Shawn Ryan Show - #117 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - CIA Propaganda & Information Manipulation

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an author, attorney, activist and 2024 Presidential Candidate. Kennedy is known for his family's long history of public service and his dissenting opinions that circle the rigid "Left" and "Right" view points. Kennedy has spent many years "fighting corrupt government agencies" and corporations alike. He has won environmental cases against dozens of municipalities and corporate giants like General Electric and ExxonMobil. Kennedy also co-founded the WaterKeeper Alliance, the world's largest nonprofit devoted to clean water, protecting 2.7 million miles of waterways. He is now running for President in 2024 and pledges to "end the forever wars, clean up government, and increase wealth for all." Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://helixsleep.com/srs https://trueclassictees.com/srs https://blackbuffalo.com https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Links: Campaign - https://www.kennedy24.com X - https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr IG - https://www.instagram.com/robertfkennedyjr FB - https://www.facebook.com/rfkjr TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@teamkennedy2024 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4ewc5vQcMpLticvqPDcSQw Store - https://merch.kennedy24.com Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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long lost twin, or deep end swimming with your flippers and fins. Or maybe you're just perfecting the art of doing absolutely nothing. Whatever vacationer you are, with Sunwing, you save more so you can do more. Book with your local travel agent or... Bobby Kennedy, welcome to the show. Sean, I'm happy you finally got down here. I know you've been, we've been trying to make this happen for a while. I'm grateful that you made the time for me. Well, I really appreciate you coming and I've really been looking forward to this interview.

I think you're a breath of really been looking forward to this interview. I think you're a breath of fresh air for a lot of people. And so I have a couple things I would love to cover. I have not heard a lot of your backstory and found out you're 40 plus years sober today. Congratulations. That's amazing. And so yeah, I'd like to cover a little bit of your upbringing, hopefully get into some of your core values. And then they just announced the presidential debate yesterday and so I wanted to speak, definitely speak with you on that.

And then if we have time, a couple other rabbit holes we can go down to. So everybody gets a introduction here. So if you don't mind, let me just knock that out. You're an American environmental lawyer, member of the prominent Kennedy political family, and activist who became a leading figure among vaccine skeptics. Time Magazine named you its hero for the planet, for your leadership in the fight to restore the Hudson River. You've spent nearly 40 years

fighting corrupt corporations and government agencies. You have had legal victories and many milestones in environmental battles over the past four decades in Latin America, Canada, and the United States. You're an award-winning writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Nation, Outside Magazine, The Village Voice, and many others. Your... Among your published books are two New York Times

bestsellers, Crimes Against Nature, which came out in 2005 and the real Anthony Fauci in 2021. Your highly reviewed biography is American Values, Lessons I Learned From My Family. You're also the author of two children's books on American history and the third on St. Francis of Assisi. You were a lifelong Democrat, but made your final break on October 9th, 2023,

when you announced your candidacy as an independent for the 2024 presidential election. You're a man of God, father, husband, and pack leader to four dogs and two giant tortoises. You are the recipient of the Father of the Year Award for dedication to family, citizenship, charity, civility, civility, responsibility, and reverence, and once again, 40 plus years of sobriety.

Congratulations. Thank you. So I have a subscription account. They're my top supporters. They've been here since the beginning and they're the reason I get to sit here and get to interview you. And so one of the things that I allow them

or I give them the opportunity to do, excuse me, allow, is ask each guest a question. And so, a lot of good ones, a lot of good questions when it came to you. So this one is from Lester Dodson. How are you going to shut down the military industrial complex and also keep the Chinese global steamroller from rolling up everything in its path?

Yeah, I don't think China wants a military contest with us. Number one, we spend more than on our military, more than the 10 next nations combined. We spent three times with what China spends on its military and China wants to compete China wants to dominate the world, but they want to do that on an economic playing field not on a Not a hot war with the US military Which we would be a catastrophe for both countries and the entire planet. The big worry is that China's going to invade Taiwan and that Taiwan is critical to us because of TSMC, Taiwan Microchip, which is the biggest producer of high-performance microchips on Earth.

All of our missile systems use that microchip. All of our jets, the F-435, all the jets use it. Our civilian aircraft use it. It's in our refrigerators. It's in our automobiles. Our country would basically come to a stop if it weren't for access to those microchips. And the worry among the neocons, the big bugaboo that they're trying to frighten everybody with and to drum up a war with China is that China is going to invade Taiwan if we don't stop them, and that they will then own that microchip factory and they'll be able to dominate the world.

And it's not a realistic scenario for a number of reasons. One is China does dominate the South China Sea, and our nearest base is Guam. China has hypersonic missiles that if we did send aircraft, we have 12 aircraft carriers in our fleet now, if they did go into the South China Sea for a battle with China, they'd be sunk within 24 hours because we have no defense against those hypersonic missiles. So you can paint a scenario, a very ugly scenario, but in fact, I think the only reason that

China would invade Taiwan is if we provoke them to do it. And we have a lot of, first of all, that microchip company is relying. It doesn't function alone. It does do something nobody else in the world can do. But it cannot function without a supply chain. And the supply chain, the lasers are designed in Silicon Valley. They're made in Amsterdam a lot of the different the silicon comes from from countries that are mainly friendly to us the

Many of the other components of those that are required for that production come from the Western nations and But China also China can't function without Mideast Oil. And although we don't dominate the South China Sea, we can shut off that flow of Mideast Oil overnight and bring China to a halt. China also cannot function without Walmart. China is trying to grow a middle class

and without Walmart and the other Western customers, it can't do that. China does not want to have war with us. China's doing something very smart. We've spent $8 trillion over the past 20 years on wars, on these forever wars, on bombing bridges, ports, schools, universities, hospitals. China during that same period has spent $8 trillion building roads, ports, schools, hospitals, et cetera.

As a result of that, China has a lot of friends around the world now, and we've got a lot of enemies. China is the principal creditor in almost every nation in Latin America, and the same is true in Africa. People would rather deal with China than with us. They want leadership, they don't want bullying, and they feel, you know, that's something that our leaders in this country have forgotten. My uncle, President Kennedy, was asked by his, one of his two best friends, Ben Bradley,

what do you want as the epitaph on your gravestone? And he said, he kept the peace. He said the principal job of a president of the United States was to keep the country out of war. My uncle was a war hero, he's the only president who won the Purple Heart. He was lost at sea after his PT boat was cut in two in a fog by a Japanese destroyer. And he rescued his crew and I was awarded numerous awards, including the Purple Heart.

But he said, I don't want children in Africa, in Asia, Latin America, when they hear the United States of America to think of a man in a military uniform with a gun, I want them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer. I want them to think of the USAID program, which at that time was legit. It was before it was taken over by the CIA. I want them to think of the Alliance for Progress.

And these were programs he created to put America on the side of the poor around the world, to growing middle class, growing stable democracies around the world. And as a result of those policies, there are, and he has commitment to keep the country out of war, which he never sent a combat troop abroad to die. There are more statues to John Kennedy, more universities named after him, more boulevards, more avenues in Africa, Latin America, and Asia than any other US president, and probably more than all other presidents combined. And that was good foreign policy.

That's the foreign policy we want. The militaristic, pugnacious, belligerent foreign policy that we have has not won us any friends. It's, you know, you look, you know, we're seeing the growth of BRICS, right, which is because of the Ukraine war, we pushed Russia into an alliance with China, which is the worst foreign policy outcome we could imagine. And we're seeing now the destruction of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. You look at what we did, about $3.6 trillion of that $8 trillion was spent in Iraq. Here's what we got for that money.

Iraq is now worse off than when we found it. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. Iraq is now a proxy of Iran. Iran owns Iraq. It owns Iraq's oil. It has now, if you put Iran and Iraq together, it's the largest producer of oil in the Middle East, largest Saudi Arabia. It basically, and it can dominate Saudi Arabia.

The reason October 7th happened is because of our invasion of Iraq. Iraq was the bulwark against Iranian expansion in the region. When we got rid of Iraq, there was nothing there to replace except for US soldiers stationed at these outlandish places in Syria where they shouldn't be, where they're sitting ducks, and where we shouldn't be at all anyway, in the middle of a Shia and Sunni battle. Iran itself is, I mean Iraq itself is now a, this kind of an incoherent, it's not a country anymore,

it's just an incoherent battle between Shia and Sunni death squads. We created ISIS. We drove four million refugees up into Europe where they destabilized every democracy in Europe. One of the outcomes of that was the Brexit. And that's what we got for $3.6 trillion. That was, you know, that's what we got.

And all of these wars, the same thing's gonna happen with Ukraine. You know, Ukraine's gonna be a catastrophe for US foreign policy. It's gonna diminish our power. It makes us enemies. It diminishes our moral authority. It's not, you know,

unfortunately our political leaders now, they're like the carpenter who has a single tool, the hammer, and everything to him looks like a nail. You know, and if they're only for, the only diplomacy tool that you have is the US military. It's turned out to be not a good plan. Yeah. You brought up a lot of points that I'd like to discuss.

I was unaware that China was trying to build a middle class. Why are they trying to build a middle class? Well, because there's this huge demand. You have over a billion people, and they were one of the most impoverished countries in the world. They now have about, I think the GDP per capita is about a quarter of ours. So you know, but they've made a promise to their middle class, to take, they moved their population off out of agricultural areas, which were a very, very hard life into the cities.

And they began this huge construction project to build homes for them and to provide jobs for them. And that is the promise, that is the source of legitimacy of the Chinese government to its people. We're going to rule you in an authoritarian manner. We're going to make you give up your rights. But the exchange for that is that we are going to put you all in the middle class. And China's done a very, very good job at that.

It's now the biggest economy, or within the next four or five years, it will be the biggest economy in the world. And a lot of that money is going down to the population, the middle class. But China also knows, the second, that middle class, that their aspirations are diminished, and that they feel disappointment. They start facing riots and China cannot afford to have riots. And that's what it's trying to avoid. Interesting.

I was not aware of that. Also, you'd brought up BRICS. I don't think, I personally don't think enough people understand what BRICS is. So BRICS is Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. Argentina is now part of it. Last time I checked, I think it was 22. At least 22 countries are now part of it. And the whole premise is to destabilize.

It's to get off the American dollar, get off the pendants, because what we've done is we've used the dollar as a military tool. And we've used it, for example, we're using it against Iran now, but we've used it against Russia. And we hold people's money, because their money is basically, therefore, Knox is the United States, is our central banks. And so when they do something bad and we then shut off their cash, the countries are just saying we're not going to do that anymore.

We're going to start, we're not going to use petrodollars anymore. We're going to shift to our own currencies or we're going to create a global currency, which is one of the things they're trying to do with BRICS, and we're going to shift to our own currencies, or we're going to create a global currency, which is one of the things they're trying to do with BRICS, and we're going to get off the American dollar to take the power away from America. And that, if that happens, the US economy will go into a freefall. So, and you know, it's already happening. The question is, how fast is it going to happen and are we going to be able to put safeguards in place to avoid a massive, massive depression

that could make the Great Depression look like a cakewalk. You had mentioned Iraq is now a proxy to Iran. Yeah, I just added that. We have a $34 trillion debt right now. The service on that debt, the cause of servicing that debt is now bigger than our military budget. About a billion dollars a year. Within five years, 50 cents out of every dollar that we collect in taxes is going to go to

servicing the debt. Within 10 years, 100%. And that's if interest rates don't rise. If interest rates don't rise, that happens much budget faster. We added another trillion dollars to the debt in the last 100 days. President Biden and President Trump are the guys who are most responsible for that.

President Trump, during his four years, added $8 trillion to the debt. That's more money than was spent by every administration from George Washington to George W. Bush, every administration before him, 283 years of history. He spent more than four years. And then he shut down all the businesses at the same time. And then Biden continued those policies, the lockdowns, and then in this absurd spending,

which is unsustainable. And neither of them are talking about it. And we need to start talking about it. We need to. The big problem with the debt is the chronic disease epidemic, which is now costing us $4.3 trillion a year, which is five times our military budget, and then the military budget. Military budget is about $890 billion. But if you include the cause of the wars, which is, you know, 300 billion in veterans

administration and then all the national security costs, it's about 1.3 trillion a year. And you know, we have to cut that. We can no longer afford to be the policemen of the world. It's not helping us. It's hurting us in every way. Can you go into a little detail on who we owe the debt to? Who do we owe that to? A lot of it is owned by China.

A lot of it is owned by Japan. They're in as much trouble as we are because, you know, they don't want that debt to crash either. But China is now switching away from the dollar. They're all trying to get away from the bomb, to get out of the splatter zone before the bomb goes off. And a lot of the debt is just to US investors and banks and investment houses who have purchased US bonds. I mean, I owned a certain amount of bonds, treasury bonds, right?

That I bought some of them after I won, I was part of the team that won the Monsanto case and I got a little bit of cash and I put some of that in bonds. So some of that debt is owed to me. So it's a, but I think the biggest creditor is China. This show is sponsored by True Classic. We talk a lot about everyday carry here. And one thing I've been looking for to round out my EDC is a perfect fitting daily driver t-shirt.

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Go to helixsleep.com slash SRS, that's helixsleep.com slash SRS. That's helixsleep.com slash SRS. This is their best offer yet. It's not gonna last long with Helix. Better Sleep starts now. You had mentioned Iraq is becoming a proxy to Iran. I'm a former special ops guy. Spent a lot of time in Iraq, a lot of time in Afghanistan. And so I have a lot of ties within that community still.

And I've heard rumors that we will be going back to Iraq already because of the stuff going on in Israel, Iran getting involved. I mean, it's, I don't think it was ever stabilized. But what are your, do you have any insight on that? No, I mean. We're sending our guys back into another country where we've abandoned lots of weapons. We have 800 bases around the world. You know, China has one base. where we've abandoned lots of weapons. Yeah, I mean, listen, we have 800 bases around the world.

China has one base. Russia has one and a half. We have 800, and each one of them is an opportunity for a new little war. And of course, you have the big military contractors, You know, the big military contractors, Northrop Grumman and Boeing and Lockheed and General Dynamics and these others, they're all owned by one company, which is BlackRock. And BlackRock has the contracts to destroy Ukraine, and it has the contract to rebuild Ukraine.

And it's one of the biggest honors to the Republican and Democratic Party. And the Ukraine war is really about the expansion of NATO. We wanted to put NATO and President Putin and every president before him have said, that's a red line, you can't put NATO in Ukraine. Russians have been invaded three times through Ukraine. Last time, Hitler killed one out of every seven Russians. Oh, you know, we've never experienced an invasion like that. Russians haven't, everybody remembers it.

And they don't want a foreign enemy army in Ukraine, and particularly they don't want an army with nuclear weapons. And we have put on nuclear-ready systems these Aegis missile systems that Lockheed made and makes in Romania and Poland. So we made those NATO countries. Why do we want to go into NATO? Here's one of the reasons. Why do we want every country in Europe? We promised in 1992, when Gorbachev said,

I'm going to remove the walls in Europe, I'm going to allow you, the West, to reunite Germany under NATO, and I'm going to move out 450,000 Soviet troops from East Germany, and I'm going to allow you to march NATO soldiers into their barracks. He could never go back to Russia after that. He went back, but he was despised.

Nobody went to his funeral. But he did it because he wanted to end the Cold War. But he said, I want one promise from you before I do this. He said this to James Baker, to President Bush at that time, and to John Major. He said, I want one promise, which is after I give you Germany, you cannot move NATO one inch. You cannot move NATO to the east until all the other countries we're gonna march out of. James Baker, who was the Secretary of State,

famously told Gorbachev, we will not move NATO one inch to the east. And in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the first in the neocons, says, OK, here's a plan. He publishes a plan for moving NATO into every former Soviet territory. And people go crazy at that time. George Cannon, who is the most important diplomat in modern American history, he was the architect of the containment policy during the Cold War, he said, if you do that,

you're going to turn Russia into an enemy. You should be treating it as a friend. You should be welcoming it to the global community and using it as a bulwark against Chinese expansion. Kissinger said that. George Kennan said that. George Kennan said, if you do this, you're going to force Russia into a violent response. Bill Pierce, who was then the Secretary of Defense, threatened to resign to Clinton. He said, if you do this, I'm going to resign.

It's so destabilizing to move NATO to the east. Bill Perry, who was then, and Bill Pierce is now the head of the CIA, Bill Perry, who was then the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, said the same thing. He said, you're forcing Russia into ultimately a violent response if you keep moving NATO to the east. What do we do? We did it anyway. Why do we want to move NATO to the east?

There's all kinds of geopolitical reasons that the neocons want to drive because they like conflict. But the big reason is that when a new country signs onto NATO, it has to then change all of its weapons specifications, weapons purchases to NATO specifications, which means it has to buy all of its weapons from Lockheed, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, and the US military contractors that are all owned by BlackRock. So there's this economic imperative to drive NATO into all of these new countries.

And Putin said again and again, if you go in there, we are going to have to fight back. What do we do? In 2014, the CIA goes in with USAID and overthrows the elected government of Ukraine. And we put in a Western government, the undersecretary of state, Victoria Nuland, who was the top neocon at that time. We now have a tape of her talking to the U.S. ambassador a month before the coup, handpicking the cabinet that would replace the neutral government with a pro-Western government. So then we go in there, we overthrow their elected government, we put in a government

that's sympathetic to us. Putin immediately says, oh, well now they're going to put the US fleet in Vladivostok, which was Russia's for 340 years, their only southern port, that's where the Soviet fleet is, which is in Crimea. And so he said, if you do this, we're going to go into Crimea. He goes in Crimea. He doesn't fire a shot because the people of Crimea have always wanted to be back with Russia.

They voted 90 to 10 to go back to Russia. And then he says, and then there's a revolution. This new government comes in and basically illegalizes the Russian language. There used to be two languages in Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian. Now they say, no, the official language is now Ukrainian. You can't speak Russian. We don't teach in the schools, et cetera. And they begin enacting these other oppressive mandates against the Russian, ethnic Russians

in Dumbass. And so there are protests in Dumbass. Those protests turn violent, and the question is why do they turn violent? The assumption is there's right-wingers in the new government that we put in who killed 14,000 people from Dombass and Lugans. And so Putin says, look, I'm going to go in there. Dombass and Lugans vote to join Russia, the Russian Federation.

Putin says, I don't want you. You stay with Ukraine, but here's a proposal. And he gives what is called the Minsk Accords, which Germany approves of, Italy, I mean, France approves of, and UK approve of. And the Minsk Accords say, we're gonna keep NATO out of Ukraine. We're gonna say, we're going to keep NATO out of Ukraine. We're going to give Dumbass and Lugansk autonomy, just like Montreal, Quebec, part of Canada.

You'll still be part of Ukraine, but you'll be able to keep the Russian language. And then he also asked to denazify some of the, you know, denazify the new government that we had put in to remove some of the extreme right-wingers. And all of these nations approve of this agreement. And Zelensky runs in 2019, and he's an actor and a comedian, no political involvement at all. He runs on one issue. I'm going to sign the Minsk Accords, and there's going to be peace with Russia.

He wins 70% of the vote. So overwhelmingly, the people wanted peace. They wanted that agreement. Suddenly, he gets in office, and he pivots. And he says, I'm not going to sign it. Why did that happen? There's two assumptions. We don't know, but there's two assumptions.

One, he was threatened by right-wingers within his own government. Two, the United States, Victoria Nuland told him he couldn't sign it. So Putin then sends in 40,000 troops. The West says, oh, he's trying to conquer Europe. He's like Hitler marching on Europe. He sends 40,000 troops. He clearly does not even want to conquer Ukraine. Ukraine has 44 million people in it. He can't conquer 40,000 troops. What Putin says, I just want you back at the negotiating table. Zelensky then says, ask the United States to help negotiate.

We won't help him. He asked President Xi of China to help him. Xi won't help him. He goes to Naftali Bennett, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Israel says, yeah, we'll help you. And to Erdogan in Turkey. So Erdogan, Naftali Bennett, referee discussions between Zelensky and Putin, and they come to an agreement, which is like Minsk accords too. It's the same agreement. and Putin and they come to an agreement which is like Minsk accords too. It's the same agreement.

And they sign the agreement and the main thing Putin wants is we agree never to put NATO into Ukraine and they agree to that. We sign that agreement and Joe Biden sends Boris Johnson over from the UK, who's now the former prime minister, to tell Zelensky he's got to tear up the agreement because we wanted the war. And Zelensky tears it up. And since then, there's probably been 600,000 Ukrainian kids who have died over there. Totally unnecessarily.

My son went over there and fought with the Foreign Legion. And he fought. He was a machine gunner in a special forces unit during the Kharkiv offensive. He and I, Connor and I, argued every night at dinner about Ukraine. And when the war started, he had supported US aid. And he felt like he shouldn't be one of these people who were advocating a war and then sitting on the sidelines and not willing to fight it.

So he didn't tell us where he was going. He just disappeared and he went over there and he joined the Foreign Legion. And he worked for the first three or four weeks as a drone operator, which was, as it turns out, that's the most dangerous job because the Russians can tell when you turn on the drone. And it's mainly an artillery war, so they would then hit the drone operator with artillery. And they had to turn it on while they were in the back of the pickup truck and then keep

the truck moving. And then he became a machine gunner for that unit. But the people that he was in the unit with are almost all gone. And is he still going over there? No, he came back here to finish law school and he's now, thank God, practicing law. Right on, right on. You had mentioned something else, switching gears a little bit, how we would instigate

China into invading Taiwan. How do you think we would instigate China into invading Taiwan? If we keep trying to militarize the South China Sea, they're going to respond by militarizing it themselves. And you know that, I mean, it's the same thing we did with Russia. If you treat somebody like an enemy and you say we want to have war, they got to start arming themselves. And you know, China would never want to put a lot of money into its military,

and it never has, but now it's putting huge amounts of money in. China is very smart. It's a rich country. They have huge, huge cash reserves, and they have the ability to quickly build a military, and they're building a smart military. Now because of these hypersonic weapons, a lot of the assumptions are... Our military, by the way, is in... I don't know how to politely say it, but it's in the crapper.

The jets don't work. The equipment is broken, the enlistments are down, I think, by 45 percent. And there's so much waste and so much corruption in the acquisitions part. And the whole assumption that upon which NATO is based is that we can get a million troops across the Atlantic Ocean if there is an invasion from the East But we can't do that anymore because these hypersonic weapons which there to which there's really no defense There'd be so many troop carriers that would sink that the American people would not tolerate it anymore Oh, you know a lot of the assumptions that we,

that current military strategy is based on are archaic. On top of that, I mean, the FBI director just came out and said that they have infiltrated our power grid and our water supply, our water treatment plants. And so I've been on top of this for a long time and talking about it for years. It sounds to me like it's pretty much a light switch and the power goes out and we're barking up the wrong tree.

Yeah. But well, thank you. Let's get into your life story a little bit. Where did you grow up? So I was one of 11 children of the Kennedy family. My great grandparents came over from Ireland, the potato famine in 1848. So on both sides of the family, the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, all came over in 1848. All of them, when my grandfather Joseph Kennedy's family,

his father was a political, a state senator and a political boss in Boston. And my grandmother's father was the first Irish Catholic mayor of Boston. He was the first ghetto mayor. There had been one Irish Catholic, but he was kind of chosen by the Brahmins. My grandfather was named Honey Fitz. They called him Honey Fitz. His name was John Fitzgerald. They called him Honey Fitz because his voice—he Fitzgerald. They called him Honey Fitz because his voice,

he had an Irish tenor and he would sing the crowds to summons them. My grandmother, Rose Kennedy, was a beautiful piano player and they would go out on a flatbed truck in torchlight parades and she would play the piano on the flatbed truck and my grandfather, my great grandfather, Honey Fitz would sing songs to the crowd,

Sweet Adeline and that kind of stuff. There, Rose Kennedy married my grandfather, Joe Kennedy, and he was kind of the patriarch of my family. I was raised, I was raised during the summers with 29 cousins, they had nine kids. I had 11 siblings. We had 29 cousins. We were all raised in the same town.

And most of us on that little seaside village, most of the families had houses adjoining each other. It was called the Kennedy compound. And when I was a kid, my uncle was president of the United States. My father the his attorney general. He'd been his campaign manager My other uncle a Sarge driver was the head of the Peace Corps My other uncle Steve Smith was the chief of staff at the White House my other uncle Ted Kennedy was a United States senator at that time

beginning in 1964 and every Friday they would land in helicopters, Marine helicopters, on the football, we had a football field on our lawn where we played every day. We were raised in kind of an athletic regimen. There was a guy who coached our family and we had to learn all sports when we were kids. We learned to sail, to swim.

We all were competitive swimmers and to box, to play tennis, play every sport, football. We played football and baseball every day during the summer times. My uncles would all land in the Marine helicopters on Friday afternoon. My grandfather had made a lot of money. People said he was a bootlegger, but he wasn't. That's just a lie that was actually spread by a guy called Sam Halpern, who was a CIA propaganda chief, who was part of his job was to tar my family's name after President Kennedy's death in 1963.

And that was one of the stories that he promoted. My grandfather had been a banker, and then he made a lot of money on Wall Street, and then he ran one of the biggest studios in Hollywood. He had a movie theater in his basement. And so on weekends when I was a kid, there were always house guests, there was a lot of Hollywood people there,

and they would have movies, first-run movies every weekend, and then we would play sports and be out on the ocean all day during the daytime. How effective was the propaganda campaign from CIA against your family? It was very, very effective. I mean, for one thing, the word conspiracy theorist, that phrase was coined back then by the CIA.

They sent a memo out after my father's death, the CIA had at least 400 leading journalists in our country. They had an operation called Operation Mockingbird, which was an illegal operation to compromise American journalism. And they had some of the leading, in fact, Carl Bernstein in 1973 published a list of the 400 journalists who were secretly working for the CIA. And they were from all the leading papers, the Washington Post, the New York Times,

Time Magazine, Newsweek, a lot of the editors, a lot of the publishers of those were, you know, had signed security agreements with the CIA and were working we're assets of the CIA. It was an illegal program. The CIA is allowed to propagandize around the world, and it's the biggest funder of journalism today in the world.

It spends 10 billion a year through USAID to fund journalism all over the world. It owns some of the biggest newspapers and magazines, the most influential in the developing world, in Europe and around the world. There was a, in the CIA's charter, it says, and then there was an act called the Smith-Montag that makes it illegal for the CIA to propagandize Americans.

Oh, in 1973, there were congressional hearings that came out of the House Select Assassination Committee hearings when all the CIA secrets were revealed. They were called the Family Jewels. It was all of the worst secrets of the CIA that they all kept in one place. And that was released during the 1970s, during these hearings from the Church Committee and

the House Select Assassination Committee. And Americans learned for the first time about Operation Mockingbird, but also about MKUltra, MK Naomi, MK Dietrich. These were all of the MKs. This stands for mind control, and the CIA had these programs at Fort Detrick, but at 220 universities around our country, and in Latin America and Canada,

experimenting with ways to control the human mind. The LSD came out of that program, and they were using psychoactive drugs, they were using torture, they were using sensory deprivation, they were using noise. Noise. And they were figuring out how to control individuals, including how to develop mentoring candidates,

unwilling assassins through a hypnosis and these other techniques, but also how do you control whole societies through destruction of institutions, the propagation of lies, instigated violence, and the orchestrated diminishment of faith in the institutions of society and the mistrust among people.

So they had all of these, you know, they were experimenting. And you know, it wasn't just the U.S., the same thing was happening in Russia and in other parts of the world. But we had a very, very sophisticated program that violated a lot of American values. How effective do you think the MKUltra program was? Well, I mean, there's a lot of things that came out of it. And there's a lot of that.

It's hard to tell because a lot of it was top secret. It's a really interesting and very surprisingly well-documented history. But I don't want it. But the term conspiracy theorist was, there was a memo that went out to all of those journalists who were associated with the CIA in 1964, where they said that anybody who questions the Kennedy assassination, you know,

the Warren Report, which was the report, that was done by a commission that was appointed by LBJ. And the commission was essentially told and individual members were told, you got to say that this was a single gunman. Do not let people talk about a conspiracy theory. That the named head of the commission was Earl Warren, who was a Supreme Court justice,

but the real head of the commission was Alan Dulles, who had been the head of the CIA, who my uncle had fired. When my uncle died, he told a young journalist, oh, he thought he was a god. I'm glad the little shit is dead. And, you know, we now know that the CIA was directly involved in my uncle's assassination and in the, you know, 60-year cover-up. They continue to be involved. They're still not releasing, you know, the last assassination documents that are required by the JFK Papers Act, the Assass papers act, and the CIA still won't let the president release him.

Why Trump didn't release him? I don't know. He promised he would. He did say, he said, I have here Donald Trump has allegedly said that he's looked at the classified JFK files and said that if the public saw what he saw, they wouldn't want the files released either I mean What what does that mean? Yeah, what the hell is that? I have friends who have asked Trump about that

and President Trump don't one of my friends who asked about that, President Trump said, I'm not going to talk about it on the phone. And you know, so- Mike Pompeo was the director of CIA when it was supposed to be released, correct? You know what's interesting? I had dinner with Mike Pompeo a couple of months ago.

I've never met him before. And I always had a bad opinion of him because I feel like he's like a warmonger. But I, when I actually met him and sat down at dinner with him, I found him incredibly charming and brilliant. And he and I have different ideologies and different views about what, about the trajectory our country's going. But I believe that his are sincerely held,

that he's a man of principle, and that he just believes differently than I do. But he was in the military, he went to Harvard, he went to Harvard Law School, I think he may have been a Rhodes scholar, he really is like an exceptionally brilliant person. He said to me something really interesting. He said that, and this is the first time I met him, I started talking to him about the

CIA and he said, my greatest regret in public life is I did not fix the CIA. And he said, I had an opportunity to change the culture there, and I didn't do it. I left it alone. He said, the entire upper echelon of that agency is made up of individuals who do not believe in the democratic institutions of the United States of America. That's a quote, what he said to me. My daughter-in-law, and I know that you had, you know, you've worked for this agency as well.

My daughter-in-law was in the clandestine services at the CIA. She's running my campaign now. Amaryll Fox, Kennedy. She was in the clandestine services for her career in the weapons of mass destruction program. She went in, she joined right after 9-11 as an act of patriotism and idealism. And she spent the years since she left the agency in a battle against the military industrial complex and winding down the war machine, which she got very much exposed to over there. She says, look, there's 20,000 people who work for that agency, and most of them are

idealistic public servants who have integrity and love of our country and want to do the best thing. But she said the upper levels of the agency are completely contaminated and corrupted by, you know, by these sort of neocon types. Yeah, it's been a long time since I've been over there, but it's a damn shame. Where I'm— You know, you were asking about my childhood. So I had this extraordinary magical childhood that was, you know, where my house at Hickory Hill in Virginia was 10 minutes from

the White House. My father was the most powerful person in government after my uncle. He had run my uncle's campaign. He was now his attorney general, but he was at a portfolio across all the agencies. And you know, he's a young man, 35 years old, and he was running the government and He was deeply involved the CIA was only minutes from my house and It was it was a mile we or less than a mile We went I went horseback riding every morning with my dad we had

Each at that time there were nine kids and each one of us had a horse and my father would take us Galloping across the countryside, through the woods, et cetera, every morning before breakfast and we'd always ride through the CIA campus. That's when the building was first being built and the CIA had, you know, my father and uncle fired Dulles but they replaced him with a guy called John McComb who came to our house every day.

We had Cuban brigade members from the Cuban brigade, 257 brigade, who were at our house all the time. We had green berets climbing on the roof. The house was filled with all of the congressmen and senators. Every meal where Supreme Court justices who were members of the administration, a lot of the big programs, the civil rights program were all directed from my house by my father.

I would sit behind a couch in the living room when he ordered 20,000 troops down to the University of Alabama to integrate it and to Mississippi. So I grew up in this extraordinary milieu and very, very lucky to have kind of first front row seats at all of these events. And then my uncle was killed in 1963. Where were you when he was killed?

I was at school, said well, friend school. I got picked up by my mom early, and she was driving us home, and I saw somebody, I saw them, I was at that, I was 10 years old. I was in fifth grade, I went into first grade at five years old. I saw men holding the flags out to half staff. I asked her why they were doing that.

She hadn't spoken to me. She said a bad man shot Uncle Jack. Then I got home. My father, we lived on a five acre, seven acre farm right outside of Washington and called Hickory Hill. My father, we lived on a five acre, seven acre farm right outside of Washington and called Hickory Hill. And it was an antebellum mansion, you know, that had been Civil War. It had been John McClellan's house,

General McClellan during the US Civil War. Wow. And it was a big house with like 25 rooms in it. You know, we had, like I said, 11 kids And it was a big house with like 25 rooms in it. You know, we had, like I said, 11 kids and there was always guests in that house. And my father was walking at the bottom of the hill with John McComb when I got home, who was the CIA director,

who was one of the first people to get to the house. My father, during that walk, and I ran down to give him a hug and make him laugh, but during that walk, my father said to him, did your people do this? So his initial instinct was that the CIA had killed his brother. He made two other calls that day.

One to the CIA desk officer, Ian Langley, which again was less than a mile from my house, and he asked him the same question. And then he made the same call to Harry Ruiz, who is one of the leaders of the Cuban Brigade, and who was then staying in a hotel in Washington. He asked him, you know, did your people do this? He accepted. He suspected it was the Cuban group that had done it. And so, you know, and then my father then, you know, really shut down for almost a year.

He was so shattered by his brother's death. And he started slowly coming out of his shell. And he ran for Senate a year later, in 1964, and won. And then he became this incredible political force. And three years after that, he announced his run for president against President Johnson, running against the war in Vietnam. And he then in June, he declared in March, Martin Luther King was killed the following month. My father did this famous speech about King's death.

My father and King were very close. And he did a speech in Indianapolis, in a black section of Indianapolis. At that time, the police chief said, you can't go in there because you're going to get killed if you go in there. And my father went in alone without police protection. He gave this famous speech that people can look up at Indianapolis, where he talked to people and he said, for the first time, he talked about his brother's death and he talked about a black, to a black crowd that did not know, most of them didn't know that King had

been shot. And he told them, and there was an audible gasp that you can hear on the tape. You can go look at it on YouTube. Could you lower those signs, please? I have some very sad news for all of you, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day,

in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are, and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black, considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible, you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred,

and a desire for revenge we can move in that direction as a country and greater polarization black people amongst blacks and white amongst whites filled with hatred toward one another or we can make an effort as Martin Luther King did to understand and to comprehend and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that is spread across our land with an effort to understand, and compassion and love. For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act against all white people. I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed,

but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond or go beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poem, my favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote, even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despair against our will comes wisdom through the awful

grace of God. What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another. A feeling of justice toward those who still suffer

within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past but we will and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence, it is not the end of lawlessness, and it's not the end of disorder. But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this

country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life? And want justice for all human beings that abide in our land? And what dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago? dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much. And then he starts talking and he talks about his own brother's death. And that was the first time that he ever talked about it.

He couldn't talk about it before that. But he said, my brother was killed. And he was killed by a white man. And he talks to the crowd about how, you know, what we're going to do as a nation, what we do with this violence, and what we do with the anger and the vitriol, and whether we just, we use each of these incidents to amplify it, or whether we try to find a better part of ourselves as individuals.

And he talked, he quoted to them a quote from the Greek poet Aeschylus, and playwright that our, you know, that our role is to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world. Then he asked them to go home and, you know, with a blessing and that, and Indianapolis was the only city that didn't riot that night.

Two months later, my father was killed. Was shot in Los Angeles. I was with him when he died. I was 14 years old. We brought him back from LA to New York, and we waked him at St. Patrick's, and then we took a train from, took him on a train. We had, you know, Coretta King was with us,

was with me and him when he died, Martin Luther King's wife, but the trainload of people were filled with, you know, my father surrounded himself with these extraordinary people with poets and economists and writers, intellectuals, and you know, there was actors there and all these, but they were all this extraordinary, idealistic group of people. I think that on that blood train, that was about 1400, we put him on the train at Penn Station and we brought him down to Union Station

in Washington, D.C. to bury him. And on that train was a group that Arthur Sessner said in his book, it would have been the most extraordinary government in American history if my father had been elected. The train ride was supposed to take us an hour, but it took, or no, it took two and a half hours usually. It took seven hours because there were two million people

on the tracks. And it was an entire cross section of the American public. When we went through the big municipal train stations like Newark and Trenton and Philadelphia and Baltimore, Wilmington, there were thousands of black people in those stations. They were singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, which is the hymn

that they had sung when Lincoln was killed. And in the countryside there were people, you know, white soldiers, military uniforms. There were not, I remember outside of Wilmington seeing seven nuns standing in the back of a pickup truck, you know, waving rosaries at us as we went by. And you know, there were priests, there were rabbis, there were hippies and tie-dye,

there were Boy Scout troops saluting. I remember passing a little league field where there was a game going on and everybody was standing at attention, all the players with their gloves at their chest, the umpires, the people in the stand, and people were holding up signs that said, goodbye Bobby, pray for us Bobby,

and American flags, people, women, were holding up their babies. And we got to Washington, and President Johnson met us at the train station and then we got in a convoy of limousines. We took my father's body up through DC, past the mall. My father and Martin Luther King, just before they both died, had started a program they They were thinking they saw the Vietnam War Was gutting the war on poverty programs all the poverty programs were being gutted to pay for the war in Vietnam

And my father Martin Luther King said the only way that we're gonna get the poor actually taken care of in this country is if If they you is if they go occupy Washington and they don't leave until there's jobs programs and Congress acts. And at that time, there was still a lot of starvation in our country. The food stamp programs had just been started. There were people in the Delta who were literally starving to death in the most abundant country in the world.

And so all these poor men were in encampments in these sort of tar paper shacks that they had built and little kind of stick houses that they built and tents that they built on the mall. They all came to the sidewalk, eight or nine deep, and they were standing there, holding their hats to their chest, their heads bowed as we went past them. We drove past and we took my father over the bridge and up the hill at Arlington and buried him next to his brother under a small stone.

And then I remember four years later seeing demographic data When I was at that point, I was in college in Boston, seeing demographic data that showed that a lot of those white people who had lined that train track, who had voted for my, supported my father strongly in 1968, four years later, they were voting for George Wallace, who was antithetical to everything my country believed, my father believed, and it occurred to me then, and it struck me many times since, that every individual, like every nation, has a darker side and a lighter side, and that the easiest thing for a politician to do is to appeal to our darker angels, to our greed, our anger, fear.

You know, that is the most potent instrument for manipulation and xenophobia, our bigotry and selfishness. And that, you know, it's much harder to do what my dad was trying to do, which is to get people to transcend their now self-interest and find a hero inside themselves, and say we're part of a community here,

we're part of something larger, we're part of this extraordinary experiment to, you know, in self-governance, that we're an example to the whole world, to the rest of the world, and we all, whenever your color is, your skin color, your background, and that, you know, we're all in this together. And that we're a family.

And it takes a risk to do that, you know, to see other people as your brother or sister. But my dad was able to do that with people, and you know, and to really unify our country. Anyway, my dad died in June of 68, the following summer. When I was a kid, I was part of a, we were raised in this very Irish Catholic community

and a lot of us took the pledge, which is a pledge that we never drink, because it was understood that our race had a disproportionate vulnerability to alcohol, right? And we called the Irish flu. Oh, Irish kids, when I was in catechism class, you would take a pledge, and you'd wear a pledge pin on your collar. When me and you'd take the pledge, you're never gonna have a drink in your life.

I took it. I took it seriously. I was 15 years old, I never even drank coffee. And I went to, that summer, the summer after my dad died, I went to, my house was in chaos, you know, because my 11 siblings who are all, you know, he's, you know, warring Irish kids who are, you know,

who are out of hand a lot of the time, and my mom trying to maintain control of them. And I went to a party for an elder brother of a friend of mine who had just been drafted to go to Vietnam. And he, and it was a goodbye party for him. It ended up in a melee, and that guy ended up punching a cop and he went to jail

and he didn't end up going to Vietnam. But I was hitchhiking home from that party and an older boy picked me up, who I knew, but not that well, and he offered me some LSD. And I had never taken any kind of drug before. I wouldn't have taken it, but the comic books would come to our town every week. It was only one little shop in the town. There was a post office. And there was a news store that also sold candy, but it also sold the comic books. Comic books came every Tuesday.

And my favorite comic was a comic called Turok, Son of Stone, and it was about these two Indians. And about a week or two before, there was an episode where they had taken peyote or mescaline or some kind of hallucinogen, and they had been transported back in time, and they had seen dinosaurs. And I had a real deep interest, intense interest in paleontology. And I said to this guy, I said,

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And I was beginning, you know, my mood has dropped. And I was filled with remorse and telling myself, you know, you swore you wouldn't do this and, you know, here you did it and feeling, you know, just really, plus I had to go home and deal with my mother who, you know, was very, my mother was a tough lady. She, like, invented tough love and, you know, I had not checked in, I had violated my curfew, etc. So I was going to be in a lot of trouble. I was walking home and getting darker and darker,

three miles from town back to my house. And just before I got to my house, I saw some older boys in the woods. I went in there to see what they were doing, and I told them I was crashing on the acid. And they said, here, try some of this. And I had been telling myself, I'm never going to do this again, right?

And they said, try some of this. It was crystal meth. I took a snort of it and I felt great. And that really, that incident was the template for my addiction over the next 14 years. Because I was constantly telling myself I'm not gonna do this and then doing it and it was strange for me because I had iron willpower in other parts of my life. I gave up candy for lent when I was 13 and

never ate candy again till I was in college. I gave up desserts the next year and I never ate another dessert till I was in college and I gave up desserts the next year, and I never ate another dessert until I was in college, and I was trying to bulk up for sports, I started eating desserts again. And I felt I could do anything with my willpower, but somehow this compulsion to take drugs was completely impervious to it. And to me, you know, my progression was also very fast.

Within, I don't know, within a month, I was shooting heroin, and that was my kind of drug of choice. And for the next, you know, coke and heroin were my drugs of choice for the next 14 years. But I was constantly trying to quit earnestly, sincerely, honestly. But to me, the most moralizing feature of that disease was my incapacity to keep contracts with myself.

So I would tell myself at 9 o'clock in the morning, I am never going to do that again. I would believe it. I would mean it. At 4 o'clock in the afternoon, it was like I had no control over that person that I was going to be at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, it was like I had no control over that person that I was going to be at four o'clock. You know, when the addict would step into my head and take control and... So within a month of trying LSD,

you're turning to... I've been around animals my whole life. I'd given injections to animals, et cetera. So, and it seemed, so it wasn't as radical as a thing for, you know, as it might be for some people doing injected drugs, but anyway, that's where I was. Very, very fast progression. And then, so I came in until in September of 1983,

I got arrested, and, I got arrested. And when I got arrested, I was, you know, first of all, I'll tell you something about heroin for me. It was, I did very, very poorly in school until I started doing narcotics. Then I went to the top of my class because I was, my mind was so restless and turbulent. And I could not sit still. I could not, you know, the teacher would be at the front of the room talking and it would

be just like noises coming out of her mouth. I had no, I mean, I was probably, I would probably today be diagnosed as ADHD. I was bouncing off the walls. I couldn't sit still. I just wanted to get in the woods. That's all I thought about all day at school. When can I go into the woods and start turning over rocks and catching animals and, you know, fishing and doing all the, you know, that's the only place that I felt comfortable.

And in school I was non-compensative, I had no idea what was happening, and I was at the bottom of my class. I started doing heroin, I went to the top of my class, suddenly I could sit still, and I could read, and I could concentrate, I could listen to what people were saying, and things made sense to me. I could concentrate, I could listen to what people were saying and things made sense to me.

So, you know, I was probably at some level medicating myself, but, you know, it worked for me and if it still worked, I'd still be doing it, but it didn't work. It starts, you know, it works really great in the beginning, but then it begins exactly at cost. And then the cost gets worse and worse, and it killed my brother, and it destroys your relationships.

It destroys, it hollows out your whole life. You have a one-dimensional life. I was, what I would describe as a bundle of appetites that just was a full-time job to feed them, and you know, drugs and sex and alcohol and extreme behavior, but it's all about me eventually, you know, instead of using the resources of your life and the assets that God gave you to help other people, that instead of using the resources of your life

and the assets that God gave you to help other people, it's self-will run riot. It's really the triumph, the ultimate addiction, the ultimate triumph of self-will. And so- What was going on with the family? Did the family know how addicted you were? How bad I was. I was kind of functional.

I was doing, I went to law school. I did really well in school. I went to law school. I was living, I was writing books. So people had an idea that something was wrong, but no clue about how badly I was doing. So people, you know, people had an idea that something was wrong, but they, but no clue about how, you know, badly off I was. And then I got arrested in 83, and I,

and so then I went, you know, then I was able to get sober, and I knew. What did you get arrested for? For heroin possession. How did they catch you? I was on an airplane, and I knew. What did you get arrested for? For heroin possession. How did they catch you? I was on an airplane and I went into a, I actually was going to a rehab out in Minnesota and a plane stopped in South Dakota. Oh no, I was going to South Dakota to detox.

I was going to go, there was a man, there was a cabin, a buddy of mine owned a cabin up in the mountains and he owned a dirt bike. And I had gone out there to detox a couple of times. I would just ride that dirt bike up into the hills. There was no roads. And I would stay in that. It had a well. And I would stay in that cabin, that log cabin and detox.

Takes about five days to detox from Maryland. I was going to go detox there. I didn't want people to see me detoxing. I had pride about that. So then I was going to go to Minnesota and go to rehab in Minnesota. When I, on my way to the airport, I picked up a bag of dope

and somebody saw me go to the bathroom with it, and then there was police waiting when I landed. And they got my luggage, so I was arrested, which is the best thing that could have happened to me, because I could have never gone into a 12-step meeting, because for me, being who I was, in a political family, a high-profile family, to talk about, you know, intimate parts of my life and about drug addiction and breaking the law and all these things, I just couldn't have done it.

It would have been, you know, so destructive, seemingly. Oh, it was just not even a place that I would consider going. But now I got busted, everybody knew. So now I could start going to 12 sub meetings. And I went, I knew that I wanted to, I knew I wanted to have a spiritual awakening because I, first of all, I did not want to be, I knew the person I was was an addict

and that I didn't want to be back out on the street white-knuckling it and just fighting it all the time. I wanted to be a normal person who just woke up in the morning and lived their day without wanting drugs all the time and being tormented by that desire all the time and by the compulsion. I wanted to escape it, and I wanted to do it the easy way,

and I knew that throughout history, there had been people, figures who I admired, I had read the lives of the saints from when I was little, and I knew that for many of the saints, like Saint Augustine led a complete debauched life. He was a sex addict and a drug addict till he was 30 years old. And he had this spiritual awakening

and he just walked away from it. He was not tormented by any of it anymore. And then St. Francis, he had been a heavy drinker, et cetera, till he had the same kind of, you know, spiritual awakening. And a lot of other people. But I had my brother, one of my brothers had a best friend, my brother David who died of this disease,

had a best friend who, and David was a year apart from me, he had a best friend who was a drug addict just like we were. But he became a Mooney. He joined a unification church and became a follower of Reverend Sun Young Moon. It was kind of like a cult. And he would still hang out with us, but he didn't want drugs anymore.

And we could take drugs right in front of him, and he would just chatter about his new life. Interesting. And was not at all tempted. And I used to think about this when I, this guy when I first got started, I went to a rehab that was not a 12-set rehab, but I knew that I wanted to have

some profound spiritual awakening. It changed me in a fundamental way. I brought a lot of people into 12-set programs over the last 40 years, and a couple of people have said to me, oh, I don't want to go to that because it will brainwash you. At that time, if somebody said I could get brainwashed,

I would say, bring it on. My brain needed washing. I didn't want to live like I was living, right? So I was like, I wanted to be changed in some fundamental way. And I used to think about this guy, my brother's friend, and I would think, I was thinking at the time, you know, that I would rather be dead than be a Mooney, is what I was thinking at that.

And you know, it was a judgmental thought, I admit. I would say I'd rather be dead than be a Mooney, but I wish somehow I could distill whatever it was that made him impervious to this compulsion and get that part without becoming a religious nuisance. Then I read this book by Carl Jung called Synchronicity and I can't tell you where I got the book. It was just sitting on a table and I picked it up because it was an album by the police out at that time.

It was also called Synchronicity. And I didn't know what the word was. No, synchronicity means, essentially it means a coincidence. It's this thing that happens to all of us. Like, you're talking about somebody that you haven't thought about for 20 years. that happens to all of us. You're talking about somebody that you haven't thought about for 20 years, and the phone rings and it's that guy on the phone, right?

And there are these little incidences that defy the laws of percentages and chance. I wouldn't recommend anybody read this synchronously, but the book, his biography, which is called Dreams, Remembrances, and something else, is riveting. And Jung had these kind of experiences all his life. Jung was a contemporary of Freud's, and Freud was his mentor. But he broke with Freud because Freud was an atheist. And Young's approach to psychiatry was deeply spiritual. In fact, he really crafted the 12-step programs. He corresponded with Bill Wilson

and then he treated Bill Wilson's best friend, a guy called Roland Hazard. Bill Wilson was the founder of AA. And he said to Roland Hazard, Roland Hazard said to him at one point, Roland Hazard was this millionaire from Boston who Young treated, and he treated him a number of times. And every time he would leave the sanitarium, Young ran the biggest sanitarium in Europe, in Zurich,

he would leave the sanitarium thinking that he was cured, not wanting to drink, and within days, he'd be drinking again. And he'd come back to Jung, and at one point, he says to Jung, give it to me straight. Is there any chance for somebody with my level of alcoholism? And Jung says to him, no. I'm giving it to you straight. No, you're hopeless.

And Roland Hazard pushes him and he says, in history, has anybody with my level ever walked away from it? And Young said yes, but only when they have a profound spiritual realignment. Hazard had gone back and shared that story with another guy called Abby and with Bill Wilson and that sort of became the basis, the 12 steps of that program are designed to induce a spiritual awakening, right? So that's how it works.

How it's supposed to work. So Jung says, and as Jung, he tells his story about he's sitting like up on the third floor of his hospital with a patient, a female patient. The patient has had a dream that she's explained to young, and the essential feature of that dream is a scarab beetle. The scarab beetle is a creature that is basically non-existent in Northern Europe. It's very common in the South and in Northern Africa, and it's a very potent and common symbol on the iconography of Egypt and the hieroglyphics

on the obelisks and the tombs and the pyramids, et cetera. But so while he's talking to this woman, and dreams are a big part of his approach to psychiatry, he's talking to this woman about a dream and he's hearing this bing, bing, bing on the window behind him and he doesn't want his attention to take his attention off the patient because he wants her to feel like she's listening to him.

But finally he gets exasperated and he swings around. He throws open the window and a scarab beetle flies in and lands in his palm. And he turns to the woman and he said, is this what you were dreaming about? And he had these kind of incidences. If you read his biography, they happen repeatedly to him throughout his life, and each one

changes the trajectory of his life in a little way. He tries to, and he believed that these were incidences where God breaks his own rules, all the rules of biology, a percentage of chance for arithmetic, and reaches in and touches on the shoulder in order to just say, I'm here, or to say, you should change your posture a little,

or I'm here and I'm watching and I'm with you or whatever. But there are ways, you know, that, and he tried to reproduce this in a clinical trial, in a clinical setting. So he put one guy in one room and another guy in the other room and he has them flip cards and he has them try to guess what the other guy, you know, flipped.

He thinks that if he can beat the laws of percentages, that he will prove in the existence of a supernatural law of something that nature can't explain. And that's the first step in proving the existence of a God. In this book, he says he never succeeds in doing it. And he says, I can't, but he says this. He says I can't prove using empirical tools or scientific tools the existence of a God.

But having seen tens of thousands of patients come through his sanitarium, he said he could prove that people who believed in God got better faster and that their recovery was more enduring, durable. For me, that was a much more impactful thing to hear at that point than if he had said that he had proven the existence of a God,

which I would not have believed. But what he was saying is whether there's a God up there or not is irrelevant. If you believe in one, your chances of recovery are much better, of achieving happiness in your life are much better. And that to me, at that point I had made a bargain with myself that I would do anything that I could

to improve my chance of recovery by even 1%. So I just made an intellectual decision to believe in God. Now, I had been raised in a very religious household, deeply biased. I went to church every day during the summer times. I said the rosary every day, prayed before and after each meal. And God was a very real part of my life.

But when you live against conscience for a long time, which is what addiction is, you push God over the periphery of your horizons. And so that's where it was for me. It just wasn't part of my everyday life or thought process. And so, I made an intellectual decision. I'm going to believe in God. I'm going to start believing in God.

And then I was presented with this dilemma that anybody who reaches that decision confronts, which is how do you start believing in something that you can't see or smell or taste or touch or hear or feel or acquire with your senses? And Jung solves that problem. He says, you fake it till you make it. You act as if. And he said that the compliance and the faith

will precede the evidence. So you will see evidence at some point and you won't need faith anymore because the evidence will become so overwhelming of the existence of God in His presence in your life, and you won't need it anymore. You have to start with compliance, with obedience, with faith. And so I just said, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to pretend there's a God watching me all the time, 24 hours a day. And it means that I have to behave myself even when I don't have an audience.

You know, I have to act like a good person even when people aren't watching me, even when I don't get any credit for it. And I began breaking my life, my day, down into like 40 different decisions that I make each day, and each one of them now, for me, had a moral implication. So when the alarm goes off in the morning, do I get right out of bed,

or do I stay in bed for another 15 minutes with my indolent thoughts? Do I make the bed when I get up? Right now I'm doing this project where, running for president, where I'm in a different hotel room every night. I was in a hotel last night, I made my bed this morning. Oh, which is crazy.

Why would you do that? I only do it because I know I'm not doing it to help any, I'm doing it to build character because I made a commitment to myself and I'm keeping that commitment. And do I hang up the towels when I get out of the shower? Do I put the water in the ice tray before I put the ice tray back in the freezer?

Do I put the, you know, do I, when I reach into my closet and pull out a pair of blue jeans and all those little wire hangers fall on the ground, do I shut the closet like I used to and say that's somebody else's job? I'm too much of a big shot for that. Or do I go in there and clean up my mess? You know, do I put the shopping cart

where it's supposed to go in the parking lot? I remember when I first got sober, addiction really makes your life tiny. But then when you start getting sober, your life starts growing big again. And my life got paid very fast, and I was running through National Airport in Washington, D.C., and I was trying to chase a plane that I was definitely going to be late for.

It was mission critical that I'd be on that plane. Like the apocalypse was going to happen for me if I did not make that flight. I was running through the airport and I put a stick of dentine in my mouth and I was bunched up the little wrapper. And as I was running, I threw the wrapper and it went a perfect arc, right into the middle swish

of a trash can. But I noticed as I was running by, it must have hit something in there because it jumped back out. And I was like, said to myself, well, that's God's fault because I made the shot. That's his problem. I kept running. I got about 40 feet down the terminal and it just started eating at me. And I put on the

brakes. And I went back and put that little piece of wrapper back in the trash. And to me, that was the most important thing I did that day because I made the plane, but it put me in that posture of surrender where this is about keeping your commitments to yourself and doing what's right, no matter what the cost of saying God's in charge.

And my inclination is when you know, when I, when I, you know, I came in on my knees, but then I get sober and, you know, my life starts going well and the cash and prizes start flowing in, and my inclination is to say, you know, thanks God, I got it from here. And then take the wheel of the car and drive it off the cliff again,

and then have to come back on my knees and do that rinse, repeat cycle. And the big challenge is how do I stay in that posture of surrender even when the good stuff is happening in my life? And how do I make this not about Bobby, but make it about the people, about being of service to other people and doing my duty, doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and getting up every

day and saying, reporting for duty, sir, and that this day and the assets that I have today do not belong to me, that I'm a trustee, you know, I hope I can be useful today. And then trying to, you know, figure out ways to develop character. It's all about the only thing they can't take away from you is character, right? If you, they can take your money, they can take your reputation,

they can take, they can't take your character, and that is eternal. And if we're here, we're not here to build a big pile for ourselves and whoever dies with the most stuff wins. We're here to build character which is eternal, which is forever and is really the only thing ultimately that matters. Did you have a profound spiritual awakening? Yeah, I did, but I'll tell you what, it was kind of like, it wasn't like a white light experience, but it was transformative. It was kind of a poor man's spiritual awakening. I was out the day that I finished reading that book

by Young, I was out on a volleyball court. I was at a rehab cell and I was with some of the other patients and we were playing volleyball and somebody hit a volleyball. I'd just finished this book, The Synchronicity, and somebody hit a volleyball, and a very, very powerful hit, and it went way up, and then it came down,

and it landed on the post, and it started bouncing off this kind of air and flight, and I said out loud, so everybody heard me. I said, that ball's gonna get hit by a Mack truck. I don't know why I said out loud so everybody heard me. I said, that ball's going to get hit by a Mack truck. I don't know why I said that. But I said it out loud and 10 people heard me. The ball went up and it landed on a chain link fence right on the top and then it kind of tipped over the top

and on the other side it ran down a driveway about 40 or 50 feet into the main thoroughfare and a big 18-wheel diesel with the bulldog on the front comes by and it pops it with a really resounding pop. And everybody there was looking at me and saying, how did you do that? Oh, man.

So I had just finished that book, and it was like God coming in and touching me, saying, yeah, this is... Reaffirming. Yeah. Here I am. So that, you know, and I, it just, I don't know, it put me in a different, it put me in a place

where I could listen for the first time instead of, you know, instead of arguing with it and fighting it to just say, okay, I'm in good hands and I can put down the oars and I can hoist the sails and let God do the hard work and me do what I'm just supposed to do on a day-to-day basis. Wow. I know you are big on the fentanyl crisis.

What? And I know you are big on fighting the fentanyl crisis. Yeah. And so I've struggled with addiction. A lot of my friends have struggled with addiction. A lot of people in the country are struggling with addiction. What lot of people in the country struggle with addiction. What advice do you have for somebody that is trying to overcome addiction?

I mean, if you want to do the easy thing, go to a 12-step program. If you go to a meeting and you don't like it, go to another one, because they're all completely different, and just go until you figure it, until you find one that works. I don't, you know, when I first came to the program

40 years ago, I said to a guy, how long do you have to keep coming to these meetings? And the guy said to me, just keep coming till you like it. And I was like, I've been going 40 years and I still don't like it and I don't have time to go. I'm running for president. I do not have time to go. I'm running for president. I do not have time to go to an A8 meeting, but I go every day and I go, you know, because when I go the rest of my life works.

You still go? Yeah, I went today already. And I actually went, I don't know if I have, anyway, I went today and I went to a little rural meeting 20 miles from here in Bern, Tennessee. I know where that is. Yeah. So. How was it?

It was great. Well, I actually went to a rehab. I went, Russell Brand was at a comedy event that I did last night. And he said to me, I said to him, do you want to go to a meeting with me today? And he's very, I can talk about him in 12 steps because you're not supposed to talk about other people in the meetings, but he's very open about it. So, and he's written books about it and all that. But he said, he'd already been to a meeting that day, which I went to a meeting in DeBerry, Inverness, Florida that day. He had landed in Tennessee, he'd gone right to a meeting.

There was a guy at that meeting who ran a rehab out in Bern. And he said to me, I said, do you want to come to a meeting with me tomorrow? And he said, let's go to this rehab. So we went out, we drove out like 25 miles outside of Nashville, and we went to the rehab and we just showed up there. And they were really happy to see us and we said, let's do a meeting. So we got all the people and we did a meeting.

I did the spoke. He was the secretary. I was the speaker and then everybody went around the room and it was great. But anyway, when I go to a lot of meetings, I don't like to go. There's always, there's something I'd rather be doing, you know, than that. I'd rather go to a movie, I'd rather hang with my kids.

But I go because my life works when I go. I'm not walking around with that knot of anxiety in my gut that I was born with, and that only, you know only heroin would quiet it. I don't have the empty holes inside of me that I have to fill with things outside me, with poisons, pills, powders, potions and all that. And also, something weird happens when you go to a lot of them. And a lot of people

say this, but my luck changes. The lights turn green for me. The parking places open up. I see all these little synchronicities in my life and feel like I'm in the hands of God all the time. And so even if I don't particularly like the meeting, the act of just going there puts my life on, it's like, for me it's like brushing my teeth. I don't like brushing my teeth. I don't enjoy it, I don't look forward to it. It's a pain in the butt to get up and do it.

But I do it every day, because I don't want to live with the consequences of what happens if I don't, you know. Or it's like going to the gym or anything else that you say Okay, I'm gonna do this because it's good for me Even though I don't want to go even though it's a pain. I'm gonna make the effort And you get this huge pay off from it and I get you know, I'm right now running in a presidential campaign I'm in this storm every day of people, you know, I'm right now running in a presidential campaign. I'm in this storm every day of people, you know, of hatred and anger coming at me from one end and then adulation and hope, people putting their hope in me, all of these different

things. And it's like being in the middle of a storm all the time. And what I need to do is get below the surface of the water where it's calm and let that wind blow and that storm happen without being impacted in the center of my soul to have that peace inside of me while all this turbulence is going on outside. And to do that you need a spiritual discipline. And the easiest spiritual discipline you'll ever get is a 12-step program. You have to do less work and it's more clear

and the blueprint is there and it keeps you in that, on that path to the light, to nirvana, to whatever you want to call it, to fulfillment, enlightenment, all of those things. That's like the clearest, easiest path. We're all on that path at some level. We're all trying to, we're chasing that spiritual yearning that is just part of the human condition.

You have people in the Amazon, in Africa, Bushmen, in the Kalahari, you know, people in Native Australians, people in Mongolia, and no matter where you go on earth, every human being shares that one thing in common, this deep spiritual yearning for something that's outside of themselves, that's good. We're all on that path. You had to go. That path carried you to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to try to find that answer. How do you get to that place?

And we all went through, you know, the drugs, all of that, the drinking, it's a spirit, you're trying to fill yourself with the spirit, it's just the wrong thing. The ScoreBet app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking. Nah, no more statistically speaking. I want hot takes. I want knee-jerk reactions. That's not really what I do.

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Yeah. Yeah, I've been, I quit booze two and a half years ago. I haven't had a drop in my life sober 15 years. So I just, I love that you shared that. Thank you. Thank you. And, and that's what we do here too. We like, I love exploring avenues on how people found their way out of addiction.

So thank you. I'd like to switch gears a little bit. We have an hour left. I wanted to, I see a lot of things going on in the media. I don't trust the media at all anymore with what you were talking about with Mockingbird and I doubt you do either, but is there anything that is in the media about you that is completely false? I would say almost everything.

I mean, you can't say everything because they get occasional facts right. But, you know, I think the portrayals of me and the media, my beliefs, whether it's about vaccines or whether it's a worm in my brain or whatever it is, it's warm in my brain or whatever it is, it's all wrong. You know, it's actually wrong on kind of a larger level. But you know, there's no way to correct it all. Yeah. I just have to, you know, first of all,

the only place you get an honest discussion about that stuff is on podcasts like this, you know, where people are doing long form, where they're not, you know, looking for sound bites and clickbait or whatever that they're actually looking for. It's kind of a deeper understanding of people, of life, of sort of, you know, where you're on the search for existential truths, rather than just, you know, this very superficial and shallow understanding of sort of

bumper stick understanding of issues. Is there anything in particular that's in the media about you that you want to address? I don't know. I mean, I think the biggest sort of constant lot thing The biggest sort of constant lot thing about me is that I'm, is you know, that I, is my beliefs about vaccines. And you know, if you ask any questions about vaccines, particularly during COVID, you were marginalized and vilified, you were gaslighted.

People were injured and were, who publicly said they were injured were gaslighted. They were told, no, you aren't, you know, you're lying. Doctors, scientists who tried to explore alternatives to the prevailing ortho-, to the receiving orthodoxy. Their careers were destroyed. They lost their insurance policies, their hospital affiliations, their university affiliations. And they were vilified. And so I've been going through this since 2005,

when I published in Rolling Stone an article about a meeting. I published the transcriptions of a secret meeting that CDC had conducted in 2001 called Simpsonwood, when they realized that their vaccination program was linked to the epidemic of autism. And they had done an internal study of the largest medical database called the Vaccine Safety Datalink, and they had brought in, CDC brought in a Belgian biostatistician and epidemiologist called Thomas Verstraten, and he had to look at, the thing that they looked at, this database is the top, it's all the patients of the top HMOs and the 10 top HMOs, so it has millions of patients in it.

And it has all of their vaccine records, but it also has all their subsequent medical claims. You can do a cluster analysis and you can see, you know, if he got the DTP vaccine here, is he more likely to be buying insulin syringes for diabetes five years later? So it's a really good tool for figuring out causal links between certain exposures and, you know, later medical claims. And they looked at kids who had, they were suspected at that time, that the CDC suspected internally,

at the vaccine program, they had gone from the three vaccines that I took as a kid to 72 vaccines. And all of a sudden you had epidemics of all these chronic diseases. Food allergies suddenly appeared around 1989. Peanut allergies, shit and stuff. I never heard of anybody who had this stuff. All these neurological disorders, ADD, ADHD,

speech delay, language delay, tick's, Tourette's syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, autism. Autism went from one in 10,000 for 2,500, one in 2,500 to one in 10,000, depending on the studies in my generation, 70-year-old men, 70-year-old men, in the amount of autism, full-blown autism in people my age, I literally have never met anybody my age

with full-blown autism. And today, it's one in every 10,000 of us. Do you think? With my kids, it's one in every 22 boys, one in every 34 kids. Something happened. And Congress directed the EPA, Congress sent the EPA,

tell us what year this epidemic started, and the EPA came back and said it's a red line, 1989. So, you know, there's a number of things that happened in 1989. So, you know, there's a number of things that happened in 1989. But those diseases, all these autoimmune diseases suddenly appeared. I never knew anybody with juvenile diabetes. When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in his career. Today, one out of every three kids who walks through his office door has something happen.

Why isn't anybody talking about this? Rheumatoid arthritis suddenly exploded, lupus, all these autoimmune diseases, Crohn's disease, these exotic diseases. Nobody ever heard of when I was a kid. Now they're everywhere. And so you have allergic diseases, you have neurological disease and autoimmune diseases, and obesity suddenly appear around 1989. And so there's a number of things

that could be blamed for it. Well, the CDC thought it may be the vaccine schedule. Let's check. So they looked at one vaccine, which is the hepatitis B vaccine. They looked at kids who had gotten it in the first 30 days, and then they looked at kids who had not gotten it in 30 days. In other words, kids who got it later or didn't get it at all.

And they compared these two groups. And among the kids who got it in the first 30 days, there was a, I think it was a 10,000% increased risk for a later subsequent autism diagnosis if you got it in the first 30 days. Wow. They immediately knew what was causing it. Oh, I know what it was, it was 11.35, so it's 1135% increased risk. So they knew immediately, it's called a relative risk of 11.35.

If you have a relative risk of two, causation is presumed, this was 11.35. The link between cigarettes, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for 20 years and getting lung cancer is a relative risk of 10. This was 11.35. We've got to find out. They knew what it was and then,

they had an emergency meeting that they called. They didn't want to do it on CDC campus because they thought it would be susceptible to freedom of information requests. So they did it in a very, in this remote retreat center called Simpsonwood, which is a Methodist retreat center on the on the wooded banks of the Chattahoochee River In a remote part of Georgia and they had all of the big panjarums from the vaccine industry from the pharmaceutical industry from the universities are the ones who test the vaccines from NIH, CDC, FDA, the World Health Organization, the European Medical Agency, and they all got together for two days to talk about this study.

The first day, they're all, and somebody made a transcript of it, and that transcript was given to me, and I published excerpts from it. But the first day, they're all talking about, oh my God, the lawyers are going to come after us. Nobody can deny this. This is bulletproof. There's no way to argue with this. This is real science. We can't, what are we going to do?

The second day, they spent talking about how to hide it from the American public. And I published these things. Oh, then I took a lot of heat at that point. But I was like, I'm not against vaccines. I vaccinated all my kids. I was fully vaccinated. I just think they ought to be tested and we ought to know what the risks are

and what the outcomes are. And there are people who are injured by vaccines. There's no question of that. There's a vaccine court that pays them off. It's paid off billions of dollars to people who have died or severely injured. And what I think we should do is not tell those people they don't exist, but we ought to acknowledge it

and we ought to be doing the studies to reduce the number of people. Oh, I don't want to take away people's, so many want to get vaccinated, they should be able to get it. But they also ought to know everything there is, you know, what the risks are and what the benefits are. But if you say that, something that's completely reasonable,

you're called an anti-factor and you're, you know, marginalized and silenced and vilified and made to look like, you know, you've committed this kind of heresy that is dangerous for the whole society. That's what they did. Yeah, I mean, ever since 2020, it's the confidence that the people have in government has just diminished at a,

I've never seen a distrust happen so fast. No, because people could say what was actually evident for a long time, but everything became amplified during COVID. I also think people shouldn't be forced to get a vaccine. And if you really think about it, most Americans don't think that either. You know, for example, right now,

CDC is recommending a ninth booster. A ninth booster. Ninth. Okay, so it's recommended that everybody get their ninth booster. There's fewer than 10% of Americans who are getting it. So 90% of Americans have lost faith in CDC. Do you think that, you know,

we should do what the Biden administration did, which is to tell everybody, if you don't get that ninth booster, you can't work. You know, you should be publicly shamed. You shouldn't be able to fly on an airplane. You shouldn't be able to walk into a public building. Your rights should be curtailed. You shouldn't be able to play professional sports.

Does anybody think that we should be doing that? I don't think most Americans believe that people should be compelled to get a ninth vaccine, which means that they don't trust CDC anymore. You're hard on the FDA too, correct? Yeah, I mean, FDA. Something the other day that said. I'm hard on all the agencies

because they're captive in the industry. They become sock puppets for the industries they're supposed to regulate. I mean, FDA gets 50% of its budget from pharmaceutical companies. I've read that 30 countries have now banned our food. Our food? Yeah, 30 countries have now banned our food. Our food?

Yeah. 30 countries. Well, you know, I don't know about our food. I'm sure there's some products within it. Like GMO plants are banned in many countries, and we are almost exclusively now GMO products. But there's a thousand ingredients that are in processed foods in this country that are banned in other countries. So we have the worst food, I would guess the worst food of any country in the world, and

we have the worst health. We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world. I mean, how do you fix this? You can fix it. I mean, how do you fix this? I mean, 50% of the income to the FDA is from pharmaceutical companies, pharmaceutical lobbying organization, from what I understand is the biggest lobbying organization in the entire world. Yeah. I mean, how do you combat that?

Well, you know, you can't. It's hard to combat, regulatory, like if I, let's say we found proof that high fructose corn syrup was causing the obesity epidemic. The obesity epidemic is now, you know, when my uncle was president, I think 13% of kids were obese, and today it's almost 50%.

And you know, this is a threat to our military readiness. It's a threat to, you know, public health. It's destroying our economy because so much money is now going to chronic disease. And it's making us, we're the sickest people in the world. During COVID, we had the highest body count of any country in the world. We had 16% of the COVID deaths. We only have 4.2% of the world's population. So whatever we were doing was totally wrong. It was the worst, the worst protocols

of any country in the world because we killed the most people. Other countries, you know countries had a tiny fraction. Haiti, which had a 1% vaccination rate, had 1 two hundredth of our death rate from COVID. Wow. Nigeria, which had 1.3% vaccination rate, had 1 two hundredth of our rate.

They had 14 deaths per million population. We had 3,000. And blacks in our country were dying at even greater rates. And we were told, oh, yeah, Africa's going to get wiped out. Africa didn't even know that it had a COVID epidemic. They didn't even know it because so few people died and they didn't have the vaccine. We don't know exactly why, but one of the problems was just this information chaos. Here's how you solve the problem. You can't, you know, let's say we even knew that

high fructose corn syrup was causing the diabetes epidemic and the OPC epidemic. Let's say even that it's the sole cause, which I don't believe. I think all of these, you know, there's a famous scientist, a toxicologist called Phil Landrigan in New York, and I've used him on a lot of my cases. He's the leading toxicologist in this country,

and he's looked at this and said, okay, all these things began in 1989. He's autoimmune this and said, okay, all these things began in 1989, these autoimmune allergies, the neurological disease, the OPC epidemic. What happened on that timeline that, you know, it's got to come from an environmental toxin, environmental exposure, because genes don't cause epidemic. They may provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. What environmental toxins became ubiquitous along that timeline that could be responsible, you

know, could be, and he said, really, there's only about 13 of them. There's glyphosate, which is in Roundup, the active ingredient in Roundup, which follow that timeline pretty perfectly. There's the vaccine schedule, which we went from three vaccines to 72 vaccines, and the big change here was around 1989, and all of those vaccines have on their manufacturers' inserts, they list all the side effects. It's compulsory for them to list the side effects. And all of those illnesses are listed as side effects.

So you have to look at that as a possibility. Atrazine is another one. Neonicotinoid pesticides. PFOA is these forever chemicals, PFAS is the military, big explosions, but it's in all of our water now. It's a flame retardant. It's in our furniture. It's in our children's pajamas. It's in many of the water supplies around our country.

I've litigated on almost all of these. Cell phone radiation, another possibility potential. There's other things that I don't think are suspects, but they're part of the list. And one of those is ultrasound, which became ubiquitous along that timeline. But you have to look at all of the exposures and then do the science. It's easy. And it probably ends up that it's a combination of all of them that's a confluence because a lot of them work along the same biological pathways. They all deplete mitochondrial energy in our cells and that ends up with a cascading effect

that can cause brain damage and can cause autoimmune diseases and all of these other diseases. And if you have a damaged mitochondrial system at the outset and you have all these exposures, you're much more likely to go down to succumb to it, get the autoimmune diseases or the neurological disease. Your question is, how do you end it, even if you knew that high fructose corn syrup was causing the obesity epidemic, you probably

could not legislate against it because, as you point out, the government agencies are owned by Cargill and Monsanto and the big agricultural producers. And there's a million farmers whose livelihoods are tied up now in methane and high-food-dust corn syrup and GMO corn, which is creating it. And there's whole government subsidies programs that are pumping billions of dollars into the corn belt. And you've got a whole system that works around it, so it'd be hard.

But here's how you do it. The same thing was true with Monsanto. If you, when people said we could never get rid of glyphosate, glyphosate in Monsanto, which is the active ingredient in Roundup, we got enough science that linked non-Hodgkin's lymphoma to exposure to Roundup. We had about 15 or 20 studies, and it was a good mixture. It was epidemiological studies, endocities studies, observational studies, and it was a good mixture, it was epidemiological studies, and studies, observational studies, animal studies, and clinical trial studies. And it was enough of them that we were able to go in front of a court, and the court said

there's sufficient evidence, there's a threshold in federal courts and essentially in state courts called Daubert. And Daubert threshold means that you can't sue somebody saying that your cancer or your illness came from their product unless there is sufficient science out there to make it plausible. And there's no standard about exactly what that means. At the courts, there's a Daubert hearing before every trial. Otherwise, you can't take the question to a jury. Oh, every trial on a toxic exposure causing an illness is preceded by a Daubert hearing

in which you show the judge all the cases and he makes a determination about whether there's sufficient science to bring the case. Well, once we brought the case, we had it. By the end, we had 40,000 home gardeners who had each claimed that they got non-Hodgkin Symphoma from Roundup. And the way that multidistrict litigation works, you try each of those cases one at a time until somebody says, Uncle. The first case we tried, we won $289 million from the jury.

The second case, which was a weaker case, we won 89 million. The third case, we asked for a billion, and the jury gave us 2.2 billion. And then Monsanto came to the negotiating table, and we settled the case for $13 billion. And Monsanto agreed to remove Roundup from home gardening products. So you can beat them. The way you beat them is not by regulating against them, but it's by getting enough science out there that the lawyers are going to sue them and win those cases. And you've done it. What?

You've done it. I've done it, but what NIH makes sure is that that science does not exist. They will not let a scientist or a university, they'll bankrupt the university if it tries to study the links between high fructose corn syrup and obesity epidemic or the diabetes epidemic or vaccines and diabetes or whatever. they won't let you do it. They control between Bill Gates and the Wellcome Trust and NIH, they control 63% of the biomedical research on Earth, and most of the rest is controlled by the Chinese and the pharmaceutical companies.

So if you're a working scientist and you want to continue to be one, you got to toe the line and you can't study certain things. And what I'm going to do is change that. As soon as I get into office, NIH has a $42 billion budget. So it's got $42 billion that it gives out in grants every year to scientists, 56,000 scientists at universities all over this country and some in Canada and elsewhere to study certain things. But they will not let them study the things that are important.

What's causing the autism epidemic? What's causing the diabetes epidemic? What's causing rheumatoid arthritis? What's causing the allergic peanut allergies. Why do we suddenly have all these things that we didn't have before? They will not let anybody study those things. What I'm going to do, I'm going to go over to NIH and I'm going to get everybody my first week in office.

I'm going to bring in all of the branch head and division heads. I'm going to say, we're going to stop doing what you're doing, which is right now, I'll tell you what NIH does. NIH, when I was a kid, NIH was right down the road from where I grew up. I used to go over there to look at the rats and to look through the microscopes because I wanted to be a scientist. And NIH was the gold standard health and medical research agency in the world. All the other countries in the world, they don't have agencies like that, and they would

rely on American research. And in 1980, we passed a law called the Bayh-Dole Act, and that law said that NIH scientists who work on new drugs get to keep royalties for them. So NIH gets to keep royalties. You've got to be kidding. So the Moderna vaccine, a good example, NIH owns half of the Moderna vaccine, is collecting billions of dollars in royalties. And there are six guys who work for NIH, the top deputies, who get $150,000 a year

because they worked on the Moderna vaccine. So these are the guys who are supposed to be telling us what the problem is with that product, but they're paying for their alimony, their mortgages, their boats, their kids' education, sales of those products. And it's a crazy, it's the most perverse incentive. their kids' education, sales of those products. And it's a crazy, it's a most perverse incentive.

I'm going to end that, and I'm also going to say, and as a result, NIH, instead of doing research and saying, answering the important questions like where is the autism epidemic coming from, where's the food allergy epidemic, where's the diabetes epidemic coming from, What they are doing instead is ignoring those problems and developing drugs to treat those diseases which they can cash in on.

And then they sell them to the pharmaceutical industry, the pharmaceutical industry makes them, gives them the payoff, and it's become a drug incubator. And I think like in 2016, I think it was, there were 220 new drugs approved by FDA and all of them came out of NIH. So that's what it does. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over there and I'm going to say, we're going to give drug development a little break right now and we're going to figure out why our kids are the sickest kids in the world.

And we're going to generate enough science on each of these exposures that lawyers can go to court and say, you guys, high fructose corn syrup, you're causing a diabetes epidemic, now you're going to start paying for it. And they will take that stuff off the shelf quicker than you can blink, because they're gonna be paying for it. And thank you for that. Something that's been needing to be done for a long time. I have seen something in the media

and it has to do with your stances on abortion. I don't know what it's true and what's not. So I've been seeing articles that say that you think that abortion should be up to full term. Is that true? You know, my position on it evolved, and it evolved because I learned some new things. I don't flip-flop on issues. I don't care what the political way.

If I flipped-flopped on issues, I wouldn't be sticking by my position on vaccines for 15 years when the politics were against me, when I came out against Ukraine war during my announcement for my presidency, 86% of Americans were strongly in favor of the Ukraine war. Oh, I know it's irrelevant to me what the political implication, what I say, I want to be right on the issue. My understanding of abortion was this,

that the late term abortions, and those in the eighth and ninth month, almost none of them were elective. That they were, you know, no woman wants to get pregnant, carry a baby for nine months, and then the day before have an abortion. Who would do that and for what reason?

That virtually all of those abortions, my assumption was, were because of medical problems that were the mother's life or her health was endangered. And if that was true, I don't want government making that decision for her. I don't want a bureaucrat to make it. I've been fighting for medical freedom for 18 years. I think people should have bodily autonomy. We should keep the government out of medical choices. What I learned in recent weeks was that a lot of those late turn abortions are in fact

elective and people make the decision for a variety of reasons. They break up a relationship or whatever, but it's sad, but it's true. And I don't think that should happen. I think the state does have a right to protect a child once they reach viability. The state has an interest in protecting them and that that, in fact, can be that it should be OK for the states to do that. That's where I changed my position. Thank you states to do that. So that's where I changed my, you know, that's where I changed my position. Thank you for clarifying that. I just, I want to ask you one other thing about abortion,

or actually it's not even about abortion, but we talked about God, you're a Catholic, grew up in that, had a spiritual awakening. When do you think that the soul enters the body? Well, my opinion on that would be extra useless because that's a philosophical issue, it's religious, it's a theological issue. And I suppose, I just don't have an opinion of it,

but what I believe is that the woman, until that baby is viable, it should be the woman's choice. It's never, every abortion is a tragedy. Every abortion is a trauma, but when you get the state involved in telling people what they can and cannot do with their bodies, it's a mistake. So, you know, we have to leave it to the woman, to the mother, to her pastor, her relationship

with her doctor, her pastor, whatever she consults, but it's her choice and not my choice. My, you know, my opinion on that is as valid as anybody else's opinion. And I don't want to impose my opinion on other people. Fair enough. Fair enough. I'm not here to judge your opinion or your stance. I just, I think it's important to have context behind it. And when you see the bumper sticker headlines.

Yeah, and you know, I also say this, my, you know, my, I think as a nation, a moral nation, we need to reduce the amount of abortions and increase the amount of live births in life. And I, if you go to our webpage, you'll see that our position is more choice, more life. About 50% or 2% of abortions in this country are made by mothers who are worried about their capacity to economically support a child. And I don't think that financial pressure should ever be a reason for a woman to terminate

a pregnancy. And I think we need a child care system in this country that makes it, that will allow women to keep their babies no matter what and not terminate a pregnancy because they're worried about finances. I think our program will end up dramatically reducing the number of abortions in this country, which is my objective. And by the way, if you have a different opinion from me, I respect your opinion. I come from a family that's split on this issue. I understand it's complicated.

People are doing their best to reconcile their conscience with various other realities. And you know, I have to do that for my own and I don't think there's any good choice here. But I do think that ultimately we have to trust women. When it comes to, if I remember correctly also, you're tough on second amendment and another of another very divisive issue. But we see all these, we see, I mean, school shootings are just, they're happening.

Mass shootings are happening more and more and more and more as time goes on. There's arguments on both sides. What is your stance when it comes to gun control? What I've said about the Second Amendment is I'm not going to take anybody's guns. And I spent a lot of my life in rural areas in this country where gun culture is part of people's identities. I understand that. I understand also we've been through three years during COVID when the US Constitution was under attack.

And that's the last thing that people need to be talking about right now is that we already got rid of the First Amendment. We closed all the churches for a year. We, you know, we now have censored speech. We got rid of the right to assembly with social distancing. We got rid of, we closed 3.3 million businesses, no due process, no just compensation,

violation of the Fifth Amendment. We got rid of the Fourth Amendment's prohibitions against warrantless searches and seizures with all the track and trace surveillance. We got rid of the Fifth Amendment, guarantee of jury trials by giving pharmaceutical companies immunity from liability. I think we've seen this wholesale assault on the Constitution.

The last thing that we need to see is now an assault on the Second Amendment. There's a lot of Americans who believe that the only reason the Second Amendment hasn't come under assault is because of the Second Amendment. And at a time when our country is so divided, I don't think it's a – it's not something that I'm going to do. So I believe in the Constitution. The Second Amendment is part of the Constitution, and I believe in upholding the Constitution. I'll say this.

What I've said, and people have criticized me for saying it, is we should figure out why we're having these school shootings and what know what is the co-variable because it doesn't seem to be have anything to do with gun gun proliferation At least the increase in school shootings. There's been since 1970 to now There's been a 1% increase in gun ownership among households and and yet the school shooting have gone up by you know 100,000%. So it doesn't seem that,

there's been no regulation during that time that would change gun ownership. When I was a kid, we had gun clubs in our schools and the kids came to school with weapons, with 22 rifles, etc. Nobody was going in and shooting up classrooms. There's other countries in the world that have comparable levels of gun ownership. Switzerland is one of them. But the last mass shooting in Switzerland was 21 years ago.

We have a mass shooting every 21 hours. What is causing it? Right? And it's the same thing with all these other issues. There's never been a time in human history when a stranger walked into a room of children or just started mass shooting strangers. It's never happened before. What did we do?

Now there's a number of things that we should look at. What's changed since Columbine, which was sort of the beginning of this? In Columbine, five of the families sued the company that made Prozac. And I don't know what happened to that lawsuit, but it was at that time it was widely discussed the potential impacts of these new classes of psychiatric drugs, SSRIs and Benzones, because all of those drugs have black box warnings on them that say that they may cause homicide, ill, or suicidal behavior. And they've proliferated coterminously almost in a direct dramatic signals of mass violence. And it's a very tough issue to study because of the HIPAA laws, which is...

And there is the aversion to studying it, too. I mean, it's the same with vaccines. With vaccines, you see these athletes dropping dead on the field. And you would think the press story would ask, was he vaccinated or was he not vaccinated? Athletes never dropped dead on the field before. Now it's a mass epidemic of athletes,

young athletes dropping dead on the field of myocarditis, cardiac arrest. But they never ask the question. And with the mass shooters, it's the first question I always ask, were they on SSRIs or Benzos? It's a question that's hard to determine because the HIPAA laws make it illegal to find out that information. So only NIH has access to that information.

And NIH ought to be doing the studies to figure out. And this isn't the only covariable. Other stuff has happened. There's social media has exploded at the same time. Video games have exploded. There's a number of things that common sense would tell you. Okay, these are potential culprits in this explosion of

mass shootings. And, you know, I have a scientific mind and I look at this and say it can't be just the guns. I mean, clearly guns, you know, the availability that we have of guns in this country makes it much, and the ease of getting them makes it much easier to do a mass shooting. But something else happened. You can't, you know, you have to,

let's look at reality here and say, what else is this? There's 120 million SSRI prescriptions every year in this country. 120 million, I think, Prozac, 120 million are all prescriptions. That's half the country right there almost. Right, and so, you know, 20 million are all prescriptions. That's half the country right there almost. Right. And so, you know, do these drugs have anything to do with it?

And the idea that they have black box warning saying this is exactly what might happen is like a signal that we ought to be studying it. But NIH won't study it. You know, getting to know you a little bit, I just, I want to compliment you on the way you think. You don't seem like a knee-jerk reaction guy. You seem like a, let's dig in and find out what the hell the problem is and fix that, rather than let's do a knee-jerk reaction

just for a publicity stunt or whatever it is. So thank you. Thanks. We are welcome. We have a couple minutes left and then I know you're a busy guy and you got a jet, but I want to, I believe it's June 29th is the first presidential debate on CNN. I read that you plan on holding both Biden and Trump accountable. What will you be holding Biden accountable for?

Well, both of them are responsible for the debt. Trump ran up the biggest chunk of—there's a $34 trillion debt. Eight trillion of that goes to Trump. Another seven or eight goes to Biden. So between them, almost half of that debt is in there. They built only in four years to do it. Both of them are responsible for the forever wars. President Biden, Trump said that he was gonna end the forever wars and this constant military engagement.

But then he brought John Bolton in to run NSA, is going to end the forever wars and this constant military engagement. Then he brought John Bolton in to run NSA, who is like a swamp creature. And two weeks ago, he gave Biden a bear hug and Speaker Johnson a bear hug and authorized $61 billion for Ukraine. That money should be coming here. It should be coming to East Palestine and to parts of this country that are desperate right now. And we don't have the money to be spending over there.

Even if it was no war of choice, we should settle that war. Putin wants to settle it. He says so every day. Let's settle that war and bring that money home. They both did the lockdowns. President Trump came in and said, I'm going to run America like a business. And then he gave the keys to all of our business to Anthony Fauci, and he let him shut down 3.3 million businesses in this country and shifted $4 trillion from the American middle class to

this new oligarchy of billionaires. They created a billionaire day in 500 days. Wow. Trump and Biden. The lying in government, you know, when I was a kid, nobody believed the government would lie to us. It was inconceivable the American government would tell a lie when I was a little boy. The first time that people understood

that the government lied to us was in, or that people, it entered people's heads was in May of 1960, five months before my uncle's election, Eisenhower, a U-2 CIA spy plane got shut down over Russia, and those spy planes travel at 60,000 feet. They're invisible to radar, invisible to the naked eye. It was a top secret program. Nobody knew.

But there was a spy, there was a Russian mole at Langley, and he gave them the plans, told the Russians how to shut it down, so they shut it down. But the pilot was supposed to commit suicide. He had a cyanide shot that he carried on him in a coin. And the Russians didn't, at first, just accused America. They didn't tell them that Gary Francis Power, the pilot, had not committed suicide. He had parachuted on them. They had captured him,, they'd caption him,

and they didn't tell anybody. They accused the United States of operating this spy plane, and they said, we shot it down. And Allen Dulles told Eisenhower to lie about it. He said, they don't have the pilot, because the pilot's dead, and they won't have enough parts from that plane to be able to prove anything.

So Eisenhower got on TV and said, it was all a lie by the Russians. And then the Russians produced Gary Francis Powers and Americans for the first time went, oh my God, the US government lied to us. We never thought that could happen. And then when my uncle was killed, 63, the Warren Commission report comes out and half

of Americans don't believe it. So there again, people start thinking they're lying. In 1973, the Pentagon Papers are published. And that detailed 27 volumes of 20 years of lies to get us into Vietnam and keep us there by hundreds of government officials. And by then people were saying, oh, they lied to us all the time. And now, you know, every time you look

at a government official on TV from the press on down, he's lying. Now, whether it's CDC, NIH, FDA, throughout COVID, they all lied. Well, the day I get in, I'm going to pass an executive order saying any government official who lies to the American public on matters connected to his job is going to be fired. And I'm going to end the line.

I'm going to end the corporate capture. I'm going to end the division. President Trump and President Biden, they're products of the hatred, this polarization, this toxic polarization that's split our country. They both say it's a problem, but they're both feeding it. And the way they're going to win the White House is by telling us to hate the other guy.

In head-to-head races, I beat them both. I beat Biden by, or I beat Trump by three electoral votes. I beat Biden by 39 states to 11. I beat him in a landslide. And people want to vote for me. I have a greater popularity than either of them, but they won't because they're being manipulated by fear. They're saying, if you vote for Bobby,

you're gonna get the other guy elected. So they're voting on the lesser of two evils and they're voting out of fear and both of those guys need to feed the fear in order to get elected so they can't end the polarization. So all of these existential things that are issues that are really threatening our country and the chronic disease epidemic, they can't solve it because they presided over it, the explosion, the epidemic.

These are things I'm going to end, you know, and they can't do it. So if you want more of the same, we already know what they're going to do because they both had a four-year chance. If you want more of the same, you should vote for those guys. But if you want something completely different, because I'm going to change everything, I'm going to change everything, I'm going to make our government trustworthy again. You know, that was actually going to be my first question of the interview, was how are you going to gain the confidence of the American people in the US government again?

And thank you. Thank you. And- Well, thank you, Sean. It's been fun talking to you. My pleasure. I wish you the best of luck and I hope to see you again. Thank you, my friend.

And thanks for your service. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Candy Valentino. I was a founder before I could legally order a drink and for more than two and a half decades I've built, scaled, acquired and exited multiple businesses in diverse industries. Now my goal is to help you by sharing the knowledge that I've learned, the mistakes that I've made, and the wisdom that I've developed over my journey. Buy weekly episodes every Monday and Thursday. The Candy Valentino Show. Wherever you listen.