerfulcorporations seeking tohold them accountable,for the harm they may cause.I love science and engineering.These two pursuits are, to me,the most beautiful and powerful,in the history of human civilization.Science is our journey, our fight,for uncovering the laws ofnature and leveraging them,to understand the universe and to lessenthe amount of suffering in the world.Some of the greatest humanbeings I've ever met,including most of my good friends,are scientists and engineers.Again, I love science,but science cannotflourish without epistemic,humility without debate,both in the pages of academicjournals and in the public square.In good faith, long form conversations.Agree or disagree, Ibelieve Robert's voiceshould be part of the debate.To call him a conspiracy theorist,and arrogantly dismiss everything he says,without addressing it,diminishes the public's trust,in the scientific process.At the same time, dogmatic skepticismof all scientific outputon controversial topics,like the pandemic is equally,if not more, dishonest and destructive.I recommend that people read and listen,to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.His arguments and his ideas.But I also recommend, as Isay in this conversation,that people read and listento Vincent Racaniello,from \"This Week in Virology,\"Dan Wilson from \"Debunk The Funk,\"and the Twitter and booksof Paul Offit, Eric Topol,and others who are outspoken,in their disagreement with Robert.It is disagreement, not conformity,that bends the long arc ofhumanity toward truth and wisdom.In this process of disagreement,everybody has a lesson to teach you,but we must have the humility to hear it,and to learn from it.This is \"The Lex FridmanPodcast,\" to support it,please check out oursponsors in the description.And now, dear friends,here's Robert F. Kennedy Jr.It's the 4th of July Independence Day.So simple question, simple, big question.What do you love about this country,the United States of America?- I would say, well,there's so many things thatI love about the country on,you know, the landscapes andthe waterways and the people,et cetera, but on the kind of a,you know, the higher level,people argue about whetherwe're an exemplary nation.And, that term has been given a bad name,particularly by the neocons,the actions, the neocons,in recent decades who have turned that,that phrase into kind of a justification,for forcing people to adoptAmerican systems or values,at the barrel of a gun.But my father and uncle usedit in a very different way,and they were very proud of it.I grew up very proud ofthis country because,we were the exemplary nation,in the sense that we were an example,of democracy all over the world.When we first launchedour democracy in 1780,we were the only democracy on Earth.And by the Civil War, by 1865,there were six democracies.Today there's probably190 and all of them,in one way or another, are modeled,on the American experience.And it's kind ofextraordinary because sort of,our first contact with,our first serious and sustained contact,with the European culture and continent,was in 1608 when John Winthrop came over,with his puritans in the Arbella,and Winthrop gave thisfamous speech where he said,\"this is a gonna be a city on a hill.This is gonna be an example for, you know,all the other nations in the world.\"And he warned that his fellow puritans,they were, you know, sitting at the,this great expanse of land.And he said, \"we can't be,we can't be seduced,by the lure of real estate,or by the carnalopportunities of this land.We have to take thiscountry as a gift from God,and then turn it into an example,for the rest of the world of God's love,of God's will, and wisdom.\"And 200 years later,250 years later, a different generation.They're mainly deists.They are people who had a belief in God,but not so much a love,of particularly religious cosmologies.You know, the framers, the Constitution,believe that we were creating something,that would be replicated around the world.And that it was an example.It would, in democracy,there would be this kindof wisdom from the collective, you know,and the word wisdom meansa knowledge of God's will.And that somehow God wouldspeak through the collective,in a way that, that he orshe could not speak through,you know, through totalitarian regimes.And, you know, I thinkthat that's something,that even though Winthrop wasa white man and a Protestant,that every immigrantgroup who came after them,kind of adopted that belief.And I know my family when, you know,my family came over, all ofmy grandparents came over,in 1848 during the potato famine.And, they saw this countryis unique in history,is something that, you know,that was part of kind of abroader spiritual mission.And so, I'd say that froma 30,000 foot level that,I grew up so proud of thiscountry and believing that it wasthe greatest country in theworld, and for those reasons.- Well, I immigrated to this country.And one of the things that really embodiesAmerica to me is the ideal of freedom.Hunter S. Thompson said,\"freedom is something thatdies unless it's used.\"What does freedom mean to you?- To me, freedom does notmean, you know, chaos.And it does not mean anarchy.It means that,it has to be accompanied by restraint.If it's going to live up to its promise,in the self-restraint,what it means is thecapacity for human beings,to exercise and to fulfill their,their creative energies unrestrained,as much as possible by government.- So this point that HunterS. Thompson has made,it \"dies unless it's used.\"Do you agree with that?- Yeah, I do agree with that.And you know, he was notunique in saying that,you know, Thomas Jeffersonsaid that the Tree of Libertyhad to be watered with theblood of each generation.And what he meant by that is that,you can't live off, we can't live offthe laurels of the American Revolution.That, you know, we had a group,we had a generation where between 25,000,and 70,000 Americans died.They gave their lives, theygave their livelihoods,they gave their status,they gave their property,and they put it all on the line,to give us our bill of rights and that.But those Bill of Rights,the moment that we signed them,there were forces within our society,that began trying to chip away at them.And that, you know, happensin every generation.And it is the obligationof every generation,to safeguard and protect those freedoms.- The blood of each generation.You mentioned your interest,your admiration ofAlbert Camus of stoicism,perhaps your interest in existentialism.Camus said, I believe,in \"Myth of Sisyphus,\"\"the only way to dealwith an unfree world,is to become so absolutely free thatyour very existence isan act of rebellion.\"What do you think he means by that?- I suppose the way thatCamus viewed the world,and the way that the stoics did,and a lot of the existentialists was,that it was so absurd and that,the problems and thetasks that were given,just to live a life are so insurmountable,that the only way that we cankind of get back at the godsfor giving us this, you know,this impossible task of living life,was to embrace it and to enjoy it,and to do our best at it.I mean, to me, you know, I read Camus,and particularly inthe \"Myth of Sisyphus,\"kind of as a parable that,and it's the same lesson that I think,he writes about in \"The Plague,\"where we're all giventhese insurmountable tasks,in our lives, but that by doing our duty,by being of service to others,we can bring meaningto a meaningless chaos,and we can bring order to the universe.And, you know, Sisyphus,was kind of the iconic hero of the stoics.And he was a man because he did,because he did something good.He delivered a gift to humanity.He angered the gods,and they condemned him,to push a rock up the hill every day.And then it would roll down.When he got to the top,it would roll down,and he'd spend the nightgoing back down the hill,to collect it and then rolling it back,back up the hill again.And the task was absurd,it was insurmountable.He could never win.But the last line of that bookis one of the great lines,which is something to theextent that, you know,\"I can picture Sisyphus smiling.\"Because Camus' beliefwas that even though,his task was insurmountable,that he was a happy man,and he was a happy man becausehe put his shoulder to the stone.He took his duty, he embraced the task,and the absurdity of life,and he pushed the stone up the hill.And that if we do that, and if, you know,we find ways of beingof service to others,that is, you know, the ultimate,that's the key to the lock.That's the solution to the puzzle.- Each individual person inthat way can rebel againstabsurdity by discovering meaningto this whole messy thing.- And we can bring meaningnot only to our own lives,but we can bring meaningto the universe as well.We can bring some kind of order to life.And, you know, the embrace of those tasks,and the commitment to serviceresonates out from us,to the rest of humanity in some way.- So you mentioned \"The Plague,\" by Camus.There's a lot of differentways to read that book,but one of them, especiallygiven how it was written,is that the plaguesymbolizes Nazi Germany,and the Hitler regime.What do you learn about human nature,from a figure like Adolf Hitler?That he's able to captivatethe minds of millions,rise to power and take on,pull in the whole world into a global war?- I was born nine years afterthe end of World War II,and I grew up in a generationthat was, you know,with my parents who were fixated on that,on what happened.And my father at that time, you know,the resolution in theminds of most Americans,and I think people aroundthe world is that there was,there had been somethingwrong with the German people,that, you know, the Germans had beenparticularly susceptible tothis kind of demagoguery,and to following a powerful leader,and just industrializingcruelty, and murder.And my father always differed with that.My father said, this isnot a German problem.This could happen to all of us,we're all just inches away from barbarity.And the thing that keepsus safe in this country,are the institutions of ourdemocracy, our constitution.It's not our nature, youknow, our nature has to,has to be restrained and thatcomes through self-restraint.But it also, you know,the beauty of our country,is that we develop, wedevise these institutions,that are designed to allow us to flourish,but at the same time, not to give usenough freedom to flourish,but also create enough order,to keep us from collapsing into barbarity.So, you know, one of theother things that my fathertalked about from whenI was little, you know,he would ask us this question.If you were the family andAnne Frank came to your door,and asked you to hide her,would you be one ofthe people who hid her?Like, risk your own life,or would you be one of thepeople who turned her in?And of course we would all say, well,of course we would hide AnneFrank and take the risk.But, you know, that's been something,kind of a lesson, achallenge that has been,that has always been nearthe forefront of my mind,that if a totalitarian system ever occurs,in the United States,which my father thoughtwas quite possible.He was conscious about howfragile democracy actually is.That would I be one ofthe ones who would resist,the totalitarianism or wouldI be one of the people,who went along with it?Would I be one of the peoplewho was at the train station,and, you know, in Kraków or,even Berlin and saw peoplebeing shipped off to camps,and just put my head downand pretend I didn't see it,because talking aboutit would be destructiveto my career and maybe myfreedom and even my life.So, you know, that has beena challenge that my fathergave to me and all ofmy brothers and sisters.And it's something thatI've never forgotten.- A lot of us would liketo believe we would resist,in that situation, but thereality is most of us wouldn't.And that's a good thing to think about,that human nature issuch that we're selfish,even when there's an atrocitygoing on all around us.- And we also, you know,we have the capacity to deceive ourselves,and all of us tend tokind of judge ourselves,by our intentions and our actions.- What have you learned about life,from your father, Robert F. Kennedy?- First of all, I'llsay this about my uncle,'cause you know, I'mgonna apply that questionto my uncle and my father,my uncle was asked when hefirst met Jackie Bouvier,who later became Jackie Kennedy.She was a reporter for anewspaper, and she was doing,she had a kind of column where she'd do,these kind of pithy interviewswith both famous people,and kind of man in the street interviews.And she was interviewinghim and she asked him,she thought what he believedhis best quality was,his strongest virtue.And she thought that he would say courage,because he had been a war hero.He was the only president who,and this when he was senator, by the way,who received the Purple Heart.And you know, he had avery kind of famous story,of him as a hero in World War II.And then he had come homeand he had written a book,on moral courage amongAmerican politicians,and won the Pulitzer Prize,that book \"Profiles and Courage.\"And which was a series of incidents,where American politicalleaders made decisions,to embrace principle,even though their careerswere at stake and in most cases,were destroyed by their choice.She thought he was gonnasay courage, but he didn't.He said curiosity.And I think, you know,looking back at his life,that the best, that it was true,and that was the quality that allowed him,to put himself in theshoes of his adversaries.And he always said that if you,if the only way thatwe're gonna have peace,is if we're able to put ourselves,in the shoes of our adversaries,understand their behaviorand that context.And that's why he was ableto, you know, during the,he was able to resist theintelligence apparatus,and the military during theBay of Pigs, when they said,you've gotta send in theEssex, the aircraft carrier.And he said, no, even thoughhe'd only been in month,two months in office,he was able to stand up to them,because he was able toput himself in the shoes,of both Castro andKhrushchev and understand,there's gotta be another solution to this.And then during the Cuban missile crisis,he was able to endureone, the narrative was,okay, Khrushchev acted in a way,as an aggressor to putmissiles in our hemisphere.How dare he do that?And Jack and my father were able to say,well, wait a minute, he's doing that,because we put missilesin Turkey and Italy,that were right on, you know,and the Turkish ones, righton the Russian border.And they then made asecret deal with Dobrynin,with Ambassador Dobrynin, and, you know,with Khrushchev, to removethe missiles, in Turkey,if he moved the Jupitermissiles from Turkey,so long as Khrushchevremoved them, from Cuba,there were 13 men on the end,what they call the End CON Committee,which was the group ofpeople who were deciding,you know, what the action was,what they were gonna do toend the Cuban missile crisis.And virtually I, and of those men,11 of them wanted to invadeand wanted to bomb and invade.And it was Jack, andthen later on, my father,and Bob McNamara, whowere the only people,who were with him.Because he was able to see the world,from Khrushchev's point of view,he believed that therewas another solution.And then he also had the moral courage.So my father, you know, toget back to your question,famously said that moral courage,is the most importantquality, and it's more rare,than courage on the football field,or courage in battlethan physical courage.It's much more difficult to come by,but it's the most importantquality in a human being.- And you think that kind of empathy,that you referred to, thatrequires moral courage.- It certainly requiresmoral courage, to act on it,you know, and particularly,any time that a nation is at war,there's kind of a momentumor an inertia that says,okay, let's not look at this,from the other person's point of view.And that's the time wereally need to do that.- Well, if we can applythat style of empathy,style of curiosity to thecurrent war in Ukraine,what is your understanding of why Russia,invaded Ukraine in February, 2022?- Vladimir Putin could haveavoided the war in the Ukraine.His invasion was illegal,it was unnecessary,and it was brutal.But I think it's important for us,to move beyond these kindof comic book depictions.Of this insane,avaricious, Russian leader,who wants to, you know,restore the Soviet Empire.And that, that's why, andwho made a unprovoked,unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine.He was provoked and we were provoking him,and we were provoking him, since 1997.And it's not just methat's saying that, I mean,before Russia, before Putin never came in,we were provoking Russia,Russians, in this way unnecessarily.And to go back that time in 1992,when the Russians moved out of,when the Soviet Union was collapsing,the Russians moved out of East Germany,and they did that, which wasa huge concession to them.They had 400,000 troops inEast Germany at that time,and they were facing NATO troops,on the other side of the wall.So Gorbachev made this huge concession,where he said to George Bush,\"I'm gonna move all of our troops out,and you can then reunifyGermany under NATO,\"which was a hostile army to the Soviet.It was created to, you know,with hostile intenttoward the Soviet Union.And he said, \"you can takeGermany, but I want your promisethat you will not move NATO, to the east.\"And James Baker, who washis secretary of State,famously said, \"I will not move NATO.We will not move NATOone inch to the East.\"So then five years later in1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski,who was kind of the father of the neocons,who was a Democrat at that time,served in the Carter administration.He said, he publisheda paper, a blueprint,for moving NATO right upto the Russian border,a thousand miles to the East,and taking over 14 nations.And at that time, George Kennon,who was the kind of thedeity of American diplomats,he was probably, arguablythe most importantdiplomat in American history.He was the architect of the containmentpolicy during World War II.And he said, \"this isinsane and it's unnecessary.And if you do this, it'sgonna provoke the Soviet,I mean, the Russiansto a violent response.And we should be makingfriends with the Russians.They lost the Cold War.We should be treating 'emthe way that we treatedour adversaries after World War II,like with a Marshall Plan totry to help them incorporate,into Europe and to be partof the brotherhood of,you know, of man and of western nations.We shouldn't continue to betreating him as an enemy,and particularly surroundingthem at their borders.\"William Perry, who was then,the Secretary of defenseunder Bill Clinton,threatened to resign.He was so upset by this planto move NATO to the east.And William Burns, who wasthen the US Ambassador,of the Soviet Union, whois now at this moment,the head of the CIA, saidat the time, the same thing.\"If you do this, it is going to provokethe Russians toward a military response.\"And we moved it, wemoved all around Russia,we moved to 14 nations athousand miles to the East,and we put Asia's missilesystems in two nations,in Romania and Poland,so we did what, you know,what the Russians had done tous in 1962 that had provoked,would've provoked an invasion of Cuba.We put those missile systems back there,and then we'd walk away,unilaterally walk away,from the two nuclear missile treaties,the intermediate nuclear missile treaties,that we had with this Soviet, with Russia.And, neither of us would put on thosemissile systems on the borders.We walk away from that and weput Asia's missile systems,which are nuclear capable.They can carry the tomahawk missiles,which have nuclear warheads.So the last country that theydidn't take was the Ukraine.And the Russians said, andin fact Bill Perry said this,or William Burns said,it is now the head of the CIA.It is a red line, if we go,if we bring NATO into Ukraine,that is a red line for the Russians.They cannot live with it,they cannot live with it.Russia has been invaded threetimes through the Ukraine.The last time it was invaded, we killed,or the Germans killed oneout of every seven Russians.They destroyed, my uncledescribed what happened to Russia,in his famous Americanuniversity speech, in 1963,60 years ago this month, or last month,60 years ago, in June, June 10th, 1963.He told, that speech wastelling American people,put yourself in the shoes of the Russians.We need to do that if we're gonna,if we're gonna make peace.And he said, \"all of ushave been taught, you know,that we won the war, butwe didn't win the war.The Russians, if anybodywon the war against Hitler,it was the Russians, theircountry was destroyed.All of their cities.\"And he said,\"imagine if all of the citiesfrom the east coast of Chicagowere reduced to rubble andall of the fields, burned,all of the forests, burned.That's what happened toRussia, that's what they gave.So that we could get rid of Adolf Hitler.\"And he had them putthemselves in their position.And you know, today, there'snone of that happening.We have refused repeatedly,to talk to the Russians.We've broken up, there's two treaties,the Minsk agreements, which the Russianswere willing to sign, andthey said, \"we will stay out.\"The Russians didn't want the Ukraine.They showed that, when the Donbas,when they voted 90 to 10to leave and go to Russia,Putin said, \"no, we wantUkraine to stay intact,but we want you to sign a Minsk accords,\"to, you know, the Russianswere very worried,because of the US involvement in the coup,in Ukraine in 2014.And then the oppression, you know,and the killing of 14,000 ethnic Russians.And Russia hasn't had, the same way,that if Mexico, withAsia's missile systems,from China or Russia on our border,and then killed 14,000 expats American,we would go in there.Oh, he does have a national securityinterest in the Ukraine.He has an interest in protectingthe Russian speakingpeople of the Ukraine,the ethnic Russians.And the Minsk accords did that.It left Ukraine as part of Russia.It left them as a semi-autonomous region,that could continued touse their own language,which is essentially banned by the coup,by the government we put in, in 2014.And, we wouldn't, wesabotaged that agreement.And, we now know in April of 2022,Zelensky and Putin hadinked a deal already,to another peace agreement.And that the UnitedStates and Boris Johnson,the neocons in the WhiteHouse and Boris Johnson,over to the Ukraine tosabotage that agreement.So what do I think?I think this is a proxy war.I think this is a, you know,this is a war that the neoconsin the White House wanted.They've said for two decadesthey wanted this war,and that they wanted touse Ukraine as a pawn,in a proxy war betweenUnited States and Russia,the same as we used Afghanistan.And in fact, they sayit, this is the model,let's use the Afghanistan model,that was said again and again,and to get the Russians tooverextend their troops,and then fight them usinglocal fighters and US weapons.And when President Biden was asked,\"why are we in the Ukraine?\"He was honest, he says,\"to depose Vladimir Putin,regime change for Vladimir Putin.\"And when his defensesecretary Lloyd Austin,in April, 2022 was asked,you know, \"why are we there?\"He said, \"to degrade the Russians capacityto fight anywhere, toexhaust the Russian army,and degrade its capacity tofight elsewhere in the world.\"That's not a humanitarian mission.That's not what we were told.We were told this wasan unprovoked invasion,and that we're there tobring a humanitarian reliefto the Ukrainians, butthat is the opposite.That is a war of attritionthat is designed to chew up,to turn this little nationinto an abattoir of death,for the flower of Ukrainian youth,in order to advance ageopolitical ambition,of certain people within the White House.And I, you know, I think that's wrong.We should be talking to theRussians the way that, you know,Nixon talked to Brezhnev,the way that Bush talked to Gorbachev,the way that my uncletalked to Khrushchev.We need to be talked with the Russians,we should, and negotiating.And we need to be looking about,how do we end this andpreserve peace in Europe.- Would you as president sit down,and have a conversationwith Vladimir Putin,and Vladimir Zelensky separately,and together, to negotiate peace?- Absolutely, absolutely.- What about Vladimir Putin?He's been in power since 2000.So as the old adage goes, \"power corrupts,and absolute power corrupts, absolutely.\"Do you think he has been corrupted,by being in power for so long?If you think of the man,if you look at his mind.- Listen, I don't know exactly.I can't say because I just,I don't know enough abouthim or about, you know,the evidence that I've seenis that he is homicidal,he kills his enemies, or poisons them.And you know, the reactionI've seen to that,to those accusations from himhave not been to deny that.But to kind of laugh it off,I think he's a dangerous man.And that of course, you know,there's probably corruption in his regime.But having said that,it's not our business, tochange the Russian government.And anybody who thinks it's a good idea,to do regime change in Russia,which has more nuclear weapons than we do,is, I think, irresponsible.And you know, Vladimir Putinhimself has said, you know,\"we will not live in aworld without Russia.\"And it was clear when he said that,that he was talking about himself,and he has his hand on abutton that could bring,you know, Armageddon to the entire planet.So why are we messing with this?It's not our job to change that regime.And, we should be makingfriends with the Russians.We shouldn't be treating him as an enemy.Now we've pushed himinto the camp with China.That's not a good thing for our country.And by the way, you know,what we're doing now,does not appear to beweakening Putin at all.Putin now, you know, ifyou believe the polls,that are coming out of Russia,they show him, you know,the most recent pollsthat I've seen show him,with an 89% popularitythat people in Russia,support the war in Ukraine and that,and they support him as an individual.So, and I understand there'sproblems with polling,you know, you don't know what to believe,but the polls consistently show that.And, you know, it'snot America's business,to be the policeman of the world,and to be changing regimesin the world, that's illegal.We shouldn't be breakinginternational laws.You know, we should actually be lookingfor ways to improverelationships with Russia.Not to, you know, not to destroy Russia,not to destroy and not tochoose its leadership for them.That's up to the Russian people, not us.- So step one is tosit down and empathize,with the leaders of bothnations to understandtheir history, theirconcerns, their hopes.Just to open the door for conversation,so they're not backed into the corner.- Yeah, and I think the US canplay a really important role,and a US president can playa really important role,by reassuring the Russians,that we're not gonna considerthem an enemy anymore,that we wanna be friends.And it doesn't mean that youhave to let down your guard,completely, the way that you do it,which was the wayPresident Kennedy did it,is you do it one step at a time.You take baby steps, wedo a unilateral move,reduce our, you know, ourhostility and aggression,and see if the Russians reciprocate.And, that's the way thatwe should be doing it.And you know, we should be easing our way,into a positive relationship with Russia.We have a lot in common with Russia,and we should be friends with Russia,and with the Russian people.And you know, apparentlythere's been 350,000 Ukrainians,who have died, at least in this war.And there's probably been60 or 80,000 Russians.And that should not give us any joy.It should not give us any, you know,I saw Lindsey Grahamon TV saying, you know,something to the extent that,\"anything we can do to killRussians is a good use of our money.\"It is not, you know, thoseare somebody's children.They're, you know, we shouldhave compassion for them.This war is an unnecessary war.We should settle it throughnegotiation, through diplomacy,through state graft,and not through weapons.- Do you think thiswar can come to an end,purely through military operations?- No, I mean, no, I don't thinkthere's any way in the worldthat the Ukrainians can beat the Russians.I don't think there'sany appetite in Europe.I think Europe is now, you know,in having severe problemsin Germany, Italy, France,you're seeing these riots,there's internal problemsin those countries.There is no appetite in Europe,for sending men to die in Ukraine.And the Ukrainians donot have anybody left.The Ukrainians are usingpress gangs, you know,to fill the ranks, their armies, men,military aged men aretrying as hard as they can,to get outta the Ukraine right now,to avoid going to the front,the Russians apparently havebeen killing Ukrainians,at a seven to one ratio.My son fought over thereand he told me it's,he had firefights with theRussians, mainly at night.But he said most of the battles,were artillery wars during the day.And the Russians nowoutgun the NATO forces,10 to one in artillery.Oh, they're killing at a horrendous rate.Now, you know, my interpretationof what's happened so far,is that, Putin actually went in early on,with a small force because he expectedto meet somebody on the other endof a negotiating tablethat once he went in,and when that didn't happen,they did not have a large enough force,to be able to mount an offensive.And so they've been buildingup that force up till now,and they now have that force.And even against thissmall original force,the Ukrainians have been helpless.All of their offenses have died.They've now killed, you know,the head of the Ukrainian special forces,which was the, probably,arguably, by many accounts,the best elite militaryunit in all of Europe,the commander of thatSpecial Forces group,had gave a speech about four months ago,saying that 86% of hismen are dead or wounded,and cannot return to the front.He cannot rebuild that force.And the troops that are now headed,that are now filling the gapsof all those 350,000 men,who have been lost are scantily trained,and they're arriving green at the front.Many of them do not wanna be there.Many of them are giving up andgoing over the Russian side.We've seen this again and again and again,including platoon size groups,that are defecting to the Russians.And I don't think it's possible to win.And anybody, (laughs) you know, I saw,of course I've studied WorldWar II history exhaustively,but I saw a, there's a new, Ithink it's a Netflix series,of documentaries that I highlyrecommend to people there.They're colorized versionsof the black and white,films from the battles of World War IIbut it's all the battles of World War II.So I watched all of that theother night, and you know,the willingness of theRussians to fight on,against any kind of, andto make huge sacrifices,of Russians, the Russians themselves,who were making thesacrifice with their lives,the willingness of them to do that,for their motherland isalmost inexhaustible.It is incomprehensibleto think that Ukraine,can beat Russia in a war.It would be like Mexicobeating the United States.It's just impossible tothink that it can happen.And, you know, Russia has deployed a tiny,tiny fraction of its military so far.And you know, now it has China,with its mass production capacity,supporting its war effort.It's a hopeless situation,and we've been lied to,you know, the press in ourcountry and our government,are just, you know, promoting this lie,that the Ukrainians are about to win,and that everything's going great.And that Putin's on therun, and there's all thiswishful thinking because ofthe Wagner Group, you know-- Prigozhin.- Prigozhin,and the Wagner Group, thatthis was an internal coup,and it showed dissentand weakness of Putin.And none of that is true.That insurgency, whichwasn't even an insurgency.He only got 4,000 of his mento follow him out of 20,000.And they were quickly stopped.And nobody in the Russianmilitary, the oligarchy,the political system, nobodysupported it, you know,and but we're being told, \"oh yeah,it's the beginning at the end for Putin.He's weakened, he's wounded,he's on his way out,\"and all of these things arejust lies that we are being fed.- So to pushback on asmall aspect of this,that you kind of implied.So I've traveled to Ukraine andone thing that I should say,similar to the Battle ofStalingrad, it is just not,it is not only the Russiansthat fight to the end.I think Ukrainian is a very,like to fight to the end.And the morale there is quite high.I've talked to nobody,this was a year ago,in August, in Kherson,everybody was proud,to fight and die for their country.And there's some aspect where this warunified the people, gave them a reason,and an understanding thatthis is what it means,to be Ukrainian and Iwill fight to the death,to defend this land.- Yeah, you know, I would agree with that,and I should have said thatmyself at the beginning,that's one of the reasonsmy son went over there,to fight because, you know,he was inspired by the valor,of the Ukrainian people and, you know,this extraordinary willingness of them.And I think Putin thoughtit would be much easier,to sweep into Ukraine,and he found, you know,a stone wall of Ukrainians, ready to puttheir lives and their bodies on the line.But that to me makes the wholeepisode even more tragic,is that, you know, I don't believe,I think that the US role in this has been,you know, that therewere many opportunities,to settle this war.And the Ukrainians wanted to settle it.Vladimir Zelensky when he ran in 2019.Here's a guy who's acomedian, he's an actor.He had no political experience,and yet he won this electionwith 70% of the vote, why?He won on a peace platform,and he won promising tosign the Minsk accords.And yet something happenedwhen he got in there,that made him suddenlypivot, and, you know,I think it's a good guess what happened.I think he was, you know,he came under threat,by ultra nationalists withinhis own administration,and the insistence of neoconslike Victoria Newland,in the White House, that, you know,we don't want peace withPutin, we want a war.- Do you worry about nuclear war?- Yeah, I worry about it.- It seems like asilly question, but it's not,it's a serious question.- Well, the reason it's not, you know,the reason it's not,is because people seem to be in thiskind of dream state aboutthat it'll never happen.And yet, you know,it can happen very easily andit can happen at any time.And, you know, if we pushthe Russians too far,you know, I don't doubt that Putin,if he felt like his regime was in,or his nation was in danger,that the United States wasgonna be able to place,you know, a Quisling on, you know,into the Kremlin thathe would use nuclear,you know, torpedoes.And these strategicweapons that they have.And that could be it, once you do that,nobody controls the trajectory.By the way, you know, Ihave very strong memories,of the Cuban MissileCrisis and those 13 days,when we came closer tonuclear war, you know,and particularly I think itwas when the U2 got shot down,over Cuba, you know, andnobody in this country,there's a lot of people inWashington DC who at that point,thought that they verymay well may wake up dead,that the world may end at night.30 million Americans killed130 million Russians.This is what our military brass wanted.They saw a war with Russia.Nuclear exchange with Russiais not only inevitable,but also desirable becausethey wanted to do it now,while we still had a superiority.- Can you actually gothrough the feelings,you've had about the Cuban Missile Crisis?Like what are your memories of it?What are some interesting kind of-- Well, you know, in the middle,I was going to school in Washington, DC,to sit, to our Lady of Victory,which is in Washington DC.So we were, I lived inVirginia across Potomac,and we would cross thebridge every day into DC,and during the crisis, USMarshals came to my house,to take us, I think around day eight.My father was spending thenight at the White House.He wasn't coming home,he was staying with the EXCOMcommittee and sleeping there.And they were up, youknow, 24 hours a day.They were debating andtrying to figure out,what was happening.But we had US marshals cometo our house to take us down.They were gonna take us downto White Sulfur Springs,in Southern Virginia, inthe Blue Ridge Mountains,where there was an underground city,essentially a bunker that was like a city.And apparently it had McDonald's in it,and a lot of other, you know,it was a full city for the USgovernment and their families.US Marshals came to ourhouse to take us down there.And I was very excited about doing that.And this was at a time, you know,when we were doing the drills,we were doing the duck andcover drills once a week,at our school where they would tell you,when the alarms go off,then you put your head onto the table,you take, remove thesharps from your desk,put them inside your desk,you put your head ontothe table and you wait.And the initial blast,will take the windows,out of the school andthen we all stand up,and file in an orderlyfashion into the basement,where we're gonna be for the nextsix or eight months or whatever.But in the basement where, you know,we went occasionally in those corridors.were lined with freezedried food canisters up to,from floor to ceiling,so people were, you know,we were all preparing for this.And it was, you know, Bob McNamara,who was a friend of mineand you know, was my father,one of my father's closefriends as Secretary of Defense.He later called it mass psychosis.And my father deeplyregretted participatingin the bomb shelterprogram because he said,\"it was part of apsychological psyop trick,to teach Americans,that nuclear war was acceptable,that it was survivable.\"And my father, anyway, whenthe marshals came to our house,take me and my brother Joe away,and we were the ones whowere home at that time,my father called and hetalked to us on the phone,and he said, \"I don'twant you going down there,because if you disappear from school,people are gonna panic.And I need you to be a goodsoldier and go to school.\"And he said something tome during that period,which was that, \"if a nuclear were happen,it would be better to be among the dead,than the living,\" whichI did not believe, okay.I mean, I had already prepared myself,for the dystopian future.And I knew I could, I spentevery day in the woods.I knew that I could surviveby catching crawfish,and, you know, cooking mud puppies,and do whatever I had to do.But I felt like, okay,I could handle this.And I really wanted to see this set up,down in, you know, this underground city.But anyway, that was, youknow, part of it for me.My father was away, and youknow, the last days of it,my father got this idea,because Khrushchev had sent two letters.He sent one letter that was conciliatory,and then he sent a letterthat after his joint chiefs,and the war mongers around him,saw that letter andthey disapproved of it.They sent another letter thatwas extremely belligerent.And my father had theidea, let's just pretend,we didn't get the second letterand reply to the first one.And then he went downto Dobrynin and who was,he met Dobrynin in the Justice Department,and Dobrynin was the Soviet ambassador.And they, you know, theyproposed this settlement,which was a secret settlement.Eric Khrushchev would withdrawthe missiles from Cuba.Khrushchev had put the missiles in Cuba,'cause we had put missiles,you know, nuclear missilesin Turkey and Italy.And my uncle's secret deal was that if he,if Khrushchev removedthe missiles from Cuba,within six months,he would get rid of theJupiter missiles in Turkey.But if Khrushchev told anybodyabout the deal, it was off.So, if news got out aboutthat secret deal, it was off,that was the actual deal andKhrushchev complied with it,and then my uncle complied with it.- How much of that part of human history,turned on the decisions of one person?- I think that's one of the, you know,'cause that of course is theperennial question, right?Is history kind of,an automatic pilot and,you know, human decisions,the decisions of leadersreally only have, you know,a marginal or incremental bearing,on what is gonna happen, anyway.But I think that is,and historians argueabout that all the time.I think that that isa really good example,of a place in human history that,literally the world could have ended,if we had a differentleader in the White House.And the reason for that isthat there were, as I recall,64 gun emplacements, youknow, missile emplacements.Each one of those missileemplacements had a crew,of about a hundred menand they were Soviets.So they were, we didn't know whether,we had a couple of questionsthat my uncle asked,Alan, or asked the CIA.And he asked, Dulles was already gone.But he asked the CIA and heasked his military brass,'cause they all wanted to goin, everybody wanted to go in.And my uncle said, my uncleasked to see the aerial photos.And he examined those personally,and that's why it'simportant to have a leader,in the White House who can pushback on their bureaucracies.And then he asked them, you know,\"who's manning those missile sites?And are they Russians?And if they're Russians and we bomb them,isn't it gonna force Khrushchevto then go into Berlin?\"And that would be thebeginning of a cascade effect,that would, you know, highly likely,to have a nuclear confrontation.And the military brass said to my uncle,\"oh, we don't think he'llhave the guts to do that.\"So he was, my uncle was like,\"that's what you're betting on?\"And you know, they allwanted him to go in,they wanted him to bomb thesites and then invade Cuba.And he said, \"if we bomb those sites,we're gonna be killingRussians and it's gonna force,it's gonna provoke Russiainto some response.And the obvious response isfor them to go into Berlin.\"Oh, but the thing thatwe didn't know then,that we didn't find outuntil, I think, you know,it was like a 30 year anniversary,of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Havana.And what we learned then was that,from the Russians, who came to that event,it was like a symposium where everybodyon both sides talked about it.And we learned a lot of stuff that never,nobody knew before.One of the insane things,the most insane thing,that we learned was thatthe weapons were already,the nuclear warheadswere already in place.They were ready to fire.And that the authorization to fire,was made, was delegated, toeach of the gun crew commanders.So there were 60 people whohad all had authorization,to fire if they feltthemselves under attack.So you have to believe,that at least one ofthem, would've launched,and that would've beenthe beginning of the end.And, you know, if anybody had launched,you know, we knew what would happen.My uncle knew what would happen,'cause he asked again andagain, \"what's gonna happen?\"And they said, \"30 millionAmericans will be killed,but we will kill 130 millionRussians, so we will win.\"And that was a victory for them.And my uncle said later said,he told Arthur Schlesingerand Kenny O'Donnell, he said,those guys, he called 'em the salad brass,the guys with all of thisstuff on their chest.And he said, \"those guys,they don't care, 'cause theyknow that if it happens,that they're gonna be inthe charge of everything,they're the ones who are gonnabe running the world after that.\"So for them, you know, itwas, there was an incentive,to kill 130 million Russians,and 30 million Americans.But my uncle, he had this correspondence,with the Khrushchev.They were secretlycorresponding with each other.And that is what saved the world,is that they had, that bothof them had been men of war.You know, Eisenhower famously said,\"it will not be a man of war.It will not be a soldier,who starts World War III,\"'cause a guy who's actuallyseen it, knows how bad it is.And my uncle, you know,had been in the heat of the South Pacific,his boat would've been cutinto by a Japanese destroyer.Many of three of hiscrewmen have been killed.One of 'em badly burned.He pulled that guy witha lanyard in his teeth,six miles to an island inthe middle of the night.And then they hid out there for 10 days.You know, and he came back, like I said,he was the only presidentof the United States,that earned in the Purple Heart.Meanwhile, Khrushchevhad been at Stalingrad,which was the worst place tobe on the planet, you know,probably in the 20th century,other than, you know,in Auschwitz or one of the death camps.It was, you know, itwas the most ferocious,horrific war with people starving people,committed cannibalism,you know, eating the dogs,the cats, eating their shoe leather,or easing to death bythe thousands, et cetera.Khrushchev did not want, thelast thing he wanted was a war.And the last thing myuncle wanted was war.But the CIA did not knowanything about Khrushchev.And the reason for that,is there was a mole at Langley,so that every time the CIAgot a spy in the Kremlin,he would immediately be killed.So they had no eyes in the Kremlin.You know, there were literally hundreds,of Russians spies who had,who had defected the UnitedStates and were in the Kremlin,who were killed during that period.They had no idea anythingabout Khrushchev,about how he saw the world.And they saw the Kremlinitself as a monolith.You know, that this kind of, you know,the same way that we look at Putin today,they have this ambition of world conquest,and it's driving them,and there's nothing else they think about.They're absolutely single-minded about it.But actually there was a bigdivision between Khrushchev,and his joint chiefs andhis intelligence apparatus.And they both at one point discovered,they were both in the same situation.They were surrounded byspies and military personnel,who were intent on going to war.And they were the two guys resisting it.So when my uncle hadthis idea of, you know,being the peace presidentfrom the beginning,he told Ben Bradley, oneof his best friends who,you know, was the publisherof the Washington Post,the editor-in-chief at that time.He said, Ben Bradley asked him,\"what do you want on your gravestone?\"And my uncle said, \"he kept the peace.\"He said, \"the principlejob of the president of theUnited States is to keepthe country out of war.\"And, so when he first became president,he actually agreed tomeet Khrushchev in Geneva,to do his summit, and by the way,Eisenhower wanted to do the same thing.Eisenhower wanted peace,and he was gonna meet in Vienna.But that peace summit was blown up.He was gonna try to do, you know,he was gonna try to end the Cold War.Eisenhower was in the lastyear of his, in May of 1968.But that was torpedoed bythe CIA, during the U2 crash.You know, they sent a U2over the Soviet Union.It got shot down, and then they told,and then Alan Dulles, told Eisenhower,to deny that we had a program.They didn't know that the Russianshad captured Gary Francis Powers.And that blew up the peace talks,between Eisenhower and Khrushchev.And so, you know, therewas a lot of tension.My uncle wanted to break that tension.He agreed to meet, withKhrushchev in Vienna,early on in his term.He went over there andKhrushchev snubbed him.Khrushchev lectured him, imperiously,about the terror of American imperialism,and rebuffed any, you know,they did agree not to go into Laos.They made an agreement thatkept the United States,kept my uncle from sending troops to Laos,but it had been a disaster, Vienna.So then we had a spy thatused to come to our house,all the time, a guycalled Georgi Bolshakov,and he was this Russian spy.My parents had met at the embassy.They had gone to a party or a reception,at the Russian Embassy.And he had approached them,and they knew he was GRU agent and KGB.He was both, oh, he usedto come to our house.They really liked him,he was very attractive.He was always laughing and joking.He would do rope climbingcontests with my father.He would do pushupcontests with my father.He could do the Russiandancing, the Cossacks dancing.And he would do that forus and teach us that.And we knew he was a spy too.And this was at the time of, you know,the James Bond filmswere first coming out.So it was really exciting for us,to have a actual Russian spy in our house.(Lex laughs)The State Department was horrified by it.- Yeah.- But anyway, whenKhrushchev, after Vienna,and after, you know, the Bay of Pigs,Khrushchev had second thoughtsand he sent this long letter,to my uncle, and hedidn't wanna go throughhis state department or his embassy.He wanted to Enron them, andhe was friends with Bolshakov,so he gave Georgi the letter,and Georgi brought it,and handed it to Pierre Salinger,folded in the New York Times.And he gave it to my uncle.And it was this beautifulletter, which he said, you know,my uncle had talked tohim about the children,who were played, you know,how we played, 29 grandchildren,who were playing in his yard.And he's saying, \"what is our moral basis,for making a decision thatcould kill these children?So they'll never write a poem,they'll never participate in election,they'll never run for office.How can we morally make a decision,that is going to eliminatelife for these beautiful kids?\"And he had said that to Khrushchev.And Khrushchev wrotethem this letter back,saying that he was nowsitting at this dacha,on the Black Sea.And that he was thinking about,what my Uncle Jack hadsaid to him at Vienna.And he regretted verydeeply, not having takenthe olive leaf that Jackhad all offered him.And then he said, youknow, \"it occurs to me now,that we're all on an ark,and that there is not another one.And that the entire fate of the planet,and all of it's creaturesand all of the children,are dependent on the decisions we make.And you and I have a moral obligation,to go forward with each other as friends.\"And immediately afterthat, this was, you know,he sent that right afterthe Berlin crisis in 1962,General Curtis LeMay tried to,had tried to provoke a war,with an incident at Checkpoint Charlie,which was the May, the entrance.The entrance exit, throughthe Berlin Wall, in Berlin.And the Russian tankshad come to the wall,the US tanks had come to thewall, and there was a standoff.And my uncle, had senta message to Khrushchev,and through Dobrynin saying,\"my back is at the wall.I cannot, I have no placeto back, please back off.And then we will back off.\"And Khrushchev took his word,backed his tanks off first,and then my uncle ordered LeMay to back.He had, LeMay had mounted bulldozer plows,on the front of the tanks toplow down the Berlin wall.And the Russians had come.So it was just, you know,it was his generalstrying to provoke a war.But they started talkingto each other then.And then after he wrote that letter,they agreed that theywould install a hotline,so they could talk to each other,and they wouldn't have togo through intermediaries.And so at Jack's house on the Cape,there was a red phone thatwe knew if we picked it up,Khrushchev would answer.And there was anotherone in the White House.- Yeah.- But they knew it wasimportant to talk to each other,you know, and you just wish,that we had that kind of leadership today,that can I, you know, thatjust understands our job.Look, I know you knowa lot about AI, right?And you know, how dangerousit is potentially,to humanity and what opportunities,it also, you know, offers.But it could kill us all.I mean, Elon said, \"firstis gonna steal our job,then it's gonna kill us, right?\"- Yeah.- And it's probably not hyperbole.It actually, you know, if it followsthe laws of biological evolution,which are just the laws of mathematics,that's probably a good endpoint for it.You know, a potential endpoint.So it's gonna happen,but we need to make sureit's regulated and it'sregulated properly,for safety in every country.And, that includes Russiaand China and Iran.Right now, we should be puttingall the weapons of war asideand sitting down withthose guys and saying,\"how are we doing?How are we gonna do this?\"There's much more important things to do.This stuff is gonna kill us,if we don't figure out how to regulate it.And leadership needs tolook down the road at what,what is the real risk here?And the real risk isthat, you know, AI will,enslave us for one thing, you know,and then destroy us anddo all this other stuff.And how about biological weapons?We're now all working onthese biological weapons,and we're doing biologicalweapons from Ebola,you know, dengue fever and, you know,all of these other bad things.And we're making ethnic bio weapons,bio weapons that can only kill Russians,bio weapons that the Chineseare making that, you know,can kill people whodon't have Chinese genes.So all of this is now withinreach, we're actively doing it,and we need to stop it.And we can easily, abiological weapons treaty,is the easiest thing in the world to do.We can verify it, we can enforce it,and everybody wants to agree to it.Only insane people do not wanna,wanna continue this kind of research.There's no reason to do it.So there are these existentialthreats to all of humanity,now out there, like AI andpolitical, biological weapons.We need to star stop fighting each other,start competing on economic game fields,playing fields, instead ofmilitary playing fields,which will be good for all of humanity.And that we need to sitdown with each other,and negotiate reasonabletreaties on how we regulate AI,and biological weapons.And nobody's talking about this,in this political race right now.Nobody's talking about it in a government.They get fixated on theselittle wars, you know,and these comic bookdepictions of good versus evil,you know, and we all go, you know, hoorah,and go off to and give themthe weapons and enrich,you know, the military and Joshua complex,but we're on the road toperdition if we don't end this.- And some of this requiresto have this kind of,phone that connects Khrushchevand John F. Kennedy,that cuts through all the bureaucracy.- Yeah.- To have this communication,between heads of stateand in the case of AI,perhaps heads of tech companies,where you can just pick up the phone,and have a conversation.- Yes.- Because a lot of it,a lot of the existential threatsof artificial intelligence,perhaps even bio weapons,is unintentional.It's not even strategicintentional effects.So you have to betransparent and honest about,especially with AI, thatpeople might not know,what's the worst that's going to happen,once you release it out into the wild.And you have to have anhonest communication,about how to do it so thatcompanies are not terrifiedof regulation, overreach of regulation.And then government is notterrified of tech companies,of manipulating them in somedirect or indirect ways.So like, there's a trust thatbuilds, versus a distrust.That seems to, sobasically, that old phone,where Khrushchev can callJohn F. Kennedy is needed.- Yeah, and you know,I don't think there's,listen, I don't understand AI, okay.I do know, I can seefrom all this technology,how it's this kind of key totalitarianism,that once you put thesesystems in place, you know,they can be misused to enslave people,and they can be misused in wars and,to subjugate, to kill, todo all of these bad things.And I don't think there's anybody,on Capitol Hill who understands this.You know, we need to bring inthe tech community and say,\"tell us what theseregulations need to look like,\"you know, so that therecan be freedom to innovate,so that we can milk AI forall of the good things,but not, you know, fall intothese traps that are gonna,you know, that are theseexistential threats,that pose existential threats to humanity.- It seems like John F.Kennedy is a singular figure,in that he was able to havethe humility to reach outto Khrushchev and also the strength,and integrity to resistthe, what did you call 'em?The salad brass andinstitutions like the CIA.So that makes it particularlytragic that he was killed.To what degree was CIA involved,or the various bureaucracy,involved in his death?- The evidence that the CIAwas involved in my uncle's murder,and that they were subsequentlyinvolved in the coverup,and continue to be involvedin the coverup, I mean,there's still 5,000 documentsthat they won't release,you know, 60 years later is,I think, so insurmountable.And so, you know, mountainousand overwhelming that I,it's beyond any reasonabledoubt, including, you know,dozens of confessions ofpeople who were involved,in the assassination.But, you know, every kind of document,it came as a surpriserecently, to most Americans.I think the release ofthese documents in which,the press, the American media,finally acknowledged that, yeah,Lee Harvey Oswald was the CIA asset,that he was recruited, you know, in 1957,he was Marine working atthe Tsui Air Force base,which was the CIA AirForce base in, you know,with the U2 flights,which was a CIA program.And that he was recruitedby James Jesus Angleton,who was the directorof counterintelligence,and then sent on a fakedefection to Russia,and then brought back,you know, to Dallas.And people didn't know that even though,it's been known for decades.It never percolated intothe mainstream media,because they have such a,they have such an allergy to anything,that challenges the Warren Report.You know, when Congressinvestigated my uncle's murder,in the 1970s, the church committee did,and they did, you know, twoand a half year investigation,and they had many, many more documents,and much more testimony available,to them than the Warren Commission had.And this was a decade afterthe Warren Commission.They came to the conclusion,that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy.And there was a divisionwhere, essentially,one guy on that committee believed,it was primarily the mafia.But Richard Schweitzer,who was the senator headof the committee, said,straight out, \"the CIAwas involved in the murderof the President of the United States.\"So, and I've talked to most ofthe staff on that committee,and they said, \"yeah, and the CIAwas stonewalling usthe whole way through.\"And the actual peoplethat the CIA appointed,George Johan, who the CIAappointed as a liaison,to the committee, theybrought him out of retirement.He had been one of themasterminds of the assassination.Oh, there's no, I mean, it'simpossible to even talk about,a tiny, the fraction of the evidence here.What I suggest to people,there are hundreds ofbooks written about this,that, you know, assemble this evidence,and mobilize the evidence.The best book to me for people to read,is James Douglass's book, whichis called \"The Unspeakable.\"And he, Douglass does this extraordinary,he is an extraordinary scholar,and he does this just anamazing job of digesting,and summarizing andmobilizing all of them.You know, the probably amillion documents and you know,the evidence from all theseconfessions that have come out,into a coherent story,and it's riveting to read.And, you know, I recommendpeople who do not take my wordfor it, you know, and don'ttake anybody else's word,go ahead and do the research yourself.And one way to do that is,is probably the most efficient way,is to read Douglass's book.Because he has all the references there.- So if it's true that CIA hada hand in this assassination,how is it possible for themto amass so much power?How is it possible forthem to become corrupt?And is it individuals or isit the entire institution?- No, it's not the entire institution.My daughter-in-law who'shelping to run my campaign,was a CIA, you know, inthe Clandestine services,for all her career.She was at Spy and Weaponsof Mass Destruction program,in the Mid East and in China.And there's 22,000 peoplewho worked for the CIA.Probably 20,000 of those are, you know,are patriotic Americans andreally good public servants,and they're doing importantwork for our country.But the institution is corrupt,and because the higher ranksthe institution, and in fact,Mike Pompeo said somethinglike this to me the other day,who was the director of the CIA.He said, \"when I was there,I did not do a good job ofcleaning up that agency.\"And he said, \"the entireupper bureaucracy,of that agency arepeople who do not believein the institutions of democracy.\"This is what he said to me.So I don't know if that'strue, but I know that,you know, that's significant.He's a smart person and he ran the agency,and he was the Secretary of State.But it's no mystery how that happened.We know the history.The CIA was originally, first of all,there was great reluctancein 1947 that we had,for the first time wehad a secret spy agency,in this country duringWorld War II called the OSS.That was disbanded after thewar because Congress said,\"having a secret spy agency,is incompatible with a democracy.\"Secret spy agencies arethings that like the KGBthe Stasi, East Germany,Slovakia and Iran,and Peep and Chile and whatever, you know,all over the world,they're all have to do withtotalitarian governments.They're not somethingthat you can have that,it's antithetical todemocracy to have that.But...In 1947, we created, Truman signed it in,but it was initially, an espionage agency,which means informationgathering, which is important.It's to gather and consolidateinformation from many,many different sourcesfrom all over the world.And then put those in reports,of the White House so the President,can make good decisionsbased upon valid information,evidence-based, you know, decision making.But Alan Dulles, who was the,essentially the first head of the agency,made a series of legislative machinations,and political imaginationsthat gave additional powers,to the agency and opened up the,what they called then, the plans division,which is, the plans divisionis the dirty tricks.It's the black ops fixing elections,murdering, what theycall executive action,which means killing foreignleaders and, you know,making small wars and bribing,and blackmailing peoplestealing elections,and that kind of thing.And the reason at that time, you know,we were in the middle ofthe Cold War and Truman,and then Eisenhower didnot wanna go to war.They didn't wanna commit troops.And it seemed to them that, you know,this was a way of kind offighting the Cold War secretly,without, and doing it at minimal cost,by changing events sort of invisibly.And so it was seductive tothem, but everybody, you know,Congress, when theyfirst voted it in place,Congress, both political parties said,\"if we create this thing, itcould turn into a monster,and it could undermine our values.\"And today they, it's so powerful,and then nobody knows what its budget is.Plus it has its owninvestment fund, In-Q-Tel,which has invested, you know,made I think, 2,000investments in Silicon Valley.So it has ownership of alot of these tech companies,that, you know, a lot of theCEOs of those tech companies,have signed state secrecyagreements with the CIA,which if they even revealthat they have signed that,they can go to jail for 20 years,and have their assets removed, et cetera.The influence that the agency has,the capacity to influenceevents at every level,in our country, is really frightening.And then, for most of its life,the CIA was banned frompropagandizing Americans,but we learned that theywere doing it anyway.So in 1973, during thechurch committee hearings,we learned that the CIA had a program,called Operation Mockingbird,where they had at least 400 members,leading members of theUnited States Press Corps,on the New York Times,the Washington Post,ABC, CBS, NBC, et cetera,who were secretly working for the agency,and steering news coverageto support CIA priorities.And they agreed at that time,to disband Operation Mockingbird in '73.But there's indicationsthey didn't do that.And they still, the CIA today,is the biggest funder ofjournalism around the world.The biggest funder is through USAID,the USA, the UnitedStates funds journalism,in almost every country in the world.You know, it owns newspapers,it has journalists on it,thousands and thousands ofjournalists on its payroll.They're not supposed to bedoing that in the United States.But, you know, in 2016,President Obama changed the law,to make it legal now for theCIA to propagandize Americans.And I think, you know, wecan't look at the Ukraine war,and how that was, you know,has been how thenarrative has been formed,in the minds of Americans,and say that the CIA hadnothing to do with that.- Well, what is themechanism by which the CIA,influences the narrative, do you think?It's indirectly?- Through the press.- Indirectly through the press,or directly by funding the press?- Directly through, I mean,there's certain press organsthat have been linked,you know, to the agency that the peoplewho run those organs,things like the Daily Beast,now Rolling Stone, you know,editor of Rolling Stone,Noah Shachtman has deep relationships,with the intelligencecommunity Salon, Daily Coasts.- But I wonder why they would do it.So from my perspective,it just seems like the jobof a journalist is to have an integrity,where your opinion cannotbe influenced or bought.- I agree with you, but I actually think,that the entire field ofjournalism has, you know,really ashamed itselfin recent years because,it's become, the principle ofnewspapers in this country,and the televisionstation, the legacy media,have abandoned their traditional,their tradition of, whichwas when I was a kid,my house was filled with thegreatest journalists alive,at that time, people like BenBradley, like Anthony Lewis,Mary McLeod, Pete Hamill, Jack Newfield,Jimmy Breslin, and many, many others.And, after my father died,they started the RFK Journalism Awards,to recognize integrityand courage, you know,journalistic integrity and courage.And for that generation of journalism,they thought, they believed,that the function of journalists,was to maintain this posture of fear,skepticism toward anyaggregation of power,and including governmentauthority, that you always,that people in authority lie,and they always have to be questioned.And that their job wasto speak truth to power,and to be guardians ofthe First Amendment right,to the free expression.But if you look, whathappened during the pandemic,was the inverse of thatkind of journalism where,the major press organsin this country were,instead of speaking truth to power,they were doing the opposite.They were broadcasting propaganda.They became propaganda organsfor the government agencies.And they were actuallycensoring the speech of dissent,anybody who dissents of the powerless.Oh, and in fact, it wasan organized conspiracy,you know, the name of it wasthe Trusted News Initiative.And, some of the majorpress organs in our country,signed onto it, and theyagreed not to print stories,or facts that departedfrom government orthodoxy.So the Washington Post wasa signature of the UPI,the AP and then the four media,or the four social media groups,Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Google,all signed on to theTrusted News Initiative.It was started by theBBC, organized by them.And the purpose of itwas to make sure nobodycould print anything about government,that departed from government orthodox,and the way it workedis the UPI and the AP,which are the news servicesthat provide most of the news,you know, news around the country.And the Washington Post would decide,what news was permissible to print.And a lot of it was about COVID,but also Hunter Biden's laptops.Where it was the impermissible to suggest,that those were real or that, you know,they had stuff on therethat was compromising.And, you know, and by the way,what I'm telling youis all well documented,and I'm litigating on it right now,so I'm part of a lawsuit against the DNI.And so I know a lot about what happened,and I have all this documented,and people can go to our website.There's a letter on my Substack now,to Michael Cher of theWashington Post that outlinesall this and gives all my sources,because Michael Cher accused me,of being a conspiracy theorist,when he was actually part of a conspiracy,a true conspiracy, to suppress anybody,who was departing fromgovernment orthodoxies,by either censoring them completely,or labeling them conspiracy theorists.- I mean, you can understandthe intention and the action,the difference between,as we talked about,you can understand the intentionof such a thing being good,that in a time of a catastropheand a time of a pandemic,there's a lot of riskto saying untrue things.But that's a slipperyslope that leads into-- Yeah.- A place where thejournalistic integrity,that we talked about iscompletely sacrificed.And then you can deviate from truth.- If you read their internal memorandum,including the statements of the leader,of the Trusted News Initiative,I think her name's Jennifer Cecil,you know, you can go on ourwebsite and see her statement.And she says, \"the purposeof this is that we're now,\"actually, she says,\"when people look at us,they think we'recompetitors, but we're not.The real competitors arecoming from all these,alternative news sourcesnow all over the network,and they're hurting public trust in us,and they're hurting our economic model.And they have to bechoked off and crushed.And the way that we're gonnado that is to make an agreementwith the social mediasites that if we say,if we label theirinformation misinformation,the social media sites will deplatform it,or they will throttle it,or they will shadow ban it,\"which destroys the economic model,of those alternative competitivesources of information.So that's true.But the point you makeis an important point,that the journalists themselves,who probably didn't knowabout the TNI agreement,certainly, I'm sure they didn't,they believe that they'redoing the right thing,by suppressing informationthat may challenge,you know, governmentproclamations on COVID.But I mean, there's a danger to that.And the danger is that, you know,once you appoint yourself an arbiter,of what's true and what's not true,then there's really no endto the power that you havenow assumed for yourself.Because now, your job is nolonger to inform the public.Your job now is to manipulate the public.And if you end up manipulating the public,in collusion with powerful entities,then you become the instrumentof authoritarian rule,rather than the, youknow, the opponent of it.And it becomes the inverse ofjournalism and a democracy.- You're running forpresident as a Democrat.What to you are the strongestvalues that representthe left wing politics of this country?- I would say protectionof the environment,and the commons, you know,the air, the water, wildlife,fisheries, public lands,you know, those assets,they cannot be reduced toprivate property, ownership.You know, the landscapes,our Purple Mountain Majesty,the protection of the mostvulnerable people in our society.People who, which would includechildren and minorities,the restoration of themiddle class, you know,and protection of labor, dignity,and decent pay for labor.Bodily autonomy, awoman's right to choose,or an individual's right to endure,unwanted medical procedures.Peace.You know, the Democratshave always been anti-war.That the refusal to usefear is a governing tool.FDR said, \"the only thing wehave to fear is fear itself.\"'Cause he recognized thattyrants and dictators,could use fear to disablecritical thinking,and overwhelm the desirefor personal liberty.The freedom of governmentfrom untoward influence,by corrupt corporate power,is the end of this corrupt merger,of state and corporatepower that is now, I think,dominating our democracy.What Eisenhower warned about,when he warned against the emergence,of the military industrial complex.And then I prefer to talk about kind of,the positive revision ofwhat we should be doing,in our country and globally,which is, you know,I see that the corporationsare commoditizing us,or poisoning our children,or strip mining the wealthfrom our middle class,and treating America as if itwere business and liquidation,converting assets to cashas quickly as possible.And, you know, and creatingor exacerbating this,this huge disparity inwealth in our country,which is eliminating themiddle class and creating,you know, kind of a LatinAmerican style feudal model.There's these hugeaggregations of wealth above,and widespread poverty below.And that's a configurationthat is too unstable,to support democracy sustainably.You know, and we're supposedto be modeling democracy,but we're losing it.And I think we have oughtto have a foreign policy,that restores our moralauthority around the world.Restores America as theembodiment of moral authority,in which it was whenmy uncle was president.And as a purveyor of peace rather than,you know, a war like nation.My uncle said he didn'twant people in Africa,and Latin America and Asia,when they think ofAmerica to picture a man,with a gun and a bayonet.He wanted them to think ofa Peace Corps volunteer.And he refused to sendcombat veterans abroad,combat soldiers abroad.He never sent a singlesoldier to his death abroad.And in, you know, into combat.He sent 16,000, heresisted, in Berlin in '62.He resisted in Laos.In '61, he resisted in Vietnam, you know,Vietnam, they wanted himto put 250,000 troops.He only put 16,000 advisors,which was fewer troops.And he sent to get James Meredith,into Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi.One Black man, he sent 16,000and a month before he died,he'd ordered them all home.He actually, I think itwas October 2nd, 1963,he heard that a Green Beret had died.And he asked his aid for a combat,for a list of combat fatalities.And the aid came backand there was 75 men,had died in Vietnam at that point.And he said, \"that's too many.We're gonna have no more.\"And he ordered, he signeda national security order,263, and ordered all of those men,all Americans home from Vietnam by 1965,with the first thousandcoming home by December '63.And then in November, he, of course,just before that evacuationbegan, he was killed.And a week later, PresidentJohnson remanded that order.And then a year after that,the Tonkin Gulf resolution,we sent 250,000, which is what they wantedmy uncle to do, which he refused.And then, and it became an American war.And then Nixon, you know,topped it off at 560,000,56,000 Americans never came home,including my cousin George Skagel,who died at the Ted Offensive.And we killed a million Vietnamese,and we got nothing for it.- So America should bethe symbol of peace.- And you know, today, my uncle, you know,really focused on puttingAmerica on the side of the poor.- Yeah.- Instead of our tradition of, you know,of fortifying oligarchiesthat were anti-communism.That was our major criteria,if you said you were against communists,and of course the peoplewere the rich people.Our aid was going to the richpeople in those countries,and they were going to the military juntasour weapons were going to the juntas,to fight against the poor.And my uncle said, \"no, you know,America should be onthe side of the poor.\"And so he launched the Alliancefor Progress and USAID,which were intended to bringaid to the poorest peoplein those and build middle classes,and take ourselves away.In fact, his most, his favorite trip,his two favorite tripswhile he was president,his most favorite trip was to Ireland,this incredible emotional homecoming,for all of the people of Ireland.But his second favorite tripwas when he went to Columbia,he went to Latin America,but Columbia was his favorite country.And there were, I thinkthere were 2 million people,came into Bogota to seehim, this vast crowd.And they were justdelirious, cheering for him.And the president of Columbia,Alberto Lleras Camargo,said to him, \"do youknow why they love you?\"And my uncle said, \"why?\"And he said, \"'cause theythink you've put America,on the side of the poor,against the oligarchs.\"And you know, when myuncle, after he died,today, there are moreavenues and boulevards,and hospitals and schools named,and statues, named afterand commemorating in parks,commemorating John Kennedyin Africa and Latin America,than any other presidentin the United States,and probably more than allthe other presidents combined.And it's because, you know,he put America on the side of the poor.And that's what we ought to be doing.We ought to be projectingeconomic power abroad,the Chinese have essentiallystolen his playbook.And you know, we've spent$8 trillion on the Iraq war,in its aftermath of wars in Syria, Yemen,Libya, you know, Afghanistan, Pakistan,and what do we get for that?We got nothing, for that money.$8 trillion we got, we killed more Iraqis,than Saddam Hussein.Iraq today is much worse off,than it was when Saddam was there.It's an incoherent violent war,between Shia and Sunni death squads.We pushed Iraq into the embrace of Iran.It's now become essentiallya proxy for Iran,which is exactly the outcome,that we were trying to preventfor the past, you know,20 or 30 years, we created ISIS,we sent 2 million refugees into Europe,destabilizing all of the nationsin Europe for generations.And we're now seeingthese riots, in France.And that's a direct resultfrom the Syrian war,that we created, and our creation of ISIS.Brexit is another, youknow, result of that.So we, for $8 trillion,we wrecked the world.And during that same periodthat we spent $8.1 trillion,bombing bridges, ports,schools, hospitals,that the Chinese spent $8.1trillion building schools,ports, hospitals,bridges, and universities.And now, you know, the Chinese,are out competing useverywhere in the world.Everybody wants to dealwith the Chinese because,they, you know, they come in,they build nice things for you,and there's no strengths attached,and they're pleasant to deal with.And, you know, as a result of that,Brazil is switching to Chinese currency,Argentina is switching, Saudi Arabia,our greatest partner that,you know, we put trillionsof dollars into protectingour oil pipelines there.And now they're saying, you know,\"we don't care what theUnited States think.\"That's what Mohammed bin Salman said.He said, \"we don't,\" you know,he dropped oil production in Saudi Arabia,in the middle of a US inflation spiral.They've never done that to us before,to aggravate the inflation spiral.And two weeks later, andthen they signed a deal,a unilateral peace deal with Iran,which has been the enemy thatwe've been telling them to,you know, to be a bulwarkagainst for 20 years.And two weeks after that, he said,\"we don't care what theUnited States thinks anymore.\"So that's what we got for spendingall those trillions of dollars there.We got short term friends andthe United States, you know,policy abroad, and we havenot made ourselves safer.We've made Americans, we'veput Americans in more jeopardy,all over the world.You know, you have to waitin lines to get throughthe airport and you have to, you know,the security state is nowcosting us $1.3 trillion,and America is unsafer andpoorer than it's ever been.So, you know, we're not getting,we should be doing what President Kennedysaid we ought to do.And what China, the policythat China has now adopted.- So that's a really eloquentand clear and powerful,description of the wayyou see US should be doinggeopolitics and the way you see,US should be taking care ofthe poor in this country.Let me ask you a questionfrom Jordan Peterson,that he asked when I told himthat I'm speaking with you,given everything you've said,\"when does the left go too far?\"I suppose he's referringto cultural issues,identity politics.- Well, you know, Jordan trying to get me,to badmouth the left thewhole time, I was in, (laughs)I really enjoyed my talk with him.- Yeah.- But he seemed to have thatagenda where he wanted me to,you know, say bad things about the left.And I just, you know, that'snot what my campaign is about.I wanna do the opposite.Oh, I'm not gonna badmouth the left.They try, you know,I was on shows thisweek with David Remnick,from the New Yorker, and he triedto get me to badmouth Donald Trump,you know, and Alex Jonesand a lot of other people,and baiting me to do it.And of course there's a lotof bad things I could say,about all those people,but it doesn't, you know,I'm trying to find,I'm trying to find valuesthat hold us together,that we can share in common rather thanto focus constantly on these disputes,and these issues that drive us apart.So me sitting here badmouthing the left,or badmouthing the right isnot gonna advance the ball.I really wanna figureout ways that, you know,what do these groups holdin common that we can all,you know, have a shared vision of whatwe want this country to look like.- Well, that's music to my ears.But in that spirit,let me ask you a difficult question then.You wrote a book harshlycriticizing Anthony Fauci.Let me ask you, to steelman the case,for the people who support him.What is the biggest positive thing,you think Anthony Fauci did for the world?What is good that hehas done for the world,especially during this pandemic?- You know, I don't want tosit here and speak unfairly,by saying the guy didn't do anything,but I don't, I can't think of anything.I mean, if you tell mesomething that you think he did,you know, maybe there wasa drug that got licensed,while he was at NIH that,you know, benefited people.That's certainly possible.He was there for 50 years and,in terms of of his principal programs,of the AIDS programsand his COVID programs,and I think that the harmthat he did vastly outweighsyou know, the benefits.- Do you think he believeshe's doing good for the world?- I don't know what he believes.In fact, in that book, whichis I think 250,000 words,I never try to look inside of his head.I deal with facts, I deal with science.So, and every factualassertion in that book,is cited and source togovernment databases,or peer reviewed publications.And, I don't, I try notto speculate about things,that I don't know about or I can't prove.And I cannot tell youwhat his motivations were,or I mean, all of us.He's done a thing.A lot of things that Ithink are really very,very bad things forhumanity, very deceptive.But we all have thiscapacity for self deception.As I said, at thebeginning of this podcast,we judge ourselves on our intentions,rather than our actions.And we all have analmost infinite capacity,to convince ourselves thatwhat we're doing is right.And, you know, noteverybody kind of lives,an examined life and isexamining their motivations,and the way that theworld might experiencetheir professions of goodness.- Let me ask about thedifficulty of the job he had.Do you think it's possibleto do that kind of job well,or is it also a fundamentalflaw of the job,of being the centralized figure,that's supposed to a scientific policy?- No, no.I think he was a genuinely,a bad human being.And that there weremany, many good people,in that department over the years.Bernice Eddie is a really good example.John Anthony Morris,many people whose careershe destroyed because theywere trying to tell the truth.One after the other.The greatest scientistsin the history of NIH,were run out of thatorganization, out of that agency.But, you know, people listening to this,probably, you know, will,in hearing me say that,will think that I'm bitter or that,I'm doctrinaire about him, but you know,you should really go and read my book.And it's hard to summarize a, you know,I tried to be reallymethodical to not call names,to tell, to just say what happened.- You are, the bigger picture of this is,you're an outspoken critic,of pharmaceutical companies, big pharma.What is the biggestproblem with big pharma,and how can it be fixed?- Well, the problem couldbe fixed with regulation,you know, the problems,but the pharmaceutical industry is,I mean, I don't wanna say,because this is gonna seemextreme, a criminal enterprise,but if you look at thehistory that is an applicable,characterization, for example,the four biggest vaccine makers,Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer, and Glaxo,four companies that makeall of the 72 vaccines,that are now mandated,effectively mandated,for American children.Collectively, those companieshave paid $35 billion,in criminal penalties anddamages in the last decade.And I think since 2,000, about 79 billion.So these are the most corruptcompanies in the world.And the problem is thatthey're serial felons.They, you know, they do thisagain and again and again.So they did Vioxx, youknow, Merck did Vioxx,which Vioxx, they killedpeople by falsifying science.And they did it, they lied to the public.They said, this is a headache medicine,and a arthritis painkiller.But they didn't tell people that,it also gave you heart attacks.And they knew, you know,we've found when we sued them,you know, the memos fromtheir bean counters saying,\"we're gonna kill this many people,but we're still going to make money.\"So they make those calculations,and those calculations aremade very, very regularly.And then, you know, when they get caught,they pay a penalty.And I think they paidabout $7 billion for Vioxx,but then they went rightback that same year,that they paid that penalty,they went back into the samething again with Gardasil,and with a whole lot of other drugs.So the way that the system is set up,the way that it's sold to doctors,the way that, nobody ever goes to jail.So there's really no penalty that,it all becomes part of thecost of doing business.And you know,you can see other businessesthat if they're not,if there's no penalty,if there's no real, I mean these, look,these are the companies,that gave us the opioid epidemic, right?So they knew what was gonnahappen and we, you know,you go and see, there's a documentary,I forget what the name of it is,but it shows exactly what happened.And, you know, they corrupted FDA,they knew that this, thatoxycodone was addictive.They got FDA to tell doctorsthat it wasn't addictive.They pressured FDA to lie.And they got their way.And they've, so far theyled this year, you know,they got a whole generationaddicted to oxycodone.And now, you know, when theygot caught and they made it,we made it harder to get oxycodone.And now all those addicted kids,are going to fentanyl and dying.And this year it killed 106,000.That's twice as manypeople who were killed,during the 20 year Vietnam War.But in one year, twice many American kids.And they knew it was gonna happen,and they did it to make money.So I don't know what youcall that, other than saying,that's, you know, a criminal enterprise.- Or is it possible to have,within a capitalist system,to produce medication, to produce drugsat scale in a way that is not corrupt?- Of course it is.- How?- Through, you know, througha solid regulatory regimen,you know, where drugs are actually tested.You know, I mean the problemis, not the capitalist system,the capitalist system, you know,I have great admiration for that.Love the capitalist system,it's the greatest economicengine ever devised.But it has to be harnessedto a social purpose.Otherwise it's gonna,it leads us, you know,down the trail of oligarchyenvironmental destruction,you know, and commoditizing, poisoning,and killing human beings.That's what it will do, in the end.You need a regulatory structure,that is not corrupted by entanglements,financial entanglements with the industry.And we've set this up,the way that this is,that the system is set up today,has created this system ofregulatory capture on steroids.So almost 50% of FDA's budget,comes from pharmaceutical companies.The people who work at FDA are, you know,their money is coming,their salaries are coming,from pharma, half their salaries.So they're, you know,they know who their bosses are,and that means getting those drugs done,getting them out the door and approved,as quickly as possible, it'scalled fast track approval.And they pay 50% of FDA's budget,goes about 45% actuallygoes to fast track approval.- Do you think money can buy integrity?- Oh yeah, of course it can.In the reg, yeah, I mean,that's not somethingthat is controversial.Of course it will.So, and then-- Slightly controversial to me,I would like to thinkthat science that will-- Well it may not be ableto buy your integrity.I'm talking about population wide,I'm not talking about the individual.- But I'd like to believe that scientists,I mean, in general, acareer of a scientist,is not a very high paying job.I'd like to believe thatpeople that go into science,that work at FDA, that work at NIH,are doing it for a reason,that's not even correlatedwith money, really.- Yeah, and I think probablythat's why they go in there.But scientists arecorruptible and, you know,and the way that I can tell you that,is that I've brought over 500 losses,and almost all of 'em involvescientific controversies.And there are scientistson both sides, in everyone.When we sued Monsanto, there was,on the Monsanto side,there was a Yale scientist,a Stanford scientist,and a Harvard scientist.And on our side therewas a Yale, Stanford,and Harvard scientists.And they were telling, sayingexactly the opposite things.In fact, there's a word forthose kind of scientists,who take money, for their opinion,and the word is biostitutes.And they are very, very common.And, you know, and I'vebeen dealing 'em with them,my whole career, you know,I think it was Upton Sinclair that said,\"that it's very difficultto persuade a man of a fact,if the existence of that factwill diminish his salary.\"And I think that's true for all of us.If they, you know, we find away of reconciling ourselves,the things that are, to truths, actually,and worldviews that actuallybenefit our salaries.Now, NIH has probably the worst system,which is that scientists who work for NIH,NIH itself, which used to be the premiergold standard scientificagency in the world,everybody looked at NIH and that.Today it's just an incubatorfor pharmaceutical drugs.And, you know, that isthat gravity of economicself-interest because if you're,if NIH itself collects royalties,they have margin rights for the patents,on all the drugs that they work on.So with the Moderna vaccine,which they promotedincessantly and aggressively,NIH own 50% of that vaccine,is making billions andbillions of dollars on it.And there are four, atleast four scientists,that we know of, andprobably at least six at NIH,who themselves have marginingrights for those patents.So if you are a scientist who work at NIH,you work on a new drug,you then get margin rights,and you're entitled toroyalties of $150,000 a year,forever from that, forever.Your children, your children's children,as long as that product's on the market,you can collect royalties.So you have, you know, theModerna vaccine is payingfor the top people at NIH, you know,some of the top regulators,it's paying for their boats,it's paying for their mortgages,it's paying for theirchildren's education.And you know, you have to expect that,that in those kind of situations,the regulatory function would be subsumed,beneath the mercantileambitions of the agency itself.And the individuals whostand to profit enormously,from getting a drug to market.Those guys are paid by us, the taxpayer,to find problems with thosedrugs before they get to market.But if you know that drug isgonna pay for your mortgage,you may overlook a littleproblem, or even a very big one.And that's the problem.- You've talked aboutthat the media slandersyou by calling you an anti-vaxxer,and you've said thatyou're not anti-vaccine,you're pro safe vaccine.Difficult question.Can you name any vaccinesthat you think are good?- I think some of the live virus vaccines,are probably, averting moreproblems than they're causing.There's no vaccine that is,you know, safe and effective.In fact-- Those are big words,what about the polio?- Those are big words.- Can we talk about the p-- Well, here's the problem.- Yes.- Here's the problem.The polio vaccine contained a,a virus called Simian virus 40, SV40.It's one of the mostcarcinogenic materials,that is known to man.In fact, it's used now byscientists around the world,to induce tumors and ratsand Guinea pigs and labs.But it was in that vaccine,98 million people who got that vaccine.And my generation got it.And now you've had thisexplosion of soft tissue cancers,in our generation thatkilled many, many, many,many, many more peoplethan polio ever did.So if you say to me, did the, you know,the polio vaccine waseffective against polio?I'm gonna say yes.And if you say to me, didit kill more people than,did it cause more deaths than averted?I would say, I don't know,because we don't havethe data on that, so.- But let's talk, well, you know,we kinda have to narrowin on, is it effective,against the thing it's supposed to fight?- Oh, well, a lot of them are,let me give you an example.The most popular vaccine in the world,is the DTP vaccine diphtheria,pertussis, and tetanus.It was used in this, introducedin this country around 1980.That vaccine caused so many injuries,(indistinct) which was the manufacturer,said to the Reagan administration,\"we are now paying $20 indownstream liabilities,for every dollar thatwe're making in profits,and we are getting out of the business,unless you give us permanentimmunity from liability.\"So the vaccine companies then were given,and by the way, Reagan said at that time,\"why don't you justmake the vaccine safe?\"And why is that?Because vaccines are inherently unsafe.They said unavoidably unsafe,you cannot make them safe.And so when Reagan wrotethe bill and passed it,the bill says in its preambles,\"because vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.\"And the Bruce Woods case, whichwas the Supreme Court case,that upheld that billuses that same language,vaccines cannot be made safe.They're unavoidably unsafe,so this is what the law says.Now, I just wanna finish this story,'cause this illustratesvery well, your question.The DTP vaccine wasdiscontinued in this country,and it was discontinued in Europe,'cause the so many kidswere being injured by it.However, the WHO and Bill Gates gives itto 161 million Africanchildren every year.And Bill Gates went tothe Danish government,and asked them to supportthis program saying,\"we've saved 30 million kids,from dying from diphtheria,tetanus, and pertussis.\"The Danish government said,\"can you show us the data?\"And he couldn't.So the Danish governmentpaid for a big study,with Novo Nordisk, which is a Scandinavianvaccine company in West Africa.And they went to West Africaand they looked at the DTPvaccine for 30 yearsof data and they hire,they retained the best vaccinescientists in the world,these kind of deities ofAfrican vaccine program,Peter Abbey, Sigrid Morgansonand a bunch of others.And they looked at 30 yearsof data for the DTP vaccine.And they came back and theywere shocked by what they found.They found that the vaccinewas preventing kids,from getting diphtheria,tetanus, and pertussis.But the girls who got that vaccine,were 10 times more likely todie over the next six months,than children who didn't.Why is that?And they weren't dying from anything,anybody ever associated with the vaccine.They were dying of anemia,bilharzia, malaria, sepsis,and mainly pulmonary andrespiratory disease, pneumonia.And it turns out this,this is what the researchers found,who were all pro-vaccine by the way.They said that this vaccineis killing more children,than diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis,prior to the introduction of the vaccine.And for 30 years nobody ever noticed it.The vaccine was providing protection,against those target illnesses,but it had ruined thechildren's immune systems.And they could not defendthemselves against randominfections that wereharmless to most children.- But isn't it nearly impossible,to prove that link, isn't it?- You can't prove the link,all you can do is forany particular interest,you can't, illness or death,you can't prove the link.But you can show statistically,that there is, that ifyou get that vaccine,you're more likely to die,over the next six monthsthan if you don't.And those studies unfortunately,are not done for any other vaccines.So for every other medicine,in order to get approval from the FDA,you have to do a placebocontrol trial prior to licenser,where you look at health outcomes,among an exposed group,a group that gets it,and compare those to a similarly situatedgroup that gets a placebo.The only medical interventionthat does not receive,that does not undergoplacebo controlled trials,prior to licenser, are vaccines.Not one of the 72 vaccinesthat are now mandated,for our children have ever undergone,a placebo controlledtrial prior to licenser.- So I should say that there'sa bunch, on that point,I've heard from a bunch offolks that disagree with you.- Okay.- Including polio.I mean, and that test testingis a really important point.Before licensure, placebocontrol randomized trials,polio, received just that,against the saline placebo control.So, it seems unclear to me.I'm confused why you say that,that they don't go through that process.It seems like a lot of them do.- Here's the thing is that,I was saying that for many years,'cause we couldn't find any.- Yeah.- And then in 2016,in March, I met President Trump,ordered Dr. Fauci to meet with me,and Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins.And I said to them, during that meeting,\"you have been saying thatI'm not telling the truth,when I said not one of these has undergonea prior pre-licensing placebo control.\"And the polio may havehad one, post licensing.Most of 'em haven't.The polio may have, I don't know.But I said, \"our questionwas prior to licenser,do you ever test these?\"And for honor, for safety, and by the way,I think the polio vaccine did undergo,a saline placebo trial, prior licensure,but not for safety, only for efficacy.So I'm talking about safety trials, now.Fauci told me that, he said,\"I can't find one now,\"he had a whole tray of files there.He said, \"I can't find now onenow, but I'll send you one.\"I said, \"just for any vaccines,send me one, for any of the 72 vaccines.\"He never did.So we sued the HHS and aftera year of stonewalling us,HHS came back and they gave us a letter,saying we have nopre-licensing safety trial,for any of the 72 vaccines.And that the letter from HHS,which settled our lawsuitagainst them 'cause we had a FOIAlawsuit against them, isposted on CHD's website.So anybody can go look at it.So if CHD had, if HHS had any study,I assume they would've given it to us,and they can't find one.- Well, let me zoom out because,a lot of the details matter here.Pre-licensure, what doesplacebo controlled mean?So this is, this probably requires,a rigorous analysis.And actually at this point,it would be nice for mejust to give the shout out,to other people much smarter than me,that people should follow alongwith Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Use their mind, learn and think.So one really awesome creator,I really recommend him,is Dr. Dan Wilson.He hosts the \"Debunk the Funk\" podcast.Vincent Racaniello, who hosts\"This Week in Virology.\"Brilliant guy, I'vehad him on the podcast.Somebody you've beenbattling with, is Paul Offit.Interesting Twitter, interesting books.People should read, understand,and read your books as well.And Eric Topol has a goodTwitter and good books.And even Peter Hotez,I'll ask you about him.- And people should, because Paul Offit,had published a Substackrecently debunking, I think,my discussion with Joe Rogan,and we have published adebunk of his debunking,and you know, so if you read his stuff,you should read-- Read both.- Yes, you should read...And I would love todebate any of these guys.- So, Joe Rogan proposedjust such a debate,which is quite fascinating to see how muchattention and how muchfunding it garnered,the debate between you and Peter Hotez.Why do you think Peter rejected the offer?- I think it's, you know, again,I'm not gonna look into hishead, but what I will say is,if you're a scientistand you're making publicrecommendations based upon what you sayis evidence-based science.You ought to be able to defend that.You ought to be able todefend it in a public forum,and you ought to be able to defend it.against all, you know, all comers.And, you know, so you know,if you're a scientist,science is based on, isrooted in logic and reason.And if you can't uselogic and reason to defendyour position, and by the way,I know almost all ofthe studies, you know,I've written books on themand we've made a big effort,to assemble all of thestudies on both sides.And so I'm prepared totalk about those studies,and I'm prepared tosubmit them in advance.You know, and for each ofthe points, and by the way,I've done that with Peter Hotez.You know, I've actually,because I had this,this kind of informal debatewith him several years ago,with him, with a referee at that time.And we were debating not only by phone,but by email and on those emails.Every point that he wouldmake, I would cite science,and he could never come back with science.He could never comeback with publications.He would give publicationsthat had nothing to do with,for example, Thimerosal and vaccines,mercury based vaccines.He sent me one time, 16studies to rebut somethingI'd said about Thimerosal.And not one of those studies,they were all about the MMR vaccine,which doesn't contain Thimerosal.So it wasn't like a realdebate where you're,you know, you're usingreason and isolating points,and having a, you know,a rational discourse.I don't think that he,I don't blame him for not debating me,because I don't think he has the science.- Are there aspects of all thework you've done on vaccines,all the advocacy you've done,that you found out thatyou were not correct on,that you were wrong on, thatyou've changed your mind on?- Yeah, there are many times,over a time that I, you know,I found that I've made mistakes,and we correct those mistakes.You know, I run a big organizationand I do a lot of tweets,you know, I'm very careful.For example, my Instagram,I was taken down from for misinformation,but there was nomisinformation on my Instagram.Everything that I cited onInstagram was cited or sourced,to a government database orto peer reviewed science.But for example, The Defender,which was our organization's newsletter,we summarized scientificreports all the time.That's one of the things,the services that we provide.So we watch the, you know, PubMed,and we watch the peerreviewed publications,and we summarize them when they come out.We have made mistakes.When we make mistake, we are rigorous,about acknowledging it, apologizingfor it, and changing it.That's what we do.I think we have one of the most robustfact checking operationsanywhere in journalism today.We actually do real science.And you know, there, listen,I've put up on my Twitteraccount, there are numerous timesthat I've made mistakes onTwitter and I apologize for it.And people say to me, youknow, \"oh, that's weird.I've never seen anybodyapologize on Twitter.\"But I think it's reallyimportant at the only, of course,human beings make mistakes.My book is, you know,230 or 40, 50,000 words.There's gonna be a mistake in there.But you know what I say atthe beginning of the book,if you see a mistake inhere, please notify me.I give a way that people can notify me.And if somebody points out amistake, I'm gonna change it.I'm not gonna dig my feetin and say, you know,I'm not gonna acknowledge this.- So some of the thingswe've been talking about,you've been an outspoken contrarian,on some very controversial topics.This has garnered somefame and recognition,in part for being attackedand standing strong,against those attacks, if Imay say, for being a martyr.Do you worry about this drug of martyrdom,that might cloud your judgment?- First of all, yeah.I don't consider myself a martyr,and I have neverconsidered myself a victim.I make choices about my life.And I'm content with thosechoices and peaceful with them.I'm not trying to be a martyror a hero or anything else.I'm doing what I think is right,'cause I wanna bepeaceful inside of myself.But, the only guard I have is just,you know, fact-based reality.If you show me a scientificstudy that shows that I'm wrong,for example, if you come back and say,\"look, Bobby, here's a polio,here's a safety study on poliothat was done pre-licensing,and use an a real saline solution,\"I'm gonna put that on my Twitter,and I'm gonna say I was wrong.There is one out there.So, you know, but that's all I can do.- All right, I have to ask,you are in great shape.Can you go through yourdiet and exercise routine?- I do intermittent fasting.So I eat between noon.I start at my first meal at around noon,and then I try to stopeating at six or seven.And then I hike every day.- Morning, evening?- In the morning.I go to a meeting, firstthing in the morning,12 seven meeting.And then I go hike for, andI hike uphill for a mile,and a half up and a milehalf down with my dogs.And I do my meditations.And then I go to the gym and Igo to the gym for 35 minutes.I do it short time.I've been exercising for 50 years.And what I've found is it's sustainable.If, you know, if I dojust a short periods,and I do four differentroutines at the gym,and I never relax at the gym,I go in there and I havea very intense exercise.And I live, you know, I mean,I could tell you what my routine is,but I do backs one day,chest one day, legs and thena miscellaneous, and I do 12.My first set of everythingis, is I try to,I try to reach failure at 12 reps.And then my fourth set ofeverything is a strip set.I do, I take a lot of vitamins.I can't even list them to you here,'cause I couldn't evenremember 'em at all.But I take a ton ofvitamins and nutrients.I take, I'm on an anti-aging protocol,from my doctor that includestestosterone replacement.But I don't take any steroids.I don't take any anabolicsteroids or anything like that.And the DRTI use is bioidenticalto what my body produced.- What are your thoughts onhormone therapy in general?- I talk to a lot of doctorsabout that stuff, you know,'cause I'm interestedin health and, you know,I've heard really good thingsabout it, but I don't know,I'm definitely not an expert on it.- About God, you wrote,\"God talks to human beingsthrough many vectors,wise people, organized religion,the great books of religions,through art, music, and poetry.But nowhere with suchdetailing grace and joy,as through creation,when we destroy nature,we diminish our capacityto sense the divine.\"What is your relationship,and what is your understandingof God, who's God?- Well, I mean, God isincomprehensible, you know, I mean,I guess the mostphilosophers would say we're,you know, we're inside the mind of God.And so it would be impossiblefor us to understand,you know, what actually, you know,what God's form is.But I mean, for me, Ihave a, let's say this.I was raised in a very, verydeeply religious setting.So we went to church in thesummer, oftentimes twice a day,morning mass, and we went to,we definitely went every Sunday.And I went, we prayed in the morning,we prayed before and afterevery meal, we prayed at night,we said a rosary, sometimesthree rosaries a night.And my father read us the Bible.Whenever he was a home, hewould read us, you know,we'd all get in the bed andhe'd read us the Bible stories.And I went to Catholic schools,I went to Jesuit schools,I went to the nuns and Iwent to a Quaker school,at one point.I became a drug addict whenI was about 15 years old,about a year after my dad died.And I was addicted to drugs for 14 years.During that time, when you're an addict,you're living against conscience.And when you're living, and I never,you know, I was alwaystrying to get off of drugs,never able to, but I never feltgood about what I was doing.And when you're living against conscious,you kind of push God to theperipheries of your life.So I'll call him he,recedes and gets smaller.And then when I,when I got sober,I knew that I had a couple of experiences.One is that I had a friend of my brothers,one of my brothers who diedof this disease of addiction,had a good friend who hadused to take drugs with us.And he became a moonie.So, he became a followerof Reverend Sun Myung Moon.And he's at that point, his compulsion.He had the same kind ofcompulsion that I had,and yet it was completelyremoved from him.And so, and he used tocome and hang out with us,but he would not wanna take drugs.Even if I was taken right in front of him,he was immune to it, he'd becomeimpervious to that impulse.And, when I first got sober,I knew that I did not wanna bethe kind of person who was, you know,waking up every day in whiteknuckling sobriety and just,you know, trying to resist,resist through willpower.And by the way, I hadiron willpower as a kid.I gave up candy for Lent when I was 12.And I didn't eat it againuntil I was in college.I gave up desserts the next year for Lent.And I didn't ever ate anotherdessert till I was in college.And I was trying to bulk upfor rugby and for sports.So I felt like I could doanything with my willpower.But somehow thisparticular thing, you know,the addiction, I wascompletely impervious to it.And it was cunning, baffling,baffling, incomprehensible.I could not understand whyI couldn't just say no,and then never do it again likeI did with everything else.And so I was living against conscience,and I thought about thisguy and I, you know,reflecting my own prejudicesat that time in my life,I said to myself, I didn't wanna be,I didn't wanna be like a drug addict,who was wanting a drug all the time,and just not being able to do it.I wanted to completely realign myself,so that I was somebodywho got up every day,and just didn't wanna takedrugs, never thought of them,you know, kissed the wife andchildren, and went to work,and never thought aboutdrugs the whole day.And I knew that peoplethroughout history had done that.You know, I'd read thelives of the saints.I knew St. Augustine had had a very,very dissolute youth and, you know,had the spiritualrealignment transformation.I knew the same thing had happened,to the St. Paul, you know, at Damascus.The same thing had happened. St. Francis,St. Francis also had adissolute and fun loving youth,and had this deep spiritual realignment.And I knew that that happenedto people throughout history,and I thought that's what I needed.You know, something like that.I had the example of this friend of mine,and I used to think about him.And I would think this again reflects,the bias and the, you know,probably the meannessof myself at that time.But I said, I'd ratherbe dead than be a moonie.But I wish I somehowcould distill that power,that he got without becominga religious nuisance.And at that time I pickedup a book by Carl Jung,called \"Synchronicity.\"And Jung, he was a psychiatrist,he was contemporary ofFreud's, Freud was his mentor.And, Freud wanted himto be his replacement.But Freud was atheist and Jungwas a deeply spiritual man.He had these very intense and genuine,spiritual experiences fromwhen he was a little boy,from really was three years old,that he remembers biography is fascinatingabout him 'cause he remembershim with such a detail.And he had written, he was always,he was in interesting to me,because he was very faithful scientist.And I considered myselfa science-based person,from when I was little.And yet he had thisspiritual dimension to him,which infused all ofhis thinking and really,I think made him, you know,branded his form ofrecovery or of treatment.And he thought that he hadthis experiment experience,that he describes in this book,where he's sitting up on the third,he ran one of the biggestsanitariums in Europe in Zurich.And he was sitting up on thethird floor of this building,and he's talking to a patient,who was talking describingher dream to him.And the fulcrum of thatdream was a scarab beetle,which was an insect that is not, is very,very uncommon, if atall in northern Europe,but it's a common figurein the iconography,of Egypt and the hieroglyphics,on the walls of the pyramids, et cetera.And he, while he was talking to her,he heard this bing, bing,bing on the window behind him,and he didn't want to turn around,to take his attention off her.But finally he does it.He, in exasperation, he turns around,he throws up the window andhis scarab beetle flies in,lands in his head and heshows it to the woman.And he says, \"is thiswhat you were thinking of?Is this what you were dreaming about?\"And he was struck by that experience,which was similar to otherexperiences he's had like that.And that's what synchronicity means.It's an incident or coincidence, you know?And like if you're talking with somebody,about somebody that you haven'tthought about in 20 years,and that person calls on thephone, that's synchronicity.Oh, and he believed it was a way that Godintervened in our lives that brokeall the rules of naturethat he had set up,the rules of physics,the rules of mathematics,or, you know, to reachin and sort of tap uson the shoulder and say, I'm here.And, so he tried to reproducethat in a clinical setting,and he would put one guy in one room,and another guy in anotherroom and have them flip cards.And guess what the other guy had flipped.And he believed that if he could beatthe laws of chance, laws of mathematics,that he would approve the existence,of an unnatural law, a supernatural law.And that was the first step,to proving the existence of a God.He never succeeds in doing it.But he says in the book,\"even though I can't proveusing empirical and scientific tools,the existence of a God,I can show through anecdotal evidence,having seen thousands of patientscome through this institution,that people who believein God get better faster,and that the recovery is more enduring,than people who don't.\"And for me, hearingthat was more impactful,than if he had claimed that he hadproved the existence of a God.Because I wouldn't have believed that.But, I was already at amindset where I would've doneanything I could to improve my chances,of never having to takedrugs again by even 1%.And if believing in God was gonna help me,whether there's a god up there or not,believing in one's selfhad the power to help me,I was gonna do that.So then the question is,how do you start believing in something,that you can't see orsmell or hear or touch.or taste or acquire with your senses?And Jung provides the formula for that.And he says, \"act as if, youfake it till you make it.\"And so that's, you know,what I started doing,I just started pretending there was a God,watching me all the time.And kind of, life was a series of tests,and each, there was abunch of moral decisions,that I had to make every day.And each one, you know,these were all justlittle things that I did.But each one now for mehad a moral dimension.Like when I, you know,when the alarm goes off,do I lay in bed for an extra 10 minutes,with my indolent thoughts ordo I jump right outta bed?Do I make my bed, mostimportant decision of the day?Do I hang up the towels?You know, do I, when I go into the closet,and pull out my bluejeans, and a bunch of thosewire hangers fall on the ground,do I shut the door and say, \"too much,I'm too important to do that.That's somebody else's job,\" or not.And so, do I put thewater in the ice tray,before I put in the freezer?Do I put the shopping cartback in the, you know,place that it's supposed to go,in the parking lot of the Safeway?And if I make a whole bunchof those choices right,that I maintain myself ina posture of surrender,which keeps me open to thepower, to my higher power,to my God, and when I, whenI do those things right,when I, you know, so much about addiction,is about abuse of power, you know,abuse of, all of us have some power,whether it's our, you know, good looks,or whether it's, you know,connections or education,or family or whatever.And there's always atemptation to use thoseto fill, fulfill self will.And the challenge is howdo you use those always,to serve instead, God's will and the,you know, the good of our community.And that to me is kind of the struggle.And, when I do that, I feel,I feel God's power coming through me,and that I can do things.I'm much more effective as a human being.That that gnawing, you know,anxiety that I lived with,for so many years in my gut, it's gone.And that I can kind oflike put down the oars,and hoist the sail and youknow, and the wind takes me,and I can see theevidence of it in my life.And you know, the big thing,temptation for me is that,when all these good thingsstart happening in my life,and the cash and prizesstart flowing in, you know,how do I maintain thatposture of surrender?How do I stay surrenderthen when my inclination,is to say to God, \"thanksGod, I got it from here.\"- Yeah.- And drive the car off the cliff again.And so, you know, I hada spiritual awakening,and my desire for drugs andalcohol was lifted miraculously.And it, to me, it was asmuch a miracle as if I had,if I'd been able to walk on water.'Cause I had tried everything earnestly,sincerely and honestly fora decade to try to stop it,and I could not do iton under my own power.And then all of a suddenit was lifted effortlessly,and you know, so I saw that evidence,early evidence of God in my life,of the power and and I see it now,you know, every day in my life.- So adding that moral dimension,to all of your actionsis how you were ableto win that Camus battleagainst the absurd.- Exactly.- Sisyphus with the boulder.- It's all the same thing.It's the battle to justto do the right thing.- Now Sisyphus was ableto find somehow happiness.- Yeah.(Lex laughs)- Well, Bobby, thank you for the stroll,through some of themost important moments,in recent human history andfor running for president.And thank you for talking today.- Thank you Lex.- Thanks for listeningto this conversation,with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.To support this podcast,please check out oursponsors in the description.And now let me leave you with some words,from John F. Kennedy.\"Let us not seek the Republican answer,or the Democratic answer,but the right answer.Let us not seek to fixthe blame for the past.Instead, let us acceptour own responsibility for the future.\"Thank you for listening andhope to see you next time.\n"