#2461 - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

19:03Joe Rogan:Yeah, to say fuck Trump. It's crazy. I hope they didn't really do it. I hope they were pretending because that's so dumb. It's just so stupid. Why would you even want to risk that? Like, how is that not a thing that you just abandon all party affiliation and go, the health of my child? This is science. They're not saying don't take Tylenol. Like, you could still buy Tylenol. It's a good thing to know that if you take too much of something, it's bad. There's a lot of things that are fine if you take one or two pills. But if you're that poor lady with COVID, if you just keep taking it over and over and over again, you'll die.

19:39Joe Rogan:We should know that. It doesn't mean you shouldn't take aspirin or you shouldn't take Tylenol. It just means know when to take it and when not to take it and know how much to take. Like, that's all information that everybody should want to be out there. The fact that people want to connect that to Trump and I'm going to take Tylenol while I'm pregnant. Like, is this what, like, imagine the aliens watching us and going, they're not ready. They're not ready for sophisticated time-traveling technology. These fucking dopes, like, what are they doing? They're fighting over nonsense. You know, and it's like it's all heavily accelerated by social media.

20:16Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the algorithms just amplify that polarization.

20:23Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Yes. They're just telling you what you want to hear and and validating your worldview all the time.

20:30Joe Rogan:And also just outraging you, just outraging you all the time. I've been off it for a while now. It's like it frees your brain. It's like all the weirdness of thinking about nonsense in the world. You're aware of it peripherally, but it's not in your face all day, which I think most people are dealing with a lot more even than I was. And they're just bombarded by sensation, bombarded by anger and frustration and angst. It kind of liberates the darkest impulses of the human spirit.

21:05Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I mean I don't use it either but I post stuff. But if I started reading my comments and taking them seriously, I would.

21:16Joe Rogan:No, it's terrible. I genuinely thought when you joined forces with Trump and then Tulsi did as well, I was like, OK, maybe this will unite us more and make more people realize that there's a lot of people that are being left out that are in the center of all this. and we can all come together and work together. That's what I thought naively. Obviously, once you guys got in there, it was you guys were MAGA and health is bad and don't stop the dyes. No matter what it was, people were ideologically opposed to you being correct about anything because now you're connected with Trump. So it's like I was watching liberals, the people that are always worried about food ingredients.

22:03Joe Rogan:Just dismissing all of this talk about preservatives and glyphosate and red dye and all these different things. And it is just an ideological thing.

22:13Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Yeah. I mean it's dogma and it's part of – it's tribalism. It's these connectors in our brain that evolved over millions of years living in these little tribal communities. And now you've got machines that can activate those parts of the brain and they're being manipulated all the time.

22:45Joe Rogan:Yeah. And then there's a bunch of people that are commenting that aren't even real people. There's that too. There's a lot of manipulation that's going on on social media where who knows who's doing it. There's a bunch of different groups doing it. But they're not real people that are outraged. They're not real human beings that are saying these things. And they can kind of shift a narrative into a certain direction sometimes. It's a fascinating time to be alive. You know, as far as what you thought this job was going to be before you get in, before you got in and what it became, What was your expectations when you got in?

23:21Joe Rogan:Did anything really surprise you?

23:27Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I mean, you know, I try to go into every part of my life without expectations and just focus really narrowly on what I'm doing day by day. And that actually makes me a lot more resilient because if you don't have expectations, you never get disappointments. And so you can never get crushed. But I would say that, you know, I had not spent a lot of my life hanging out with Republicans. And what I imagined that they were talking about is exactly the opposite of, you know, now I'm in an administration that is surrounded by immensely talented people. and they're immensely idealistic. And, you know, nobody – I always imagined the Republicans would get together and they'd be thinking about how do we screw the poor and how do we, you know, reduce attacks on the rich.

24:29Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And all their – they're just narrowly focused on how do we solve these big problems and how do we make our country work. And the level of idealism that I see at every level in the White House and, you know, in my agency is inspiring. And then the level of the capabilities, just the, you know, the competence of the people who I'm surrounded with. I think the thing that shocked me most was how bad the agency was, how, you know, just how inefficient, how nobody seemed to care that people were getting sicker and sicker. nobody was taking accountability of the fact we're the health agency and yet we have the worst health and the richest health agency in the world.

25:19Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I think HHS is the sixth biggest country in the world if you look at its budget. It's got the biggest budget in the federal government, bigger than the defense budget. And yet we are absolutely miserable at what we did. I mean, we're literally presiding over this cliff where every American is getting – where people are just – 77 percent of American kids can't qualify for military service. And nobody is asking why is that happening. We've gone – when I was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of of juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50 year career today 38 percent of teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic so one out of every three kids who walks through his office door why isn't anybody noticing as the autism rates have gone from one in 10 ,000 in 1970 and people knew what autism was they knew what it looked like in 1970 they did the biggest epidemiological study in history to answer the question, what is the percentage?

26:34Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And they came up with 0.8 per 10 ,000. So less than one in 10 ,000. And today it's one in 31. In California, it's one in 19 and one in 12.5 boys. That's crazy. We are, you know.

26:49Joe Rogan:That's so crazy. One in 12.5 boys is crazy.

26:53Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And when my uncle was president, you know, I was a 10-year-old boy. we spend zero on chronic disease. Zero. And today we spend$4.3 trillion a year. And it's the fastest growing item in the federal budget. And it's existential. We can't sustain it. And the Republicans and Democrats have been arguing for years about whether we do the single payer Obamacare, this or that. It's all about throwing money. Who gets to keep the money? and we're throwing in a system that's completely broken. It's not a health care system. People just keep getting sicker and sicker. It's like changing deck chairs on the Titanic.

27:34Why is nobody focusing on how do we get people healthy?

27:39Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Because that's how you solve the health care cause problem. Right now, 40 cents out of every dollar that you spend in federal taxes is going to health care, and about 90 percent of that is chronic disease. So, you know, it's clear. And Americans don't want to be sick. They're being made sick. They're being – the obesity rates have gone from 5 percent in kids when I was a kid to now close to 20 percent. And in adults, 70 percent of adults are obese or overweight. That was not true when we were kids. And it's not because Americans got indolent or lazy or hungry. It's because they were being mass poisoned.

28:25Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And, you know, the vested interests that are making money on keeping – everybody makes money on keeping us sick. The food companies make money on getting us sick. But pharma makes money on keeping us sick. The insurance – you would think insurance would want to keep you well, but it doesn't. It actually makes more money if more people are sick.

28:48Joe Rogan:The hospitals. How does the insurance company make more money if people are sick?

28:52Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Well, I mean think of it this way. If you're Lloyd's of London, do you want one ship – and you're insuring all the ships in the ocean. Do you want one ship to sink a year or do you want 1 ,000 to sink? If 1 ,000 sink, everybody is going to be paying you premiums to insure themselves against that eventuality. And you're making money on the friction. So you're making the money that comes into this. You're making your money on the money that comes into the system. So the more that you pump up that volume of money, the more you make. So nobody is interested. Nobody is economically incentivized to make people well.

29:39Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And we are not going to get well until we align those economic incentives with the health outcomes that we want, which is nobody gets sick, we end the chronic disease epidemic. And that's what we're doing now. We're trying to realign all those perverse incentives. For example, the medical system pays out on fee-based service. That means that the more tests the doctor orders for you, the more drugs he prescribes you, the more contact he has with you, the richer he gets. So he is not incentivized to give you well. We ought to be paying him a flat fee at the beginning of the year and saying anything, any cause from this patient the rest of the year come out of your pocket.

30:30Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And then he's like, OK, how do I get this guy from getting sick? And he started studying nutrition books.

30:35Joe Rogan:And, you know, that's actually an interesting idea. It seems so captured at this point. It's going to be difficult to unravel all that.

30:43Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:It's difficult but it's not impossible and we're doing it.

30:47Joe Rogan:About three years from now, you're going to see a different healthcare model in our country. I think talking about it has a big impact because most people are just not aware of how the whole system works and what is actually wrong with it. Most people just hear about it. Healthcare, people are sick. They need healthcare. Why would they cut healthcare? Cutting healthcare is bad. That's what they would just immediately think. And I think most people, they think of the fraud stuff and they want to dismiss it. Like they – I've heard all these people dismiss this Nick Shirley kid and what he exposed in Minneapolis.

31:20Joe Rogan:But the reason why is because it's the wrong party. If this was a Democrat that was exposing Republican fraud, then they would be all into it. They would be – it would be on every newspaper. But instead they're trying to dismiss it as not relevant.

31:34Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Yeah, and to me it's weird because I know Democrats are human beings and they care about the same things that I do. I've known all of these guys, almost all of them, many of them for 40 years. Bernie Sanders I've known for 40 years. Their only solution is more money to the system, a system that is broken, that is making us sicker and sicker. And what President Trump wants to do is he wants to fix the system. Stop. Most of that money is not going to the patient. It's going to the insurance companies and the PBMs and all of these middlemen that are, you know, are milking the system. And that's why President Trump says, you know, the answer is to not pay the insurance company.

32:18Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:It's to pay the consumer directly and put him, make him the CEO of his own health care. that he can spend money. He's now incentivized to do prevention and to maybe do holistic medicine or take vitamins or take vitamin D, which, you know, as you know, it's kind of miraculous, or to do alternatives, you know, to do preventative care. And he wants to say, he's going to want to save money. Right now, nobody is in that position of accountability. We need to make them the CEO of their own health so that they have responsibility and they're going to pay the cause if they get sick. Government pays. But they then decide how to allocate that money.

33:13Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And then we need to make the system transparent. And that's one of the things that we're doing. During his first term, Trump passed a transparency bill. But because Trump had passed, everybody wanted transparency. If you're a woman, you're pregnant, you want to know how much it's going to cost you to have that baby. There's no way you can find that out for most of them. You can go nine months on a phone every day, how much it's going to cost, and you'll never get a straight answer. And so, you know, in New York, for example, what we're doing now is we're going to make all of the hospitals and all the providers post a menu of their prices that are available to everybody and that are available on a website that we're creating.

34:02Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So if you want an MRI and there's 40 places around your home that offer MRIs, you can't right now figure out what they cost. Now you're going to be able to go and look at them all on a single page and figure out what the cheapest one is. If you go to a restaurant, the prices are on the menu. If you go to buy a car and the guy said to you, yeah, you can buy the car, but I'm not going to tell you how much it costs until after you bought by it. Nobody would operate that way, but that's how our medical system operates. So I looked at – we have a mock-up of this website. We're right now, during the Biden administration, because Trump had passed that law, the Biden administration just refused to enforce it.

34:46Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So we're in the same position now where there's no transparency. We're changing that now. We've sent out over 1 ,000 letters to hospitals, warning letters. You've got to post them right now, and we just finalize new regulations. If they don't do that, they're going to pay a huge fine. So I saw the mock-up of the website, and I asked the question, how much does it cost in the hospitals within a mile of Manhattan to have a baby? One of them was there were about 30 hospitals that I could visualize on one page. One of them was$1 ,300. That was the lowest. The highest was$22 ,000. In Detroit, it is the cheapest place to have a baby is about$5 ,000.

35:47Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And the most expensive is$60 ,000. And it's the same service, the same quality care. Nothing changes except that price. Why do we have that information chaos? We have it because the industry wants to hide what it's doing. And so there's no market. There's no ability for people to make good choices. And when I met – I was staying with Dr. Oz during the transition at his house in Florida. And one day Prime Minister Rudd, who was the former prime minister of Australia, came by. And he had – after he was prime minister, he had been appointed to run a commission to reduce health care costs and improve quality.

36:30Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And they were very successful. But he said the number one thing that they did that changed everything was price transparency, was showing people the price of what they're going to pay. So we're now going to do that. And people will be able to shop. And now we also have to shift all of that money away from the insurance companies and put it in the hands of the public so that they have an incentivized, maximum incentivized to make good choices.

37:05Joe Rogan:Sag mal, hast du bei der Steuer auch diesen Schul-Flashback? Einfach irgendwas raten und dann hoffen, dass es stimmt? Boah, nee, gar nicht. Wieso Steuer ist so mein Safe Space? Du meinst, damit ist alles sicher? Yeah, exactly. Wieso Steuer is the app that understands you. No matter whether it's a job, job or a job. That's right. It doesn't feel like Steuern.

37:28Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Steuern completed? With Wieso Steuer.

37:47Joe Rogan:The primary diet should be grains and rice and wheat. And now it's things that we've known for a long time. It's whole food, actual real food. That's what you're supposed to be eating. The problem is getting people to change their habits and change their ways. And if people don't start eating good food and if people don't start taking care of their body, how – what other things can you even imagine would shift this trend? Well, here's what's going to happen.

38:17Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:But first of all, the food pyramid, I inherited a food pyramid from the first week. I was I came into office one year and two weeks ago. A week after I got in, I was handed the food pyramid that the Biden administration had. It wasn't even the food pyramid. They got rid of that. They just were doing the dietary guidelines. So it was the recommendations that would go be reflected in the food pyramid. It was hundreds of pages long and it was incomprehensible. And it was driven by all the mercantile impulses that had corrupted the fruit pyramid for 50 years. And it was written by lobbyists. It was written by the food industry lobbyists and the same impulses that put fruit loops at the top of the fruit pyramid, which isn't even a food.

39:06Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Fruit loops were at the top of the – Fruit loops were at the top recommendation of the food pyramid. You can ask them to look up the old food pyramid.

39:13Joe Rogan:I need to see where fruit loops stand. And don't they throw some vitamins on Froot Loops? Isn't it like vitamin enriched? Oh, yeah. As if that's good for you.

39:22Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:It's good for you.

39:23Joe Rogan:They add vitamins. Do they even add vitamins to Froot Loops? You add vitamins to Sinai, and it's not going to make it any better for you. No. No, I'm joking, obviously. But it was a ridiculous—so how did—

39:37Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So what we did is we got the best nutritionist in the country. You know, we got Mark Hyman and we got the nutritionist from the best universities in the country and we put them all in a room. And I thought it was going to take a month. It took 11 months because they fought over every recommendation and everything is cited in the source so that we know we have good science. But, you know, some of this stuff, because of regulatory malpractice all these years, some of the studies simply haven't been done. So there are knowledge gaps which we should not have. so um so now we have a food pyramid where and because of the old food pyramid people didn't like the food on it and they were going to ultra processed food which was okay on the food pyramid so now 70 percent of the food that our kids eat is ultra processed food 70 percent of the calories they get and it's just poisoning them and they took off the good stuff like a whole milk which is nutrient dense which is feeding their brain we We have two generations of kids that grew up without milk, without the proper nutrients for their brain.

40:41Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:We have the first country in the face of the earth that has chronic obesity and in the same people malnutrition. So you have immensely obese people and they're malnourished. They're medically malnourished. It's because the food pyramid was so messed up. So what's going to happen now, Joe, is that we are going to be able to drive that. We're going to be able to change dietary culture. Just the food pyramid is going to change dietary culture. And here's how. So Brooke Rollins, who's an incredible USDA secretary, she administers$405 million a day. She gives out food subsidies, school lunches, the WICS program, the SNAP program, Indian Health Services and all of these other programs.

41:37Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:and so those programs now are going to get good food because the dietary guidelines dictate what they can and cannot feed kids. The military and the VA also are changing. Now, this week I met with a guy, Chef Robert Irvine, who is a television chef. He's been hired by Pete Hegseth to come in and change all the military meals. Military, and he's already on five bases. By the end of this month, he'll be on 20. What he's done is the food that we give our military is so bad, they won't eat it. So they're going out and they're spending their money on fast food. And fast food is not cheap. A Big Mac meal costs$12 to$14.

42:26Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:It's not a cheap meal. You can get a really good food for that price. You could feed yourself the whole day for that price with good food. Mark Hyman's new book has a diet,$10 a day diet, three meals, great food. Anyway, Robert Irvine has gone into these places and he gives them all fresh food, almost all of it locally sourced. As it turns out, it's cheaper. The military is spending$18 a day for three meals for each soldier. He's spending$10 a day and giving them real food, good food. And the lines now are around the block and nobody's going to fast food. Everybody's fighting to get in. And what he says is it doesn't cause more.

43:11Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:We don't need any more money. We just need to buy smarter and to be smarter about how we do it. And, you know, we're going to be able to do that. One of the things that we're doing with the dietary guidelines is the SNAP program. We have 20 states now that have applied for SNAP waivers and have been granted so that you can no longer get candy on SNAP. You can no longer get soda. That was 18 % of SNAP purchases. So we were taking the 63 million poorest kids in our country, giving them taxpayer-funded diabetes, and then 78 % of them end up on Medicaid. Many of them are being treated for diabetes.

43:53Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So we're paying to give them the disease and then we're paying to treat them for the rest of their lives. And we're changing that. And one of the things that Brooke is doing is she's going to require that any retailer that accepts food stamps has to double the amount of real food in their establishment. We're working with farmers. We're working with entrepreneurs to make sure every American can get high-quality food that is affordable.

44:19Joe Rogan:I don't know how anybody would be opposed to that. That all sounds fantastic. It's weird that they are. How could you, the way you just laid it out, how could anybody be opposed to that? That all sounds great. I mean, what the Democrats. Especially for the soldiers. The fact that they were getting terrible food that they didn't want to eat is just, that's really offensive. You know, you think about what you're asking of them and then you're giving them garbage that they don't even want to eat. Like, what do they, how do they feel that you care about them?

44:44Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Well, and you know, one of the things that Robert Irvin, the chef, told me, he said, you know, it costs$9 to get a frozen salmon. It costs$6 to get a fresh salmon. So, you know, food, good food is actually, if you cook yourself at home, good food is much, much less expensive. The problem is Americans have forgotten how to cook. And cooking is really important because it's important for family cohesion, for a sense of community. It's a daily, almost sacred ritual. And taking that away from our lives has amplified the spiritual malaise that we're in. And one of the things we're going to do is to start sending federal workers out to teach people how to cook.

45:38Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:They don't have the implements. They don't have the cutting boards. They don't have – they don't know how to buy groceries. And you can go into any big grocery store in this country. If you go and buy a steak, it's still pretty expensive. But if you buy the cheaper cuts, it's great meat and it is very, very affordable or liver or all these alternatives. Chuck roast. Now, you said – how can you be against that? But I told you 20 states have applied for the SNAP program and we've granted them SNAP waivers. Why would you want taxpayers – if you want to drink a Coke, you ought to be able to. We live in the United States.

46:19Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:We're not going to take anything away from anybody. But the taxpayer shouldn't be paying for it, particularly when we're paying for it on the other end in diabetes. So this just makes sense to anybody. 20 states have applied. Only two of them are blue states. Why? Bernie Sanders has been fighting for this for years, but Vermont won't apply for one. And it's all partisanship. And they're putting their hatred of Donald Trump ahead of their love for their own children. And until we learn to stop doing that, this, you know, the health care in this country is not going to improve, at least in those states.

47:00Joe Rogan:So what strategies, if any, could you ever imagine that could be implemented that would kind of unite people on these things and get them to stop being so partisan about – one of the most important aspects of being a human being is staying healthy. It's like love and health. They're all – those are the top ones that we all want. It just seems insane that we would choose this as a battleground. And it seems insane that it's connected to one party or another. It shouldn't be. It should just – we should all be united on at least this. And I think if people were a little healthier and they were a little more fit, they'd probably have a lot less anxiety, probably a lot less conflict when it comes to political disagreements.

47:48Joe Rogan:Things could probably be worked out more amicably, especially among friends. It's like having good health improves virtually every aspect of your life.

47:58Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Yeah, I mean I would say – For everybody. I would say two things. The food ties directly into your mental health. Yes. And we now know – this is so well documented that there's a gut-brain connection and that depression, ADHD. Chris Palmer up at Harvard is dramatically reducing the symptoms of schizophrenia simply by changing people's diets. He's using a keto diet. There are – dramatically like what what kind of percent losing 30 of their symptoms really uh um just from ketones

48:33Joe Rogan:from keto what about have they done anything with the same thing is true i mean you know

48:37Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:there are now there's a big paper about to come out on losing a uh bipolar diet a bipolar diagnosis kids who lose by bipolar diagnosis simply by changing their diet we know that adhd is driven and buy all these food dyes and stuff, and that's very well documented. But there's all of these. You go on the Internet, and you look for studies that show what happens when you change the food in prisons and juvenile detention facilities. And they'll put it in one wing of the prison, they'll put good food, and then they'll put the standard food in the other. And the level of violence goes down by 40, 45, 50 percent.

49:24Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:The use of restraints in juvenile detention facilities goes down 75 percent. The number of incidents dramatically drops. And so it's a public safety issue in the prisons. And, you know, I've been meeting now with all the prisons. Prisons have a real problem because they're allocated – the state prisons are allocated 60 cents a day to feed the prisoners. And it's all about shelf life. So they're just feeding them the worst kind of poison that you could possibly. It's all just chemicals. Oh, my God. But, you know.

50:02Joe Rogan:Well, we've kind of given up on the idea of rehabilitation. It's just all about punishment. And then. But this is also public safety. It's guard safety. Of course. Yeah.

50:11Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And the other thing, the answer to your first question about how do you sort of, you know, mitigate the polarization, I would say the only way that you do that is by getting people to start talking to each other. Yeah. Because that you got to be able to find common ground with other people. And if you don't talk to them, you don't see their humanity.

50:33Joe Rogan:Right.

50:33Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And, you know, that's one of the things that you do that is so great, which is you bring a lot of people on here who you disagree with and you have a civil conversation about them and you show your curiosity about them and you get to hear their rationale. And a lot of times I'll listen to somebody on this show. I'll say, I don't like this guy. And then I'll listen to his rationale and I'll think, oh, actually, he's making a lot of sense. And we have to stop. hating people because of the label on them and start listening. And it's really important we do that now because these algorithms are designed to drive us all apart.

51:16Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And we've always had political polarization in this country. I mean, I grew up during the 60s and there were bombs going off and people being shot and it was very, very violent and vitriolic. When my dad was, running. And the polarization probably was the worst since the American Civil War. But today, when it is amplified by the algorithms, it's hard to see where it's going to end up in a good place unless we start learning to talk to each other.

51:51Joe Rogan:It's not just the algorithm. It's also the method of communication. When you're only talking to people through angry tweets back and forth with each other, you were saying, like, sit down and talk to people. No one's doing that anymore. There's a few FaceTime conversations going on. You see your friends if you go out with them. People are not talking that much anymore, and they're not sitting down and talking. And when you do, everyone's distracted. Everyone has their phones out. Everyone's checking text messages.

52:18Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I'll tell you one of the most important things that we're doing right now as part of the Maha legislation from my agency. We're going state by state, and we're asking them to do bell-to-bell legislation so that and 26 states have now already done it so more than half the states so that kids can't use cell phones in schools I went to a school in Loudoun County the other day and the states love them I went to Loudoun County and you know they had the students had fought and fought against this against getting their cell phones the way they do it all of the schools, school districts and states do it differently but in that state they can bring their cell phones to school but they have to leave it in their backpack and and if the parent calls and needs to talk to them they can do it but i walked into cafeteria 600 kids in that cafeteria and they're all talking to each other they're sitting across the table nobody's looking at their labs the parents the parents came you know that day i pulled the students and i said how many of you think this is a good idea and they all put their hands up and they said we all hated it for the first two weeks and now we love it the um the parents said uh it's the best thing that ever happened my kid is not driving with their cell phone in the car anymore because they know they can live without it or eating dinner with the family and we're actually having conversations and then the the teachers in the schools love it because the disciplinary problems go down and the the test scores go through the roof because they're focusing on work.

53:58Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So it's just like a no-brainer. But again, it's the blue states that are the hardest to convince to do it because they see it as a Trump, a part of the demonization of Trump being the tyrant or whatever.

54:16Joe Rogan:It's just so stupid to not recognize the kids are distracted. It's just one of those things. Why does that have to be a right or a left issue? It's stupid. This is a United States issue. The best way to have a group of people that succeed in this world is make it as clear a path for them as possible. And as soon as you allow them to use their phone all day, it's too addictive. No one can put them down. You're going to lose 30 percent of your concentration or more easily, I would imagine. The fact that that would be a partisan thing is just nuts. It just shows how goofy we are. I don't know how you get people to talk, though.

54:57Joe Rogan:I mean, other than... I mean, I do it on a podcast, but that's my job. I don't know how many conversations I'd be having with people who I was politically opposed to or ideologically opposed to or just didn't see eye to eye with them and wanted to know how they think. I don't know how many opportunities I would ever even get to do that.

55:17Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:What you're doing is so important. And now, you know, there's a thousand people imitating you. Many really good podcasts. but it's teaching people to have conversations I mean you are the best teacher, mentor on that and people admire you so they I have seven kids and they grew up with devices and stuff and I would look I'd slap them out of their hand and also they couldn't concentrate on long points, long conversations they're like get to the point You know, I only got five seconds. You got to make your point. And then I see them sitting for three and a half hours and listening to a Rogan podcast.

56:05Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:That was a cultural phenomenon. That was a cultural change. This generation of kids, I have so much hope for because they grew up with that. And, you know, they want it. So I do have a lot of hope that we're going to be able to do this. And then, you know, I think Charlie Kirk did that, too, was an example to a lot of those kids. Because whether you agree with him or not, and he had very strong opinions that people consider terrible. But the one thing that he really did is he talked to people he didn't agree with. And he always gave them the microphone and allowed them to amplify their voice. And then he had a civility.

56:44Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And he talked to them and he used logic a lot of times destructively. But not in an angry way. and so I think you know he was teaching people uh to how to have conversations again you're teaching people how to have conversations again and it's you know I think that's uh you know one of the big hopes that I have for the future that people learn to talk to each other with whom they

57:09Joe Rogan:did with with people with whom they disagree it would be nice but there's also a real genuine problem today in the marketplace of outrage that a lot of people, a lot of their podcasts are just focused almost entirely on outrage and of like having arguments and screaming matches with people and, you know, putting people down and not having civil discourse, but trying to win, trying to dominate someone in an argument, you know, trying to squash people. And I guess in a sense some of that is really good because it exposes bad ideas but it just encourages that kind of discourse where if someone's ideologically opposed to you they are the enemy and you want to destroy them and i'm like okay they're just a human being like find out why they got to where they are that is a different perspective than you have and why you got to where you are and try to figure out if there's a middle ground in there like what what do you believe like why do you believe that and find out why and ask them and don't cut them off.

58:14Joe Rogan:Let them talk. Let them express themselves. Help them if you can. Try to figure out what makes someone actually think instead of just thinking that your ideas are a part of you. They're just ideas. Like they're not you. Like some ideas you can hold in your mind and they're bad for you. They're bad. You haven't examined them. You're acting on them like their doctrine. And then you're stuck with that idea because you've already espoused it so many times you don't want to be a flip-flopper. And so people get mad. And you get this weird cycle of shitty communication and nobody ever breaks out of it and nothing ever gets done.

58:51Joe Rogan:And there's no common ground that's ever achieved. And the only way you're going to ever break that is to stop talking to people like that. You've got to just talk to them. Instead of talk to them like they're the enemy, just talk to them like they're a fellow human being about some ideas. and treat them with respect. Talk to them like a person that, you know, in any other circumstance maybe even could be your friend. Just talk to them. People can do that. It's possible. It just takes discipline. You have to learn how to do it. It took me a while. It took me a long time to learn how to talk to people better.

59:24Joe Rogan:But it can be done. It's technique.

59:28Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:But as prevalent as, you know, that kind of vitriol is in the podcast world, Right. It's it is incomparable to what's happening on television because there are no conversations on television.

59:42Joe Rogan:Right. That's more of what I was getting at, honestly, is there's some shows that do that. But like some of these CNN shows, it's just these crazy ideological battles. And you also, guys, pro tip, you can't have fucking six people at a table all yelling out for seven minutes. You don't have enough time to get a real point across. And it becomes a battle of like who's got the best prepared sound bites. or who's got the best snarky quip. It's stupid. It's a stupid way to talk about things. Yeah, I mean, Cheryl went on. The View?

1:00:13Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Yeah, The View. And it was that. It wasn't like you say, you know, like let's have a congenial conversation with people and allow them to express themselves and to be fun and funny.

1:00:31Joe Rogan:Yes. Yeah, well, just have a conversation with someone. If you disagree with them about certain things, like they disagree with her, it would have been far more productive to have a one-on-one conversation instead of this gaggle of hands squawking all at her. It's just like you see it over and over again when they oppose somebody. It's like they're all chiming in, and it's just not the way you could ever, like, thoroughly cover a subject. And they're limited by their format. That format is very limiting. It's a shitty format where you go to a commercial at predetermined times, period, no matter what.

1:01:05Joe Rogan:Like maybe you got a little leeway here or there, but you've got to get that commercial in. And that's crazy because if you're in the middle of talking, a lot of points take a long time to flesh out. Like just think about all the stuff you just explained about Medicaid. Imagine if you try to do that. You can't. You can't. You can't do it. And they would try to stop you. You're too in the weeds. No one's going to pay attention to this. It's like, I don't think that's true. And I think we've learned that because of podcasts, because there was no production. There was no executives. There was no one there.

1:01:36Joe Rogan:People were just putting on a webcam and talking. And so we realized like, well, people actually do like conversations still. They just don't get a lot of them, not real ones. You know, you get interviews where someone has like a sheet of questions. You know, you get where someone is, you know, playing a role. You're playing a role of a person who interviews people. You don't really give a shit about what this person has to say. But people do want connection. They still do. And the fact that we don't get it from social media, but most of our time is in social media, is just accelerating this detachment we have from each other.

1:02:11Joe Rogan:And that's what people have to get past. I don't know how to do it.

1:02:14Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Tell everybody you know, you and I were talking before we came in here about Larry King.

1:02:20Joe Rogan:Yes

1:02:20Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:He did that a lot of people in the 70s and 80s David Susskind and you know All of these other people who were who were actually having conversation. Yeah Larry King was great

1:02:34Joe Rogan:I love when he asked DJ Khaled. How'd you gain all the weight? What did he say? He said I ate too much Such a crazy question. How did you gain all the weight? Like, what, Larry? What are you talking about? That's crazy. That's a wild question to ask someone. But, you know, he would just have a conversation with you. You know, and I think people have a hunger for that. And a lot of this infighting comes from no face-to-face communication. I think when people get a chance, especially if it's not performative, that's part of the problem, like the Charlie Kirk stuff or some of the other things that people do in front of a crowd.

1:03:11Joe Rogan:Things become very performative where there's a bunch of people watching and cheering. And then you know how the audience feels and you play to them a little bit. That's probably not the best way to talk about stuff. And I think human beings naturally understand one-on-one conversations. We've had them for all of human history. So when you get a chance to hear people talk one-on-one for hours at a time, it expands your understanding of the world. Now I know how you feel about things. I know at least for this brief three-hour conversation, I get more of a sense of how you approach things. And then people put that into their own mind and go, maybe I should approach things a little bit differently.

1:03:51Joe Rogan:Maybe I should think about things a little bit differently. And we miss that. We're missing that. And social media robs you of that. It gives you the exact opposite of that.

1:04:02Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know what Charlie Kirk was doing? You're right. You know, it was less of a conversation and more of a— Sometimes it was conversation. It was like in the ring. You know, it was like being in the ring. But it's a lot better than what's happening elsewhere, which is just blanket censorship of people and not any willingness to just shutting people down and canceling them.

1:04:29Joe Rogan:Yeah, 100 percent. And that's another weird thing that that's a Democratic Party impulse because it was the opposite of the Democratic Party I grew up with, which was unafraid of any debate.

1:04:42Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:My uncle, my father said we should be able to debate. We should be able to win these debates in the marketplace of ideas. If we can't, then we need to examine ourselves.

1:04:51Joe Rogan:It was a core tenet of the Democratic Party. Yeah. And, you know, the unfortunate shift in that, it's just like, you know, I remember during the Bush administration when the FCC was going after Howard Stern. It was it was this huge thing. They were trying to close down Howard Stern because Howard Stern was very critical of Bush. And it was like he was the guy out there fighting for free speech. And they were getting fined like enormous fines, enormous fines for things that he had said, you know, they deemed to be obscene, you know. And that was a right-wing thing, and we always thought of it as a right-wing thing.

1:05:27Joe Rogan:And when you see what's happening today, just like any – the wanting silence of your political opponents is the dumbest way to cut off your own hand. It's so dumb because if you can't see that this could be used against you if someone else gets a new position of power, if all of a sudden some enormous right-wing corporation buys these social media platforms and only pushes right-wing agendas and silences all left-wing agendas, do you know how fucking crazy that is to just give that kind of power willingly to an anonymous group of people that you supposedly align to because you're in the same tribe?

1:06:05Joe Rogan:It's the dumbest thing ever. And the fact that people on the left weren't outraged when they read the Twitter files and found out how much involvement there was in silencing real information and removing people who were from Stanford and MIT.

1:06:20Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:He ordered me to be removed from Instagram, and I lost a million followers. Insane. 37 hours after he took the oath of office, swearing to uphold the Constitution, they were ordering Mark Zuckerberg to take me down. And then you look at what's happening in England now, you know, with people going to jail for Twitter posts.

1:06:42Joe Rogan:12 ,000 people this year. 12 ,000 in the last year.

1:06:46Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And this was the Magna Carta was written and now there's – it's just a dictatorship.

1:06:54Joe Rogan:Well, they got rid of trial by jury except for murder and rape and a couple other things. Now it's just a judge. So whatever it is, if it's a social media infraction, if it's – there's no reasonable judge by jury of your peers. No, you're getting judged by a judge. And that's nuts. It's the Soviet system. It's like Kafka. I just can't believe how quick it happened. When you look at the social media arrests, they were always disturbing. Like if you go back even four or five years, they had quite a few of them a year. But it really ramped up, really ramped up over the last year or so. And it's just insane to watch.

1:07:33Joe Rogan:And a lot of it is criticism of immigration, like legitimate criticism of immigration and legitimate criticism of crimes that have been committed. and people outraged, which is completely normal. But instead of doing anything about that, they want to arrest people from complaining, and it's just really weird to watch.

1:07:57Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:It's going to get worse with the AI.

1:08:06Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:It's scary.

1:08:07Joe Rogan:Well, it's just strange that they couldn't do anything to stop that from happening, And that anybody with anybody that's reasonable would be willing to let that happen because their side is imposing it. That seems like an existential threat to all critical thinking, all communication and debate. As soon as you start arresting people for opinions, that's crazy. You're getting nuts. Like anything that you deem might incite violence or like outrage. People are outraged. They have a right to be outraged. if you can put them in a cage because they're outraged that's nuts that's really not now they have a pub law do you know this one no oh find that jamie they're trying to pass this thing i don't know if they passed it where uh someone's i don't want to speak out of turn i don't want to fuck this up because it was disturbing enough without me uh misinterpreting it but the idea was to stop people from saying things on social media that you get arrested for.

1:09:11Joe Rogan:Stop them from saying those kind of things in pubs. Where is this? In England? Yes. See if you can find it. I know I saved it, but it'll take me too long to pull it up. You find anything like that? I'm trying to make sure it's... Legit? Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't imagine it's not. I mean, it's not outside the realm of what they're capable of doing if they're arresting 12 ,000 people a year for social media posts. I mean, if that was happening in America and they were only arresting Republicans, I don't think you'd hear a peep out of the Democrats. I think they think it's important. We have to stop misinformation.

1:09:51Joe Rogan:Yeah. It passed? No, I don't think it passed. You don't think it passed? I'm going to find out if it passed or not. Okay, so what is the – what were they – It was legislation aimed, blah, blah, blah, but it says you're still free to converse, know the law, not place the system, I don't know. What was the – what were they trying to – okay, point, free speech in UK pubs, employer responsibilities. It requires employers to take reasonable steps to prevent staff from experiencing harassment by third parties such as customers. That's normal, right? You don't want to be harassed by a – concerns have been raised that debates on, for instance, gender identity or political matters could lead to staff complaints resulting in patrons being asked to leave if the behavior is deemed aggressive or harassing.

1:10:40Joe Rogan:It should not be misinterpreted as a ban on lawful, polite or controversial speech. Who's to decide what's controversial, though? Third party harassment legislation focuses on addressing harassment rather than banning specific topics of conversation entirely. Just any regulation of conversation is nuts. It's one thing you're harassing the staff.

1:11:02Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I've never known a pub owner who would allow people to come in and harass his staff. He already has an economic and management incentive to not allow that. It's not the kind of thing you need to legislate. But to say that someone doesn't feel safe if people are having a civil conversation about gender identity, you don't feel safe if you work there and that you're getting harassed by people's opinions that you don't agree with.

1:11:27Joe Rogan:Well, that's where things get weird. because then you as we've seen there's a lot of people that get they get really triggered about a lot of things that are pretty normal for most folks you know microaggressions dumb shit there's a lot of people that just want to be offended and if this is a law that could lead to a lot more problem it's just a slippery slope and they're not going in the right direction and i don't know how they course correct if they've fallen this far that quickly 12 000 arrests is crazy that's a crazy amount of people go to jail for social media posts. And it encourages self-censorship so you don't get a real sense of what people want or don't want.

1:12:07Joe Rogan:Because people don't want to be involved. They don't want to go to jail. They don't want to take a chance.

1:12:14Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:The framers of the Constitution, free speech was everything for them. And they put it in the First Amendment because they knew all the other rights and guarantees were dependent on it. If you have a government that can silence its opponents, it has a license for any kind of atrocity.

1:12:34Joe Rogan:It's just shocking that all other Western nations haven't adopted that.

1:12:40Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Well, most of them don't have constitutions.

1:12:44Joe Rogan:It's so crazy. It's just so ridiculous. It's so ridiculous that free speech, which is like we all agree, especially in America, it's one of the most important things. is the only way to find out what's real and what's not. You've got to let people talk it out, you know? I mean, when you're living in a world where the government has the power to dictate what's real and what's not real, and they don't have an obligation to be correct, you've got a real problem. And if there's no consequences for them being incorrect, and they've silenced correct speech, they've gotten away with something that's real slippery and real dangerous.

1:13:20Joe Rogan:And when there's a lot of money involved and a lot of businesses involved, I typed it into perplexity, and this gives a little context on it because the pubs were being— The same, the pub thing? Yeah. Reverses a 2013 removal of third-party harassment liability, making pubs liable if staffs overhear comments deemed harassing based on protected characteristics like sex or race. Critics call it a banter ban, fearing landlords will police conversations to avoid lawsuits, chilling speech in social venues. That makes it sound like if someone was doing that, the business was getting in trouble versus the person who was saying it.

1:13:59Right.

1:13:59Joe Rogan:So they removed a third-party harassment liability. So they removed the pub owner being in trouble. They removed that. It says it passed when I was looking it up. It said it passed a couple months ago. So that makes pub owners liable again. so removed a 2013 removal of third-party harassment liability them liable i don't think i think it's back to reverses that reverses making them liable no no no it reverses the removal of the third party harassment liability so they removed the liability now making pubs liable so it now makes them liable if they overhear comments so what this does is it encourages the pub itself to censor people, which makes sense.

1:14:47Joe Rogan:I mean, if you all of a sudden can now sue a pub that you went into and you didn't like this conversation about gender identity that was taking place next to you, you have the basis of a lawsuit now. Yes.

1:14:58Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So now the incentive is the pub owner to go out and police all the conversations so that if anybody, if anybody crosses a guardrail, you know, the pub owner now has to go in and interrupt them, Which is not a good thing.

1:15:13Joe Rogan:If you weren't a charitable person, you could imagine that there are certain groups that would have people go to places, have conversations, and set up a lawsuit. You could just – you could commit fraud. If the pub is liable, you pay some kook to go in there and start yelling about transsexuals, and then next thing you know, you collect the lawsuit. That's not outside of what I think a shady person would do. If you think about what you've just talked about with all the Medicare fraud and all the other fraud that we know has happened in the world, this is a giant loophole. This is a giant loophole for people to come in and sue people and silence everybody's speech.

1:15:53Joe Rogan:And the fact that this is not being recognized, it's very disturbing that people don't understand human behavior. It's very weird. They're willing to accept this kind of stuff.

1:16:06Joe Rogan:When you look at the challenges of getting things done, what has been the most frustrating in terms of what you wanted to get done and what you were actually able to get done or in the process of getting done?

1:16:18Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I mean, I've been surprised by how much President Trump has supported me on this stuff because, you know, I'm going after the biggest, you know, big pharma, big insurance. Big food. Big food. And these have all been, you know, those were all taboos for every administration, Democratic, Republican. There was little incremental things that you could do under Democratic administrations, but nothing like this has ever happened. You know, I mean, the agreement we made with the pharmaceutical industry could not have happened under any other president of the MFN agreement, the most favored nation. And the way that that worked is, you know, we've been paying for the last 40 years the highest price in the world for medicine.

1:17:14Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And so we have 4.2 percent of the world's population here and over 70 percent of pharmaceutical profits and revenues come from the United States. Why is that? We do buy more drugs than anybody, but it's because we pay higher prices. We pay two to three to five times what they're paying in Europe. For example, and President Trump likes to talk about this, Ozempic, the list price was$1 ,350 in America. You could buy the same drug in any pharmacy in London for$88. And it's made in the same factory in New Jersey. And the reason that was allowed to happen is the Europeans just said, we're not going to allow, we're not going to pay anymore for it.

1:18:03Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:They would set the price, and that was the maximum. There's a lot of drugs they don't have. There's a lot of cancer drugs they don't have in Europe because they just wouldn't pay the price. And so President Trump, you know, every president has vowed to stop this. Clinton tried to stop it. Obama, Bush, all of them tried. And Biden all said, we're going to get rid of the MFN price, and none of them did anything on it. And President Trump literally called me sometimes once a day, called late at night, 1130 at night and, you know, say, where are you on MFN? And we ended up getting the – to me even, it seemed insurmountable.

1:18:51Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:But he said, I'm going to use tariffs. I'm going to force the Europeans to raise their drug prices. and because he didn't want to – he didn't – we had enough leverage on the pharmaceutical companies because of our Medicaid and Medicare programs that we could pretty much force them to lower their prices. But it would put them out of business. So – and he didn't – he wants us to continue to be the center for innovation in this country and he also wanted the companies to reshore all their productions so that we're making all the drugs here and they're not making it elsewhere in the world. And so we sat down with them for months and we came to agreements with 16 of the 17 pharmaceutical companies.

1:19:37Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Now Americans are getting the lowest prices in the world. If somebody lowers a price in Europe, we get that price or lower. And people can get that today on Trump Rx. They can go for the most popular medications and get the cheapest price in the world. And not only that, but the pharmaceutical industry, because we gave them certainty and because President Trump forced the European countries to raise the price that their citizens pay for drugs, the companies actually did well. They increased stock values by$1.3 trillion among them. And they've all agreed to onshore their production. So Lilly is building six plants here, new plants, including one of the biggest API facilities in the world.

1:20:22Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:The API are the pharmaceutical ingredients that we ran out of during COVID. We need to be making them here because otherwise other countries can blackmail us. Pfizer, Merck, they're all building big facilities here. And drug production is now going to come to the United States. We are going to be the center of the world in terms of drug production. And those negotiations were very, very tough, and they were extraordinarily complex. We have a really good suite of talented individuals, high-caliber individuals who've left billion-dollar businesses. One of them is a guy called Chris Klump, who's immensely talented.

1:21:07Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:He said he walked away from a company that does data management for 85 percent of the hospitals in this country. And he's – he walked away from a billion-dollar company. He divested, lost a lot of money to come just because he wants to improve things. He ran the negotiations and the pharmaceutical companies fell in love with him because they realized they could trust him. And we worked out this extraordinary agreement where now Americans have gone from paying the most in the world for drugs to the least in the developed world for drugs. And that's going to change everybody's experience.

1:21:43Joe Rogan:Can I ask you how that applies? Is it the same if someone has insurance or if they don't have insurance? How does insurance bill it versus how does someone buy on their own?

1:21:57Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:It's going to lower prices for everybody. Anybody can go on TrumpRx, whether they have insurance or not, and they can get it there.

1:22:03Joe Rogan:And they would buy it themselves. Yeah. And so it would be at a substantially lower price than they would have had in the past. Exactly. If they buy it themselves. But what if people are just getting it through insurance? Does insurance lower it as well? Yeah, the copay is lowered. OK.

1:22:22Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And, you know, we had the first woman to buy a drug on it. The first customer was a woman who has been trying for years to do IVF. The drug cost$4 ,000. Now I think it costs something like$600. Really? So it's going to allow women. One out of every three women in this country does not have as many children as she wants, and she can't have more. and IVF is going to be really important because our birth rates just dropped. I mean, dramatically this year, they dropped to 1.75.

1:22:59Joe Rogan:Yeah, people don't understand that. We've had a few conversations on this podcast about population decline and most people are not aware of it. They just see how many people are on the highway. They think we're overcrowded. They don't understand this replacement number that we're going to need unless we want our population decline.

1:23:17Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:The U.S. is in a different situation than other countries. Japan is in total crisis. Right. China is in an existential crisis because, you know, its population is going to drop dramatically. South Korea. Yeah. But, you know, people want to immigrate here so we can make up the deficit through immigration. It's going to, you know, and we have that advantage. But, you know, it's still the birth rate has dropped. It dropped one and a half or it dropped from 1.9 this year to 1.75. And that affects Social Security. It affects, you know, it makes it so that the cliff for Social Security was pushed ahead by another year because of that drop in birth rate.

1:24:07Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So it's not a good thing. And, you know, American women want to have babies and a lot of a third of them cannot have as many children as they want.

1:24:18Joe Rogan:What was the pushback when it came to things like removal of dyes?

1:24:26Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:The removal of dyes. Again, we were I think because of President Trump's leadership, we were able to convene the industry and talk to them about it. And a lot of them came in and said, yeah, you know, we know we got to change. Really? Yeah. The only one that really –

1:24:46Joe Rogan:Did you ever ask them why didn't you do it a long time ago?

1:24:49Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Well, they didn't have options.

1:24:52Joe Rogan:And what we did – But didn't most of them like for cereal, for example, didn't they have to have no unnatural dyes when they sent it to Canada?

1:25:01Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Yeah, the ones in Canada. But in our country, we hadn't approved a bunch of them. So we only had one or two vegetable-based dyes. Marty McCary, who's done a fantastic job at FDA, has now fast-tracked this year seven new ones. So we're working with the industry to make sure they have the dyes, and they're supposed to get rid of all the dyes by the end of this year. And that's going to –

1:25:27Joe Rogan:So instead they'll use just food-based dyes?

1:25:30Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Yeah, just vegetable and mineral-based dyes. And that's, you know, another thing that we did, again, through convening, two things that we did through convening industry because of President Trump's convening power. We fixed the prior authorization. So one of the most frustrating things that people go through when they encounter the health care system is that they have to wait for prior authorization from their insurance company. So you go in, your doctor tells you you need a knee replacement, and then it gets you – it takes you six months for the company to approve – for the insurance company to approve the surgery.

1:26:14And it was infuriating for people and really devastating and heartbreaking for a lot of them.

1:26:21Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And we got the biggest insurance companies representing 80 percent of the American public all voluntarily agreed to eliminate prior authorization for almost all their procedures. A very small number now. I think 15 percent of the procedures still have it. And those are procedures we want prior authorization because there's a potential for abuse, for example, with spinal surgeries. A lot of people don't need the surgery, and Medicaid and Medicare wants to make sure that they actually need that surgery, and it's beneficial to them. But for all the other ones, you will now know at point of care whether or not you're insurance.

1:27:00Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So you go to your doctor. He says you need a knee surgery. Before you leave his office, he'll know whether the insurance company approves it or not, and that's going to dramatically change the medical experience. Another thing that we did, again, through convening industry, is we originally got 63 top tech companies together, and then we ended up final agreement with 405 of them to agree to stop information blocking. So your medical records are owned by you, but you can't get access to them a lot of times, most of the time. You're the data company won't give them to you. And so we've got them all to agree to stop doing that.

1:27:46Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So by the end of this year, every American will be able to get their medical records on their cell phone. And that's going to dramatically change the medical experience. It's going to save lives because if you get hit, you know, you live in New Jersey, you get hit by a car in Portland, Oregon. You go to the hospital and you spend the first two hours while you're bleeding out, you know, making out clipboards. Now, or you come in unconscious and they don't know what to do with you. They don't know anything about you. Now your medical records are on your cell phone. They can see if you have allergies.

1:28:16Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:They can see what your blood type is. They can look at all of your previous medical records and make good decisions about how to treat you. So – and that is – and also you're going to be able to sync that with food purchases apps so that you'll be able to go into a grocery store and the app will tell you this one is bad for you. You know, this choice is bad for you and I'll offer you a better choice, et cetera. And there's an app like that, Yucca now, but there's a lot of them coming online now. What is it called? Yucca is the one. I think 50 % of the people in France use Yucca. Can you spell it?

1:29:01Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I think it's Y-U-C-C-A. Okay. Or Y-U-K-A. I don't know. You can look it up. We use it. My wife used it. You go into the grocery store. You go into the grocery store and you put it on the barcode and it rates each of the products about whether or not they're, you know, whether it's a good or a healthy one, and then it makes you a recommendation for a healthier one if it's bad for you. And that is going to change the food culture in our country because the company is already changing their ingredients so that they can get better scores from the Yuck app and from other apps that are like it. It's not the only one out there.

1:29:45Joe Rogan:But what about preservatives in processed foods? They're always going to exist, right? You're always going to have a certain amount of preservatives in processed foods.

1:29:54Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Well, I mean, first of all, we're not going to take processed foods away from people. But we're going to – I think we're going to change the amount of processed foods. One is by April, we will have a federal definition of ultra-processed foods, first time in history. And as soon as we do that, we're going to do front-of-package food labeling. So every food in your grocery store will have a label on it. It will have maybe a green light, a red light, or a yellow light telling you whether or not it's going to be good for you.

1:30:30Joe Rogan:Oh, wow.

1:30:31Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And that – and it's going to evaluate all of the ingredients, et cetera. So I think we're not going to change this overnight, but we're going to change it pretty quickly. And if you want to be healthy, we're going to give you the information to take control of your own health. If people just don't want to be healthy and don't care, there's not much you can do. about it. Most Americans want to be healthy. And they are, you know, we've seen that when

1:30:58Joe Rogan:they're allowed to make a healthy choice, they do not want to be eating this poison. Yeah. And ironically, the people that don't want to be healthy, they feel that way because they're not healthy. If they wanted, if they were healthy, they would want to stay healthy. They're just part of the reason why they're feeling this way is because they're unhealthy. You get demoralized. That's why they don't care. Yeah. Well, it's also like the mountain is so big. If you're 300 pounds, like, oh, my God, it's so much work to do something about this and not fall back on the old behaviors. And I don't know, other than by example, how you can get a large group of people to go along with that.

1:31:34Joe Rogan:When someone like Jelly Roll loses, I think it's close to 300 pounds, when someone like that does that, that's going to help a lot of people. So that's some kind of an example of a guy who just completely changed his lifestyle around, changed what he eats. And he did it without GLPs. Yes, he did. It was pretty amazing. Which brings me to peptides. Like where are we at right now on peptides and getting them regulated and making sure it's not this weird gray area? Because we know they're effective, but we also know that there's a lot of pushback on peptides.

1:32:05Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Yeah, I mean I'm a big fan of peptides. I've used them myself and used them with really good effect on a couple of injuries. What happened was there were 19 peptides that you can – just so people understand, there was a law written that – to allow compounding pharmacies to make compounds that were part of approved drugs. So, you know, part of approved ingredients of approved drugs to make them individually for patients who did not have access to the particular formulation that they needed to fit them, maybe if they had an allergy to the commercial brand or whatever. And the compounding pharmacies and peptides was part of that group.

1:33:05Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:There were 19 peptides that were widely formulated by compounding pharmacies during the Biden administration. They illegally moved those to category two, which says do not formulate. It was illegal because they're not supposed to do that unless there's a safety signal. And they didn't have a safety signal. They're not allowed to look at efficacy. They're not allowed to say, well, we don't believe these are efficacious or whatever. They can only look at safety. They move those to Category 2, which means do not formulate. What happened? There was huge demand for peptides. And so a black market came out.

1:33:46Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And the black market is run by companies that say that they're making the peptides for animal use or for research purposes. and that peptide now basically completely replaced the legal market. The legal market for peptides, the pharmacies, the compounding pharmacies were getting those peptides from FDA-inspected facilities and some of them in India and China, but they were the same one that the pharmaceutical industries are buying them and we inspect those. You know you're getting a good product. You know you're getting what you bought, what was advertised. With the gray market, you have no idea.

1:34:37Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And a lot of this stuff that we've looked at is just, you know, is very, very substandard. Oh, I'm very anxious to move. Probably not all of those peptides. Some of them are in litigation, but about 14 of them back to making them more accessible. And the FDA is in the middle of, I think, within a couple of weeks, we will have announced some kind of new action. And my hope is that they're going to end up with, they're still looking at the science. My hope is that they're going to get moved to a place where people have access from ethical suppliers.

1:35:20Joe Rogan:That's ultimately the problem with all this black market stuff, right? A lot of people are getting bogus peptides. And they don't have any idea how they – if they work, whether to test them. They just take a chance. They take a risk. They get a little flyer in their email or something. And they hear from somebody else, I got it from this place. They don't even know. And they try it. And you're getting nonsense, bogus peptides. I mean we created the black market. Yeah. Which we do with everything. And it's a very dangerous black market. Which they've done during prohibition. They're doing it right now with everything else.

1:35:52Joe Rogan:It's unfortunate. I know there's been some talk about psychedelics. And I know that in particular Ibogaine, what's going on in Texas with the Ibogaine initiative where former Governor Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard have been helping a lot of veterans. a lot of people with like serious opioid addictions. And this is the plan to have this and run some programs where you have this very effective way of getting people off addictions that we have for some reason banned in America up until these initiatives. I think there's some stuff that can help a lot of people. I mean, how many people are addicted to opioids in this country?

1:36:37Joe Rogan:It's pretty high. How many people are alcoholized? 48 ,000. 48 million. Have you looked into the Ibogaine stuff? Yeah. What's your thoughts on it?

1:36:46Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I don't know enough and I don't think it's well documented enough about whether it's long-term impact on addiction. But in terms of just sort of the field of psilocybin and MDMA, there are lots and lots of good studies now that clearly demonstrate that or strongly suggest that it is effective against PTSD. PTSD. Yeah, PTSD, sorry. and also some forms of depression, et cetera. And so I would say everybody in my agency and over at VA, at Doug Collins' agency, is very anxious to get a rule out there that will allow these kind of studies, will allow access under therapeutic settings, particularly to the military.

1:37:52Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:soldiers who have suffered these injuries to get access to these products. We're working through that process now. And, you know, you have from Marty McCary. I mean, we're all working on it and trying to trying to make it happen.

1:38:07Joe Rogan:It would be great to extend that to police officers, too, probably. Yeah. You know, I mean, a lot of the same type of PTSD they experience. It just doesn't get brought up as much.

1:38:18Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And if you can treat depression without using SSRIs, putting somebody a lifetime sentence to SSRIs, you can treat them. There's a number of things, not just psychedelics, but a number of interventions that we're looking at that are rapid interventions are more transformative than the way that psychedelics seem to rewire your brain. And so we're looking at that as an entire category of interventions that people ought to be able to study, ought to have good access to, and we should get it out to the public as quickly as possible.

1:38:57Joe Rogan:What would be the hurdles to something like that?

1:39:03Joe Rogan:I think that we're going to get it done. So how would that be implemented? Would it be implemented in a clinical setting? Would it be somewhere that—

1:39:11Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:For some of them, you know, for some of them, it would be that you can do, you know, to encourage more clinical trials. Now, there would be very strong guidelines. I mean, this is what we're envisioning, so I can't tell you exactly what we're going to do. But very, very strong guidelines, therapeutic guidelines. So how they're applied, what kind of follow-up. Because a lot of these things rewire your brain. I mean, if you don't do follow-up, it doesn't work or you have a failure rate. So, you know, those kind of protocols are all stuff that we've been developing and studying. And, you know, I think most of the people in the administration are anxious to make this happen as quickly as possible.

1:39:57Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And I know Doug Collins over at the VA already has, I think, 21 studies going over there. And they're, you know, they're very, very promising. And what are they using at the VA? I think they're using combinations of MDMA and psilocybin, maybe using epigame. And I think they're looking at a number of things, including ayahuasca and epigame.

1:40:22Joe Rogan:They shot down something fairly recently in California where they were going to decriminalize – were they going to decriminalize psilocybin or they were going to allow it for clinical use? But I think the problem that they had was they didn't shut. They didn't say we're completely opposed to it. They said there's no guidelines in terms of like, how is it going to be clinically applied? Who are going to be the people? What's the dosage? Yeah.

1:40:48Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:You need those guidelines because you don't want to make the wild west. Exactly. You have horror stories overnight because people, as you know, you know, some people can have very, very bad experiences on that.

1:41:00Joe Rogan:Also, some people are on medications, and they should be very aware that this medication would go really badly with X amount of whatever the substance is.

1:41:10Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So, I mean, we're looking at ways to get it done so that it's in a very controlled setting.

1:41:15Joe Rogan:And so would you envision a place like that, like once it's implemented, where someone who's suffering from depression or PTSD, regardless of whether they're a soldier or cop or just a regular person, could be able to go to a place like that and get treatment?

1:41:31Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:For me, personally, I would like to see that. But we need to move in baby steps with this because you don't want to create a situation where people are getting hurt.

1:41:46Joe Rogan:And you don't want to create a situation where mentally unstable people snap, which can happen. Which can happen. Yeah. These are very powerful tools you're working with. It's like everything else. You can do it wrong. But it just makes sense that if you had less depressed people, more happy people, more people connected, more people that can kind of let go of whatever traumatic experience they went through and just live a more joyful, productive life, which many people that have taken these substances have experienced. Like it's not a cure-all for everything. It's not going to fix everybody. It's not even for everybody.

1:42:24Joe Rogan:But you should deny people access.

1:42:26Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:You shouldn't have a soldier who has given everything for the country, who has suffered terribly, who has to go to Tijuana to get these treatments, who has to leave our country in order to get the treatments. It doesn't make any sense.

1:42:41Joe Rogan:No, it doesn't, especially when so many of them have come back with these stories. Guys, Sean Ryan, a bunch of my friends have done it. And I had a good friend who – my friend Ed Clay who runs the CPI down in Tijuana, the Cellular Performance Institute, which is an amazing stem cell clinic down there. He went down there because he hurt his back and he got on pills and he couldn't get off them. Did Ibogaine got off them? He's like, oh, my God. Like more people have to be aware of this. This really works. This is a thing that has been shown – I think it's in the 80 percent range when you do one treatment where people don't relapse.

1:43:17Joe Rogan:And it's in a 90 percent range with two treatments. I mean, it's incredibly effective. There's nothing like it. And yet we've been denied. It also has like no chance of you being addicted to it. It's a terrifying experience, apparently, or at least very, very uncomfortable. It takes 24 hours. Nobody wants to hop in and do it again. It's not like, hey, let's party and take Ibogaine. That's an ordeal. It's an ordeal. Exactly. And that ordeal is extremely beneficial to people but also like severs the impulse of addiction in a lot of people. It's very successful at it.

1:43:53Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Yeah. I mean I had a family member whose life was transformed by it. And, you know, I've been in recovery for 43 years. So – and I go to a meeting every day. Oh, it's pretty hard to convince me that you can fix what's wrong with you by taking something outside of you. But I have seen so much overwhelming anecdotal evidence but also clinical studies that attest to the effectiveness under some circumstances with some people or these medicines. You know, and I think you've got Jay Bhattacharya at NIH and Marty McCary at FDA who are all, you know, doing whatever they can to make this happen. Yeah.

1:44:49Joe Rogan:Well, I sincerely hope that more people consider it. And I think one of the big hopes that we have is when you have someone like former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who's a Republican, looking at this instead of from – like for the longest time, that was a left-wing perspective, right? Legalized marijuana, legalized psychedelics. You didn't hear about it from former Republican governors like Rick Perry. But when he sees the benefit that it has with veterans, which he cares very deeply about the veteran community, he's like, no, this is not something to ignore just because it's connected to hippies.

1:45:23Joe Rogan:I don't know if you remember this, but Hunter Thompson during whatever election he covered in Fear and Loathing on the campaign trail. In 73. When he put out that rumor that Ed Muskie was addicted to Ibogaine, that Brazilian witch doctors were coming in and giving him Ibogaine, it ruined that guy's career. But it's so funny that he chose that drug because no one's addicted to that. That's not the risk. The risk is heart attacks. The risk is you have to have your heart monitored while you're doing it. It's very stressful for a lot of people. But on a clinical setting, it's shown to be incredibly effective.

1:46:05Joe Rogan:And I don't think we should ignore these things. I think it's foolish. And I think that is one that seems to have a bipartisan agreement on because a lot of people on the left have always been in favor of some kind of psychedelic therapy just based on experiences they've had that were positive. But seeing it from the right is very encouraging because I think it's something for human beings. It's not for everybody, but it's something – it's a tool that I have seen benefit many, many people, and we should use every tool that could help us be healthier and happier, period. That shouldn't be a right or a left issue.

1:46:40Joe Rogan:That's just silly. It's just dumb. Agreed. Yeah. I mean it's shocking that that is an unusual perspective. But I think we've been propagandized for so long, particularly on certain things like just the blanket term of drugs, that all of them fall into this category of you trying to escape reality. And this one is literally the opposite. It's like you confronting reality and finding out why the pathways to certain destructive behaviors were set in your life and how to correct it. I think that would be great for everybody. I agree. Yeah. You've got – you're already a year in here plus. And is it going as fast as you'd hoped like some of these reforms?

1:47:31Joe Rogan:Is there – what are the main frustrations that you have to deal with?

1:47:36Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I mean I didn't know what to expect and I didn't know when I came in. I didn't know the president that well. So, you know, but from the beginning, he he was empowering me. And, you know, I never made an agreement with him about anything. But the first time he asked me whether I wanted to be HHS secretary, I said, I don't think so. I wanted to do some I wanted to be maybe a health czar in the White House. And then I thought about it for a while and thought, no, I really won't be effective unless I'm in this agency and can actually get into the weeds and has 82 ,000 employees and the biggest budget in government.

1:48:23Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And that would actually give me the power to change the system. And so then I went back to him and I said, you know, I want HHS. And he said, fine. And then he allowed me to appoint all of my sub-agency heads, which no president has ever done with an HHS secretary in history. He allowed me to appoint Marty McCary, choose Marty McCary, and FDA, Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Oz, and CMS, and everybody else below them. So nobody's ever been able to do that. And then he gave me a very prominent job on the transition committee to set this all in motion. And then once I got in, he supported me on everything.

1:49:09Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And that, I think, allowed me to do things more. I think – I mean I don't want to sound like vain or something. But because of the great team that we have and because of the support of the president, we've been able to accomplish more in one year than I think any other HHS secretary has done in history in four years. Oh, I'm pleased with what we've done. But there's still – I mean it's the – it's 20 percent of our economy. And so it's a huge agency and there's – you know, it's in everything and there's a lot to do. but I think we're moving really fast. So better than you'd hoped? I would say, yeah, if you put this on the table and said you can have this, you know, the first day I got into office, I would snatch it off and say I'll take it.

1:50:06Joe Rogan:But, I mean, I could only imagine staring at that mountain when you're at the foot of it and realizing what a climb this is going to be.

1:50:14Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:That's not how I approach it. I just did it one thing at a time. and there's something to fix every single day and I have the smartest people in the country working with me and you know we meet every day me and Oz and Jay and now Chris Klum and and Marty we have a meeting every morning and we talk about what we're doing and about where we need to help each other and you know it's a Really, it's a very, very congenial team. We all feel like family with each other, and we vacation together. And, you know, it's—I think because of that, in former times, the HHS secretary has always been at odds with his departments.

1:51:04Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And, you know, under Biden and even under the previous Trump administration. Why do you think that was? I because I think part of it is personalities. They're all kind of, you know, alpha people. They have different ideas. And and then they I don't know. I mean, we I think a lot of that is just personality and struggling for for.

1:51:37Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:for power and influence and all of that kind of stuff. You know, you want to run your own agency and you don't want interference. And we've been able to do it in ways that are very, very collegial.

1:51:52Joe Rogan:I wanted to ask you about pesticides. So what was the recent ruling on glyphosate?

1:51:57Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I was on an EO, which is an executive order, from the president saying that we're going to make the ingredients for glyphosate in this country and for elemental phosphorus. And, you know, I've – listen, I've spent 40 years fighting pesticides. It was I was part of the trial team on the Monsanto case, which was the team that, you know, we won three cases in a row and then got an 11 billion dollar settlement with with Monsanto, which is now Bayer. By the end of our trial, Bayer owned Monsanto. But, you know, pesticides are poison. They're designed to kill all life. It's not a good thing to have in your food.

1:52:47Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So it's not something that I was particularly happy with, let me put it that way mildly. But I also understand the president's point of view. The president didn't create this system. He's dealing with a problem that was created long before over the past 60 years. when, you know, through federal policies and subsidies and the management of farming in this country, the agricultural management, we have addicted our farmers to these pesticides, and particularly glyphosate. Glyphosate is the foundational pesticide of our food production system. So 97 % of corn in this country is produced with glyphosate and can't be produced without it.

1:53:38Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:98 % of, you know, you could do it. You could change it. There's organic corn producers in this country. It's like 3%. 98 % of soy is produced with glyphosate. If you ban glyphosate overnight or if you got rid of it or if somebody else cut off our supply, it would destroy the American food system.

1:54:03Joe Rogan:How crazy is that statement? The American foods, the entire system is based on using poison.

1:54:11Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Right. Farmers don't like it. Let me just explain what the EO did. Right now, according to the industry reports, 99 percent of our glyphosate comes from China. The Pentagon and others said this is an extreme national security vulnerability that China controls the U.S. food system. We can't afford to let that happen if we got it in some kind of tangle with them. It could literally cut off our food supply overnight and cripple the country. And so that's what the president was responding to. But we all know we've got to transition off of glyphosate. We all know that. And the farmers hate it. One, they're now starting to see these chemical-resistant weeds that can't be treated with glyphosate.

1:55:06Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Now it's predictable. Two, they hate the inputs. It's cost them a lot of money. Three, the foreign countries won't allow them to export like Europe doesn't allow. Most European countries don't allow the export of our crops to their countries. Well, how are they doing? it. They use less glyphosate than we do. But they use some. They use it. But, you know, our system is all Roundup Ready corn and Roundup Ready soy. And so they don't, you know, they don't use it like we do over here.

1:55:44Joe Rogan:Ideally that we would transition away from that, right?

1:55:47Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Yeah. And it's also they know it's destroying their soil and they're all suffering from runoff. You know, it destroys the microbiome and the soil. And because of that, the soil can't – you don't get water infiltration in the soil. And so the soil then runs off. And, you know, it's destroying their farms. It's not sustainable. Everybody knows that.

1:56:12Joe Rogan:We had Will Harris from White Oak Pastures on here, and he showed us the literal line in the river between his organic farm and the next-door neighbor's farm. We could see this clear line where all the runoff is going into the river.

1:56:24Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:But Will Harris will also tell you the same thing that I said, is that what he did is, you know, is very hard. And it's not 20 years. What? Took him 20 years. It took him 20 years. And it's not applicable to every farmer. Right. You know, he understands the problem, too. We all understand that this is a huge problem. The president was dealing with national security, and they did something that I really don't like, which is to support – there's a lawsuit about – that's now before the Supreme Court, but in the lower court they supported – is ask for federal preemption. So that would mean that if the federal label says that this is safe, these state lawsuits now cannot be brought.

1:57:17Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So it would throw out a lot of the state lawsuits and effectively gives them immunity from liability, which is – to me, it's not good to give any company immunity from liability. It takes away all incentive for them to make the product safer. Again, the president is dealing with bigger issues, which is the company that's making this has paid$11 billion to, you know, in my lawsuit. They just they're just about to sign another$7.6 billion settlement. Sixty five thousand cases out there. And they've said we're getting out of this business, you know, if this if we don't get relief. So the president is hearing that.

1:58:00Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:The farmers are hearing that and they're saying, you know, this is a temporary fix. We're putting huge amounts of money into studying the impacts of glyphosate right now in my agency. I'm doing that. And we're doing – and the president has made a big commitment, a billion-dollar commitment, not only to regenerate farming but also to developing new ways of chemical – of dramatically reducing the amount of chemicals in our agriculture. I met this week with three farmers who are using this new system of lasers, which is now the cheapest way to control weeds in the vegetable fields. So, you know, vegetables, lettuce, celery, all of these vegetables now, they're using a lot of them.

1:58:55Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:You know, you're going to see a very quick transition. It's an attachment that is dragged by a tractor. It kills the weeds at every stage of their life. It identifies their species and kills them instantly all the way down through their root system by exploding them with this laser. And, yeah, here is one of those. This is what it looks like? Yeah, that's what it looks like.

1:59:20Joe Rogan:And this guy. Can I ask you this? Does this have any negative effect whatsoever on the food?

1:59:27Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:No. In fact, you get a 30 % increase in productivity of the farm. And the growing season shortens by three weeks for onions. And that is a huge economic boom. Does that the way it pays itself back? And for some of these farmers, it pays itself back in nine months. It's a million dollar. That's a million dollar machine. But it pays back. They're paying vegetable field. This onion producer in South Texas, the biggest onion producer in Texas, she has 8 ,000 acres. She was paying$1 ,500 per acre for pesticides for mainly glyphosate and for manual labor. And now with this machine, it's$300. She's saving over$1 ,000 an acre.

2:00:17Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Is this showing how it does? She's got 8 ,000 acres. So it's a million-dollar machine, which sounds like a lot. You got 8 ,000 acres, and you're paying$1 ,500 an acre per growing season. They missed one.

2:00:29Joe Rogan:And, you know, now they're making them on drones.

2:00:31Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Maybe it was a crop.

2:00:32Joe Rogan:Yeah. Yeah.

2:00:33Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Interesting. There's all these kind of new exciting technologies that give us a light at the end of the tunnel to transition. And it could be very, very fast. What the president wants to do is accelerate that. He says, yeah, we've got we can't allow the company to go bankrupt. We can't allow foreign interference, but we got to get off of this stuff. We got to give these farmers an off ramp so that they can get off it because they don't want to be on it. Nobody wants to be on it.

2:01:01Joe Rogan:Without crashing the food system. Without crashing. So this is a bridge. This is a bridge to an ultimate path you think would be technologies like this for weeds. What about for bugs?

2:01:11Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:It's harder. These systems are more difficult. They're not yet economic in the cornfield, the row crops. They're economic for organic corn. And I talked to an organic corn farmer who was in love with his machine. But, yeah, they can do it for bugs, too. So they just zap the bug? They zap the bug. They identify them and zap them. But in the row crops, you know, these guys, the vegetable crops are paying$1 ,500 an acre. Row crops are$50 an acre. And so to get economically to their level, they have to scale enormously. So that is, you know, how do we help them do that? But how do we bring Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and billionaires in to start investing really heavily in these kind of technologies?

2:02:02Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And let's get off of this stuff.

2:02:04Joe Rogan:What are the primary health concerns about people that consume too much glyphosate? Or is there a threshold? I know there's like a safe level that's supposed to be detectable in your blood. Like what does that mean in terms of – I don't know if there's any safe level.

2:02:20Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I don't know.

2:02:21Joe Rogan:I shouldn't even say there is a –

2:02:23Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And that is what we are trying to figure out right now. And it's associated with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. It's so, you know, there's a scientific association, but it's not strong enough for people to litigate on. The litigation was all about non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Only that. Yeah, because that's the one thing that they had a critical mass of scientific studies supporting. Now, what about when they use it at the end of production? It definitely disrupts your gut biome.

2:02:59Joe Rogan:Yes.

2:03:02Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:The advantage of glyphosate is unlike the other poisons, it doesn't harm organic tissue, but it goes after plants, not animal tissue. Your stomach microbiome is plants. And so, you know, it may contribute to the celiac disease and to all these gluten allergies. It was coterminous with that. You know, the introduction of glyphosate of Roundup Ready corn. You know what Roundup Ready corn is, right? It means that you can spray the field and everything green dies except for the corn, which is immune to glyphosate. That's why it's so advantageous to them. It saves huge labor costs and it allows them to sell the corn at a price that people can afford.

2:04:01Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:One of the most controversial uses is a desiccant. And that means that there is no Roundup Ready wheat. So normally they weren't using this in the wheat field. But around 2003, they started using it to dry out the wheat just before harvest. And that way they can harvest it without getting fungus on it and without getting mold on it. And for the first time, they were spraying it right on food. And so that is real, you know, the major factor for getting into human beings. And, you know, around 2003 is when you started seeing these explosions and celiac disease and gluten allergies. There's no clear scientific evidence that it's related.

2:04:44Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:But, you know, there is a you know, there's some signals out there that now we're looking at it. HHS for the first time, they should have been looking at this 30 years ago. And but, you know, they're not. But we're doing it now.

2:04:59Joe Rogan:Well, there's a lot of anecdotal stories about people going to Italy or Spain and France, eating bread over there, not having any problem with it at all and being so confused. And then also people coming from Europe and eating in America and getting sick.

2:05:14Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And I don't know whether that – there's no telling whether that's glyphosate or other pesticides or whatever. But it's just something. I have a son who had chronic eczema from when he was a kid, a disease I never heard of as a kid, and everybody's got it now. And he would get it any time that he ate spaghetti or bread or, you know. And he went to the University of Bologna. He went to Brown, and then he took a year at the University of Bologna, and he ate spaghetti three meals a day and had no problem. and so and you hear there's you know there's hundreds of stories like that that we've all

2:05:52Joe Rogan:heard i feel different when i go to italy when i go to italy and i eat over there i feel different i feel different if i use there's a restaurant that uh um i called gaetano's in las vegas and henderson and they use all italian flour they import it all from italy you could it tastes different it feels different you don't feel terrible after you eat it there's a something's wrong with our food and everybody knows it and the fact that it's become a left-wing or a right-wing issue is one of the dumbest decisions we've ever made as a country and i know that a lot of it is again a lot a lot of a lot of propaganda a lot of a lot of these narratives trying to push people into thinking that things aren't dangerous because right-wing people believe in them and that it's nonsense and it's just i don't know what that pathway is when you're dealing with monocrop agriculture and you have these enormous farms and you say 98 % is based on glyphosate use or whatever it is, like, how do we get those people to ultimately transition?

2:06:52Joe Rogan:And if they do, could they even produce enough of their product to stay viable?

2:06:58Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I can tell. I mean, I've met with over 100 farmers and developing the food guidelines, our team. And, you know, I've been doing agricultural issues for 30 years. I can tell you, So farmers are the most hardworking people that I've ever met. They are good people. They want to produce the healthiest foods. And they don't want – the inputs are killing them. They're – seven out of ten years, farmers lose money. And there's no young people moving to the farm country anymore. So we really need to do what we can to make sure we don't lose any more farms in this country. And that's what the president is worried about.

2:07:39Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:That has to be his priority. But he also wants to make sure that we accelerate the off ramps, the development of off ramps, that they can transition off of this. And we're putting huge amounts of money into regenerative agriculture. People like, you know, Mr. Harris and, you know, and meeting with him, Brooke Rollins, meeting with these guys all the time, trying to figure out how do we help you? how do we help other farmers to do what you're doing? And, you know, that is a priority for the administration.

2:08:16Joe Rogan:Do you envision a possibility, a real possibility of a country that is all regenerative agriculture with no pesticides? Is that even possible that we could get to a point, whether it's a decade from now or two decades from now, where we've completely eradicated the uses of these harmful chemicals? I mean, I think that's going to happen.

2:08:36Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:You know, I think technology is going to allow that to happen. But, you know, you're going to have a lot of robotic farming happening. And that's another question. But that's robotic with these lasers.

2:08:53Joe Rogan:That's what you're doing. Yeah. So that would be the solution. And you're going to have drones doing this.

2:08:59Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:You know, you'll have drone swarms over farms killing insects.

2:09:03Joe Rogan:What about industrial fertilizer? What would be the solution to that?

2:09:08Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And that's a little more difficult, particularly in some parts of the country. You know, you need nutrients in the soil. But there's ways of growing. And, you know, Harris has shown this, where you can dramatically reduce the amount of petroleum-based fertilizers that you're using dramatically, almost eliminate them.

2:09:32Joe Rogan:Sure, but the scale of his farm and the scale of the production in comparison to these monocrop agriculture places that produce corn, I mean, these people are dealing with enormous amounts of crops. The question is, could that be scaled regeneratively? Could you get it to a point where you have organic farms only?

2:09:54Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:You know, I think with technology, you're going to eliminate a lot of the pesticides and the herbicides. I think that it's going to be much slower when you talk about fertilizers.

2:10:09Joe Rogan:But is there a pathway for that?

2:10:12Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I hope so.

2:10:13Joe Rogan:But you haven't? No. No. Is it so far off? Yeah. I mean, that's going to be after my three years before that happens. Do you – I mean, if someone else wins and they want you to stay, are you going to stay? Do you have a thought of that or do you want to do as much as you can in four years? Well, whatever happens because you can't tell what's going to happen in the election.

2:10:38Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I'm going to act as if I've got three years to do everything. And if I get more time, then I would probably take it. How many days a week are you working? Well, I work. I mean I'm working when I'm home I'm working it doesn't stop and then we have a president who has you know never stops working and he's up till 11, 12 at night you know which you can get a call at that point he says were you sleeping 2 o 'clock in the morning yeah no no of course not I was working oh he's an interesting guy to work for yeah he's got a lot of energy for an old guy. He's got an incredible amount of energy. I've never seen anything like it.

2:11:27Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And particularly with the food he eats. Yeah. I don't know how he does it. He's still eating mostly, I mean... I've never seen it. Well, let me put it this way. When he's on the road, he eats like fast food because he trusts it. He doesn't want to eat in some local place where he gets food poisoning or something. But when he's at home, At the White House or Mar-a-Lago, it is the, you know, it's all like locally sourced incredible food. Oh, that's good. So he eats well. I mean, but he still drinks. Dana White told me that he's known him for 20 years and he's never seen him drink water.

2:12:11Joe Rogan:Just drinks Coca-Cola? What does he drink? Diet Cokes, right? Diet Cokes, yeah. Doesn't he, you know, I just had Michael Malison here. He was talking about how he got off aspartame and how his brain fog just completely cleared up. You drink a Diet Coke every day. That is a really sleazy saga about how that got into her. We talked about it the other day. Yeah, we brought it up. Donald Rumsfeld. Donald Rumsfeld. Yeah.

2:12:34Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And there was a really good FDA commissioner back then named David Kennedy. No relation, but he was a guy from Stanford. I think he was the president of Stanford for a while. And he was really good, had total integrity. He was like David Kessler, another really great FDA head. And he banned aspartame. And then Rumsfeld came in there and just overruled him. Rumsfeld had owned Searle, which was making it.

2:13:11Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:That's how it worked.

2:13:13Joe Rogan:Well, that's why this time with you in office has been encouraging. I mean, you doing the things that you wanted to do was to me the most interesting thing about this administration going in because I knew your conviction. I had read your Fauci book, and I'm like, if anybody could do something about this, it's you. and I'm kind of amazed at how much you have been able to do and also you know watching the struggle the difficulties of getting things pushed through that should have been pushed through easily with rational thinking it's it's a fascinating time because we are in a time of change some of it's good some of it's bad but we're we're definitely in a time of change and that's not something you could say about every administration it's definitely not something you say about everybody that's been the head of the HHS.

2:14:04Joe Rogan:You're the first guy that gave me hope when you got in there. I'm like, okay, maybe we'll see some meaningful change with some things that are really important for people's health. I think - Well, we're doing it. I think you are. I think you're doing that. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Any other subjects you want to cover? Why don't you ask me about immigration?

2:14:23Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Because I know that that's something that's

2:14:25Joe Rogan:Well, what are your thoughts on immigration, on what's going on?

2:14:31Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Well, you know, here's the background of my kind of assumptions. During the last 10 years of his life, I worked very closely with Cesar Chavez. And I worked with him. He had two issues. He had pesticides, which were a huge issue with him. And that's what I worked with him on, on the dangers that, you know, his workers were experiencing from pesticides. And the other issue he had was immigration. He wanted to shut down the border because he saw the way that it was impairing this huge influx of illegal immigration across the border. It was impairing his ability to bargain, to leverage good wages and conditions for his workers.

2:15:17Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:When I grew up, the Democratic Party was against immigration. And it was the Republican Party who wanted it because the big corporations wanted cheap labor. The Chamber of Commerce was firmly embedded in the Republican Party and they were all about open borders. Today, the Chamber of Commerce is with the Democratic Party. And so it's one of these switches that is kind of inexplicable to me. But I think, again, it happened because President Trump said, I'm going to fix it with a wall. And that became, you know, it suddenly became open borders, suddenly became a calling card for the Democratic Party.

2:15:55Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:But there's a reason, you know, and I see it in my agency, the cause that it's imposing on our country. And, you know, on health care, diminishing health care for Americans and housing and jobs and all of these places where it hurts. We need workers in here and we need legal immigrants in here. But they should come in legally and every country has to do that. President Trump ran on this issue. He's now and he ran that he's going to enforce and deport particularly the bad people. This is what you don't hear. 70 percent of the people that they've arrested have criminal records. What the Democrats are always saying is only 14 percent of them have been convicted of a violent crime.

2:16:43Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Well, they've been convicted. A lot of them, the other ones have been arrested and they just haven't been convicted yet because they jumped bail or they jumped their warrants. The other 30 percent, a lot of them are gang members. When they go looking for an immigrant, they're not just randomly searching restaurants. They're going after particular people who they've gotten their names from local law enforcement and from others. During the Biden or during the Obama administration, President Obama deported more people than President Trump did, most in history. Nobody cared. And there were 76 people shot during that process, during the Biden administration.

2:17:32Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:None of it made headlines. About half of those people were killed. None of it made the news. now because it's Trump doing it. You have the entire Democratic Party and the media establishment saying, oh, look at the horrible things. He's a dictator, but he's doing what he promised to do to the American people. It's very disturbing watching what you see on TV. The thing that makes it most disturbing is because there's so much interaction with protesters, which is weird that the democrats are telling protesters to go out there and stop law enforcement from doing its job if you that's not how protests usually work if you don't like u.s drug policy which you don't you know and a lot of people don't a lot of people don't like the war on drugs at all they think it's counterproductive you wouldn't send people to try and interfere with people who are arresting a drug dealer.

2:18:34Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And when you have thousands and thousands of people doing that, there's going to be thousands of interactions. And some of those are going to end badly because you have armed people doing dangerous things. And when you have crowds doing that, it's going to blow up. And so, you know, I see this, you know, nobody is happy with the way that things have looked, particularly in Minnesota. But a lot of it is because of this capacity of the press to take Trump derangement syndrome and amplify it into public outrage and set up a situation. I mean, if you were a dad, I wouldn't send my kids out to interfere with a law enforcement operation.

2:19:24Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:There's other ways to protest. But so I think that, you know, I think now they're pulling out of Minnesota and they're going to do this, you know, in other states where they're not going to get that kind of crowd interaction. But a lot of the people that they're arresting are not, you know, they're people who are actually, you know, have, like I said, 70 percent of criminal criminal records.

2:19:49Joe Rogan:Yeah, we've actually covered that here. And then there's also the issue that this is the first time in history that the border has been wide open for four years. It's a different thing. It's a different thing when you have at least 10 million people. They don't even know how many for real. Yeah, it could be 20 million. They don't know. And that's a lot. And to have that happen all at once is pretty crazy. I think what disturbs people is, again, obviously these violent interactions. What should disturb them is that these are not organic protests, that these protests are organized and paid for. And that's crazy.

2:20:25Joe Rogan:When you find that out and you find out that people can actually be paid to protest and that they provide them with signs, they tell them what they do, it's organized, they have signal chats. There's been a lot of people online talking about being paid to protest in certain places. And that's kind of insane that that's even legal, that you can organize a mob and pay them to go and make a bunch of noise. It's like the color revolution. Right. Exactly. And that it just happened to take place in the place where hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud was being exposed. So then the narrative completely shifts away from the fraud and onto this unnecessary violence with ICE.

2:21:03Joe Rogan:And then there's the natural thing that people have, this distrust of people wearing masks. They don't like that. They don't like officers wearing masks. But on the other side, they have to wear masks because they're being doxxed and their families are being threatened and you're filming everything they do and you're these organized instigators. So if it wasn't for organized protest, I wonder if those particular interactions would have even happened, would have even taken place. and I know you're saying that they don't that they're targeting specific people they're going after bad people but also they're showing up at Home Depot and just grabbing people too and trying to find out if someone is a bad guy or a good guy so there's probably a lot of people that are just people that got duped into coming to this country thinking they're going to be welcomed and then they come over here and they're trying to get jobs and now they're getting arrested and deported You know, it wasn't their fault that they were encouraged and brought into this country, but they did break the law.

2:22:06Joe Rogan:And I understand. I understand that perspective. But it's kind of insane that no one is pointing the blame at the fact that they let at least 10 billion people or 10 million, excuse me, people into this country over the last four years, at least being charitable. It's kind of nuts.

2:22:23Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And I was down at the border and, you know, I was – during my presidential campaign, I went down there and went down a bunch of times. But the first night I went down there to Tucson and I couldn't believe what I was saying. It was like the Boston Marathon at the beginning of it, which was the sheer number. And they were – you know, they all had it planned. The cartels were all, you know, running the whole thing. They were advertising all over the world and bringing people in. And everybody was – the Border Patrol was completely demoralized. They were told don't arrest anybody. Just fingerprint them.

2:23:02Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:If they're a criminal, turn them back. But most of these people, they couldn't figure that out. And otherwise, put them on a bus or a plane to anywhere they wanted to go in the country.

2:23:14Joe Rogan:So it was just – And at the same time, you have legitimate people that are doing it the right way that have to go through a long and difficult, lengthy process to attain citizenship. and to come here or get a green card and come here.

2:23:25Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:The whole thing was crazy. And one of the complicated issues, you have now a bunch of sanctuary cities and sanctuary states. And it used to be that if somebody who was an illegal immigrant was arrested for a crime and put in the local jail, ICE was notified. So ICE would then come and local law enforcement would transfer it to ICE. in the sanctuary cities, they don't do that. They just let them go. And, you know, it's not...

2:23:58Joe Rogan:How is that legal?

2:23:59Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:That seems insane.

2:24:01Joe Rogan:That seems like it's a violation. Because it was never a law.

2:24:03Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:It was just a policy. You know, the law enforcement always cooperated with each other. Now, because Trump's in there, they're saying, okay, we would rather take the side of, you know, a criminal than take the side of the president. So they're all, Well, they're choosing sides. And it's like the other day during the State of the Union speech when President Trump said – he was talking about immigration. And he said, please stand up if you think that law enforcement should protect the American people over illegal immigrants and not a single Democrat stood.

2:24:43Joe Rogan:Yeah.

2:24:44Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:How can you do that?

2:24:46Joe Rogan:Well, that's what we were talking about earlier and what you were saying. It's just they're ideologically captured. Yeah. I mean that should be something. If you want to be taken seriously, you're a reasonable person. You would stand up for that. Yeah. It just – it really disturbs people when you see masked people grabbing people and arresting people. And a lot of them turn out to be American citizens. That's part of the problem too. But I did look at a chart recently because I thought it was fascinating. the number of American citizens that were arrested, what percentage during what Obama did versus during Trump.

2:25:21Joe Rogan:It's actually, I think, higher. More American citizens were arrested during this Obama thing. You just never heard about it. Also, if you hear Obama talk about immigration, if you hear Hillary talk about immigration, or if you hear Bill talk about immigration, you would swear they were running for president as a Republican. Like if you listen to the things they were saying back then, it was very much the Republican perspective.

2:25:47Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:That was the Democratic Party always was, you know, against an open border.

2:25:53Joe Rogan:Yeah. Bernie even said it's like open borders are that's a Republican idea. They want cheap labor. Yeah. So. All right. Anything else? We wrap this up. Listen, thank you very much for all your hard work. And it's really – it's very exciting for me to have someone like you doing what you're doing because I do know that you really want to push for meaningful change. It's genuinely going to help. And I think so far you're on a good path. So I hope we can get all the other stuff done too. Well, thank you, Joe, and thanks for the conversation.

2:26:25Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:My pleasure. And thanks for all of your conversations.

2:26:28Joe Rogan:My pleasure. Thanks for being here. All right. All right, buddy.

2:26:38Thank you.