Ask Dr. Drew - The Real RFK Jr: Biographer Dick Russell Discusses The 2024 Presidential Candidate w/ Dr. Kelly Victory – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 233

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

For decades, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been portrayed by the press as the unhinged conspiracy theorist king of anti-vaxxers. But today, Kennedy is a prominent contender in the 2024 Presidential election – and as his voice cuts through the corporate media curtain, millions are discovering that their judgements of RFK were influenced by multi-billion dollar companies fighting desperately to silence him. Using exclusive source material and access to Kennedy’s personal journals, author Dick Russell reveals “The Real RFK Jr.” and tells the real story that inspired Kennedy’s campaign. Read “The Real RFK Jr.: Trials of a Truth Warrior” at Amazon.com Dick Russell (https://dickrussell.org) is an investigative journalist and the eclectic author of fifteen books, including three New York Times bestsellers coauthored with Jesse Ventura and Eye of the Whale, named a Best Book of the Year in 2001 by three major newspapers. His book The Man Who Knew Too Much, probing the forces behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, has been hailed as a “masterpiece of historical reconstruction.” 「 SPONSORED BY 」 Find out more about the companies that make this show possible and get special discounts on amazing products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • PRIMAL LIFE - Dr. Drew recommends Primal Life's 100% natural dental products to improve your mouth. Get a sparkling smile by using natural teeth whitener without harsh chemicals. For a limited time, get 60% off at https://drdrew.com/primal • PALEOVALLEY - "Paleovalley has a wide variety of extraordinary products that are both healthful and delicious,” says Dr. Drew. "I am a huge fan of this brand and know you'll love it too!” Get 15% off your first order at https://drdrew.com/paleovalley • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew • BIRCH GOLD - Don’t let your savings lose value. You can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered retirement account, and Birch Gold will help you do it. Claim your free, no obligation info kit from Birch Gold at https://birchgold.com/drew • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get an extra discount with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 ABOUT the SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 WITH DR. KELLY VICTORY 」 Dr. Kelly Victory MD is a board-certified trauma and emergency specialist with over 30 years of clinical experience. She served as CMO for Whole Health Management, delivering on-site healthcare services for Fortune 500 companies. She holds a BS from Duke University and her MD from the University of North Carolina. Follow her at https://earlycovidcare.org and https://twitter.com/DrKellyVictory. 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 For over 30 years, Dr. Drew has answered questions and offered guidance to millions through popular shows like Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Dr. Drew On Call (HLN), Teen Mom OG (MTV), and the iconic radio show Loveline. Now, Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio. Watch all of Dr. Drew's latest shows at https://drdrew.tv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome, everyone. We are having an interesting show today. The author is Dick Russell. He has written a book called The Real RFK Jr., Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And he, you know, I think everyone understands that Mr. Kennedy has been sort of marginalized for quite some time, but is being taken rather seriously right now in the face of some of the revelations in the post-COVID world that we live in right now. And Dick Russell uses source documents, Kennedy's personal journals, to write a story about who this man is, and we're interested in finding out more. When I get back after this brief break, this brief interlude, I will tell you about the other books that Mr. Russell has written. But right now, let's get to it. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction,

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slash Drew. Use the code Drew for an extra discount and free priority shipping. Again, that is Genucel.com slash Drew. G-E-N-U-C-E-L.com slash D-R-E-W. All right, as I said, we are very excited about our guest today, Dick Russell. He's written this book, The Real RFK Jr. Dick Russell is an investigative journalist. He's an author of 15 books, including three New York Times bestsellers. He co-authored a book with Jesse Ventura, Book of the Year, Eye of the

Whale in 2001. His book, The Man Who Knew Too Much, probes the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. So it's interesting that the Kennedys have been in his crosshairs more than once. And of course, it is Wednesday, so Dr. Kelly Victory is here.

She has read his book carefully, and she's got a head of steam on her. So we'll get her in here in just a couple minutes. But first, let me welcome Dick Russell. Welcome, Dick. Thanks so much. Good to be with you today. So, you know, the usual questions to get things going. How did you get interested in RFK?

And he's somebody that has been marginalized, even by his own family. I was doing a public event with Patrick Kennedy recently, and he took a shot at him. I thought, wow, even his own family has marginalized him. And I had a conversation with him about a month ago on this show where we didn't mention vaccines in an hour and almost an hour and a half conversation. I didn't need to talk about vaccines. He has tons of other really interesting ideas and experiences he's been through. And I found that more interesting than any of these. I think the vaccine thing that people think he's gotten off the rail with may be best left somewhere else while he runs for president. But why did you go for him and what did you learn?

Yeah, well, you know, I've known Bobby for more than 20 years. We met back in 1998 when I was working on a book called Eye of the Whale, which was about the California gray whales, and I eventually traced their migration all the way from Mexico's Baja, California, all the way to Russia. But at the time, he was very involved as an environmental attorney in fighting to save this salt works, well, this lagoon in Mexico, Baja California, where the gray whales came to give birth every year from this industrial salt works that would have altered their habitat, you know, forever. And so I was working on a book about it. I interviewed him

at his home in New York. We started to get to know each other. We discovered we had common interests in not just whales, but in fishing and the environment. And so I interviewed him again for a book I did on fighting to save a fish about the Atlantic striped bass. And then we just started working together on different things through the years. Did a piece about the 2004 election, which we'd uncovered was basically stolen by these votes being transferred out of Ohio to a place in the south by computer. Anyway, and then later he wrote the introduction to two of my two volumes of books that I did about climate change. And then the reason I decided to write the biography was neither his idea nor mine, but it came from the publisher and people who'd gone to Skyhorse Publishing and said,

you know, shouldn't there be a real book about Bobby and his many accomplishments in the environmental world? Because, you know, he was just being torn apart by the big media during the pandemic and unjustifiably so. I mean, he was being accused of all kinds of things. He was labeled an anti-vaxxer and a disinformation expert and a conspiracy theorist. And I knew none of that was true, and that I'd been keeping up with what he'd been doing and writing about and putting out there about the pandemic and the rush to market of the vaccines

and the squelching of therapeutic alternatives like ivermectin, which was very effective, by the way, against COVID. But anyway, yeah, he said, I'm not in a vaccine. I want safe vaccines that have been adequately safety tested. And the fact was that they weren't being safety tested in that way, that they were never tested against a placebo, and the pharma companies had liability from, there was no accountability because they'd been exempt

from having to pay fines for vaccine injury. So anyway, I decided then that I would write something that I hoped would portray his entire life and everything he'd been through in a real manner and show how much he'd accomplished in those 40 years as an environmental lawyer and what he was still trying to do and tell the behind the scenes story really of why he got into the public health arena and what he was trying to get across. So that's in a nutshell how the book came to be.

Were there any surprises when you really got in deep uh you know sort of you know it's again you were sort of you were co-workers on these environmental books you were then friends and now he's the object of scrutiny for your investigative journalism i'm guessing you learned things yeah i, I did. And, you know, one thing I learned was what a, for lack of a better word, spiritual guy he was in the sense of, you know, I'm not saying conventionally religious or any of that. He is a devout Catholic. But, you know, what he'd been through in his life when he was young,

you can imagine after the trauma of both his uncle and his father being assassinated, he was 15 when Robert Kennedy was killed. And, you know, he went through really about 20 years of really tough stuff and coming of age at a time when he became an addict. He was a very functional addict. But obviously, you know, he wasn't going to go on to be who he could be if that remained the case. And so, you know, we explored, going to go on to be who he could be if that remained the case. And so, you know, we explored and he was willing to talk about it.

You know, we sat down many times and he wanted the truth about the fact that this is where he come from. And that, you know, that he he he'd had to overcome a lot and he was still part of Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, and in that capacity had helped literally hundreds of people get sober as he had, including some of his family members. So he didn't want to hide that and that was one thing. Real sober people, truly sober people in the program are very happy to witness on behalf of the program are very happy to witness on behalf of the program. Listen, first of all, you can't get sober from those kinds of severe illnesses,

that particular illness, addiction, without some sort of spiritual component. And it's different for different people, but you have to have a spiritual sort of thing. And the other thing is, you know, what most addicts will tell you is that helping other addicts actually keeps them sober so today I stayed sober by helping somebody else and and I have had enough interaction with him to know that

he's real deal sobriety and have been there for a long time and of course would not have you know I've seen the miracle of sobriety many many times he would not be functioning at the level he did without anything like a full, complete recovery from that illness, which he is a great example of. So good. That's good. Hopefully the program will, he'll attract people to the program and people understand you can be severely ill and then have a completely flourishing life afterwards, which is really why I got into the field when I was running an addiction program, because I saw these people go from dying to flourishing, and that was such a fascinating thing.

Nothing else in medicine does that, nothing. And so there it was. So other surprises, were there anything about his positions? I mean, for instance, one of the things that people, I think, on the left have forgotten about is his environmental record. He's an environmental attorney and has been for many years and seems to be getting no traction around that record. Do you bring that? I'm sure you must bring that out in this in this document. Oh, yeah, there's many chapters about this, you know,

starting with his because when he when he got sober, he went to work for the Hudson Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council and as a professor at Pace University in New York in environmental law. And, you know, he had amazing success on the Hudson, working with commercial fishermen, you know, whose livelihoods had been wiped out, really, at that point in time by devastating effects of pollution. And mounting these very successful lawsuits, enlisting his students at the university. You got permission for them to actually try some of these cases. And they did an amazing job, too, because he was a hell of a teacher.

And so that was where it started for him. And then, you know, he began to take on other waterways issues with great success. He went into North Carolina, for example, and where this huge conglomerate, Smithfield Foods, was dumping their hog waste into the rivers and waterways and, you know, again, wiping out people's livelihoods. And there he worked with farmers and he worked with fishermen again to, you know, get some stronger regulations in and took on Smithfield Foods in a way that he also took on other big corporations. He was up against Exxon Mobil and later Monsanto, you know, and in the Monsanto

case, which was fairly recent. I mean, he'd already gotten into the public health stuff, but you know, he was one of the leading lawyers in a case where Monsanto, which had been acquired by Bayer, was being sued in a big class action for poisoning these people who'd gone out there and sprayed Roundup, which has this chemical called glyphosate in it that was causing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, I mean, an epidemic of it. And so for this first guy that they defended, or as a plaintiff, Dwayne Lee Johnson, an African-American guy who had been severely, you know, he's a handsome guy. Suddenly, you know, his whole life had been completely destroyed by using this chemical. And they won almost a $2 billion settlement for him and took on some other cases, too, against Monsanto.

So, you know, I mean, his track record was amazing, and he had, I think, some 500 successful lawsuits. So that's an accomplishment that I chronicle, you know, throughout the book, including his work on Indian reservations and in Latin America. I want to get Dr. Victory in here as quick as possible, but my one question before I do so is, do you have any thoughts about how you think this presidential campaign is going to go for him? I know you don't have a crystal ball, but I'm just wondering how you, I've heard Cheryl Hines speak and she's reticent and worried. I'm not sure she's fall in for this, but she loves seeing him thrive in it. He seems to be very invested in this process. How do you imagine it's going to go for him?

You know, I think actually he's got a decent shot. The reason I say that is because already, I mean, it's been, you know, just two months really since he made his public announcement in Boston and almost out of the, out of the box, you know, his favorability rating, well, first of all, his poll rating was like 20% of the Democrats thought that he would be a good candidate and would like to vote for him. And then just a week or so ago, the poll was taken about favorability, and he comes out ahead of both Biden and Trump in that poll. And I think the reason is that he can appeal to all kinds of people you know he's he's a lifelong democrat and staying as a democrat but he's trying to revive

the democratic party you know to toward the values that his uncle and his father espoused in the 1960s which is uh you know a party that really reaches across party lines hey works with all kinds of folks he's learned how to do that over the years. He's really good at it. And, you know, he's a fighter for the people. And to bring back what he calls, rightfully so, a dying middle class and do something about this, you know, merger of corporate and state power that's destroying democracy in this country.

Right. I find it interesting that two of the significant candidates, he, RFK Jr., and Vivek Ramaswamy, have both zeroed in on this phenomenon that seems to be such a problem in the world today. So here's what I want to do. I want to dispense with some, we're going to get some business out of the way right away, and I want to bring Dr. Kelly Victory in here so we can get on with this conversation. So please stand by. We'll be right back. I suspect you've seen Susan and I gushing over Paleo Valley products. We love the taste and how well they fit into a paleo-based nutrition regimen. They're delicious and we use them for travel all the time. But there's more. We are huge fans as well of Paleo Valley's grass-fed bone broth protein. It comes in three flavors, unflavored, vanilla, and chocolate.

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on the entire population. This is uncharted territory, Drew. Dr. Kelly Victory, we welcome Dick Russell. Hey, Dick, thanks so much for joining us. I've really, really been looking forward to this conversation since we scheduled it. So appreciative. And folks, if I'm looking a little bleary-eyed today, it's because I stayed up way past my bedside, bedtime, finishing the last pages of your book. Brilliantly done. Kudos to you for this really in-depth analysis or recounting, if you will, of Bobby Kennedy's life. I've known Bobby for a long time too, since well, well before

the COVID pandemic. And since he announced for the presidency, running for presidency, I've been referring to him as the anti-corruption candidate. And I believe that's a reasonable way to call him, but it's so much more than that. Truly, reading the book was very helpful for me because when I met Bobby, I knew him primarily as an environmentalist. And he and I have not always agreed on everything, but he has a remarkably open mind. But the book really gets into it. I started to see him through a different light, not as a vaccine, you know, truth teller, or just as an anti-corruption candidate, but really as an unbelievable champion for the underdog. He has a life, as his life, he has always, and that's where I'd like to start this discussion.

He has always championed for the underdog, however you choose to define that, whether it's Native Americans, inner city blacks, underprivileged communities, the vaccine injured, fish and birds and wildlife that are under attack. He somehow sets a laser focus on that thing, that entity that is either underprivileged or under the onslaught of a more powerful force. And he fights for that underdog. So I don't know if you had that same approach, but that's certainly in reading the entire book, that's what I was left with. I said, here's somebody who will always look out for the person and speak for those who don't have a voice. Yeah. I think that's really true. And I think it was ingrained in him, you know, from his childhood, because, of course, his father used to have these amazing dinner table

conversations. He'd come back from, you know, a poor town in Mississippi where people were, you know, the kids were all starving. And, you know, he talked to his own kids about this. And he would say, hey, you know, when you grow up, I want you to help these people. He took Bobby and his siblings too to Native American reservations like on Pine Ridge and introduced them to the people who were remarkable people in their own right, but, you know, just didn't have anything. And then, you know, when he went through that teenage period of real anguish and depression and, you know, addiction, You know, he took off for a summer. He was like 15 years old and he just hitchhiked. He disappeared. He didn't want to be a Kennedy anymore. You know, he was out there on the West Coast riding freight trains and living with hobos

and, you know, sharing their meals. And around that same time, a little bit later after that, he started going to Latin America. And he had this amazing mentor named Lem Billings, who had been a very, very close friend of his father when JFK was president, and all the way back to they were in high school together at Choate. And Lem knew that Bobby was suffering and also knew kind of intrinsically who he was, that he carried this, I don't know, call it the Kennedy spirit, I guess, you know, that really had an important role to play in the future. So he took Bobby to Latin America and had him live on this ranch he had there in Colombia, you know, for several

summers. And Bobby kept going back. He kept being drawn to the people who really had nothing in those countries. And then, you know, later he could apply that when he became an environmental lawyer to the people of Ecuador who were fighting in the early 1990s against this oil development that was, again, killing people in these small villages. So he was both born to it and, you know, given those opportunities that opened to him, he would respond because he was somebody who'd been through a lot himself and he could relate, he could identify with people who came from those circumstances. No, and I think you do a great job of laying that out in the book, that it's really not just his anger at the assaults against the environment,

but as much, if not more, the impact on the individuals, on the people, the impact on the Native Americans. And he went to, and I'd like you to talk a little bit, he actually spent time, I think a month in jail, in prison on Vieques, Puerto Rico for an act of civil disobedience. And that was relatively recently. I think I had met him around that time. 2001. That he had... 2001. Yeah, I had just met him when he was spent a month in prison there. Talk a little bit about that, because I think it's a story that many people don't know about him. Yeah, it's quite a story.

I mean, he tried, he became aware that the U.S. Navy was bombing this island, this little island in Puerto Rico called Vieques, and had been doing it for years as a practiced target bombing range. And it was really severely impacting the health of the people. And they'd done everything they could to try to, you know, get it stopped by legal means. Bobby tried, went to President Clinton at the time, who he knew, and tried to get him to take action, and he didn't. So finally, he felt like, you know, what else can I do except I'm going to put my money where my mouth is, basically. We can't achieve this through legal grounds, although it's legal to do a civil disobedience. So he went there, and he brought a couple of friends with him, Edward James Olmos, the actor, and Dennis Rivera, who was a

union leader in New York who'd been instrumental in helping get this landmark watershed agreement accomplished in New York State along with Bobby. And they went out on the water and then they landed on the island at a time when the bombing was just about to start for that day. And they were hiding for a while and then ended up getting themselves arrested. And, of course, they were recognized. I mean, you know, and then they were, I mean, but they were just regular prisoners. You know, they were strip searched and all this. In fact, there's a very funny story about almost turning to Bobby during the course of that.

Because he hadn't counted on that happening to him, right? A major strip search by the police. And he just looked at him. He said, lose my number. So, you know, was born, actually. And he had some visitors. And I think eventually when the trial happened, it was Mario Cuomo who had been the governor of New York and was a family friend. And his son was at the time had been married to Bobby's sister.

And he came and defended Bobby there. And, you know, but Bobby, you know, said he spoke about it in a fascinating way because he was saying, you know, actually it was a time he could, he didn't have to be on the phone. He couldn't be doing his regular life. And he was just hanging out, you know, with these prisoners and learning about their lives. And he spoke good Spanish. So it was kind of a turning point for him in that way and an experience that he actually came to value greatly. And they won. I think one of the things I think that you – go ahead.

I'm just going to finish the story, which is not right. The Navy finished bombing. Yeah, go ahead. They didn't bomb. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So go ahead and finish that. How did that end up?

Yeah. So anyway, what happened was they were feeling the pressure and it was because of the people like Bobby and Olmos and, you know, putting themselves out there, getting themselves arrested. There was enough public attention paid to this that finally the Navy just stopped. And the Bush administration wanted to continue it, and it took a couple of years, but they ended what they were doing to the people there. One of the things I think that you did a remarkable job of doing in the book, Dick, and I mean this sincerely, is that most people

think of Bobby Kennedy, and perhaps rightly so, as someone of privilege. He certainly comes from a very well-known family, a wealthy family. He's had the best of everything in terms of education and opportunities, but he is incredibly humble and he never uses or relies on his privilege to get out of things. He has had incredible adversity, which he has overcome. And I think that it really is perhaps because he has such a strong foundation, a foundation that was given to him by his father, Robert Kennedy, and also by just his family upbringing. But you do a great job in the book. It relies heavily on quotes from, and Bobby and I share this, a love of the classics, not only the Greek classics, but other great authors. And you rely heavily in the book on

quotes from Upton Sinclair and Langston Hughes and Albert Camus and lots of other terrific authors. And you rely heavily in the book on quotes from Upton Sinclair and Langston Hughes and Albert Camus and lots of other terrific authors. And I think that it is Bobby's foundation. So many people are lacking foundation, where we came from, what this country was built upon. Talk a little bit about that and your experience with him and in writing this book, his understanding of the foundation of this country, of our values, of our civil rights, and how that literature. He grew up that way. And he loves American history and all history. And he has really a strong knowledge of it. I mean, he's always in his speeches today, you know, citing the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the great men we had, the founding fathers. I mean, he carries that. And he was, of course, educated about it, you know, to some degree when he when he was a

kid but I mean it's he has a remarkable memory so yeah he could stay stood there for two hours during his announcement speech in Boston and and devoted a lot of that to to American history and and you know and and using that as an example of course his own family too I mean think of what he went through when he was a kid right he was uh he was like uh 10 years old um nine i think when the cuban missile crisis happened that his his father and his uncle if they hadn't intervened against the the military guys and the joint chiefs of staff who wanted to take us into a nuclear war with cuba we wouldn't be sitting here talking today i mean you know the world would world would have ended as we know it. And so, you know, he applies that. I mean, he gave the speech just yesterday, actually, that I saw about foreign policy. And he spent a lot of it talking about those years

and what his, he said, talked about how his uncle, JFK, had said that what he wanted on his tombstone when asked about that, one day, said he kept the peace. And, you know, had said that what he wanted on his tombstone when asked about that one day, said he kept the peace. And you know, he did. And the speech was given yesterday by Bobby on the 60th anniversary of his uncle's speech to outlaw, get rid of nuclear testing in the atmosphere, which stopped in 1963, that there was a test ban treaty. And he equated it to what's going on today with the Ukraine situation. And in the face of, I should, you know, this is a very interesting thing that happened to Bobby because his oldest son, Connor, they had these very similar discussions at the dinner table at his house that he had when he was

a kid. And his father had encouraged and he encouraged, you know, let's duke it out. Let's argue about the issues of the day if we don't see them the same way and let's debate it. And so his son, Connor, probably some people have heard this, ended up, you know, secretly without telling his father, going off to Ukraine and fighting, you you know for several months in the Ukrainian army because he believed that that's what was necessary and his Bobby doesn't see it that way he sees it like we've got a you know that the he's not a fan of Putin by any means but at the same time he feels like you know we betrayed a promise to Russia, actually, some years back to not put NATO forces on their border. And so in

that sense, it's not justified, but it is somewhat understandable that Putin did what he did. So anyway, but he's, you know, he wrestles with these kind of personal things as well. I mean, when his son came back, I talked to Connor about it, you know, they're great kids. He's got, he's got six kids, and I know them all. I've interviewed them for the book. And Connor, you know, said that there were times over there that he didn't know if he'd make it back. But he said, you know, I had to do it because I believed that. And he said he made such great friends among the people.

And when he got back, he called his dad and told him where he'd been probably just a little bit suspected it because he was seeing credit card bills from not ukraine but before that a good hint but i i have a couple questions about the um the kennedy the kennedy sort of ethos and and what you learned about that i noticed in the the Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary, he talked about how amazing it was to go visit Maria at the family compound in Hyannis, because what went on there were these elaborate, lengthy debates and discussions about helping, being useful in a way. And I'm guessing a lot of it was to support the underdog my question really is it feels like that runs all through the kennedy family's sort of uh heritage and history did that

of all things come from joe kennedy who was quite a scoundrel and a had all kinds of other sort of nefarious uh history behind him where did this come in? And do you agree? And is it changing over time? Or is it really this one stable, consistent attitude that they all maintain? No, I think it's changed over time. I mean, Joe Kennedy had his own influence on his kids, right? I mean, they used to have these same kind of dinner table conversations. And, you know, they talked about World War Two and fascism and things that were really important during those times but the thing that was amazing to me and i've studied kennedy family before i ever knew bobby because i did this big book about the assassination of his uncle which interestingly i never even talked to him about i never even brought up for the first 10

years of our relationship i i didn't feel comfortable doing it. Our relationship was around the environment. I knew that it was a painful, terribly painful thing for him. Only later, when we can talk about that if you want, when he began to look into it himself and realized there was much more to it than the lone assassin narrative, did we really get into it. But, you know, he, what was I going to say here? The family. About the Kennedy ethos. Yeah.

Yeah. So when JFK was president, I think the thing that set him apart was that he was faced with the greatest crisis humanity had ever seen, actually, with the nuclear holocaust on the horizon. He was willing to change. He grew in office. He learned things. And so did his father, Bobby's father, about civil rights. They weren't people to whom this came naturally. I mean, people like Harry Belafonte and others in the Black community. And he took it, and he listened, and he learned, you know, and eventually became a champion, you know, who was stopping George Wallace from segregation in Alabama. And so on all these different fronts, they were willing to, they were open. They would listen and debate. And JFK, you know, ended up truly a peacemaker as a president.

He was going to pull us out of Vietnam before that conflict escalated when he was killed. And then his brother, Bobby, Robert Kennedy, who I saw speak, give his, I was a junior at the University of Kansas, and the second speech he gave after he declared for president, I watched him give. And wow, I mean, Kansas, corn-fed kids, right? I mean, everybody went crazy because he was telling the truth and fighting for them against an unjust war that he knew was wrong. And so he became, after his brother's death, a truly compassionate human being. You know, somebody who could, when Martin Luther King was killed in 68, you know, he could stand in front of that crowd of mostly African American people in Indianapolis while people were starting to riot all over the country. And just by what he said and what he'd been through, make sure that didn't

happen there. And people responded to him. So, you know, cause he gave a damn and they knew it. And so that to me was what set him apart. You know, I mean, I would even go so far as to say that Robert Kennedy was probably riddled with certain guilt because he felt like maybe the things that he'd been doing as Attorney General had contributed to what happened to his brother eventually. By saying that, I don't mean it was Cuba or the Russians, because it wasn't. It was a cabal in this country of right-wingers involved with the mafia and the Cuban exiles and the CIA. But, um, and I know that's for sure. And, uh, so anyway, uh, that's the way I kind of see the, the, the ethos. I, well, I will tell you also that Bobby, Bobby and I share a, uh, a common background also that

we both come from large Irish Catholic families. I have six brothers and sisters myself. And that Jesuit concept of a man for others, the Jesuit idea of fighting for the other underdog, for being selfless, I think that he truly embodies that. And I think that his father did. And I think that that is part of the Kennedy ethos, despite the fact that they are humans with human failings. They do have that Jesuit concept of a man for others. And I'm guessing that that really has been his guiding light. I do want to fast forward us for a minute here to more present times, to the COVID debacle. Bobby went, he ended up, although I didn't end up on the list, he ended up on the disinformation dozen list that was put out ultimately by the Biden administration as someone

who was a purveyor of mistruths regarding that. And that's after, not long after, he had been invited by the Trump administration to actually head up a vaccine safety program in the White House. He ended up, that ended up never coming to fruition. And I want you to talk about why it didn't. But the fact of the matter is he was invited by then President Trump to head up a vaccine safety program. And he goes from that to being on the list of the disinformation dozen by the next administration. Lead us through that. Talk about that. Yeah, well, it's an interesting story that I cover in the book. You know, I mean, he was someone who completely disagreed with Donald Trump on certainly environmental policy and many other things. But they did have that in common, that Trump was interested in

vaccine safety and knew that Bobby was on that topic. So he did bring him in and they talked. But what happened with that was, well, I don't call it unfortunate. I mean, this was 2016. And all of a sudden, the Trump administration didn't want to talk to him anymore. And this was quick, after they'd even asked him to go out and announce to the press that this is what he'd been asked to do. And Bobby later found out that right when that came to the fore, the inauguration was soon to happen of President Trump, and that Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, had given a million dollars

to the inaugural effort. And then Trump immediately appointed a couple of very powerful pharma people to top positions in his cabinet. So was he sincere in the beginning? I have no idea. But, you know, once Pfizer stepped in and did not want Bobby Kennedy in as a vaccine overseer, then that's what happened. And then, you know, later on, I mean, yeah, I mean, once COVID happened, of course, anything Trump did then, as far as the Democrats were concerned, had to be anathema, you know, I mean, we're just not going to believe anything. And it's just this monster in there trying to get us to believe hydrochloric might work. Well, in fact, in certain cases, it did work. But anyway, the Democrats definitely pushed censorship of Robert Kennedy and others' views. There was an organization that started that disinformation does and was called the Center for Countering Digital Hate. And it was one

of the people that ran it was a woman who had written a book back in 2004 about her life as a CIA agent. So it kind of makes you wonder, you know, how much input those people in power or the deep state, whatever it was, you know, we're having over that situation. So once again, we're saying, and I've certainly spent the last three and a half years of my life talking about this and trying to expose the corruption of big pharma. Bobby and I are in lockstep on these issues, but they were fundamentally able to sideline him from heading up that position in the Trump administration, and ultimately were certainly complicit in landing him on a list of persona non grata,

people who are not to be believed and people who are marginalized. And it's specifically, by the way, because they're terrified of him. And they are terrified of him for the same reason that Peter Hotez is terrified of him and many others are terrified of him for the same reason that Peter Hotez is terrified of him and many others are terrified of him because he knows the facts. He knows the data. He can cite it with nary a note. He knows the studies. He's talked to the people who've been harmed. And I think that they are legitimately scared of him and they will do anything they can. I certainly was egregiously censored during this entire fiasco along with Bobby. But I think that let's talk about that. Let's talk about the role of censorship. You do cover that quite a bit in the book.

And there's a wonderful quote that I will botch mercilessly because I didn't memorize it from Harry Truman, who was talking about the idea that when the government has said it's decided that it is willing to silence the opposition, then there's only one place to go from there. And that is for them to lead, to continue and to lead with fear until people are all living in a state of constant tyranny and fear. And that was something that Truman said. Bobby has been very vocal about the idea that the good guys, in his words, the good guys are never the ones who are trying to censor.

It's always nefarious and evil forces. Talk a little bit about, you know, his experience, Bobby's experience with regard to censorship and how it impacted his role in the vaccine debate. Well, yeah, you know, it had been going on for a long time, actually, long before the pandemic. Now, he wasn't somebody who went full throttle into talking about public health all the time. He still was an environmental attorney and taking on these cases, taking on Monsanto, as I mentioned. But when he started to get back into it, he started in 2005 with an article about thimerosal, mercury,

and vaccines that had a lot of scientific backup behind it, but it was the first time that the media really, the big, you know, legacy media, as it's now called, stepped in and tried to say this was bullshit. So anyway, what happened then was he got back into it around 2011 and published a book, edited a book in 2014 about Tamirisol. And then from about 2010 on, I mean, nobody would let him write an op-ed, do even a letter to the editor in defense of himself if he was labeled as a liar or crazy or whatever they increasingly said about him. And so once COVID began and he began addressing the fact that perhaps Dr. Fauci was not what he seemed and that he had, in fact,

as Bobby investigated it for the real Anthony Fauci, the book that sold a million copies, word of mouth, by the way, it was never reviewed by anybody, never listed as number one by the New York Times book review, even though it was the top best selling book in the country. So anyway, this was going on and he was learning things as he went along about Dr. Fauci's history with the AIDS epidemic and the AZT drug and what was happening with foster kids who were being subjected to these pretty cruel experiments during that era. And then later, of course, which now we finally are coming around to know a lot about, where did that virus come from? And Bobby was on that from the very beginning and looking at the fact that, OK, here was this lab in Wuhan, China, Institute of Virology, the place where the virus suddenly emerged. And here was Dr. Fauci's agency, the National Institutes of Health,

pouring money into that lab to do these very problematic gain-of-function, as they were called, experiments to create man-made, human-made viruses that are out of the coronavirus that were potentially lethal. So this was happening. And I'm not saying by this that Fauci, you know, intentionally released the virus or anything, but by the time that that happened, and now we're learning, just found out, you know,

it's just come out in the last couple of weeks, that the patient zero, as he's always been called, that person in China who was the first one to contract the virus, worked in that laboratory. That's pretty amazing when you think about it. And so, you know, Bobby was pointing out these things and pointing out the fact that perhaps there were legitimate therapeutic alternatives. We didn't have to do Operation Warp Speed, rushing these vaccines that were never tested adequately, that were brand new technology, mRNA, to market and give them to people, mandate them for people, especially when there were these

other possibilities. So, you know, that's kind of the backstory on what he was doing. And Kelly, you mentioned the use of fear, and you and I have talked about Matthias Desmet and the mass formation theory. I've come upon another physician from 50, 60 years ago, a Dutch physician named Joost Meerloo. I hope I'm pronouncing this right, or Meerloo. And he goes through very careful analysis. analysis he was a nazi um you know he was a prisoner in the nazi nazi germany era and went through a very careful analysis of what he saw how these things happen how it happened in germany china russia and the use of fear systematic use of fear uh and the the paternalistic uh in intervention uh in the name of doing what's good and right to help everybody without,

you know, this sort of weird, we know what's right for you, is sort of always there as the mechanism that leads to this craziness, and people just don't see where it's going. He felt actually the only way to fight back is exactly the kinds of conversations we're having to try to cut the strings of all this. But go ahead, Kelly. We're going to ask a question of David. Well, I was just going to say that all of these politicians get it, particularly we've seen recently people talking about draining the swamp. That's been sort of the byline for the past 10 years.

I honestly think that Bobby Kennedy is the only person who could potentially do it because he's the equal opportunity slayer. It's not just the CDC and the FDA he's after. It's the DOJ and the CIA and the IRS and all the rest of them. We had him on this show a couple of times. But in our last conversation, I was bringing up, you know, he talks a lot about agency capture, and I was talking about the big pharma capture of our storied medical journals, and the fact that we as physicians can no longer go to what I always considered the Oracle, you know, the Lancet, the BMJ, JAMA, whatever, to read the science. And he said, Drew asked him

specifically, you know, what would you do or what idea would you have to address that big issue? And I thought his answer was brilliant. He said that he would ask on day one in the Oval Office that he would invite in the editors of all of the journals, these scientific journals, and tell them that if they don't essentially get their act together and rid this corruption, this big pharma connection in their publications, that he would go after them with a RICO, using RICO laws. And I thought it was a brilliant, because it is racketeering. What big pharma is doing in any other, if any other industry did this, it would be called racketeering. And so I think that in my viewpoint, Bobby Kennedy is the one person who can right this ship because in his own words, the answer to our problems is to get our government to stop lying to us. Yeah, God.

He said that one thing that if we just – that is the one thing he would do, get them to tell the truth and it could really get things back. Just that could get things lined up a little bit. So start from there, Dick. In terms of the lying, if you talk about the thing that I would, you know, that is probably perhaps nearest and dearest to Bobby's heart that we've been lied to is about the truth behind the assassination of his uncle and his father. There's certainly lots of other things we've been lied to about. Do you think, is he ready, in your mind, you talk about it a little bit in the book, to really address or get into, delve into the reality about those atrocities, those particular assassinations? Oh, yeah, I think he will. Because, of course, it's the ultimate personal pain for him, but it's not just because of that. I mean, he knows that the CIA had a hand, elements of the CIA, in killing both his father and his uncle. And he's not going to let that go. And it's still dangerous, of course, but he's got really good

security, thank God. And, you know, he'll take that on and he'll do other things. You know, you were talking about the pharma and what he would do on day one. He also said the other day that he would do an executive order to force these big pharma companies not to advertise anymore on TV. Because, you know, if you think about it, yeah, it's a standard practice now, but it never happened. Before the mid-1980s, the Federal Communications Commission under Reagan passed a bill that would, or not didn't pass a bill, but put in a regulation that allowed the floodgates to open and allowed the pharmaceutical industry to advertise their products on TV. So now that's all you see on the TV news, as we know.

It's one of the most shocking things when people come in from other countries. That's one of the first things they will talk about is like, this is allowed? This is crazy. How do you allow this? It seems completely wrong. Only one other country does allow it. That's New Zealand. We never allowed it. And yet, you know, now it's, you know, of course the networks, network news isn't going to go after their bread and butter yet you know now it's you know of course the networks network news isn't going to go after their bread and butter you know i mean that would be unrealistic and to think that that was

going to be the case so you know it's it's all there's so much that's wrong capture capture capture capture that that is his theme and that is what we're talking about. The military is captured. The media is captured. The journals are captured. This is what he wants to unravel, and I just think that's such a smart place to apply the pressure. I agree. Well, because it's also bipartisan. It reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt and the way he kind of saw through some of the problems of the day. This is the problem of our time.

Dick, you agree with that? I do. And Teddy was the trust buster, right? And he broke up the big monopolies. And now we've got this, I mean, more monopolies than ever, right? I mean, and he also said he would call the social media companies in there, you know, and talk about AI and talk about censorship. And the fact that the government has basically been, you know, in league with Facebook,

for example, and Instagram is owned by Facebook and kicked him off the platform, right? He's back on it now. But, you know, he would really take these things on. And I think Americans know, I mean, people don't have faith in the government anymore. And we're so divided. So we just, you know, kibitz at each other, right, and accuse each other of living in demand a leader who will get out there and tell the truth and correct this situation where it's so out of balance. I mean, 500 new billionaires created during the pandemic and, you know, 300 million people or what, not 300 million, but 300,000 some people losing their food stamps. I mean, the inequities are so huge. And he would take that on. It's also in my, it's the consummate nonpartisan issue. You know, people should not believe that because they're watching Fox versus MSNBC or because they watch Newsmax rather than CNN, that they somehow are avoiding it. I think you quoted in the book, Dick, if I'm not wrong,

that Roger Ailes told Bobby that 70% of their revenues, is that correct? 70% of their ad revenues come from pharma on Fox News. So what do you think the Fox News folks are going to push? Again, they are owned by big pharma just as much as Rachel Maddow, you know, and Anderson Cooper are, uh, you know, this is, this is a, the consummate nonpartisan issue. And I think it's why, uh, or one of the reasons that, that Bobby has resonated so much with people. Um, it's not only because he always fights for the underdog, but because he has been able to reach both sides who have been impacted by the agency capture. And I think he really fits that in my viewpoint. Oh, yeah. And he's been doing it his entire career. He was working with people during the

watershed agreement days in New York, which went on for years and resulted in ultimately protection for the water supply for everybody in the state. But he ended up going to work there with a state legislator who was also a beef farmer in upstate New York who hated him, and so was sure Bobby Kennedy was just out to screw them and take their land away and divert the water from New York City. And they ended up getting, Bobby went to visit him on the farm and they got to know each other and they worked together to the point where this fellow who I interviewed, Dick Kuhn was his name, he cost him his job in the legislature, but he was still stuck in there with Bobby to fight for a better water supply for everybody. And this happened many, many times. It happened in the case of Bobby getting together. I read about a chapter about this in the book, too,

with this Republican legislator, not legislator, Republican businessman. And the two of them got together and who had worked for a company that did hydraulic fracturing, fracking for natural gas. And they got together and they got a band in New York State because it was, again, impacting the people in a detrimental way. So, you know, he's had a long life of experience doing this. As I said before, you know, visiting impoverished communities and Native American reservations and fighting for them and learning how to just work with people to get things done. And he's very pragmatic in that way. And he studies, he studies his ass off on the science. The Fauci book has 2,500 some footnotes. It's extremely well-documented. Yeah. The other thing, I heard him also give an answer. Let me just say

this, Drew. I can't remember what show it was on. I believe it might have been a Fox interview, but he was asked specifically, if you were to not win the presidency or even win the nomination and a Republican president were elected, would you serve a role in a Republican administration, say, as an example, as the head of HHS or something. And his answer was unbelievably thoughtful. And I thought selfless. He said, yes, he would have to consider that because he believes he has a lot to offer. And the idea that at a time when we are so divided, everybody's so blessed partisan, I thought it was really said a lot of, again, about his character, that he would absolutely openly consider, willingly consider an appointment in a Republican administration, even though he's still a Democrat, because he has something to offer. I hope that he ends up in the White House personally. But I just love that he was that selfless that he said, yes, he would have to consider that. Yeah. Well, that's, look, that's kind of what happened with Trump, right?

Except Trump backed away from it. He would have done it. He would have run the vaccine commission, you know, under the Republican presidency of Donald Trump, even though he was still a Democrat. So, you know, it's, it's another example of, Hey, he's, he's willing if he can make a difference and improve the safety standards of vaccines or whatever it is, he'll do it. It doesn't matter in terms of who's in power. It's for the people. Well, Dick, you've been very kind with your time. We're sort of rolling to a

stop here. Kelly, if you could stay on, we'll take a couple of calls. I see some people with their hands up there in the Twitter space. Sure space. I don't think there's specific. There it is. It's up. Get Dick's book. The real RFK Jr. If you're contemplating voting for RFK, this is a great way to help you make that decision.

Dick has spent a lot of time with him. He knows him well. And I think it's, you know, I, I obviously you're an enthusiast, but I'm imagining given your record as an investigational journalist, it's a dispassionate analysis. Yeah, it is. I've tried to be, you know, straightforward with the book and get across who

he is. And I'm not a cheerleader for him, but I do think he's the man for our time. And I hope that comes across in the book and a lot of different uh anecdotes that people will find interesting and thanks thanks so much for having me on and dick does the uh does does the book have a website or anything we can send people to if they want to sort of read a little more about it before they head over to amazon and get it well sky horse publishing has Publishing has a website, and then also Amazon has information about the book if people put in the name of it, they can get right to it. I have some things on my website, but my website's way out of date.

But I do have a website, Dick Russell.org, if people are interested in me. There it is. I see it down there. We have it in the right-hand corner. DickRussell.org uh it's the real rfk jr thanks dick appreciate you spending time with us thank you again thanks you betcha and kelly I've got a bunch of hands up here so I'm going to uh some people have had their hands up for quite some time so I'm going to get uh russ I guess up here and give him a question for you and um see what he's thinking about. And again, yes, you click on the microphone,

the lower left-hand corner, raise your hand to be requested. And once you're on, you unmute yourself. So Russ has just done. Go ahead, Russ. Russ. I'm not hearing. We're not hearing him. Is it my end? He's there.

I just heard him speak. Try again, Russ. Drew, can you hear me? There we are. We got you now. Go ahead. Okay. Hey.

Hey, I love your show, you and Adam. I've listened to you a long time. Love line. And my question is about R.F.K. Jr.'s kind of data, his use of data and kind of how he's systematically wrong and specifically about the autism link to vaccines and how his unwillingness to back down, that was wrong, I made a mistake.

And then he goes a step further and when you get into like Bayes' theorem on conditional probability, and he's talking about how, you know, people who are on antidepressants are also doing school shootings and committing suicide. I mean, that's Bayes' theorem right there. There's a conditional probability that if you're depressed,

you're more likely to be on antidepressants. And then if you're depressed, you're also going to be suicidal. So it just seems like he doesn't have the ability or he's not trusting people or hiring people who can accurately interpret data. So what I noticed about him was, and I'll let Kelly give her response, but when he and I disagreed on a topic, I realized immediately, oh, this is a lawyer building a case.

That's how his mind works. He builds a case, and his building of that case sometimes may not include Bayesian reasoning in terms of the conclude raising issues such as huh is this cause or is this incidental that people that do these shootings seem also to be on psychotropic medication now I obviously have been involved with so many of these cases I know damn well exactly how it goes down, that we start piling on medication when the patient becomes homicidal and suicidal, not before. This is all the time. This is sort of, again, back to your Bayesian reasoning. But I don't think, well, let Kelly ask, do you think he would back down if we were to show him evidence that sort of pulled him out of that thought process?

I do. In my experience with him, I do. So here's where I push back. I would say, I agree with you that there are times that he builds a case as an attorney, that he is very compelling in that way. And therefore, he doesn't think necessarily like a scientist. He sometimes misses or chooses to ignore confounding factors, for example. But I would submit to you that he is not, I am not so sure he is wrong about the connection any longer. And I would not have said this two years ago, three years ago, but I'm not sure that he's wrong about the connection between autism and mercury containing vaccines. If you look at the data and you look at

the connection, you look at the increase in autism at the time that the number of mercury-containing vaccines were being given to children, and if you understand that mercury is perhaps the greatest neurotoxin that we know of, greater than lead, for example, then it is certainly a reasonable thing to look at vaccines. And what's interesting is that the people on the other side of the argument, pharmaceutical companies, the FDA, the CDC, the pro-vaccine crowd, of which I was one for the better part of my career, we're all saying, oh, it's not that. We know it's not vaccines. We can't tell you what it is, but we're damn sure it's not the vaccines. Really, if you're damn sure it's not the vaccines, you better come up with some other credible ideas. What do you think is

causing this huge uptick in autism and other neurocognitive disorders. So I'm not sure that he's wrong on that. I have found. Are we defining these differently? I mean, going back to like, if you, I mean, Drew, you talk about this a lot, like in the forties, certain behavior, it had a different term. So are we, No, I know.

Are you not... No, that's part of it. That is part of it, Russ, that we are diagnosing it, picking it up, categorizing it, calling it something. And that's one of the... Again, this is back to your Bayesian thought process, which is that's one of the things that people are looking at. Are we just better at detecting it and categorizing it and calling it something rather than just, hey, that dude is quirky, that dude is different, as we used to say in the 40s. But go ahead, Kelly, finish your thought. Well, I was going to say, I think there's some component of

that, but I think you're remiss in believing that it's all related to that in the same way that, yes, we have normalized the concept of gender dysphoria recently, but something else has happened. Something else has changed that has allowed the gender dysphoria to go from a fraction of 1% to now 25% of all kids in high school think that they might be the wrong gender. Okay. Something else has happened. And it's what is that thing that is likely environmental. Again, Bobby Kennedy's, even if you're willing to ignore the autism component, he points out rightly. So the massive increase in autoimmune issues. When I grew up, I didn't know a kid with asthma. I didn't know a kid with a peanut allergy. We didn't, we aren't defining those things differently, yet there's a massive increase now

in allergies, massive increase in childhood asthma, massive increase in psoriasis, eczema, other autoimmune issues, food allergies. We aren't defining those differently. Autism is kind of tough because yes, we have come to a different understanding of that quirky behavior, if you will. But peanut allergy, asthma, been pretty clearly defined the same way for decades and decades now. What's causing the increase? Right. even though Kelly and I disagree on some of these issues, we all agree on the fact that this, this something I've seen crazy shit in the medical literature in the last three years and crazy behavior that I'd never seen anything like this in my entire career.

And so this, this capture idea is something I think we can all sign on to as something that may be adulterating what we're all saying. And we'd like to get that piece fixed so we can at least go back to trusting the literature that we do have. Thanks, Russ. I've got a bunch of hands up here, so I've got to get to this. Just while you're getting the next person up there, Drew, I was going to say, I think that's, and I'm not saying that I know it is the vaccines. I'm kind of in the middle where I feel right now, Drew, is like I've been duped as a physician and I no longer trust the journals. I no longer

trust what I've been taught. I know. Listen, I got the same feeling. I'm telling you, I've saved this one journal. I saved this one annals. Did I hold it up for you to show you? There was one annals that it's turned the corner. This one journal on one day suddenly started talking about interesting topics that I had not seen one mention of in three years. And that never happens in the medical literature. Medical literature is a back and forth. And so something is terribly, terribly wrong. It has been for a little while here.

And the fact that that can happen tells me that it has been happening. Right. Once you find out whether it's a spouse or a trusted friend or that, you know, the medical literature has lied to you, then you start questioning everything. Then you start saying, what else is a lie? What else have you told me? And that's the quandary we are in as physicians. So I am just now willing to take a more circumspect look at things and saying, maybe I've been wrong about this. Maybe Andrew Wakefield was onto something. And I at least owe'm really trying not to go all the way there. I've been arguing with Rob Schneider about this for many, many years,

and he keeps holding my hand to the fire. Stephen, go ahead. Oh, hi. My audio was down a little bit. I hope you didn't all hear me. Yes, we got you. Okay. I'll tell you my favorite Bobby Sr. story, which is going to be short.

But, you know, Bobby Sr. was a very different person in 1961 when he became attorney general than he was in 1968 when he was doing the civil rights stuff during his campaign. During 61, they sort of put him in charge of handling MLK Jr., And the two didn't like each other at all. And Bobby Jr.'s main criticism of MLK Jr. was that he was a rich road on the coattails of his father, who was MLK Sr., who was known very, very well at the time. MLK Jr. was not, believe it or not. And MLK Sr. was a big preacher and had been for decades, and everybody knew him.

They didn't know his son, and so Bobby just, he said, he was wet behind the ears. He was a guy who just was writing on his dad's money and fame. Sound familiar? Okay, now think about that. Somebody had so little self-awareness that he would criticize somebody for that. This is coming from Bobby, you know, Bobby Sr., okay? So there's a little bit of a hint of that kind of thing. He grew out of some of that, to give him credit, before he died. All right.

My problem with Bobby Jr. is, yeah, he's a lawyer and he's an advocate, and he isn't a data-driven person nor a scientist. I'm going to stay away from COVID, but knowing what I do about HIV and AZT, his comments about Christine Maggiore and the idea that AZT caused the AIDS epidemic really took me back to the 80s, and I wanted to strangle a man. And if he can't get away from that. If you heard me talking about it with him, I got into it a bit.

Because I was there when we literally, at the county hospital, when we opened the boxes of AZT and we were so thrilled. We had something, something to offer these men. And it really started the process of us utilizing, deploying antiviral therapies. And you have to start somewhere. It was not a great drug. It had all kinds of problems. But my God. And it was Bob Guccione that we were fighting.

I literally at the time was fighting him. I had him on Loveline back then. I was fighting the guy because he was killing my patients. They were afraid to take any medicine. And if I could buy, think about it, that time, if I could buy somebody four months or six months, I mean, when they came in at that point and they came in with their first pneumocystis pneumonia, they were dead in six months, period, end of story. If they came in with KS, with Kaposi's, it was quicker. And if we could extend that four months, maybe now we've got a year during which time other medicines would come forward. And that is exactly what happened. That is exactly what happened.

That's exactly what happened. And, you know, things are not perfect. They start out bad or they start out with problems. And we found out later that AZT only works until the virus gets around it, so it's great for maybe six months. So it's great at the end of the disease, but it's not so great if you start it early. And there's a wonderful lesson about induction.

If you have a drug that works great in one group of patients, can you generalize it, give it to everybody? And the answer is no. Sometimes nature bites you in the rear, and that's exactly what happens with AZ people. You have to understand that every drug, as Louis Goodman used to teach us in my medical school, every drug starts out as a panacea and then it becomes a plague and people say, oh my god, we never should have approved this ever. And then finally, as you learn how to use

it, it ends up as a perfectly pedestrian pharmaceutical. And somebody who doesn't work in the field like Bobby Kennedy has got to understand this stuff before he runs for president on it. Kelly and I will try to bend his ear a little bit. The point is well taken. And, you know, a lot of the stuff I've been seeing lately that I've sort of been upset about is in this general area, you know, where things

have to go one way and all the other way. It's ridiculous. Well, and what I would hope, what I would hope if Bobby got into office is that he will take, he is smart enough to surround himself with people to look into each of these things. You know, I don't want him to be defined. And my goal with bringing Dick on was to keep Bobby Kennedy from being defined by his stance on, you know, vaccines, by his stance on the environment, by his stance on any one thing. He has a very, very long and interesting career. And I think that he is quite open-minded. So hopefully once in office, he's certainly not going to be heading up the vaccine safety component of his administration. He would surround himself, I would certainly hope, by smart people who are scientists, who are data-driven,

who will look at these things in each particular component. He and I have disagreed vehemently on a lot of the environmental stuff. I am nowhere near the environmental zealot that he has, and we disagree on a lot of that. But again, hopefully he will not be defined by any one of these things. He is passionate for sure and probably oversteps his bounds on some things. We could have this exact conversation about fracking and climate, I'm sure, too. But, Stephen, you sound like you're sort of like me and Kelly. And one of the craziest things that happened during this pandemic, in my estimation, is that physician judgment became something that was not allowed. The one thing that we are trained for is the application of our judgment,

and we were not allowed to use it or say it, whatever the judgment dictated. I'm wondering if you have any headlines from what your experience was from the pandemic. Well, it's what Oscar Wilde used to say, which is, the plain and simple truth is rarely plain and never simple. And that turned out to be true with the pandemic, a larger topic than I want to talk about. I mean, I could, we should have a whole thing on the pandemic, but the real message of the pandemic is the vaccine was crappy like AZT, but seatbelts, you know, 50% of people who die in accidents are wearing their seatbelt. That's not, that's not a good reason for not wearing your seatbelt.

So, uh, you have to approach it. And I think most people understand a kind of probabilistic approach to many things. They do many things that they know aren't perfect. And that will only increase their chance a little bit. Like if you were in a poker game and you got a chance to see the other guys cards, 10% of the time, would you do it? Yes, you would. Of course you would. Would that keep you from losing the pot and cashing in? No. Sometimes you'd have to cash in anyway. But anything that gives you a slight advantage, like an injection of anabolic steroids or

something, that's why those things are illegal because it gives you the 5% advantage. So we have to start thinking that way, or we have to start teaching the public to think that way, because that's the way all good doctors think, I think. And can I give you one more example? Here's a little bit out of the field. Bobby Jr. believes that his uncle was killed. And when you ask why, the answer he gives includes things like, well, the House Select Committee, which met long after the Warren Commission, decided that it was a conspiracy. And if you know anything about the House Select Committee, the reason they decided it was a conspiracy is they had a dictabelt tape which showed one extra noise, which they decided was a gunshot, which means two shooters, which means a conspiracy. And what Bobby has missed is that since then, they found that that dictabelt came from a couple of minutes later, and that extra impulse was not

an extra shot, and it's irrelevant, and now we're back to one shooter. But Bobby did not put that in his hat of evidence. So there you have another confirmation bias instance, if you know what I mean. And I don't trust a guy like that without a flexible mind to be president. Okay. Fair enough. Thank you, Stephen. Appreciate those comments. AJ,

we'll get one more speaker in here if you don't mind. AJ. Sorry, guys. I'm not going to have a chance to get to everybody but AJ unmute yourself once you were up there yeah interesting this is the this is the back and forth that I look forward to all the time this is very interesting AJ unmute your mic and you're good to go. Maybe it's not going to happen. If you can't handle unmuting the mic,

I have to throw you back into the sea. Speaking of the saving the fish, which we've been talking about today. All right, my friend, sorry about that. And this is George. We'll get George in here.

All right. Kelly, do you think that RFK Jr. Yeah, George, one second. Do you think he would be interested in being on Gutfeld show? I don't, but I cannot speak for him but i don't think i don't think that that's a kind of platform um i think he's he's more serious than that and i think he wants to get his uh yeah i don't think that was on there and i i've even i thought improved it's that made him look a little more uh approachable but i just i think g Greg wants to do a one-on-one interview with him. If you can send that message in, if he's up for that.

Does he open to that kind of thing? Sure. I'd certainly let him know. Yeah, and as I said, I can't speak for him. I'm not his mouthpiece. But just so you're asking my personal opinion, I don't think that being on the Gutfeld show is something that would float his boat. Okay, cool. But I'd be happy to throw it out there. I don't think that being on the Gutfeld show is something that would float his boat.

But I'd be happy to throw it out there. I thought it would be interesting in there, number one. And number two, that is the opinion I was asking for, but do send in the word that he is, I believe, looking to do a one-on-one with him. George, go ahead and unmute yourself there. Thank you, Dr. Drew. Appreciate your time. Long-time fan, another fan from back in the loveline days i used to listen to you and uh i've worked industrial maintenance for a manufacturer

and we'd have you on the shop listen to you guys around second shift when i came in there you go that was so that's who that's how we were listened to at work usually with some headphones on and um my my sort of a question comment here um really addressing the problem i think in um it's it's not just i think in medical journals and medical side of things but i think in in basically in a lot of the science journals across the board is that we've almost kind of developed this sort of calcification, like a hardening in ideas where they can't be challenged, certain things can't be brought up. And I'm not talking about the crazy, you know, out there kind of flat earth or anything like that kind of stuff. I'm, you know, I'm talking about general science stuff overall.

My studies was nuclear engineering in the Navy. And when, when we were in there, we were, we were learning stuff as we went. And there was a few things that still had kind of big questions around it. Now we ran reactors, they ran just fine. They worked just, you know, like we wanted them to, and we ran them very safely. But there was still questions around some of the science in there. And then, you know, since then, some better theories were developed and everything along the way. But there was always a discussion there. And as time went on, I kind of noticed, I'm in my mid-40s now.

I was, you know, obviously like around 18 when I joined the military. And what I kind of noticed is it's almost like a cult-like mentality, like a religion, sort of this religious thought that's kind of arisen when somebody, the scientist has become the new priest. If that's, you know, if that's kind of the thought process, if I challenged anything in my own research on radiation pipes, I was exploring some shielding ideas, actually. And I was exploring, like our own sun, the kind of radiation, this was, you know, years after my military training, and then after I got my degree, and I was looking into it, and it made me start to question some things because I realized we didn't understand this giant, you know, ball of burning hydrogen in the middle of our solar system very

well. And we had a lot of questions around it still, but we took a lot of that for granted. And, and instead of, um, saying, okay, we're going to continue to explore this. We don't know, you know, it's okay to say, I don't know. I feel like there's not enough, I don't, you know, I don't knows in science nowadays and saying like, hey, we're exploring this idea instead of it becoming so set in stone. I mean, my own mother. Here's what I think. Listen, it's a really interesting, really interesting point. I just was reading a book called The Eighth Day of Creation,

Makers of the Revolution in Biology. It was really sort of all these great minds that came over from Europe during the Second World War and established themselves in MIT and Caltech and Princeton and how they were thinking, the open-mindedness, the problem-solving, the risk-taking. I thought to myself, oh, yeah, I was sort of trained in that kind of science solving, the risk taking. I thought to myself, oh yeah, I was sort of trained in that kind of science back in the 70s. It does not exist anymore. And at the core, science is taught more like a language lesson or some sort of vocabulary course. Back in the day,

it was all about problem solving and math and trying to predict sort of things like the behavior of clouds is what I always think of. We were trying to predict sort of general things that really you can't predict with that kind of certainty. And I believe we have trained people. Listen, I think if you asked most physicians, what is the scientific method, they couldn't even tell you that. And so that's where it's sort of starting for me.

And I agree with you. The outcome is there's a certain amount of, and cult is a word I've thought to myself over the last 10 years or so, lack of questioning, lack of humility, lack of ability to say, I don't know. Kelly, what do you think? Well, I think the mark of a good leader to me is someone who, in the face of new data, new evidence, new input, is able to change his or her mind. If somebody doesn't do that, if they have a premise and they are faced then with new information and they are not willing to incorporate that and change their position or change their opinion, then it's one of two things. Either they're not very bright, either they're just not very bright, or they have an ulterior motive. They're being motivated by something other than truth. It's

one or the other, because a good leader, and I don't care if you're leading a company, if you're leading a country, if you're a physician, if you have a premise, a place from which you begin a factual belief, and then when faced with information that is contradictory and you are unwilling or incapable of incorporating that and determining whether or not your position should change, you're just dumb or you're bought off or you've got something else going on. And so right now we are left to believe that our leaders, either it's one or the other. Are they that dumb?

Are you trying to tell me Anthony Fauci is that dumb or is it that he actually is owned by something else? And really there's not much in between because good leaders do change their position. And those leaders, if they're physicians, need to change their positions. So Adam Carolla, who George alluded to, who did Loveline with me for years in the 90s, and he and I do a podcast. Now, he distills it down to two words.

And Kelly, this is exactly what you're talking about. He just looks at somebody and he goes, stupid or liar, stupid or liar. Right. That's it. Which is it? Stupid or liar? That's exactly what I'm saying. Now, unfortunately, we live in a time.

Yeah. I know it's exactly what you're saying. It's great to hear it coming back at me from somebody else. And the fact, though, that we can't even discuss, though, in today's world, differing intellectual capacities and talents that that to me is really we need to be realistic about what each of our abilities are and our talent i don't have talent in certain areas and i have ability in certain areas and i'm not if you think of a person in the world right if you think about you know the thing that causes most small recreational aircraft crashes is when the pilot is incapable of rectifying

information that is different in what they are seeing visually versus what they're seeing on their instruments, a difference between whether or not they are taught to trust your instrument panel. Do not trust because you cannot trust what you are seeing. You're disoriented. Trust one. And when they are incapable of rectifying those two things that are contradictory, they drive it into the ground. And this is what's happening, is that we have got to teach people again that life is not simple. It is not simple. And the data are changing all the time. And if you are not able to be in that OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, and act, observe, orient, decide, and act, that is what keeps fighter pilots alive. If you cannot take that fast incoming changing data and change your position,

whether it's your position in the air or your position in terms of your opinion on things, if you can't do that quickly and in real time, the results can be disastrous. And we've got to teach people back to that critical thinking, the OODA loop. How do you stay alive to fight the next dog fight? Well, I think this is a great place to wrap up. You and I will go talk to Bob Kennedy and see if we can soften some of his attitudes about certain things, you know, certain things we disagree with him on. And my bet is he will.

That's sort of my sense of him. Well, I think so too. That's my sense of him too. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see. But Kelly, thank you for coming on afterwards here and taking some calls with me and for

bringing us. Was Dick Russell your suggestion? Is that how we got to him? Yes. And I think I just reached out to his publicist because I was aware of the book. And I wanted to highlight, as I said, I'm not plugging for Bobby Kennedy necessarily. I just want people to see that there's more to this individual. And I'm happy to have this conversation

about other candidates, but that there's a lot more to him than his particular stance about COVID vaccines and the fact that he's been marginalized because of some of his opinions and statements about the vaccines. There's a lot more to him when you're talking about somebody who's potentially running for the highest office in the land. And I just wanted to highlight that. And I think the book does a great job of that. And I think Dick Russell's a good investigative journalist. I think it was very interesting.

Tomorrow, I will take on more callers. And we're going to have Bobby Chacon in here. He created the FBI's underwater retrieval program. Did he confirm with you? Not me, but I heard he was coming. Okay, maybe. That's a maybe. He's a great guy.

And then next week, when Kelly comes back, Tom Rents returning. Oh, wait. He just said he could. Okay, good. Like this minute. Okay, good. Tom Rents returning as the attorney, and he has some insight for us. Speaking of the funding of the Wuhan laboratory,

we're going to get more data out of him about what is behind all that. He's been studying that for a bit. And Kat Lindley on July 5th. Yes. Yes, Vivek Ramaswamy, John Bowden.

You see the numbers, the dates and the names up there. We will see you all tomorrow at three o'clock Pacific time and Kelly next Wednesday, three o'clock Pacific. Thank you next Wednesday, three o'clock Pacific. Thank you so much for joining us. Sounds good.

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