This Past Weekend - #639 - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. Before this he was a presidential candidate, attorney and environmentalist.  RFK Jr. joins Theo to talk about going... from an outsider to the head of HHS, how much fraud he uncovered in existing government agencies, and the research that went into developing the new food pyramid.  Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: https://www.instagram.com/robertfkennedyjr/  ------------------------------------------------ Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com ------------------------------------------------- Sponsored By: Celsius: Go to the Celsius Amazon store to check out all of their flavors. #CELSIUSBrandPartner #CELSIUSLiveFit https://amzn.to/3HbAtPJ  Moonpay: Head over to https://www.moonpay.com/theo  to sign up  Tecovas: Go to http://tecovas.com/theo for 10% off. Ethos: Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/THEO. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Morgan and Morgan: Visit https://forthepeople.com/THEO  to see if you might have a case. Morgan and Morgan. America's Largest Injury Law Firm. Ryl Tea: the tea that cleaned up its act and still tastes like the good old days. Refresh yourself now at www.drinkryl.com  ------------------------------------------------- Music: “Shine” by Bishop Gunn Bishop Gunn - Shine ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: tpwproducer@gmail.com Hit the Hotline: 985-664-9503 Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: https://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Send mail to: This Past Weekend 1906 Glen Echo Rd PO Box #159359 Nashville, TN 37215 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips Shorts Channel: https://bit.ly/3ClUj8z ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers Producer: Trevyn https://www.instagram.com/trevyn.s/  Producer: Nick https://www.instagram.com/realnickdavis/ Producer: Andrew https://www.instagram.com/bleachmediaofficial/  Producer: Halston https://www.instagram.com/halstonrays/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:05 Just wanted to let you know our episodes are now available in video on Spotify as well. Today's guest is the Secretary for Health and Human Services for the U.S. government. He's an attorney. He's an environmentalist. And he's my friend. I'm so thankful that he is joining us. Today's guest is Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Good to see you, bro.
Starting point is 00:01:49 Yes, good to see you. Secretary. Secretary now. You can still call me Bobby. Okay, cool. I know each other from, can I say where we know. Yeah, sure. We've been in recovery for together for years.
Starting point is 00:02:05 You for almost over 40 years, right? Yeah, 40, 43 years. Wow. That's wild. Yeah. That's where we met each other. Like 7 a.m. meetings above the bank over there. That was a good meeting. They shut those down during COVID.
Starting point is 00:02:20 I know. That was heartbreaking. We still did live meetings every day during COVID. We moved from the bank. There was about 15 of us who moved from the bank. And we got into the Palisades Playhouse, which now burned down during the fire. But it was kind of a pirate group.
Starting point is 00:02:39 And, you know, I mean, for me, I, you know what, I said this when we came in and I said, I don't care what happens. I'm going to a meeting every day. Yeah. And I said, I'm not scared of a germ. You know, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet disease. And I know this disease will kill me. Right. If I don't treat it, which means for me going to meetings every day, it's a, it's a,
Starting point is 00:03:09 it's just bad for my life. So for me, it was survival. And then, you know, the opportunity to help another alcoholic, that's the secret sauce of the meetings. And as what keeps us all sober and keeps us, you know, from self-will. Yeah. Well, yeah, you get reminded. I mean, I go to meetings and I get reminded that other people,
Starting point is 00:03:39 people, like, I hate to say exist, but like, just that other people are, just that I'm not alone, I think, you know, I get like, I see face. I'm like, oh, yeah, I care about this person. They care about me. It's like, for some reason, in my, in my addiction, it's like, there's a part of me that forgets that people care about me and that I care about them. And so, but when I go to meetings, it's like an immediate, it immediately fills that whole backlog in, you know, but I have to go and kind of recharge that battery a lot. You, uh, welcome to Tennessee. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:04:14 Yeah. So you were with Kid Rock. Yeah. Pretty cool, dude. That freaking, he used to say, he used to have cocaine and oysters. I'm like, that's a meal. That's a meal, dude. That's an aphrodisiac, I think.
Starting point is 00:04:26 I'm saving a seat for him still. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's one of a kind, man. His brother only has one leg, too. You know that? I met his brother, Bill. I think he got the vaccine, but that's just me. But anyway, he had two of years ago.
Starting point is 00:04:39 Solem's sight. But he lost his leg when he was a kid. At around the same time, my cousin Teddy lost his leg. And both of them became ski racers. So they were the top. I think my cousin Teddy was the number two slalom skier on one leg. And he was also very proficient. So they became friends.
Starting point is 00:05:03 So that was interesting. So he knows your cousin? Yeah, he grew up with him. And they were in like a special division or no, just normal division? What do they call the Paralympics? Paralympics. Paralympics. I didn't know Billy was a Paralympian.
Starting point is 00:05:16 I know he's a great golfer. I mean, they're just so hilarious. How does he golf? Because he doesn't, his leg is cut off so high. He can't really use a prosthetic. He, I mean, I don't know they had it. I know a lawnmower. Somebody hit him with a lawnmower.
Starting point is 00:05:32 Look at that right there. Yeah. Wow. His father ran him over with a tractor. Yeah. Oh. And just put him in time out. But yeah, he's phenomenal.
Starting point is 00:05:42 And he has the best sense of humor, you know. I'm just joking. I know both those guys super well. And they've been great, like, neighbors in Nashville. And Kid Rock, Bobby, he's done a lot of nice stuff for me over the years and stuff like that and includes me and things. And we were just texting the other day. He's got a big heart, you know. Yeah, well, he spoke very highly of you.
Starting point is 00:06:04 He's a nice guy. I saw you with Bill Lee, too, our governor. Yeah. I met him at the, he did a fireside chat with me about a year ago at the governor's conference and I really, we really bonded. He's a good guy and he works with both sides on the legislature. He's got a great relationship. He's done a bunch of good stuff in this state. He's gotten, you know, he's on top of fluoride. They got really good snap waiver. So I think they've got a bunch of good. I'm probably one of the best snap waiver. The snap waders, the food stamp waiver.
Starting point is 00:06:41 So you can't spend food stamp dollars on sodas or candy, but they also have sugar content and they have corn syrup content. Oh, here in Tennessee? I think they're the only state that has that now, and they've also banned food dyes. They've banned a couple of them, and they're going to ban the rest of them now. And what did we find out with food dyes? The food dies, we've now, you know, we've told the companies they've got to get rid of all of them.
Starting point is 00:07:11 There's nine of them. And the worst four, we already banned. The other five, I think by the end of this year, everybody should have stopped using them. And then we rapid approved four new vegetable dyes so that they can replace them with, you know, something healthy. So we did that through FDA. We're working with the industry to make sure that they can do it. been very, very cooperative. Most of them about 40% of the industry, you know, came to us,
Starting point is 00:07:42 including the entire ice cream industry, came to us and said, we want to do this, but, you know, help us. So we're working very closely with them, and they're all getting rid of it. I mean, we should have gotten rid of it a long time ago. The Europeans don't allow it. Canada doesn't allow it. Other countries don't allow.
Starting point is 00:08:01 You can buy fruit loops in this country that are just loaded with chemicals, and you can buy same company makes fruit loops for Canada and Mexico that don't have the chemicals. Yeah. Well, yeah, there's a kid on TikTok and he was eating fruit loops and then his poop was glowing in the dark. You see that? I'm like, dang, that thing will swim upstream. That's crazy. I mean, but yeah, yeah, some of it definitely seems bonkers.
Starting point is 00:08:26 And what did you say about fluoride? Tennessee has a law that has to, where the water district has to inform the public about him. Fluoride is crazy because we know it reduced IQ. There is no question. The National Toxicology Program has done a meta-analysis, and they can, you know, it's dose-related. So every milligram of fluoride that you add, reduce your IQ more. And it doesn't work systemically. You know, it was put in in the 40s because it does help with tooth decay, but the effect is all topical.
Starting point is 00:09:03 And back then, they didn't have fluoride. toothpaste and have fluoride mouth wash. Now we do. The parents can get the fluoride for their kids. And they don't, when you put it in systematically, it destroys your bone mass and destroys your thyroid. So it's horrible for us. It's horrible.
Starting point is 00:09:21 And it destroys IQ. I mean, if you have kids, would you rather have cavities or lower IQ? Yeah. I'd rather have them have cavities. I'd rather have holes in their teeth and holes in their ideas or whatever. Right. But the European nations have banned, and there has been no increase in cavity. So, you know, it doesn't make any sense for us to be putting it in.
Starting point is 00:09:45 And, yeah, this is the bill known as the Tennessee Fluoride Free Water Act prohibits public water systems in Tennessee from adding fluoride or any fluoride containing compounds of drinking water intended for human consumption and bans a sale of bottle water with added fluoride. So we don't have fluoride in our water here? Well, there is natural fluoride in a lot of water. It's just, it comes from the geology. But we're not adding more.
Starting point is 00:10:05 Right. We're not adding it. Nice, dude. Yeah, because what, yeah, what if you're trying to think of something and you have two sips of water and then you're like, God, I can't even know. I'm screwed. Your parents send you to take a test and they give you a bottle of water and you're like, God, I don't have a chance now.
Starting point is 00:10:21 But thank you. Thank you for leading the charge on a lot of these things. Thank you for caring about a lot of these things. I think I just want to say that. I know that you do care about so many of these things. I did see there's a, there's a Tennessee Farm Bill, and there's a lot of stuff you want to talk about, too, and we'll get into some of it for sure.
Starting point is 00:10:35 But this is what I was talking about here. This bill, it's that, yeah, Farm Bill 8.09. The bill is sponsored by Representative Rusty Grills would limit lawsuits if a user gets sick from a pesticide. Under the proposed legislation, as long as a product's label was approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, a person wouldn't be allowed to sue over the labeling.
Starting point is 00:11:00 So actually, Sean Ryan, the podcast, and John Rich, the musician, they shared this online and on the day that it was going up for vote, I believe. Yeah, right here. Tennessee state politicians side with foreign pesticide companies over people dying of cancer. Ryan posted on X alongside a video speaking out against the bill. As did musician John Rich, after the pushback representative Grills took the bill off notice, which at least delayed the vote. It's unclear why that decision was made or whether Grills has plans to bring the bill back to this legislative session. And bring up a, just so we know who's doing this, bring up a picture of Mr. Grills.
Starting point is 00:11:40 Oh, there you go. Well, I mean, look, if you're a farmer and you get sick from using a pesticide that you didn't know would make you sick, that you wouldn't have recourse against a pesticide company that did know that they caused illness. Because these companies knew that these caused illnesses. Yeah. Yeah. Evidence from lawsuits and.
Starting point is 00:12:01 Internal documents and independent reports indicates that Monsanto had information suggesting potential risk to human health from some of its pesticides, yet worked for years to downplay or obscure those risks in public and regulatory arenas. I mean, that's just wild. The reason they're doing this is because of my lawsuits against Monsanto. Right. I remember you had that huge settlement against them a long time ago, right? Yeah. I think it was maybe 2019.
Starting point is 00:12:28 we finally settled it, but I did three of the trials in San Francisco, and the first one we won, I think, $289 million for, you know, people who got not a Hodgkin Symphoma from using Roundup. And then the second one, we won $89 million. The third one, we asked for a billion dollars from the jury.
Starting point is 00:12:50 It was a couple that had both got it simultaneously. They were home gardeners. And their dog also got it at the same time. They had a laboratory retriever and the dog died. Both the couples was sick. We asked the jury for a billion dollars, and they gave us $2.2 billion. And they did that because we were able to show them documents that showed Monsanto knew of the danger and then worked with corrupt officials, a guy called Jess Rowland inside of EPA, who was the head of the pestiside division. and that they had deliberately concealed the science,
Starting point is 00:13:30 fix the science. And now the big study that they used to prove safety has now been retracted. Yeah. Yeah, I think I saw an article about that. Like they'd found emails that they were like, that it was kind of ghost written or something from the science. Yeah, it was ghost written.
Starting point is 00:13:47 And also the head of the pesticide division, they asked him, the Mont Santo asked them secretly, and now we have these emails. house to kill a study by another agency called ATSDR. And he said, I can't kill it. That's not my agency. I can kill them in EPA, but not outside. And they said, you got to do it.
Starting point is 00:14:10 We can't have this study forward. And he said, okay, I'm going to do it. But if I succeed, you've got to give me a gold medal. And we had all of that. And we were able to show it to the jury. And they were angry. And that's why they gave us that huge judge. A gold medal in what, just anything?
Starting point is 00:14:27 A gold medal for, you know, killing a study. That showed that it caused cancer. That shows that it grew tumors. That it's at a contest level now. That things like that are so, like, prolific that now it's like there's awards for it. You know, it seems baffling. There's been a ton of lawsuits about this, right? Like about pesticides causing diseases and sickness in people, right?
Starting point is 00:14:52 Or about this glyphosate, I think it's called? Yeah, glyphosate. There's been a ton of lawsuits, but they still don't have to take this product off of the shelf, so that's the craziest thing to me. Is that right? Well, you know, it's a problem because you have, all the row croppers are dependent on it right now. And there's other technology that is emerging right now that actually, you know, I looked at one yesterday. It's a tractor attachment that uses lasers to kill weeds. And that, you know, if they can make that affordable, particularly for smaller farmers, that will be the answer because you'll be able to, they can kill bugs and they can kill weeds.
Starting point is 00:15:34 You program this thing and it zaps the weeds with a laser. It makes all the cells explode and it destroys them. And so, you know, there's a future that we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel there. But right now, if you banned glyphosite outright, it would put out of business, 80% of our farmers. Got it. Wow. So we're kind of dependent upon something that we know makes us sick.
Starting point is 00:16:00 Yeah, we are. And, you know, we're trying, we're doing a lot of work in the HHS, look for other alternatives and to find a, you know, find an off ramp because the farmers don't want to be using chemicals anyway. They're very expensive. They know, you know, they have some of the highest cancer rates of any profession. And farmers care about. their land. They want to leave it for their kids. It also destroys the microbiome and the soil,
Starting point is 00:16:28 and that causes erosion. And so it's not a, you know, it's not a good long-term solution. You know, the issue is how do you transition off of it without putting farmers out of business? Right. Here's that laser. Wow, that's unbelievable. Laser, weeding robot kills 100,000 weeds per hour. Yeah, and it also kills insects. You can program it to kill, you know, certain insects. And, you know, that machine looks, that machine probably caused a million dollars. So. But if you could have a couple of those running at night through your farm, that'd be sick. Well, yeah, it would be, it's a lot better than using chemical pesticides.
Starting point is 00:17:08 So this is going to be, you know, the future. But we're not there yet. We're not there yet. Wow. It's just wild that we get stuck in it's something that makes us sick and we don't have a, you know, it's like, I don't know. It just feels like such a conundrum. It must be like that for you guys a lot where you're like, this is just kind of where we are, you know?
Starting point is 00:17:26 The agricultural community has been very, very supportive of the Maha agenda, and they're helping us transition away from ultra-process foods, which is really the biggest issue. That's what's causing all these chronic disease and kids. And farmers are going out of business. You know, farmers usually lose money seven out of ten years. Even when they're making money, they're making, you know, a lot of them are just making for their work.
Starting point is 00:17:52 work hours minimum wage. And we're having a hard time finding young people who will go into farming. So that is a crisis that, you know, we need to keep into consideration. And, you know, you have people at USDA finally who are, you know, really intent on solving this problem, but nobody wants any farmers going out of business. Got it. Whenever you became secretary, did it feel like you like, that now you're like on the inside? Like, does it feel like you go behind this curtain and now you get to see this?
Starting point is 00:18:29 Yeah. It does? Yeah. Do you have to sign an NDA to have the job? No. No. And I mean, we're doing the opposite of that. We're going to be, you know, this is the most transparent administration in history.
Starting point is 00:18:44 I mean, there's no president who's ever done three or four press conferences. day like President Trump does, asking, answering any question people to fire out. He's a machine. I don't know how many press conferences President Biden did in his entire administration. He doesn't know. But it's a lot less than President Trump does it a month. Yeah. Oh, for sure.
Starting point is 00:19:07 And then, you know, we're, we are right now using AI to revolutionize the freedom of law is so that people are going to be able to get freedom of information requests immediately. Like what do you mean a freedom of information requests? Yeah, so if somebody wants a document for the government, now it could take six months, two years, and we're going to make it so that they can get it instantaneously, and that all of our documents are going to be public except those that are shielded under the statute for, you know, for one reason or another. And the big issue that, you know,
Starting point is 00:19:48 You know, the big problem that we're dealing with is that there is, you know, that there are names and privacy issues, and you have to redact those. Legally, we have to do that, and we have to make sure we don't make any mistakes. So the AI is, you know, that's what we're working out now. When you got in office, there was, you guys did like a big cut down of like a lot of the divisions and stuff like that. What was, I think you went from 20 something to 15 maybe? Well, we had 82,000 employees and 20,000. of them left. And they left.
Starting point is 00:20:20 20,000 left? Or did you guys make like cuts? Because I just know you guys made like a bunch of cuts. There were a bunch of cuts that were buyouts so that people who are at the end of their career could retire early. There were riffs where people were like people who were very new were let go. And it was about reducing the workforce. But it was reducing the bureaucracy.
Starting point is 00:20:41 We weren't reducing. We weren't getting rid of, of research or any. like that. We didn't touch that except if there were certain categories of research like DEI research or there were other categories that were just, it was not real science and it was not science. You know, we're changing the trajectories so that the purpose of NIH, the focus of NIH is going to be figuring out why we're also sick. You know, why is this chronic disease happening? What are the exposures that are causing it? What are the alternatives?
Starting point is 00:21:19 How do we end it? And so we're shifting the focus, but we're, the amount that we're spending on research is the same that we spend, you know, in 2020, 2019. Well, was there like a recalibrating there? Because, like, I had a friend Heather who was working at UCLA. She was a researcher there. And she said that, like, a lot of the, during like the Doge period and stuff, a lot of their grants got cut. And there was like a kind of a, I don't know if it's called a moratorium or like a pause. It was a pause.
Starting point is 00:21:45 And every administration does that. you need to do a review and make sure that those research projects are not, you know, torturing beagles or, you know, or doing TEI or. And how do you decide that? Is it, do you decide or is it like, we go through every single grant? We had, you know, big teams going through those grants. And then with there's tremendous, there's tremendous ways. We had 40 communications departments.
Starting point is 00:22:18 We had 40 different divisions studying addiction. And so we consolidated those. So you have 10 people doing the same job and not talking to each other with computers that are not interoperable. Oh, it's the government. Yeah. And we're changing that now so that we consolidate it and we're making it more streamlined and efficient. but it's so that we can do the job better. So we can do better research.
Starting point is 00:22:51 And then the research, you know, was never replicated, which means that that's part of science. And if somebody does a paper that makes it scientific hypothesis, you don't just accept that. You get somebody to replicate it and see if they come up with the same result. And that was not happening. There was virtually no money spent on replication.
Starting point is 00:23:14 And because of that, there was huge incentives to cheat because the scientists, if they have a hypothesis and they do, they get a grant, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars to prove that hypothesis. And then once they prove it, they get it published. And that's how they advance their careers. Well, if they fail to prove it, if the science says what you were thinking is not true, then they can. can't get published. You should publish that too because that's science, you know, but it doesn't get published. So their careers are, you know, and endangered. It's hard for them to get the next grant. And so a lot of them had this incentive to cheat. So they have to win. If they get it, if they prove it. The hypothesis is a null hypothesis. They don't get, you know, their whole future
Starting point is 00:24:08 goes into the toilet, intentionally. And so, because. Because they knew that study was never going to be replicated, nobody was going to check on them. There was an incentive for them to cheat. And that must have been a pipeline just for companies then to just get like, get like, well, it was also. Lopsided science or solo-sided science that wasn't. Yeah, I mean, I'll give you an example. There was a study done about 20 years ago on amyloid plaque and that as the cause of Alzheimer's.
Starting point is 00:24:43 and that study came up and said, yeah, it's the cause of Alzheimer's. Then we spent billions of dollars doing six or 800 studies that followed that. And they all were, as it turned out, they were all cheating. And, you know, the ones that were, many of them were cheating, but all of them were kind of confirmatory. And all of their hypothesis about what's caused Alzheimer's was ignored, put on their shelf. you couldn't get money for it because they said we already know the answer
Starting point is 00:25:15 and then there were drugs developed et cetera and and the in the end you know we came in and this scandal was brewing the head of Stanford University
Starting point is 00:25:30 medical school had to resign the dean because they knew it was going on because he was involved in publishing some of these fraudulent studies and but they did it for 20 years because nobody ever had to really replicate those original studies. And that happens all the time.
Starting point is 00:25:47 And you go down these scientific dead ends. And so now what Jay wants to do is to spend 20% of our budget on replication. So every study gets replicated. And we know Jay Bata Chara, who is the... Okay, yeah, I knew you're talking about it. And he was one of the guys who was censored during COVID. He was one of the top statisticians at Stanford. and he and a lot of other ones were, you know, were censored,
Starting point is 00:26:13 were lost their jobs. Marty McCary, who you know also. Yeah, I love his book. One of his book I read. He was also censored. Oz was censored. And they're now running the agency. So these are people who want to do real science and not politicize it,
Starting point is 00:26:30 to de-politicize the science. We had 10 people doing, you know, these bureaucratic jobs. And now we've got that. down to five, you know. So all the cuts that we did were meant to streamline the agency so that there's more money for research. Got it. Like after the pauses on the grants and some of those things, are you? The grants were renewed. Most of the ones are the ones that you guys seemed, that you guys thought were viable. Yeah, almost all of them. Got it. When I want to add some Bitcoin, MoonPay is usually the first app that I reach for. You don't need to buy a full Bitcoin,
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Starting point is 00:29:09 Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash Theo. That's ethOS.com slash t-h-e-o. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. I saw you in your speech that you gave yesterday here in Tennessee saying that like there's all kinds of temptation to cheat if you know you're not going to get call it. Yeah. Well, that's true in every system. Yeah. Have you seen a lot of that?
Starting point is 00:29:40 Like, um, I mean, the amyloid black is a really good example. Yeah, we see it everywhere. We, we see it everywhere. And medicine, it's everywhere. And the journals are utterly corrupt because they're owned by the pharmaceutical companies. And so people read a journal and they think, oh, this is science. But even, you know, Marsha Engel, one that ran the New England Journal medicine for 20 years has said, you can't believe anything in the journals anymore, but they're just propaganda vessels for the pharmaceutical company. Richard Horton, who are in Lancet, who still runs it, says the same thing at the, you know, the journals. And those are the people running them?
Starting point is 00:30:20 Well, what happens? They make huge amounts of money. Yeah. And they make money from advertising, which is paid for for the pharmaceutical companies. And through a scheme called preprints, where the pharmaceutical company plants the story. They pay for the journal about a drug that they're trying to promote. They pay the journal to print the story, and then they get a pre-print. So it's a very neat-looking copy of their article with the cover sheet of the New England Journal of Medicine on it.
Starting point is 00:30:55 And then they distribute that to their pharmaceutical reps who are like former Playboy models who go out, and talk to the doctors, and they give that to the doctor and say, this drug works. You know, do you want to have lunch? Yeah. And the doctors then start prescribing the drug, and they think, oh, well, it's legitimate because it was in the New England Journal of Medicine, but it is not. It's, you know, you can't believe what's in those journals because it's all propaganda for pharma.
Starting point is 00:31:23 So how do we get away from that? Like, what are you guys doing to combat this or to change us? Or can this change? Or is it just awareness? And then people have to take the response? No, I mean, what we're doing is open source journals. We're going to have our own journals that, you know, that people can open source and publish, but you'll have the peer review published with it.
Starting point is 00:31:46 So before you publish, you give that publication to a panel of experts who then read it themselves and criticize it. And the peer review now is secret. And then there is no raw data published. so nobody can go in and replicate it. So to the extent possible, sometimes you can't. You have to buy the raw data, and it's very expensive or inaccessible, so you can't publish it.
Starting point is 00:32:14 But you can publish the peer review, which is what we're doing. And so everybody will be able to say, if they have 10 peer reviewers and they all say this article sucks, it's got all these holes in it, then the public will be able to read that, and doctors will be able to read it. and the regulators will be able to read it. And so it's basically open source.
Starting point is 00:32:37 It's, you know, it's crowdsourcing, essentially. And it, you know, that's how you get credibility in science. Science doesn't come from consensus. It comes from debate. And, you know, that's why you remember when they were telling us during COVID, oh, trust the experts. That's not a thing in science. Trusting the experts is the opposite of science.
Starting point is 00:32:59 It's not a function of science or democracy. It's a feature of religion. And it's a feature of totalitarianism. And in science, you always question the expert. Yeah, you can't. There's not an expert in science because it's like an evolving thing, right? Well, you know, when I did the Monsanto cases, I was part of a, you know, a big team. We had, and Cheryl came to my, to my trial.
Starting point is 00:33:26 You know, a couple days she sat through and watched us to try the case. and Monsanto had experts from Stanford, Yale, and Harvard. They're three big experts. And they testified, and Cheryl said to me at the end of the second day, she said, why are you guys even here? These guys are, you know, this science is very clear that Monson, that Roundup doesn't cause cancer. And I said, just wait. And then our experts went on, and they were from Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.
Starting point is 00:33:57 and they said the opposite and we're much more convincing and the juries were convinced. And so there's experts on both sides of every debate and a lot of them are paid to be experts. They're hired guns, they're mercenaries. And we call them biostitutes, the one that worked for industry, the ones that work for industry.
Starting point is 00:34:16 Biostitutes, that's great. But, you know, so there's experts have their own bias. We all have biases. Everybody's got a bias. What you want to do when you're, you know, when you're dealing with science, you want to expose those biases,
Starting point is 00:34:30 you want to admit them and acknowledge them, and then you want to, the science to be able to stand on its own. And that's the only way, really, to deep politicize it as best we can. Right. What were some of the biggest cases of fraud? Like when you got in there and got behind the curtain
Starting point is 00:34:46 and see, like, you know, like the NIH, the EPA, like, just see what's going on back there. What were some of the biggest cases of fraud that you kind of found? I mean, the biggest cases are what were, between Medicaid and Medicare, there's about $100 billion stolen every year. And a lot of it is like what's happening in Minnesota with the Somali community and what's happening now, even worse in California. But, you know, one of the problems is that, that's a systemic problem,
Starting point is 00:35:19 is that Medicaid and Medicare now no longer, it used to be, that they paid for your medical treatment, your doctor's visit. But now they pay for the person who takes you to the doctor, and they pay for home care, and they pay for, you know, a person to come in and pay your bills, right? So there's all kinds of opportunities for fraud. And a doctor recently, you know, Oz told me this, told Oz, He said, and there was a doctor in California that he visited,
Starting point is 00:36:00 and the doctor had a patient who was a heroin addict. Heroin addict was coming to see him four times a month for some kind of a treatment. And one day, the doctor looked out the door and saw his ex-wife waiting for him in the car. And the doctor said, oh, are you back together with your ex-wife? And he said, no, I hate her guts. And he said, but she drives me because she gets paid $600 every time she drives me. Wow. And he said,
Starting point is 00:36:27 That'll put you back together with your ex. We make $3,000 a month, you know, with her driving me this, and then I drive her to hers. Wow. And so there's all kinds of those opportunities for fraud. And, you know, we found a hotel that had literally every room in it was the headquarters for a nursing group. Where was that located?
Starting point is 00:36:53 It was in California. God. And, you know, so they're all just PO boxes. They're not actually doing any nursing care. No, uh. They're just collecting money. And as we now know, a lot of the money that was, you know, was going into the Somali community for autism care. There were these phony autism care houses.
Starting point is 00:37:13 Yeah. And a lot of it was ending up with al-Shabaab in Somalia. So hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars were being stolen, shipped Somalia to fund a terrorist group. But that's happening every day. Now we have the ability to catch them. How? How were you able to adjust that sort of thing now?
Starting point is 00:37:36 Like what makes it different now? Well, because first of all, under the Biden administration, I don't want to get superpartisan. Yeah. But the Biden administration turned a blind eye to all the fraud. It was mainly going to blue states, and it was an economic generator. there's money pouring into the blue states.
Starting point is 00:37:58 And they just said, we're going to, we know a lot of it's stolen and illegal, but we're going to let it happen. Because it's coming to us. It's coming to our state. And so what we've done now is with Medicare, we control Medicare. The states control a lot of Medicaid. So it's harder a little harder for us to detect fraud there. They've started out with Medicare. We're using AI.
Starting point is 00:38:24 And we're using AI which can detect the fraud. You know, it can tell us whether this guy who we're paying has been convicted of fraud before. And we shouldn't be paying them again. And it will be telling us every aspect of his business that we need to know to understand whether it's fraudulent. So we're going to save just this year tens of billions of dollars in eliminating fraud in Medicaid. and they used to pay it under the Biden administration. The system was called pay and chase. So if they sent in a fraudulent invoice,
Starting point is 00:39:04 even if we knew it was, the HHS knew it was fraudulent, they would pay it, and then they would put the Inspector General to go claw it back. And of course it wasn't there, so they never recovered anything. Oh, I see.
Starting point is 00:39:17 Now we're not going to pay them anymore. If they're fraudulent, they're not going to get a check. we're going to save tens of billions of dollars just this year, and we're going to save hundreds of billions over annually from now on. And that's because the AI is keeping track of that? The AI can spot the fraud. Got it. And then with Medicare, with Medicaid, which is, you know, a joint state federal program,
Starting point is 00:39:44 it's a little bit. We don't control the rails, and the states control them. And so we need state cooperation. and the red states are cooperating with us, but the blue states still won't cooperate. So that's going to take some time. And then there's categories that are much easier for us to control, like medical devices.
Starting point is 00:40:05 We can do that quickly on our own. But there's other categories that are going to be much more difficult, but we will get it done within the next three years. Whenever Doge happened, right? When Doge occurred, when Elon was in, or he was involved or hypothetically involved, That's what it seemed like just like to the regular. He was definitely involved.
Starting point is 00:40:23 He was involved. Was that successful? Was that real? Like what was the outcomes of that? Like did that seem like a, were you guys working together with that? Like, what was that all about? You know, I think even Elon has said that there would have been better ways to do it. And that we, you know, going after the systemic, what we're doing now, this is the, you know, these large thefts.
Starting point is 00:40:49 you can cut a couple of thousand people, and over the long run, it's just, you know, drops of water in the ocean. Yeah. So that's not going to save us huge amounts of money over the long term, but what we're doing now is going to. The things you were just talking about, you mean? Yeah. That's going to help a lot.
Starting point is 00:41:08 Yeah. Is those still active? Is that program still active? What were the outcomes of that? Well, the outcomes were that a lot of, you know, I cut my workforce by 20, percent. But, you know, in truth, some of the, some of those were very good cuts. It would have, I think we all agree, including Elon, that it would have been better to do targeted cuts, cut the people who are actually causing the problem and then keep the people, a lot of the new workers
Starting point is 00:41:41 who, you know, who are only there for a couple of months, that it might have been better to keep some of those people and change the culture. I see. So, yeah, instead of more of like a mowing, more of like a pruning kind of thing, you mean. Yeah. Do you think America is sicker than ever these days? It is sicker. We're the sickest country in the world.
Starting point is 00:42:05 We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world. And that's one of the reasons during COVID, we had 19% of the COVID deaths in our country. And we only have 4.2% of the world's population. and so the question is why did America do worse than any country in the world in COVID? Was it mismanaging? Part of it was that, but the big part, and this is what CDC says, or the sickest country in the world, the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases. And that's really what was killing them.
Starting point is 00:42:41 It was very hard to die from COVID if you were healthy. And so, you know, we need to get America. Americans healthy, we need to end the chronic disease epidemic right now. We spend two to three times on our health care per capita what they spend in Europe. And yet we have the worst health outcomes in the world. We're 79. Bring up a capital chart if you can. We have the, you know, we've dropped behind Europe by six years in lifespan, 10 years in some cases.
Starting point is 00:43:16 And yet our health outcomes are. worse, we have the highest maternal immunity, highest maternal mortality. That means women dying in childbirth in the developed world. We have the highest infant mortality. How could that be with the United States? And a lot of it is because of chronic disease. And then, you know, our diabetes rate. When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes over, juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50 year career. Today, 38% of American teens is diabetes. or prediabetic. God.
Starting point is 00:43:50 It was unknown. Autism rates have gone from more, less than one in 10,000 in 1970 to one in 31 today. Oh, yeah. You can throw a rock and hit an autistic kid anywhere. And California is one in every 19 kids, one in every 12.5 boys. And so the cost to our country,
Starting point is 00:44:11 77% of American kids can't qualify for military service. How many percent? 77 percent. and cannot get into the military because of the health reason. No. What? That is the truth. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:44:24 And. Oh my God, bro. That's insane. Yeah. That should get people's attention. Bring that up. Is that true? Let me see if that's true.
Starting point is 00:44:34 Bobby probably just uploaded this stat on the internet from his phone a second ago, but still, that's okay. That's how it works. 77% of American youth can't qualify for military service. Yeah. And why? Why? Because they have chronic disease. They have asthma. They have diabetes. They have, you know, they're obese. One of those. But when my uncle was present, I was a 10-year-old kid, we spent zero on chronic disease in this country, zero. Today we spend $4.3 trillion a year. and it's about 40 cents out of every tax dollar
Starting point is 00:45:13 that is paid by you, the federal government is now going to treat chronic disease. And it's unsustainable, and it's getting worse every year. And who's, is it, is it, do you find that it falls more, and it's the responsibility of the individual, we're not taking care of ourselves, or is it that we have a health system
Starting point is 00:45:34 that is allowing, I don't want to just say foods and drugs, but allowing things into us that is not maintaining our natural health. I mean, the individuals have a responsibility by the obesity, when I was again, 5% of children were obese. Yeah, you had one kind of fat kid in your class.
Starting point is 00:45:55 Yeah, and today is, you know, 15% it's going overweight is 40%. Adults that's even higher. We should just have a 50% military then, I think. But people did not get, Americans did not get obese because they're indolent or lazy or they don't want to do exercise. They got that way because they're being mass poisoned. And they're being mass poison because the government lied to them and it lied about the food. Oh, now 70% of the food that our kids eat is ultra-processed food and it's just
Starting point is 00:46:32 poison. It's not food. It's just poison. And which agencies allow? that, I mean, the EPA puts labels like the FDA. Yeah. So do you feel like that's been one of the most compromised agencies? Yeah, it was owned by Big Pharma and Big Food. And we're, you know, Marty McCarrey has changed that now. So how do we know that that's changed? Like, how do we is like a...
Starting point is 00:46:52 Look at the food pyramid. And, you know, the food pyramid, when I came into office, we were supposed to publish this in January of last year. Oh, yeah, the last food pyramid, I saw had vapes on it. So it was getting pretty bad. We're doing vapes now. You mean the food pyramid? Oh, the last one, yeah, the one that, yeah.
Starting point is 00:47:10 That's funny. I was like, this is getting bad. The food pyramid, so when I came in, we were, the, the, the, the, the, Iden administration had prepared new dietary guidelines, and they, they were 453 pages long, and they were completely driven by the same mercantile impulses that put fruit loops at the top of the food pyramid. how do you put fruit loops, which is not a food at the top of the food bear? It's just poison. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:47:42 And that, but it was all driven by the commercial interests of the companies that controlled FDA. So when we came in, we went, we got the best nutritionist from the best universities in our country. We basically locked them in a room. We thought it would take a month, but it took about 11 months. is they fought over every single item on this in the food pyramid. It took them 11 months to put this together? Yeah, because you have to go over science. You know, what is broccoli?
Starting point is 00:48:12 Right. How does it relate to how much protein should you eat? How much saturated fat should you eat? What's optimal? And so they had to go through tens of thousands of scientific papers to make sure that every recommendation that we made is based solidly on a foundation of gold standards. So for this, so this, for them to create the food pyramid, it took 11 months.
Starting point is 00:48:36 Yeah. And then we flipped it over. Right. So we flipped it over because the category of food that you should eat, you know, most is a broad category. It includes vegetables. It includes proteins, you know, salmon and steak. And most of this is for children, right? Well, no, this is good for everybody.
Starting point is 00:48:57 I mean, most diabetes. I remember from like when I was a kid, you know, you would. see it, you know? Yeah, right. But I guess that's the first point you learn about it. And that's why we're all so screwed up. But most diabetes can be cured through diet. And the doctors don't know this because they don't take, most of them aren't taking nutrition in medical school. And we're now requiring or we're working with the medical, with the accreditors and with the testing, the people who do the MCAT to make sure there's tests on nutrition.
Starting point is 00:49:31 We're working with all the medical colleges to make sure that now doctors are going to have 40 hours of nutrition in school. 80% of doctors say they do not feel competent to give nutrition advice. So what are they learning? They're learning pharmacology. Right. They're learning the pill. Let everybody get sick from eating the food and then tell them the pill that will treat
Starting point is 00:49:56 that sickness. Yeah, at that point you're just a drug dealer. And you can get rid of the diagnosis. you can get rid of the diagnosis. Not only that, but now, you know, there's really clear science that you can get rid of mental health diagnoses. That food can cure mental health problems. There's a doctor at Harvard, Dr. Paulin, who has cured schizophrenia with dietary change with keto diets. There's a paper that is that up.
Starting point is 00:50:22 Is that true? Go ahead and look it up. Cure schizophrenia with keto diets? Yeah. Well, I definitely notice it. When I'm fasting, I get, I'm pretty smart. Yeah, you get smarter, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:50:35 Preliminary clinical findings, including case reports and small traits suggest that ketogenic therapy may improve positive and negative symptoms, cognitive performance outcomes, and individual schizophrenia spectrum disorders. I mean, I believe that so much of this is true, just that, like, that so much of it is how we are operating. It just feels like we've been stuck in such a place where you have a, like, you have, you you have a food industry that doesn't care if you're healthy, and then you have a health care industry that doesn't care if you get well.
Starting point is 00:51:04 Everybody's making money from us being sick. And I'll say one other thing about this. There are all these, there are dozens and dozens of studies, and you can look them up, of their case-controlled studies of juvenile detention facilities and prisons, where they change, for example, in one wing the diet to real food, and they leave the other diet in there,
Starting point is 00:51:27 and that the disciplinary fighting, the violence drops precipitously, the use of restraints in one juvenile detention facility dropped by 75%. Usually the violence drops by 40 or 50%. And, you know, people, it caused depression, it caused anxiety, these foods. You know, if your kid has anxiety, look at what they're eating. And you can change that in many cases by changing their diet. getting them to eat real food. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:51:59 How do you get the everyday person then to adjust their psychology or like their thought, like about taking more of an interest in themselves, you know? Because I think you should just be you trusted the commercials. You're like, this is great for you, you know, it's like, and you believed that, you know? Yeah. I mean, the way to change being human behavior is one, get information out there that's real information. The other thing that you have to do is you have to change the economic incentives. And right now we have perverse incentives that reimburse doctors that, you know, that insurers,
Starting point is 00:52:35 pharmaceutical companies, the doctors, the hospitals are making more money if you're sick. The rea, with drug rehabs. If you come back, if you relapse, they make more money. Right. They shouldn't be paid that way. The insurance company should pay them one lump sum and then follow that attic for the next two years. and every time he comes back, you've got to treat him for free. And that will incentivize them to do better treatment.
Starting point is 00:53:02 Yeah, to do treatment that works. And the ones that can't do that will fail. And the ones that can do it, they get better and better at it will do it. You change the economic incentives. You'll change human behavior. And then you have to get the information to the individual. And that's what we're doing. We're doing, we've met, we've convened the 400 top tech companies before this administration.
Starting point is 00:53:24 you could not get your own health records. So you own your health records, but you couldn't see them. You can't get a hold of it. What do you mean? Why not? Because they would information block you. They would make sure you couldn't get them. And now we've got them all to agree. They're going to stop the information blocking.
Starting point is 00:53:42 Oh, your medical records will be on your cell phone. And that is great for you because if you live in Nashville and you travel to Los Angeles and you get hit by a car, you don't want to spend it. hour in the emergency room, but with a clipboard making out, you know, one of those forums. Yeah. You hand your cell phone to the doctor. He puts it in AI and he knows what your blood type is, what your allergies there, what your contradictions, you know, previous treatments, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:54:11 Yeah, it is ridiculous. You have to do that all the time. Right. So what President Trump said to me is he said, I want to make every American the CEO of their own health, that they're in charge of it. And then we're doing, you know, we've got now we've changed the prior authorization. We've got 80% of the insurance industry together to eliminate all unnecessary prior authorization, which is going to change the experience that every American has with the healthcare system.
Starting point is 00:54:42 As when you go to a doctor, he says you need a knee surgery. You may wait six months for your insurance company to approve it. You can't do anything about it. And now, by the end of this year, you will know at the point of care, that means before you leave your doctor's office, you'll know whether your insurance company will cover that. And that's going to dramatically change it. We are also...
Starting point is 00:55:09 But does that make it any more likely that they're going to cover it, or does it just make it that you're going to know? It makes it so that you'll know. And so the doctor will know there before you leave. Got it. And the doctor can change the prescription or whatever you need to do. you'll at least know and you won't be you know sitting at home and then that's actually going to happen that's happening yeah and then the other thing that we're doing is we're doing price transparency
Starting point is 00:55:34 so that every hospital will have to publish its prices for every procedure how are the patients are you familiar with it exactly and that's just making the CEO of your own health they already are supposed to do that right it was a law that Trump has this first term but Biden never enforced it so none of the hospitals do it. We've now passed new regulations that is going to punish them draconian way if they don't do it. So they're all going to be doing it by the end of this year. Are they going to try to find a way to skirt around that, though, I wonder. Like, are they?
Starting point is 00:56:03 Well, it's not. And it's so screwed up because if you go buy an automobile and the guy tells you, yeah, but I'm not going to tell you the price left. You bought it. Yeah, it's insane. You'd be, you know. And right now, if you're pregnant in this country, you could go nine months. on the phone every day trying to figure out what the childbirth is going to cause you in your local
Starting point is 00:56:25 hospital and not be able to do it. Yeah. And we are bound to go online with a system that will make all procedures visible to every patient. So I actually looked at the mock-up two days ago for New York, and it shows a map of Manhattan and a mile around Manhattan, and there's 30 hospitals. and it shows the price of child bird at every hospital. The lowest one is $1,300. The high is $22,000.
Starting point is 00:56:58 And it's everything in between $9,000,000, $5,000. You can look and see. You can look and see. You'll be able to go to a menu online. Yeah, it's like gas buddy when you're looking for a gas station, but you're going to be able to do that. A clean bathroom or whatever, that clean bathroom. That one, that was crazy.
Starting point is 00:57:13 And they lie on there. And some of them are at rest areas, too. And I, yeah, I got accosted by a guy who was in a, I guess he was like an Easter, he was like an Easter bunny, like impersonate or whatever. Anyway, whatever. Good to be here today. So you're telling me that that's going to be a real thing. That's going to be available to us on our phone.
Starting point is 00:57:31 So say if you, I need to get an MRI. I can look online and see. You can look and find. And right now there's no way that you can figure out the price of an MRI. And they'll lie to you. And but if you call them and say, okay, I'm not going to come. I've had experiences where they will call you back and then we'll offer you a lower. Yes.
Starting point is 00:57:49 But they're all playing that game, and now they're not going to be able to do it anymore. How soon is that going to be released? It's going to be released very, very soon in the next couple of months. All the hospitals now have to come online and start reporting, and the ones that don't do it immediately, we are going to have very, very high fines for them. So there's going to be big incentive for them to start our reporting. But it also is going to drive down prices because why is there that absurd differential between 13,000 and 22,000? It's just because we don't know.
Starting point is 00:58:19 because we don't know, so there's no market, so they do whatever the hell they want. And now there's going to be competition because people will be able to shop. But won't there be lobbyists that are, aren't there lobbyists just fighting you? I mean, right here it says, here's compiled a list of example of hospitals
Starting point is 00:58:34 and childbirth costs in Nashville based on available self-pay cash bundles. Ascension St. Thomas is 4,800 to 7,800. National General is 10,000 to 15,000. Yeah, I mean, why is it? Yeah. It's just chaos. That's chaos.
Starting point is 00:58:48 There's no market there. Yeah, but I mean, it's unbelievable. And this happens at every sick. It can be something as small as getting like an aspirin when you're in the hospital. It can be anything where they just bill you later and like, oh, it's a $70. Or they'll say to you, you know, if you want, you can spend an extra day here. You look sick. You look like you could use the rest.
Starting point is 00:59:09 And you'll say, I'll do that. And then you get a $100,000 bill. That's crazy. Yeah, and they only have fluorescent lights. You could have gone to the four seasons. Yeah. Yeah, for four years at that rate. So that's actually going to come into play.
Starting point is 00:59:25 Yeah, that will be in play. And what's that going to be called? How will we access it? It's called price transparency. I think we're calling a Trumparency. Really? No. I mean, if Trump named that he would.
Starting point is 00:59:41 I mean, he would name it at an heartbeat, you know. That's hilarious, though. Trump currency, dude. Oh, it's opaque. What does opaque mean, actually? Look it up. I don't know if I land. So did I land that right or not?
Starting point is 00:59:56 Somewhere in the middle of that. It's halfway transparent. Yeah, there you go. Hey. What was that? That's somebody in boots. Anywhere worth going is worth going in good boots. Find your perfect pair with Tukovas.
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Starting point is 01:02:43 two years is the price transparency power to the patients that's one of the groups that's like helping to push that i know um who are the people that are lobbying so hard for these things not to happen well there were a lot of people in the agency who were you know obstructing any kind of change and you know part of the challenge of running an agency this size is to is to change that you know the institutional culture. And, you know, it's, you're only bringing in, there's, you know, 82,000 people, we only have 250 political appointees. They have to be good leaders. They have to be able to work with the bureaucracy. You need the bureaucracy. A lot of these people are very gifted. They're idealistic. They want to do a good job. The leadership has been very bad for so long that
Starting point is 01:03:37 it's not allowed them to do what they want. And we need to reignite that feeling of idealism. Do you feel good about it? Yeah, I think we're doing a really good job. I mean, I think we've done more this year than any House Secretary has done in history, that HHS has done in a single year at any time. And I think we're dramatically changing. the relationship between Americans and their health care system.
Starting point is 01:04:12 But, you know, it's like turning a giant oil tank. You have to keep hitting it and hitting with the tugboat and the bow. And then ultimately it will start to turn. And then, you know, you hit that, you hit it just enough times that don't flip fast. And things change. I know before you leave you head, there's a lot of like stuff that's focused around addiction, right? what do you want to say about where do you think that we're headed with that some of the new things that you guys are going to try to implement like with part of your new program like what are
Starting point is 01:04:43 some of the new implementations or some of the new focuses that you want to have people look at when they look at addiction yeah i mean the the problem with addiction is that the cost of the addict you know we at at hHS were the fiduciary the medical cost of the addict so we're we can look and say, okay, if we can cure you from addiction, you know, I have a cousin who, you know, Patrick Kennedy, who was in Congress, but he did, he had 17 rehabs. And he was telling me, during that period of his life, he was at the emergency room every two weeks. And he had, oh, he had an irritated bowel syndrome, and he had contusions, and he had all of these, you know, other illnesses that he didn't even associate with addiction, but they were
Starting point is 01:05:34 all associated with, and you know that. Oh, yeah, it gets deep. And he said in 15 years that he's been sober, he's never been to the emergency room once. And so HHS is able to look at those costs and those trajectures and all those collateral damage in the health care system. The addict's costing elsewhere a lot more money with law enforcement, with broken families, with, you know, lost jobs and inefficiencies, and those aren't internalized anywhere. And what we're trying to do is bring together all of the agencies, the VA, Labor, HUD, and HHS, all the agency of the HHS together to look at that addict and then follow him over, have somebody responsible for following him over the lifespan of his addiction.
Starting point is 01:06:26 And nobody does that. And so now it's the same problem that we have with the health care system is that it's everybody's been, financial benefit to keep that addict sick, sick, because everybody's making money from them. And so you don't have anybody who's accountable for the outcome. And what you need to do is, you know, we're doing these pilot programs called street and eight different locales to figure out how to do this, to bring all the agencies together, do early interventions, confront the addict on the street, get them out of crisis into treatment, and out of treatment into, you know, rehab, out of rehab into sober housing, long-term care,
Starting point is 01:07:10 help them find a job and stabilize their lives and have one person who's responsible for that whole trajectory. Amen. Yeah, because when it goes piecemeal like that, it's just like it's easy for people to just. And they hand them off. And then everybody checks the boxes. Yeah. Everybody. I found him a house.
Starting point is 01:07:26 Okay. He's still shooting up. He's pulling the copper wand, you know, piping out to pay for his attic. That's not my business. Yeah. That's law enforcement. That's somebody else. Well, thank you.
Starting point is 01:07:38 I just, I think it's amazing that you care so much about that. And, yeah, I just, yeah, for the chance that people can get well and change their lives. Before you go, Bobby, you and I've been friends, and I've always trusted you and I've always, you know, I believe in you. And I just know you as a person. And I know this is a guy at certain points in your life, I think you just have to make choice. Like, this is a guy I believe in, right? Like, for as much as you can believe in a human being, you know, like acceptable levels. Who are some other, like, congressmen and senators on either side of the aisle that you believe that we can, that regular people like me can trust?
Starting point is 01:08:13 People that I, there's a ton of Congress people who are incredible. And there are actually too many to even name, to start naming because there's so many good ones. But in the Senate, Ron Johnson, who, you know, is fantastic. Roger Marshall from Kansas is fantastic. Mark Wayne Mullins. The president isn't crazy about Rand Paul, but Rand Paul has been really good on a lot of my issues. And, you know, there's a lot of other ones, too.
Starting point is 01:08:48 So, you know, I- What about Senator Hawley? Have you familiar with him? Yeah. Yeah, and he's great. You know, I've had tremendous support from the Senate, from the Republicans. The Democrats who have been my friend,
Starting point is 01:09:02 my whole lifetime are, you know, it's just so tribal now that people, you know, are not able to follow their conscience. They need to, they need to ask their handlers, all that. Well, they need to be part of the, you know, the clash of tribal narratives. And, you know, my family is the same way. You know, I lost a lot of family and a lot of friends. And, you know, The Democratic senators were all my friends. Bernie was my friend, et cetera. But now they are, you know, they're just locked in. If you're, if you're anything to do with Trump, you're, you know, you're demonized and
Starting point is 01:09:47 vilified. And like President Trump says, he said, if I cured cancer, they'd still find something wrong with me. And I think that's true that we're not, you know, we're locked in this very, very polarized space that is not good for our country. When my uncle was in there, everything he did was bipartisan. He was there for 50 years. And, you know, he did, he had more legislation under his name than any senator in history.
Starting point is 01:10:17 And it's because he was able to work across the aisles. But no matter who you are now, you can't work across the aisle. So we're locked in this dead lock. And it's very, it's troubling. but, you know, that it's just the reality of where we are. Whenever you kind of got behind the curtain, was there any more information for you there about any of the assassination attempts
Starting point is 01:10:41 that had happened with your family or anything like that? No, I mean, my... Like, did they give you any more, like, unredacted statement? Like, was there anything like that? No. I mean, the President Trump has ordered all that stuff to be released. And in fact, it was some stuff that I asked him not to release.
Starting point is 01:10:57 And he said, no, I'm releasing all of it. The reason I didn't want to release is because there was information in some of the telegrams that could have jeopardized people who were still alive on a completely different issue. But it seemed to me that it was, you know, that it was worth withholding a couple of these documents. The reason I knew a lot about it is because my daughter-in-law, Amar Ellis Fox, Kennedy, who ran my campaign, is now the deputy director of national intelligence, and she's the chief of national intelligence at OMB. And she was given the responsibility by President Trump of releasing all the JFK files.
Starting point is 01:11:53 And she's been thinking about this for years. She was in the CIA. Wow, that's wild. She, Oh, I met her. Yeah, you've met her. But so, no, nobody slipped to a napkin and was like, No.
Starting point is 01:12:06 This is who did it. It wasn't like that. Not on that issue. Got it. And then napkins slipped to me on other issues, but not on that one. Before you go, and thanks so much, man. I appreciate it. And it's great to see you.
Starting point is 01:12:18 You look great. And I'm so proud of you, you know? I mean, I know you don't care about that. Maybe or you do. I don't know. It doesn't matter. I shouldn't have said that. I'm just like, yeah, you just, oh, you always remind me of like a, just to be resilient.
Starting point is 01:12:31 So thank you. That's what I'm meant to say. Yeah, if you had just like, if you had one thing to just tell just people, like, what would you tell them? I mean, I'd say eat real food. If it comes in a package, you probably should leave it in the package. But, you know, if it comes from the ground, if it comes from the water, if it comes from the air, you know, that's going to be good for you. And food is medicine.
Starting point is 01:12:59 And you can heal yourself with a good diet. Amen. Cool, man. Thanks so much for hanging out, dude. And congratulations. And, yeah, keep fighting for us. We appreciate it. Thank you, Theo.
Starting point is 01:13:12 Great to see you. You too, bud. Now, I'm just floating on the breeze, and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must be cornerstone, that ground. I'll share this piece of mind I found I can feel it

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