In conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

1. 0:00 – 0:49

   Bestie intros!

   1. JCJason Calacanis0:00

      Sachs, you ready? You got your QuickTime going?

   2. DSDavid Sacks0:02

      Oh, uh, let me do that real quick.

   3. JCJason Calacanis0:04

      And just a quick note, Sachs, Mr. Kennedy doesn't have earpieces in, so he... We just have to be careful of the crosstalk or talking over each other. I'll direct, uh, questions to each person and then follow up, so you can obviously just use your judgment of when to insert yourself. But be, uh, be gentle on the insertion there because we don't want... That came out wrong. Um, just be, uh-

   4. DSDavid Sacks0:22

      (laughs)

   5. JCJason Calacanis0:23

      ... be gentle when you interrupt. Cut. There's your cold open.

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:27

      At least if you did it incorrectly, it'll be quick. Where you'll be...

   7. JCJason Calacanis0:30

      Okay, here we go in three-

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:32

      (laughs)

   9. JCJason Calacanis0:32

      ... two...

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:32

       I'm going all in. Don't let your winner slide. Rain Man, David Sachs. I'm going all in. As I said...

   11. DSDavid Sacks0:41

       We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:45

       Love you, S.I.D.E. West Side Queen of Kinwah. I'm going all in.

2. 0:49 – 3:46

   Jason and Sacks intro Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:49

   2. JCJason Calacanis0:49

      All right, everybody. Welcome to the All-In Podcast. As many of you know, this podcast has gotten quite popular over the last two years, typically in the top 10 or 20 each week. And we talk about politics.

   3. DFDavid Friedberg0:59

      (laughs)

   4. JCJason Calacanis0:59

      We've got a big, uh, following in DC and-

   5. DFDavid Friedberg1:03

      Why are you calling me self-absorbed, Chavan? I mean, listen to how your co-host opens his show.

   6. JCJason Calacanis1:07

      Calm down, everybody.

   7. DFDavid Friedberg1:08

      It's okay. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead.

   8. JCJason Calacanis1:09

      And as part of that, our ongoing discussions about politics and presidential candidates has resonated in particular communities. And today, we are lucky enough to have one of the top presidential hopefuls in the 2024 election joining us, uh, Robert Kennedy Jr. And we will be inviting all presidential candidates to come on to the All-In Podcast and have candid, uh, discussions that are unfiltered, uh, the way the audience would expect them. We're gonna play with different formats, but we decided for this first one, we've got a series of topics we'd like to cover, and we're gonna treat it like any other All-In Podcast. With that, I'll have David Sachs, who has... is the most conservative of our panel, who has been also the most enthusiastic, I think, of everybody here, uh, and one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Robert Kennedy Jr's pursuit of the presidency of the United States. So with that, Dave, would you like to introduce our guest?

   9. DSDavid Sacks2:10

      Yeah, let me give, uh, Bobby a proper introduction here. So Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is entering the political arena as a candidate for the first time at the age of 69. But it's perhaps no exaggeration to say that he was destined for the mission he is now pursuing. He is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. When Bobby was 14, his dad was running for president on a platform of civil rights, civil liberties, lifting Americans out of poverty and opposing the Vietnam War. He had just won the California primary when he was tragically assassinated. RFK Jr. graduated from Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School and became an environmental lawyer who aggressively litigated against corporate polluters and government agencies that were failing to regulate them. He has always put the health and safety of the American people at the forefront of his activism, and this has made him controversial at times as he has questioned the safety of some pharmaceutical products and also criticized COVID restrictions during the pandemic. For this, the mainstream media has tried to paint him as a "conspiracy theorist." But given that so many conspiracy theories about COVID have been vindicated, Tablet Magazine wrote, "At this point, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy is the country's leading conspiracy theorist alone qualifies him to be president." But the biggest reason why I think his candidacy is so interesting and relevant is that it hearkens back to a Democratic Party that believed in peace instead of war, free speech and civil liberties instead of censorship, building up the middle class instead of the donor class, and opposing corporate greed, especially in the military-industrial complex, which is a message you just don't hear much anymore coming from the Democratic side of the aisle. So with that, Bobby Kennedy, welcome to the program.

   10. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.3:44

       Thank you so much for having

3. 3:46 – 17:17

   Foreign policy: Ukraine / Russia

   1. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.3:46

      me.

   2. JCJason Calacanis3:46

      So maybe we could start with foreign policy, something we've discussed here, specifically the Ukraine and Russia's invasion of Ukraine and our support of that war. Sachs, would you like to tee up a, a question for Mr. Kennedy?

   3. DSDavid Sacks4:01

      I think Bobby's tweets on the subject show that he has a really deep understanding of it. He's been saying a lot of things that I've been saying since the beginning of the war, which i- i-... Not just the fact that we're risking World War III over, you know, getting involved in a, in a country that isn't, uh, a treaty ally of the United States, has never been a vital interest to the United States. But I think your critique goes deeper because you actually understand the causes of how this war started. So maybe, you know, Bobby, you could speak to that. How, how did we end up in this proxy war with, with Russia from, from your standpoint?

   4. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.4:38

      Well, you know, fir- first of all, I would... Uh, well, let me start by saying this. I supported the humanitarian aid to the, to the Ukraine, which is what we were told initially was the em-... Was the mission, although I had... Uh, I was suspicious of it. And, you know, my son, as, as I've mentioned, actually went over, left law school, did not tell us where he was going, and went over and joined the Foreign Legion, um, and fought in the Kharkiv, um, uh, offensive with a special forces group. He was... Served as a machine gunner. He was in engagements with the Russians. And... But he feels gi- gi-... The same way, essentially, that I do, that this is no longer a humanitarian mission, that all the decisions the United States have made, has made since i- since the start, has been about, have been about prolonging the war, uh, about maximizing the, the violence of the war, um, and being absolutely intransigent, uh, against the many opportunities to actually settle the war. If he... And, and that... My u- understanding of the war is that not that Zelenskyy is pushing this war as hard as he can, uh, but that the neocons in the White House-... want this war. They want a regime change with the Russians. They want to exhaust the Russian armies. This is what, uh, this defense secretary Lloyd Austin said in 2022, "Our objective is to exhaust and to degrade Russian forces so they cannot fight anywhere else in the world." Um, and President Biden acknowledged that one of his objectives in the war is regime change in Russia, removing Vladimir Putin. Well, if those are the objectives, that is the opposite of a humanitarian mission. That is a mission to maximize casualties, to prolong the war. It's essentially a war of attrition, and that's what we're seeing. And the brunt of this is being paid by the flower of Ukrainian youth. There have been over 300,000. This is something that the US government and the Ukrainian government have worked hard to hide, the number of casualties, which has been catastrophic. This is the most violent conflict since World War II that's taken place, probably anywhere in the world. And the casualties are enormous. Al- over 300,000 Ukrainian dead. The Russians are killing Ukrainian, depending on who you believe, at a ratio of five to one, to eight to one, which was the seven to one in the, in the recently, recently leaked, whistleblower-leaked, um, Pentagon documents. And the, the Russians cannot lose this war. We're being told they're losing. They cannot afford to lose this war. This is existential for them, and they have been building up their forces. They have a ten-to-one artillery advantage on us, and this is an artillery war. So it's simply... And we do not have the artillery to replace what we've lost up there. This is a war that is proceeding in a very cataclysmic trajectory. And, uh, the, the answer to your question about how we got in this war, uh, goes back, you know, a long way, but I would say the, the real story starts in 2014 when the US government, and particularly the Neocons in the White House and elsewhere, uh, participated and supported the overthrow, violent overthrow, a coup d'etat, against the democratically elected government of the Ukraine. And put in a very, very anti-Russian government. This prompted the Russians, who then believed that, that the US w- navy was now gonna be invited into the Black Sea, to have a port at Crimea. It prompted the Russians to preemptively invade Crimea. At the same time, the R- the government that went, came into the Ukraine began enacting a series of laws that turned the Russian populations of the Donbas region into second-class citizens. They, they, um, they illegalized essentially their culture, their language, and they began ultimately killing them. They killed 14,000 of them. And it was a, it prompted a civil war in the country. And the Russian, uh, uh, response, which it was illegal, I have no sympathy or, um, uh, uh, toward Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin is a gangster and he's a thug. But his, uh, his response in the Donbas was not irrational.

   5. JCJason Calacanis9:34

      So, I guess the question becomes, if you were elected president, would you stop sending armaments to Ukraine?

   6. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.9:42

      I would immediately, uh, uh, have a ceasefire, and, and I would settle the war. And I think it can be settled. I don't even know. The- I mean, listen, the best settlement for this war was outlined in the Minsk Accords in 2014.

   7. JCJason Calacanis9:59

      Mm-hmm.

   8. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.10:00

      The Minsk Accords, which all the European, uh, uh, countries agreed upon, was when, they, when the Russians and the Russian people in Donbas voted to leave Russia, and Russia did not want them, Russia said, "No, let's develop an accord, an- an agreement which would make Donbas a- an autonomous region within the Ukraine, which would agree to not put missile systems in Ukraine, NATO missile systems, which would agree that, uh, Ukraine would not join NATO."

   9. JCJason Calacanis10:32

      If Zelenskyy says, "No, I wanna keep fighting," would you stop sending US weapons?

   10. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.10:36

       I would settle this. I would settle this war. Uh, Ukraine cannot fight without US support.

   11. JCJason Calacanis10:43

       So then at some point, you would tell Zelenskyy, if I'm reading into what you're saying correctly, "Hey, settle it or we're out"?

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya10:50

       You're on your own. Yeah.

   13. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.10:51

       I, I would settle the war.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya10:52

       Yeah. Do you think that we somehow allowed Zelenskyy to believe that we would allow him into NATO? Meaning, do you think that US foreign policy somehow almost induced this thing to happen? I just wanna try to understand the boundaries.

   15. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.11:12

       Yeah. We have been doing integrative military exercises with the Ukrainian military. So we were actively integrating them into NATO forces. There was no question that... You know, the, the one thing that Putin said from the outset, "This is a red line." You know, when my uncle was president, one of the things that he said, he said a couple of things. He said, number one, "The principal job of a president of the United States is to keep the nation out of war." And he succeeded doing that during his term in office. He, he sent 16,000 military advisors to Vietnam who were not ca- not authorized to participate in combat. That didn't mean that some of them didn't, but they were not authorized. In, in fact, that was fewer federal troops than he sent to get James Meredith into the University of Mississippi. So, he sent fewer to Vietnam, and two weeks before he died...He signed a national security order ordering all of those troops home by 1965, with the first thousand to come home that month, in November. And he died two weeks later. So, and then, of course, Johnson came in and remanded the war and sent 250,000 troops over there, which is what all of my uncle's military advisors wanted him to do.

   16. JCJason Calacanis12:32

       Yeah.

   17. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.12:32

       And he stood up to them. Um, one of the other things my uncle said, and you know, the anniversary of his speech at American University, which is an extraordinary speech, probably one of the best in American history, uh, Jeff Sachs has called-called it the most important speech in American history. Um, it was a speech to the American people and it was, it's an extraordinary speech because if you read it, he's asking them to put their- their, themselves into the shoes of the Russians and understand that the Russians bore the brunt of World War II. They lost, one out of every thirteen Russians died in that war. A third of their country was occupied and leveled to the ground. It's like, he said, "It's as if the entire East Coast of the United States to Chicago was put into rubble." And he described this in detail for the American people to say, you know, "We're all people. We're all on an arc and we need to f- we need to understand each other's motives-"

   18. JCJason Calacanis13:35

       Well, he-

   19. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.13:35

       "... and not just vilify each other." And what we're seeing now is this formulaic vilification, this narrative that we saw with Saddam Hussein, with, you know, Putin, with every little war that we want to get into, where, "Those guys are purely evil, we're pure good, and we're gonna go rescue, you know, the damsel in distress."

   20. JCJason Calacanis13:55

       Just on that, could you contrast and compare, just maybe the last three or four presidents on this very narrow dimension of that, of JFK's promise of what a president should be doing? Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden. How do you see the things that these guys have gotten right, or, and/or very wrong here? On that dimension, just on that dimension.

   21. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.14:16

       Well, you know, I've been friends with Joe Biden for many, many years. Uh, Joe Biden is a, you know, he's a go-to-war guy. He- he was one of the strongest supporters of the Iraq War. He's been a supporter of every war that's come along. And that, you know, I think that's one of the reasons that, you know, some of those, uh, that- that portion of the Democratic Party, which is a very, very powerful kind of king pickers, was very happy with him getting in office, is that he never says no to a war. I think Trump, you know, I liked a lot of what Trump said about foreign policy, about disentangling us from this knee-jerk reaction of, you know, of constant wars and that, the cost that that imposes on our country, what it's doing, it's hollowing out our middle class. Uh, but then Trump did a lot of things, including walking away from the, you know, from the, uh, um, uh, uh, the, uh, intermediate nuclear missile treaty, which is a, was another provocation for Russia. 'Cause that treaty, you know, we're- we're putting these intermediate missile systems all along the Russian border, in Romania and Poland, and, you know, and in- in, uh, Ukraine. And, uh, and th- that, those missiles could hit Cuba, I mean, could- could hit Moscow in a, in a few minutes. So there was a very destabilizing system, we all signed it, and he walked away from it. And now, I don't think that was a... I think that was another provocation. We should be deescalating these provocations, though. You know, the, why didn't NATO... This is what George Kennan said after- after, you know, the- the- the Soviet Union collapsed. "Wh- why do we even have NATO anymore? Why do we have it? Why do we have it, unless we're gonna involve the Russians in it? Why don't we do a Marshall Plan for Russia? We won the war, they are the losers. They admit they're the losers, but they wanna join the European community. Let's make that easy for them. Let's not continue to treat them as if they're the enemy, because that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that-"

   22. JCJason Calacanis16:29

       So-

   23. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.16:29

       "... unfortunately, is what we did."

   24. JCJason Calacanis16:31

       Let's pivot then. You want to contain and you would force everybody to the table, to a resolution, uh, if I'm understanding correctly. You weren't explicit in terms of would you remove support, but I think we can infer from it, you would have a point at which you would stop sending armaments to Ukraine.

   25. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.16:47

       We have tremendous moral pressure and economic pressure-

   26. JCJason Calacanis16:51

       Right.

   27. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.16:52

       ... and everything else on Ukraine.

   28. DSDavid Sacks16:53

       How about this, Jason? I mean, would you be willing to take NATO expansion off the table if it helps resolve-

   29. JCJason Calacanis16:59

       A hundred percent, yeah.

   30. DSDavid Sacks16:59

       ... this conflict?
4. 17:17 – 18:57

   Foreign policy: Taiwan / China

   1. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.17:17

   2. JCJason Calacanis17:17

      Let's talk about Taiwan. So, we gotta stay out of wars. If Xi Jinping decides Taiwan is strategic and he invades Taiwan, what would your response be if you were elected president?

   3. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.17:30

      Well, my response would be to deescalate that conflict. There's essentially a war party in Washington, um, that is- is encouraging that conflict, that is drumming up that conflict. What I would do is I would- I would deescalate it. I would stop looking at it as a threat, uh, now, and- and, uh, and allow the Chinese and the Taiwanese to come to their own solution about what kind of relationship they have. Uh, and I think that- that, that if we stopped our provocations toward the Chinese, that that would naturally deescalate.

   4. JCJason Calacanis18:11

      And if China decided, "It's strategic and we're going in anyway," would you, if you were president, defend Taiwan?

   5. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.18:18

      ... that is a question that I would not answer.

   6. JCJason Calacanis18:22

      I'm curious, why not? Why don't presidential candidates just answer that question?

   7. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.18:26

      Because you're committing the country to a war in the future that would be probably the bloodiest war ever fought. And it's not something that strategically ... It's not good strategy to prot- pro- project your, your intentions. You wanna leave room for negotiation. You wanna leave r- room for all kinds of movements, and you wanna have a debate with the American people and with Congress.

   8. JCJason Calacanis18:52

      But Biden's been clear that he would defend it, right? So th- that's an, it's an interesting insight

5. 18:57 – 33:22

   Government spending: Fiscal responsibility, where to cut budget, debt ceiling

   1. JCJason Calacanis18:57

      right there. Friedberg, do you wanna talk maybe a little bit about the economy and the spending that we're seeing?

   2. DFDavid Friedberg19:02

      Yeah. So Robert, I think my biggest question, I've referenced this on the show a number of times, um, is this, uh, extraordinary concern I have about the fiscal deficit and the debt level of the US, running deficits north of a trillion dollars a year, 33 trillion in total debt. Some people use the debt to GDP metric, which, you know, at this point is approaching or has exceeded 130%. And 52 nations that have reached that level of debt to GDP, only one of them has not had to restructure their currency or restructure their debt payments, obviously with the debt ceiling approaching and some fiscal conservatives using this moment as a point to try and generate leverage. I guess my biggest question for the country now and going forward is, you know, do we actually have the ability to pursue all of these interests on a social, a geopolitical, a security agenda and, and do so without having either a balanced budget or a plan that says, here are the boundaries and here are the boundary conditions? Because in the last couple of years, and particularly in the last five years, we've seen almost like a bipartisan unmitigated spending spree that, you know, is largely driven to, you know, to, to do what the electorate wants, which is to give people stuff. And giving people stuff costs money, and that money has to be paid back at some point. I guess, how do you think about the importance of this? And how do you think about the boundary conditions that you would, you know, look to articulate and impose, uh, as you, you know, think about this role with respect to the, the deficit, spending, and the debt levels for this country?

   3. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.20:57

      In terms of a boundary, I, I, you know, I would love to hear arguments about that. But I, um, you know, I, we ... As you say, I think the, the debt is now 32 trillion. Uh, the GDP, our GDP is around 25, uh, trillion. So that is, that's just a really alarming ratio. Uh, if you look at why, you know, the, the primary cause are our military expenditures. It, we're spending eight, uh, this year, I think, uh, eight, uh, 8.4 trillion on the military budget this year. Um, but if you throw in the Homeland Security and all the surveillance and security expenditures at home, it's 1.1 trillion a year. Uh, that's 1.1 trillion a year that is attributable to, to essentially to our, our, you know, warmongering. And I don't think we can afford to be policemen of the world anymore. We have 800 bases around the world. We need to start rebuilding our middle class at home. We need to be responsible with our debt. And we need ... My grandfather always said, "Uh, we should make America, w- uh, too expensive to conquer. We should make fortress America. We should arm America to the teeth at home so that no ... so we're too expensive to conquer. And then we should concentrate on building up our economic power and a robust middle class. That's what's gonna make America strong. And instead of, uh, projecting military strength abroad, we ought to be projecting our economic strength and a marketplace of ideas and economic power." I, I, you know, w- right now we're borrowing six tr- uh, $6 billion a day, mainly from the Chinese and Japanese, just to serve the interests on that debt. That's not a healthy thing for America to be. And we gotta figure out, you know, a way to, uh, impose fiscal discipline. But I can't tell you exactly what my boundaries would be. Uh, that's something I need to think about.

   4. DFDavid Friedberg23:01

      How do you, how do you think about that? Like, I think non-d- uh, of discretionary spending, you know, defense is, is about 800 billion, non-defense is about 900 billion. And then obviously there's Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid. In order to get the budget balanced, you think cutting defense would be kind of the first priority and you could kind of get there through th- you know, that approach. But I, I ... There still seems to be a big gap to me on, you know, given how much we're spending on how do we actually get there? Are we ultimately gonna have to kind of change retirement benefits, restructure Medicare, Medicaid? Or are we gonna raise taxes? Or are we gonna do all three to get to this point? Otherwise, we have this obviously kind of never-ending debt spiral that, that's, that's gonna cause a massive crisis, uh, whether it's not this year, maybe it's in five years or 10 years. Right now, it's projected Social Security will go bankrupt in 2035, 2034, around that range. So this is coming up fast. What are we gonna be cutting besides defense and ... Or are we gonna be raising taxes to 70%, do you think, to kind of bridge this hole?

   5. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.24:09

      I can't answer that question any better than I already have. Uh, you know, I think with there are, uh, there is, um, there are targets for opportunity in the, uh, in the Homeland Security. I think once we stop fighting these wars all over the world, there's a lot n- less need for us to have a surveillance state at home. So the real cost in the military is 1.1 trillion a year.... and not just the 800 trillion that shows up on the books. And I think those are targets for opportunity. And I, I can't, you know, I have to kn- I, uh, need to study more th- the issue about how to j- how to get back into a balanced budget. I, you know, one of the things I'd say disturbs me is that I don't think we should be playing chicken in Congress about raising the debt ceiling, um, because I th- I don't think we should mess around with the full faith and credit of the United States, particularly at this point in time.

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya25:05

      One of the things that's happened in the world, Bobby, is that there's been a couple of countries, France is probably the best example, that had to raise the retirement age. And irrespective of the view that one has on whether that was right or wrong, the practical reality of doing it is just that when these initial so- social safety nets were passed, the average life expectancy of folks was 10, 15 years less than what they are today. And presumably, as we keep inventing technologies, folks are gonna live to 80, 90, 100 years on average, which may seem implausible, but is likely if you look at the trend. I'm just curious how you think about the state of our social safety net and what has to change, what would you keep the same, and what has to be totally reimagined for what the world will look like in 30 or 40 years?

   7. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.26:03

      I would say it's a red line for me to touch Social Security, um, or Medicaid or Mer- Medicare. I think we need to take care of people, particularly people who have spent their whole life pa- paying into a system, uh, with a promise at the end of it, and have worked hard and, uh, uh, um, and saved and done what they were supposed to do. I don't think they, you know, it's right to pull the rug out from under them. But again, I ... This is an issue that I need to spend more time looking at, uh, and studying. Maybe the next time I come back here, I'll have a better answer for you guys.

   8. DFDavid Friedberg26:41

      I think this is my concern is, uh, sorry, r- but Robert, the, the, the comment you just made is the same comment I hear from both sides of the aisle, that we can't touch Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid because it would be so unpopular, we wouldn't get elected. And that's ultimately kind of what a democracy like ours may lead to, is that folks vote and elect representatives that are gonna create these systems that benefit them, but in aggregate, we may not be able to support those benefits over time and at scale. And we may be facing that moment sooner than any of us want to. And I think it's one of the more pressing issues and concerns, not just for the United States, but for the global economy, that if the US doesn't resolve this massive hole, talking about Social Security, for example, going bankrupt in the next 12 years a- as one acute example of that problem set, you know, we may not be able to turn it around.

   9. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.27:41

      Right.

   10. DFDavid Friedberg27:41

       And, I mean, do you think that politics is set up to solve the structural economic problems that the US is now facing? Because so much of politics ends up leading towards, "What additional benefits can I provide to my, uh, the folks that get me elected?"

   11. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.27:55

       Here's the thing, is we spent $8 trillion in the war in Iraq, $8 trillion, and we got nothing for it.

   12. DFDavid Friedberg28:05

       Yeah. That's pretty nuts. That's nuts.

   13. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.28:07

       In fact, we got worse than nothing. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. We killed a million Iraqis probably. Uh, we created ISIS, we turned Iraq into a proxy for Iran, which is exactly what we've been not trying to do for 40 years, um, and we drove two million refugees with the Iraq War and its aftermath, Syria and Yemen and, you know, Pakistan and Afghanistan, two million refugees into Europe, destabilized democracy in Europe, and we go ... Here's the thing, is we spent $8 trillion in the war in Iraq, $8 trillion, and we got nothing for it.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg28:33

       Yeah. That's pretty nuts. That's nuts.

   15. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.28:33

       In fact, we got worse than nothing. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. We killed a million Iraqis probably. Uh, we created ISIS, we turned Iraq into a proxy for Iran, which is exactly what we've been not trying to do for 40 years, um, and we drove two million refugees with the Iraq War and its aftermath, Syria and Yemen and, you know, Pakistan and Afghanistan, two million refugees into Europe, destabilized democracy in Europe, and we go ... And so $8 trillion there. We spent $16 trillion on the pandemic, on the lockdown, and ag- again, got nothing in return. Um, so that's $24 trillion, and now we're doing bank bailouts every, you know, couple of months, uh, uh, uh, Silicon Valley Bank, the Fed said that it was, uh, printing $300 billion for that, made up for all of the, you know, deflationary, um, uh, uh, uh, steps that the Biden administration had previously taken. So you go to, uh, you know, you go to a, an American who's been working their whole life and has been promised at the end of the life that they're gonna get a few bucks every month, and ... You know, I have a friend who I brought to my speech with me who's, who, um, during the same month that we committed another 750 million during March, sev- we sent $750 million extra to the Ukraine, we, uh, we cut 15 million Americans from Medicare. My friend got a call from a, from the, from the government on his cellphone, a recorded call, saying that, "Your food stamps have just been cut by 90%." He went from $283 a month to $25 a month, so you try to feed yourself on $25 a month. There are 30 million Americans who are starving right now, and that to me is unacceptable. And it's hard to go to people like that, people who have been honest, who have played by the rules, who have done everything that they were supposed to do with the promise that they would be taken care of, that their healthcare would have been taken care of in old age, you go to those people and say, "Okay, now we're gonna cut your food stamps, and try to fa- feed yourself on $25 a month. Try to feed yourself for $25 a week." We're telling them that ...... and, and, uh- (laughs)

   16. JCJason Calacanis30:40

       And then spending 800 billion to make a plane.

   17. DSDavid Sacks30:43

       How are you gonna cut the federal budget when you're sending over 100 billion to Ukraine? There's, you can't, you have no moral authority to do it.

   18. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.30:49

       I wanna finish up by saying, you know, y- y- y- you're like tinkering in the engine room when the ship is sinking, you know, because, uh, the, you know, the, the, or the, or switching deck chairs on the Titanic.

   19. JCJason Calacanis31:01

       Yeah.

   20. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.31:02

       Let's deal with the real problem. Let's figure out how to make this nation a nation that is really focused on taking care of our people inside, rather than saying, "Okay, well, in order to pay for the Ukraine war, we gotta screw every American on, on Social Security and Medicare." We've had, by the way, the inflation that we've created from, you know, from, from just printing money is making my friend Keith's food twice expensive. So the, the cost of staples in this country was raised by 76% in two years, and now they're cutting his food stamps and bailing out the same month, $300 million, the Silicon Valley Bank. We, we gotta ... I mean, it doesn't make any sense. And having this kind of conversation, how do we screw the poor to make sure (laughs) that we can, you know, we can milk them while we're doing all of this great ... It's like this country is acting like the alcoholic who is behind on his mortgage and who takes the milk money and goes into the bar and buys rounds for strangers. You know, that's what you're dealing with.

   21. JCJason Calacanis32:11

       (laughs) That's a pretty good analogy. Shots, everybody. (laughs)

   22. DSDavid Sacks32:14

       So let me, let me ask a follow-up question on this debt ceiling fight, which is, which is a game of chicken. And the, the country's economy might go off a cliff in the next month because Republicans and Democrats can't agree. So Biden's position is, "I want a clean debt ceiling increase, no terms on it." House Republicans have passed a debt ceiling increase, but it contains things like a 1% cap on spending growth, it claws back unspent COVID-19 relief funds, and it would halt Biden's student debt forgiveness plan. So Robert, I guess, the question to you would be, would you negotiate? Like, what would your posture to House Republicans be? Would you be willing to negotiate? Because Biden is basically saying, "I will not negotiate at all." So negotiate or not negotiate, I guess that's my question to you.

   23. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.33:06

       You, you, you have to negotiate. I'm, I'm not sure if he's posturing, you know, or what. They have to negotiate. They have to, you know, they have to work out something that's good for our country. And that, you know, and, and you're gonna, both sides are gonna have to give up something.

6. 33:22 – 46:04

   US Govt Intelligence Agencies: "Deep State," increasing accountability, "agency capture"

   1. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.33:22

      Uh, we have to, you know, we have to put our country first. And it's, it's insane to play this game (laughs) of chicken with, uh, you know, w- with the s- when the stakes are so high.

   2. JCJason Calacanis33:31

      There's been a lot of talk, Robert, about the deep state, the FBI, DOJ, CIA. Your family, obviously having dealt with two tragic assassinations, your father and your uncle, has dealt with this firsthand in terms of just having the CIA information about these assassinations released. I'm curious your position on some of the most radical proposals people have this election cycle of dismantling the FBI, CIA, DOJ, AKA, the deep state. Do you believe there's a deep state? And how would you, as president, deal with this intelligence, uh, operation we have? And, and then also personally, what are your personal feelings on it?

   3. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.34:19

      Well, um, on the ... You know, I have, I- ... You know, I, I've, I have a pretty clear idea about how I would handle, um, the intelligence agencies. And in fact, my father wa- was thinking very deeply about that at the time. My father, who believed ... Hi- his, his, you know, first reaction when his brother was killed was that the CIA had killed him, and in fact, the first three calls he made on that day. And, you know, I was home, uh, at the time when John McCum ... The CIA was right across the street from my house. And so John McCum, who was the CIA director, he would come to our house and swim every day after work during the spring and summertime. And my father called the CIA desk and talked to a desk officer and said, "Did your people do this?" That was his first call. And he called Harry Ruiz, who was a Cuban, uh, who was th- one of the Cubans who had remained friendly with my family, my ... You know, while we were surrounded by Cubans growing up because of, who were Bay of Pigs refugees, my father had got them freed after a year in, you know, in the, uh, Castro's prisons. And, um, and m- my father and mother spent a lot of time finding houses for them, schools, integrating them to the US military, finding jobs. And so we were all raised very, very closely with the Cuban community. But gradually, uh, they turned away from my family. But this one Cuban, who had been a, been an engineer and fought with Castro and then turned against him when he cam- became communist, was very close friends with my father. The second call that he made was to Harry Ruiz and he said, "Did, uh, did our people," meaning the CIA people, "do this?" And, um, and that was, uh ... And so my father was thinking very oth- very, very carefully about how to handle the CIA. He had been, you know, he had been essentially managing the CIA since he came into office and he recognized that the probab- ... And, you know, as I, I talked about in my speech, and I think David on this show mentioned this, that during the Bay of Pigs invasion, my uncle realized that he had been lied to by, uh, by Charles Cabal and, uh, Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, the heads of the CIA, uh, as well as the joint chiefs.... and he came out in the middle of the invasion when it turned against them, and he realized these, these men were being killed on the beach. And he said, "I want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind." So he recognized that the function of the intelligence agencies had devolved and that they were, they had become captive of the military industrial complex and the military contractors. And their, uh, uh, their function was essentially to provide our nation with a constant pipeline of new wars, to feed the military industrial complex and the growth of the surveillance state. And my father, when he ran for President, Pete Hamill, who was one of his favorite, uh, newsmen, asked him on the bus during ... two weeks before he died, asked him what he, what he was gonna do about the CIA. And he said, "What we need to do is to we, we need to remove the espionage division, the espionage branch from the plans division." The plans division of the CIA is essentially the dirty tricks, um, provision. That's the, the division, the action priv- uh, division. Uh, they do the assassinations, they fix elections, they do paramilitary operations, black ops, torture, black sites, all of that stuff. The espionage division ... And CIA was originally set up by Cuba, by Truman as an espionage agency. Espionage means information gathering and analysis. It's not violence. It's about information acquisition. And unfortunately, the, the, uh, the, the clandestine action division was wagging the espionage dog. So the function of the espionage division was to, to, to provide new actions, things to do for the clandestine division, uh, and then covering up their mistakes. So there was never any ac- accountability. And what my father understood is that the espionage division should not be working for the, for the clandestine services. They should be overseeing them and particularly doing accountability. Uh, oh, you know, what ... If the C- the CIA looks ... The way that the CIA looks at the war in Iraq is it was a success because we accomplished our mission of deposing Saddam Hussein. But, and you know, the CIA was George Tenet who lied to President Bush and said it's a slam dunk. So they got us to go in there with weapons of mass destruction.

   4. JCJason Calacanis39:28

      So as President, would you rethink it? And then just as a final question, as fol- final follow-up to that, do you believe they murdered or were involved in the murder of your uncle? What, what have you come to personally?

   5. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.39:41

      The CIA? Yes, they were definitely involved in the murder, and, you know, and the six-year cover-up. They're still not releasing the, you know, the papers that legally they have to release. Um, but I don't think there's any doubt if you look at this huge, you know, mountain, monumental mountain of evidence and confessions, and, you know, so many people have confessed to their involvement. And, you know, we understand the, um ... If you look, I mean, there, there, for anybody who has doubts about that, I would recommend a book by Jim Douglas called The Unspeakable. Because I think he's done a better job, uh, than anybody else at kind of assembling and distilling all of the millions and millions of documents that, uh, have been released over the past 50 years. And these things, these revelations are released incrementally, and so nobody really takes notice. Um, but when you put them all together, the story is very clear.

   6. JCJason Calacanis40:38

      So you, you would definitely rethink the CIA, the FBI, DOJ, you know, the whole intelligence operation?

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya40:44

      At the minimum, I think what you're saying as well is maybe you would also release the documents that maybe would at least provide some more transparency. I just wanted to build on that because you had a very provocative tweet. Part of what you're talking about is accountability, and we need data and transparency to have that. There are people that have whistleblown, there are people that have leaked, and I think it's fair to say that they've all been treated by the security apparatus in largely the exact same way. But you tweeted recently about your desire to see some of those folks forgiven and pardoned. Do you want to just take a few minutes just to talk about some of those folks that you think has allowed us to actually see the truth if we want to see it and why you think that and what you think should be done with folks like that?

   8. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.41:32

      I mean, Julian Assange is an example. Julian Assange is a, is a newspaper publisher. He published leaked documents. You know, why are we ... I mean, I, if I was any newspaper publisher in this country, uh, I would be worried about that, that now he can go to jail for life because he published leaked documents of great import to the American people, of things that should not have been secret, that we should have known about. Um, revelations that affect our civil rights, affect our foreign policy, affect things that we have a right to know about. And, you know, it's, it's really ... It, it's strange that there's any support for his imprisonment a- among the press. And I think the press is beginning to figure this out finally. The most controversial of those figures is Edwin Snowden. But Edwin Snowden, um, released documents that showed us that we were all being spied upon.

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya42:29

      Yeah.

   10. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.42:29

       And that's important for Americans to know, and in fact, it was so important that Congress passed laws based upon his revelations to protect the American people. So why are we punishing the whistleblower rather than punishing the people who were, you know, who were illegally spying on us?... that's what we should be doing. We shouldn't be, uh, jailing dissenters in our country. We shouldn't be jailing whistleblowers. We should be jailing the people who break the law.

   11. JCJason Calacanis42:59

       Who, to keep this bipartisan, do you believe the deep state is acting to subvert the Trump presidency and that they are framing him on these three or four indictments that they are working on, some that have dropped, some that haven't? Do you believe there's a deep sp- state con- conspiracy against Trump? 'Cause you might be facing him.

   12. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.43:21

       I don't use the word deep state. I mean, I, you know, I... You know, I've described how these, uh, bureaucracies function, and it's not that, it's not so much a group of people. The kind of deep split state implies-

   13. JCJason Calacanis43:35

       (laughs)

   14. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.43:35

       ... that there's a group of, of people and it's kind of, you know, black coats in a smoky room, uh, pulling strings. But the corruption is systemic. The, these, uh, you know, they, all of these agencies are captive agencies. The CIA is ultimately working for a, for industry, like the oil industry, the coal industry, and the military contractors, and that they've always had that tie since the very beginning. You know, Allen Dulles, who had worked for Sullivan Cromwell and ended up doing coup d'etats on behalf of his former clients, like Texaco and United Fruit, Texaco and BP in, in, uh, Iran in mi- 1953. His former client, United Fruit, when, when, uh, Jacob Arbenz in Guatemala tried to nationalize United Fruit, you know, uh, the CIA under Dulles went and overthrew the government to protect the interests of his former client. So there's always been these ties to industry, and the ties now, and particularly the oil industry, and the ties to, um, to the military industrial contractors, really drive CIA action and CIA intelligence. And we have to, you know, you have to stop. And, and this is systemic in all these agencies. I mean, USDA is run by Cargill, Smithfield, um, Monsanto, um, Bo Pilgrim, John Tyson. EPA is run... When we sued EPA, uh, we got discovery documents that showed that the head of the pesticide division, Jess Rowland, had been secretly working for Monsanto for a decade and, you know, sending memos back and forth with Monsanto, directing them, "You need to kill this study. You need to kill that study." And this, unfortunately, is not the exception, it is the rule. Most of the people who work for those agencies are good citizens, they're good Americans, they're honest, and they're patriots. Uh, the people who tend to rise in those agencies and occupy these very, very powerful key positions from decades or years, like Anthony Fauci, 50 years, are people who are in the tank with industry. And what we, you know, we need to do is unravel that across the government. And that's really what people say, that's the deep state, that really is what, it's a systemic corruption within our agencies, that is, that's driven by agency capture.

7. 46:04 – 55:10

   COVID: mishandling, more "agency capture," vaccine policy

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya46:04

      Can we actually just talk about the coronavirus, maybe pandemic, for a second? And I, I just wanna tie in two concepts. Sometimes, again, there's a lot of mainstream misinformation about it. There is a lot that came out about you, particularly as it relates to vaccines. I just want to give you an opportunity to set the record straight, just on what you think happened, COVID, all that corruption, your thought on vaccines, the efficacy of our programs, how we should change, what we keep the same. Just maybe a chance to clear the air so that we can get some of the gobbledygook on the internet set straight.

   2. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.46:39

      I mean, it's hard to, uh, you know, I wrote a, uh, 250,000 paid book about it and I've written a couple of books in, so it's hard to summarize, you know, what went wrong in, in a, uh, in a second. But essentially, we had, instead of a public health response to a public health crisis, we had a militarized and monetized response that was the inverse of what, of everything that you would wanna do if you actually wanted to protect public health. We've known, you know, if you look at WHO protocols or CDC protocols, the EU, the NHS in Britain, all those, they all had protocols for how to manage the pandemic. They all said unanimously, "You do not use lockdowns, mass lockdowns. You quarantine the sick, you protect the vulnerable, but you keep society moving, because the consequences of not do- of shutting down society will be cataclysmic beyond anything that the disease is gonna impose." Everybody knew that. And so, you know, we had these, these agencies that, that had drilled for years and years, uh, this alternative, you know, militarized response. And instead of, you know, doing what you wanna do, which is to get early treatment to people, to have... I mean, you know, we, we live in the age of the internet. We should have had a, a grid that connected all 15 million frontline doctors, every country around the world, and figured out what do you do when that works in your country, you know, and try, and, and distilling that information and processing it and getting it to other doctors. Well, we knew what was working. We knew ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were working. We knew that since 2004, 'cause NIH did this study that said hydroxychloroquine obliterates coronavirus. We knew what would work at that time. And what was the response? They, the response was they could not allow early treatment to occur. Why? Because there's a little-known federal law that says if there is a drug that is shown effective against a target disease, it is ill- uh, a drug that is approved for any purpose, it is illegal...... to issue an, a, a emergency use authorization for a vaccine. So if they had admitted that hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin worked against coronavirus, it would have destroyed their whole $100 billion vaccine, you know, enterprise. So they had to kill early treatment and they went after stuff that they knew worked, they, this was the first respiratory virus in history where people would go to the hospital, and they would test positive for coronavirus and be symptomatic. They were sick, uh, that's why they went to the hospital. And the hospital would say to them, "There is no treatment. Go home till your lips turn blue and you can't breathe, and come back and we will give you two things that are gonna kill you, remdesivir and hydroxy... and, and, uh, and, uh, uh, ventilation." So people still look at, in this country at Anthony Fauci as a hero. And we were doing things, um, a couple of miles from me in Malibu, there were police pulling surfers out of the surf and giving them $1,000 tickets and telling them to go home. Getting them out of the sunshine where, where coronavirus doesn't spread and lock them in their home where it does. And every time they sent some- one of these people home from the hospital sick, it was a super-spreader event. So you look at our record of coronavirus, and this is when nobody can explain who is, you know, defending Fauci, et cetera. We had the highest body count in the world, by far, from coronavirus. Uh, our... We have 4.2% of the world's population, we had 16% of the COVID deaths. How does anybody explain that? And you go to nations that didn't do what we told them. Nigeria, Nigeria has the highest malaria burden in the world, so it, everybody, everybody gets hydroxychloroquine once a week. They call it Sunday, Sunday. Everybody in the country takes it on Sunday. They had the highest, uh, river blindness burden, so half the country's on ivermectin. Nigeria never had an epidemic. It had a death rate in Nigeria of 14 people per million population. Our death rate, 3,000 per million population. Blacks in our countries were dying at 3.6 times the rate of whites. Uh, why were American Blacks dying and Nigerian Blacks weren't? And, uh, and then you go to Haiti. Haiti had a, Ha- and by the way, Nigeria had a 1.3% vaccination rate. Haiti had a 1.4% vaccination rate, and they had a death rate of 15 people per million population. Th- these are the countries that Tony Fauci and Bill Gates said, "We gotta get them vaccinated. We gotta do whatever you can, 'cause they're gonna get totally wiped out 'cause of their poverty." And guess what? They never had a pandemic. Across Africa, there was a 10% vaccination rate and guess what? They had a death rate of about 340-

   3. JCJason Calacanis51:55

      So some people, uh, think that the death rate here was overstated because of incentives to do that. Do you believe that as well?

   4. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.52:03

      Yes.

   5. JCJason Calacanis52:04

      So maybe part of that death rate is, it was overincentived. But you believe, looking back on this, that Fauci, as well as the pharma companies, Bill Gates' investments in those areas, that led us down a path, we'll call it the medical-industrial or the pharma-industrial complex. You believe the pharma-industrial complex dictated our response to coronavirus? And then Freiberg, I'll let you jump in.

   6. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.52:28

      Yeah.

   7. JCJason Calacanis52:28

      But y- you believe that, that that's the...

   8. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.52:31

      I, I don't have any question about that.

   9. JCJason Calacanis52:33

      Okay.

   10. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.52:33

       I believe this was a, you know, it was, uh, as I said, it was a military response. I mean, look at who was running the, look at who was running the coronavirus response. Wouldn't you think it would be HHS? Well, when they h- when Warp Speed had to present its, declassify its organizational charts to show to the FDA committee called VRBPAC, when they demanded it, and Warp Speed went in and showed them the organizational cha- charts, the, the, the, uh, the agency running Warp Speed and pandemic response was not HHS, it was NSA, the National Security Agency. Avril Haines is the Director of National Intelligence, so she was running Operation Warp Speed. And who was manufacturing? It wasn't Pfizer and Moderna. It was 140 military contractors who, you know, who had lines ready. And you say, you know, and, and, you know, all of this clampdown on, on civil rights that we saw, the, the censorship, um, the closing the churches, the, you know, the, the closing of the right to assemble, the banning of jury trials against pharmaceutical companies. They, they crushed the Seventh Amendment, the First Amendment. They closed down 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation. Uh, they, they obliterated the Fourth Amendment right to, you know, uh, to, uh, against warrantless searches and seizures, with all these intrusive... Uh, you know, you, you had to show your medical records to go and get out of your house, or to get into a public building.

   11. DFDavid Friedberg54:16

       Yeah.

   12. JCJason Calacanis54:16

       Freiberg, what, what is correct here do you believe, and what is incorrect about Roberts, what's Roberts saying, if anything?

   13. DFDavid Friedberg54:21

       Well, look, I mean, there's obviously a lot of things I could say. Uh, by the way, I wa- I was on the executive team at Monsanto for a couple of years. So, you know, I, one, one thing I will say, as I sat (laughs) on the, at the table facing the EPA and the USDA, and certainly didn't feel like a very cozy relationship in at least what I saw in the few years I was there, it was, it did feel like a very, kind of, independent regulatory and challenging, frankly, regulatory process that Monsanto had to manage and deal with and go through in, in releasing new products. You know, it, I, I don't think that this notion that there were, kind of, embedded parties that did our whims and wishes really plays true, at least from my experience sitting there. And I'm not a longtime Monsanto executive. I built a software company, sold it to Monsanto and sat on the exec team for a few years after the acquisition. But I guess the, the,

8. 55:10 – 1:05:54

   Broader thoughts on vaccines in general

   1. DFDavid Friedberg55:10

      the more...... kind of, I think bigger framing question for you, Robert, is really around vaccines in general. I think your, your commentary around the, the COVID response and, uh, you know, the influencing forces there didn't start with COVID, right? I mean, you, you've, you've been a, a kind of, you know, outspoken voice on vaccines in general for some time. Is that a fair statement? 'Cause I think that that's part of the media narrative around your history and legacy, is that you have been kind of outspoken on vaccines and the, you know, the, the risks and the, and the, uh, effects that you, that you consider to be kind of ... I don't know if it's implied or explicit with respect to the use and, and wide adoption of, of vaccines over time. Maybe you could share a little bit about your broader perspective in the years leading up to COVID, and how that then kind of informed your point of view specifically on COVID.

   2. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.56:01

      Uh, uh, you know, my objective is not to vaccines. I'm not anti-vax. I, I am fully vaccinated-

   3. DFDavid Friedberg56:06

      Okay.

   4. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.56:06

      ... and my kids were fully vaccinated. Um, I wish, at this point, that I had not done that, because I know enough about them now. But my principal objective is that vaccines, um, in the, the childhood vaccines are immune from pre-licensing safety testing. Of the 72 ... When I got, was a kid, I got three vaccines. My children got 72 doses of 16 vaccines. And the vaccines are, are the one medical product that does not have to go through, uh, placebo-controlled trials where you test exposures on exposed population prior to licensure. And that, there's a number of historical reasons for that, that come out of the kind of military, uh, beginning is the... Uh, these vaccines were regarded as, um, as national security defense against, uh, biological attacks on our country, so they wanted to make sure if the Russians attacked us with anthrax, uh, or some other biological agent, they could quickly formulate and deploy a vaccine to 200 million Americans with no regulatory impediments. So they, they called them biologics, uh, medicines, and exempted biologics from pre-licensing safety trial. I've litigated on the issue. Not one of them has ever been ta- tested, pre-licensure against. So nobody knows what the ... You know, you can say that the vaccine is effective against a target disease, but you can't say that it's not causing worse problems. Now, I- I'll just summarize this story. In the, the vaccine schedule exploded in 1986. The vaccine industry succeeded in getting Ronald Reagan to sign a law, and my uncle was also, you know, a group that was pressured, um, by Wyeth, which was losing $20 in downstream liabilities on every vaccine it made, because of lawsuits, for every dollar that it made, and they ... And, and promised, they went to Reagan and said, "We're gonna get out of the vaccine business, and you're gonna be left without a vaccine supply unless you give us full immunity from liability." And Reagan, you know, reluctantly signed that. And so today, no matter how, uh, negligent the company, no matter how grievous your injury, no matter how reckless their conduct, you cannot sue them. That caused a gold rush, 'cause now you've got a product that there's no downstream liability. You're immune from that. There's no upstream safety testing, so that's a $250 million saving, and there's no marketing or advertising costs, uh, because, uh, the federal government's gonna mandate this product to 76 million American children whether they like it or not. And there's no better product in the world. And so there was a gold rush, and instead of three vaccines, we quickly ended up with 72, and now we're going to, you know, toward 80 right now. And there's no end in sight. And a lot of those vaccines were unnecessary. They're not even for casual disease, it caused diseases. Here's what happened. In nine- beginning in 1989, we experienced a chronic disease epidemic in this country. It is unlike anything in human history. Uh, we went from having 6% of Americans affected by chronic disease, to 54% by 2006. And what do I mean by chronic disease? I mean neurological diseases that I never saw when I was a kid. ADD, ADHD, special ed language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, um, ASD, autism, narcolepsy, all of these suddenly appeared. Autism rates went from one in 10,000 to one in every 34. 1989 was the year this began. Allergic diseases, peanut allergies suddenly appeared. Um, food allergies, eczema suddenly appeared. Uh, anaphylaxis and asthma, you know, which had been around, but it exploded. And then autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and juvenile diabetes. Um, I never knew a kid, I had 11 siblings, about 70 cousins, uh, I never knew anybody with any of these diseases. And suddenly, why do five of my kids have allergies? So, uh, so then if you look at the manufacturer's inserts for those 72 vaccines, there's 420 diseases that have been associated with the vaccines that are listed, uh, including every one of those diseases that went epidemic in 1989. And this is the country which is the most heavily vaccinated, and this was happening here unlike any other country in the world. And so we have this, you know, this ... And, and you know, it's good for the pharma, 'cause pharma now makes 60 billion on the vaccines. When I was a kid, they were making 250 million. Now they make 60 billion a year, plus 100 billion from COVID vaccine.

   5. DFDavid Friedberg1:01:01

      Friedberg, do you believe that these vaccines are over-prescribed, and are part of the rise in ADHD and, and all, all this litany of diseases? I'm just asking Friedberg, who's our resident scientist here. Do you, do you believe this?

   6. JCJason Calacanis1:01:17

      ... you know, explicitly as a scientist? I'm curious.

   7. DFDavid Friedberg1:01:20

      I don't think there's direct evidence supporting that relationship. I think that there's a lot of environmental factors that have been driving changes in, you know, the rate of, uh, problems with autoimmunity as it relates to our food proj- products, our food system. It relates to environmental chemistry, like Robert has talked about generally. I think there's a lot of environmental conditioning that's caused this rise in, in, in problems in human health.

   8. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:01:48

      Can I interrupt for a second?

   9. DFDavid Friedberg1:01:49

      Yeah.

   10. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:01:49

       Because I, I don't think it's solely the vaccines. Our children today are swimming around in a toxic soup. Um, but there's a timeline and... And actually, the, a toxicologist that I've used in many of my lawsuits, probably the most famous in the country, Phil Landrigan, looked at the timeline of, of the explosion of all these chronic diseases and he said, "Uh, there's only a finite number of things that have caused it." You know, one is glyphosate, things that went, became ubiquitous against, uh, uh, in every demographic beginning in, around 1993 or 1989. Um, one of them is glyphosate, neonicotinoid, pe- uh, pesticides, PFOAs, cell phones, ultrasound, and he made the whole list. Um, uh, and so it's a finite number. And the question is- and vaccines are, are part of that. And, you know, it is suspicious because the vaccines list all of these as side effects. Now (clears throat) , I've (clears throat) , I put together books. You know, one of my books on this subject, on connecting these, has 1,400 references and 400 studies digested, so the, the science out there is pretty clear. But we, you know, there's... NHI refused to study these things because it knows that whatever, wherever they follow the dots, it's gonna end up with a big shock. And so they simply have stopped studying them, and they've turned themselves into an incubator for pharmaceutical products, and they don't do this kind of basic research. I want to just give you guys one example. The most common vaccine in the world is called the DTB vaccine, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. We gave it in this country in, beginning around '79. It was killing or, uh, uh, causing severe brain injury in one out of every 300 kids who got it. UCLA study funded by NIH that found it, so they got rid of it. That's what caused all the lawsuits that eventually precipitated the passage of the Vaccine Act. If we stopped it here, they stopped it in Europe, but Bill Gates and WHO are still giving it to 161 million African children every year. It's the most popular vaccine on Earth. Bill Gates says publicly it saved 30 million lives. He went to the Danish government and said, "We've saved 30 million lives. Will you support this program?" In 2017, the Danish said, "Show me the study that shows that it saved all those lives." He couldn't do it, so they went down and they conducted a study in West Africa with the Danes that operate all these health clinics, and they looked at 30 years of data, and as it turned out, in a nation called Guinea-Bissau, half the kids in that country at the age of two months had received the vaccine and half had not. It was a perfect natural experiment. And they looked at 30 years of data, and what they found was that the kids who received the vaccine were not dying of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, but girls who received the vaccine were dying at 10 times the rate of unvaccinated girls, and they were not dying of anything ever, anybody ever associated with the vaccine. They were dying of dip- of, uh, bilharzia, malaria, anemia, uh, minor cuts and scrapes, and mainly pulmonary respiratory diseases and, and pneumonia. And what the researchers concluded... And this was a, uh, study funded by the Danish government and Novo Nordisk, which is a vaccine company, and the scientists were all pro-vaccine. What they said is this vaccine is killing more people than the disease ever were. Nobody knew it because nobody associated the people who were dying, because they were dying of all these different things, uh, with only the unvaccinated kids. So the vaccine had saved them from diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, but it had ruined their immune systems so that they could not defend themselves against other diseases, and that's the danger of not having placebo-controlled trials prior to introducing the product, par- particularly when you're gonna-

   11. JCJason Calacanis1:05:52

       Let's-

   12. DFDavid Friedberg1:05:52

       ... mandate a product for healthy people.

9. 1:05:54 – 1:15:29

   Energy policy: thoughts on nuclear

   1. DFDavid Friedberg1:05:54

   2. JCJason Calacanis1:05:54

      Let's, um, with our remaining time here, move on to energy. You and the environment, you've got an incredible track record. I remember, growing up in New York, the amazing work you did for the Watershed Project, and I'll let you expand upon that in a moment. Uh, but the only confounding thing I, I found in your position, and I'm curious if it's changed or not, is that you spent decades trying to close the Indian Point nuclear power plant in a time when clearly nuclear power has gotten safer and is clearly, I think we're- the world believes and certainly everybody who's on this panel believes nuclear is a key point, uh, in the transition to renewables. So what is your actual position, explain it to us as basically as you can, on nuclear power, and do you regret or have you rethought your position on Indian Point?

   3. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:06:47

      Uh, no. I mean, Indian Point is l- leaking tritium into the, uh, odds every, every day. So I don't see how you can say it's safe. And, you know, they, they still haven't figured out what to do with the waste, so they're now storing it, you know, it's, it's 18 miles from Midtown Manhattan. Um, if they... Uh, you know, the, the, the shack where they were stor- storing, uh, the fuel rods had the structural integrity of a Kmart. A terrorist attack a- against it would, you know, would, uh, basically render New York-... and have it uninhabited for, you know, the next 5,000 years or so. So to have a, a, a, to put it, to put something that risky so close to, you know, 10 million people doesn't make any sense. Now, nuclear power, I'm all for it if they can ever make it safe or if they ever make it economical. And it's not me saying it's not safe, it's the insurance industry. They can't get an insurance policy. If they can't get an insurance policy, then I would say I, I don't want it. But the nuclear, American nuclear industry ... I mean, you go look at what Fukushima ... They're poisoning the Pacific every day with huge amounts of really deadly radiation and they ... And now their only solution to it is to suck the water out of the groundwater and store it in these big, big tanks. And if you just go on the internet and look at a picture of the Fukushima water tanks and they go on to the horizon and there's no end to it.

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:08:18

      Robert, can I just make a point? The thing with nuclear that's worth separating is it's not the fundamental technology there that's broken in either example that you use, but it's the profit motive that caused both the industrial engineering of both plants to be subpar. Because Fukushima, for example, was engineered not to the seismic levels that you really needed.

   5. DFDavid Friedberg1:08:41

      Or elevation, yeah.

   6. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:08:42

      Even conceding all that, here's what I would say is that i- you know, in our country, w- we, uh, there, there's n- the, uh, nuclear is regarded as so dangerous that they can't get insurance. So the industry had to go to Congress in a sleazy legislative maneuver in the middle of the night and get the Price-Anderson Act passed so that their, so that, to shift their accident burden onto the American public. So if their plant goes up, I am, I, and I was ten miles from that plant, then I'm gonna have to pay for it. So I don't think that's free market capitalism. I believe in free markets. And I can tell you this, there is no public utility on the face of the Earth that will build one of those plants without massive public subsidies. Not one. Nobody will ever do it. And then they have to store the waste for the next 30,000 years, which is five times the length of recorded human history. And if you tell me how that, you know, if they had to amortize that ra- r- upfront, there's no way anybody'd do it. Num- number two or three or four or whatever I've gotten to, it costs now between nine and $16 billion to build a nuclear power plant, just the construction cost. And then you gotta get the technicians and then you've gotta get, you know, the waste disposal and the regular outages and all of this. There's no way that it could compete in a free market. I believe in free market capitalism. I am a radical free marketeer. I believe that our energy system should reflect the marketplace. And they, y- right now, you can build a solar plant for a billion dollars a gigawatt. You can build a wind plant for $1.2 billion a gigawatt. A coal plant will cost you about three and a half billion dollars a gigawatt, and then you have to pay for the fuel by cutting down the mountains of West Virginia, uh, poisoning 22,000 miles of streams, burning, you know, putting mercury that gets into every freshwater fish in America, sterilizing the lakes of the Appalachians. If they had to internalize that cost, coal which says is the, you know, it's, or nuke which says it's t- too cheap to meter, it turns out it's the most expensive way to boil a pot of water that's ever been devised.

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:11:05

      I'm just trying to make the point that if you look at the levelized cost of energy now, what you're saying is exactly why solar and wind are winning. It's just so much cleaner. It makes so much more sense.

   8. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:11:14

      There's no fuel cost and if the impediment is distribution, is that we don't have a grid system that can effectively, you know, orchestrate a variable power. And that's what we-

   9. DFDavid Friedberg1:11:26

      Let me, let me, let me provide a counter that maybe it's not about distribution, but it's about scaling production capacity. So, you know, if you look over nearly any historical time scale since we've had industrial energy production on Earth, for every 1% increase in GDP per capita, you see a roughly 1.2% increase in energy consumption per capita. And so if you forecast out by the end of the century the GDP per capita estimates in the US and around the world, we need to increase global energy production by roughly, you know, anywhere from five to 10X. And, you know, the current system of pulling carbon out of the ground and burning it up and pulling heat energy out of it doesn't scale, doesn't make sense obviously. Put aside the carbon effect problem. And there appears to be, you know, reasonable chance of a pretty serious material shortage for renewable sources by the middle of next decade. So, what do you think is the right answer to long-range energy security and what sort of technology should we be embracing? And do you think that they scale fast enough to kind of allow us to have our economy grow in the way that it needs to to support the, the, the population demands over the next century?

   10. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:12:34

       Uh, I mean, I'm agnostic about the energy source. I think you need a, you know, you have to be eclectic about it and a lot of them are, are, you know, make sense locally but w- d- we, I mean, we have enough ener- we have enough wind energy in North Dakota. North Dakota is the windiest place on Earth ou- outside of the Arctic. North Dakota, Montana and Texas, we have enough wind energy to produce five times the amount of, uh, our entire grid. Um, the, the problem is a North Dakota wind farmer cannot get his product to market because it dissipates in a, you know, we have an a- an antic, uh, uh, uh, a, an or- antiquitated grid system that simply will not efficiently move electrons across country. And we need a DC grid system that, you know, with off-ramps in the big cities, et cetera, that can do that. In North Dakota-... if you have an acre of farmland, it's worth about 300 bucks. If you put a wind turbine on it, it's worth about 32 hundred bucks. So every farmer in North Dakota wants to put wind turbines in their cornfields. And the problem is, they cannot get that energy to market. That is the only chokepoint. And if we... And the same is true, you know, in, in, uh, in... You know, we have great solar power in this country. Um, we, we have, you know, we have an abundance of, of renewable energy in this country and the power... The, the problem is, the incumbents were, were, were, were operating on rules, under rules that were written by the incumbents to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous-

   11. JCJason Calacanis1:14:17

       Right.

   12. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:14:17

       ... most toxic fuels from hell rather than clean, cheap, clean, green, wholesome fuels from heaven. And we oughta reverse-

   13. JCJason Calacanis1:14:24

       I-

   14. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:14:24

       ... that and, and make it, make them all competitive.

   15. JCJason Calacanis1:14:27

       Well, it seems like technology and economics have reversed that i- in a way, yeah.

   16. DFDavid Friedberg1:14:31

       Yeah. One last question on this. So as president, would you support initiatives that could advance and allow approval of safe nuclear fission production systems to be built here in the US?

   17. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:14:46

       Well, I, I will, like, like I say, I support nuke and new technologies of nuke that are safe, you know, with a... But, but as long as they can compete in a marketplace. You show me, and by, by the way, I think we should be doing science even when there's no, you know, economic end to it. So we should be looking at this stuff. But I would not promote nuke if it's not competitive in the marketplace. And it's, you know-

   18. JCJason Calacanis1:15:11

       Right.

   19. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:15:11

       ... and, and that means, you know, cleaning up your mess after yourself, which, w- you know, is a lesson we were all supposed to have learned in kindergarten. They have to show us what they're gonna do with the waste, how they're gonna internalize their cost, rather than what they're doing now, which is to externalize their cost and internalize their profits.

   20. JCJason Calacanis1:15:28

       Okay. We

10. 1:15:29 – 1:23:09

    Culture wars: trans issues, CRT in schools, public vs charter schools

    1. JCJason Calacanis1:15:29

       have covered a lot of territory, and I hate to get to, uh, controversial ones, like culture wars, but it's gonna come up in the presidential election. I personally don't think this is what's important in the presidential election. I think the fiscal stuff, the energy stuff, the, the, the wars and political stuff we've discussed today are much more important. But I'm curious your take on the issues around Disney, DeSantis, trans, uh, and this cohort of issues which have become an obsession, it seems, between certain members of certain political parties or both parties, the media, and certainly it's taken over a lot of discussions amongst a generation on social media. What's your take on all this? And when you get caught up in these debates, in the presidential debates, about trans athletes as but one example, do you think a trans woman who was a biological male should be able to be put in a female prison? Do you think they should be able to play on a female basketball team and change with a bunch of 15-year-old girls in a high school locker room?

    2. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:16:36

       Uh, I've already is at... First of all, I wanna say this. I think that people... I believe in bodily autonomy and that people's choices about what they wanna do with their body should be respected, and people should not be shamed. I do not believe that, uh, that somebody who was born a biological man should be able to compete later on in life, whatever choice they've made, on a woman's team. I mean, I have a, uh, a niece who is, uh, playing softball at, at BC. She has worked, uh, she has devoted her entire life to getting that scholarship, and it's, uh, it's consumed her. And I've watched... You know, during my lifetime, women's sports go from essentially nonexistent to, to equitable, mainly with men's sports, and I think that's important. And I don't think that, you know, um, uh, uh, women should lose ground, um, in, in any way. So I would... You know, I've said, and I, I don't believe it that's the right thing, but I think everybody should be respected.

    3. JCJason Calacanis1:17:46

       Let me ask a question then, uh, about parents who are struggling with this issue. At what age should a doctor be allowed to perform gender reassignment surgery on a individual? You believe adults? So at what age should you be able to have gender surgery? 'Cause this is gonna come up multiple times in this debate.

    4. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:18:11

       I think adults oughta have that choice. Uh, I don't think a child should have that choice, uh, um, except with, you know, certainly not without parent- parental permission. And I really don't, you know... Uh, I know that the, um, the r- I... You know, it's a li- w- and let's start by saying this, that this is a difficult issue, and it's an issue that we should not be judging people on, and we should not be hating people about. We should much... be trying to solve people's problems and give people as much leeway as possible to, uh, and as much respect... to ha- as much leeway to exercise their choices and much respect to those choices as we possibly can. Um, within that framework, I don't believe that it's, uh, that a child without their parental permission should be allowed to choose that kind of surgery, because...

    5. JCJason Calacanis1:19:05

       What if their parents agree to it? Should a 15-year-old be able to be...

    6. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:19:09

       I, uh, that's a very difficult question, and I, and I don't feel like I'm equipped to answer it. I'm not gonna, you know, interfere. There's-

    7. JCJason Calacanis1:19:17

       Yeah, I think this panel agrees with you. This is a very difficult issue, and, you know, people should be... Yeah.

    8. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:19:22

       What do you think about things like critical race theory? And maybe we can just use that as a way to just talk about the state of US education in general. Are we preparing our children for the task at hand?... and what is the task at hand maybe in your eyes, and how does it need to change, if at all?

    9. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:19:42

       Uh, you know, I think critical race theory as much as I understand it, um, is, you know, though, listen, we should not be hiding from people. We should be honest people about the history in this country of genocide, of racism, and those things. Uh, uh, we, we, you know, we need to be honest about that with each other. Not to shame people, not to make people, people feel badly, not to make people feel guilty. But to understand the, the milestones that we never want to no- go near again and to move forward with those things. I, you know, in turn ... I, I don't really understand the battle over critical race theory in, in schools, but, you know, to the extent if somebody would say that this has to ... that that theme has to dominate all historical, um, teaching, I would be against that. I think it's very, very m- important. You know, A- America, our country, has, ha- has done wonderful things in the world. We have a history of idealism, we have a history of moral authority and leadership, and we have a history of doing bad things too. But I think for children, for the sake of our national unity, for the sake of, you know, for ... Uh, we need to instill children with a sense of optimism and hope and love, and also a love of history. I mean, I grew up learning history and learning, you know, kind of the heroic aspects of history, which I now understand are not the only parts of history. Um, but it's really important for children to have, have role models to look up to and to have an optimistic view of our country and to have, uh, understand what the shared values are. And by values, I mean aspirational values and, you know, the things that our country is supposed to stand for when we are at our best.

    10. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:21:33

        For, for example, Robert, in the, um, in San Francisco, we canceled advanced placement classes because it made people feel bad.

    11. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:21:41

        Uh-

    12. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:21:41

        Do you think that was a good decision?

    13. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:21:42

        No.

    14. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:21:43

        In the f- in the name of equity?

    15. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:21:44

        No. We should be inspiring our children towards excellence, and we should be able to, as adults, give them measures of what mea- we mean by excellence. A- and, you know, that inspires kids and inspires the best out of them, and, you know, we need to, we need to have those kind of metrics. So that doesn't make any sense to me.

    16. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:22:04

        But then what's your view on, for example, just educational diversity in charter schools and your just position on the teachers' unions?

    17. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:22:13

        Y- I mean, my view is that we oughta be putting huge resources into public schools and making them the best schools in the world. And I think if we, uh, you know, uh ... Right now, we're making stealth bombers for a billion dollars that cannot fly in the rain, and I think if we just cut production of a couple of those, we can make all our schools the best schools in the world.

    18. JCJason Calacanis1:22:37

        Do they need competition? Do you believe in vouchers, uh, and, um, parents getting to choose which school they go to? Because it does seem like there's not a lot of competition and that these teachers' unions have a stranglehold on these schools.

    19. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:22:50

        I have to look at that issue more. I mean, my inclination is that we should be putting resources into making our public schools the best schools in the world.

    20. JCJason Calacanis1:22:58

        But you said you believed in free markets. With regard to energy. Why not free markets in regard to education?

    21. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:23:05

        Uh, it, it's, it has an appeal. I, I need to look at it.

    22. JCJason Calacanis1:23:08

        Okay. Fair enough.

11. 1:23:09 – 1:30:07

    Media: declining trust, misaligned incentives, conflict of interest with large advertisers

    1. JCJason Calacanis1:23:09

    2. DSDavid Sacks1:23:09

       Yeah, let's talk about censorship. Let's talk about the media. One of the things that happened during the COVID pandemic is that a lot of people grew suspicious of the mainstream media, even more suspicious than they already had been. It seemed like the media was carrying water on certain issues. It was almost impossible for the media to take seriously the idea that the virus might have come from the Wuhan lab, for example. People who put forward that, I think, reasonable explanation were called conspiracy theorists. The media didn't wanna look into why, for exam- just as an example, Fauci lifted Obama's moratorium on gain-of-function research. Couldn't get the media to really cover whether, you know, masking toddlers in schools did anything positive. And then, you know, when we found out that the mRNA shots didn't prevent COVID the way they said, they never even really asked the CEOs of Pfizer and these other companies, "When did you know this? When did you know that the vaccines didn't do what you said they were gonna do?" And I remember at Davos, you had, uh, Rebel News. It was this guerrilla media out- outfit that accosted Bourla, the, the CEO of Pfizer, out on the street, and they were just asking him questions that the media is supposed to ask, like, you know, "When did you know ... W- what did you know and when did you know it with respect to whether the, the vaccines prevented the spread?" And you couldn't get The New York Times or any of the mainstream outlets to cover this at all, so it fell to this guerrilla media outfit. So any event, that's a long wind-up, but, you know, Robert, what, what's your take on the media? Why, why can't we get what seems to be honest media coverage? How does this fit into your theory of regulatory capture? Who are they sort of carrying water for and, and why?

    3. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:24:57

       You know, I ... In 20, um, 15, I wrote a book on thimerosal, and there was a, a documentary that came out at that time called Trace Amounts. It was a really good demod- um, documentary on the, the mercury, uh, based, um, uh, uh, uh, preservative that was in a lot of vaccines at that time, and it's been removed for most, except for the flu vaccine now. Um, but I took that ... I had a very close relationship with Roger Ailes, who is the founder of Fox News. I had this weird relationship just because when I was 19 years old, I spent three months in a tent with him in East Africa.... and, um, we, you know, he would like... When- when he started Fox News, he became like Darth Vader to me and we were antithetical on-

    4. JCJason Calacanis1:25:45

       (laughs)

    5. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:25:45

       ... every issue. But we always... He's a, was a very funny guy and very clever, but... And he was also very loyal to his friends, and he would make all of the hosts of Fox News put me on. So I was the only environmentalist who was going on Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and Neil Cavuto, et cetera, regularly, like weekly, and he made them do that. But I went to him with this, with this, um, this movie and showed it to him, and he found it compelling. And he had a relative who he believed was vaccine-injured, a very, very close relative. And he thought... He believed what was going on and what the documentary... You know, the thrust of the documentary was. And he said, "I cannot let you talk about this on Fox News, I'm sorry." It was the first time he ever told me this. And he said, um, "If I let you, if any of my hosts let you on to talk about this, I would have to fire them." And he said, um, "And if I didn't fire them, I'd get a call from Rupert within 10 minutes." And he said to me at that time that 70% of the revenues for his not-on-network news on, um, on prime time were pharmaceutical ads. And that, um, that... He said, "Of 22 ad spaces that we sell on the network news, on the evening news, 17 of those are pharmaceutical." He, "We cannot afford to, uh, to offend our biggest, um, our biggest, our biggest, uh, funder, these advertisers." And, you know, I had this interesting experience with Jake Tapper where, when I worked on my Rolling Stone article, Deadly Immunity, which was about this secret meeting that took place in Simpson, Georgia by the CDC and all of the vaccine companies, the FDA, et cetera, where they decided to hide the autism effect from the American people. And we, I got the transcripts from them published in Rolling Stone. And, um, and Jake Tapper worked for 21 days with me on a, on a doc- on a exclusive story, and he was gonna add simultaneously with, with Rolling Stone publishing it. And Tapper, the night before it went on, he called me in total distress and he said, "It's been pulled by corporate, the whole thing is gone." He said, "Never in my career has corporate killed one of my stories, and I'm really angry." And then I called him back the next day, he's never spoken to me again. Um, but, you know, there are consequences for these newscasters who depart from the orthodoxy, and they know it. You know, if you look at Anderson Cooper, he's got a, now probably a $13 million a year salary. Um, but if you actually do the math, probably around $10 million of that comes from Pfizer, which sponsors his show. So, you know, that's... He's working for them, he's not working for us. And, you know, they know who they're working for.

Episode duration: 2:01:46