Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh - RFK Jr. on JFK assassination, Larry David stories, and meeting Epstein

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Yerrr, RFK Jr. came through to get Flagrant and explain how he met, lived with and eventually married Larry David's wife; unsettling stories about his time meeting Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwel...l; how he thinks the CIA played a MAJOR role in the death of his Uncle & Father; and much much more. INDULGE 00:00 START 00:57 Larry David: Roomies, Rules & First dibs on Cheryl 11:39 RFK Jr’s voice issues 17:13 Jeffrey Epstein - Always a creep & Ghislaine’s tears 31:12 Fighting Monsanto dismissed as “conspiracy theory” 35:13 CIA involved in JFK assassination + how Joseph made his money 43:05 Mafia hating JFK/RFK + Chicago vote fixing 54:32 Ukraine & Russia + NATO feeds industrial military complex 1:06:18 Managerial class + Corporate interests aligning with US policy 1:19:06 Corruption in political system + Family disowning RFK 1:35:04 The Kennedys have truly impacted American life 1:38:34 RFK’s assassination - official story doesn’t add up 1:56:06 RFK suspicious of CIA + right to fair trial esp. for the assassin

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you believe that there were government agencies involved in the deaths of your father and uncle? Clearly there was government agencies involved not only in the death of my uncle, but the cutlery. How do you end up living with Larry Davis? Larry, he has a lot of rules that he expects everybody to know. You just announced that you were on Epstein's flight? Glenn had called my wife and said, we want to do an adventure this weekend. I said, do you want to take the kids fossil hunting? We flew out.
Starting point is 00:00:26 Great plane? No, it was not. Was the election in Chicago fixed? Probably. What does that mean, fixed? I mean, they found ballots in the Chicago River. They overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014, which is really what this war is about.
Starting point is 00:00:40 I mean, I knew Harvey Weinstein. I knew Roger Ailes. O.J. Simpson came to my house. Bill Cosby came to my house. Bill Cosby came to my house. You also knew good people. Yeah, I knew them. You don't know these people.
Starting point is 00:00:53 They're swamp creatures until all this stuff comes out. O.J.'s innocent. Yeah. You just said you lived with Larry David. How do you end up living with Larry David? He was, I recruited him to, him and his wife, Laurie David.
Starting point is 00:01:08 Yeah. To, I flew out to Los Angeles to recruit them to be on the board of the Natural Resource Defense Council. I was a senior attorney. It's probably,
Starting point is 00:01:18 it's the big, one of the two biggest environmental groups in the country. And Laurie had a big interest in the environment. And Laurie had a big interest in the environment. Larry. What was Larry's interest?
Starting point is 00:01:32 She actually, we had lunch, the first time I met them, we had lunch at the Sunset Hotel in Los Angeles. And Laurie, the thing with NRDC is they didn't let you on the board unless you were the principal. So the wife of a principal could not be on the board, right? It had to be Robert Redford. It had to be that person. And Laurie was the one who was driving this and she wanted them both
Starting point is 00:02:07 to have a board scene okay and so she was talking about you know that she really called called the shot you're a very very powerful character yeah and she said um she said I control the money. I write the checks. I have two interests. One is child health, and the other is the environment. And then I heard Larry, who hadn't said anything, and I heard him say something. He said, I only have one interest.
Starting point is 00:02:43 And I said, what is that? And he said, it's Larry David. Did they both get board seats? That was my first meeting with him. Did they both get board seats? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you met him then. And we became friends. And then they had a house.
Starting point is 00:03:01 They were building a house at that time in Martha's Vineyard. Right. They had a house. They were building a house at that time in Martha's Vineyard. Right. And I had lost my home. I had outgrown my home in Hyannisport, which is where we summered every summer. So they invited us to stay with them.
Starting point is 00:03:24 So we stayed with them for two and a half summers, and then we started taking our other vacations together. And we went skiing every winter and we became very very close friends and at that time Larry was still doing Seinfeld and he had just retired and then he decided to he was going to go up to
Starting point is 00:03:40 back to stand up comedy and he decided to make a film about his return to stand-up comedy. Okay. And he decided to make a film about his return to stand-up. Which kind of ended up being like the curb pilot. And that was the pilot. They didn't intend to do a whole series. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:03:56 And they were recruiting... Cheryl got recruited because they wanted it to be plausible. Yeah. So that they didn't want to use no actors. Cheryl's your wife for everybody watching. Yeah, it to be plausible. Yeah. So that, you know, they didn't want to use no actors. Cheryl's your wife for everybody watching right now. Yeah, Cheryl's my wife. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:04:09 And she plays his wife. Yeah. And the first pilot, actually, she was supposed to be Jewish. Really? Then they changed that later. You know, and she was a shiksa. Are there any weird house rules that Larry had when you guys lived there? He has a lot of rules that he expects everybody to know.
Starting point is 00:04:33 Okay, what are Larry's rules? Well, I mean, one of the rules, and I've talked about this before, but when I started this thing, this couch really sucks you in. Wait till the massage is started. But when I, you know, I met Cheryl. He introduced me to Cheryl at a time when both of us were married. And so, you know, there was no chemistry. He brought her up. I was doing there you know there was no he brought her up i was doing no chemistry
Starting point is 00:05:07 well not not any kind of you know of that kind of chemistry you know i like you yeah you know it was it was all proper and towing the company line i like this yeah but it was a it was noteworthy not both of us remembered the us remember what happened that day. We were skiing up in Banff and I did every year for Waterkeeper, which was my environmental group that I co-founded and then built the biggest water protection group in the world. Our big event every year was a pro-celebrity ski event. And that year we were doing it in Banff and it was very cold Our big event every year was a pro-celebrity ski event.
Starting point is 00:05:45 Okay. And that year we were doing it in Banff, and it was very cold. And so I would say, Larry would come every year, and I'd say to him, can you bring some other people? So he brought Cheryl and some other people. And so we met on that ski trip, but as was, as I said, there was no chemical reaction. Six years later, we were both involved in a divorce, and she came to another event at that time, and there was kind of an instant chemical reaction.
Starting point is 00:06:34 But I knew that Harry, because he does have these rules, one of those rules would be that I could not date his television wife without getting his permission first. Why? What is his logic? Well, you know, I mean, he watched the show, right? But the show always has logic. That's the thing. What I like about it. Yeah, and they all have logic. They're not arbitrary rules.
Starting point is 00:06:48 They're rules that kind of everybody does know, but they're not written down anywhere. Exactly. Yeah. Whereas like some people are like quirky and weird and their shows are built around how different and weird they are. And they go, yeah, I'm just an anxious, weird guy. I feel like Larry's like, you guys are weird for not adhering to these rules that we all know make sense. He feels right and justified in everything he does. I mean, that's a good way of characterizing his humor.
Starting point is 00:07:14 So what is his justification for why you can't be with his TV wife? It's just obvious that, you know, that. Oh, it could affect the relationship. You might not want him kissing her on the show. No, no, no. It was that he had initial claim to her, and since we're friends... You think sexually?
Starting point is 00:07:35 You think Larry was, like, into it, or what? I think he loves Cheryl. Right. And, you know, and I'll tell you what he said to me, because I came, I, that's... He called dibs, right?
Starting point is 00:07:49 He called dibs. First right of refusal, right there. What did he say? He's like, you know, Kennedy's always meddling. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:57 So that season was one of the, was a season when Cheryl wasn't in it. He later, you know, it was after his divorce from Cheryl, which was the way it happened was, that show would follow his life and it would predict his life.
Starting point is 00:08:14 So he wrote himself getting a divorce on that show and then that year, Laurie told him she wanted a divorce. Wow, yeah, yeah. I think he had that happen. This is my dream world. So he was shooting, the year after the divorce, he moves to New York to shoot a play, which is called The Producers.
Starting point is 00:08:37 I remember that. That's right. But he has to move to New York to do that. So I flew to New York and I went to visit him. He was staying at the Lowe's Hotel. And I visited him at 10 o'clock at night and I
Starting point is 00:08:53 said, I need to talk to you about something. And I said, you know, I feel like you know, I don't know how I put it, but I said I feel a lot of affection and attraction to Cheryl. And I just wanted to check with you to make sure that was cool. And he said, he surprised me because I felt like he would be horrified by it.
Starting point is 00:09:20 But he said, he said she's the best human being that he's ever met. He said that she is beloved in the industry and that she is the only person in Hollywood that doesn't have a single enemy and that he was really happy for me. Now, when he talked to Cheryl and she said, do you think this is going to work? He went, eh. And then... said, do you think this is going to work? He went, eh.
Starting point is 00:09:46 And then... To be fair, you didn't ask him what he thought about y'all's chances. He was consistent. You asked what he thought about Cheryl, and he's like, she's the best. She asked what he thought about you, and he was like, eh. Exactly. It was true. He's always honest in that way.
Starting point is 00:10:01 But then he reenacted it that moment on Curb with Ted Danson asking him permission and he says, you know, fuck no, you can't do that. That's because that's what he wanted to say. I know that's what he wanted to say. And when you guys
Starting point is 00:10:17 were living together out at the vineyard, was it like, did he have rules about food or anything? Like, did you ever drink too much OJ and he had to like sit in this? He's a shoes off guy, I assume. Yeah, like I just imagine. He would, you know, he was always, one of the preoccupations he had, and he actually gave a speech about this at another comedy event that I had. The difference between the Kennedys and the Davids.
Starting point is 00:10:43 Okay. the difference between the Kennedys and the Davids. Okay. And he had a long speech of all the different things that the Kennedys, you know, when they were kids, could not come in the house unless, until it was dark. So we were locked out of the house in the morning, and they said, don't come back till dark. And he said the Davids were locked in the house all day
Starting point is 00:11:02 and were never allowed to go out because the world was dangerous. He had a litany of those kind of things. And my family, my brothers, would come over and visit a lot. And, you know, he was always – he's the same person he is on the show except a much more generous, kind-hearted version of that. And anyway, it was really, really fun living over there. Okay. So many things I want to talk to you about today.
Starting point is 00:11:36 All these crazy notes, maybe I get there. First of all, there are people that are listening or watching Roundup that might not know you. Can you explain your voice to them? Yeah. So I had a very strong voice. In fact, unusually strong voice. Till I was 42 years old, 1996, my voice, I got an injury, a brain injury that caused my voice, caused this to my voice. And it's called spasmodic dystonia. Yeah. And it's pretty much stable, and in fact, it was much worse. Got better.
Starting point is 00:12:12 Yeah. So Cheryl and I went over about, I don't know, eight months, maybe three months before I announced my candidacy, and we went to Japan, and they do this surgery in Japan where they put a piece of, like a bridge of titanium in my throat. And it helped. And then I started doing some therapies.
Starting point is 00:12:37 And, you know, it's improving. If you woke up from that surgery with an Asian accent, that would have helped. I said that. I said, I don't want that happening. I told that to the guy. Before you went under, you said. I need to pronounce
Starting point is 00:12:51 R's. I'm RFK. They never put me under the Did you get in trouble for Asian stuff? No. I must have misread that. It was a misread. It was. I don't get it.
Starting point is 00:13:11 He got you. He got you. Go, go, go. But anyway, so I'm not going to go there with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good, good. You're our president.
Starting point is 00:13:20 You can't be making these jokes. I'll be making these jokes. Okay. It's not the worst thing America's done to Japan. When I did that surgery, they never knocked me out. So they did the whole thing when I was awake
Starting point is 00:13:33 because they had to test out a bunch of different voices on me. No way. And Cheryl was in the room, but there was a lot of carnage that was associated with it, and she ended up having to leave. But she was listening to the voices, and they would say, okay, count in this voice, and they'd move the bridge, and I'd say, you know,
Starting point is 00:13:54 one, two, three, four, five, and they'd say, do you like that one? And that's what happened. Is it laborious at all to talk? It's, I have to think about it, which I didn't before. But not painful. I have to do some action. It's not painful, but it's painful for me to listen to myself.
Starting point is 00:14:15 I can't listen to myself. If I hear myself on TV, I'll never watch this podcast. Oh, thanks. Sorry. Because I just can't stand the sound of my voice and I feel sorry for other people
Starting point is 00:14:28 who have to listen to it, but it's all I got. Well, if you're president, we're going to have to listen a lot now, you know? A lot of people, you know, aren't worried about that. You can just tweet.
Starting point is 00:14:38 I see what they say on the internet. I like everything about you, but I can't take your voice. Can't we do auto-tune? Isn't there like a... There should be AI. Yeah. Because we do it tune you isn't there like a there should be AI because we do it with singers right
Starting point is 00:14:47 like they have these weird inflections and then we manipulate it and make it perfect people are starting to write me saying I can fix you with AI or I can fix the way you appear or something like that but every day I get somebody who says I can fix your voice
Starting point is 00:15:02 and I used to try them all because I'm willing to try sort of new therapies and treatments. But I don't have patience for them, so it's hard for me to stick with them over long periods of time, especially if I don't see quick returns. And now I say to people, and a lot of them went to dead ends, now I say to people, show me somebody with my condition who you've fixed before.
Starting point is 00:15:31 And so very few of them can do that. Actual question, having to think about what you're going to say, does that kind of end up being a good thing in your position? No, because it doesn't give me extra time. I'm having to think about, I better take a breath first before I start talking or maybe nothing will come out. But it used to be with my voice that there were times, particularly early in the morning, if I spoke, I didn't know if anything was going to come out. So now it's much better. It's much more reliable.
Starting point is 00:16:02 Yo, quick announcement. Los Angeles. I know a lot of you out there have been asking me to add another show. First of all, thank you guys so much for selling out the forum. And I have some fantastic news. May 9th, Staples Center. I believe it's called Crypto or something right now, but we're still calling it Staples. Shane Gillis and I will be headlining motherfucking Staples Center or Crypto Arena or whatever the hell it is.
Starting point is 00:16:30 Thank you, my boy. Anyway, you guys can get tickets for that. Pre-sale starts Thursday, 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. Pre-sale code is crypto. Go scoop those up. That's going to be wild. Get those before they are gone. That is going to be a dope show. That's going to be wild. Get those before they are gone. That's going to be a
Starting point is 00:16:48 dope show. Also, the Life Tour, we added a bunch of dates. You guys saw it last week. If you didn't get those, get on them immediately. We are adding a third show in Vancouver. Thank you guys so much for that. We added a bunch of other shows
Starting point is 00:17:04 as well. You can go to theandrewschultows.com and you can get those tickets. But Vancouver, we have added a third show. Thank you so much. And now let's get back to the show. You've done one of the craziest things ever, which is you just announced that you were on Epstein's flight. You're the only person I think that was like, hey, I was on. Usually people were like, hey, you were on. And you were like, no, let me just tell everybody. Great plane? Was it a plane?
Starting point is 00:17:31 No, it was not. First of all, I don't know. I'm not going to impress him, right? It wasn't like a big plane. I've been on Donald Trump's plane. It's like a 737. It's not like a big plane. I've been on Donald Trump's plane. It's like a 737.
Starting point is 00:17:48 It's not like a little G6 or something like that. Wow! He does flex on them. Okay, but give the context, obviously, to the Epstein thing. Because you basically got out ahead of the... So, first
Starting point is 00:18:04 of all, you know, I'm in New York for most of my life. Yeah. And you run into everybody in New York. I mean, I knew Harvey Weinstein. I knew Roger Ailes. I knew O.J. Simpson came to my house. Bill Cosby came to my house. You also knew good people.
Starting point is 00:18:23 I did know a lot of them, but you don't know these people are swamp creatures until all this stuff comes out. OJ's innocent. OJ has done nothing. Yeah. Wait, do you know something?
Starting point is 00:18:47 Okay, go on. So you're hanging out with your besties. So in 1993, my wife, who has since passed away, Mary Richardson, she knew Glenn Maxwell. And I forget exactly how, but she lived in England, and she knew Glenn Maxwell. And I forget exactly how, but she knew, she lived in England and she, you know, she knew Glenn Maxwell. And she said to me, I, we, we were going to Palm Beach to visit my mother over Easter. And she said that Glenn had offered her a flight. So we went on the flight and, um, a flight.
Starting point is 00:19:23 So we went on the flight and we flew down there with them and then we stayed with my mom and all my kids were all on the flight. This is 93. Don't look like that. In retrospect. I had very
Starting point is 00:19:39 very young kids. I don't know. But anyway. They made it worse. They, uh, uh, yeah, the,
Starting point is 00:19:50 the stuff didn't come out about him till I think 2006. 2006, yeah. Well, that's 13 years later. Nobody knew at that point. Yeah. And then sometime in the next year or two,
Starting point is 00:20:03 I can't remember when, um, I did another flight with them because they had, they, Glenn had called my wife again and said, we want to do like an adventure this weekend. And I said, do you want to go fossil? I knew a paleontologist who worked on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. And I had wanted to go out there and do fossil hunting. And I said, do you want to take the kids fossil hunting?
Starting point is 00:20:30 What an awesome weekend activity. Yeah. So we flew out. We went to Sitting Bull, which is the big mountain that they've caught. We went to Rushmore. And then we spent a day fossil hunting, which was really great. My son found a skull, almost a perfect skull of a saber-toothed tiger.
Starting point is 00:20:54 But Epstein at that time— Sometimes you say things that my brain can't even comprehend. As if they're so normal. You said I summered in Banff. You lost me at summered in or whatever. The fossil hunter. Was Epstein on the Fossil Hunter? Was that the first time he's looked for old fans?
Starting point is 00:21:07 That was the first time I spent time with him. Oh, wow. And I realized he was creepy. Was he? Okay, go. I'll tell you two things that happened on that flight. First of all, when we got to Rapid City, there were two cars, rental cars, SUVs waiting for us to take us out to the fossil hunting. And he took one of them
Starting point is 00:21:37 for himself, and then all of us were in the rest of them. And he didn't actually fossil hunt. He stayed in that car and then he would get out and be on his cell phone when we were at Rushmore or something like that. And when we were fossil hunting, then all the kids filled up boxes with fossils and we had a great time, but he was not a participant. And then on the way back, I was asking him about how he made his money because I knew that he had been a teacher at Dalton School. Yeah. And he told me that, and I asked him, and I knew then he was the money manager for Les Wexler on the Limited.
Starting point is 00:22:22 Yeah. Yeah, on the Limited. Yeah. So I said to him, how did you go from being a math teacher at Dalton School to that? Okay, good, good. And he said that some Chinese people had approached him who had been taken advantage of by American grifters. And they had lost a lot of money. And they asked him to find the money for them
Starting point is 00:22:46 and he succeeded in doing it. And that was how he had, that was the launch pad for his career. So that didn't make any sense to me. Yeah, yeah. Because it just raised 50 more questions like how did the Chinese guys find you at Dalton School?
Starting point is 00:23:05 So anyway, that, you know, when somebody is talking to you and you have a meter that is like this, it doesn't make any sense. And he told me something else on that flight, which was I said to him, I asked him something about investing in the stock market. And he said, I don't invest in anything on the stock market unless I have inside knowledge.
Starting point is 00:23:30 And I had just met him, and he was telling me that he was committing federal crimes. He's only an insider trader. And then the plane landed in Chicago. We thought we were going down to New York, and it landed in Chicago, we thought we were going down in New York and it landed in Chicago and he got off the plane and there was a limousine waiting for them
Starting point is 00:23:54 a Mercedes waiting for them there and it had a very beautiful blonde like very beautiful woman standing next to it and he said my plans have changed. I need to go to Europe. And he got off our plane,
Starting point is 00:24:09 and they took the Mercedes to another plane on the time hack. And he and the girl got on it. And Glenn was sitting in our plane crying. And never explained it. But I just thought that he's a creep. Yeah. What do you think her involvement in that he's a creep. Yeah. What do you think her involvement in that whole? I have no idea.
Starting point is 00:24:28 I don't have any information. My kids. Did you get a vibe from her like you got from him? No, I didn't. So you see, sometimes. I don't know. I mean, I also, I mean, I wasn't thinking about it. Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I knew, you know, I felt like she was raised in wealth and privilege.
Starting point is 00:24:56 Incredible, on top of the aristocracy, and everybody knew her. Her father is Robert Maxwell. Robert Maxwell. And then Robert Maxwell and her brother, who was the heir apparent, Robert Maxwell then dies in this very weird way off a boat. Yeah. And in the Mediterranean. It could be suicide.
Starting point is 00:25:18 It could be, you know, something else. So, and then the brother then, and they find out, then his whole empire collapses, and it turns out that he's been stealing from the labor unions, and the entire fortune disappears. And Glenn then comes to the United States. It's hard for them to live here, and she
Starting point is 00:25:39 comes, and I think she, my impression was that, and I don't know, she was always wonderful to me and, you know, kind. But again, you never know about people. But it seemed to me that she was looking for somebody, you know, who to replace the father who had wealth, et cetera. And then, you know, Jeffrey was the kind of guy who would test your loyalty by, you know, continuing to push you to the edge from what I know about him now. So I don't know much about what happened to him then, you know, other than what I read. It's not a big interest to me, but my kids were very, very smart and well-informed and not
Starting point is 00:26:26 a conspiracy theorist like me. Right? One of my older kids said to me, he was definitely killed. And I, it was Connor, and I said, and I was shocked to hear him say that, because usually when I say to him
Starting point is 00:26:42 things to him, like, you know, when I say something to him about, he's skeptical of me. Right? And that's their job as kids. You want to raise kids who don't just believe everything you say. And I succeeded in doing that. Easier for you than most people. So anyway, he's very, you know, he's very grounded, very well informed.
Starting point is 00:27:07 And he said to me, it was definitely a murder. Yeah. Because of the weird circumstance. There's too many weird coincidences. Follow up question real quick about this. There's all these people that are kind of with Epstein a lot. You picked up on a creepy vibe from him immediately. Do you have any judgment toward a guy like Bill Gates who's associated withstein a lot. You picked up on a creepy vibe from him immediately.
Starting point is 00:27:28 Do you have any judgment toward a guy like Bill Gates who's associated with him a lot? And either, are you like, nah, you must have seen some creepy shit and looked the other way? Because I picked it up very quickly. Like, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't, I try to stay away from that kind of speculation.
Starting point is 00:27:43 Like, if you look at my book, Anthony Fauci, I tell people what I know happened and what can be documented, but I never connect the dots and say, oh, he must have known or he was motivated by this or that. I try never to look in people's heads. But I did see creepiness immediately. I don't know. The other thing is,
Starting point is 00:28:06 I think Jeffrey immediately realized that I was not a target, that I was not, you know, oh, yeah, that I was not. You couldn't be an asset. He couldn't manipulate you. I'm not gonna, yeah. And I didn't have interest.
Starting point is 00:28:21 I was like, you know, interested in building Riverkeeper and, you know, so I don't have interest. And I was like, you know, interested in building Riverkeeper. And, you know, so I don't know. Yeah. And yeah, that's also interesting that you kind of, I don't want to say checked him, but you were vetting him. Like just asking him where the money came from. Yeah. I think immediately it's like, uh-oh, this guy might be able to smell something fishy.
Starting point is 00:28:39 There's already skepticism. Exactly. And he's not going to wow you with money. Yeah. He's not going to wow you with experience. Yeah. He's not going to wow you with experience. Bitch ass G6, get out. Yeah, exactly. The answer to the question
Starting point is 00:28:50 that everybody wants to know, Akash, what is your decision? In this March 10th, man, this is very tough. In this March 10th, I'm going to take my talents to YouTube
Starting point is 00:29:02 and release my new special, Gaslit. YouTube. That was the conclusion that you woke up with this morning. That was the conclusion I woke up with this morning. Why? You know, I just feel it's going to give me the best opportunity to grow, to expand my- No, no, no. I mean, why is this newsworthy at all? I'm sorry. What do you mean?
Starting point is 00:29:22 You've been on YouTube for years. Well, yeah, but this is my special, so it's special. You already did a special on YouTube. It was Bring Back Apu. I helped you promote that. Yeah, but this is an hour, and it's an hour. That's more time. You've done a million times.
Starting point is 00:29:37 I mean, your friend Andrew Schultz has a whole business model around this. That's a good point. You know, I have the news to do, right? I have wars to cover. I mean, what makes you think that I have time for this? Does it help you to know that this money is going to the children? Is it actually going to the children? I mean, it will if I have a child.
Starting point is 00:29:56 Okay, well, thanks for wasting my time. Gaslit, March 10th on YouTube, because where else would it be? Guys, my special is coming out this Sunday, March 10th on YouTube. It's called Gaslit. It is the most important thing I've done in the 17 years I've been doing stand-up. Everything built up to this moment. I put every fucking ounce of my soul into this. I hope you guys love it as much as I do.
Starting point is 00:30:20 Sunday, March 10th, noon. Please watch it. Please tell your friends. I'm so fucking grateful for all of you who made this possible. And I'm so happy to be sharing this and I'm truly proud of it. And I hope you guys love it.
Starting point is 00:30:32 Thank you. Gaslit, Sunday, March 10th on my YouTube channel. Please tell the world, let's blow this thing the fuck up. That is on my YouTube, Akash Singh Comedy, Sunday, March 10th at noon. I love you guys. Thank you so much.
Starting point is 00:30:49 Also, dates. We're not gonna spend a bunch of time on that, but thank you to everybody who came out in Greensboro. I didn't even really promote until, except for this and the day of the shows, and we still sold out two of them, so thank you. Also, Stanford, Connecticut, March 8th and 9th, and then next weekend, Dania Beach. I'm going to be doing a little promo for this special, so we can only do shows March 16th. Those shows will sell out. Hurry up and buy tickets. All those dates and more, akashsingh.com. But most importantly, guys, gas lit. Thank you so much. I love y'all. You said that sometimes
Starting point is 00:31:13 you have conspiracy theorist ideas. Based on what you've seen in your life, how can you not conspire? By the way, show me a conspiracy theory that I've had that is not either generally accepted or is not demonstrably true. Yeah, I'm not giving pushback. It was, you know, I was told that I was a conspiracy theorist because I thought glyphosate, which is Roundup, caused cancer.
Starting point is 00:31:39 Right. Well, then, you know, I won a $2.2 billion jury verdict on that. Can you explain what it is, Roundup? Roundup is... For us city boys? Yeah, Roundup is an herb. It's the most commonly used herbicide on Earth. And the active ingredient is glyphosate.
Starting point is 00:31:59 It's made by Monsanto. It kills everything green except things, except plants that have been genetically altered to be Roundup resistant. And so, you know, you have Roundup Ready corn where the seeds have been altered so that, and you can fire all the farm workers who used to wear backpack sprayers
Starting point is 00:32:22 and spray the weeds when they were competing. And you saturate the entire landscape who used to wear backpack sprayers and spray the weeds when they were competing. And you saturate the entire landscape from an airplane with glyphosate and everything green will die except for the corn. So now they have Roundup Ready corn, they have Roundup Ready soy. And glyphosate is everywhere now.
Starting point is 00:32:40 It's in your kids' Cheerios. It's in the wine. It's in beer. It's in your kids' Cheerios. It's in the wine. It's in beer. It's in everything. But what we did, we sued on behalf of home gardeners. And in the end, we had about 40,000 home gardeners who had gotten on Hodgkin's lymphoma from Roundup. from Roundup. And the reason we sued home gardeners is because home gardeners are very careful
Starting point is 00:33:08 about chemical exposures. And we could not sue on behalf of farm workers because farm workers are exposed to everything, atrazine, neonicotinoids, all of this wide range. And so you can't really... That's about which thing is actually causing the cancer. But with home gardeners, you could. Yeah, we could isolate it.
Starting point is 00:33:28 And we could say, you know, we get them on the sand and say, did you ever use another pesticide? No. Never. Why did you use it? Because they had a picture on the front of it that had a guy spraying with bare feet and his shirt off. And it said, safer than aspirin,
Starting point is 00:33:45 safer than anything, you can drink it. Yeah. And so we represented home gardeners and we won a series. We won $289 million in the fursuit. An African-American groundskeeper for a school in Northern California who had gotten it all over his body.
Starting point is 00:34:09 He was getting it. He was carrying a sprayer that leaked, and he was getting these postulating lesions. He called up Monsanto, and he said, could this be from the Roundup? And they either didn't answer the phone, or they told him no. And he said, could this be from the Roundup? And they either didn't answer the phone and they told him no. And he kept using it. And then they covered his whole body and he was dying when we tried the case. The massive accomplishment, I think to reinforce what Andrew is saying, is an idea of like, I think people will just kind of write you off as conspiracy theorists. I think his point is to empathize with like what you've seen in your life. You're we say assassinated because it's not personal for us.
Starting point is 00:34:47 Your dad is murdered. Nobody really understands what happened. Your uncle is murdered as the president. Nobody's really clear on what happened. So obviously, a guy who grows up like that is going to see these theories and be like, you know, I'm not dismissing any of this because of what happened to me in my life. I think that's what you're trying to say. 100 percent.
Starting point is 00:35:02 Yeah, I think that's where it's like people can write you off as conspiracy theorists, but also empathize, agree or disagree with, of course, you probably would be too. Why wouldn't you be skeptical? Especially if it's, you know, I mean, I don't know. Do you believe that there were government agencies involved in the deaths of your father and uncle? Yeah. I mean, clearly there was government agencies involved, not only in the death of my uncle, but the cover up. There was government agencies involved not only in the death of my uncle but the cover-up. And, you know, I'm an attorney. If I – just with the evidence without any – doing any discovery with the evidence out there now Morales, Charles Harrelson, Woody's father, who was involved peripherally in it, and many, many others who were involved
Starting point is 00:35:59 have confessed. But also, there's hundreds of thousands of documents that show what happened. And you have a 60 year CIA effort to make sure nobody sees that. OK, so can you tell us what one you think happened based on those documents and based on what those people said? And then also what the CIA has done to squash those? the CIA has done to squash those voices? Yeah, I mean, the best evidence is that the CIA was involved in a project to assassinate Castro. And in order to promote that project, they recruited, there was a CIA station chief in Miami,
Starting point is 00:36:50 And there was a CIA station chief in Miami, and the head of the project was a guy called Bill Harvey, who hated my father. My father and him just tangled with each other from the beginning. And my father was attorney general, but he was also overseeing the CIA. And Harvey hated my father, and my father extremely disliked him. And Harvey was running the Cuba Project, including the assassination project. And he recruited three big mob families to help him assassinate Castro. Santos Traficante from Tampa, Florida. And Giancana, Sam Giancana from Chicago. and Sam Giancana from Chicago and Carlos Marcello,
Starting point is 00:37:27 who was the Dallas and New Orleans crime chief. These are Italian mafia families or Cuban? Well, actually, Carlos Marcello is of Italian descent, but he was Tunisian. He was born in... He's a very interesting character. My father once... At one point, they deported him because he was here illegally,
Starting point is 00:37:51 and he ran... He was a tiny little guy, and he ran the whole mob family, the mob from Dallas to New Orleans. Wow. My father, at one point... Which mob, though? The Italian mob?
Starting point is 00:38:03 Yeah, those are the three most powerful mafia families. Wow. And the reason they were involved is they all had casinos in Havana. Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it. And when Castro, that was his big thing. In fact, when I've talked to Castro, I've met with him a number of times. Really? Yeah, and I asked him,
Starting point is 00:38:27 are you getting capitalism back? And he said, yeah, we're going to carefully bring it back, but never the casinos. And the casino, because he thought that it corrupted the whole country. So this is interesting. So there's the interest from the Italian mafia families, because they're profiting off these casinos. Americans are flying down there,
Starting point is 00:38:44 they're spending tons of money in these casinos they're extra they were making millions millions on those casinos so they're incentivized to get him the fuck out of here so it's easy for the u.s so they can go back and bring their casinos i get it i get it i get it vegas okay so uh so they So they – and Bill Harvey, the CIA agent, had a liaison to all of those mobs, and that guy was named Johnny Roselli. And Johnny Roselli was actually murdered I think in 73 when Congress reopened the Warren Commission. is reopen the Warren Commission, and it's called the Church Committee, and they tried to... Actually, Gary Hart, who I've talked to about this, they subpoenaed Johnny Roselli.
Starting point is 00:39:33 He was supposed to come talk to the committee, and he never showed up, and then his body was found in a 55-gallon oil drum, chopped into pieces, floating in Biscayne Bay. and oil drums chopped into pieces floating at Biscayne Bay. But he had also been involved in a weird way in my father's destiny. Now, I always thought that my father, that Saran killed my father. Can we give a little context to your father's death? Okay, your father was running for president.
Starting point is 00:40:00 My father, in 1960, ran my uncle's campaign. He was my, you know, my grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, made a lot of money in banking and in owning a studio, one of the biggest studios in Hollywood. He was making films. I didn't even realize that. He was a big filmmaker. They weren't good films, by the way.
Starting point is 00:40:27 They were family films at that time, and it was like Tarzan, but all clean, you know, that you could show in theaters across the Midwest. That was his business plan. It was part of RKO. My grandfather, after my uncle's death, the CIA tried to smear my grandfather by starting this rumor that he had been a bootlegger.
Starting point is 00:40:51 That's what I was about to ask. He was never a bootlegger. So this was, to me, common knowledge my whole life. Of course. And then I start doing some research on you, and I find out that there was money made in alcohol, but it was through exclusive deals when prohibition dropped. Yeah, he and Jimmy Roosevelt, who was the president's son, when they knew because the way that they got rid of prohibition, you had to get, I think 26 states had to reject, was it the 16th Amendment or 17th Amendment, the one that, you know, illegalized it.
Starting point is 00:41:26 So you had to have state by state adopt laws saying we want to get rid of that prohibition. Yeah. And when it got closed to the end and they knew they were going to win it, my grandfather and Jimmy Roosevelt went over to Scotland and they bought pinch, which was a very high quality Van Plan of Scotch. And they took all the inventory and they shipped it over to warehouses on the Canadian border with the U.S.
Starting point is 00:41:55 So it was ready to go. So the night that prohibition ended, they were shipping a high quality whiskey to everybody. But that's his only involvement with it. And then I think he sold that company later on for a lot of money. He was conscience-stricken about it. Oh, really? Yeah. He didn't think he should be
Starting point is 00:42:14 selling alcohol. And he sold it not... For religious purposes or because it was... It was like a... You know, it was a sin enterprise, essentially, what they call a sin enterprise. And he made a lot of statements about, I don't feel good about this. So he overcorrects and starts making family films, which suck apparently.
Starting point is 00:42:39 Well, I don't think he was making family films for, I don't know whether he was making them for moral reasons or whether it was just a marketing strategy. There were all these theaters in the Midwest that didn't want to see women in stockings, you know, to see their ankles, right, and that kind of stuff. He was Tyler Perry before Tyler Perry. Exactly. Okay, so CIA starts to smear... Well, after he died, there was a guy who worked for the CIA. He had been the Havana bureau chief for the New York Times. And his job for the next 30 years was smearing my family. And he's working for the Times.
Starting point is 00:43:20 He was... Well, no, he had been. His cover had been New York Times Bureau Chief in Havana before he just came out of the closet and said, oh, I actually work for the CIA. Wow. And then he transferred to Langley, and that was his job. And there was a
Starting point is 00:43:37 whole cottage industry of Kennedy books that came out. And he's the one that started this rumor that my uncle or that my family, my grandfather had gotten Sam Giancana to fix the election in Chicago. In Chicago.
Starting point is 00:43:59 I've seen an entire one-hour documentary. So that is all baloney. Like the History Channel. And if you think about it, when I was, and then, Giancana was angry because my father tried to put him in jail. My father had six FBI agents follow him. When he left his home in the morning, they'd sit behind him in the movie theaters. They'd get the table next to him when he went out.
Starting point is 00:44:22 They ruined his life. They get the table next to him when he went out. They ruined his life. And so, but the thing is, when I was a kid, like maybe six or five or six-year-old kids, there's pictures of me sitting on my mother's lap in the front row of the Rackets Committee hearing, which my father was running. My uncle was a senator. He was the head of that committee.
Starting point is 00:44:52 My father was his counsel. And my father, I'm grilling Sam Giancana. I was there. Giancana took the Fifth Amendment over a hundred times. My father was ridiculing him and saying, you know, he said, do you hang people? Is it true that you hang your enemies on meat hooks? And Giancana laughed. And my father said to him, you're giggling like a little girl. So they hated each other. So now, you know, this is one year before the election. He's doing that to Giancana. The idea that Giancana, that my father would then go bri to Giancana. The idea that Giancana,
Starting point is 00:45:25 my father would then go bribe Giancana to fix the... One year before JFK won the election? Yeah. And my father ran the campaign for him. So the idea that my father would go from that hearing room where the mob hated him and somehow he
Starting point is 00:45:42 would convince the mob to now... To fix the election. To fix the election. Now, was the election in Chicago fixed? Probably. How? How? Well, because Daley fixed all the elections. Daley, you said?
Starting point is 00:45:54 Mayor Daley. He fixed the Democratic elections in Chicago. And the Republicans fixed them in Southern Illinois. So they were all fixed and in fact they would wait for each other. What does that mean, fix? Explain, like how do you do that? You have dead people voting,
Starting point is 00:46:11 have all of the different ways to get rid of ballot. You know, a million different ways. I mean, they found ballots in the Chicago River. But they were mainly interested in the down-ballot contest. Down-ballot means something. Judges, you know, the people who were governing Chicago, that's what he was mainly interested in. But here's the thing. When the election was over, some of the Republicans said, oh, they fixed it.
Starting point is 00:46:48 So Daley said, let's do a recount of the entire state, and I will personally pay for the recount. And the Republican election commission, which was run by Republicans, voted unanimously to not do that. Why? Because they, probably because they knew that an account would disclose to everybody. But here, the bottom line, punchline is that even if my uncle had lost Illinois, he would have still won the election. Okay, so that's another CIA smear. Why is the CIA... Why do they hate you guys so much? Alright guys, let's take a break for a second. I need to point
Starting point is 00:47:30 something out, how the UFC has made me a better predictor of basketball outcomes. Talk to me. Okay. I wish that there was a way that the line adjusted super quickly, but this was a few nights ago. The Knicks were playing. jalen brunson suffers like what they believe is a non-contact knee injury scary right very scary
Starting point is 00:47:52 that's all like almost always you're like okay that's acl or something like that um and he tries to lift up his leg and his leg is kind of like labored in his ability to lift it up and his foot is almost like dead. He has like a dropped foot, so he can't move his foot. Everybody in the group chat immediately is like, oh my God, Jalen, toward the ACL, it's over. Like a knee injury, this looks bad.
Starting point is 00:48:15 You're a Knicks fan, you're prepared for the worst. Exactly. I go, yo, I think that he banged his perennial nerve, which is what we saw happen to Izzy, happened to this fighter, Crute. Isn't that what happened to Sugar Sean in that one fight? Sugar Sean, or Sugar might have actually broken his foot. I'm not exactly sure.
Starting point is 00:48:32 But there is this injury that happens when you bang the side of your knee. Your perennial nerve swells, and then you lose the ability to kind of like move your ankle. Yeah. Imagine I could have. kind of like move your ankle yeah imagine i could have imagine in that moment the line for the knicks adjusted like crazy because without their superstar they don't have a chance but i know you know i should have fucking taken advantage of it anyway uh i did not take advantage of it but right now we get to take advantage of akash singh's picks uh the akash singh locks hey that's the video prize picks you don't need to have years of foresight, months of foresight.
Starting point is 00:49:06 You just pick once and leave it alone. So here's your picks for tonight. Singh-Lox for tonight. Alex Caruso, more than eight points against the Kings. I believe that they're not the strongest defensive team. Marvin Bagley Jr., I got him getting less than 21.5 points plus rebounds. And I got DeMar DeRozan making less than half a three. I love DeMar DeRozan.
Starting point is 00:49:24 I just don't know. You don't think he's going to hit a three? I just don't. I just don't know him to be a three-point shooter. I'm trying. He hit one three. I was the least positive about this one, but the multiplier goes up with price picks, the more you pick. I would go more on that one.
Starting point is 00:49:36 You go more, I go less. Let's see what happens. We'll see what happens. A hundred percent. All right. PricePicks.com. Tell them about the promo code. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:49:41 Promo code Schultz. S-C-H-U-L-Z. They're going to match your initial deposit bonus of $100. So if you put up to $100, they put in $100. You go get that bread. Let's get back to the show. Why is the CIA, why do they hate you guys so much? What is it about the Kennedy family?
Starting point is 00:49:54 You know, there was a fit, and I wrote a book about this, this 60-year fistfight between my family and the CIA. It started, I think, in 1955. My family and the CIA, it started, I think, in 1955. My uncle was appointed to a commission run by what's called a Hoover Commission that looked at what the CIA was doing. And the CIA originally was created as an espionage agency. It wasn't supposed to do dirty tricks. Espionage means spying.
Starting point is 00:50:24 It means data collection and analytics. And that's why it was started. Abroad, right? Not at home. Its charter forbids it from operating in the United States, from propagandizing Americans, from doing anything in this country. Yes.
Starting point is 00:50:40 Which it violates constantly. Yeah. But its charter prohibits that. So it wasn't supposed to do dirty tricks. And it's Mitch Allen Dulles, who was essentially the first director, manipulated, and he had been at the OSS, which was the...
Starting point is 00:51:00 Precursor to... Yeah, but after the war, Congress and the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, said we can't have a secret spy agency in this country. Because that's what totalitarian regimes do. That's the Stasi in East Germany. It's the KGB. It's Peep in Chile. It's Savak in Iran.
Starting point is 00:51:22 And, you know, the only totalitarian regimes have spy agencies. So, and everybody agreed on that. And then Truman got in there and realized, okay, now we have one big bomb, right, that we can drop on the rest of the world.
Starting point is 00:51:40 But you can't do that in all of these little contact, you know, these little brush fire rebellions that are happening. We have to have a way to fight these wars without dropping the bomb on everybody. And so they, you know, realized the cheapest way to do that is let the CIA go. Handle all of it.
Starting point is 00:51:58 To fix the elections, to assassinate, they weren't supposed to assassinate anybody, but they started almost immediately. Who was number one that they took out? to assassinate, they weren't supposed to assassinate anybody, but they started almost immediately. Who was number one that they took out? Well, they deposed Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. So the agency was started in 1947, and they began immediately overthrowing governments. The two most famous ones are Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 in Iran.
Starting point is 00:52:24 The two most famous ones are Mossadegh in 1953 in Iran. He was the first democratically elected leader of Iran in its 8,000-year history. And then the next year they overthrew. And they did that because he loved the United States, Mossadegh. And, in fact, he threw the British out because he thought Churchill was trying to overthrow him. And his aides were saying the U.S. is going to do it too. And he said, no, the U.S. was a colonial nation itself, and it threw it off in their idealistic. They're on our side.
Starting point is 00:52:58 He made a big mistake. Dulles sent Kermit Roosevelt over there, and they overthrew him. And then the next year they, because Dulles, before he was at the CIA, had been a lawyer at Sullivan Cromwell. And Texco was one of his clients. His biggest client was United Fruit. And the next year, Jacobo Arbenz nationalized United Fruit in Guatemala. And so they went down and overthrew him the next year, Jacobo Arbenz nationalized United Fruit in Guatemala. And so they went down and overthrew him the next year. Then they overthrew multiple governments in the next two years in Syria and Iraq and all over the Mideast in order to control the oil. The incentive structure for overthrowing these governments, is it always monetary in terms of businesses that have been purchased out there or there's investing interest in the business out there like it was in Guatemala? Or is part of destabilization just like global colonial power and this is how we need to keep things up? I mean, David Talbot, who wrote the best book about Dulles, it's called Devil's Chessboard.
Starting point is 00:54:07 It's a really riveting book. If you start reading that book, you will not put it down. It's really, it's so crazy. But what he says in that book is that Dulles was incapable of distinguishing between American interests and the interests of the corporations who he had represented at Sullivan Cromwell, he honestly believed that whatever was good for U.S. corporations was good. And, you know, the CIA still has, I mean, that's what it does. It does regime change. It mainly funnels the money through USAID, which is a CIA puppet.
Starting point is 00:54:43 I mean, they overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014, which is really what this war is about. They spent $5 billion overthrowing that government and putting in, handpicking the U.S. government, which Victoria Nuland, who's the Deputy Secretary of State, they have her now. You can go and listen to this on the Internet. Her giving orders, a voice mail, a voice recording of her giving orders to the U.S. ambassador of Ukraine a month before the coup in which she's picking the cabinet, the new cabinet. So this would obviously upset the Russians
Starting point is 00:55:26 because they don't want U.S. weapons systems in Ukraine. Okay, that makes sense. Now, did the Russians support the democratically elected government that the Americans overthrew? In Mosadag? No, no, in Ukraine. Oh, in Ukraine? Before 2013 yeah i mean that like is it possible that they also no no information systems to prop up well that was democratically elected but i mean is it is that in quotes democratically elected is it possible no no the thing is that a large percentage of ukrainians are russian are
Starting point is 00:56:09 ethnic russians right the boss lugans crime especially over there yeah 90 of the people there and when you know um uh when when after we overthrew their government and then started killing ethnic Russians, killed 14, the new government killed 14,000, illegalized the language, killed 14,000 Russians. And that's when Putin invaded Ukraine, because, I mean, invaded Crimea, Invaded Ukraine because, I mean, invaded Crimea. Because Crimea, Vladivostok, is the biggest Russian port.
Starting point is 00:56:53 It's the only warm water port. And he saw, okay, they're going to invite the U.S. Navy in there and take away our port that's been ours for 347 years. And that was, you know, untenable for their national security. I'm not defending Putin. I don't think he's a good guy, but I think it's important for Americans to understand our role in the provocations that led up to the war. What did you think of Putin? By the way, my son fought in the war. Oh, really? Yeah. What did you think of Putin's interview with Tucker? I thought it was fascinating. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:57:30 Elaborate on that. What, like... Well, I think, I mean, he didn't say anything that surprised me, but he, you know, he just, he talked about, I mean, one thing, he confirmed something that we already know. Which? Which is on two occasions they had made these very generous peace offers. The Minsk Agreement?
Starting point is 00:57:55 The first one was the Minsk Accords, and then again in April of 2022. And what he said is, we signed that agreement. And what he said is, we signed that agreement. And the major objective for Russia at that time was making us not move NATO into Ukraine. They don't want NATO there. And that's really what this war is about. what this war is about. And he said, he said,
Starting point is 00:58:25 I, you know, we signed the agreement and the principal part of the agreement was that NATO would not go into Ukraine and I was withdrawing from Kiev, which we knew.
Starting point is 00:58:35 But he said, as soon as I started withdrawing groups, troops from Kiev, they double-crossed us. And, you know, Biden sent Boris Johnson over there to force Zelensky to tear up the peace agreement. And since then, 450,000 Ukrainian kids have died in a war that should have never happened.
Starting point is 00:58:54 Now, who's profiting from this war? If all of our— Well, if you look at why, why did we want to send NATO? Why did we want to extend NATO? So, you know, in 1992, when the wall came down in Berlin and the Soviet Union collapsed, Gorbachev went to John Major in England and Bush in the United States and said, look, I'm going to let you do something that I'm never going to be able to go back to Russia because the Russian people are going to hate me so much. I'm going to allow you to reunify Germany, East and West Germany, under a NATO army. I'm going to move out 450,000 Russian troops and I'm going to hand it over to you,
Starting point is 00:59:38 but I want one promise from you. You will not move NATO to the East after that. You'll be satisfied with that. So five years later, and James Baker famously, who was the Secretary of State under Bush, famously said, promised Gorbachev, we will not move NATO one inch to the east. But what happened five years later,
Starting point is 00:59:59 the neocons came into power in the U.S. government led by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and they published a plan saying, we're going to surround Russia with NATO. George Cannon, who is the most important diplomat, arguably, in American history, he was the architect of the containment policy during the Cold War,
Starting point is 01:00:18 said, if you do that, you're going to force a violent response to Russia. Why are you treating Russia as an enemy? You should do a Marshall Plan with Russia. Bring them into the community of nations. Why are you treating Russia as an enemy? You should do a Marshall Plan with Russia. Bring them into the community of nations. Why do you need a permanent enemy there? I'll give you, I'll take a shortcut and tell you.
Starting point is 01:00:33 No, no, take as long as you want here. One of the, when we move, when we bring a new nation into NATO, the first part of that contract is that that new nation has to conform its weapons purchases to NATO specifications,
Starting point is 01:00:53 which means they have to buy their weapons from Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Rocky Martin, and all of those companies are owned by BlackRock. And BlackRock is the big donor. So they're incentivized to expand NATO because the only way that they can increase their profits is if they get more countries that have signed up. Well, it's a whole market that they now have a trap market.
Starting point is 01:01:16 They can only buy from them. It's like Starbucks selling frappuccinos. It's like you want Starbucks everywhere. And the, oh, my God. Every coffee shop should be at Starbucks. Yes. And then we break into a new market. There's also, you know, it's a confluence of ideological and economic incentives that, you know.
Starting point is 01:01:37 And this seems like what is, you know, often happening in the United States where the corporate interests match up with the geopolitical interests, which are America wants to exert force against our enemies and the corporations want to, you know, get as much profit as possible. So they probably align themselves in that way. Exactly. Could you argue that that is that does end up benefiting the American economy? And I'm not necessarily like a trickle down guy. I'm not a trickle-down guy, but people who would believe that putting billions of dollars into corporations in America does end up benefiting the U.S. citizens, according to that line of thinking. Yeah, it creates a lot of jobs in our country, in one industry, the fence industry. And, you know, that's now our biggest export around the world. Does it benefit us over the long run? I would say no.
Starting point is 01:02:27 You know, we need to rebuild our industrial base, and it allows the financialization of the American economy. Because the economy is now no longer based upon industrial production or any kind of production. It's based upon speculation. So everybody is, if you look at what's happening on Wall Street, they're no longer going factory by factory and saying, what's the production? What's the efficiency?
Starting point is 01:02:53 What's the lowest cost? What's the future? They're all focusing on what is the Fed going to do this week, right? And that's what everybody bets on. And it's financialized their economy. It's sent all of their industry. It's destroyed abroad. Yeah. It's destroyed the American middle class. And we do that by printing dollars. You print $34 trillion of dollars that you don't have. Why would the world even value them anymore? And the reason that they continue to value them is because we have 800 bases abroad,
Starting point is 01:03:28 and that kind of anchors this whole system. The system is going to collapse. It's not sustainable. It is corrupt, and it's already destroyed our moral authority around the world. And now our influence around the world is this big compared to when I was a kid, when we had moral suasion and we also had, you know, people wanted American leadership.
Starting point is 01:03:54 Now they consider it bullying. And it's not sustainable. The national debt is now just the service on the debt is now larger than our military budget. I'll adjust that. And if interest rates raise. Service meaning the interest on the debt. The interest on the debt. Yeah, the VIG.
Starting point is 01:04:19 Yeah, so what we're paying is bigger than $1.3 trillion. So what we're paying is bigger than $1.3 trillion. And if interest rates go up, like if interest rates double from, let's say they go from 2% to 4%, that service doubles. So it goes from $1.3 trillion to $2.6 trillion. And if you get up to the typical interest rates, which are eight or 10 percent, it's the entire every tax dollar collected in our country is going to service the debt. That's happening right now. And it's not, you know, it's not sustainable. And all of that is attached to this, you know, the warfare state. Do you think there's a path to redemption and getting the sway that you had, that the U.S. had when you were a kid?
Starting point is 01:05:09 And if so, what is it? Yeah, I mean, I think I don't want to be plugging myself here. Plug yourself. I think if I'm elected, we're going to get that back. How do you reverse it? I think, first of all, the world wants to see that America, the America that they used to see, which is an America that is a moral authority,
Starting point is 01:05:30 an America that is telling the truth to people on every issue, an America that comes with a little bit of humility. That is not, you know, where, I mean, I'm going to stop the CIA from these regime change operations and say, you know, we actually do support democracy. We're not, if somebody elects a leader, they ought to be able to serve. And, you know, it's not the U.S. choice to do that. And, you know, I'll end that. the U.S. choice to do that. And I'll end that. But across the board, the corporate corruption,
Starting point is 01:06:10 this corrupt merger of state and corporate power happens within the agencies. The agencies are now, all have become sock puppets for the industries they're supposed to regulate. And this is, we have Vivek on, and he spoke about this. He used the term managerial class. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:06:23 And I like the term because deep state is this nefarious entity, but it's so conspiratorial that I feel like people don't take it as serious as they should. I read it off, yeah. You kind of write off the word deep state. What is a deep state? I don't know who it is there. I don't use that term for that reason. What is the term that you would use for it? Because I do think that you're tapping into a feeling and sensation a lot of Americans have with their disillusion with government and the people in control, and they feel like their desires are not being met by candidates.
Starting point is 01:06:51 It's probably why you've had so much success, because you're speaking to a lot of the frustrations that Americans have. So what is that term that we use for the powers that be that are not elected, but able to exert immense force and control, i.e. the people at the CIA. I think Vivek's term is pretty good as a managerial class. I mean, there are entities within the government that are actually dictating a lot of this stuff. Like whom? I would say probably most,
Starting point is 01:07:26 you know, particularly with our foreign policy, the Atlantic Council. And the Atlantic Council has, I mean, just go look at who's on it. There is six former CIA chiefs on the Atlantic Council. But these are elected officials or? No.
Starting point is 01:07:43 And who appoints them? They are appointed by invitation. Who is inviting? The Atlantic Council. What I'm trying to understand is like how do these positions of power, where do they come from? Like who creates them? How does the Atlantic Council even get power? Yeah. them? How does the Atlantic Council even get power? Yeah.
Starting point is 01:08:06 What? How does the Atlantic Council even get power? Can you just break this down for us, simplest possible terms? Like, how does this get started? Who starts it? I mean, you know, there are a lot of different centers of power. And I'm just saying this is one of them because it really, everybody, it dictates U.S. foreign foreign policy and it dictates policy in NATO. These people are all highly respected.
Starting point is 01:08:32 They tell the president, yeah, Vladimir Putin is a crazy person. He's about to invade all of Europe. We need to be over there and we need to go to war with him. And they not only influence the U.S. government, but they are the primary body that influences NATO. There's other things that counts on foreign relations. And then there are panels across the government that are made up of industry people, people within who are, you know, who have,
Starting point is 01:09:08 and you can look at them in every agency, you know. In FDA, it's called VRBPAC. In CDC, it's called ACE, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. And if you look at the people who sit on it, they're all people who are profiting from, you know, this, not from making people healthier, but from making, you know, from a sick country and a country that's constantly at war and a country that is doing the opposite of what its ideals say it's supposed to be doing. How would you stop corporate influence in government institutions? Well, the worst thing that happened in terms of corporate influence
Starting point is 01:09:52 was the Citizens United case, and it's hard to fix that. And just so that you know what Citizens United is, we lost democracy at one point in our history in the 1880s and 1890s you had our country was being run by a corporate plutocracy and it was john d rockefeller the melons the carnegies the fricks the whitneys and they all sat on interlocking boards for the sugar trust the rail trust the steel trust the oil trust etc and at trust, the steel trust, the oil trust, etc. At that time, there was no direct election of senators. The senators were not chosen by the public.
Starting point is 01:10:31 They were chosen by the legislatures. The legislatures were completely on the state legislatures by Congress. I mean, by these guys. In fact, it was said that the only legislatures that you could not purchase, that could not be purchased, was the Pennsylvania state legislature because John D. Rockefeller owned them all and he wasn't selling any. Wow.
Starting point is 01:10:53 And so they would then pick the senators and everybody from top to bottom was chosen by this group. Didn't Rockefeller like bail out the entire country with like a check? Didn't you tell me this story? One of these guys, like the U.S. needed money and he was like, yeah, I'll just write you a check. The different time, but maybe during, I think the bunch of them actually came together. This is before, this is during, right before the Great Depression. They just dumped a bunch of money in the stock market to try to regulate it, but different than what we're talking about. But go on, go on. So then you had a confluence of these extraordinary
Starting point is 01:11:28 events that happened. You had the rise in the countryside of the populist movement, which was democratic. Can I just say one thing real quick? So when you have these people, the billionaires, the aristocracy, owning the legislative branch. They're dictating the laws in the country, essentially. Yeah, they were dictating the laws and they were also dictating the personnel. But I'll just do this very briefly. You had two big movements that happened. One was Republican, one was Democrat populace in the countryside, organizing farmers, which were then a huge part of the population, the progressives in the city. And you had suddenly appear all these muckraking journalists who really changed America.
Starting point is 01:12:11 Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair E. Lewis, and many others. They were writing for a magazine called McClure's, and they started doing exposés on John D. Rockefeller and all the other robber parents. And America, everybody was reading those magazines. Everybody, the whole middle class was reading it. And there's a sense of indignation. And then you had one guy came along, Teddy Roosevelt, who was a member of the Arab plutocracy. And he wasn't intimidated by him.
Starting point is 01:12:40 And he got elected president and started to dismantle them. And they passed the Shermanerman antitrust act and he broke up uh the standard oil the biggest company in the world yeah yeah they passed the 40-hour work week they let unions start to organize they passed the they gave women the vote they uh they uh they passed frustrating uh corporate income tax for the first time they passed graduated income tax for the first time. They passed graduated income tax for the first time. The most important bill they passed was in 1908. They passed a law that made it illegal for corporations to give to federal political candidates.
Starting point is 01:13:18 So that stood for 102 years. And then Citizens United. And then Citizens United, this very business-friendly Supreme Court in 2010 came and said that donations are free speech. They're protected by the
Starting point is 01:13:35 First Amendment, and you can't do anything to interfere with them. And that's the court we got today. So it's really hard to fix that part of it, which is the systemic part because it unleashed the so I'm running against Biden and Trump and both of them are gonna have $2 billion. So just to clarify why this is difficult, you have a situation before where these billionaires or corporations, if you will, the owners of these corporations are dictating the laws
Starting point is 01:14:02 because they own the legislative branch of government. They own Congress, right? Teddy dismantles it. 102 years later, Citizens United essentially allows corporations to fund candidates. And now it's almost impossible to beat a corporately funded candidate. So you're back in the same system that Teddy had to break. Real quick question about Teddy. Is that why Teddy kind of has a shaky reputation historically? Like, have they tried to smear him a little bit? Like, he's some weirdo that likes to go out to, where was it, hang out in the forest for months at a time. I think he's actually, you know, according to public polls, one of the most popular presidents in history.
Starting point is 01:14:46 I mean, progressives don't like him. Of course. Because he was a warmonger and he was an American imperialist. And he, you know, he bullied his way around, you know, the Philippines, you know, built the Panama Canal and, you know, and then took over Cuba. He was the one, they sent people down to help with the Cuban insurrection against Spain.
Starting point is 01:15:15 But in the end, he told the Cubans, oh, and by the way, we're keeping Guantanamo Bay, which is your biggest port. That's how we got Guantanamo Bay. Shout out to him. And, you know, he did the same thing. He took over the Philippines and Guam. And so people think of him as an imperialist, but I think generally his reputation has withstood the test of time. All right, guys, let's take a break for a second.
Starting point is 01:15:42 Listen, you guys have some bad habits, maybe one bad habit in particular you need to quit. And you're going to give yourself lung cancer or emphysema with that bad habit. I want you to stop. I want you to stop that bad habit. How do you beat a bad habit? You maybe replace it with a good one. Fume is that good habit, okay? So it doesn't feel like you're just quitting cold turkey and brutally shaking through your day. You have that same physical sensation going on with none of those negative side effects. I'm telling you, fume is an innovative, award-winning, flavored air device that does just that. Instead of vapor, fume uses flavored air. Instead of electronics, fume is completely natural. Instead of harmful chemicals, fume uses delicious flavors.
Starting point is 01:16:26 You got all these different flavors. I'm telling you, you take the hit, pull. It calms that desire, that sensation that you are addicted to. You have a very bad habit, and this is going to help you with that, okay? I'm telling you, the taste is fantastic. I prefer the mint. That's the one I go. They have plenty of different flavors.
Starting point is 01:16:47 You guys choose whatever you want. The feel. This is a nice feel to it. It also, you know, satisfies that little fidgety. The click. I love the click. Yeah. The click is nice.
Starting point is 01:16:56 The click is nice. Gives you something to do for those ADD brains. Okay. Fume just released the magnetic stand for your fume as well. So there's no more losing it around the house. It's built with fidgeting in mind. Remember, so you can spin it all you want. So start the year off right. The good habit, okay, is going to be fume. So tryfume.com slash flagrant. The website is tryfume.com slash flagrant. That is F-U-M for fume.
Starting point is 01:17:23 And getting the journey pack right now, when you go to tryfume.com slash flagrant, Fume is going to give the listeners of this show 10% off when they use the code flagrant. Okay? So use Fume. Start that good habit. Let's get back to the show. All right, guys. We're going to take a break real quick because your bank sucks.
Starting point is 01:17:41 Probably. How do I know? Because most banks suck. That's why you need Current. Current actually helps you build your credit, gets your paychecks faster, and gives you a great interest rate on your savings. We're going to start with this. You see what this is? This is the Build card from Current, and here's why it's great. It's a secured credit card that lets you use your own money to build up your credit. What that means is it functions kind of like a debit card. You buy shit using your money, not the credit company's. But while
Starting point is 01:18:10 a normal debit card doesn't have any effects on your credit score, the build card reports all of your purchases to credit companies, so it helps you build your credit score. The build card reports all your purchases, like I said, and there's no credit check or history required to get this card. So if you are looking to improve your credit score, this is the card for you. I know people who use it and love it, and you will too. On top of all that, when you switch to Current and set up a direct deposit, you can get paid up to two days faster. Guys, it's your money. You worked hard for it. Now get it faster. And maybe most importantly, you can get up to 4% interest on your savings with Current. Guys, how much more of a no-brainer can we make it? So guys, what are you waiting for? Get Current, the future of banking. Go to current.com slash flagrant or download the app
Starting point is 01:18:54 that is current.com, C-U-R-R-E-N-T.com slash flagrant. Terms apply. Why? Courtesy of the financial technology company, not a bank. It's a bank that's provided by Choice Financial Group. Remember, FGIC. It's a cross-border bank. Remember, FGIC. For full terms and conditions, visit current.com or call 888-511-724-4133.
Starting point is 01:19:07 Are you guys the class clowns in here? No. More school shooter vibe, I think. Get the job done. I was a class virgin. Okay. All right. And we're back.
Starting point is 01:19:24 We're back. We took a little pee break. I think we're all kind of still digesting this this is kind of crazy um okay so would you immediately tear apart citizens united well i that's the problem is you can't do that as president i mean that's now the constitution right the only thing that's going gonna fix that is if all of these Supreme Court justices, after they get old and retire or die and new ones come on and say, yeah, this is not a good system. Yeah. And the first amendment does not protect legalized bribery, which is what a campaign
Starting point is 01:20:02 donation is. Now, let's say, for example, we strip it down, get rid of it, tear it up, and each citizen can only donate up to $10,000 to a candidate or whatever that number is. We can adjust that number. Doesn't that incentivize the wealthy to run? Because now they can spend their own money, whereas some poor dude who wants to be president doesn't have it. And he has to hope he's getting all these donations. Yeah, I mean, yeah.
Starting point is 01:20:30 So the system's never going to be perfect. But I'd rather guy run and say, hey, I'm financing myself. I own myself. Than being owned by the corporations. Yeah, and you don the logos of the team. I love it. Yeah, that's great. Love it.
Starting point is 01:20:54 Are you financing your own campaign? No. So who's in your bank? I think Cheryl would still be mad. All right, so what? Oh, yeah, here you go. Okay. You know, the campaign itself is financed by small donations.
Starting point is 01:21:13 The maximum donation is $6,600, and those are hard to raise. I'm competing against the White House, the Democratic and the DNC and the RNC, and they can take, I think, $250,000 as their minimum. So, you know, I'm at a big disadvantage in fundraising. But there's also a couple of super PACs, and the super PACs that support me, I'm not allowed to coordinate with them, but they've raised a lot of money. I think one of my super PACs has maybe raised $70 million. Can you explain what a super PAC is? What they did is they said, okay, federal, you can't donate directly to a federal political
Starting point is 01:22:01 candidate. The maximum for that is $6,600. But you can donate to an entity, which is called a PAC or a super PAC, and you can donate unlimited to them. And they can help on the campaign, but they're not allowed to talk to you about how they're going to help.
Starting point is 01:22:21 So you can't coordinate with them. What's the justification for that? about how they're going to help. So you can't coordinate with them. What's the justification for that? I guess it's supposed to be a place where... I mean, none of it makes sense, but I guess the best justification is that if you're very rich and you want a certain person to win,
Starting point is 01:22:43 you ought to be able to promote their candidacy without giving them money. And, you know, I don't know. So they can buy commercials for you or something? Yeah, they buy, in fact, the Super Bowl commercial was purchased by my super PAC. Oh, wow. So, you know, Cheryl and I were sitting,
Starting point is 01:23:02 watching the Super Bowl with my kids. You didn't even know that commercial was going to happen? No. Wow. How bizarre. And I heard her let out a yelp. My son said something and I looked up, you know, because it was an ad. So I was looking at my phone.
Starting point is 01:23:18 Yeah. And then I heard both of them, you know, sort of make these surprise shouts and then looked up and saw the ad. And now do you have to, you have to live with whatever they say about you, I guess. Yeah. I mean, usually the super PAC is going to say much nicer things about me than, you know, the Democrats and Republicans. Right. Okay. And now that you've run for president...
Starting point is 01:23:45 The DNC now has a van that follows me around that has billboards on the side. You know, those moving billboards. Yeah. Yeah. So they... Who's more corrupt? The DNC or the RNC?
Starting point is 01:24:00 Yeah. I'd probably be equally corrupt, but I don't know I don't even know the metric by which you would measure that but they're all I mean the DNC is really misbehaving they're really trying to block people
Starting point is 01:24:17 they try to block you right they try to block me they try to block Trump and I'm not a fan of Trump's but I want to be on a level battlefield with him. I don't want to beat him because a court threw him out. I want to beat him because I'm able to make the argument to the American people that I should be president. And I have a debate and that kind of stuff. have a debate and that kind of stuff. I don't think it's good for our country. I don't think it's good for the DNC. I think this persecution that the DNC has leveled,
Starting point is 01:24:52 that people see that as unfair. Americans just viscerally are saying, this guy is being attacked and they're, you know, it's moving huge numbers of voters over to him because they're pissed at what the DNC is doing. It's also terrible for America, who are supposed to be the exemplary democracy around the world. This is what they do in banana republics. You don't want to run against a guy because he's popular.
Starting point is 01:25:15 So you get a judge to throw him out. It's a great comparison. It's not America. They're doing the same thing to me. They're trying to make sure that nobody can vote for me rather than having President Biden come out and say, here's why I think I should be a good president. And here's why I think you shouldn't be.
Starting point is 01:25:35 And let's have that discussion. Not just say, you're not going to let me on the ballot. You're going to disenfranchise America so they can't talk to you. The Democrats kind of seem from a distance more crooked is the Republicans didn't seem to want Trump in 2016. They could not stop him in the primary. He just fucking destroyed everybody. It seemed like on the flip side of Hillary and with you in 2024, it's like we don't want this guy, this person to win Bernie in 2016, you in 2024. We're just going to have super delegates and then we're going to get our person in there and that's what it's going to be.
Starting point is 01:26:07 I think that's right. And also the fact that he won't give me Secret Service protection. You know, that's another kind of weaponization of the federal agencies to help him win. Who is that guy? He's got Ted Cruz's nephew. I'm just joking. He's strapped, right? Very much so.
Starting point is 01:26:32 He didn't like Kevin. You look nothing like him. You look nothing like him at all. He's making sure you guys don't make a lunch at me. Fair enough. I have Gavin DeBecker, associates,
Starting point is 01:26:49 who's giving me protection. It's really good, but it's very expensive. So a third one out of every $3 I raise is going to this, and it's not fair. I could be using that. I should be able to use that
Starting point is 01:27:05 to make the argument okay um your last name kennedy one of like the american dynasties i feel like most americans maybe most people around the world very familiar with it uh what are the benefits and what are also like not what are the benefits, what are the rules of being a Kennedy? Are there rules? Is there, like, a culture that you all have to live by? That's a great question. Is there a way to behave? Like, what is the... Yeah, I mean, I think we were all raised in a milieu where, you know, we have expectations of each other that you're going to, you know, try to do something good for other people. You know, many of my cousins, there were 29 cousins, 29 grandchildren of Joe Rose Kennedy. And most of us were raised during the Camelot era. And, you know, I think that really sort of dictated
Starting point is 01:28:06 a lot of our worldview and our lives. We all, I think, are raised with this attitude that our lives would be consumed by some great controversy and that it would be a big privilege for us to be able to play a role, an efficacious
Starting point is 01:28:22 role in that. You know, I of course, all, of course, everybody's lives diverge, and I've got members of my family now who do not like the fact that I'm running against President Biden. I have five members of my family who work for the administration or closely with the administration, and, you know, President Biden has a bust of my father behind him in the Oval Office. He's been a long-term friend of my family's.
Starting point is 01:28:50 So I have, there are people in my family who are not excited about that. But, you know, I think generally we all, you know, we were raised arguing with each other. My father would come home in the evenings from the Justice Department and he would set up debates at the dinner table, and we would have to argue a point. My grandfather did that to his nine children. And that, you know, we argue with each other without hating the person, you know, which I think is a good thing for the country to be able to do. One thing I really admire, I'm even listening to you talk. I don't agree with everything you say, but you surround yourself with people who don't agree with it.
Starting point is 01:29:27 Cheryl will publicly say she disagrees with you about X, Y, and Z. You say on this pod, my kids think I'm a kook sometimes. Like, I really think that is a thing that is missing from the spirit of America right now. And I think it's very cool that you are so open to people disagreeing with you. I mean, I argued with my son on ukraine you know from the beginning and he just he pushed back on me and then you know he put his money where his mouth was and went over
Starting point is 01:29:53 there and joined the foreign legion and he fought the kharkiv offensive and you know i'm i'm lucky that he came back alive but you know he i I raised the kids and my grandfather raised his kids. In fact, my grandfather sent his kids over to London School of Economics to study under a guy called Harold Lasky, who was regarded as the greatest socialist philosopher of the time. And my grandfather hated him and hated socialism, but he wanted his children to be exposed to different ways of thinking and to be able to do critical thinking themselves. And, you know, they traveled around Europe. They went to Spain during the Spanish Revolution.
Starting point is 01:30:42 They went to Hitler's Germany. During the Spanish Revolution, they went to Hitler's Germany. And he wanted them to be exposed to every kind of thought. And he loved our country because in our country, everything's supposed to be done by debate. And the best ideas, the ones that become policy, are ideas that have triumphed in the marketplace of ideas. And they annealed in the furnace of debate. And that's really important for democracy because democracy is actually a very inefficient system. You know, it takes a lot of effort to get anything done.
Starting point is 01:31:19 And so totalitarian systems have a big advantage on us. And the one advantage that we have is this open ferment of debate, which ultimately gives precedence to the ideas that win that contest. And the framers of the Constitution believe that that would put us at an advantage with totalitarian regimes. And it certainly puts us at a business advantage. There's no country like ours. Somebody said to me the other day, what do you see that's happening good in America today? we have in this country that really does not exist anywhere else in the world, that people really believe that they can start a business and have an idea, may bring it to fruition.
Starting point is 01:32:12 And you don't get that in Europe. Yeah, not at the same level, for sure. You can be the best version of yourself here. Yeah. I think a lot of people feel that way. Also, guys, we got to talk about this bad boy. You know what this is? This is an extra wallet, the world's largest smart wallet brand. This is the best wallet on the market. First of all, they got this thing right here. You see that quick card access. Every card you need right there at your fingertips. You can fit four or five in there. You also got this little clip for your money. You're good. This is all you need. Small, trackable. That's very important. I literally lost my wallet all weekend one time because I'm a dumbass and I
Starting point is 01:32:45 just put it somewhere. This wallet, you will not lose. It is trackable worldwide. It's also voice activated. You could literally call it using Google Home, Alexa, Siri, whatever. And these wallets, most importantly, probably offer RFID protection. You know, all the identity theft, the skimming that happens. You don't even just like that. They just skim. I don't know the mechanics of it. I think it's like that. Anyway, these offer RFID protection. Guys, this is the best wallet on the market. It's such a fucking no-brainer to cop this. And if you check out all the wallets at shop.extra.com slash flagrant, that's shop.extr.com slash flagrant. You can get up to 25% site-wide with the code flagrant. Again, that is shop.extra.com slash flagrant. You can get up to 25% site-wide with the code flagrant. Again,
Starting point is 01:33:25 that is shop.extra.com slash flagrant. Let's get back to the show. All right, guys, let's take a break for a second. There are many things about life that is very hard. Paddle is very hard. Okay. Bandejas are very hard. Vibras are very hard. Okay. Ground strokes are very hard. Playing the net is very hard. The volley is very hard. But one thing that is not hard at all is submitting an injury claim with Morgan & Morgan. That is incredibly easy. It's 2024 now. We got to talk about this.
Starting point is 01:33:50 If you get injured by a person, place, or thing, you deserve to get paid, okay? And Morgan & Morgan has got your back. You can check out Morgan & Morgan. It is very easy. Like I said, incredibly easy. America is number one, the largest injury law firm. They have over 100 offices nationwide and more than 1,000 lawyers with over $20 billion recovered from over 500,000 clients.
Starting point is 01:34:17 Morgan & Morgan has a proven track record of fighting to get you full and fair compensation. And like I said earlier, submitting an injury claim with Morgan & Morgan is unbelievably easy, okay? It's more like using an app than it is filing a legal document, okay? If you're ever injured, you can check out Morgan & Morgan. Their fee is free unless they win.
Starting point is 01:34:41 That means they only get paid if you get paid. For more information, go to forthepeople.com slash flagrant or dial pound law. That's pound 529 from your cell phone. That's F-O-R the people.com slash flagrant or pound law, pound 529 from your cell. Remember, this is a paid advertisement. Now let's get back to the show. I've heard people will kind of use your family legacy to kind of leverage a tack against you as a presidential candidate. I've heard people say, you know, he's a Kennedy. Kennedy's, what do they know about the middle class? What do they
Starting point is 01:35:14 know about working hard and, you know, being working class people? I'm curious, what would be your rebuttal to that point? Well, you know, I would say. But what doesn't Kennedy know about the work place? I thought that was. Some people. I mean, you went to jail, then got into Harvard. Like, it's pretty fucking crazy. You know what I mean? That is a nice move.
Starting point is 01:35:34 What? Jail, then Harvard? I'm fairly certain. No, no, you got kicked out of some boarding schools, and then you went to Harvard. I went to prison for. Kicked out of some boarding schools and then you went to prison. I went to prison for, I spent the summer of 2001 in an maximum security prison in Puerto Rico. So I have been to jail.
Starting point is 01:35:51 Oh, hell yeah. In his presidential campaign, he did something that everybody thought was impossible, which was to unite white working class Americans and middle class Americans with the poor, with people of color, with American Indians, with Cesar Chavez and with urban blacks. and with urban blacks. And, you know, when I was a kid, my father would take us whenever we traveled anywhere, he'd always take us to an Indian reservation nearby. When we went to Appalachia, he'd take us to a place where there was a lot of poverty. On weekends, he'd take us a drive through southeast Washington, and he would say to us, these are our people.
Starting point is 01:36:51 These are Kennedy people. The wealthy people in this country, they don't need a politician or a lawyer or anything else. They don't need the Kennedys. They already have the system rigged. And he said, these are your people. And, you know, my father would come back. He came back one time from Mississippi, and we were all sitting at dinner,
Starting point is 01:37:16 and he came back and he said to us, today I saw a family, a visitor family, who was, there were two families living in a house smaller than this dining room. And they were, and they have all, the children have only one meal a day. And he said, when you get older, I want you to help those people. And so that was kind of a message that, you know, that was part of, I think, all of our growing up. It was an expectation of benevolence.
Starting point is 01:37:44 You're going to help somebody who's less fortunate. Like, you know, my aunt, Eunice Shriver, founded Special Olympics. Her son, Anthony Shriver, who's a very strong supporter of my campaign, is running my campaign in Florida, was the founder of Best Buddies, which helps people with intellectual disabilities, to unite them with college kids. Another of his brothers runs UNICEF. Another of his brothers runs Save the Children.
Starting point is 01:38:12 And, you know, you go through my family and most of them are doing things like that where they're, you know, doing things to stand up for the most vulnerable, alienated, dispossessed people in the society and bring them into the American experience. doing things to stand up for the most vulnerable, the alienated, dispossessed people in society and bring them into the American experience. That's awesome. And they keep trying to kill you guys.
Starting point is 01:38:32 What the fuck is this about? Well, that's a question I have. You firmly believe the CIA killed your uncle, killed your father, and then you said I did. Well, I was saying, you know, my father, the abundance of evidence on my uncle's death, the CIA was involved. I think it was beyond any dispute. If I were a prosecutor, I feel I could win that case without doing any further discovery.
Starting point is 01:38:57 Just because with my father, I always assumed that Sir Anne killed my father. Sir Anne confessed to the crime, confessed to killing him. There were 77 eyewitnesses in the room. And, you know, and so I didn't think there was any question. And then a guy called Paul Schrade, who is one of my father's close friends, he was a deputy director of the United Auto Workers. He had brought, recruited Cesar Chavez into the labor movement. He was standing next to my father the night that my father was killed. And he took the first bullet. So he got shot in
Starting point is 01:39:31 the head by Sirhan. Sirhan was waiting at a steam table. And my father was brought through the kitchen where he was not scheduled to go. And Sirhan fired two shots at my father. The first one, he hit Paul Schrade in the head. The second one, he hit a door jamb behind my father, the wooden frame of the door. The LAPD later took it out of that, you know, removed it. Then he was grabbed by six men, including Rafer Johnson,
Starting point is 01:40:03 who was the 1960 Decathlon champion, one of my father's best friends, Rosie Greer, who was part of the Fearsome Foursome, and three other guys, or four other guys. They pinned him against the steam table, and they took his gun hand, and they pushed it away from my father pointing the opposite way but ray for johnson later told me he was trying to pry the gun out of sir hans and sir hans's little guy when i met him in prison he was the first thing that impressed me is how tiny and frail he looked but ray forfer Johnson said that he had superhuman strength.
Starting point is 01:40:47 And he then fired off six more shots and emptied the chamber, but exactly the opposite direction of my father. And all of those shots hit people. So we know what happened to every bullet in his gun. He was always in front of my father. And I never got behind him. But the bullets that killed my father, according to Thomas Noguchi's autopsy report, Thomas Noguchi was the most important coroner in American history.
Starting point is 01:41:13 And my father's autopsy is called the perfect autopsy. Because Noguchi knew that what had happened in Dallas with my uncle where the autopsy was completely botched. And so he wanted to make sure nobody, you know, to avoid all that criticism. So he flew in the chief coroner of all the armed service, every branch of the armed service and a lot of other famous coroners. And they all sat in the theater and watched him perform the autopsy. And what his autopsy found is my father was shot four times from behind, never from in front. The shots, one of the shots passed harmlessly through his shoulder pad.
Starting point is 01:41:51 The other three, two lodged in his back. The other one was right behind his ear. And in each case, they were contact shots, meaning the barrel of the gun was touching his skin or half an inch from it, and they left carbon tattoos. And they all had an upward angle so that whoever was doing it was standing behind my father and holding the gun, not directly at him like that, but at an angle where you could keep him closer. So it was almost like...
Starting point is 01:42:24 And the guy who was in that position was a guy called Eugene Thane Cesar, and he was a security guard who was hired two days before when my father's schedule was already known. So now he's walking through this kitchen, which he shouldn't be walking through. He's got this brand new security guy. He grabbed the security guard is the guy who steered him into the ambush. That's what I'm saying. He had my father's elbow and he was directing him. And then, you know, Sirhan starts firing.
Starting point is 01:42:55 My father then falls back and he lands on Cesar. Cesar and... Wait, Eugene is, what's his last name? Eugene Thane Cesar. Thane Cesar. Thane. Oh, Thane Cesar.... Wait, Eugene is... What's his last name? Eugene Thane Cesar. Thane Cesar. Thane. Oh, Thane Cesar. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 01:43:08 And my father must have known he was being shot from behind because the last thing he did is rotate and turn and pull off the clip-on tie that Cesar had on. Wow. Get the fuck out. If you see the original early pictures
Starting point is 01:43:23 before my mother took that out and put a rosary in his hand. But he originally, he has that tie in his hand. And there's pictures of Cesar from that night that don't have a tie on. Cesar was seen by all the eyewitnesses with his gun drawn. When he pushed my father off, he had his gun drawn. He was asked by the police, why did you have your gun drawn? He said, I was shooting at Sirhan, but there's no evidence of that. And then he was caught in multiple, multiple lies about what he did with the gun.
Starting point is 01:44:02 The police did not take the gun from him that night. There was a gun that was fired at the scene and the police did not take it. And the police also destroyed all the photos before trial. They collected every photo taken in that room, 2,200 photos, and destroyed them all. Who hired Eugene? He was hired by a company called Ace Security, but he had a real job.
Starting point is 01:44:29 His real job was at the Boeing plant, and he had a high security clearance. He was allowed in the top secret part of the plant. Before that, he had worked for Hughes Engineering, which, you know, Howard Hughes was very much, you know, people, Robert Mayhew, who is his deputy, was deeply involved in the Kennedy, the JFK assassination. Now, here's what happens next. A guy shows up as Sirhan's lawyer. It's an attorney who is at that point involved in the Friars Club case. Do you know what the Friars Club is? It's a club. Well, I know the Friars Club in New York, but I don't know the case.
Starting point is 01:45:14 The original one is in L.A., and it was famous because the Rat Pack, Joey Bishop, Frank Sinatra, all of those guys, Sammy Davis, Dean Martin were all members. And it was run by Mickey Cohen, who's the mafia chief, and Johnny Roselli, who was— Roselli was the Cuba guy. He was the liaison. Yeah. And so— We need the red string. They have a lawyer. And need the red string. They have a lawyer.
Starting point is 01:45:45 And the wall full of pictures. Their lawyer, Mickey Cohen's lawyer, shows up. Mickey Cohen is Alcatraz, right? He's the guy. Mickey Cohen is the mafia boss in L.A. Yeah, they've been in a bunch of movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, wow, wow. And the lawyer is now, has been indicted because in the Friars Club, it turns out that the mafia had secret.
Starting point is 01:46:16 Recording? They had a television camera, they had cameras on the roof of the Friars Club and they were looking at everybody's cards and fixing the games. And then it's a famous trial that took many weeks. In that trial, it comes out that the defense, the mob lawyers, had obtained the grand jury testimony, which is completely illegal. You go to jail for a long time for that. This attorney was charged with that. So he's under a lot of stress. He's trying the case for the mafia that he doesn't want to lose.
Starting point is 01:46:54 And he's charged with stealing the grand jury testimony. And he somehow finds time to show up and represent Sirhan. So he goes. So he's Sirhan's lawyer. So you think... And he tells Sirhan, you got to plead guilty. And then he buries all of the forensic evidence, all the ballistic evidence,
Starting point is 01:47:16 which if there's no way Sirhan could have been convicted because the gun, the bullets that are in my father did not match the bullets that were in my father did not match the bullets that were in other people. It didn't come from the same gun. Also, 13 shots fired. Sirhan's gun only holds eight. Exactly.
Starting point is 01:47:31 So we know that there, it's not like he's reloading. There's recording. There's audios of it, you know, of the 13 shots. Wow. So this is- Anyway, it's a lot of circumstantial evidence. It's not the kind of evidence that we- I think that that's solid.
Starting point is 01:47:44 No, it is circumstantial. But you say with your uncle, you think it's not circumstantial. With my uncle, it's a lot of circumstantial evidence. It's not the kind of evidence that we... I think that that's solid. No, it is circumstantial. But you said with your uncle, you think it's not circumstantial. With my uncle, it's just black and white. But with my father, it's circumstantial. So you cannot definitively say, but you can say there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of... Wait, why is it so black and white with your uncle? I hate to move on. Oh, you know what?
Starting point is 01:48:01 It would take me three days to go through the evidence, you know, to even give you the tip of the iceberg. People who are genuinely curious about my uncle's assassination, the CIA involvement, should read a book. There are many books, but I think the best one is a book called The Unspeakable by Jim Douglas. And what he's done is he's taken this mountain of evidence and he's distilled it all. And it's riveting. It's very, very easy to read. And it's really fascinating. And, you know, I think it's impossible to read that book and come away without thinking that, you know, the CIA killed JFK. Okay. Is it possible that any kind of mind-altering experiments or substances were used in both cases?
Starting point is 01:48:48 Like you've heard of MKUltra. Oh, yeah. Or MK, that's interesting that you say that because... Because didn't Sirhan say that he didn't have any recollection? He believes that he was hypnotized. And the defense, even the San Quentin psychiatrists, defense and prosecution scientists, all said it was hematized. And I'm not arguing this because I really don't know. I'm just saying that there's a lot of fishy stuff about this.
Starting point is 01:49:20 But there's a guy called Dan Martin who teaches at Harvard Medical School. Got him. You got it. And he is the world's expert on hypnosis. And he's been in to hypnotize Sirhan many, many, many times. And he said, I've talked to him. He said, there's four classes of people in hypnosis. I don't know any of this, but I think it's number one
Starting point is 01:49:52 is the people who simply cannot be hypnotized. And then four is people who are the easiest to hypnotize. And he told me this. He said, Sir, it's like 4.9. And he said that when he goes into Sirhan, he takes out a coin and shows it to Sirhan, and Sirhan immediately goes out. And he said his head flips back, and snot starts pouring out of his nose.
Starting point is 01:50:28 So his eyes roll up. And then he gives him a post-synoptic suggestion. And the suggestion, for example, he'll say to him, when I, you know, after I wake you up, if I ever show you a handkerchief, I want you to climb on the roof of the cell. Then he'll wake him up and he'll wait a while and he'll fool with the handkerchief. And Sir Anne will start climbing on the cell. He said, if you ask Zerhan, why are you doing that? He said, I just need the exercise. He'll deny that he's been
Starting point is 01:51:08 hypnotized. Again, I'm not, this gets really deep into this sort of conspiracy, and I am not arguing that this happened. You're saying these things are also true. What? You're saying these things are also true. These are true, and you can make of them what you will, but
Starting point is 01:51:24 and there's a lot of other really interesting parts of this story that are fishy. And it's not circumstantial to you. It's black and white. I could prove this in a court of law if I had the opportunity. Well, Sirham, no. Sirham is totally, to me, it's all circumstantial. There's no confessions, none of that. But with
Starting point is 01:51:46 my uncle, I think it's black and white. Are you scared at all? That's my question. If you do get into power, that this same circumstance will happen to you? Well, I'm not scared. But I'm also not
Starting point is 01:52:03 stupid about it. I know that what I'm doing is, you know, challenging trillions of dollars of financial interest and power interest. And the CIA specifically, which, you know. Yeah, the CIA, you know, other interests too. Oh, I know, you know, and so I'm not stupid. I take precautions. I do things that I don't want to do, you know, other interests too. Oh, I know, you know, and so I'm not stupid. I take precautions. I do things that I don't want to do. You know, I don't, you know. Like, for example?
Starting point is 01:52:33 Well, I don't like a guy following me when I go to the bathroom, right? Right. And I want to get out and, you know, if there's people in a supermarket, you know, I have these arguments with my team all the time i said oh i wanted to go out you know they had this big van i gave a speech down in bed stye this week two days ago and there was a van outside that the dnc is paying to that has you know uh that has slanders about me running in lights. It's one of those moving billboards that is constantly changing.
Starting point is 01:53:11 I want to go outside and talk to the driver and also get my picture taken in front of the van. And they say no to that? Yes, my security team wouldn't let me do that. There are certain things they say you can't do that. And I got to do what they tell me to do because otherwise they'll pull it. Do they charge you extra because you're like a high-risk, like, assassin? No.
Starting point is 01:53:35 You know, Gavin DeBecker would give it to me for free. Right. He loves me. But I'm saying the security guys. He's very supportive, and he runs the company. But he can't, because I can't take anything for free, so I have to pay the full fare. So that's what I'm doing.
Starting point is 01:53:54 Nobody can give it to me for free. What happened to this guy, Eugene, the security guy? It's interesting. He went to, and the whole story is fascinating, because actually Sirhan worked at a track that apparently was, I think it was in the name of Dina DeLaurentis, but the true owner was Mickey Cohen, and he worked at a horse track. And at that horse track, they were the stable boys and a walker.
Starting point is 01:54:25 He was a walker. He'd never been on a horse before. And the trainers were all experimenting with hypnosis on their lunch breaks, their different breaks. So they were all, you know, hypnotizing each other. And, you know, who knows what happened. Maybe it was a screening, you know who knows what happened maybe it was a screening you know issue there but I'll just tell you one other interesting
Starting point is 01:54:50 fact you mentioned MK Ultra one of the hospitals that apparently was used MK Ultra was I think it was a naval base there was naval infirmary in Pasadena one day they said to Sirhan, we want you to get on the horse.
Starting point is 01:55:08 He'd never been on any horse, and they were going to put him on a thoroughbred and have him race around a quarter mile track. Obviously, he falls off. He hits his head on the rail. He's brought to the Pasadena hospital. Get the fuck out of here.
Starting point is 01:55:23 His memory is that he stayed in that hospital for three months. When his appeals attorney went to the hospital and got his records, it said he got four stitches and was discharged in an hour. Wow. And he has very vivid memories of what took place in this hospital. He said there were other people from the track who were also there that had bandages on their heads. Again, this is stuff he says. Right.
Starting point is 01:55:52 I'm not assigning any credibility to it. I'm just saying it's part of this. It's part of this. A lot of the questions I would like to ask people that were never asked of people. There's a lot of women that complain about gaslighting from their boyfriends. Nobody has been gaslit more than the Kennedy family. I mean, how do you stay sane? There is one narrative that is constantly being pushed out in media, in film, in television.
Starting point is 01:56:23 And then there's another completely plausible narrative that you and your family are investigating. My family's not investigating. My family does not want anything to do with this. They just accept it? You know, it was so shattering to my siblings and to my, you know, and if you, you're not around when we were kids, but for maybe 20 years, the Zabruder films were played almost as a loop on television. So you actually watched this. And when those came on in my household, the TVs were turned off. Everybody was so devastated by this, and they don't want to, you know, nobody's bringing, nothing you do is going to bring my father back. Nothing is going to bring my uncle back.
Starting point is 01:57:09 My father, the first day when my uncle was killed, I came home from school. My mother picked us up early, and my father was walking in the yard with John McComb, who was the head of the CIA, and he was the first person to get over there because the CIA is only a half mile from my house. And McComb used to come there every afternoon and swim in the pool. But as soon as, the first thing they did, my dad did when he learned that his brother,
Starting point is 01:57:40 when J. Edgar Hoover told him his brother was shot, on the telephone as he called up the CIA and said, the desk officer, and said, did your people do this? Wow. He asked the same question to John McComb. John McComb, you know, had been, my uncle had fired Alan Dulles and Richard Bissell and Charles Cabell, the guys who had orchestrated the Bay of Pigs because they lied to him. And he said, I want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.
Starting point is 01:58:11 He fired them and they brought in, my uncle originally wanted my father to run the CIA because he thought it's such a mess and only Bobby can fix it. My grandfather had stepped in and said, you can't do that. You can't have your brother running the spy agency. It's like Stalin
Starting point is 01:58:29 and Molotov. You can't have the brother of a president. It's just terrible optics for the whole world. You don't want that. They brought in John McCone, who's like a Republican business guy, very pious Catholic,
Starting point is 01:58:46 and he ran it. But nobody ever told him anything. So, you know, the whole sort of bureaucracy that's under, he doesn't know what's going on. And then my father then called one of the Cuban big leaders, a guy called Harry Ruiz, who was very close to my family. Bay of Pig leader is a guy called Harry Ruiz, who is very close to my family. I was in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. with a famous writer who wrote the book on the Bay of Pigs. And my father said to him, did your guys do this? So that was his first instinct. And then, you know, he then didn't talk about it until a week before his election. He refused to talk about it until a week before his election. He refused to talk about it.
Starting point is 01:59:26 But you would ask about, and my family is still that way. They're still in shock. There's still PTSD in my family from what I, and I mean, we're all there watching my dad die. A bunch of us kids were there and watching me in Los Angeles that night. I was with my dad when he died. And it's, you know, it just is too much, and they don't want to go into it. So you asked about Eugene Thinsizer.
Starting point is 01:59:59 I got in contact with him, And this was like three years ago. And I said, will you talk to me? He's in the Philippines. And I said, and he said, he said that through an intermediary, he said that he would. But I had to pay him $10,000. Mother fucker. I said, okay, I'll do that. And I want to
Starting point is 02:00:26 interview you on video. And he said for $10,000. And I was getting ready to leave and they told me now it's $15,000. And then basically the day before I was going to the airport
Starting point is 02:00:41 he said, no, it's $25,000. So then I said, okay, this is... A setup. Yeah. Yeah, he's going to spin you along. Yeah. So then he died about a year ago. Of?
Starting point is 02:00:55 Who knows? It's very hard to find out. And he's in the Philippines. Wow. And he fled to the Philippines immediately after? Not immediately. You know, he's kind of got an interesting background besides being a, you know, having this high intelligence classification at a series of military,
Starting point is 02:01:15 of the top military contractors. And if you're, you know, those military contractors, a lot of people who work for them are CIA. So you have to sign, they're either CIA assets or agents. You have to sign, in order to work there, in order to get the classification, you have to sign a state secrecy agreement, which makes you basically a lifetime CIA asset. And so, and he identified himself. There's a writer called Lisa Pease who really did a deep dive into him. And at one point he identified himself as a CIA agent, and that's in her book.
Starting point is 02:01:53 And so I, he also was extremely right wing. right wing and he independent of any intelligence connections that he had he hated my father because he thought if my father was elected president he was going to put the blacks in charge of our country
Starting point is 02:02:16 was that his plan yeah that was that was I could finally come clean about that I like that guy between you and me it's just remarkable man wow
Starting point is 02:02:37 it's just yeah I mean it's a lot to digest we need to have the we need to have the three day deep dive on your uncle. Well, you read that book. Yeah, I'm going to check it out.
Starting point is 02:02:49 That's a really good book. And then the other one by Talbot you said? By David Talbot. David Talbot wrote two fantastic books, one about my father and uncle and the CIA, but the one that you should read is Devil's Chessboard, at least first, and that is about just this biography of Dulles.
Starting point is 02:03:07 And if you want to talk about a supervillain like Luther, that's the guy. When you met with Sirhan in prison, this is the man that allegedly killed your father. That's what the record says. Oh, he was definitely involved in the ambush. Did you feel he was guilty when you met him? Did you feel like he was remorseful? What did you feel like his energy was? Well, first of all, he's a very gentle soul.
Starting point is 02:03:41 He was very humble and he cried and he also said he cried and he held both my hands and put my hands to his forehead and said thank you for coming here every time I saw your mom on TV with all of you guys it would make me cry.
Starting point is 02:04:06 So, you know, he was, it was an interesting conversation. You know, he had a fascination. He came from Palestine. Incidentally, you know, when the Murmuff dad was killed, he was facing the death penalty. And my family all signed a letter to Judge Walker saying, please don't give him the death penalty. And then I think three years later, my brother Joe was hijacked. He was on a plane coming back from Pakistan and Palestinians
Starting point is 02:04:48 Black September group hijacked the plane and they tried to land in Amman and Jordan and King Hussein wouldn't let them and so then they landed in the desert in Yemen
Starting point is 02:05:04 and they demanded the release of Saran initially and then they blew up the plane and burned it but they ultimately released my brother but you know I you know I feel like
Starting point is 02:05:23 people deserve justice no matter who they are. Yeah. And, you know, Sirhan, you know, I'm curious about what happened with my dad. And, you know, Sirhan was just, he was interesting. It was very, very interesting. And, you know, Sirhan was just, he was interesting. It was very, very interesting. He, you know, he came over here as a refugee and really had nothing.
Starting point is 02:05:53 But he was, he loved the horses from when he was little. He never was on a horse. The only time he was on a horse was that time they put him on a horse. But he became a horse walker at this track. But you weren't mad? Because, like, you know he was involved in the plot. You know, I... I... I try to forgive people.
Starting point is 02:06:17 And I... You know, Sir Anne, for a couple of reasons, Sir Anne was in jail for 60 years. I don't think anger or resentments are a good thing. I think that they're corrosive to your soul. And I think, you know, having anger or resentment, carrying that around against another human being is like swallowing poison and hoping someone else will die. And you're letting other people live in your head rent-free,
Starting point is 02:06:47 and you're giving them power over your life. So, you know, the best way to escape from, you know, that kind of corrosive force is to pray for people and forgive them. And so I don't, yeah, I don't carry resentments or anger toward him. But also I don't believe that his bullets killed my dad. Yeah. And I think if my dad were around, my dad really, you know,
Starting point is 02:07:16 the arc of his whole career was toward justice. And, you know, there's a little brown guy in jail who didn't get a proper trial for 60 years. And I think my father would at least, you know, would not like that. Oh, wow. Best book on your granddad? Well, I think the book I wrote, which is American Values, is the best thing to read about my grandpa. And there's a chapter on him in there that answers a lot of these questions. I wrote, which is American values, is the best thing to read about my grandpa.
Starting point is 02:07:49 And there's a chapter on him in there that answers a lot of these questions. And it's easier to read, and it's the first chapter in the book. The major work that's been done on my grandfather that is kind of the definitive, if you want to read a big research. It's called The Patriarch. Yeah, I have. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 02:08:13 And do you think that's fair? Sorry, do you think it's a fair take on him? I think it's pretty fair. I don't like it completely, but it does exonerate him from being a bootlegger. Got you. Okay. He didn't know, what's his name, David, the guy who wrote the book. He's written a few of these. Yeah.
Starting point is 02:08:31 He didn't, you know, he was not as, I think he missed a lot, a big part of the story because he was not aware of the bad feelings, you know, between my family and the CIA. He knew the incidences, but he didn't know what was happening in the agency. Yeah. Wow. So through everything that you've been through, all the trauma that you faced as a kid experiencing all these horrible events, you still have a desire to serve the American people and to wake up every day, whether it's through environmentalism, whether it's through, you know, politics. Do you ever get the feeling of just giving up? Do you ever just say, you know what?
Starting point is 02:09:11 Fuck all this. I'm not dealing with this. What all these people say, I'm smeared by the media. Just go to hell with all of it. Do you ever feel that? No, I don't. Because, you know, what are we here for, right? I mean, it's not just to make a big pile for ourselves
Starting point is 02:09:26 and whoever dies with the most stuff wins. You know, there's got to be a, you know, there's got to be a reason. I think anything that is worthwhile is you have to struggle for. I mean, I look back, I read a lot of history and everybody that I've admired throughout human history whether it's you know
Starting point is 02:09:48 Alexander the Great to Magellan to you know they've all been through a struggle where they were disavowed by everybody that they knew and where they had to kind of walk through a valley of death
Starting point is 02:10:01 where they were completely alone and you know that is one of the things that made their lives worthwhile. All the incoming flack that I get, you know, I try to look at that as a gift and say, you know, the harder this is, you know, the more important it is. And if you look at it that way, you can change your attitude towards it. You don't ever feel oppressed by it. I think that the most paralyzing thing that people,
Starting point is 02:10:31 that really disables a lot of people is a sense of victimization and self-pity. And that, you know, when I got sober 40 years ago, but at one point I said, I heard myself complaining about something, and I thought, you know, that's kind of a natural reaction for me that if somebody asks me, how are you doing, that I'll share some bad thing that happened to me recently or something. So I said, I'm going to experiment with just not complaining about anything for Lent. And it was right at the beginning of Ash Wednesday. I went for 40 days, and I just didn't complain.
Starting point is 02:11:15 So if somebody asked me, how are you doing? I always say, great. And then what I would do, because I don't want to lie, I'd say, well, why am I feeling great? I'm feeling great because I'm an American at a time in history when most of the people in this country live like gods compared to every other person in history. I live at a time when there's antibiotics.
Starting point is 02:11:36 I'd be dead if it weren't for antibiotics. I can get orange juice whenever I want it. I can get, you know, there's glass in front of me when I drive so the bugs don't come in my eyes. And I think of all these like little things that, okay, I'm grateful for it. And then I make that list and I feel differently about life. I'm processing life differently, processing experience differently in a way that lifts my mood and makes me feel grateful. Gratitude ultimately is a choice, you know. So at the end of 40 days, I just said, this is really working for me. And so since then, I've never complained about anything in my life, nothing.
Starting point is 02:12:18 And I have my son, Connor, when I was about, when he was, I don't know, he was like 14 years old, and he said to me, Dad, how come I've never heard you complain about anything? And I said to him, it's actually not a natal impulse for me. My out-of-hispy impulse is to complain about a lot of stuff. And I told him the story that I, you know, that I just made a decision and that it really worked out for me.
Starting point is 02:12:50 And after that, I never heard him complain in his whole life. And he's went through a lot of, like, nightmare stuff. But everybody loves him because he just has a buoyant attitude and never complains about anything. So I recommend it. I think it's a really good way to live your life and to forgive people who wrong you.
Starting point is 02:13:16 And I've had people do things where I could walk around with justified anger. I have things that I could justify if I wanted to be, if I let myself be angry. You're giving other people control of your mind and, you know, over your
Starting point is 02:13:34 day. So when it comes to complaints, it's about personal situations. Like, obviously, you have gripes with the American system, and you have gripes with government, and you feel comfortable pushing back against those things. Oh, yeah. I'm going to criticize if I say something wrong.
Starting point is 02:13:49 Yeah. I'm not going to say, look what they're doing to me. You know, they're treating me unfairly. It's not about you. It's about something bigger than yourself. Yeah. Listen, we've been informed that you have a busy day. Obviously, you're running for president.
Starting point is 02:14:01 You've got other things to do than hang out with us and tell us awesome stories. But I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been absolutely amazing. Thank you, guys. Yeah, it's just really cool. Just great to hear your perspective on all these things. And it's great to hear. Yeah, I wish you the best of luck, man. I really do wish you the best of luck. It's cool. This is really awesome. Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen in this election. I don't even know if Biden's running. I don't know what's going on. Genuinely, the two people, you have Trump and you have Biden, right? I don't know if Biden makes it to the election and I don't know if they'll allow Trump to do it.
Starting point is 02:14:32 So you might be president by default. That's my only issue with you. I wish you were like 95 years old. Yeah, we need you to be a little older. I wish you were a little older. That's kinda what I look for in a president, 100 years old. Anyway, so please tell them, I know that they can go to kennedy old. Anyway, so please tell them. I know that they can go to Kennedy24.com if they want to support your campaign, if they want to learn more about you. Obviously, you've got tons of books that we've mentioned here. We'll put some links in. But is there anything else that you want to tell the people?
Starting point is 02:14:57 Kennedy24.com, we have to get on. We have to get almost a million signatures to get on the ballot in 50 states. So whether you are going to vote for me or not, it's good for democracy to have a choice. I agree. I'm going to put my signature on there today. That's when you drop in your sneakers. Oh, yeah. Trump got his sneakers. You need a nice boat shoe, a Kennedy boat shoe. A Kennedy boat shoe would be flames.
Starting point is 02:15:18 Yeah, top sider, dude. Let's go. I need to get on that. Guys, thank you so much, man. That's RFK Jr.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.