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Joe Rogan Experience #2461 - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance and Children’s Health Defense, and an attorney and author. https://www.hhs.gov/about/leadership/robert-kennedy.html Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan.

Joe RoganhostRobert F. Kennedy Jr.guest
Feb 27, 20262h 26mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:02 – 0:55

    Focus hacks, ADHD, and settling into the conversation

    1. JR

      Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

    2. SP

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

    3. JR

      Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat rock music] I like them, but if it's just me wearing them, it feels stupid.

    4. RJ

      Why do you wear them?

    5. JR

      I like it because it locks me in. Just locks me in. The only thing I hear is that person's voice, and I, I can't hear Jamie's chair moving. I, I can't hear anything else. And it just, like, makes me really, like, focused on the conversation only.

    6. RJ

      I have ADHD. I was-- had 11 siblings, and I have seven kids, so I can work.

    7. JR

      [laughs]

    8. RJ

      I can focus.

    9. JR

      No matter what?

    10. RJ

      No matter what.

    11. JR

      It's a skill. It's a thing to learn.

    12. RJ

      [laughs]

    13. JR

      You know, if you, if you're the person that can focus without distraction, you're in a good-

    14. RJ

      I am

    15. JR

      ... you're a good person to be in the job you're at. [laughs]

    16. RJ

      Yeah.

  2. 0:55 – 3:30

    RFK Jr. on running HHS: “sick care,” broken incentives, and scale of Medicare/Medicaid fraud

    1. JR

      What is it like? So since you've been appointed, I, I haven't talked to you-

    2. RJ

      Um

    3. JR

      ... uh, on a podcast since.

    4. RJ

      I know. [laughs]

    5. JR

      Yeah.

    6. RJ

      Um, it, it's the best job I could ever have. I, I feel like I was designed for the job, and I just have so much fun. I mean, it's a, it's a target-rich environment, so there's so many ways that you can effective and, be effective and improve people's lives every single day. And part of that is because the agency was just such a mess. You know, it was, it wasn't doing healthcare. It was doing sick care and just managing the, you know, all of these perverse incentives and have us spending $5 trillion a year on two to three times per capita what any other nation spends, and we have the sickest population in the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world, and you, we're the best at medicine in this country, but that's when people get sick. You'd rather get sick here than any place in the world, um, but you're more likely to be sick here than any place in the world.

    7. JR

      [laughs]

    8. RJ

      And, you know, and then it was just a big political patronage, um, operation, and it still is. And, you know, we're putting an end to that now. I mean, the tr- the amount of fraud that goes through that place, we lose just in Medicaid and Medicare $100 billion a year, and it's all just this really, you know, shocking, blatant fraud where... that's become industrialized. I mean, there, there's foreign nations like Russia, everybody's heard of Somalia, but also Cuba, has this operation in Florida where it's, um, where they open up these little, um... they open up, um, these, these PO boxes for durable medical equipment, as like knee braces and wheelchairs, and then they don't have any knee bl- brace or wheelchairs, but they have patient identification numbers, so they just claim to be shipping them to people. And we found one hotel, it had like 129 rooms, and every one was a different company that was selling durable medical equipment. And we go in and shut them down, and they immediately go back to Cuba, and the whole thing is apparently run by the Cuban government. But Russia's doing the same thing with hospices in-

  3. 3:30 – 11:43

    How the fraud works: patient IDs, AI enforcement, and state-level noncompliance

    1. JR

      Where do they get the patient ID numbers?

    2. RJ

      They get-- They can buy those numbers, you know, they, on the black market.

    3. JR

      Really?

    4. RJ

      Yeah. And Russia does the same thing, um, in Los Angeles with hospice care. So there's, [laughs] there's more hospice care in Los Angeles than the entire rest of the country combined. It's all fraudulent, and we're just pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into these fraudulent operations, the same thing that the Somalis did in, in Ethiopia, and a lot of that money was going back to Boko Haram and, you know, terror groups over there. But they were... y- it was, a lot of it it was based... The Medicare stuff is different, and we're, we're able to... We're gonna be able to catch almost all of that now because we're using AI to do it. It was never used before. There was no effort at pro-program integrity. In fact, the Biden administration deliberately, purposely ordered them. They ended the Program Integrity office, so they went from hundreds of people to six people, and they said, "We don't want you doing program integrity. We just want you doing enrollments." And, um, and so we got all this fraud. It was-- Most of it came from these waivers that the states got. All the states got them for home care and community care. So, you know, 30 years ago, Medicaid and Medicare played... If you got a hernia operation, y- we paid for that. And you could tell somebody got the hernia operation because they had the scar. They used a licensed nurse. They used a licensed doctor. It was all documented. Then they, some of the states said, "You know, we're sending a whole lot of people to the hospital, and if, and we don't have home care providers. So if you, if we, if you let us pay family members to do home care, the patient won't have to go to the hospital. They won't have to go to the emergency room, and we'll save a lot of money." So it was well-intentioned, but then what happened is people immediately started abusing it. So today, if you, um, y- these are services that are n-normally played by family members, m- performed by family members. Buying groceries for your grandmother and bringing them home, you now get paid for that. Balancing your grandmother's checkbook... driving her to a ho- to a, a medical visit. So, um, so then you had this, you know, organized fraud where, and this is what happened in Minnesota, is, um, these organized crime companies would come in and say, "You designate this family, this fa- you designate all your children have autism now," even if they didn't. "And we're gonna now pay providers for each of them, and we'll give you a few thousand dollars to do it." But then they would collect all the money, and that's what was happening. It's happening all over the country because there was no ... It, it's very, very difficult. There's, the guardrails on that system were very pervious, and anybody can defraud it. If you are inclined to do fraud, this was the, uh, you know, this was a, a, an irresistible opportunity.

    5. JR

      How long was this going on for? Like, when did this fraud begin, do you believe?

    6. RJ

      It really accelerated during the Biden administration. We expected to pay for the, for the Minnesota program just for autism care for kids who have autism. The kids need the care because, you know, they go to maybe a special school, but then they come home from school and the parents aren't there 'cause they're working. So who's gonna take care of them? Um, so i- in legitimate circumstances, you would want to pay for that. But what happened is they just started this wholesale fraud. We expected the cost of that program to be about $3 million a year in Minnesota, in Minneapolis. It got up in, over a three-year period, it got up to $400 million a year.

    7. JR

      [laughs]

    8. RJ

      So they, you know, it was all fraudulent, almost.

    9. JR

      I just don't understa- so this accelerated during the Biden administration?

    10. RJ

      Yeah.

    11. JR

      But when did it begin? Like, how long has it been going on?

    12. RJ

      The states stopped doing program integrity. They told, specifically, they told people in my agency, and I've talked to them, "We don't want to do program integrity anymore. We now just want to focus el- everything on enrollments." In other words, enrolling more people in Obamacare-

    13. JR

      Right

    14. RJ

      ... and the, and the programs. And, you know, you could say there was, um, bad motives there because, one, the, the states don't pay, the states pay a tiny fraction of it, but it's all goes to the federal government. So the states don't really want to do f- uh, fraud, uh, detection 'cause all that money is coming into their state, and then every time you enroll somebody, you're registering them to vote. And so, you know, they may have had ulterior motives, let me put it that way. Um, but, you know, right now what we're doing is we're saying to the states, "We have audited you. We expect that, we believe that 50% of the, uh, program dollars you're spending were fraudulent or possibly fraudulent. You show us a corrective action that you're gonna take, or we're going to withdraw that money the next time." The money's not being withdrawn from any individuals. Uh, we're not reimbursing the state for it until, like they told us. Now, the red states have all said, "Yeah, we'll do it." But Maine, Minnesota, California, and New York have said, "No, we're not gonna." Basically, they sent us corrective action that was just, you know, it was ridiculous.

    15. JR

      So is there financial incentive? Is, is, are these people that are making all this money from fraud, are they donating to any specific groups? Like, is there a direct turnaround?

    16. RJ

      Well, like, you know, the, the, the Cubans in Florida, in Florida, you know, they get mad at Trump 'cause they say, "Oh, all the states you're designating are blue states." That's just 'cause the blue states refuse to cooperate. But Florida's a red state, and we're really going after them. We're shutting down all durable medical equipment reimbursements for the whole state because it was all being run, it was probably being run by the Cuban government, 'cause this is-

    17. JR

      But I don't understand how no one saw it, no one from the government saw it.

    18. RJ

      [laughs]

    19. JR

      And would there be a reason why they weren't looking for it other than they just wanted to, they were only thinking about recruitments? But were they als- was anybody making money outside of these crime organizations?

    20. RJ

      I would say no. The money was not... The states were making money.

    21. JR

      Right, but there was a lot of talk online about donations to parties and donations to NGOs and don- and-

    22. RJ

      Well, that may, that is probably true, too, although I don't have any evidence of that.

    23. JR

      Okay. No evidence, okay. Um, so it really just ram-

    24. RJ

      And you wouldn't have... You know, even if you get those kind of donations, it's not the kind of proof that I would talk about because you cannot prove that-

    25. JR

      Right

    26. RJ

      ... that that donation w- you know, motivated the be- behavior.

    27. JR

      But it just, it really highlights how ideologically captured some people are. That because it's the right wing going after this Medicaid fraud, that somehow or another that fraud is okay, and that fraud's not that big a deal, that there's... Who, what, I mean, like, what's the all-told number that's been stolen from, from this stuff over the, if you had to t- take a wild guess?

    28. RJ

      I, I, it's at least $100 billion a year.

    29. JR

      $100 billion a year.

    30. RJ

      Um, just from Medicaid and Medicare.

  4. 11:43 – 15:45

    Partisanship, party realignment, and RFK Jr.’s break with the Democrats

    1. RJ

      Yeah. I mean, I... Listen, I was a Democrat my whole life. And, you know, one of the thing, and then I, you know-

    2. JR

      What are you now?

    3. RJ

      Now I'm kind of, first of all, I, it's illegal for me now to vote in any state. So I don't really have a party affiliation because-You know, they chal-- um, I was a New York state resident when I was running. They sued me, and they said, "Oh, you don't really live in New York. You live in California." I said, "Yeah, but my driver's license is from New York. My law license is from New York. I have an address in New York. My car is registered in New York. My falconry license is in New York. My hunting license is in New York. My fishing license is in New York. And I intend to return to New York." And there were hundreds of cases, just black letter law saying if y- the only measure is if you intend to return there at some point. We got crooked judges, and they said, "No, you're not a New York resident." I'd already said I'm not a California resident. I don't intend to stay there. So now I'm not le- you know, [laughs] I'm, I'm not legally allowed to vote in any state. [sighs] But, you know, I saw this with, um, a party... My father hated partisanship because he thought it was dishonest. And he said you should, he always said, told us, "You should vote for the man, not the party." Or the w- you know, he said the man because at that time it was predominantly men. But, um, I saw this when Trump, um, you know, I grew up in a Democratic Party that was very anti-NAFTA, so it was against working people and labor unions.

    4. JR

      Right.

    5. RJ

      Then Trump said that he was anti-NAFTA, and all of a sudden the Democratic Party was pro-NAFTA, and that's what, what turned my head the first time. And then, you know, when I was, um, then I saw how they, when Trump questioned vaccines during the 2016 election, the Democratic Party w- it, it was kind of that skepticism, and the concerns were spread evenly across the party. My uncle, Ted Kennedy, was very much on the side of medical freedom. Um, and it was evenly spread, but as soon as Trump said that, it became part of the dogma of that party. And then, you know, when I ran, we were, um, you know, it was, I, one of the things I ran against was the Ukraine war. And, um, and the Democrats were always the anti-war party. As soon as Trump questioned that war, they became the pro-war party, and they invited the CIA director to speak at the Democratic convention, and it just is, it's the, the en- the, the party's only agenda is, "We hate Trump, and anything he says, we're gonna do the opposite of it." And I, it makes me very sad for the party, and I don't think it's a sustainable way to, you know, to operate.

    6. JR

      No. There, there, there has to be some sort of an appeal to people in the middle that left when things went crazy. Just let us know you're not crazy anymore.

    7. RJ

      [laughs]

    8. JR

      Let us know you've abandoned a lot of this crazy stuff, and also, like, recognize what's good for everybody, right? Hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud is not good for any of us, the whole country. So we should all be together on this one thing. Like, this is terrible. This is stealing from your tax money, all of our tax money.

    9. RJ

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      Us, American citizens, we should all be united on stopping any kind of fraud. Forget about who, who's the fucking president and what, what's the, who's gonna get responsibility for it, who's gonna take resp- who's gonna get the accolades. Like, who cares? Stop fraud.

    11. RJ

      [laughs]

    12. JR

      Stop. We're all together. You shouldn't have criminals from other countries living here just stealing money from Medicaid. That seems like that should be a bipartisan issue in a rational society.

  5. 15:45 – 20:15

    Tylenol in pregnancy: warning letters, science disputes, and social-media backlash

    1. RJ

      Yeah. And, you know, on the, you know, I saw this, the craziness when we did the, uh, the Tylenol findings because, you know, the science is really clear that, and there were, there are dozens of studies. I read 76 studies over a weekend, and when, you know, when we were looking at this. And the, the studies that support Tylenol's safety are very weak, and they have huge holes in them. There's overwhelming science that says you shouldn't take it, particularly, you know, n-n-it's okay f- normally, but you shouldn't take it during pregnancy, and particularly the last days of pregnancy or in the perinatal period, prenatal, perinatal period, which is immediately after pregnancy. You don't want to take it because the association with Tylenol usage at that point and neurodevelopmental disease are very, very high and, and, uh, and pretty clear. And so we issued a warning. We didn't ban Tylenol. We just sent a letter out to all doctors saying, "Be careful about..." Um, we, we didn't want to ban it during pregnancy because as bad as it is, it's the best thing. It's better than taking ibuprofen or, or aspirin.

    2. JR

      Why, why is aspirin bad?

    3. RJ

      They have, because of Reye's syndrome. It, it has a clear association with Reye's syndrome, and they all have problems.

    4. JR

      What is that word? Reye's syndrome?

    5. RJ

      Reye's syndrome. R-E-Y-E-S. Yeah.

    6. JR

      What is that?

    7. RJ

      It's, um, uh, uh, I'm not sure exactly what it does.

    8. JR

      Jimmy, put that into our wonderful sponsor, Perplexity.

    9. RJ

      And if you put-

    10. JR

      Let's find out

    11. RJ

      ... aspirin use and Reye's syndrome, you'll, you'll see the link.

    12. JR

      So is this just with pregnant women or with people in general?

    13. RJ

      Yeah, for pregnant.

    14. JR

      Only for pregnant women.

    15. RJ

      Pregnant or young children.

    16. JR

      Oh. Well, so baby aspirin? Didn't they always used to have children's aspirin?

    17. RJ

      I, yeah, I don't know if they do it anymore. [laughs]

    18. JR

      Reye's syndrome is a rare but serious condition causing sudden brain swelling and liver damage, primarily in children and teens recovering from viral infections like flu or chickenpox, become very rare due to reduced aspirin use in kids. Wow. Aspirin.

    19. RJ

      Yeah, so-

    20. JR

      I always thought of aspirin as, like, the most natural and healthy out of all those things that you take for pain.

    21. RJ

      Oh, I think it is pretty safe, but it's, um-

    22. JR

      Avoid aspirin and, what's that word?You say it.

    23. RJ

      Salicylate [laughs]

    24. JR

      [laughs] What is it?

    25. RJ

      Salicylate-containing meds.

    26. JR

      Salicylate-containing meds in children and teens with flu, chickenpox, or cold. Use acetaminophen or ibuprofen instead. Vaccinate against flu and chickenpox, and screen newborns for metabolic risks. So it's ame-

    27. RJ

      Mm.

    28. JR

      Acetaminophen is the issue in Tylenol, right?

    29. RJ

      Yeah.

    30. JR

      'Cause I, I read-

  6. 20:15 – 25:38

    Social media algorithms, polarization, and what changed inside government

    1. RJ

      Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the algorithms, um, just amplify that polarization.

    2. JR

      Yes.

    3. RJ

      'Cause they're just telling you what you wanna hear and, and validating your worldview all the time. I mean-

    4. JR

      And also just outraging you, out- just outraging you all the time. I've been off it for a while now, and it's like, it frees your brain. It, it's like all the, the weirdness of thinking about nonsense in the world just so- you're aware of it peripherally, but it, it's not in your face all day, which I think most people are dealing with a lot more even than I was, and they're just bombarded by sensation, bombarded by anger and frustration and angst and... [sighs]

    5. RJ

      It kind of liberates the darkest impulses of the human spirit. I mean, I don't, I don't use it either, but I, uh, you know, I post stuff. But, you know, I, if I start reading my comments and take them seriously [laughs] I would-

    6. JR

      No, it's terrible.

    7. RJ

      [laughs]

    8. JR

      I genuinely thought when you, uh, joined forces with Trump and then Tulsi did as well, I was like, "Okay, maybe this will unite us more and make more people realize that there's a lot of people that are being left out that are in the center of all this, and we can all come together and work together." That's what I thought, naively. You know, obviously, once you guys got in there, it was you guys were MAGA and, like, health is bad, [laughs] and don't, don't stop the dyes. Like, uh, uh, no matter what it was, people-

    9. RJ

      Yeah

    10. JR

      ... like, were ideologically opposed to you being correct about anything, 'cause now you're connected with Trump. So it's like, I was watching liberals ca- the, the people that are always worried about food ingredients, just dismissing all of this talk about preservatives and glyphosate and v- red dye and all these different things, and it is just an ideological thing.

    11. RJ

      Yeah. Um, I mean, it's, uh, it's like, it's dogma, and it's, part of it's tribalism. It's these, you know, these, uh, uh, these connectors in our brain that evolved over millions of years-

    12. JR

      Yes

    13. RJ

      ... us living in these little tribal communities and, you know, and now you've got, um, now you've got machines that can activate those parts of the brain and, you know, they're being manipulated all the time.

    14. JR

      Yeah. And then there's a bunch of people that are commenting that aren't even real people. There's that too. There's a, a lot of manipulation that's going on on social media where who knows who's doing it. There's a bunch of different groups doing it. But they, they're not real people that are outraged. They're not real human beings that are saying these things, and they can kinda shift a narrative into a certain direction sometimes. It's a fascinating time to be alive, you know? Um, as far as, uh, what you thought this job was gonna be before you get in, before you got in, and what it became, what, w- what was your expectations when you got in? Like, did, did anything really surprise you?

    15. RJ

      Um, I mean, you know, I try to go into every part of my life without expectations and, uh, and just focus on, really narrowly, on what I'm doing day by day, and that actually makes me a lot more resilient, 'cause if you don't have expectations, you never get disappointments, and so you can never get crushed. And, um, uh, but I would say that, um, you know, I had not spent a lot of my life hanging out with Republicans, and what I imagined that they were talking about, um, is exactly the opposite of... You know, now I'm in an administration thatSurrounded by immensely talented people, and they're immensely idealistic. And I always imagine the Republicans would get together, and they'd be thinking about how do we screw the poor and how do we reduce-

    16. JR

      That's right

    17. RJ

      ... tax on the rich. And they're just narrowly focused on how do we solve these big problems and how do we make our country work. And the level of idealism that I see at every level in the White House and in my agency is inspiring. And then the level of the capabilities, just the competence of the people who I'm surrounded with. I think the thing that shocked me most was how bad the agency was, just how inefficient, how nobody seemed to care that people were getting sicker and sicker. Nobody was taking accountability of the fact we're the health agency, and yet we have the worst health, and we're the richest health agency in the world. I think HHS is the sixth biggest country in the world if you look at its budget. It's got the biggest budget in the federal government, bigger than the defense budget. And yet we are absolutely miserable at what we did.

    18. JR

      Right.

  7. 25:38 – 31:41

    Chronic disease explosion and the incentives that keep Americans sick

    1. RJ

      We're literally presiding over this cliff where every American is getting-- where people are just 77% of American kids can't qualify for military service. And nobody's asking why is that happening. [chuckles] When I was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50-year career. Today, 38% of teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic. So one out of every three kids who walks in his office door. Why isn't anybody noticing this? The autism rates have gone from one in 10,000 in 1970, and people knew what autism was. They knew what it looked like in 1970. They did the biggest epidemiological study in history to answer the question, what is the percentage? And they came up with 0.8 per 10,000, so less than one in 10,000. And today it's one in 31. In California, it's one in 19 and one in 12.5 boys.

    2. JR

      That's crazy.

    3. RJ

      We are-

    4. JR

      That is so crazy. One in 12.5 boys is crazy.

    5. RJ

      And when my uncle was president, I was a 10-year-old boy. We spent zero on chronic disease. Zero. And today we spend $4.3 trillion a year, and it's the fastest-growing item in the federal budget. And it's existential. We can't sustain it. And the Republicans and Democrats have been arguing for years about whether we do the single-payer, Obamacare, this or that. It's all about throwing money. Who gets to keep the money that we're throwing in a system that's completely broken? It's not a healthcare system.

    6. JR

      While people just keep getting sicker and sicker.

    7. RJ

      Yep. It's like changing deck chairs on the Titanic. Why is nobody focusing on how do we get people healthy? Because that's how you solve the healthcare cost problem. Right now, 40 cents out of every dollar that you spend in federal taxes is going to healthcare, and about 90% of that is chronic disease. So it's clear, and Americans don't want to be sick. They're being made sick. The obesity rates have gone from 5% in kids when I was a kid to now close to 20%. And in adults, 70% of adults are obese or overweight. That was not true when we were kids. And it's not because Americans got indolent or lazy or hungry. It's because they were being mass poisoned. And the vested interests that are making money on keeping-- Everybody makes money on keeping us sick. The food companies make money on getting us sick, but pharma makes money on keeping us sick. The insurance might-- You would think insurance would want to keep you well, but it doesn't. It actually makes more money if more people are sick. The hospitals-

    8. JR

      How does the insurance company make more money if people are sick?

    9. RJ

      Well, think of it this way. If you're Lloyd's of London, do you want one ship, and you're insuring all the ships in the ocean. Do you want one ship to sink a year, or do you want 1,000 to sink? If 1,000 sink, everybody's going to be paying you premiums to insure themselves against that eventuality, and you're making money on the friction. So you're making the money that comes into this. You're making your money on the money that comes into the system. So the more that you pump up that volume of money, the more you make. So nobody is interested, nobody is economically incentivized to make people well, and we are not going to get well until we align those economic incentives with the health outcomes that we want, which is nobody gets sick. We end the chronic disease epidemic, and that's what we're doing now. We're trying to realign all those perverse incentives that reward you. For example, the medical system pays out on fee-based service. That means that the more tests the doctor orders for you, the more drugs he prescribes you, the more contact he has with you, the richer he gets.Oh, he is not incentived, incentivized to get you well. We ought to be paying him a flat fee at the beginning of the year and saying anything, any costs from this patient the rest of the year come out of your pocket. And then he's like, "Okay, how do I get this guy from getting sick?" And he starts studying nutrition books and, you know. [laughs]

    10. JR

      That's actually an interesting idea. It seems so captured at this point. It's gonna be difficult to unravel all that.

    11. RJ

      It, it's difficult, but it's not impossible, and we're doing it. You know-

    12. JR

      Well, I think-

    13. RJ

      ... about three years from now, you're gonna see a different healthcare model in our country.

    14. JR

      I think talking about it m- has a big impact because most people are just not aware of how the whole system works and what is actually wrong with it. You know, most people just hear about it, healthcare, people are sick, they need healthcare. Why would they cut healthcare? Cutting healthcare is bad. That's what they would just immediately think. And-

    15. RJ

      Yeah, and that's-

    16. JR

      ... I, I think most people are... They, they think of the fraud stuff, and they wanna dismiss it. Like they-- I've heard all these people dismiss this Nick Shirley kid and what he exposed in, in Minneapolis. But the, the reason why is 'cause it's, uh, the, the wrong party. If this was a Democrat that was exposing Republican fraud, then they would be all into it. They would be-- It would be on every newspaper. But instead, they're trying to dismiss it as not, you know, not relevant.

    17. RJ

      Yeah. And it-- To me, it's weird because I know Democrats are human beings-

    18. JR

      Yes

  8. 31:41 – 37:05

    Price transparency and “CEO of your own healthcare” reforms

    1. RJ

      ... and they care about the same things that I do. I've known all of these guys, almost all of them, for many of them for 40 years. Bernie Sanders I've known for 40 years. Their only solution is more money to the system, a system that is broken, that is making us sicker and sicker. And what President Trump wants to do is he wants to fix the system, stop... Most of that money is not going to the patient. It's going to the insurance companies and the PBMs and all of these middlemen that are, you know, are milking the system. And that's why President Trump says, you know, the answer is to not pay the insurance company. It's to pay the, the, the, the consumer directly and put him, make him the CEO of his own healthcare, uh, that he can spend money. He's now incentivized to do prevention and to maybe do holistic medicine or take vitamins or, you know, take vitamin D, which, you know, is, uh, as you know, is kinda miraculous, um, or to, um, or to do, uh, alternatives, you know, to do preventative care. And he wants to save-- he's gonna want to save money. Right now, you-- nobody, nobody is in that position of accountability. We, we need to make them the CEO of their own health so that they have responsibility, and they're gonna pay the costs if they get sick. Government pays, um, but they then decide to allocate that, how to allocate that money. And then we need to make the system transparent, and that's, you know, one of the things that we're doing. We're, uh, during his first term, Trump passed a transparency bill, but because Trump had passed, everybody wanted transparency. If you, if you're a, a woman, you're pregnant, you wanna know how much it's gonna cost, you know, to have that baby. There's no way you can find that out for most of them. You can go nine months on a phone every day, "How much is it gonna cost?" And you'll never get a straight answer. And so, you know, in New York, uh, for example, what we're doing now is we're gonna make all of the hospitals and all the providers post a menu of their prices, uh, that are available to everybody and that are available on a website that we're creating. So if you want an MRI, and you-- there's 40 places around your home that offer MRIs, you can't right now figure out what they cost. Now you're gonna be able to go and look that up, them all on a single page and figure out what the cheapest one is. If you go to a restaurant, the prices are on the menu. If you go to buy a car, and the guy said to you, "Yeah, you can buy the car, but I'm not gonna tell you how much it costs till after you bought, buy it," nobody would operate that way, but that's how our medical system operates. So I looked at... We have a mock-up at the, of this website. We're right now, during the Biden administration, because Trump had passed that law, the Biden administration just refused to enforce it. So we're in the same position now where n- there's no transparency. We're changing that now. We sent out, we've sent out over a th- a thousand letters to hospitals, uh, you know, warning letters. These, that says, "You gotta post them right now, and we're gonna..." And we just, uh, finalized new regulations where if they don't do that, they're gonna pay a huge fine. So I saw the mock-up of the, um, of the website, and I said, I asked the question, um, "How much does it cost in the hospitals within a mile of Manhattan to have a baby?" One of them was-- There were about 30 hospitals that you-- I could visualize on one page. One of them was $1,300. That was the lowest. The highest was 22,000. In Detroit, it is, the cheapest place to have a baby is about, uh, $5,000, and the most expensive is 60,000. And it's the same service, the same quality care. Nothing changes except that price. Why do we have that information chaos? We have it because the industry wants to hide what it's doing, and so there's no market. There's no ability for people to make good choices. And when, you know, the, um... Uh, I met-- I was staying with Dr. Oz during the transition at his house in Florida.And one day, Prime Minister Rudd, who was the former prime minister of Australia, came by. And after he was prime minister, he had been appointed to run a commission to reduce healthcare costs and improve quality. And they were very successful. But he said the number one thing that they did that changed everything was price transparency, was showing people the price of what they're going to pay. So we're now going to do that, and people will be able to shop. And now we also have to shift all of that money away from the insurance companies and put it in the hands of the public so that they are maximum incentivized to make good choices.

  9. 37:05 – 46:33

    New dietary guidelines: flipping the pyramid, fixing school food, SNAP waivers, and cooking culture

    1. JR

      So as far as making good choices with food, I like what you guys did. I love what you guys did with the food pyramid. You essentially flipped it on its head, which is kind of crazy that for the longest time we are being told that the most important things, the primary diet should be grains and rice and wheat. And now it's things that we've known for a long time. It's whole food, actual real food. That's what you're supposed to be eating. The problem is getting people to change their habits and change their ways. And if people don't start eating good food and if people don't start taking care of their body, what other things can you even imagine would shift this trend?

    2. RJ

      Well, here's what's going to happen. First of all, the food pyramid, I inherited a food pyramid. I came into office one year and two weeks ago. A week after I got in, I was handed the food pyramid that the Biden administration had. It wasn't even the food pyramid. They got rid of that. They just were doing the dietary guidelines. So it was the recommendations that would go be reflected in the food pyramid. It was hundreds of pages long, and it was incomprehensible. And it was driven by all the mercantile impulses that had corrupted the food pyramid for 50 years. And it was written by lobbyists. It was written by food industry lobbyists and the same impulse that put Froot Loops at the top of the food pyramid, which isn't even a food.

    3. JR

      Froot Loops were at the top of the food-

    4. RJ

      Froot Loops were at the top recommendation of the food pyramid. You can ask them to look up the old food pyramid with Froot Loops.

    5. JR

      I need to see where Froot Loops stand. Don't they throw some vitamins on Froot Loops? Isn't it like vitamin-enriched?

    6. RJ

      Oh, yeah. As if that's good for you.

    7. JR

      It's good for you.

    8. RJ

      Right?

    9. JR

      They add vitamins. Do they add vitamins to Froot Loops?

    10. RJ

      You can add vitamins to cyanide, and it's not going to make it any better for you.

    11. JR

      No. No, I'm joking, obviously.

    12. RJ

      But-

    13. JR

      But it was a ridiculous... So the laws-

    14. RJ

      So what we did is we got the best nutritionists in the country. We got Mark Hyman, and we got the nutritionists from the best universities in the country, and we put them all in a room. And I thought it was going to take a month. It took 11 months because they fought over every recommendation, and everything is cited in the source so that we know we have good science. But some of the stuff, because of regulatory malpractice all these years, some of the studies simply haven't been done. So there are knowledge gaps which we should not have. So now we have a food pyramid. And because of the old food pyramid, people didn't like the food on it, and they were going to ultra-processed food, which was okay on the food pyramid. So now 70% of the food that our kids eat is ultra-processed food, 70% of the calories they get, and it's just poisoning them. And they took off the good stuff like whole milk, which is nutrient-dense, which is feeding their brain. We have two generations of kids that grew up without milk, without the proper nutrients for their brain. We have the first country in the face of the earth that has chronic obesity and in the same people malnutrition. So you have immensely obese people, and they're malnourished. They're medically malnourished. It's because the food pyramid was so messed up. So what's going to happen now, Joe, is that we are going to be able to drive that. We're going to be able to change dietary culture. Just the food pyramid is going to change dietary culture, and here's how. Brooke Rollins, who's an incredible USDA secretary, she administers $405 million a day that she gives out food subsidies for school lunches, the WIC program, the SNAP program, Indian Health Services, and all of these other programs. And so those programs now are going to get good food because the dietary guidelines dictate what they can and cannot feed kids. Military and the VA also are changing. Now, this week I met with a guy, Chef Robert Irvine, who is a television chef. He's been hired by Pete Hegseth to come in and change all the military meals. Military, and he's already on five bases. By the end of this month, he'll be on 20. What he's done is the food that we give our military is so bad they won't eat it. So they're going out and they're spending their money on fast food. And fast food is not cheap. A Big Mac meal costs $12 to $14. It's not a cheap meal. You can get a really good food for that price. You could feed yourself the whole day for that price with good food. Mark Hyman's new book has a diet, $10 a day diet, three meals, great food. Anyway, Robert Irvine has gone into these places and he gives them all fresh food, almost all of it locally sourced.As it turns out, it's cheaper. The military is spending $18 a day for three meals for each soldier. He's spending $10 a day and giving them real food, good food, and the lines now are around the block, and nobody's going to fast food. Everybody's fighting to get in. And what he says is, "It doesn't cost more. We don't need any more money. We just need to buy smarter and to be smarter about how we do it." And we're gonna be able to do that. One of the things that we're doing with the dietary guidelines is the SNAP program. SNAP, we have 20 states now that have applied for SNAP waivers and have been granted so that you can no longer get candy on SNAP. You can no longer get soda. That was 18% of SNAP purchases. So we are taking the 63 million poorest kids in our country, giving them taxpayer-funded diabetes, and 78% of them end up on Medicaid. Many of them are being treated for diabetes. So we're paying to give them the disease, and then we're paying to treat it for the rest of their lives. And we're changing that. And one of the things that Brooke is doing is she's gonna require that any retailer that accepts food stamps has to double the amount of real food in their establishment. We're working with farmers. We're working with entrepreneurs to make sure every American can get high-quality food that is affordable.

    15. JR

      I don't know how anybody would be opposed to that. That all sounds fantastic.

    16. RJ

      It's weird that they are.

    17. JR

      How could you, the way you just laid it out, how could anybody be opposed to that? That all sounds great.

    18. RJ

      Well, the Democrats-

    19. JR

      Especially for the soldiers. The fact that they were getting terrible food that they didn't want to eat is just... That's really offensive.

    20. RJ

      Yeah.

    21. JR

      You think about what you're asking of them-

    22. RJ

      Yeah

    23. JR

      ... and then you're giving them garbage that they don't even want to eat. How do they feel that you care about them?

    24. RJ

      Well, and one of the things Robert Irvine, the chef, told me, he said, "It costs $9 to get a frozen salmon. It costs $6 to get a fresh salmon." So food, good food is actually, if you cook yourself at home, good food is much, much less expensive. The problem is Americans have forgotten how to cook. And cooking is really important because it's important for family cohesion, for a sense of community. It's a daily, almost sacred ritual. And taking that away from our lives has amplified the spiritual malaise that we're in. And one of the things we're gonna do is to start sending federal workers out to teach people how to cook. They don't have the implements. They don't have the cutting boards. They don't have-

    25. JR

      Right, right

    26. RJ

      ... they don't know how to buy groceries.

    27. JR

      Right.

    28. RJ

      And you can go into any big grocery store in this country. If you go and buy a steak, it's still pretty expensive. But if you buy the cheaper cuts, it's great meat, and it is very, very affordable, or liver or all these alternatives.

    29. JR

      Yep, chuck roast.

    30. RJ

      Now, you said, how can you be against that? I told you 20 states have applied for the SNAP program, and we've granted them SNAP waivers. Why would you want taxpayer... If you want to drink a Coke, you ought to be able to. We live in the United States. We're not gonna take anything away from anybody. But the taxpayer shouldn't be paying for it, particularly when we're paying for it on the other end in diabetes. So this just makes sense to anybody. But 20 states have applied. Only two of them are blue states. Why? Bernie Sanders has been fighting for this for years, but Vermont won't apply for one. And it's all partisanship, and they're putting their hatred of Donald Trump ahead of their love for their own children. And until we learn to stop doing that, the healthcare in this country is not gonna improve, at least in those states.

  10. 46:33 – 1:04:03

    Reducing polarization: phones in schools, long-form conversation, and media incentives

    1. JR

      So what strategies, if any, could you ever imagine that could be implemented that would kind of unite people on these things and get them to stop being so partisan about... One of the most important aspects of being a human being is staying healthy. It's like love and health. Those are the top ones that we all want. It just seems insane that we would choose this as a battleground, and it seems insane that it's connected to one party or another. It shouldn't be. We should all be united on at least this. And I think if people were a little healthier and they were a little more fit, they'd probably have a lot less anxiety, probably a lot less conflict when it comes to political disagreements. Things could probably be worked out more amicably, especially among friends. It's like having good health improves virtually every aspect of your life.

    2. RJ

      Yeah. I would say-

    3. JR

      For everybody

    4. RJ

      ... I would say two things. Food ties directly into your mental health.

    5. JR

      Yes.

    6. RJ

      And we now know, it's so well-documented, that there's a gut-brain connection and that depression, ADHD. Chris Palmer up at Harvard is dramatically reducing the symptoms of schizophrenia simply by changing people's diets. He's using a keto diet. There are-

    7. JR

      Dramatically? Like what kind of percentage?

    8. RJ

      They're losing 30% of their symptoms.

    9. JR

      Really?

    10. RJ

      Yeah. The-

    11. JR

      Just from ketones?

    12. RJ

      From keto.

    13. JR

      What about, have they done anything with like-

    14. RJ

      And the same thing is true. There's a big paper about to come out on losing a bipolar diagnosis. Kids who lose bipolar diagnosis simply by changing their diet. We know that ADHD is driven by all these food dyes and stuff, and that's very well-documented.There's all of these, um, y-you go on the internet and, um, you look for, um, uh, studies that show what happens when you change the food in prisons and juvenile detention facilities. And they, you know, the, the-- they'll put it in one wing of the prison, they'll put good food, and then they'll put the standard food in the, in the other. And the level of violence goes down by 40, 45, 50%. The use of restraints in juvenile detention facilities goes down 75%. The, the number of incidents dra-dramatically drops. And so it's a public safety issue in the prisons. And you know, I've been meeting now with all the prisons. They, prisons have a real problem because they're allocated this... State prisons are allocated to 60 cents a day to feed the prisoners. And it's-

    15. JR

      Oh my God

    16. RJ

      ... and they're, it's all-

    17. JR

      Oh my God

    18. RJ

      ... for them, it's all about shelf life. So they're just feeding them the worst kind of poison that you could possibly-

    19. JR

      Oh my God

    20. RJ

      ... it's all just chemicals.

    21. JR

      Oh my God.

    22. RJ

      But, you know, um, it-

    23. JR

      Well, we've kind of given up on the idea of rehabilitation. It's just all about punishment and then-

    24. RJ

      But this is also public safety-

    25. JR

      ... locking you up is-

    26. RJ

      ... it's guard safety-

    27. JR

      Yeah, of course

    28. RJ

      ... and everything else.

    29. JR

      Yeah.

    30. RJ

      And the other thing, in the answer to your first question about how do you sort of, you know, mitigate the polarization, I, I would say the only way that you do that is by getting people to start talking to each other. [chuckles]

  11. 1:04:03 – 1:15:52

    Free speech, censorship, and UK “speech policing” concerns

    1. RJ

      And that's another weird thing that that's a Democratic Party impulse because it was the opposite of the Democratic Party-

    2. JR

      Yes. Oh

    3. RJ

      ... I grew up with, you know, which was unafraid of any debate.

    4. JR

      Right.

    5. RJ

      My uncle, my father said we should be able to debate, we should be able to win these debates in the marketplace of ideas. If we can't, then we need to examine ourselves.

    6. JR

      It was a core tenet of the Democratic Party.

    7. RJ

      Yeah.

    8. JR

      And, you know, uh, the unfortunate shift in that, it's just like, you know, I remember during the Bush administration when the FCC was going after Howard Stern. It was, it was this huge thing. They were trying to close down Howard Stern because Howard Stern was very critical of Bush, and it was like he was the guy out there fighting for free speech, and they were getting fined like enormous fines.

    9. RJ

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      Enormous fines for things that he had said, you know, they deemed to be obscene. You know, and, um, that was a right-wing thing, and we always thought of it as a right-wing thing, and when you, uh, see what's happening today, just like any, the, the wanting silence of your political opponents is the dumbest way to cut off your own hand. It's so dumb because if you can't see that this could be used against you if someone else gets into a position of power, if all of a sudden some enormous right-wing corporation buys these social media platforms and only pushes right-wing agendas and silences all left-wing agendas, like do you know how fucking crazy that is to just give that kind of power willingly to a, an anonymous group of people that you supposedly align to because you're in the same tribe? It's the dumbest thing ever, and the fact that people on the left weren't outraged when they read the Twitter files and found out how much involvement there was in silencing real information and removing people who from Stanford and MIT-

    11. RJ

      But the White House ordered me to be removed from Instagram, and I lost a million followers.

    12. JR

      Insane.

    13. RJ

      Thirty-seven hours after he got, after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold the Constitution, they were ordering Mark Zuckerberg to take me down, and then you look at what's happening in England now.

    14. JR

      Oh.

    15. RJ

      You know, people going to jail for Twitter posts.

    16. JR

      12,000 people this year.

    17. RJ

      Yeah, I mean-

    18. JR

      12,000 in the last year.

    19. RJ

      And, uh, this-

    20. JR

      That's-

    21. RJ

      ... the Magna Carta was, you know, written and now there's, now it's just a-It's just a dictatorship.

    22. JR

      Well, they got rid of trial by jury, except for murder and rape and a couple other things. Now it's just a judge. So, you know, whatever it is, if it's a social media infraction, if it's... There's no reasonable, you know, judge by a jury of your peers. No, you're, you're, you're getting judged by a judge, and that's nuts.

    23. RJ

      It's a Soviet system. It's like Kafka.

    24. JR

      I just can't believe how quick it happened. When, you know, when you look at the social media arrests, they were, they were always disturbing. Like, uh, if you go back even four or five years, they had quite a few of them a year.

    25. RJ

      Yeah.

    26. JR

      But it really ramped up, it really ramped up over the last year or so, and it's just insane to watch. And a lot of it is criticism of immigration, like legitimate criticism of immigration and legitimate crimisi- cr- uh, criticism of crimes that have been committed, and people outraged, which is completely normal. But instead of, like, doing anything about that, they want to arrest people from complaining, and it's just really weird to watch.

    27. RJ

      Yeah. And it's gonna get worse with the AI. Um, um, it's, it's scary.

    28. JR

      Well, it's just strange that they couldn't do anything to stop that from happening and that anybody with... A- anybody that's reasonable would be willing to let that happen because their side is imposing it. That, that seems like an existential threat to all critical thinking, all communication and debate, all... As soon as you start arresting people for opinions, that's crazy. Y- Now you're getting nuts. Like anything that you deem might incite violence or, like, outrage, people are outraged. They have a right to be outraged. The... If you can put them in a cage because they're outraged, that's nuts. That's really nu- Now they have a pub law. Do you know this one?

    29. RJ

      No.

    30. JR

      Oh, find that, Jamie. They're trying to pass this thing, I don't know if they passed it, where, uh, someone s- Uh, I don't wanna speak out of turn. I don't wanna fuck this up, because it was disturbing enough, uh, without me, uh, misinterpreting it. But the idea was to stop people from saying things on social media that you'd get arrested for, stop them from saying those kind of things in pubs. And-

  12. 1:15:52 – 1:23:51

    Drug pricing overhaul: MFN, TrumpRx, onshoring production, and IVF affordability

    1. RJ

      I've been surprised by how much President Trump has supported me on this stuff because I'm going after the biggest... Big pharma, big insurance, the-

    2. JR

      Big food

    3. RJ

      ... big food. And those were all taboos for every administration, Democratic, Republican. There was little incremental things that you could do under Democratic administrations, but nothing like this has ever happened. The agreement we made with the pharmaceutical industry could not have happened under any other president, the MFN agreement, the most favored nation. And the way that that worked is, we've been paying for the last 40 years the highest price in the world for medicine. And so, we have 4.2% of the world's population here, and over 70% of pharmaceutical profits and revenues come from the United States. Why is that? We do buy more drugs than anybody, but it's because we pay higher prices. We pay two to three to five times what they're paying in Europe. For example, and President Trump likes to talk about this, Ozempic, the list price was $1,350 in America. You could buy the same drug in any pharmacy in London for $88, and it's made in the same factory in New Jersey. And the reason that was allowed to happen is the Europeans just said, "We're not going to pay any more for it." They would set the price, and that was the maximum. There's a lot of drugs they don't have. There's a lot of cancer drugs they don't have in Europe because they just wouldn't pay the price. And so President Trump... Every president has vowed to stop this. Clinton tried to stop it. Obama, Bush, all of them tried, and Biden all said, "We're going to get rid of the MFN price," and none of them did anything on it. And President Trump literally called me sometimes once a day, called late at night, 11:30 at night, and say, "Where are you on MFN?" And we ended up getting the... It seemed to me even it seemed insurmountable, but he said, "I'm going to use tariffs. I'm going to force the Europeans to raise their drug prices." And because he didn't want to... We had enough leverageOn the pharmaceutical companies, because of our Medicaid and Medicare programs, uh, we can pretty much force them to lower their prices. But he-- But it would put them out of business. So... And he didn't mi-- He wants us to continue to be the center for innovation in this country, and he also wanted the companies to reshore or-- their, all their production so that we're making all the drugs here, and they're not making it elsewhere in the world. And so we sat down with them for months, and, uh, we came to agreements with sixteen of the seventeen pharmaceutical companies. Now Americans are getting the lowest prices in the world. If somebody lowers a price in Europe, we get that price or lower. And people can get that today on Trump Rx. They can go for, you know, the most popular medications and get the cheapest price in the world. And not only that, but the pharmaceutical industry, because we gave them certainty and because President Trump forced the European countries to raise the price that their citizens pay for drugs, uh, we-- The, the companies actually did well. They, they increased stock values by one point three trillion among them, and they've all agreed to onshore their production. So Lilly is building six plants here, new plants, including one of the biggest API facilities in the world. As the API are the, um, the, the pharmaceutical ingredients that, you know, we ran out of during COVID. We need to be making them here because otherwise other countries can blackmail us. Pfizer, Merck, they're all building, um, big facilities here, and drug production is now gonna come to the United States. We are gonna be the center of the world in terms of drug production. So-- And those negotiations were very, very tough, and they were extraordinarily complex. Uh, we were... You know, we have a really good suite of, of, um, talented individuals, high-caliber individuals who've left billion-dollar businesses. One of them is a guy called Chris Klomp, who's immensely talented. He walked away from a, a company that does data management for eighty-five percent of the hospitals in this country, and he's... You know, he walked away from a bill- billion-dollar company, divested, lost a lot of money to come just because he wants to improve things. He ran the negotiations, and the, uh, the pharmaceutical companies fell in love with him because they realized they could trust him. And we worked out this extraordinary agreement where now Americans have gone from paying the most in the world for drugs to the least in the developed world for drugs, and that's gonna change everybody's experience, you know?

    4. JR

      Can I ask you how that applies if someone-- Uh, is it the same if someone has insurance or if they don't have insurance? Like, i-is-- How does insurance bill it versus how does someone-

    5. RJ

      Yeah

    6. JR

      ... buy it on their own?

    7. RJ

      It-- If they, um... I-it's gonna lower prices for everybody. Anybody can go on Trump Rx, whether they have insurance or not, and they can get it there.

    8. JR

      And they would buy it themselves?

    9. RJ

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      And so it'd be at a substantially lower price than they would have had in the past-

    11. RJ

      Exactly

    12. JR

      ... if they buy it themselves. But what if people are just getting it through insurance? Do they-

    13. RJ

      Again, you know, then there-

    14. JR

      Does insurance lower it as well, or does it-

    15. RJ

      Yeah, the, the copay is lowered.

    16. JR

      Okay.

    17. RJ

      And, you know, we had the first woman to buy a drug on it. The first customer was a woman who has been trying for years to do IVF, and the drug costs four thousand dollars. Now I think it costs, uh, you know, something like six hundred dollars.

    18. JR

      Really?

    19. RJ

      Yeah. So-- And it's gonna allow a lot... You know, women, uh, one out of every three women in this country does not have as many children as she wants, and she can't have more. And IVF is gonna be really important because our birth rate has just dropped, I mean, dramatically this year. They dropped to one point seven five, so...

    20. JR

      Yeah, people don't understand that. You know, we've had a few conversations on this podcast about population decline, and people just-- Uh, most people are not aware of it. They just see how many people are on the highway. They think we're overcrowded. They don't understand this replacement number that we're going to need u-unless we want our population to decline.

    21. RJ

      I mean, the U.S. is in a different situation than other countries. Japan is in total crisis.

    22. JR

      Right.

    23. RJ

      China is in an existential crisis because, uh, you know, its population is gonna drop dramatically.

    24. JR

      South Korea.

    25. RJ

      Yeah. Um, but, you know, people want to immigrate here, so we can make up the deficit through immigration. It's gonna, you know, uh... I m- And that-- W-we have that advantage, but we-- You know, it's still the birth rate has dropped. It dropped o-o-one and a half, w- uh, or, um, it dropped from, uh, one point nine this year to one point seven five, and that affects Social Security. It affects... You know, it, it makes it so the, the cliff for Social S-Security was pushed ahead by another year because of that, uh, drop in birth rate. So it's, um, it's not a good thing and, you know, American women wanna have babies, and a lot of them, a third of them, cannot have as many children as they want.

  13. 1:23:51 – 1:31:23

    Food dyes, prior authorization, unlocking medical records, and front-of-package labeling

    1. JR

      Um, w-what was the pushback when it came to things like removal of dyes?

    2. RJ

      Uh, the removal of dyes, uh, again, we were-- I think because of President Trump's leadership, we were able to convene the industry and talk to them about it, and a lot of them came in and said, "Yeah, you know, we know we gotta change." [chuckles]

    3. JR

      Really?

    4. RJ

      The, uh, the only one that really-

    5. JR

      Did you ever ask them, "Why didn't you do it a long time ago?"

    6. RJ

      Well, they didn't have options, and what we did-

    7. JR

      But didn't most of them... Like, for cereal, for example, didn't they have to have no unnatural dyes when they sent it to Canada?

    8. RJ

      Yeah, the ones in Canada, but in our country, we hadn't approved a bunch of themWe only had one or two veget- vegetable-based dyes. Uh, Marty Makary, who's done a fantastic job at FDA, has now fast-tracked it this year, five new-- or seven new ones. So we're working with the industry to make sure they have the dyes, and they're supposed to get rid of all the dyes by the end of this year. And that's gonna, you know, that-

    9. JR

      And so instead they'll use just food-based dyes?

    10. RJ

      Yeah, just-

    11. JR

      Like-

    12. RJ

      ... yeah, vegetable, um, vegetable and mineral-based dyes. And that's, you know, another thing that we did, again, through conven- two things that we did through convening industry because of President Trump's convening power, um, we fixed the prior authorization. So one of the most frustrating things that, um, that people go through when they encounter the healthcare system is, is that they have to wait for prior authorization from their insurance company. So you go in, your doctor tells you you need a knee replacement, and then it gets you-- it takes you six months the company to approve, for the insurance company to approve the surgery. And, and, you know, it was infuriating for people and really devastating and heartbreaking for a lot of them. And we got all, um, we got the, the biggest insurance companies representing eighty percent of the American public all voluntarily agreed to eliminate prior authorization for almost all their procedures. A very small number now, I think fifteen percent of the procedures still have it, and those are procedures we want prior authorization because there's a potential for abuse. For example, with spinal surgeries, a lot of people don't need the surgery, and Medicaid and Medicare wants to make sure that they actually need that surgery and it's beneficial to them. But for all the other ones, you will now know at point of care whether or not your insurance... So you go to your doctor, he says you need a knee surgery. Before you leave his office, you'll know whether the insurance company approves of it or not, and that's gonna dramatically change the medical experience. Another thing that we did, again, through convening industry, is we originally got sixty-three, the top tech companies together, and then we ended up final agreement with four hundred and five of them to agree to stop information blocking. So your medical records are owned by you, but you can't get access to them a lot of times. Most of the time. Your, the data company won't give them to you. And so we've got them all to agree to stop doing that. So by the end of this year, every American will be able to get their medical records on their cell phone, and that's gonna dramatically change the medical experience. It's gonna save lives because if you get hit, you know, you live in New Jersey, you get hit by a car in Portland, Oregon, you go to the hospital, and you spend the first two hours while you're bleeding out, you know, making out clipboards. Now-- or you come in unconscious, and they don't know what to do with you. They don't know anything about you. Now your medical records are on your cell phone. They can see if you have allergies. They can see what your blood type is. They can look at all of your, you know, previous medical records and make a, uh, make good decisions about how to treat you. And that is-- And also you're going to be able to sync that with, um, with food purchases apps so that you'll be able to go into a grocery store, and the, the app will tell you this one is bad for you. This, you know, this, uh, this choice is bad for you and offer you a better choice, et cetera. And there's an app like that, Yuka, now, but there's a lot of them coming online now.

    13. JR

      What is it called?

    14. RJ

      Yuka is the one. I think fifty percent of the people in France use Yuka, but it's-

    15. JR

      Can you spell it?

    16. RJ

      I think it's Y-U-C-C-A.

    17. JR

      Okay.

    18. RJ

      Or Y-U-K-A. I don't know. You can look it up. W-m- we use it, my wife uses it. You go into the grocery store, you go into the grocery store, and you, uh, you put it on the barcode, and, and it, it rates each of the products about whether or not they're, you know, whether it's good or a healthy one, and then it makes you a recommendation for a healthier one if it's, if it's bad for you. And that is gonna change the food culture in our country because the, the company's already changing their ingredients so that they can get better scores from the Yuka app and from other apps that are like it. It's not the only one out there.

    19. JR

      But what about preservatives in processed foods? Um, they're always gonna exist, right? You're always gonna have certain amount of preservatives in processed foods.

    20. RJ

      Well, I mean, first of all, we're not gonna take processed foods away from people, but we're going to, I think we're gonna change the amount of processed foods. One is by April, w-we will have, uh, a federal definition of ultra-processed foods, first time in the history. And as soon as we do that, we're gonna do front of package food labeling. So every food in your grocery store will have a label on it. It'll have maybe a green light, a red light, or a yellow light telling you whether or not it's gonna be good for you.

    21. JR

      Oh, wow.

    22. RJ

      And that, you know, and it's gonna evaluate all of the ingredients, et cetera. Um, so I, you know, I think we're not gonna change this overnight, but we're gonna change it pretty quickly. And if you wanna be healthy, we're gonna give you the information to take control of your own, own health. If people just don't wanna be healthy and don't care, there's not much you can do about it.

    23. JR

      Right.

    24. RJ

      But most Americans wanna be healthy, and they're, you know, we've seen that when they're allowed to make healthy choices, they do. They do not wanna be eating this poison.

    25. JR

      Yeah, and ironically, the people that don't wanna be healthy, they feel that way because they're not healthy. If they wanted- [laughs]

    26. RJ

      Right.

    27. JR

      If they were healthy, they would wanna stay healthy.

    28. RJ

      [laughs]

    29. JR

      They're just, part of the reason why they're feeling this way is because they're unhealthy.

    30. RJ

      You get demoralized.

  14. 1:31:23 – 1:35:20

    Peptides and the compounding crackdown: how regulation created a dangerous gray market

    1. JR

      Um, which brings me to peptides. Like, where, where are we at right now on peptides and getting them regulated and making sure it's not this weird gray area? 'Cause we know they're effective, but we also know that there's a lot of pushback on peptides.

    2. RJ

      Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of peptides. I've used them myself and used them with really good effect, um, you know, on a, with, on a couple of injuries. Um, the-- what happened was there were 19 peptides that y-you can... Just so people understand, the, there's a, there was a law written that, um, to allow compounding pharmacies to make compounds that were part of approved drugs. So, you know, part of approved ingredients of approved drugs, to make them individually for patients who could, did not have access to the particular, um, formulation that they needed to fit them. Maybe if they had an allergy to the commercial brand or whatever. And the compounding ph-pharmacies and peptides was part of that group. There were 19 peptides that were widely formulated by compounding pharmacies. During the Biden administration, they illegally moved those to Category 2, which says, "Do not formulate." It was illegal because they're not supposed to do that unless there's a safety signal, and they didn't have a safety signal. They're not allowed to look at efficacy. They're not allowed to say, "Well, we don't believe these are efficacious," or whatever. They can only look at safety. They moved those to Category 2, which means do not formulate. Well, what happened? There was huge demand for peptides, and so a black market came out, and the black market is run by companies that say that they're making the peptides for animal use or for research purposes. And the, um, and that peptide now basically completely replaced the legal market. The legal market for peptides, the, um, uh, um, the f- the pharmacies, the compounding pharmacies were getting those peptides from FDA-inspected facilities, and some of them in India and China, but they were the same one that the pharmaceutical industries are buying them, and we inspect those. You know you're getting a, a, a good product. You know you're getting what you bought, what you [chuckles] what was advertised. Uh, with the gray market, you have no idea, and a lot of the stuff that we've looked at is just, you know, is very, very substandard. So I'm very anxious to move, not, probably not all of those peptides, some of them are in litigation, um, but about 14 of them back to making them more accessible. And the FDA is in the middle of, of, um... I think within a f- couple of weeks, we will have announced, uh, some kind of new action. And my, you know, my hope is that they're gonna end up with-- They're still l-looking at the science. My hope is that they're gonna get moved to a place where people have access from ethical suppliers.

    3. JR

      That's ultimately the, the problem with all this black market stuff, right? A lot of people are getting bogus peptides and-

    4. RJ

      Yeah

    5. JR

      ... th-they don't have any idea how they, if they work, whether to test them. They just take a chance. They take a risk. They get a, a little flyer in their email or something, and, uh, they hear from somebody else, "I got it from this place." They don't even know, and they try it, and you're getting nonsense, bogus peptides.

    6. RJ

      I mean, we created the black market.

    7. JR

      Yeah, which we do with everything.

    8. RJ

      And it's a very dangerous black market.

  15. 1:35:20 – 1:51:24

    Psychedelics for PTSD and addiction: ibogaine, MDMA/psilocybin trials, and clinical guardrails

    1. JR

      Which they've done during Prohibition. They're doing it right now with everything else. It's unfortunate. Um, I know there's been some talk about, um, uh, psychedelics, and I know that, uh, p- in particular ibogaine, what's going on in Texas with the, uh, Ibogaine Initiative, where, uh, former Governor Rick Perry and Bryan Hubbard have been helping a lot, a lot of veterans, a lot of people with, like, serious opioid addictions. And, a-and this is, uh, the plan to have this and run some programs where you, you have this very effective way of getting people off addictions that we have s- for some reason banned in America up until, you know, these initiatives. And I think there's some stuff that can help a lot of people. I mean, what, how many people are addicted to opioids in this country? It's pretty high. How many people are-

    2. RJ

      Uh, 48,000. 48 million.

    3. JR

      Have you looked into the ibogaine stuff?

    4. RJ

      Yeah.

    5. JR

      What, what's your thoughts on it?

    6. RJ

      Uh, my, I don't know enough, and I don't think it's well documented enough about whether, you know, its long-term impact on addiction. But, um, in terms of just sort of the field of psilocybin and MDMA and, uh, uh, there are lots and lots of good studies now that, um, that clearly demonstrate that or strongly suggest that it is effective against, uh, PS, P, P, uh, PSTD-

    7. JR

      PTSD

    8. RJ

      ... yeah, PTSD, sorry. And, um-And al- you know, also s-some forms of depression, et cetera. And so the-- I would say everybody in my agency and over at VA, at Doug Collins' agency, is, um, very anxious to get a rule out there that will allow these kind of studies, will allow access under therapeutic set-s, um, settings, and, you know, particularly to the military soldiers who have suffered these injuries to get access to these products. Uh, we're working through that process now. And, you know, you have, um, you know, from Marty Makary. I mean, we're all working on it and trying to, trying to make it happen.

    9. JR

      It would be great to extend that to police officers too, probably.

    10. RJ

      Yeah.

    11. JR

      You know? I mean, a lot of the same type of PTSD they experience, it just doesn't get brought up as much. Um-

    12. RJ

      And if, you know, if you can, if you can treat depression and, you know, r- uh, without using SSRIs, putting somebody on a lifetime sentence to SSRIs, you can treat them. There's a number of things, not just psychedelics, but a number of interventions that we're looking at that are rapid interventions, are more transformative than the way that psychedelics seem to rewire your brain. And so we're looking at that as an entire category of interventions that people ought to be able to study, ought to have good access to, and we should get it out to the public as quickly as possible.

    13. JR

      What would be the hurdles to something like that?

    14. RJ

      Um, I think that we're gonna get it done.

    15. JR

      So how would that be implemented? Would it be im-implemented in a clinical setting? Would it be some-somewhere that-

    16. RJ

      Well, for some of them, you know, for some of them it would be either you can do, you know, to, to encourage more clinical trials. And others, it would be, there would be very strong guideline... I mean, this is what we're envisioning, so I can't tell you-

    17. JR

      Right

    18. RJ

      ... exactly what we're gonna do. But very, very strong, uh, guidelines for, therapeutic guidelines. So how they're applied, what kind of follow-up, because a lot of these things rewire your brain. If you don't do follow-up, it doesn't work, you know, or you have a failure rate. So w- you know, those kind of protocols are all stuff that we've been developing and studying, and we're, you know, I think most of the people in the administration are anxious to make this happen as quickly as possible. And I know Doug Collins over at the VA already has, I think, 21 studies going over there, and they're, you know, they're very, very promising.

    19. JR

      And what are they using at the VA?

    20. RJ

      Uh, I think they're using combinations of MDMA and psilocybin.

    21. JR

      So-

    22. RJ

      Maybe using, um, Ibogaine. Uh, and, you know, I, I think they're looking at a number of things, including ayahuasca and ibogaine.

    23. JR

      Um, they shot down something fairly recently in California where they were going to decriminalize... Were they gonna decriminalize psilocybin, or they were gonna allow it for clinical use? But I think the problem that they had was they didn't shut-- They didn't say, "We're, we're completely opposed to it." They said, "There's no guidelines in terms of, like, how's it gonna be clinically applied?"

    24. RJ

      Well-

    25. JR

      "Who are gonna be the people?"

    26. RJ

      Yeah.

    27. JR

      "What's the dosage?"

    28. RJ

      Yeah. You need those guidelines-

    29. JR

      Yes

    30. RJ

      ... 'cause you don't wanna make the Wild West.

  16. 1:51:24 – 2:13:54

    Glyphosate executive order: national security vs. health risks, and the technology ‘off-ramp’

    1. JR

      Um, I-I wanted to ask you about pesticides. So what was the recent ruling on glyphosate?

    2. RJ

      It was an EO, which is an executive order-

    3. JR

      Right

    4. RJ

      ... from the president saying that, um, we're going to make the ingredients for glyphosate in this country and for elemental phosphorus. And, you know, I've... Listen, I've spent 40 years fighting pesticides. It was... You know, I was part of the trial team on the Monsanto case, which was the team that, you know, we won three cases in a row and then got an $11 billion, um, settlement with, with, uh, Monsanto, which is now Bayer. By the end of our trial, [clears throat] Bayer owned Monsanto. But, you know, pesticides are poison. They're designed to kill all life. It's not a good thing to have in your food, so... But I also... So it's not something that I was particularly happy with. Let me put it that way mildly. But I also understand the president's point of view. The president didn't create this system. He's dealing with a problem that was created long before, over the past 60 years, when, um, w-you know, through federal policies and subsidies and m- uh, management of, of farming in this country, the agricultural management, w-we have addicted our farmers to these pesticides, and particularly glyphosate. Glyphosate is the foundational pesticide of our food production system. So 97% of corn in this country is produced with glyphosate and can't be produced without it. 98% of... And, you know, you could do it. You could change it. There's organic corn producers in this country. It's, like, 3%. 98% of soy is produced with glyphosate. If you ban glyphosate overnight, or if you got rid of it, or if somebody else cut off our supply, it would c- uh, it would destroy the American food system, and it-

    5. JR

      How crazy is that statement? The American food s- the entire system is based on-

    6. RJ

      It's based upon-

    7. JR

      ... using a poison.

    8. RJ

      Right. The farmers don't like it. I m- you know, and let me just explain what the, the EO did. Right now, according to the industry reports, 99% of our glyphosate comes from China. So the Pentagon and others said this is an extreme national security vulnerability that China controls the U.S. food system. And we can't afford to let that happen. If we got in some kind of tangle with them, they could literally cut off our food supply overnight and cripple the country.

    9. JR

      Right.

    10. RJ

      And, and so that's what the president was responding to. But we all know we've got to transition off of glyphosate. We all know that, and the farmers hate it. Far- One, it, you know, they're now starting to see these, uh, these chemical-resistant, uh, uh, weeds, so that, that can't be treated with glyphosate. And that was predictable. Two, they hate the inputs. It's cost them a lot of money. Um, three, the, uh, foreign countries won't allow them to export. Like, Europe doesn't allow, most European countries don't allow the export of our crops to their countries.

    11. JR

      Well, how are they doing it?

    12. RJ

      They use less glyphosate than we do.

    13. JR

      But they-

    14. RJ

      Or they, uh, they use some. They use it, but, you know, our system was, is all Roundup-ready corn and Roundup-ready soy.

    15. JR

      Right.

    16. RJ

      And so they don't, you know, they don't use it like we do-

    17. JR

      Right

    18. RJ

      ... over here.

    19. JR

      Ideally, that we would transition away from that, right?

    20. RJ

      Yeah, and it's also they know it's destroying their soil, and they're all suffering from runoff. You know, it, it destroys the microbiome in the soil, andBecause of that, the soil, um, can't... You, you, you don't get water infiltration in the soil. And so the soil then runs off and, you know, it, it, it's destroying their farms. It's not sustainable. Everybody knows that.

    21. JR

      We had Will Harris from White Oak Pastures on here, and he showed us the literal line in the river between his-

    22. RJ

      Yeah

    23. JR

      ... organic farm and the next-door neighbor's farm. We could see this clear line where all the runoff is going into the river.

    24. RJ

      Yeah, but Will Harris will also tell you the same thing that I said, is that what he did is, is, you know, is very hard, and it, it's not applicable-

    25. JR

      Took him 20 years.

    26. RJ

      What?

    27. JR

      Took him 20 years.

    28. RJ

      It took him 20 years, and it's not applicable to every farmer and-

    29. JR

      Right

    30. RJ

      ... he, you know, he understands the problem too. We all understand that this is a huge problem. So the, the president was dealing with national security, and they did something that I, I really don't like, which is to support... There's a lawsuit about, that's now before the Supreme Court, but in the lower court they supported, uh, uh, is as for federal preemption. So that would mean that if the, uh, if the federal label, uh, um, uh, says that this is safe, that these state laws is, now cannot be brought. So it would throw out a lot of the state laws. It's, and me, effectively gives them immunity from liability, which, um, which is, you know, to me it's not good to give any company immunity from liability. It gives, it takes away all incentive for them, them to make the product safer. Again, the president is dealing with bigger issues, which is the company that's making this has paid $11 billion to, you know, in my lawsuit, they just, uh, they're just about to sign another $7.6 billion settlement. 65,000 cases out there, and they've said, "We're getting out of this business," you know, "if this, we, if we don't get relief." So the president is hearing that. The farmers are hearing that, and they're saying that, you know, this is a temporary fix. Uh, we're putting huge amounts of money into studying the impacts of, of glyphosate right now in my agency. I'm doing that. And we're doing, um... And the president has made a big commit of, a, a billion-dollar commitment, not only to regenerate farming, but also to, uh, developing new ways of, of chemical, of, of dramatically reducing the amount of, of chemicals in our agriculture. I met this week with three farmers from, um, who are using this new system of lasers, and which is now the cheapest way to control weeds in the vegetable fields. So, you know, vegetables, lettuce, celery, um, all of these vegetables now, they're using, a lot of them, you know, the, you're gonna see a qui- very quick transition. It's a, it's a, a, an attachment that is dragged by a, a tractor. It kills the weeds at every stage of their life. It identifies their species and kills them instantly, all the way down through their root system by exploding them with this laser. And yeah, here, here is one of the-

  17. 2:13:54 – 2:26:17

    Immigration, labor impacts, sanctuary policies, and media narratives (closing segment)

    1. RJ

      You know, why don't you ask me about immigration? 'Cause I know that that's something-

    2. JR

      Yeah

    3. RJ

      ... that's disturbed you.

    4. JR

      Well, w- what are your thoughts on immigration, on what's going on with-

    5. RJ

      Well, you know, here, here's the background, my kind of assumptions. During the last 10 years of his life, I worked very closely with Cesar Chavez, and I worked with... He had two issues. He had pesticides, which were a huge issue with him, and that's what I worked with him on, on the dangers that, you know, his workers were experiencing from, from pesticides. And the other issue he had was immigration. He wanted to shut down the border because he saw the way that i-i-it was impairing this huge influx of, of illegal immigra- migration across the border. It was impairing his ability to get, uh, to bargain, to leverage good wages and conditions for his workers. When I grew up, the Democratic Party was against im- immigration, and it was the Republican Party who wanted it because the big corporations wanted cheap labor. The Chamber of Commerce was firmly embedded in the Republican Party, and they were all about open borders. Today, the Chamber of Commerce is with the Democratic Party, and so it's one of these switches that is kind of inexplicable to me. But I think, again, it be- it happened because President Trump said, "I'm gonna fix it with a wall," and that became-

    6. JR

      Right

    7. RJ

      ... you know, and that suddenly became open borders, suddenly became a, a calling card for the Democratic Party. But there's a reason, you know, and I see it in my agency, the cost that it's, it's imposing on our country and, and, you know, on healthcare, diminishing healthcare for Americans and housing and, and jobs and all of these place where it, uh, it hurts. And we need workers in here, and we need legal immigrants in here, but they should come in legally, and every country has to do that. President Trump ran on this issue. He's now-- And he ran that he's gonna enforce it and deport particularly the bad people. This is what you don't hear. 70% of the people that they've arrested are, have criminal records. What the Democrats are always saying is o-only 14% of them have been convicted of a cr- a violent crime. Well, they've been convicted. A lot of them, the other ones have been arrested, and they just haven't been convicted yet because they jumped, you know, bail, or they, uh, or they, you know, they jumped their, their, uh, their warrants. The other 30%, a lot of them are gang members. When they go looking for an immigrant, they're not just randomly searching, you know, restaurants. They're going after particular people who they've gotten their names from local law enforcement and from others. During the Biden admin- or during the Obama administration, President Obama, uh, deported more people than President Trump did, the most in history. Nobody cared. And there were 76 people shot during that process, during the Biden administration. None of it made headlines. About half of those people were killed. None of it made the news. Now, because it's Trump doing it, you have the entire Democratic Party and the media establishment saying, "Oh, look at the horrible things. He's a dictator." But he's doing what he promised to do to the American people. It, it's, it's very disturbing watching what you see on TV. And the thing that makes it most disturbing is because there's so much interaction with protesters, which is weird that the Democrats are telling protesters to go out there and stop law enforcement from doing its job. If you-- That's not how protests usually work. If you don't like US drug policy, which you don't, you know, and a lot of people don't, a lot of people don't like the war on drugs at all. They think it's counterproductive. You wouldn't send people to try and interfere with people who are, who are, uh, who are arresting a drug dealer. And when you have thousands and thousands of people doing that, there's going to be thousands of interactions, and some of those are gonna end badly 'cause you have armed people doing dangerous things. And when you have crowds doing that, it's going to blow up. And so, you know, I, I, I see this, you know, I, I... Nobody is happy with the way that things have looked, particularly in Minnesota, but a lot of it is because of this capacity of the press to take, to take Trump derangement syndrome and amplify it into public outrage and, and set up a situation. I mean, if you were a... You're a dad. I wouldn't send my kids out to interfere with a law enforcement operation. There's other ways to protest. Uh, but, um, so I think that, you know, I, I think now they're pulling out of Minnesota, and they're gonna do this, you know, in other states where they're not gonna get that kind of crowd interaction. Um, but a lot of the, the people that they're arresting are not, you know, they're, they're people who are actually, you know, have, like I said, 70% of them have criminal records.

    8. JR

      Uh, yeah, we've, we've actually covered that here. And then there's also the issue that this is the first time in history that the border's been wide open for four years. It's a different thing.

    9. RJ

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      It's a different thing when you have at least 10 million people.

    11. RJ

      Yeah.

    12. JR

      They don't even know how many for real.

    13. RJ

      Yeah, it could be 20 million.

    14. JR

      They don't know.

    15. RJ

      They don't know.

    16. JR

      And that's a lot, and to have that happen all at once is pretty crazy. Um, what-- I think what a- what disturbs people is, uh, again, obviously these violent interactions. What should disturb them is that these are not organic protests, that these protests are organized and paid forAnd that's crazy.

    17. RJ

      Right.

    18. JR

      When you find that out, and you find out that people can actually be paid to protest, and that they provide them with signs, they tell them what to do, it's organized, they have signal chats. There's been a lot of people online talking about being paid to protest in certain places, and that's kind of insane-

    19. RJ

      Yeah

    20. JR

      ... that that's even legal, that you can organize a mob and pay them to go and make a bunch of noise. Um-

    21. RJ

      [laughs] It's like the color revolution, you know?

    22. JR

      Right, exactly.

    23. RJ

      Yeah.

    24. JR

      And that it happened-

    25. RJ

      But they're doing it here

    26. JR

      ... just happened to take place in the place where hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud was being exposed. So then the narrative completely shifts away from the fraud and onto this unnecessary violence with ICE. And then there's the natural thing that people have, this distrust of people wearing masks. They don't like that. They don't like officers wearing masks. But on the other side, they have to wear masks because they're being doxxed, and their families are being threatened, and you're filming everything they do, and you're these organized i-i-instigators. So if it wasn't for organized protests, I wonder if those particular interactions would have even happened, would have even taken place. And I know you're saying that they don't... that they're targeting specific people, they're going after bad people, but also they're showing up at Home Depot and just grabbing people too, and trying to find out if someone is a bad guy or a good guy. So there's probably a lot of people that are just people that got duped into coming to this country thinking they're gonna be welcomed, and then they come over here and they're trying to get jobs, and now they're getting arrested and deported. You know, it wasn't their fault that they were encouraged and brought into this country, but they did break the law, and I understand, I understand that perspective. But it's kind of insane that no one is pointing the blame at the fact that they let at least 10 billion people, or 10 million, excuse me, people into this country over the last four years, at least, being charitable.

    27. RJ

      Yeah.

    28. JR

      It's kind of nuts.

    29. RJ

      And I was down at the border, and, you know, I was, on, when I, during my presidential campaign, I went down there, and I went down a bunch of times. But the first night I went down there to Tucson, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was like the Boston Marathon, the beginning of it [laughs] , just-

    30. JR

      Yeah

Episode duration: 2:26:17

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