Jocko Podcast - 431: You'll Get The Political Leadership You Deserve. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

>Join Jocko Underground<Bobby Kennedy Jr. comes from an illustrious political family. The son of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, Bobby Jr. was a lifelong Democrat but became increasingly estranged from the party in the 2010s as it drifted away from its traditional values. He made his final break on October 9, 2023, when he announced his candidacy as an independent for President of the United States.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 431 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. We rode behind the gun carriage. Uniformed soldiers and sailors with fixed bayonets marched slowly before the case on as rows of drummers pounded a mournful beat. The grim sea of people on Pennsylvania Avenue was utterly silent, but for the occasional wail of anguish. Behind us was a long file of black limousines carrying all the other members of our clan. Behind them, the sidewalk crowds stood nine deep all the way from the White House to the capital Rotunda,

where Uncle Jack would lie in state. Mesmerized, I studied the riderless ebony funeral horse that followed the case on with empty boots mounted backward in the stirrups the symbol of a fallen prince looking back over his truncated life the gilding's name i learned was blackjack after general pershing he was tall with the fiery temper of a thoroughbred stallion and his and his rioting against the poor soldier who struggled to cling to his bridle earned the horse national attention over the next two days blackjack never stopped bucking furiously throwing his head and dancing wildly as his sleek coat shimmered black in the cold November sunlight. I could see the army brand on his neck.

I had a million questions. Our mother told us that Jack was in heaven with God. And with God's help, he would watch over us and take care of the rest of the country. More bullets reach my world. As with Uncle Jack, there were many omens. Shortly after my father announced his candidacy, Jackie confided in Arthur, do you know what I think will happen to Bobby? The same thing that happened to Jack. There's so much hatred in this country and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack.

Like most children, I saw my father as invincible. But having lived through Jack's assassination and other violent deaths, I knew he was at risk. Nevertheless, I understood that violence was not going to deter him from his course. We had been raised to live life fearlessly and to fight for our principles without regard to personal danger. The bullets found him as he reached out to shake the hand of a $25 a week Mexican busboy Juan Romero in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. My father died Surrounded by his fiercest supporters Replaced my father's

Flag-draped casket In the last car of the train Resting it on velvet chairs in the dining section High enough so that the crowds lining the tracks Could view it as it passed Two million people lined the tracks To bid my father farewell as we moved Through the ghettos of Newark, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore

And through the role countryside of Pennsylvania and Maryland. The morning multitudes slowed the train so that a two and a half hour trip stretched to seven hours. Among the vast crowd that lined the tracks were whites, blacks, Orthodox Jews and Hispanics. Uniform soldiers and Boy Scouts saluted the passing train. Cops and firefighters stood at attention alongside long-haired hippies and tie-died and adolescents in Catholic school uniforms. Black militants sporting giant afros waved, clenched fists. Catholic priests, brothers and nuns stood with hands folded, including a half a dozen sisters perched on the bed of a yellow pickup truck. A team of little leaguers halted its game to salute us.

Others, including honor guards from high schools and VFWs and American Legion halls held flowers or flags or signs reading goodbye, Bobby. God bless the Kennedys. We will miss you, Bobby. And so long, Bobby. I could see onlookers crying, covering their faces and kneeling with clasped hands. In the countryside, people held babies high in the air. and shouted, pray for us, Bobby. And those are some excerpts from a book called American Values,

which is written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In this book, chronicles one of America's most prominent families, a family that has served and sacrificed, a family that has led and followed, a family that is surrounded by both commendations and controversy that family is the Kennedy family and it is a privilege to have the author of that book the son of Robert F. Kennedy the nephew of John F. Kennedy here with us tonight to share his experiences his lessons learned his values and to discuss his decision to follow his family tradition into the political world.

Robert, thank you for joining. Jocko, thanks for having me. Echo, pleasure to be with you. So I grew up in New England and I heard about your family as long as I can remember. and it's incredible we're sitting here talking to you, just knowing the lore behind your family. And believe me, I heard from all sides. I heard every bad thing that could be said about your family

and every good thing that could be said about your family and everything in between. And so it definitely was very interesting to go through this book and hear your perspective and the way things looked through your own. eyes through your life and pretty amazing to to be able to experience it through the book what you experience at least to some extent so um let's talk a little bit about this and and you know it's interesting and I was kind of telling you this before we before we started recording

like I said I'm from New England and I guess I'm old enough I'm 52 years old but there's a lot of people that might not fully understand the family itself So a little bit about the family. So you're born, 1954, Georgetown University Hospital, your grandparents, Joseph and Rosa Kennedy, and she's the daughter of John Fitzgerald, otherwise known as Honey Fitzgerald. Yeah, he was the first Irish Catholic mayor of Boston. There was actually a, he was the first Irish Catholic ghetto mayor. there was a handpick Irish Catholic mayor before him who was kind of a tool of the Brahman's.

The Brahmins were, as you know, in New England, they're kind of the Yankee class, the original, sort of the descendants of the Puritans who run New England. They call the wealthy ones, they're called Brahms, the poor ones are called Swamp Yankees. and I know you knew a lot of them growing up in Maine. They run the country stores and all those towns and sell lobster. So, but my grandfather, Honey Fitz, was, he had a beautiful singing voice, which is how he got the name Honey Fitz. And my grandmother, my great-grandmother, Josie, who I spent a lot of time with when I was a little kid, hated politics.

And so he relied on his daughter, Rose, one of his three daughters, to escort him, essentially, to be his escort in political events. And she was a beautiful piano player. And he would have these famous torchlight parades where he would have mules pulling a flatbed, trailer. They had a piano mounted on it. She would play the piano and he would sing his favorite song, his signature song was a sweet ad line. He'd sing these patriotic songs and Irish songs, Italian songs, French, Canadian songs to the crowd and she would play and then he would give his speech and he was elected, he was elected mayor, he was the first mayor, he was elected to Congress. And he was kind of one of the reigning.

He had my uncle's seat in Congress later inherited by John Kennedy. And he was a reigning political patriarch of Boston for a long time. His contemporary, my whole family came over from Ireland in 1848 at the height of the potato famine. And they arrived here with nothing. one of my great-great-grandfather was a Cooper. He was a barrel-maker. And then his son owned a saloon, which was one of the common things that the Irish did. But the Irish came over from Ireland,

where they had been a colony of the British for 600 years. and they were not under the law, they were not allowed to practice laws or practice any profession. They weren't allowed to learn to read or write in some jurisdiction, some time periods. I actually visited my ancestral home over there, and there was an article about a priest who had been hanged for teaching some of my ancestors how to read and what they call the hedge schools, these secret schools behind the hedges. and they weren't allowed to own land or participate in politics. So when they landed in the United States, they took to politics like a starving man takes the food. And they became, you know, very adept at it. And they took over pause, essentially.

But my, so my great-grandfather in one side was Honey Fitz, John Fitzgerald. My great-grandfather on the other side was Patrick Kennedy. And they were both in politics. Patrick Kennedy was in the legislature. He was a political boss in Boston, and their children married. My grandfather Joseph Kennedy was, he won the Mayors Cup for Best Baseball player in Boston, and he ended up going to Harvard. He was one of the first Irish Catholics to go to Harvard.

He then became a bank examiner. He was the youngest bank president in the country at age 20, and during the Great Depression, or just before in the 20s, he made a huge amount of money on the stock market. He got out in 1929 just before the crash, and during the Depression, he was one of 10 millionaires in the country. People say that he was a bootlegger. He was not there, and I show that in the book, and all the people who have actually seriously examined that, say, yeah, he had nothing to do with bootlegging. Yeah, he had distribution rights for some whiskey, but that really kicked off after the, after Prohibition was over, right? During Prohibition, when they saw it, you know, Prohibition was passed. I think it was the 16th Amendment, 17th Amendment, I forget which.

But it was passed because enough states voted for it to put it in the Constitution. And in order to get it out of the Constitution, they had to have a certain number. I think 26 states had to vote against it. So when they got to around 25 and the other ones were about to topple, he went with Jimmy Roosevelt, who was FDR Franklin Roosevelt's son, over to Scott. And they brought one of the leading Scotch companies, Pinch. And they shipped the entire inventory to Canada and they put it in warehouses like two feet from the U.S. border. So they knew, you know, as soon as Prohibition was over, they shipped it all in and they made a killing on it.

And that was his only involvement with the liquor industry. But he was the first SEC commissioner. He was the only guy from Wall Street has supported Roosevelt. So he was very powerful in the Roosevelt administration, and he became the first commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He then became the ambassador to the Court of St. James, which is Great Britain. and his nine children were raised at least for that five-year period in England, and that was right during the war and right at the beginning of the war.

So they developed a lot of relationships over there. My aunt Kick was killed in an airplane crash immediately after the war. I'm married into the biggest house in England, the Duke of Devonshire. She would have been the Duchess of Devonshire. Her husband was killed on the Maginot line, I think, three weeks into the war. Her brother, Joe Kennedy, my uncle, was killed during the war after he completed all of his, he was in the Naval Air Force. He was, he completed, I think at that time he had to do 42 missions and then you came

home or something like that. And he committed, he completed those. He was on his way home. and they asked him to volunteer for what was essentially a suicide mission, which was flying the first flying bomb. So they had developed a remote control the capacity to control the controls of a aircraft while it was in the air. They couldn't take it off, but you can control in the air. And so they loaded this plane with bombs. and they were sending it over to the submarine base in Norway, a Nazi submarine base in Norway,

and it was supposed to explode on impact. But they needed a pilot to take it off and then jump out in parachute before they hit the English Channel, and that's what he did. He volunteered for that job. There was a companion plane that was controlling it, and as soon as they turned the remote control on, the plane blew up and evaporated, and no part of him was ever found. So that broke my grandfather's heart. He was kind of the golden child. He was the one, and my grandfather had ambitions, political ambitions, for Joseph Kennedy. And his death, my grandfather never recovered from.

Forty years later, if you mention his name, my grandfather would cry. and he had everything. He had every gift except for gray hair. He was good-looking. He was brilliant. He was charming. People loved him. And he, you know, he had a lot of personal courage, et cetera.

His younger brother was Jack Kennedy. And during World War II, he served in the Pacific on the PT boats. his B-T boat was cut into by a Japanese destroyer in the blackestrade's near the Solomon Islands. It was a corridor known as the Tokyo Express and his boat sunk. Two of his crew were killed. One of them was badly burned. He towed that the burned crew member, I think, about six miles. with a lanyard in his teeth. He'd been on the Harvard swim team, so he was a very strong swimmer.

And he brought his crew to a little spit of sand where there were some palm trees, and they hid from the Japanese patrol boats for the next week. He was presumed dead. His family was told that he was missing in action, presumed dead. He was hiding on that spit of land. And at some point, some Solomon Island natives came by to gather coconuts, and they were climbing the coconut trees. My uncle came out of his hiding place, and the Solomon Islanders didn't like the Japanese. The Japanese weren't occupying force. My uncle communicated with him, and then he carved his coordinates on a coconut. and the Solomon Islander put that coconut at the bottom of his canoe that was filled with coconuts,

battled about 20 miles across the Blackett Straits to the British base, and gave the coconut to the commander, and my uncle was then was rescued. And my uncle had that coconut on his desk during his entire presidency in the Oval Office. But I'll tell you something, at his inauguration, he, invited the admiral of the Japanese fleet who had been piloting the dis commanding the destroyer that cut him into so I got to meet him there but he also invited the two Solomon Islanders and and the British governor of the Solomon Islands was embarrassed by their appearance because they were barefoot they never had shoes they were not I think they were wearing like loin claws

or something and they didn't speak any English. So he did not want to send them as kind of ambassadors from the Solomon Island. So he picked two more presentable Solomon Islanders. And when my uncle met them, he was like, these are not the guys in rescue me. And he was furious at the British governor. A years later, my little brother, Max, went over with Robert Ballard, the Undersea Explorer, who found the Titanic. And my brother was with him.

They went over to find PT 109. And they found, you know, I think the engine block or something. They were not sturdy craft. And so, you know, there was much left of it. But during that trip, he ran into the two Solomon Islanders who had rescued my uncle. And they were both wearing t-shirts that said, I saved John F. Kennedy. And Max says that when he met him, he fell to the ground and kissed Max feet, and he kissed his legs and had tears coming down his face. And it was just an incredibly emotional and very, very moving moment for both of them.

Anyway, funny story. Yeah, that's one of the many amazing stories. I want to read a little bit from the book about, well, about your grandfather, your grandmother, and then kind of what was like growing up for you. My father, this is what your dad said, Robert Kennedy. My father went on to say of grandpa, what it all really adds up to is love. Not love as it is described with such a facility in popular magazines, but the kind of love that is affection and respect, order, encouragement, and support.

He loved all of us. Our awareness of this was an incalculable source of strength and because real love is something unselfish and involves sacrifice and giving we could not help but profit from it. His feeling for us was not of the devouring kind, as is true in the case of many strong men. He did not visualize himself as a son around which satellites would circle or in the role of puppet master. He wanted us, not himself, to be the focal points. So that's an interesting or I would say a different take than what a lot of people think. Also here from the book, at Cape Cod, Grandma alternated her afternoon lunches and evening meals with different sets of grandchildren. It took courage to be late for a big house dinner.

Like Grandpa, she was prompt and rigid about decorum, elbows off the table, hair groomed, forked, Fork placed neatly next to the knife on our plate after dinner, etc, etc. Her love of learning, along with her deep religious faith, were principal remedies against materialism, which she declared eroded everything of value. She was an exemplar of platonic love of knowledge and beauty without the need to possess. Grandma wanted us to be well-rounded, interested in every aspect of life, including politics, music, art, science, religion, architecture,

history, sports, and languages. Over dinner of chipped beef, asparagus, and angel food cake, she inquired about our summer reading or instructed us on how to distinguish Doric from ionic and Corinthian columns. She led us into discussions of topics ranging from local politics to African topography to Gaelic Renaissance. She would accost us on the compound lawn and grill us about entomology, multiplication tables or the stations of the cross or give us spot quizzes on history, astronomy,

or religion. It was scary. That's definitely a good. She would read the papers every morning and she would also read all kinds of other reading material. If she saw an article or a poem or a stanza that she'd like, she would clip it out and then she would pin it to her sweater. So she had all of these clippings, you know, flowing off her sweater. She looked like a Christmas tree. And then she would go along walks every day.

She would walk probably eight miles a day. And usually she'd pick up one of the grandchildren to walk with her. And then she'd quiz them on stuff. She'd read from these clippings and quiz us on French or Spanish or, you know, our American history. This is what you say about growing up there. This kind of describes life as a young Kennedy in this day and that day and age. Every day we spent time on the ocean. My mother and father took us on Victora, a 26-foot wooden day sailor for a picnic lunch on one of the nearby islands,

where we fished for sand sharks, scup, flounder puffers, and sea robins, gathered hermit crabs, periwinkles, and scallops, or dug for tasty steamers that betrayed their location on the title flats by squirting. With Captain Frank at the helm, we also took lunch outings on Grandpa's wooden cabin cruiser, the Marlin, crossing the sound Monamoie or Cuddyhunk to explore the Elizabeth Islands and gorge from picnic baskets of Grandpa's favorite foods, lobsters with hot butter and lemon, corn on the cob, strawberry shortcake, Boston cream pie, baked beans, and clam chowder. We children talked and caroused up on the bow while Grandpa sat astern with the grownups. Uncle Jack, my father, Teddy, my mother, Aunt Eunice, and Sarge Shriver. Gene and Steve Smith and Pat and Peter Lawford. Hianasport was a magical paradise for me. I love the endless palette of colors.

The vivid blue sea, the vivid blue of sea and sky separated by rich green landscapes, peppered with roses and daffodils, each in their seasons, the gleaming white houses, and offshore a panoply of brightly hued spinnickers running down wind. The ocean was always changing from blue to every shade of green to gray and almost black to match the moods of the wind and sky. Here, surrounded by my family, I could indulge my obsession with the natural world. When I was 11, my father gave me a motorized aqualung, a two-horsepower compressor wedged in a styrofoam ring that bobbed at the ocean's surface,

pumping air down a 15-foot umbilical hose into a mask the perfect contraption for exploring the shallow waters off hyanus port I filled its tank with gasoline from the private gas pump adjacent to grandpa's garage and wearing this apparatus I swam with my little spear gun into dark caverns the wrinkled rocks below the mile-long Hyannisport jetty yeah that both the Marlin um was like a a Hemingway-esque, you know, cabin cruiser or mahogany. And I, a guy that bought it in Capri and during my honeymoon with Cheryl, we ended up staying at his house. He's a guy who owns Tom's shoes. And we ended up going back on that boat every day and going to the Greek Islands.

It was really like a magical, magical, you know, renewal of my youth. youth. So that's the childhood. It's like kind of amazing. Amazing childhood. I was very lucky to have that. And, you know, during the White House years, every

Friday afternoon, three marine helicopters would land on the football field. We had a football field in front of my grandfather's house where we would play every day. And there was a baseball field near President Kennedy's house. All these

all of the houses were, the properties were all attached to each other. So it was, and there's probably, even today, there's probably 15 Kennedy's owned houses that are adjacent to each other in that town. There's 110 of us, 105 of us last July 4th. There were my kids and all their cousins grew up kind of community too. But when I was a kid, the U.S. 1 would fly up to Hode. Air Force Base, which is on the Cape, from Andrews Air Before Space in Maryland, and bring, you know, basically the whole White House.

And then they would get on three Marine helicopters. They'd land on the football field. And my father would get off. President Kennedy would get off my uncle. My uncle Steve Smith, who was the chief of staff at the White House, my uncle's son. George Robber was the director of the Peace Corps. My uncle Ted Kennedy, who was in the U.S. Senate, who won Jack seat after Jack won the presidency,

and then their top aides, Dave Powers, would they call the Irish Mafia, Kenny O'Donnell, and they would all get off and spend the weekend at the Cape. And then there was people coming in, sort of celebrity guests, who they all had in their houses. Every week, Judy Garland would be, there, Franks, Adra, all kinds of, you know, people of my grandfather had owned one of the biggest studios in Hollywood, you know, in Pathay Studios, which later became RKO, and he made about

a thousand films, and none of them incidentally very good, but they were kind of family films that, you know, for all these theaters that were popping up in every little town in the Midwest and they needed something where there was nothing controversial happening. So, you know, my grandfather made Tarzan and all these, you know, very innocuous family films. But because of his contacts in Hollywood, he could get first run films and he had a theater in his basement. So all of the families would gather in that theater on Fridays and Saturday nights with their Raskas and watch films. And, you know, after a day outside in the ocean,

it was a very kind of magical, idyllic childhood. And you're born in 1954, so when JFK is elected, it's 1960, so you're six, seven years old, something like that. Yeah. I was at the convention in 1960. I was at the convention in Los Angeles,

I think there's a picture of me in that book. On the way home from the convention, we had a family airplane called the Caroline K, which my uncle used as a campaign plane. And I sat in the seat next to him during that ride, and there's a lot of us talking of pictures, of us talking intensely with each other on that plane ride. And he sent me a picture saying,

and with that he signed saying, President gets his advice from all kinds of people. And I love Uncle Jack. And your dad was appointed as Attorney General. Yeah, my father had been my uncle's chief counsel in the mafia hearing. I had attended the mafia hearings. I saw him grill, Sam Giancana.

I saw, you know, Joey Gallo. I was there when that happened. My mother would come and we'd sit in the, front receipt. So my father then in 1960 became the campaign manager for my uncle. And when my uncle won the presidency, he appointed my father to be attorney general. And my father then, you know, my father then, you know, they then kind of got to introduce. They were, he originally was really targeting the mob as attorney general. That's what he was interested in. By 1962, civil rights had been there, became their biggest priority.

Once your dad becomes Attorney General, then you guys move to a different spot called Hickory Hill. We had moved there when I was two years old, so we moved there in 56. Okay, so you've been there for a while. All the time up at Hyannisport was in the summertime. That's in the summertime. But the winter, we were always in Hickory Hill.

Hickory Hill had been what was in Annie Bellum House. it had been General McClellan's house during the Civil War. So it was kind of union headquarters. There was all kinds of civil war artifacts that we could dig in the yard that my brothers and I, when we came up from school, we'd get shovels and just dig up the yard looking for stuff. Apparently the Green Berets came and built like a ropes course as well. You mentioned that. They built a ropes course, which is still there, by the way.

I was there recently. and they built a really very dangerous rums course, and we had a lot of people going to the emergency room. They had a zip line and went from the top of Hickory Hill, down it to a grove of pines. And there was no real way of stopping it unless somebody grabbed a tail rope on it before it hit the pine tree.

And a lot of people got hurt, including Muhammad Ali, who got his face, really wrecked in those pine trees. From the, from doing the zip line? Yeah, from doing the zip line. Okay. You also say in the book here, at Hickory Hill, my life revolved around the seasons. In the springtime, it was rare not to come across a box turtle with its blood red eyes

and brilliant pattern shell or butterflies of a dozen species producing explosions of colors as they danced among the wildflowers. Once teeming populations of bats, honeybees, amphibians, and flying insects have now dwindled to obscurity in northern Virginia. But in those days, we could capture bats by lofting a bandana draped stone high into the twilight sky and netting the flying mammals as they chase the floating hanky down to the ground. Salamanders and frog eggs crowded every roadside ditch and puddle, transforming them into bubbling cauldrons thick with tiny polywogs.

On weekends, I wandered nearby streams with David and Michael and my sister Carrie searching for frogs and crayfish snakes and mud puppies or spent time with my little brothers digging in the yard for Civil War relics. In the summer, honeybees covered the clover in our yard, making barefoot play a hazard. David Michael and I would capture a dozen or so in a jar, then let them go one at a time, triangulated them to track their hive, and then smoking them into sedation to get the honey without too many stings. On autumn weekends, we would often visit Camp David. While my dad conferred with Uncle Jack, we explored the mountain wood. Sometimes with secret service guards turning over logs and rocks capturing red and dusky salamanders

Winter in those days still brought snow to northern Virginia David Michael and I spent long days Building bobsled runs on Hickory Hill or skiing at a neighborhood neighboring farm that operated a small Skitoe we played pond hockey or practice barrel jumping on skates a once popular sport that seems to have lost its mighty grip on the American imagination Do you remember the day it's a barrel shop? No, I'd never have barrels jump. I'm not quite that old. I've seen pictures of it. And actually, you don't skateboards.

That was a crazy sport. What is he? Just line up barrels and jump them. Is that the deal? How many you can shop with skates on? No wonder it didn't last very long. So there you are. You're growing up.

And again, it's a, you're, like you said, it's very clear in the book. And you talk a lot about it. And obviously, this leads to what you. ended up doing in your life, but you were very obsessed with nature, spent all kinds of time in nature. And as you're living this sort of movie-like life, there's also what's going on in the rest of the world and what your uncle is doing with the, as the president,

1961, April, you got the Bay of Pigs happens. And the book has great perspective. You did obviously what you, remembered, but also what you researched, what you knew, the stories that you put together. And some really interesting dynamics come out of the Bay of Pigs. Primarily, don't trust the generals, don't trust the CIA, don't trust the FBI. Yeah, my uncle was lied to by the CIA, you know, not only by the CIA, by the three top officials of the CIA, Alan Dulles, Charles Cabela, who was the general, the military guy at the CIA, and Richard Bissell.

And over the next year, he fired them all because of the Bay of Pigs. During the Bay of Pigs, they had lied to him. Nixon had planned the Bay of Pigs. Nixon had tended to be president at that time. He had planned the Bay of Pigs, and my uncle came in and said, my uncle felt very young. comfortable with it because, you know, why? He felt like Cuba, yeah, Cuba's a, this before the Soviets were in Cuba, you know, that late, that arose later. But he said, yeah, we don't like the government in Cuba, but, you know, it's a little tiny island and we, we don't get to choose what

other people have as their government. And he also, he had grown up going back and forth to Cuba from Palm Beach. You know, they'd get on a boat and go over there and go to the casino, and stuff. And he knew that Batista was, who was, you know, who was overthrown by Castro, that Batista was a nightmare and that the, he invited the mafia and to run the island, and he was oppressing, torturing people. And he was, he understood that Castro had been revolting against something real and that the U.S. was involved in that. So he had a more nuanced view of it. And he didn't think America, he didn't like communists, but he didn't think America should be telling other countries, should be bullying other countries into telling them what kind of

governments they should have. And Cabell and Dulles and Richard Bissell said, look, we've already armed these guys. They're trained. They've got, you know, weapons and they're dangerous. And if you keep them here, it's going to be a huge problem. You got to let them go. These were Cuban nationals that were in America training to go back and invade. and they were all kinds of people. Some of them became very close to my dad, particularly one called Harry Ruiz, who spent a lot of time with us as kids.

He had been an engineer. He had been with Castro in the Sierra Maestrade. So Castro had come over in, I think, 57 from Mexico. And actually, I talked with Castro. I spent a whole day one time. I spent a lot of time with Castro. show. One of the times I visited him with Cheryl and my kids, and we spent a whole day at his house, talking about everything, including the assassination, everything. And, you know, he's a really

interesting guy, but he said, he told my son, Aden, who was then about 10 years old, was asking him about, because the day before we went to the Cuban National Museum, and we visited the, the, the, the, the, uh, the grandmother, which is the big ship, which is in the museum now. It's a cabin cruiser. I think it was like 60-foot cabin cruiser. That they had come over, they had gotten a hold of that. There was a bunch of revolutionaries, Cuban revolutionaries, training in Mexico. And they had all come over in 57 and landed on the beach.

There's a 63 of them had been on that boat. My son, Aidan, said to him, said to Cash, how did you decide which guys would come? Were they the ones who were most fervent about communism? And Castro said, no, we just brought the smallest people because we wanted to fit as many as possible on. They were ambushed on the beach, and 11 of them made it up into the mountains to the Sierra Maestro.

And from there, those 11 people created the Cuban Revolution. Three years later, they marched into Havana on New Year's Day and took the country. It was really an extraordinary story. One of those guys was a guy called Harry Ruiz, who was an engineer. He was just, he didn't like Batista. He wanted democracy. He'd been very close to Castro.

But when Castro had declared that Cuba was going to be a Marxist society, he had turned against him like many of the people who had been in the revolution with him and gone over to the other side. He had fled to the United States and then, you know, it was part of this, this Bay of Pigs. Some of the other people were just, they were people who were involved with the mob, which was running the casinos. Or they were like bad actors from Batista's army. They were, you know, officers who were like bad.

guys. They were like killers, torturers, those kinds of, so it was a whole mix of people. But a lot of them were very idealistic. My uncle didn't want any part of it because he thought the U.S. cannot be involved in overthrowing the government of another country. That's not what we do as a country. So he was skeptical, and they originally their plan was to have the U.S. Navy use amphibious vehicles to drop the men off. And he said, we're not going to do that. The U.S. government can't have anything to do with this. So they ended up getting a bunch of ships from United Fruit Company,

which owned all the sugar cane fields in that had been nationalized by Castro. Oh, they're the ones who dropped him, you know, who dumped them on the beach. My uncle said, I want to make sure that you don't know. expect air cover from the United States military because you're not going to get it. And Dulli said, don't worry when we land over there. My uncle said, how is this going to work? Because Castro has an army, 200,000 men. How are you going to get 1,200 men to overthrow him? And they said, we have the whole thing wired. As soon as they land there, the nation is going to rise up. We have people from every sector of the country who are going to rise up and overthrow them.

So they were just lying to him. He also, he also, you know, he knew a lot about military operations. And he said, you're landing on a beach here. It's not like when Castro came and landed in the mountains where he could go hide. There's no place to hide here. It's a beach with a swamp. And they said, don't worry, we got the whole thing under control. So as soon as they landed there and Castro met, I mean, knew they were coming.

and they were dying on the beach. Dulles went back and said, we need air cover. And my uncle said, no. And my uncle later said to his age, they thought that I was a young president who would be terrified of having this terrible failure and would give them the air cover and send in the Essex, which was the aircraft carrier. And he said he wasn't going to do it.

He took public blame for the people. a pig's invasion. But privately, he said to his aides, I want to take the CIA and shattered it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. Then after that, he fired Bizzle, Cabell, and Dulles. And he tried, he wanted to appoint my father to run the CIA because he recognized the CIA was a huge problem for our country. And my grandfather said, you can't do that. You can't have your brother as the head of the spy agency. It's just, it's got a bad look to what the optics are wrong. And he said it'll be like Stalin and Molotov if they were brothers. You know, they essentially were brothers. But, you know,

you could turn that spy agency against the American Republic pretty easily. And you've got to make sure, you know, to have some daylight between you and the, between the president, the executive, on the spy agency. So they brought again in a guy called John McCone, who was a very pious Catholic, and he was a Republican, conservative, and they were confident that he would end the monkey business over there. But in fact, McCone never knew what was happening there.

Nobody ever told him what was really, you know, happening at the CIA, and, you know, the indications are dullest, continued to run it from a distance. and when my dad, when my uncle was killed in 63, I came home at, the first thing my father did was to call the desk officer at the CIA and say, did your people do this? That was his first instinct. The second call he made was to Harry Ruiz, this Cuban, who was at our house all the time. and Harry was then in Washington, D.C. with a famous writer who'd written a book about the Bay of Pigs,

a famous American journalist, and were both in the hotel room, and my father said the same thing to him, did your people do this? It was the Cubans, the CIA Cubans. And then I came home, the early that I was pulled out of school, my mother picked us up,

I was brought home, with my brothers from Sidwell Friends. When I arrived at home, my father was walking in the lawn at Hickory Hill with John McCone. And we went down and hugged him and McCone went back to the CIA. The CIA was only less than a mile from my house.

So we wrote our horses through the CIA every morning. My father took us out of horseback riding, nine little kids horseback riding at six o'clock every morning before breakfast. and we always rode through the CIA campus. And McCone would come to our house during the springtime and summer to swim every day at four o'clock after he got out of work. My parents were closed to him.

And McCone was the first one to arrive at the house. And my father took him for a walk in the yard and said, did the CIA do this? And McCone said, no, you know, I don't know anything about it. But so anyway, that was his first instinct. We had green berets in Dallas all the time. My grandfather, I mean, my uncle was very close. The green berets, my uncle started the Navy SEALs. But he also, the green berets had been started earlier,

but the Pentagon would not let them wear their berets. And my uncle ordered the Pentagon to change that role. So there was this, we ended up going a lot to Fort Bragg. We saw the, you know, we ran the, obstacle courses there and did the zip lines, and then they came to our house. And in one of the pastures, they created this really hairy obstacle course. And we had Cubans at our house all the time. When we rode in the morning, we would ride to the houses of some of the Cubans because my father and my mother found homes for them when they came back to the country. And they made sure they got

to schools. They made sure all of them could find jobs. A lot of them were put in the U.S. military, the ones, because my father, you know, his job was to get all those Cubans out of jail and in, Castro captured 1,200 of them. And my father was, my uncle was heartbroken and said, no matter what the cost, we got to get those guys out of jail. And so my father spent a year negotiating with Castro. And he sent two of his age, John Nolan and John Donovan, who was his famous spy, who had been at top of OSS. There's a movie about him that came out last year about a deal that he made to free a spy in East Berlin. But he was a famous spy.

My uncle sent the two of them down to negotiate with Castro. They spent a year every weekend in Cuba, and they went all over Cuba. and they went to all the, Castro would go to baseball games every weekend. And they, so they would go to the baseball games with Castro. It became very close to him. And they said that when he walked in the stadium, everybody in the stadium would jump up to their feet and cheer. And they were looking at that, and they said, this is not orchestrated.

These people love him. And they told that to my father and my uncle. and it started opening their eyes about Cuba. And the last day when my uncle's life, he had an ambassador at Verde de Rale Beach talking with cash about detente. And my uncle said, we don't care what kind of government you have. We want two things from you. One is get rid of any Soviet military in Cuba.

Number two, stop your efforts to do. disrupt Latin American governments, Che's efforts and to disrupt the Latin American governments that were part of the Alliance for Progress. And Castro said we need to talk, but we need to do it when Che is not around. So my uncle had an ambassador with him at Verde Darryl Beach the day that he was shot talking about

detente and ending the embargo. And they were making progress through that. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I wrote a book called Extreme Ownership, and it's about when you mess up, you know, you take ownership of it, and that's an interesting fact.

When your uncle, when the Bay of Pigs went down, there's some, and I forget the exact numbers, but there's some sort of report that came out that his approval numbers went up after the Bay of Pigs because he got on television and said, hey, I'm the senior guy, I'm responsible for what happened? This is my fault. Yeah.

And his approval numbers actually went up when that happened. It was the lowest point. presidency and he he actually considered resigning at that time he was absolutely heartbroken because here he was two months in office and he made this you know disastrous judgment call but having been in the military having been around politicians and in the Pentagon I can see how they're thinking oh we listen if we just get over there we just we get these guys on the ground yeah we hit the beach head like he's going to have no choice of course he's going to say yes he's going to give us air support we get ourselves a nice

little war going on here and we can We can do whatever we want to do, do whatever we need to do. You can see that. So for your uncle to say, no, it's not happening. And again, how can you portray that? You can portray that as Kennedy let those guys onto the beach and didn't back them up. That's one way to portray it. The other way to portray it is, oh, Kennedy didn't get another war started by saying, look, I'm not going to do this.

And unfortunately, I guess they didn't have a good enough relationship. to where they understood your uncle and that your uncle was not going to appease what they wanted to do. Yeah, and, you know, they really thought he was a traitor. The Miami station particularly, which was the CIA's biggest station, it was run by a guy called Bill Harvey. And he hated my uncle after that, just despise him and despise my father even worse. And it was the same group of people. It was David Adley Phillips, who was the propaganda chief at the CIA. He did the 1954 coup in Guatemala, through Yakoparabins, the greatest democratic leader in the history of Latin America.

Again, it was the United Fruit. Interestingly, Dulles was the attorney for United Fruit and for Texaco. And so he was overthrowing leaders of whoever screwed around with Texaco or United Fruit. when he became, he was at Sullivan Gromwell, and they were the attorneys for all these big corporations. And David Talbot's written, the best book on Dulles, which is riveting, is called Devil's Chess Board.

And he says in that book that Dulles was incapable of distinguishing between U.S. national interests and the mercantile interests of the corporations he had represented at Sullivan Cromwell. Well, that group of people in the Miami station were also part of this larger group with David Morales and Operation Phoenix who were running the Vietnam War. If the Vietnam War was completely a CIA enterprise, the CIA owned the provincial governments. and I think 60% of the provincial governments in South Vietnam were CIA agents who were actually running those provincial governments.

So they were, it was their issue. Well, my uncle, they tried to get my uncle to go into Laos, and he refused and he negotiated a peace with the Soviets, which they considered treacherous. they tried to get him to go into Berlin and then 62 during the checkpoint Charlie confrontation and he refused he was able to peacefully negotiate that with Khrushchev and then they started corresponding with each other and they installed hotlines so they didn't have to go through the State Department of the CIA and they could talk directly with each other I grew up in a house

where there was a red phone you know my uncle's house and we knew if we picked that up Grushchev would answer, because they wanted to be able to talk directly with each other, which is what we should be doing with Putin right now. Oh, and then my uncle, they really wanted to go into Vietnam, and he refused to send combat trips. He said, I'll send advisors. These advisors were mainly green berets. They were helicopter pilots. They were mechanics. I was 16,000. It was fewer troops than he sent to get one black man James Meredith into Ole Miss. So that's what he had in Vietnam. And he heard that a Green Beret, on October 22nd, 1963, he heard that a Green Beret had been killed in Vietnam. And he asked Walt Rosstow, he said to Walt Rosstow, bring me a casualty list.

and because they weren't supposed to be fighting. You know that. Their rules of engagement are there don't participate in combat, but of course they do because they can't resist now. So they, so he brought him back a casualty of this

and 75 men had died over there. And my uncle said, that's too many. I'm pulling them all out. And that afternoon, he signed National Security Order 263 ordering all troops home from Vio, all U.S. military personnel out of Vietnam by 1965, with the first thousand coming home in December 63, beginning about six weeks later after the order. Well, 30 days after he signed that order, he was murdered. And then a week after that, LBJ his successor remanded the order. And then LBJ, after the talking golf institute, nine months later,

sent 250,000 troops over, which they had been asking Jack to do and he refused. And then it became an American war. And then, you know, Nixon came in and sent $560,000 over $56,000 never came back, including my cousin, George Skako,

who died in the Tet Offensive. But, you know, that's, like you say, it's all mission creep. Yeah. You mentioned it quickly, but your dad and your uncle also went after the mob hard. Yeah. And that was no easy task.

Yeah, I mean, my father, during part of his, I was shocked to learn about the mafia. And at that time, his employee, Jay Edgar Hoover, was, Jay Edgar Hoover was an interesting guy, right? I know, Kim. Yes, he certainly was. But one of the things he did is he loved gambling, love the horse, love the track.

And he was going to, he was going to the, he went, he took his partner, you know, in the modern sense, the word partner, to, on their vacations and weekends, he would take them to the, the horse, tracks in California, which were run by Mickey Cohen's mob. And he was getting markers from the mobsters. So his position was the mafia didn't exist. And he was furious at my father because my father

was like obsessed with the mafia. My father, when I was a little kid, there was a lot of police departments that realized the mafia was running their towns. One of them was the Los Angeles police and they had a you know they had organized crime division the new york police had an organized crime division and they were infiltrating the mob and they were and my father would come home he would want raids with them of you know these um uh card houses and gambling houses and he would come home with these artifacts and you know he gave me one night a a pack of marked cards that they had confiscated and a pair of red tinted glasses where if you were wearing those glasses, you could see the patterns on the back of the cards, and if you memorized those patterns,

then you knew what the cards were. But my father was, you know, was in a war with Hoover during that time. And Hoover then, so he was trying to prosecute the mafia, and which he did. He had not a only FBI, but U.S. Marshals, and they were harassing Giancana. I think he did 650 prosecutions, including some of the guys who were involved in my uncle's death, St. Giancana, Santos Traficandé, who was the Tampa boss. Giancana was the Chicago boss, and Carlos Marcella, who was the boss of New Orleans and Dallas. And Marcella was an interesting guy who was a Tunisian. He was only about I think he wasn't even five foot tall, but he was absolutely homicidal. And my father deported him twice.

At one point, he dropped him, had an airplane, bring him to Guatemala, and then a helicopter, and they dropped him in the middle of the jungle barefoot, because he was illegally in this country. You know, he was not here legally. and my, and he was actually in trial when my uncle shot. And a lot of the people who were involved in the assassination had deep ties to that, you know, to that New Orleans mob. Yeah, it's, it's, and I usually say this when I'm reading from a book. I haven't said it yet.

So I'll say it right now. There's so much detail in the book. I mean, the book is like 400-something pages long. And you go into so much detail, so much research, so much memory. So get the book for these details, but that you really lay out this kind of conflict that I think a lot of people don't understand how you have different departments, different organizations within the government that are at odds with each other. And like a real, like the most friendly of these is between, let's say, the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Air Force. And they all, oh, well, they are trying to get a little bit more money. They're trying to get a little bit more manning.

And so you have this sort of little rivalry where they're all competing. But it's all very much in the clear. It's all very obvious to the world that this is what's going on. So the budgets are all in the open. But when you start talking about the FBI, you start talking about the CIA,

you start talking about the marshals, and then you throw in the mob and you throw in the Cubans. It is like, it is, it's mayhem. It's mayhem. And so that's what your uncle, Was up against and brought your brother in as well to go against but it's it's you have all these competing and it's not really just competing for money. They're also it's competing ideologies and so you had Jay Edgar Hoover Like you said was an interesting person and he's got his ideology that he's trying to protect and and push and that goes against what what your uncle's trying to do in a lot of cases and you brought up you know and this is a huge part of the book and a huge part of your

your family's legacy as well, and that is the civil rights movement that's happening. I mean, this was like, again, it's mayhem, it's movies get made about these incidents. You talked about the Old Miss, getting James Meredith enrolled at Old Miss. What do you remember about that from a perspective of what's going on in the country? What does that look like? Well, that was all happening at Hickory Hills. So my father would be, Hickory Hill was a satellite White House,

and we had phones in every room with five lines on them, which nobody else had. I never knew anybody who had, you know, five lines on their telephone. And they were directly connected to the White House, which were so they could literally get anybody in the country on the phone within minutes. But, and the, you know,

there would be U.S. marshals in our home. There would be the entire civil rights staff in the White House. meeting in our living room or around the swimming pool and having lunch and planning these actions, what are we going to do? And I'd sit behind the couch and listen to them. My father, when important things happen, like when they integrated University of Alabama, University of Mississippi, or when they were fighting with freedom writers, my father would write letters to each of his kids and tell them what was happening. He also talked to us every night at the

dinner table. And he'd either talk about history, he was an incredible, military historian. And he would talk about the battles that changed history, you know, the Demosonies and whatever, you know, all of these great battles. And he gave us very, very vivid descriptions of those battles. But he also would talk about what was happening in the White House. And he, you know, I have a letter at home that says, here, Bobby, today, we nationalize the, we federalized the National Guard in Alabama, and we got six Negroes. the six Negroes into the University of Alabama. And I hope these troubles are gone when you go to college.

So, you know, he wanted to keep us kind of updated, which his father had done for him on current events. And the story with my father, my dad in the civil rights movement and my uncle, they grew up in Boston. And like you know, having grown up in New England, there just, civil rights was not an issue there. It wasn't even on their radar.

They didn't know people who had been, they didn't know what was happening in the South. They assume that, you know, the blacks that they met, the very few that were in Boston and Roxbury is, that, you know, their lives were much like other immigrants, you know. and so they didn't it just wasn't on their radar and then during the 1960 election they needed to win the

south Nixon and you know the south was going to be key to the election that's why they chose linda johnson as the vice president because that was the way to win Texas but they were also worried about the other deep south states which traditionally had been always voted for the Democratic party. It's called the Solid South. But during the Roosevelt era, whites in the South began defecting a little bit to the Republican Party, and blacks started voting Democratic, some blacks, not a majority, but enough to change the elections. The few blacks who were allowed to vote, you know, there were as a voting block. But the whites were more important. And the only only way you could hang on to whites in the South was by expressing an antipathy for civil rights,

either indirectly or through dog whistles or whatever. My father, who's the campaign manager, had made deals with three southern governors, powerful governors, including Van Dievner, from Georgia, that they would support JFK. But all of them had said, But if you get involved with Martin Luther King, we're gone, we're out. Because we can't stand up for, we cannot stand that, take that from our own constituents. So my father was kind of avoiding King and made sure his brother avoided King. Nixon was doing the same thing. Nixon had been very close to King.

They had a strong relationship. And Republicans had traditionally been on the side of blacks in the south. since the Lincoln and the Civil War. So in October of 1960, a month before the November election, King gets arrested at a lunch counter sit-in in DeKalb County, Georgia, and he didn't even want to do it.

He was pressured to do it by some young, you know, guys, sort of radical, is John Lewis and others from the next southern nonviolent coordinating committee, which is another group. And he reluctantly did it, and then he got arrested. And then he's in the DeKalb County Jail at 4 o'clock in the morning. Cops come into this jail cell, drag him out. They don't tell him anything. They throw him in the back of the police car.

Head south, he's saying where I'm going, they won't talk to him. And he said they brought him down at what he called Cracker Country, a place in Georgia, where you could easily lynch him, and nobody would complain. So, and what they were really doing, they bring him to a state prison, and they threw him in the state prison, but they didn't tell Coretta, his wife,

where he was, and she was terrified. So she called Sarge Shriver, my uncle who was always involved in the civil rights issue, and she said, I tried to talk to Nixon, who's then vice president could help he won't answer my phone calls. And that destroyed King's relationship with Nixon, that in this instant.

He calls Sarge Driver and she says, can I talk to the president? Sarge then goes into my uncle's office and his aides are in there in the other office. And Sarge says, I want a favor from you. I've never asked one before. Can I talk to you alone? Because he knew the AIDS would not let him make this call.

The AIDS old will leave the room. And Jack then hears the story and says, yeah, I'll call her. So he calls Corretta. My father then, a few moments later, finds out about it. And he goes to Sarge Driver angrily, and he said, you just lost us the election. And my father then goes home. He goes out of Hickory Hill changing because he's getting on an airplane. And he starts thinking about it, you know, that they arrested this guy for doing nothing.

and now they moved him in the middle of night, now they might kill him. And he didn't know much about civil rights, but he hated bullies. And in fact, when he had played football for Harvard and they had gone on the road, and he had learned for the first time that blacks could not say,

a black teammate of his, couldn't stay in the hotel, and he had raised Holy L. and then at University of Virginia, he had invited this black statement, Ralph Bunch, speak there and he learned about the segregation laws that he could not address an integrated audience. And he raised such hell at University of Virginia, and it was the first integrated audience in the

history of the state at a state institution. So he had sort of a sense of it. He just didn't have, you know, the whole view. So on the way of the airport, he started steaming and thinking about it. He hates bullies. He gets the airport. He goes to a phone booth. And he gets the DeKalb County Sheriff on the line at home. And he says, this is Robert Kennedy. My brother's going to be president a month. If anything happens to Dr. King, we will remember who you are. And you will not forget it.

And then he calls the judge and says, you know, has a similar conversation with him. And he gets Jack to call the governor. and Jack calls Van Diebner and says, can you get him out of jail? And Van Dievner says, I don't think I can. And Jack said, well, listen to what I'm saying. I want you to try.

And then I want you to tell me, call me back and tell me what you have done. And the next morning, King was released. So King never made an endorsement, but his father, Daddy King, spoke, I think, at the Dexter Avenue of Baptist Church that weekend on Sunday. and he had previously endorsed Nixon, and he changes in endorsement to Kennedy.

And that word spread throughout the black community. And my uncle won the black vote. And because of that, he won the presidency, because it was the narrowest margin in the history of our country at that time. So I think that was one of the things that kind of cemented the relationship, and then they just became partners with King in the civil rights movement. You know, they did a 1963 march on Washington with King. They handled all the arrangements.

And that was the famous speech where King says, you know, I have a dream. I have a dream speech. And then my father had a very close relationship with King after Jack died. And, you know, when King was killed, my father gave this impromptu speech in the Black ghetto in Indianapolis. and that was the only city that didn't riot that night. And it's attributed to the speech that my father gave. And before King died, my father and King collaborated on the poor people's campaign,

which summons all the poor people in our country to Washington, D.C. And when the day that we buried my dad, we drove past these encampments. There were 10,000 men encamped on the mall in Washington, D.C. And who, you know, both my father and King who had died two months before, had summons there, and now both of them were gone. Just to rewind a little bit, you talked about LBJ, you talked about Vietnam. One of the quotes from your uncle was in the final analysis, it's their war, and that's why he had decided to bring everyone back from there.

LBJ, I don't like LBJ, I guess if I'm allowed to not like someone that I've never met before. I don't like him and I also throw into that basket McNamara and in the book you seem to shine a light a friendlier light on McNamara than I do. It seemed like maybe McNamara was trying to do his best to control LBJ and just he felt like if he didn't kind of go along with what LBJ wanted LBJ would just get rid of him and someone else would And drop a nuke on North Vietnam. Yeah. I mean, that's always a dilemma.

And, you know, it's a dilemma for a lot of the people who said, who were criticized for staying with Trump, you know, who said, no, I stayed there because it would have been so much worse or other presidents, you know. So, you know, I don't know, history, I think is, history judges him like you do very harshly. I think that, did you see the movie Fog of War? Yes. And how did you think he came out of that? I felt the same. I really felt, you look terrible. Yeah.

And I just, yeah, when I look at the Vietnam War and the books I've read and McNamara's, what is it, McNamara's Follies, I think is what he lowered the mental or the, the acuity score. So you basically had people that were mentally disabled being accepted into the military so they could fill the slots they need. I mean, it was just a disaster across the board. And the fact that they knew, you know, halfway through the war and that they, that they weren't going to win and they had, they knew they weren't going to win and they still lost another 20 or 30,000 men. So, yeah, all those things make me really. Killed a half a million of them.

Yeah, and killed a half a million of them. After, after that, because they killed a million altogether. Yeah. And the fact that LBJ during, you know, he, his whole, his whole. whole, you know, he was in the military, but he kind of got in as a political person and he went on one operation flying to bomb somewhere and the plane. He got a silver star from this. The pilot of the plane that saved the plane didn't even get a silver star and he got, so I just, yeah, I have a grudge against those guys, I guess.

Yeah, I think he came from, I think my father and uncle brought him into the Defense Department because he was a good manager, you know, he'd been the CEO of the four. motor company and he was you know they wanted a they wanted some Republicans in the administration he had been a Republican but my father really liked him personally and I you know sort of grew up with him and his kids what I would tell you I and I wouldn't differ with your judgment about him I think you know there's a lot of different ways as you know of judging you know men and character and you can never be completely sure but there's a lot of bad evidence against him my father thought my father called him every single night I think I write about this in the book literally every

night yeah that's it says before he went to bed and said you got to publicly resign and uh and and and magnair would keep saying to him I can't do it if they if I do it they're going to drop a new on on Hanoi so you know if so who knows yeah um you also have the um Obviously, you mentioned it briefly, but the whole thing that happened in Berlin and then the big Berlin speech that JFK gave. Freedom has many difficulties in democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in. Then, like you mentioned, JFK gets, or JFK gets assassinated. What's going on in your world when that happens? I mean, what's going on in the Kennedy family when that happens?

How do things change? Does anybody says, what do we? Does it strengthen our resolve? You know, I have a friend that's an ER doctor, and he always tells the story that if a family has problems and something tragic happens to the family, like someone gets killed, if the family has some fissures,

it can either explode the family and they come apart, or it can actually make them tighter and stronger and strengthen their resolve. It would appear from the outside that it strengthened the resolve of the family when your uncle got killed. What did it look like from the inside? I don't know, you know,

I'd have to think that through because I think everything was happening all at once. First of all, my father was utterly shattered. He was bereft and he was, you know, he was staring out into space. He was trying to do his best to be apparent to us. And I think the one time that he kind of escaped from the very grim thoughts that he was having was when he was with us, then he would play sports.

We'd play football. We'd play in the pool. He started doing a lot of wilderness trips with us. We started doing a lot of mountain climb. He climbed Mount Kennedy, the tallest on climbed peak in the hemisphere. He took up whitewater kayaking, which we all learned when we were very, very young. This is a time when people were not doing whitewater in our country. And then doing other kind of extreme sports.

He also, he went through kind of a, I think, what it was a healthy, philosophical, reconstruction where he never left the Catholic Church or his faith. But he kind of had this very simplistic belief that, you know, that good was rewarded here on earth, that, you know, that good would ultimately triumph over evil and that, you know, good people got some kind of reward here on earth a tangible reward. And his brothers, that shattered all that. You know, anything he believed about, you know, a beneficent universe was now gone. And he had to reconstruct a philosophy that was much more stoic in its nature.

So he started looking for, you know, outside of the Catholic faith, he read Shakespeare, the existentialist, he read, he read, the poets, he read a lot of the Greeks, and he immersed himself in the philosophies of stoicism. I talk a lot about, you know, my father, two weeks before he died, he gave me a book called, a chemo called The Plague. And that book is, that book, and I've talked about this before, but that book is a book, and I've talked about this before, but that book is a, about a, and he said to me with kind of a special intensity, I want you to read this book. And he would tell me that about poems or books all the time. But this time there was something

about how he said, and then he died two weeks later. And so I end up reading that book several times to try to unlock the key of why it was so important to him. But the book is about a doctor or in a quarantine city in North Africa, that where there's an unknown plague that is ravaging the city and people are dying, it's very high infection fatality rate. Nobody knows how to treat it.

Anybody who comes into contact with sick people ends up sick, and almost all of them die. And it's the story of a doctor who is of a conversation that he's having with himself about whether he should leave his quarters and try to treat people. And he's almost certainly going to die if he does that. And there's nothing really good that's going to come of it, of course,

because he doesn't know how to treat him. Nobody does. And so what's the point of doing it? Shouldn't he just take care of himself? In the end, he ends up going and doing his duty. And he consoles people, he gives them consolation. He ministers them with him as he dies. And Camus was a...

was an existentialist, but he was kind of the legate of the existentialists were of the Stoic philosophy. So in the Stoics believe that, you know, that life is kind of meaningless. The universe is absurd, but that somehow through individual character and acts of courage, we can bring meaning and order to a disorderly universe. And their hero was Sisyphus. Sisyphus is cursed by the gods to push a boulder up a hill for the rest of eternity. And he's got to push it over. His mission is to push it over the edge of the cliff.

But every time he gets to the very top, he pushes it all day. When he gets the top of the hill just before it rolls over, it rolls back on him and it mangles him in some new way every day. And then it rolls all the way down to the bottom. the mountain he used to go down there all night long and then he comes back and pushes up the next day the normal person would look at that and say this is a very miserable man but in the view of the stoics sycphus was a happy man and camus wrote a book about him called cisphus a smile where you can see him smiling because ultimately happiness comes from doing your duty from putting your shoulder to the

wheel from undertaking the tasks, the unpleasantries of life, the difficulties and challenges of life, and doing the right thing. And that's the only source of happiness and order in the universe. Everything else is just, you know, window dressing. But true happiness comes from hardship and from, you know, from pushing the, from challenging and the, unabsurd and meaningless universe. through development of personal character. So, you know, I think my dad. That's a very clear explanation as if that's what your father was thinking. Yeah.

After your uncle gets killed and a few years go by and he decides that he's going to, he's going to run for president himself. That actually makes perfect sense. Yeah. Well, you mentioned this briefly, but I think it's actually, worth reading and that is so now fast forward a little bit

again get the book get all the details but your dad's now running for president and well I'm going to go to the book on April 4th my dad was scheduled to give a campaign speech in the roughest part of Indianapolis

Black ghetto a place no white American politician would go as voters were sparse and safety concerns manifold just before he headed into the inner city neighborhood he learned that an assassin had murdered Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis.

My father staggered in anguish at the news. Oh God, he said, when is this violence going to stop? The Indianapolis police chief warned him not to enter the neighborhood. When my father said he was going in, the captain withdrew his police escort. Most of the electrified crowd were unaware of the tragedy as he climbed on the flatbed to address them. The night was cold. I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world.

And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight. The crowd gave a collective gasp of horror. Then my dad went on to speak directly for the first time about the circumstances of Jack's death. His brother was killed by a white man, speaking from the battlefield of his own psychic struggles with a calm but breaking voice,

He urged everyone, quote, not to be filled with bitterness, with hatred, with a desire for revenge. We could respond with violence and polarization, he said, or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that is spread across our land with an effort to understand with compassion and love. My dad's Indianapolis speech was not an artful, rehearsed, oratorical masterpiece. It was an anguished, visceral expression of shared agony. He had never spoken about his brother's death like that before. The crowd sensed he was doing something unusual and gave him their hearts. Indianapolis was one of the few cities with large black communities that did not explode in riots that night. 119 other cities were not so fortunate and President Johnson deployed 75,000 soldiers to quell the violence.

Casualties included 2,500 injured and 39 dead. From our boarding school in Rockville, Maryland, we watched smoke rise over the Capitol and troop trucks roll past all day. Hell did that feel like in the country at the time? I can't imagine. It must have seemed like everything was just kind of hanging on by a threat. Yeah, I think it was. I mean, there's a story, I think, that I wrote in there about my father toward flew home and toward Washington, D.C. that morning,

and it was just, you know, burning heaps of rubble, southeast Washington. And my father sort of climbed over a big pile of a exploded building and was coming down this rubble pile, and there was a black woman standing in the street looking up at him through the smoke. And when she recognized him, she said, oh, it's you. I knew you would be here. So that was, you know, I think that that was,

You know, that was the place that he began to fill in the American psyche. And then, I mean, you have LBJ drops out of the race, and then your father gets killed. How old are you at that time? I was 14. I was with him. I was not with him when he was shot. My little brother, David, was, and some of my other younger siblings were. But I, you know, he was brought to Good Samaritan Hospital.

I was woken up in my bed. I was at a boarding school. Outside of Washington, D.C., I was woken up by the priest. And he said, he didn't say what had happened. He just said, there's a car waiting for you. I was woke up maybe 5.30 in the morning. And I was taken to the, I think it's Andrews Air Force Base, and then put on with some of my siblings,

the older kids who were not traveling with my father, Kathleen and Joe, and myself, I'm the third of 11 kids, that we were sent out in Hubert Humphreys Plain, who was the vice president, to Los Angeles. And my father died that night, so I was with him when he died. And then we brought him back to Washington. And we brought him back to New York. And it was interesting. I mean, he didn't have police protection.

He didn't want protection from the LAPD because they were very racist. And in the black communities, which were supporting him, they were hated. And then the Secret Service, he wasn't entitled to Secret Service that time. You didn't get it until after the convention. whoever won the convention got secret service the FBI Hoover offered him FBI protection but he thought that that's just going to be Hoover spying on me and reporting to Johnson whatever I do so I'm not going to do that so he relied he had the Oakland Raiders the fearsome foursome he had you know these big linemen from the Oakland waiters who were his personal

bodyguard and then you know Rosie Greer also Rayford Johnson who was the decathlon and then when he went on the road, he had this odd assortment of escorts. He had a Black Panther Party, which was acting as his bodyguard and the Hells Angels. And when we, which is, if you think of it today, it's weird. But I remember when we took off, they all rode their bikes out onto the runway, and they were kind of like escorting, you know, U.S. too, which, you know, of course today you couldn't get away with, but back then the runways were very accessible, and so you had about 100 bikers on the runway, and I don't think they never understood how to

plane engine work, but when the jet took off, it blew a bunch of them off their bikes, and we were watching from the plane windows, and that was just one of these little things, vignettes that, you know, in a very weird period, we flew them to New York, and we waked them at St. Patrick's Cathedral. I remember, you know, I was one of the pallbearers who we brought him down, and it was Fifth Avenue was just jammed, you know, people, eight or nine foot, even the whole length of Fifth Avenue, that part of Fifth Avenue, and we, the coffin was very heavy, and we brought him down the steps there,

and there was a crowd of blacks who were singing, the Battle of the Republic, Glory, Glory, out, as we came out, and this very, very large black woman stepped, you know, in front of the coffin as we were trying to lug it down that staircase, and she collapsed on the stairs,

and she was waving a handkerchief at the coffin, saying, you know, you've done your best, you've done your best, was very, you know, emotional. and, you know, you can rest now, she was saying. And then we brought them to Penn Station, and we brought them down to Penn Station, to Union Station of Washington. And as I say in the book,

it was supposed to be a two and a half hour ride, but it was seven hours because there was a couple of million people on the tracks, and there was the whole panoply, the cross-section of the American experience, of blacks and whites, and we were going one mile an hour. Windows were all open on the train. The people on that train, you know, Arthur Sletnery later said,

would have made the most interesting government in American history. There were poets and economists and, you know, civil rights activists and Indian rights and Hispanic rights and, you know, some of the great musicians and poets in the world at that time. and Carretta King was on there with us. But we were going one mile or so. When we went through those train stations,

we could hear people singing. There were thousands of blacks who were in those train stations. They were singing that Battle of Him of the Republic. And then we got to Washington. President Johnson picked us up in a confoy, and we went up the hill. We went past the mall where the pool. people's campaign.

There were, you know, thousands of poor men, and they all came to the sidewalk and stood, you know, eight or nine deep with their heads bowed, their hats, their hats, holding their hats of their chest, just standing there silent as we drove by. And we drove up to Arlington and buried my dad next to his brother under a small stone. And then four years later, I was in Boston. I was a college student, and I was studying American history and politics. And I came across demographic data that showed that those whites would line the train tracks.

And they had voted strongly for my father in Pennsylvania and Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland. They had supported my dad in 1968, four years later in 1972. They didn't vote for George McGovern, who was completely aligned with my father in every issue, but they voted largely almost altogether for George Wallace, who was diametrically opposed to everything that my dad believed in. He was rampant segregation as his announcement speech that year. He had promised segregation now, segregation forever. He had stood in the school house dorm when my father tried to get, you know,

tried to get, you know, Vivian Malone and five other blacks into the, you know, Old Miss. And he was a, you know, he was a bad guy. And, you know, I later got to know Wallace very well. He made a big turn in his life after he himself was shot and was paralyzed from life, but he ran for governor successfully after that a couple of times. And I knew him when I was living in Alabama. But he was antithetical to everything my father believed in. And it occurred to me then, how could these same people who voted for the idealism of Robert Kennedy then go vote for the cynicism of George Wallace? And it occurred to me then and struck me many times since that every nation, like every individual, has a darker side and a lighter.

side and that the easiest thing for political leaders to do is to appeal to our greed, to our bigotry, to our hatred, to our xenophobia, you know, to push all the alchemies of demagoguery. And that my father tried to do something different, which was to get people, to persuade people to transcend their narrow self-interest and see themselves as part of a community, to see themselves as part of of a noble adventure to find a hero in each one of us and say, okay, we're going to take a risk, you know, by trusting people, by being part of a community, by thinking that we're part of something that's larger than ourselves that's worth devoting our lives to, you know, making this country live up to its promises and exemplary nation. And my dad was able to do that out with people.

And I think, you know, there's other politicians. our history who have done the same thing. William Jennings Bryant did that, and a lot of other ones, Lincoln. But, you know, I think that's the challenge because the same people can go to a dark place. You know, we all have the lighter angels of light and the angels of darkness.

And, you know, there's the old metaphor about each of us has a, has a white wolf on one shoulder and a dark wolf on the other. And, you know, how do you know which one is going to win the battle? And it's the one you feed. And, you know, if you feed them with good activity and good conduct and virtuous thoughts, and, you know, then the white wolf is going to get bigger. And if you feed them with hatred and bigotry and fear and, you know,

self-interest, the dark will win. I think the same is true for our country. Yeah, I've never heard that metaphor of the nation having gone. I've wondered about that, what that actually was. So this traumatic period that we went through with the death of your uncle, Martin Luther King, and then your dad. And yeah, let's like I was talking about earlier, where the family that has something bad happened to it, It can either solidify their values and make them stronger or it can turn them to the dark side. And yeah, that's the thing with voting for Wallace as opposed to who's diametrically opposed to what your father believed in in four years time.

That's a dramatic turn. I want to go to the book here for a second. July 4th, 1969, up until that point in my life, in conformance with King Frederick II's prescription against the inebriation among falconers, which I had not talked about. You were a falconer, and you had started hunting with falcons and other birds. And this guy, King Frederick II, had all these rules that you were following. I had resolved to never used drugs or alcohol. In fact, I'd never even tasted coffee.

However, I'd recently gathered from my favorite comic book, To Rock, Son of Stone, that hallucinogens might allow me to see dinosaurs, which I greatly desired. Jeff O'Neill assured me that this was a near certainty. So I swallowed the LSD, which more than delivered on his promise. Buildings melted like wax candles, trees bowed and swayed on a windless night, bright lights with long comet tails, lent Hyannisport, the cheery, or. of Christmas in July. Still tripping, I rode into hyanus with two older kids struggling and struggled in a Main Street diner with a plate of lively white noodles that squirmed and squeaked as I stabbed at them with my fork. I became suddenly appreciative of the impossibly complex choreography of minute movements required by my mouth in its various

parts in order to chew and swallow food. Abandoning that endeavor, I looked up to see a picture hanging behind the counter of my father. Uncle Jack and Jesus. All of them had their hands folded in prayer. Until that moment, everything had been a delight. My soul was happy with this strange new adventure, and I was laughing along with my friends. Now things turned sour.

I greatly admired all three of those fellows, and I doubted that any of them would have approved of my hallucinogens. A pall came over me. What was I doing? My father had been practically, had been practically, teetotaler a straight arrow his personal life was beyond reproach he had sacrificed his life to a higher purpose and here I was high on drugs I left my friends and walked the three miles back to hyenas port swearing I would never do drugs again by then it was morning and I was in a funk

wondering how I was going to explain my all-night absence and cope with my exhaustion a few blocks from my home, I ran into a group of boys who prescribed me a line of methadrine. And that snort miraculously solved all my problems for that day. So thus begins a period of your life with drugs. Yeah, so my, what they call progression was very, very fast. Within several weeks, I was shooting heroin. And I did that from when I was 15 years old to when I was 28. And I got sober at 28.

You know, virtually all that time, I was taking drugs against my own conscience. So I was trying to stop. I was constantly making vows, making efforts to stop. But I couldn't do it. And the weird thing was for me that I had iron willpower in other parts of my life. I gave up candy for Lent when I was. I was 13 and I never ate it again until I was in college. I gave up desserts the next year and I never for lent.

I never had another dessert till I was in college. I was playing sports. I was playing rugby and was trying to bulk up so I started eating desserts again. And I felt I could do anything with willpower. And yet this compulsion was completely impervious to anything that I threw at it. I can make a resolve and stay sober for a week, two weeks, three weeks, but then I'd be doing it again. And the most demoralizing feature of this illness of addiction for me was my incapacity to keep contracts with myself. I would tell myself at 9 o'clock in the morning, earnestly, sincerely, honestly, I am never going to do that again.

and at four o'clock in the afternoon I'd be doing it. It was like somebody else had stepped into my body and was now, you know, it was now manipulating the gears and driving the rig. And I had no capacity to bind that person with anything that I said earlier. And, you know, I went, I struggled like that for 14 years. I'm not saying it was all bad

because I had a lot of fun during that period, and I did a lot of wild time. things and but I was always I was always trying to stop and you know particularly toward the end it became it became miserable it's like it's like dancing with a

gorilla you know it's really fun and exhilarating in the beginning and you know you realize that you're dancing until the gorilla tells you to he's ready to stop yeah you end up

and again a bunch of this This is the stuff from the book. You get kicked out of a couple of schools. You get arrested with your cousin in 1970 for marijuana possession. You end up getting, you graduate in 1972 from high school. You go to Harvard. You graduate from Harvard. You end up getting your law degree from University of Virginia.

You get sworn in as the assistant district attorney for Manhattan. You get married. you fail your bar exam, which is interesting. How do you fail your bar exam? At one point. Okay. Fair enough. $6.59 out of $6.60.

You know, I was, you know, I was, you know, I was, the weird thing about heroin for me is that I, it made me, I was very bad in school when I was a kid. I had ADHD and I just, it, the voice of the teachers just sounded. like a foreign language to me. I couldn't understand anything. I couldn't sit still. My mind was racing all the time and I couldn't read. I just could not sit still in my head or physically. I was always movement. And when I started doing narcotics, I went from the bottom of my class to the top of my class. I went from, I was either the first or second in my class at every school I went to after I started after I started doing narcotics.

And I, you know, it allowed me to get into Harvard. It allowed me to flourish. And if it still worked, I'd still be doing it. You know, it stopped working for me. And it also was destroying my life in other ways. Well, yeah, most people don't get off that train. I mean, most people don't get off the heroin train alive, right?

I don't know most, but I would say, that's probably a good guess that um you know and particularly these days i think you know with the with the advent of the age of fentanyl it's you're much more likely to die than you are to get sober um and you know i had this i had a um i was lucky um i was um you know i got i had a i had a i had a i had a i was had in 1983 at the end of 1983 I had I went to a rehab and I had a spiritual awakening that freed me from addiction so it was it's almost like for me it was like a miracle like almost as if I could walk on water it would be that shocking because I had really tried and then suddenly it was just lifted it was like as if it never had happened as if I never had the compulsion and I had um

I knew that I wanted to have a, the only thing that was going to save me was a profound spiritual realignment that I had to change in some fundamental way, the person that I was, because I was an addict. You know, I was a junkie. And if I didn't change in a very, very fundamental way who I was, that I was going to either be white-knuckling it for the rest of my life and fighting me. impulse, which would have been a miserable existence, or I was going to find some way to make myself into a normal person, just a guy who wakes up in the morning and is not thinking of heroin all day and cocaine. And I had a couple of things happened to me. One is, first of all,

I'd read the lives of the saints, because we did that every night when we were kids. So I knew that there were templates, there were examples of people who throughout history, who had had these very decadent lives, like St. Augustine was one, until he was 30 years old. His mother was St. Monica. She prayed for him every day until he was 30, and he was a whoremonger. He was living with prostitutes. He was a sex addict. He was a total alcoholic. And at the age 30, he transformed. He became the most important figure, and one of the most important figures in the history of Christianity. St. Francis Fasisi, the same thing. He was, you know, he led her rather debauch life.

He was a soldier, and he was a, he was a party guy. He was a musician, and, you know, he was a party guy, and then he had had this spiritual transformation. St. Paul had the same thing. Everybody knows at Damascus. But I also had a personal experience, because I had a friend and two of my brothers died from this disease, David and Michael, you know, in ways that were, as a direct result ultimately of this disease, one of them had an overdose, the other in a ski

accident. But one of them, my brother David had a friend who was one of his best friends, who had the same level of addiction that I did, and that David did. and took drugs with the same enthusiasm and compulsion and, you know, recklessness and out of control. And he became a Mooney. So he joined the Unification Church and became a follower of Reverend Sun Young Moon. And he didn't want to take drugs anymore. And he would still hang out with us. But he would be chattering about his new life.

And we could take drugs right in front of him. he was indifferent to them. And I used to think about him, and I think to myself when I was getting sober, I think I'd rather be dead than be a mooney, because that's the kind of narrow view that I had of life at that point. But I wish somehow I could distill whatever it was that gave him this imperviousness to the compulsion

without turning into a religious nuisance. And at the same time, I picked up this book by Carl Young. And Carl Young was, you know, one of the fathers of modern psychiatry. And he was, he was, Freud was his mentor. But Freud wanted him to be his successor, but he had a big different, with Freud. If Freud was an atheist and Young was a deeply spiritual man, his father had been a preacher. Interestingly, his father had never had a genuine, authentic spiritual experience and was just kind of very, very good at repeating at wrote the shibbolous and, you know, sort of consensual

you know, language and vernacular of religious beliefs. And he was very good at it. but he never believed it, and he ended up. And meanwhile, Young himself began having genuine spiritual experience when he was three or four years old. His biography is extraordinary, because he has perfect memory. And he was having dreams then that were, you know, very significant, but also these other spiritual things that happened to him. And I'll tell you one of the things that happened in this book,

he young um so young spent a lot of time thinking not only about mental health but also of how to induce profound spiritual experiences and he the book that i read is called synchronicity and synchronicity means a coincidence essentially it's one of these things that happens to us like if you spend if you if you're talking about somebody that you haven't thought about in 20 years and the phone rings and it's that person on the phone. And these kind of things happen to us all the time, right? And we can either dismiss them and say, oh, that's just a coincidence. But he would put significance into them.

And he thought this was a way that God broke his own rules that he set up when he put the universe in spinning, the rules of mathematics, the rules of science, the rules of biology, and that God was, and the rules of change. chance and God was breaking those rules to come in and kind of tap us on the shoulder and saying, you know, I'm here and I'm watching stuff. And I'm interested in you particularly. You know, I'm showing you these kind of little miracles where, you know, the rules of the universe are shattered. So he was sitting, he ran the biggest sanitarium in Europe and he's sitting

and with his back to the window. And he's talking to a patient, a female page, who's sharing a dream with him. And he was very big on dreams. And the dream is about the central fulcrum of the dream is a scarab beetle, which is a creature that has these profound kind of spiritual significance. It's very common iconography on the tombs, the hieroglyphics, on the obelisk, the tombs of Egypt.

But it's almost unknown in northern Europe where he was. and there's a rick in Switzerland. And so he's talking to her, and she's telling him about this scarletal dream, and he's hearing this ping, pink, ping on the window behind him. And it's irritating him, but he doesn't want to turn his attention away from his patient. So he just, he maintains his posture for a while,

but then it became so exasperating to him that he finally gets up and he throws the window open and a scarletal flow. and lands in his palm. And he turns to her and says, that's what you were talking about. So, and those kind of things happen to him all the time. In his biography, which is called dreams, memories,

and something else, which is, if anybody wants to read about young, they should read his biography. They should not read synchronicity, which was the one that was much more difficult read. But, um, uh, so he, he saw these,

this divine intervention. And what he tried to do is to, he tried to reproduce that phenomena in a clinical setting. So he would put one guy in one room, another guy in another room, and he'd have them flip cards. And he, and guess what the other guy had flipped. And he believed that if he could beat the laws of percentages, laws of chance, the laws of mathematics, that way he would have proven the existence of a supernatural force because this was beyond the laws of nature. And if you could beat the laws of nature,

then you could say there's something out there that we cannot explain through the laws of nature and that that was the first step in proving the existence of a God, which he was a very spiritual man, but he was also a very faithful scientist. So he's trying to use these tools to improve the existence. of God. Well, he fails. He can't do it. And he says in the book that he could not use empirical tools or scientific tools to demonstrate the existence of a God. But he then said this. He said, having seen

tens of thousands of patients come through his sanitarium, that he could prove that people who believed in God got better, faster, and that their recovery was more durable than people who did not. And that statement had a profound impact on me, much more profound than if he had said, and he had proved the existence of a God, which I would not have believed, right? But what he was saying is, it's irrelevant if there's a God up there. If you believe in him, your chance of getting sober are much higher than if you don't believe. And for me, you know, I had already made a vow to myself that I was going to do anything. that improved even 1% my chances of staying sober.

So, you know, I made an intellectual decision. I'm going to start believing in God. And then I confronted, you know, the universal dilemma, which is how do you start believing in something that you can't see or smell or touch or taste or hear or acquire with your senses? And Young answers that question. He says, fake it to you make it.

act as if that the compliance will precede the evidence, then once you start complying and living like you're somebody who believes, pretending you believe, you actually start seeing evidence that will put that supposition beyond any reasonable doubt. So that's what I did. I started, I just said, okay, I'm going to pretend there's a God up there that he's looking at me the whole time, and that everything that I do is kind of a moral choice has a moral dimension to it.

And I began breaking my, and that I had to behave myself even when I didn't have an audience, you know, and even when I didn't have eyewitnesses. So I started breaking my day down into about 40 different decisions. and each one has a moral implication. Do I, when the alarm goes off in the morning, do I get out of bed immediately, or do I lie in bed for another 15 minutes with my indolent thoughts? Do I hang up the towels when I go?

Do I make my bed? That's the most important thing every day. Even when I'm staying at a hotel now, I make my bed, which is ridiculous. It's crazy to do that. But I do it because it's part of building care. character, which is what we're doing here. We're not here to build a pile for ourselves and whoever dies with the most stuff wins. You know, we're here to build character, which is the

only thing that is enduring, that's durable, that will survive our own lives. And so, and you do that by making the bed even when you don't need to, you know, by doing the right thing, even when somebody's not looking at you. So do I put the water in the ice tray before? I put the ice right back in the freezer. You know, when I reach into my closet and I pull out a pair of blue jeans and all those little wire hangers fall on the floor of the closet, do I go in there and say, because what I used to do is say, hey, I got a lot to do today.

I am too important for that job. That's somebody else's job. And I shut the closet door. And I left a lot of those closed closets all day long, you know, for other people to do, right? and so now I go in there and I hang them all up even if I'm in a rush when I do I put the shopping cart back where it's supposed to go you know and I remember when I first got sober I was I was my life had gotten very very small which is what

it happens you get isolated you get small from addiction and when I got sober my life started getting big very quickly And I was running through National Airport, and I was late for a plane. It was mission critical, like the, I don't even remember what it was, but the apocalypse was gonna happen if I didn't make that plane,

and I was late and was already gonna miss it. And as I was running, I was putting a piece of dentine in my mouth, and I wrapped the wrapper up, and I was running, and I threw the wrapper into a garbage can and make a perfect arc right into the center, swish of the can. But I noticed through that corner of my eye that it must have hit something in there and jump back out. I was like, well, that's God's fault because I made the shot, right? So I come running. But then I got about 40 or 50 feet down that terminal, and it just started eating at me.

And I put on the brakes and I went back and put that little piece of garbage back in the can. And I still made my plane. But the most important thing that day that I did was to do that. That little task is the most important thing I did on that day. Because the whole challenge with life and sobriety but also life is how do we stay in that posture of surrender of humility? You know, how do we stay there? Even when the cash and prizes are flowing in and people are telling you how great you

are. and you got everything going for you. And that's when I want to say to God, thank you God, I got it from here, you know, and take the wheel and drive the car off the cliff again. You know what I mean? Got to watch out for that one. How long did the spiritual awakening take?

Like, how long were you in rehab for you? Within, I had it from when I made that decision. I'll tell you what happened to me. I went out, I finished that book, and by the time I finished that book, I had made a decision. I'm going to turn my life over to God, okay, whatever that means, however I find him. And so I made that decision. And then I closed that book, and I go to out, you know, these rehabs, they have a lot of

volleyball, and we went out to play volleyball. And during that volleyball game, a ball, somebody hit a ball. Somebody hit a ball on a very, very powerful punch. It went way up in the air, and then it came down, and he hit the top of the post with a net was tied. And it started up again, and I said out loud, so everybody heard me, I said, that ball is going to get hit by a Mack truck.

And the ball goes up again on this kind of air and flight. It lands right dead on the center of a chain link fence, and it topples over the other side onto a driveway. and it rolls down the grade about probably 40 or 50 feet into the middle of a thoroughfare and a big 18-wheeled diesel with a bulldog on the hood comes and pops and it goes bang you know a big resounding pop and everybody there just looked at me and said how did you know that it was just a moment but i was like okay this is you know and i had just finished that book about synchronicity. So I said, I felt like, you know, I was being tapped on the shoulder and I said,

I can either just say that was a coincidence and walk away or I can see God in it and I can be grateful and thankful and joyful, you know, that I, you know, that I got to see it so soon, you know, and that, and now I see those things every day in my life. I rely on them. And as long as I stay in that posture of surrender, you know, I have miracles in my life all the time. And it's like, you know, my life before I figured it's all out was all activity and no progress. You know, I had a lot of ambition. I was like a big truck, you know, that has headers and the pipes that are spitting fire and smoke and the engine revving and the wheel spinning stuck in a ditch going nowhere,

but a lot of energy going into it and a lot of activity, you know, getting stuff right to the end of the coal line and never getting across. And all of that. And now, and when you connect to that higher vibrations, to that spiritual side, and, you know, it's almost like you can put down the oars and hoist the sails and that you're being propelled. And it's like judo because, you know, if you apply the effort toward your spiritual condition,

then it pays off in all these other ways that just don't, in the reality that we live in, they don't seem connected, but they are. You know, if you can stay in that high vibration, just good things happen. So you get sober and then you kind of... Let me give you another metaphor just one thing that just occurred to me. When I was a kid, sometimes I'd pick a flower like a rose that was still in the bud and then try to unfold it.

And it never looks right. You know, and a lot of times you have to just learn to be still. You do your job, which is watering the flower. But otherwise, you leave it alone. And, you know, I remember when I got out of the rehab, I read a line from Isaiah that said, be still and know that I am God. And that had a huge impact on me of learning to be still is so much

because my life before was including drugs. It's about, you know, feeling discomfort and then having to fix it somehow. And, you know, growing up is about learning to live with this discomfort. and just experience it like dark clouds on the horizon that it's going to come through and that you just have to experience it and let it keep flowing and there's nothing to do about it you know and learning that learning to be still learning to be indifferent to pain learning to be indifferent to pleasure to desire those should be ultimately the ambition of an enlightened you know

of the spiritual enlightenment. Now your next phase in life, which is a long phase, is this environmental war. You go on, environmental support and trying to clean up the Hudson. It starts with the Hudson River,

Fisherman's Association, which eventually became riverkeepers, which became all kinds of keepers in a variety of different things across the world. I mean, the amount of work that you did in that is epic, epic amount of work. And you talked about this when you were on Joe Rogan's podcast, you went into significant amount of detail.

And by the way, if anyone hasn't listened to that podcast, on the podcast when you were on with Joe Rogan, and also when you were on with the All In podcast, you really kind of laid out your history when it comes to the environmental piece with the whole vaccine piece. You go into incredible depth on those. So that's a great, I don't want to have you

rehash all that stuff right now. But that's what you do for the next well I mean I guess it's the next like 20 years Basically actually more than 20 years almost 40. Yeah 40 years of These lawsuits you're a lawyer you end up in these incredible legal battles Protecting the environment going after big companies and industries that are destroying the environment and and and that's what you're focused on for years and years you know you sued Monsanto And it's too many to name. There's too many to name.

2020 comes around. And actually, COVID hits. I got to, I got, if you go and look at your Wikipedia page, which I got a good kick out of. Your Wikipedia page says, quote, known for advocating anti-vaccine misinformation and public health conspiracy theories. So that's just part of it. And what's really crazy, and I mean, of course, Joe Rogan has talked about this a lot. The kind of things that people were being banned from Twitter for saying have now been completely proven to be true.

There's all kinds of things like that. You wrote a book, The Real Anthony Fauci about Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the global war on democracy and public health. you wrote another book called the Wu Han cover-up so you've written these books you were crusading against those you know this sort of just vaccination for

and again I want to point out the fact that you're not anti-vax you there's all kinds of vaccines that you support there's just vaccines that you don't support um 23 April 19th 2023 you decide that you're going to run as run for president

and and to the best of what I can suss out right now, you go back to this Albert Camus theory of you got to do your duty. Is that a good assessment? Yeah. I mean, that's kind of a good summary of, you know, those years. And, you know, I hit a place where all the signs were telling me that this is something, this is the place that I can be most effective in my life. So I had toyed with the idea of running for political office earlier in my life. And then 90, what would have been when Hillary was, well, it would have been around 2006, when Hillary was appointed to the Secretary of State under Obama, what year would that have been?

Anyway, that, when she was, I thought about running for the Senate C, which my dad, seat in New York State my numbers were better than anybody else in the state and a lot of people had polled me then and my I had very you know I was working on the Hudson I was on TV all the time it was you know people really had affection for my dad would been senator from New York so it would have been a kind of an easy run for me to run for her United States Senator of New York and I was going to do that the year that Hillary ran but I had family issues that time that kept me from doing that. And then, and so I helped Hillary take that seat. I did advertisements for her. I did a lot of work for her. And then when she left and to go to the

State Department, David Patterson, who was the governor of New York, called me and offered me the job. He got to appoint her replacement. So he said, I want you to do it. And I said, give me 24 hours to think about it. And I had some of the same family issues at that time. that made me just say no. And at that point, that would have been the easiest way to political office, just an appointment without ever had to run. But at that point, I kind of was, any thought of ever running for political office was, you know, I felt like I was too old because not that I lacked energy,

but you have to be, particularly the U.S. Senate, you don't get a chairmanship of a committee until you've been there for three terms, which is like 18 years. You have to be there for a long time before you get any power. And so it's really a young man's, you know, game or young woman. You need to get in there a little earlier in life if you're going to be effective at it. And I didn't need the attention. A lot of people may run and just say, I'll use a bully pulpit,

but I already had as many microphones as I want. I could go on TV any time I wanted. So I didn't need attention, and I didn't, you know, I'd been in politics, political. I could call any politician America and they'd answer the phone. I could call the president getting him on the phone. I could call virtually any business leader and get him on the phone. So being in the Senate was not going to add to my life, my effectiveness, and it caused a lot of misery because you have to go live in Washington and my family was in New York and you know and I was

happy doing what I'm doing I was effective at it it was fun it's fun going for me I love being in a fist fight and you know I was in every fist fight at that time whether you know name a corporation that was polluting and I've sued them I brought over 500 losses successful losses you know I've lost plenty too I you know if you're not people who say they've never lost a lawsuit are not taking difficult ones and I was taking anything you know I was trying to figure out a way to sue anybody who mess with the environment and I tried a lot of novel stuff that didn't work but I tried mostly I was successful and so I you know and I was having fun and I got to do what I wanted to do I didn't have you know

press questioning me I and I had a wildlife you know I was having fun you know I was having fun and I I was, you know, I was a heroin addict. I rode freight trains across the country and, you know, I'd been arrested. I had all kinds of stuff that, you know, I'm not. I didn't want to explain to people. So, you know, I was happy, and I didn't have to explain to anybody about my personal conduct, you know. And so anyway, it was off the shelf. for me. And I started thinking when I saw this censorship, which I never believed the Democratic Party

moving to censor political opponents and everybody being okay with it, I saw this explosion of chronic disease in our country that was just being covered up. You know, diabetes today, we spend more on diabetes than we do for our national defense. This is great. When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see one diabetes case in his career. And today, one out of every three people who walk into his office kids is pre-diabetic or diabetic. And nobody's explaining this to us. In my generation, 70-year-old men, autism rates are one in 10,000 today, right now. One in 10,000.

in my kids generation, one in every 34 kids, one in every 22 boys, and nobody's explaining this. Why did food allergies disappear? Why did I not know a single person? I had 11 siblings, 70 cousins. I knew nobody with a peanut allergy when I was growing up. Why do five of my seven kids have food allergies? Why, you know, why does this entire generation have autoimmune disease? Why are we the sickest nation on the planet?

why do we have the highest COVID death rates? We had 16% of the COVID deaths. We only have 4% of the world's population. Somebody needs to explain that. Why are people getting awards for this? And the intensity of the cover-up of why nobody's talking about it. And then I saw the Ukraine war and the Democrats and Republican parties become the parties of war. Nobody's asking the questions like with Iraq.

You know, nobody asks. Why are we a war in Iraq? Saddam Hussein didn't bomb the World Trade Center. He didn't have weapons of mass destruction. You know, why are we in another country's business and why we spent $8 trillion over there and destroying the one country that was the bulwark to Iran? And now Iraq is a proxy of Iran, you know.

And that's why this attack on Israel happened because we destroyed the one obstacle between, between the Mullahs and Iran and the hegemony across the Mideast. They had Israel's one and Saddam was the other. Saddam had a country that was fully functioning, it had electricity and 100% of the population. It had, you know, it's better operated than any country in the Mideast. It had been our ally for many years.

Saddam was not a good guy. He was a horrible, you know, tyrant and torture and murderer, but so is MSB. So are, you know, a lot of them, right? And, you know, what were we doing? No, why was not, why was the press not asking questions, real questions about it, you know, the lessons we were supposed to have learned from Vietnam

about not getting into wars of choice? So I saw all this stuff happening. And I felt like I was in a unique position to be able to stop it and to be able to change the direction of the country. And then I saw the Democratic Party go to war against the American middle class, you know, and there's a whole generation, my kids' generation, none of them are going to get into a home. That's something wrong with that. And, you know, we've spent a trillion dollars on wars since 2020, and we've killed millions of people

and all unnecessary, and we're less safe. and we're here, Americans are less safe abroad, where our country is depleted in power. We got a $34 trillion debt. It's gone up another trillion dollars in the last hundred days. To service that debt, we now pay more than we do for our military. Within five years, half of every dollar that's collected, we'll go to service the debt. Ten years, it could be 100%. And, you know, that's not tenable. And nobody's talking about this. Nobody's trying to do anything about it.

So I just felt like, okay, you know, I'm going to start talking about this stuff and the best, the only way to fix it is to run myself. So that's what I, you know, that's what led me to this place. And obviously the Democratic nomination didn't work out. They're speaking of mafia. Right?

I almost did a spit take. I mean, yeah, I got a friend named Tulsi Gabbard, and they kind of did the same type of thing to her. Yeah, they did the same to Tulsi. They did the same to Bernie Sanders, yeah. So that's a little mafia scenario. So now you're running as an independent. Yeah. Now, how does this, how do you win?

Well, the first challenge, I'm going to, the first challenge is getting a VP because I can't get signatures in half the states without having a vice president. So, you know, they don't, the other parties don't have to get vice presidents until August, but I have to get one now. And there's a lot of advantages. They don't have to collect signatures. I have to collect a million signatures. They're automatically on the ballot. They get secret service. I don't, you know, because the president decided that he didn't want me to have it.

And so I have to spend a lot of money on that. Those are all challenges. I'm gonna announce the VP within two weeks. On the 26th of March in Oakland, we will announce a VP. Within, we then can start collecting signatures in about half the states, and we will complete those states within six weeks. And I'll get on the ballot everywhere.

And then, you know, my big, challenge. I'm beating President Trump and President Biden in Americans who are under 45 years old. So I'm beating them in all young people. I'm beating them among independents. And independence for the first time are the biggest demographic in this country. So there's the first election in history where self-identified independence, our registered independence are a larger part of than either Democrats, Republicans. The independence is now 43 percent. of the voting voters. 27 are Democrats,

27 are Republicans. So it's huge. And I beat President Trump and President Biden among independents. I'm tied, a three-way tie with Hispanic voters. And my

popularity with Hispanics is getting higher all the time. I'm the most popular candidate. Highest favorability rating by far. I have a 52% favorability rating. I'm, I think, 20 points in the black. In other words, 20 points net favorability. So when you measure my unfavorability, favorability, nobody else is even, I think, five points.

I'm 15 points ahead of anybody on favorability. The one demographic that is a challenge for me is baby boomers. And if you think about it, they should be, I should be most popular with them because they're the only ones who are remember Camelot and they lived through the Kennedy Air. I also was really popular with them when I was the environmental champion. But they get their news from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC, and the New York Times and Washington Post. And, you know, if I was living in that ecosystem, I'd have a really bad opinion of myself.

So my son Connor, who incidentally was in Ukraine, he fought in Ukraine for Special Forces Unity, joined the Foreign Legion, and fought for three months during the Kharkiv offensive. Thank God he made it out alive. But I asked him the other day, he's very well informed, you know, he reads everything, he listens to podcasts. I said to him, have you ever listened to a, or have you ever seen an evening news show on TV? And he said, no, never. You have a whole generation of kids who are getting there, who are getting their news from, you know, places like this from podcasts.

And those guys are on my side and they're supporting me. So my big challenge is breaking through the baby boomers. Yeah, that is a very strange place to be where the generation that should be, know you the best is not on board. And yeah, you're right. It's because they're not on board with the new forms of media and they're being fed whatever's coming out. To them, I'm a wacko, anti-science, antivaxer.

A crazy person, conspiracy theirs. Check, check and check. Well, you know, I would advise people. You just did a state of the union, or I think you called it, how I see the state of the union, or the state of our union, something along those lines,

it's on your YouTube page. That's a really good piece to go check out. You, like I said, you were on the All-In podcast, you've been on Rogan's podcast, you've been on Theo Vaughn's podcast. Many times.

And they put his back up because they took him down for a while. And so there's so much information out there about you. And I would recommend people go and listen to those because they can learn more about you. Clearly, the books that you've written, there's great information

the book that I covered today, American Values, fantastic book to read. And then like I said, the Wuhan cover up and then the real Anthony Fauci, those books are filled with information that you might want to check out if you don't understand these things or if you have questions.

So I think that's probably gets us to a pretty good spot. Does that get us up to speed? Yeah. People can find you. Kennedy24.com. You're on Instagram. you're on what I call Twitter X. Yeah, that's a good thing.

There's no way to talk about it if you don't call it Twitter or tweeting. Yeah, so Instagram, Twitter, X, and Facebook, you're at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You've got a YouTube channel, which is at Team Kennedy 24. Echo Charles, do you have any questions? No questions. I didn't notice that you're in a lot better shape than most politicians. I know. Is that like, are we working out every day?

Yeah, I'm at the gym every day. You haven't seen. There's a video of him at, you remember we were up at Venice Beach recently, Muscle Beach? Yeah. He's up there at Muscle Beach. Okay. No shirt. Doing it.

Getting after it. That makes perfect sense to me. Yes. Good to meet you. Good to meet you too. We got to get on the ballot and in California right now. People can go. We need 75,000 people to sign up for our political party, which is we the people and they can go to.

Kennedy.24.com slash California. And we need 75,000 to sign up and then we're on the ballot there. Okay. Well, I'm sure we can definitely make that happen. Robert, any other closing thoughts you want to cover? No, I, you know, I just want to thank you for your service. And, you know, we talked beforehand that I had represented a lot of the seals during COVID who were non-compliant with some of the mandates. And anyway, it's a real honor to be with you. And, you know, thanks for everything that you've done for our country.

Well, I appreciate it. And, well, thanks for your service and the sacrifice of your family, especially your uncle Joe, who gave his life. And your uncle Jack and your father, both them served in the Navy. All three of them actually served in the Navy and gave their lives for our country. So thank you for what you've done.

your family's done. Thank you for what you've done for our environment. And thank you for what you are trying to do today to help fulfill the true promise of America. Thank you. Thank you very much, Chaco. Thank you, Echo. Sir. And with that, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has left the building.

Echo Charles. Yes, sir. How is that for a historical review? Good. Yeah. Good. Yeah, so a lot of us on Kauai, if you grew up on Kauai, you're not quite as privy to all that. You know, like a lot of this was probably a lot more familiar just from general knowledge to you than it was for me. So yes, to kind of, in a way, go down memory lane.

And in my case, get privy to all the, you know, all the back info, very helpful. Yeah, it's definitely interesting. Yeah, you're right. For me and I told, I mentioned this at the beginning of the podcast. Growing up in New England, you're going to hear about the Kennedys. Yeah. And you're going to hear, like I said, you're going to hear the good, you're going to hear the horrible and everything in between.

The Catholics that I knew from Massachusetts, these people, I mean, they love the entire Kennedy family can do no wrong. The Protestants that I knew growing up, other in the spectrum. Other deal can do no right. The conservative Republicans. bro like no and it's it's so interesting because now we're so much more aware of how things are like how the media media manipulates things yeah there's so much we could be unpacking the entire media view of the Kennedy family you could just unpack it for years it would take years yeah of you know what the what the what the conservative

would put out about them, what the Democrats would put out about them, what the liberals would put out about, everybody's got, they're going to, they're going to spin it. And so it's, it's a very difficult to look at and figure it all out. Yeah. The red, I always thought that a red, big red flag as far as like convincing someone about someone, you know, like who, if someone's going to say something about someone else, like the, a big red flag was always if it was like a name calling. like he's a X, Y, Z, he's a Nazi, he's a whatever. He hates this, like all reading their mind and stuff. Or he's anti, well, actually anti can be accurate sometimes, but just the whole name calling in general,

which is just all, it's pretty much all the time. Now, you can notice it when you're really looking for it. It's like, bro, that's just name calling. Anytime this name calling, I feel like, oh, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah, you suspect because there's probably like way more to it. In fact, I would say that might even be an indicator. Yeah. Yeah.

And I guess the way I look at things in general is, I talk about this a lot of at Eshlam Front as well. You want to look at a target. If you're going after a target, if you're assaulting a target, you want to see it from as many different perspectives as you can. And so it's the same thing when you're looking at an issue or you're looking at a political figure. You want to see that political figure from as many different perspectives as you can. Because what you see or what this other person sees, if you only listen to what one other person says, about a topic or an issue, you're only going to see that one perspective. You have to see things from as many different perspectives as you can.

And you have to keep an open mind when you do that. So when you're reading something about a particular topic, you need to do with an open mind. And then when you read the counter argument, you need to read that one with an open mind. And what you're going to end up with is not some solid 100% like, okay, well, this is what I now believe, what you end up with is a broad picture of the possibilities that could encompass this particular issue. Could be this, could be that. And you've got to be aware of all those things, which is a very different approach to take because most people, especially if you go on to online social media, everybody's an expert

about everything. And when they make a statement, they're making the statement of what they believe to be the capital T, truth capital T. Like the thing is, boom, and they're going to say it. Instead of saying, well, that's an interesting perspective. I will put that into my calculus of how I view this particular issue. Yeah. People don't do that.

So this was, for me, it's good to hear a first person account of a lot of this stuff and a very well researched book. And even then you go, okay, well, there's his perspective. There's going to be other perspectives that we could come up with and go, oh, there's a counter to that. Oh, here's another view of, and we didn't get, there's, there's one of the things that I always heard about the Bay of Pigs was, and it's very similar to what he's saying. That's why I didn't think it was worth bringing up, but is that the Cubans that were saying, hey, don't worry. When we get to Cuba, when, when the freedom forces get. to Cuba yeah there's gonna be all the Cubans are gonna be on our side well all the

Cubans that were saying that were in America that's why they were saying it and all the Cubans that didn't think that were in Cuba and so when you went down there you're like oh we thought everyone's gonna be on our side oh no no that's what you think yeah so I always heard that now you take Dallas and you put you know what Robert said today is like oh their spin was like hey listen we just don't want to tell we'll tell them that everyone's gonna be on our side and we'll get we'll just start a little here and we'll be able to beat them. Right.

So we'll be okay. No far. Yeah. And so, yeah, very interesting to hear all these different perspectives and, and learn more in an open-minded way. So that's what we're doing. We're also, you noticed that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is in pretty good shape. What was he?

69 years old. Seventy. Seven years old. Wait, wait, unless he didn't have his birthday. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty shit. Just rolling around. So, yeah, you know how like, okay. So I was, I was going over. this with my daughter.

And she was like, what did she say? She goes, oh, yeah, you get shorter when you get older or whatever. And I was like, yeah. But, and we were talking about someone in our family, one of the elders of our extended family, we'll say. And he goes, oh, yeah, she walks around like, she, it's almost like she's trying to be short. You know how people, you know, older people, they start hunching over.

I was like, yeah, that's true. I was like, yeah, well, you figure, you know, your muscles and your structures, they get fatigued, right? And like if you notice older people, even if they're not that old or whatever, they'll start walking super flat on their feet, you know? And then younger people, they got this hop, this pop, this pop in their step, you know, a little pep. But it's like a physical, like, bounciness in their steps. And she's like, yeah, that's true. That's true.

RFK, pop in the steps 70 years old, where we are at? And I noticed it. And then when, after we went over that, I started really just paying attention and being like, man, that can kind of add youthfulness just to your whole. appearance if you got that pop in your step I think some people they just have it naturally when you stay active you know and I think he was one of those guys Boy it felt like he put down that go didn't me He was hyped in the break He said he's gonna have to put a seat you said you said hey you want another you want another one he goes no I already need to feel like I need a seat belt So that's what we're doing we're staying in shape. We're keeping that pop in the step. Yes sir

How are we gonna do that when we're gonna get after it joccofuel.com fuel your workouts Jagofuel.com. We got everything that you need. We got a clean energy drink. By the way, his assistant there, Stephanie, or maybe she's not an assistant. I don't know. She's his chief of staff, let's say.

She was like, oh, I'm an ingredient reader. And I go read up. I noticed that. I noticed your confidence. Yeah, I was like, read up. And she said, I can't eat natural sweeteners. I go, there's none in there. She goes, oh, monk fruit.

Okay. Yeah, she was fired up. So very cool. Yep, that's what we're doing. Clean energy, clean protein, joint warfare for your joints, super krill. We got it all going on. We got it all going on. Greens.

Oh, by the way, my mom came in, visited it for a few days or whatever. How many greens did she steal from it? No, she didn't steal any greens, but she mentioned the greens. She mentioned it again. She told the exact same story. And you know how like when you tell a story that you heard from somebody and then after a while, you're like, I hope I told that story completely accurate. Right.

It was the exact same story. Word for word. She's like I've been into greens since I was freaking a kid and all this stuff and you just accept the fact that greens just don't taste good It's just it's just part of the healthy lifestyle. It's like you got to eat some stuff that doesn't taste good. That's how it is But these greens they actually taste good and I was really surprised She's in the game. Thank you Joccofuel.com go get yourself some good fuel for your system also you get it at wah-wah Vitamin Chop Gnc military commissaries a fees hand for dashed stores in Maryland wake fern Shop right

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Go get some Also you're going to be training Subjointed Also you're going to be trained to Jitsu and you know we talked about and this was There's so many categories we could have gone down, but you know, R.F.K. Jr. has been in a crusade for the environment.

And I was going to start talking about the environment, start talking about clothing manufacturing, start talking about what clothing manufacturing in other countries does to the environment. See, we have environmental laws. Some of them are attributed to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. There are environmental laws that are in place in America so that we have to take care of an environment. as we should. So when we make clothes in America at origin, USA.com, at origin USA, when we make clothes here, we protect the environment. Not like what they're doing overseas. When there's no rules, no laws, the only law overseas that they have is the lowest possible

price, which means we're going to destroy the environment. So don't get your clothes from a chemical spewing, environment destroying slave labor owning company. Get your clothing from origin USA.com. Jeans,

boots, Jiu Jitsu geese, Jiu Jitsu rash guards, T-shirts, joggers. Yes, sir. Jackets, hunt gear.

Did you get a puffy jacket yet? No. Oh, I got a big box from origin. Oh, you didn't open it? I haven't fully explored and it's big. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we got everything. You don't need to go to www. Destroy the Environment.com or www.w. w. Slave Labor.

Dot com. Don't go to those. Go to www. orgionUSa.com and invest in freedom. That's another thing he talked about today. Look, we are,

well, I don't know if we talked, we didn't talk about it on the podcast, but bringing manufacturing back to America. Look, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to do that. I want to do that. He's running for president.

I'm building companies that manufacture here in America. That's what we're doing. You want to support it. So there you go. OriginUSA.com. Yeah, very true. Also, jaco has store called jococococor.com. Also known as defecor.com.

Anyway, you want to, you want to, if you want a shirt, hat, who's all this stuff with discipline equals freedom good you know all these things that that are representative of the path is where you can get it telling this it's good stuff so one of actually I told you my mom was visiting and it was my mom's friends like son or brother okay and they had met or whatever and they're in the game we'll say and they're like hey and the guy was like hey the man they do good work or whatever the discipline equals freedom shirt man they do good work because it's my favorite shirt not only because it says discipline concern but how it fits that's what I'm saying that's that

quality stuff right there don't worry I got you anyway you want to represent that's where you go that's where you get it um shirt locker let's talk about it sure locker new design every month people have been liking and giving me feedback on the latest one sugar coated lies here's the thing what we what we don't realize that sugar coated lies is one of the OG OG sings and it's in reference to donuts and how donuts trick you and their lies their lies and you say hey your willpower is is not going to be defeated by a donut I would hope not right that was the whole message right there but yeah in the event of you know some newcomers who maybe missed that OG saying that's what it is that's the explanation it's in in this book he talks about the whole and he mentioned

it today where he's basically like taking or when he's addicted he's taking orders from this other thing. That's real. That's real. So sometimes that other thing is heroin. I hope it's not. Sometimes it's a donut. Yeah. It shouldn't be a donut, dude. Shouldn't be heroin either. No. But give yourself orders. You're the general. You're in charge. Yeah. Don't listen to that guy over there. That's funny because like it kind of does. And you know how like when you're, you know how they say and there's all these different behavior like helpers, right? Behavior modification like helpers. where it's like they'll say hey don't do just don't do this if you hey look if you have a problem with donuts right the kind of where if you see a donut it's really really hard for you to resist a donut

then don't keep them in the house like that's like it's helper i agree and here's the thing that that works for a reason or actually for a few reasons or whatever so you can literally and so one of them is don't go shopping when you're hungry like that's an old school one right problem bro i'm telling you if you have like let's say this affinity and this love in your heart for that you the taste of donuts and you're not in you're full you just ate dinner you know had a moke and you're kind of like kind of kind of full like right after and then you go shopping and see the donuts but it's like whatever I think it's good if we're gonna go extreme here I'm gonna say like have a good day like workout in the morning early get a run in

get some jiu jitsu done go home eat yeah a lot by the way steak mulk greens creatine like and then go shopping oh yeah because you'll be like just overflowing with discipline. Yeah, you know what I mean? And that's just one part of it. So you don't even have any like desire really, you know, and if you do like just because of the, what do you call you, how much you like it or whatever, it's not at its full peak. In fact, it's at its lowest peak.

So now you just got this, like for you to do that is, it's almost impossible to just betray your whole self like that, you know? You're not getting donuts. No, you're not getting donuts. So nonetheless, this shirt, this current shirt from the shirt locker is just a Small little reminder that a donut is not stronger than your will. There you go. Hey, here's another thing.

Another little tie-in. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. talks about factory farming and factory processing of meat, like big giant corporations. We don't like that. Not good for you. Not good for the country. Not good for the environment. Not good for anything. That's why if you want some steak, which you should.

should by the way get your steak from primal beef.com or from Colorado craftbeef.com these are small nice little farms where we have control over the whole process so go to primal beef.com or Colorado craft beef.com and check it out get yourself some good steak that supports America supports America supports the small ranches out there, the small farmers. That's what we're doing. So check it out. Colorado Craftbeef.com.

They got meat sticks, by the way, at Colorado Craftbeef.com. Is this anyway? Yes. Okay, yeah. They're really good. They are, let's face it, they're like kind of replace,

in general speak for a general person. They replace a Snickers bar. You know what I'm saying? They replace a Snickers bar. Because you could be, you know, how, look, when you, when you, when you want a Snickers bar, yeah, you're not, you don't want a steak, right? You just want a snack. A little something, right?

A little something. Sure. Well, Snickers bar is about the same as a meat stick from Colorado Kraft Beef. So is it the same, you think? Or would you say just in the, because it feels that snacking. Yeah, it's a snack thing. It tastes good. It's, it's gratifying because a Snickers bar is gratifying.

Now, it's not going to be a Snickers bar isn't as gratifying for as, long because it's just like sugar. And so you get you burn through that pretty quick. Yeah. Those beef sticks, dude, they're freaking they, they, they are gratifying for, for an extended period of time. Yeah. Like they, they make you feel, uh, satiated.

Sir. So it's like, uh, what's the slogan freaking Colorado craft beef sticks satisfies you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

They try and say snickers satisfy you, but let's face it. Snickers satisfies you for about a half an hour. Yeah. It doesn't make you want more snickers. This is what I noticed about Colorado. craft beef sticks is if you like sometimes I'll because you know me you know my my eating habits you know like I don't really like to have a big lunch but sometimes I'm hungry because I lifted and I ran maybe I even surfed oh hell yeah but I'm a little bit more hungry and so maybe the

handful of nuts or bowl of nuts that I might have doesn't do it then I have one of those beef sticks and all of a sudden I'm kind of like not hungry for a long time jee. teaching yeah which is pretty awesome so check those out and also subscribe to the podcast and also go to jocco underground.com you know we're talking about Theo von's podcast dude they they took his podcast down when he had Robert F Kennedy Jr. on one I think they were talking about the vaccine they were talking about COVID I don't know what they were talking about I forget who took it on YouTube YouTube amongst others I don't really know but listen that's why we have the

jocco underground dot com so we won't have that happen on that channel. So if something's gonna get taken down, not gonna get taken down from there because the only people that can take it down from there is Echo Charles. So it ain't coming down. And that's why we have it. And look, it costs $8.18 a month if you want to support it. If you can't afford that and you still want to have freedom, just email assistance at jocco underground.com will take care of you. We just want to make sure that information, that there's freedom of speech. And on that platform, it's guaranteed. It's 100% guaranteed so there you go also YouTube subscribe to that also psychological warfare

also flipside canvas books covered today Robert F Kennedy Jr. American values he also wrote the real dr. Fauci also root the woo the woo hand cover up check those out I've written a bunch of books so if you want to get the books that I've written you can check those out as well especially the kids books get the kids books the kids need these books you should be able to square yourself away whoever you are but your kids those kids your neighbors your your niece your nephew the kid around the block they might not be able to do that they need more guidance than you getting these kids books they will help them immensely also we have a leadership

consultancy we solve problems through leadership go to echelonfront dot com for details we actually have a battlefield coming up in Gettysburg and there's another thing in the book talk about touring these battlefields these Civil War battlefields if you want to learn about leadership It is outstanding to go to those battlefields and check it out and learn the lessons from the battlefield I'll be there Laif will be there we'll walk around J.D will be there Jason Garno will be there we'll be getting after it so if you want to go to those check out on echelonfront.com go to events also we have an online training academy

because leadership is integral in every part of your life When you talk to your kids, when you talk to your wife, when you talk to your subordinates, when you talk to your peers, when you talk to your friends, when you talk to your boss, leadership, that's what all that is. And you need to go to the gym every day to stay in shape and you need to go and work every day

to maintain and sustain and improve your leadership. So go to Extreme Ownership.com, take some of our courses. There's free courses on there. You can take, just go take those. Just go take those. At a minimum, go take those. The framework of Extreme Owners, ownership, go take that course.

Learn how to take extreme ownership. That's what we're doing. And there's a couple other courses on there for free. Check those out. Also, if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization.

If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org. Also check out heroes and horses.org. Also, Jimmy May has got an organization called Beyond the Brotherhood. Check all those out and if you want to connect with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. If you want to support him go to Kennedy24.com slash California if you want to register and he needs 75,000 of those. So get on there. Make that happen. Also he's on Instagram Twitter, Twitter X Facebook at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And he's on YouTube at Team Kennedy 24. Go check out his state of our union if you want to get a feel for what he's thinking and where he's at. If you want to connect

with me I'm at jocco.com I'm also on social media I'm at jaco willing Echo's on social media he's at echo Charles third measure is on social media dang third measure made the cut

they made the cut at third 3 rd measure that's where it's at if you want to see some scraps sure right sure it's where it is scraps yeah scraps

some post-apocalyptic possibilities. Okay. Any forthcoming? Anything we need to know about? Nope. Nothing you need to. Hey, if you do go there, don't do an infinite scroll.

Yeah. Infinite scroll through your life. Addictive. It's addictive. Don't let that happen. Watch out for the algorithm. And of course, we get to talk about elections and presidents and democracy only because of our brave men and

women in uniform. So thanks to all of you that are out there in uniform right now, protecting our freedom and our democracy and our way of life. And also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thanks to you as well. You keep us safe here at home. and everyone else out there, I'm going to leave you with a quote from John F. Kennedy, who was a

lieutenant in the Navy. He was also president of the United States. And he said, quote, in a democracy, every citizen, regardless of his interest in politics, holds office. Every one of us is in a position of responsibility. And in the final analysis, the kind of government we get depends upon how we fulfill those responsibilities. We, the people, are the boss. And we will get the kind of political leadership, be it good or bad, that we demand and we deserve. End quote. That's it.

We are responsible. It's on us. So pay attention. And until next time, Zeko and Jocko. Out.