#639 - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

29:09Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash theo. that's e-t-h-o-s dot com slash t-h-e-o application times may vary rates may vary i saw you uh in your speech that you gave yesterday here in tennessee saying that like there's all there's all kinds of temptation to cheat if you know you're not going to get caught yeah well that's true in every system yeah have you seen a lot of that like um i mean the amyloid Black is a really good example. Yeah, we see it everywhere. We see it everywhere. In medicine, it's everywhere. And the journals are utterly corrupt because they're owned by the pharmaceutical companies.

29:55And so people read a journal and they think, oh, this is science. But even, you know, Marsha Engel, the one that ran the New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years, has said, you can't believe anything in the journals anymore. But they're just propaganda vessels for the pharmaceutical company, Richard Horton, who were in Lancet, who still runs it, says the same thing. At the, you know, the journals. And those are the people running them? What happens, they make huge amounts of money. Yeah. And they make money from advertising, which is paid for pharmaceutical companies. And through a scheme called Preprints, where the pharmaceutical company plants the story, they pay for the journal about a drug that they're trying to promote.

30:40They pay the journal to print the story and then they get a preprint. So it's a very neat looking, you know, copy of their article with the cover sheet of the New England Journal of Medicine on it. And then they distribute that to their pharmaceutical reps who are like, you know, former Playboy models who go out and talk to the doctors. And they give that to the doctor and say, this drug works. You know, do you want to have lunch? Yeah. And the doctors then start prescribing the drug and they think, oh, well, it's legitimate because it was in the New England Journal of Medicine. But it is not.

31:16You can't believe what's in those journals because it's all propaganda for pharma. So how do we get away from that? Like what are you guys doing to combat this or to change this? Or can this change? Or is it just awareness and then people have to take the responsibility? No, I mean what we're doing is open source journals. We're going to have our own journals that people can open source and publish, but you'll have the peer review published with it. So before you publish, you give that publication to a panel of experts who then read it themselves and criticize it. And the peer review now is secret.

31:58And then there is no raw data published, so nobody can go in and replicate it. So to the extent possible, sometimes you can't. You have to buy the raw data and it's very expensive or inaccessible, so you can't publish it. But you can publish the peer review, which is what we're doing. And so everybody will be able to say if they have 10 peer reviewers and they all say this article sucks, it's got all these holes in it. Then the public will be able to read that and doctors will be able to read it and the regulators will be able to read it. And so it's basically open source. It's crowdsourcing, essentially.

32:40And that's how you get credibility in science. Science doesn't come from consensus. It comes from debate. And that's why you remember when they were telling us during COVID, oh, trust the experts. That's not a thing in science. Trusting the experts is the opposite of science. It's not a function of science or democracy. It's a feature of religion and it's a feature of totalitarianism. And in science, you always question the expert. Yeah, you can't. There's not an expert in science because it's like an evolving thing, right? Well, you know, when I did the Monsanto cases, I was part of a big team.

33:20We had – and Cheryl came to my trial. A couple of days, she sat through and watched us try the case. and Monsanto had experts from Stanford, Yale, and Harvard. They're three big experts. And they testified. And Cheryl said to me at the end of the second day, she said, why are you guys even here? These guys are, you know, this science is very clear that Roundup doesn't cause cancer. And I said, just wait. And then our experts went on and they were from Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. And they said the opposite. and were much more convincing and the juries were convinced. And so there's experts on both sides of every debate.

34:05And a lot of them are paid to be experts. They're hired guns. They're mercenaries. And we call them biostitutes, the ones that work for industry. Biostitutes, that's great. But, you know, so there's experts on their own bias. We all have biases. Everybody's got a bias. What you want to do when you're dealing with science, You want to expose those biases. You want to admit them and acknowledge them. And then you want the science to be able to stand on its own. And that's the only way really to depoliticize it as best we can. What were some of the biggest cases of fraud? Like when you got in there and got behind the curtain and see like, you know, like the NIH, the EPA, like just see what's going on back there.

34:51What were some of the biggest cases of fraud that you kind of found? I mean the biggest cases are what we're – we got – between Medicaid and Medicare, there's about$100 billion stolen every year. And a lot of it is like what's happening in Minnesota with the Somali community and what's happening now, even worse, in California. But, you know, one of the problems is that that's a systemic problem is that Medicaid and Medicare now no longer – it used to be that they paid for your medical treatment, your doctor's visit. But now they pay for the person who takes you to the doctor and they pay for home care and they pay for, you know, a person to come in and pay your bills.

35:46Right. So there's all kinds of opportunities for fraud. And a doctor recently, you know, Oz told me this, told Oz, he said there was a doctor in California that he visited. And the doctor had a patient who was a heroin addict. Heroin addict was coming to see him four times a month for some kind of a treatment. And one day, the doctor looked out the door and saw his ex-wife waiting for him in the car. And the doctor said, oh, are you back together with your ex-wife? And he said, no, I hate her guts. And he said, but she drives me because she gets paid$600 every time she drives me. And he said, so.

36:28That'll put you back together with your ex. We make$3 ,000 a month, you know, with her driving me this, and then I drive her to hers. Wow. And so there's all kinds of those opportunities for fraud. And, you know, we found a hotel that had literally every room in it was the headquarters for a nursing group. Where was that located? It was in California. God. And, you know, so they're all just P.O. boxes. They're not actually doing any nursing care. Nuh-uh. They're just collecting money. And as we now know, a lot of the money that was going into the Somali community for autism care, there were these phony autism care houses.

37:13Yeah. And a lot of it was ending up with al-Shabaab in Somalia. So hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars were being stolen, shipped to Somalia to fund a terrorist group. But that's happening every day. Now we have the ability to catch them. How? How were you able to adjust that sort of thing now? Like what makes it different now? Well, because first of all, under the Biden administration, I don't want to get super partisan. Yeah. But the Biden administration turned a blind eye to all the fraud. It was mainly going to blue states and it was an economic generator. There's money pouring into the blue states and they just said we're going to – we know a lot of it is stolen and illegal but we're going to let it happen because it's coming to us.

38:07It's coming to our state. and so what we've done now is with Medicare, we control Medicare. The states control a lot of Medicaid, so it's a little harder for us to detect fraud there. We've started out with Medicare. We're using AI, and we're using AI which can detect the fraud. It can tell us whether this guy who we're paying has been convicted of fraud before, and we shouldn't be paying him again. and it will be telling us every aspect of his business that we need to know to understand whether it's fraudulent. So we're going to save just this year tens of billions of dollars in eliminating fraud in Medicaid.

38:53And they used to pay it under the Biden administration. The system was called pay and chase. So if they sent in a fraudulent invoice, even if we knew it was, the HHS knew it was fraudulent, they would pay it and then they would put the inspector general to go claw it back. And of course it wasn't there, but they, so they never covered anything. Now we're not going to pay them anymore. If they're fraudulent, they're going to get, they're not going to get a check. We're going to save tens of billions of dollars just this year. And we're going to save hundreds of billions over, you know, annually from now on.

39:31And that's because the AI is keeping track of that. The AI can spot the fraud. Got it. And then with Medicare, with Medicaid, which is a joint state-federal program, we don't control the rails and the states control them. And so we need state cooperation and the red states are cooperating with us, but the blue states still won't cooperate. So that's going to take some time. And then there's categories that are much easier for us to control, like medical devices. We can do that quickly on our own. But there's other categories that are going to be much more difficult. But we will get it done within the next three years.

40:14Whenever Doge happened, right? When Doge occurred, when Elon was in or he was involved or hypothetically involved, that's what it seemed like just like to the regular person. He was definitely involved. He was involved. Was that successful? Was that real? Like what was the outcomes of that? Like, did that seem like a, were you guys working together with that? Like, what was that all about? I, you know, I think even Elon has said that there would have been better ways to do it. And that we, you know, going after the systemic, what we're doing now, this is the, you know, these large thefts. You can cut a couple of thousand people and over the long run, it's just, you know, drops of water in the ocean.

40:57Yeah. Oh, that's not going to save us huge amounts of money over the long term. But what we're doing now is going to. The things you were just talking about, you mean? Yeah. That's going to help a lot. Yeah. Is those still active? Is that program still active? What were the outcomes of that? Well, the outcomes were that a lot of, you know, I cut my workforce by 20%. But, you know, in truth, some of the, some of those were very good cuts. I think we all agree, including Elon, that it would have been better to do targeted cuts. Cut the people who were actually causing the problem and then keep the people, a lot of the new workers who were only there for a couple of months.

41:47That it might have been better to keep some of those people and change the culture. I see. So yeah, instead of more of like a mowing, more of like a pruning kind of thing, you mean? Yeah. Do you think America is sicker than ever these days? It is sicker. We're the sickest country in the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world. And that's one of the reasons during COVID, we had 19 % of the COVID deaths in our country. And we only have 4.2 % of the world's population. And so the question is, why did America do worse than any country in the world? and COVID was it mismanaging?

42:27Part of it was that, but the big part, and this is what CDC says, we're the sickest country in the world. The average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases. And that's really what was killing them. It was very hard to die from COVID if you were healthy. And so, you know, we need to get Americans healthy. We need to end the chronic disease epidemic. Right now, we spend two to three times on our health care per capita what they spend in Europe. And yet we have the worst health outcomes in the world. We're 79. Bring up a capita chart if you can. We have, you know, we've dropped behind Europe by six years in lifespan, 10 years in some cases.

43:16And yet our health outcomes are worse. We have the highest maternal immunity. the highest maternal mortality, that means women dying in childbirth. In the developed world, we have the highest infant mortality. How could that be with the United States? And a lot of it is because of chronic disease and then, you know, our diabetes rate. When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes over, juvenile diabetes over a 40 - or 50-year career. Today, 38 % of American teens is diabetic or pre-diabetic. God. It's unknown. Autism rates have gone from less than 1 in 10 ,000 in 1970 to 1 in 31 today.

44:00Oh, yeah. You can throw a rock and hit an autistic kid anywhere. And California has 1 in every 19 kids, 1 in every 12.5 boys. And so the cost to our country, 77 % of American kids can't qualify for military service. How many percent? 77 % cannot get into the military because of health reason. What? That is the truth. Yeah. Oh, my God, bro. That's insane. That should get people's attention. Bring that up. Is that true? Let me see if that's true. Bobby probably just uploaded this stat on the internet from his phone a second ago, but still, that's okay. That's how it works. 77 % of American youth can't qualify for military service.

44:46And why? Because they have chronic disease. They have asthma. They have diabetes. They have, you know, they're obese. One of those. But when my uncle was present, I was a 10-year-old kid. We spent zero on chronic disease in this country. Zero. Today we spend$4.3 trillion a year. and it's about 40 cents out of every tax dollar that is paid by you to the federal government is now going to treat chronic disease. And it's unsustainable and it's getting worse every year. And who's, is it, is it, do you find that it falls more on, it's the responsibility of the individual, we're not taking care of ourselves or is it that we have a health system that is allowing, I don't want to just say foods and drugs, but allowing things into us that is not maintaining our natural health?

45:44I mean, individuals have a responsibility, but when I was a kid, 5 % of children were obese. Yeah, you had one kind of fat kid in your class. Yeah, and today it's, you know, 15 % is going. Overweight is 40%. Adults, it's even higher. We should just have a thick military then, I think. But people did not get, Americans did not get obese because they're indolent or lazy or they don't want to do exercise. They got that way because they're being mass poisoned. And they're being mass poisoned because the government lied to them and it lied about the food. Oh, now 70 % of the food that our kids eat is ultra processed food and it's just poison.

46:32It's not food. It's just poison. And which agencies allowed that? I mean, the EPA puts labels like the FDA. Yeah. So do you feel like that's been one of the most compromised agencies? Yeah, it was owned by Big Pharma and Big Food. And we're, you know, Marty McCary has changed that now. So how do we know that that's changed? Like how do we as like a... Look at the food pyramid. in the food pyramid. When I came into office, we were supposed to publish, it was in January of last year. Oh, yeah, the last food pyramid, I saw it had vapes on it. So it was getting pretty bad. We're doing vapes now. You mean the food pyramid?

47:08Oh, the last one, yeah. The one that, yeah. That's funny. I was like, this is getting bad. The food pyramid, so when I came in, we were, the Eiden administration had prepared new dietary guidelines and they were 453 pages long and they were completely driven by the same mercantile impulses that put fruit loops at the top of the food pyramid. How do you put fruit loops, which is not a food, at the top of the food pyramid? It's just poison. And that, but it was all driven by the commercial interests of the companies that controlled FDA. So when we came in, And we went, we got the best nutritionists from the best universities in our country.

47:56We basically locked them in a room. We thought it would take a month, but it took about 11 months. They fought over every single item on this in the food pyramid. It took them 11 months to put this together? Yeah, because you have to go over science. You know, what is broccoli? Right. How does it relate? How much protein should you eat? How much saturated fat should you eat? What's optimal? And so they had to go through tens of thousands of scientific papers to make sure that every recommendation that we made is based solidly on a foundation of gold standard science. So for this, for them to create the food pyramid, it took 11 months.

48:36Yeah. And then we flipped it over. Right. And we flipped it over because the category of food that you should eat most is a broad category. It includes vegetables. It includes proteins. You know, salmon and steak and meat. And most of this is for children, right? Well, no, this is good for everybody. I mean, most diabetes— I remember from like when I was a kid, you know, you would see it, you know? Yeah, right. But I guess that's the first point you learn about it. And that's why we're all so screwed up. But, you know, most diabetes can be cured through diet. And the doctors don't know this because they don't take— Most of them aren't taking nutrition in medical school.

49:21And we're now requiring or we're working with the medical, with the accreditors and with the testing, the people who do the MCAT to make sure there's tests on nutrition. We're working with all the medical colleges to make sure that now doctors are going to have 40 hours of nutrition in school. 80 % of doctors say they do not feel competent to give nutrition advice. So what are they learning? They're learning pharmacology. They're learning the pill. You let everybody get sick from eating the food and then tell them the pill that will treat that sickness. Yeah, at that point, you're just a drug dealer.

49:58And you can get rid of the diagnosis. Not only that, but now, you know, there's really clear signs that you can get rid of mental health diagnoses. That food can cure mental health problems. There's a doctor at Harvard, Dr. Paulin, who has cured schizophrenia with dietary changes, with keto diets. There's a paper that— Is that true? Go ahead and look it up. Cure schizophrenia with keto diets? Yeah. Well, I definitely notice that when I'm fasting, I get—I'm pretty smart. Yeah, you get smarter, right? Yeah. Preliminary clinical findings, including case reports, and small traits suggest that ketogenic therapy may improve positive and negative symptoms, cognitive performance outcomes, and individual schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

50:45I mean, I believe that so much of this is true, just that so much of it is how we are operating. It just feels like we've been stuck in such a place where you have a food industry that doesn't care if you're healthy, and then you have a healthcare industry that doesn't care if you get well. Everybody is making money from us being sick. I'll say one other thing about this. There are all these – there are dozens and dozens of studies, and you can look them up, of their case-controlled studies of juvenile detention facilities and prisons where they change, for example, in one wing, the diet to real food.

51:24and they leave the other diet in there and that the disciplinary, the fighting, the violence drops precipitously. The use of restraints in one juvenile detention facility dropped by 75%. Usually the violence drops by 40 or 50%. And, you know, people, it caused depression. It caused anxiety, these foods. You know, if your kid has anxiety, look at what they're eating. And you can change that in many cases by changing their diet and getting them to eat real food. Yeah. How do you get the everyday person then to adjust their psychology or like their thought, like about taking more of an interest in themselves, you know?

52:09Because I think you should just be, you trusted the commercials. You're like, this is great for you, you know, is like, and you believed that, you know? Yeah. Well, I mean the way to change human behavior is one, get information out there that's real information. The other thing that you have to do is you have to change the economic incentives. And right now we have perverse incentives that reimburse doctors, that insurers, pharmaceutical companies, the doctors, the hospitals are making more money if you're sick. the drug rehabs. If you come back, if you relapse, they make more money. They shouldn't be paid that way.

52:50The insurance company should pay them one lump sum and then follow that addict for the next two years. And every time he comes back, you got to treat him for free. And that will incentivize them to - To do better treatment. Yeah, to do treatment that works. And the ones that can't do that will fail. And the ones that can do it, that get better and better at it will do it. you change the economic incentives, you'll change human behavior. And then you have to get the information to the individual. And that's what we're doing. We're doing, we've met, we've convened the 400 top tech companies before this administration.

53:25You could not get your own health records. So you own your health records, but you couldn't see them. You can't get a hold of them. What do you mean? Why not? Because they would information block you. They would make sure you couldn't get them. And now we've got them all to agree they're going to stop the information blocking. Oh, your medical records will be on your cell phone. And that is great for you because if you live in Nashville and you travel to Los Angeles, you get hit by a car. You don't want to spend an hour in the emergency room with a clipboard making out, you know, one of those forms.

53:58You hand your cell phone to the doctor. He puts it in AI and he knows what your blood type is, what your allergies are, what your contraindications, you know, previous treatments, et cetera. Yeah, it is ridiculous. You have to do that all the time. Right. So what President Trump said to me is he said, I want to make every American the CEO of their own health, that they're in charge of it. And then we're doing, you know, we've got now we've changed the prior authorization. We've got 80 % of the insurance industry together to eliminate all unnecessary prior authorization, which is going to change the experience that every American has with the healthcare system.

54:42Because when you go to a doctor, he says you need a knee surgery. You may wait six months for your insurance company to approve it. You can't do anything about it. And now, by the end of this year, you will know at the point of care. That means before you leave your doctor's office, you'll know whether your insurance company will cover that. And that's going to dramatically change it. We are also— But does that make it any more likely that they're going to cover it, or does it just make it that you're going to know? It makes it so that you'll know, and so the doctor will know there before you leave.

55:17Got it. And the doctor will change the prescription or whatever you need to do. you'll at least know and you won't be you know sitting at home and then that's actually going to happen that's happening yeah and then the other thing that we're doing is we're doing price transparency so that every hospital will have to publish its prices for every procedure how are the patients are you familiar with exactly and that's just make you the ceo of your own health they already are supposed to do that it was a law that trump has his first term but biden never enforce it so none of the hospitals do it. We've now passed new regulations that is going to punish them draconian way if they don't do it.

55:59So they're all going to be doing it by the end of this year. Are they going to try to find a way to skirt around that though, I wonder? Like, are they... It's so screwed up because if you go buy an automobile and the guy tells you, yeah, but I'm not going to tell you the price until after you bought it. It's insane. You'd be, you know, and right now, if you're pregnant in this country, you could go nine months on the phone every day trying to figure out what the childbirth is going to cost you in your local hospital and not be able to do it. And we are bound to go online with a system that will make all procedures visible to every patient.

56:35So I actually looked at the mock-up two days ago for New York, and it shows a map of Manhattan and a mile around Manhattan, And there's 30 hospitals. And it shows the price of childbirth at every hospital. The lowest one is$1 ,300. The highest is$22 ,000. And it's everything in between$9 ,000,$5 ,000,$3 ,000. You can look and see. You can look and see. You'll be able to go to a menu online. It's like Gas Buddy when you're looking for a gas station. But you're going to be able to do that. A clean bathroom or whatever. That clean bathroom. That one's crazy. And they lie on there. And some of them are at rest areas too.

57:17and I yeah I got accosted by a guy who was in a I guess he was like a Easter but he was like a Easter bunny like impersonator or whatever um anyway whatever good to be here today um so you're telling me that that's going to be a real thing that's going to be available to us on our phone so say if you I need to get an MRI I can look online you can look and find and right now there's no way that you can figure out the price of an MRI and they'll lie to you and but if you but if you call them and say okay I'm not going to come I've had experiences where they will call you back and then we'll offer you a lower.

57:49Yes. They're all playing that game and now they're not going to be able to do it anymore. How soon is that going to be released? It's going to be released very, very soon in the next couple of months. All the hospitals now have to come online and start reporting. And the ones that don't do it immediately, we are going to have very, very high fines for them. So there's going to be big incentive for them to start reporting. But it also is going to drive down prices because why is there that absurd differential between$1 ,300 and$22 ,000? It's just because we don't know. Because we don't know. So there's no market.

58:21So they do whatever the hell they want. And now there's going to be competition because people will be having to shop. But won't there be lobbyists that are – aren't there lobbyists just fighting you? I mean right here it says, here's compiled a list of example of hospitals and childbirth costs in Nashville based on available self-pay cash bundles. um ascensionst thomas is 4 800 to 7 800 national general is 10 000 to 15 000 yeah i mean why is it yeah it's just chaos that's chaos there's no market there yeah but i mean it's unbelievable and this happens at every single it can be something as small as getting like an aspirin when you're in the hospital it can be anything where they just bill you later and like oh it's a 70 or they'll say to you you know if you want you can spend an extra day here right you look sick, you look like you could use the rest.

59:09And you'll say, I'll do that. And then you get a$100 ,000 bill. That's crazy. Yeah, and they only have fluorescent lights in the room. You could have gone to the Four Seasons. Yeah, for four years at that rate. So that's actually going to come into play? Yeah, that will be in play. And what's that going to be called? How will we access it? It's called Price Transparency. I think we're calling it Trump-arency. Really? No. Oh. I mean, if Trump named it, he would. I mean, he would name it that in a heartbeat, you know? Oh, that's hilarious, though. Trump currency, dude. Oh, it's opaque. What does opaque mean, actually?

59:52Look it up. I don't know if I'll land that right. Yeah. So did I land that right or not? It was somewhere in the middle. It's halfway transparent. Yeah, there you go. Hey.

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1:02:34This is a paid advertisement. See, that's one of the most important things. That's something that we've been talking about in here for probably like a year and a half now, two years, is the price transparency, power to the patients. That's one of the groups that's like helping to push that I know. Who are the people that are lobbying so hard for these things not to happen? Well, there were a lot of people in the agency who were, you know, obstructing any kind of change. And, you know, part of the challenge of running an agency this size is to change that, you know, the institutional culture. and you're only bringing in, there's 82 ,000 people.

1:03:18We only have 250 political appointees. They have to be good leaders. They have to be able to work with the bureaucracy. You need the bureaucracy. A lot of these people are very gifted. They're idealistic. They want to do a good job. The leadership has been very bad for so long that it's not allowed them to do what they want. And, you know, we need to reignite that feeling of idealism. Do you feel good about it? Yeah, I think we're doing a really good job. I mean, I think we've done more this year than any health secretary has done in history, that HHS has done in a single year at any time. And I think we're dramatically changing the relationship between Americans and their health care system.

1:04:12But, you know, it's like turning a giant oil tank or you have to keep hitting it and hitting with the tugboat in the bow. And then ultimately it will start to turn. And then, you know, you hit that. You hit it just enough times that don't flip them, flip fast. And things change. I know before you leave you had there's a lot of like stuff that's focused around addiction right What do you want to say about where do you think that we're headed with that some of the new things that you guys are going to try to Implement like with with part of your new program Like what are some of the new implementations or some of the new focuses that you want to have people look at when they look at addiction?

1:04:49Yeah, I mean the the problem with addiction is that The cost of the addict, you know So we at HHS, we're the fiduciary, the medical costs of the addict. So we can look and say, okay, if we can cure you from addiction, you know, I have a cousin, you know, Patrick Kennedy, who was in Congress, but he had 17 rehabs, and he was telling me during that period of his life, he was at the emergency room every two weeks, and he had an irritated bowel syndrome, and he had contusions and he had all of these other illnesses that he didn't even associate with addiction, but they were all associated with it.

1:05:36And you know that. Oh, yeah, it gets deep. And he said in 15 years that he's been sober, he's never been to the emergency room once. And so HHS is able to look at those costs and those trajectories and all those collateral damage in the health care system. The addict's costing elsewhere a lot more money. with law enforcement, with broken families, with lost jobs and inefficiencies. And those aren't internalized anywhere. And what we're trying to do is bring together all of the agencies, the VA, Labor, HUD, and HHS, all the agencies of HHS together to look at that addict and then follow him over, have somebody responsible for following him over the lifespan of his addiction.

1:06:26and nobody does that. And so now it's the same problem that we have with the healthcare system is that it's everybody's financial benefit to keep that addict sick because everybody's making money from them. And so you don't have anybody who's accountable for the outcome. And what you need to do is, you know, we're doing these pilot programs called Street in eight different locales to figure out how to do this, to bring all the agencies together. do early interventions, confront the addict on the street, get them out of crisis, into treatment, out of treatment, into, you know, rehab, out of rehab, into sober housing, long-term care, help them find a job and to stabilize their lives and have one person who's responsible for that whole trajectory.

1:07:17Amen. Yeah, because when it goes piecemeal like that, it's just like it's easy for people to just... And they hand them off and then everybody checks the boxes. yeah everybody i found him a house okay he's still shooting up he's pulling the copper wad you know piping out to pay for his attic that's not my business yeah that's law enforcement that's somebody else well thank you i just i i think it's amazing you care so much about that and uh yeah i just yeah for the the chance that people can get well and change their lives uh before you go bobby um you and i've been friends and i've always trusted you and i've always you know i I believe in you and I just know you as a person and I know this is a guy.

1:07:54At certain points in your life, I think you just have to make sure he's like, this is a guy I believe in, right? Like for as much as you can believe in a human being, you know, like acceptable levels. Who are some other like congressmen and senators on either side of the aisle that you believe that we can, that regular people like me can trust? People that I, there's a ton of congresspeople who are incredible. and there are actually too many to even name, to start naming because there's so many good ones. But in the Senate, Ron Johnson, who you know, is fantastic. Roger Marshall from Kansas is fantastic.

1:08:33Mark Wayne Mullins. The president isn't crazy about Rand Paul, but Rand Paul has been really good on a lot of my issues. And, you know, there's a lot of other ones too. So, you know, what about Senator Hawley? Have you, are you familiar with him? Yeah. Yeah. And he's great. You know, I've had tremendous support from the Senate, from the Republicans. And the Democrats have been my friend of my whole lifetime are, you know, it's just so tribal now that people, you know, are not able to follow their conscience. They need to, they need to. Ask their handlers, all that? Well, they need to be part of the clash of tribal narratives.

1:09:24And my family is the same way. I lost a lot of family and a lot of friends. And the Democratic senators were all my friends. Bernie was my friend, et cetera. But now they're just locked in. And if you have anything to do with Trump, you're, you know, you're demonized and vilified. And like President Trump says, he said, if I cured cancer, they'd still find something wrong with me. And I think that's true that we're not, you know, we're locked in this very, very polarized space that is not good for our country. When my uncle was in there, everything he did was bipartisan. He was there for 50 years.

1:10:11and he had more legislation under his name than any senator in history and it's because he was able to work across the aisles but no matter who you are now, you can't work across the aisles. So we're locked in this deadlock and it's very, it's troubling but it's just the reality of where we are. Whenever you kind of got behind the curtain, Was there any more information for you there about any of the assassination attempts that had happened with your family or anything like that? No, I mean my— Like did they give you any more like unredacted statements? Like was there anything like that? No. I mean President Trump has ordered all that stuff to be released.

1:10:52And in fact, there was some stuff that I asked him not to release and he said, no, I'm releasing all of it. The reason I didn't want it released is because there was information in some of the telegrams that could have jeopardized people who were still alive on a completely different issue. But it seemed to me that it was worth withholding a couple of these documents. The reason I knew a lot about it is because my daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, who ran my campaign, is now the deputy director of national intelligence. And she's the chief of national intelligence at OMB. And she was given the responsibility by President Trump of releasing all the JFK files.

1:11:52And she's been thinking about this for years. She was in the CIA. Wow, that's wild. Oh, I met her. Yeah, you've met her. But so, no, nobody slipped you a napkin and was like, this is who did it. It wasn't like that? Not on that issue. Got it. And then napkins slipped me on other issues, but not on that one. Before you go, and thanks so much, man. I appreciate it. And it's great to see you. You look great. And I'm so proud of you. I mean, I know you don't care about that. Maybe you do. I don't know. It doesn't matter. I shouldn't have said that. I'm just like, yeah, you just, oh, you always remind me of like a, just to be resilient.

1:12:31So thank you. That's what I meant to say. Yeah, if you had just like, if you had one thing to just tell just people, like what would you tell them? I mean, I'd say eat real food. If it comes in a package, you probably should leave it in the package. But, you know, if it comes from the ground, if it comes from the water, if it comes from the air, you know, that's going to be good for you. And food is medicine. And you can heal yourself with a good diet. Amen. Cool, man. Thanks so much for hanging out, dude. And congratulations. And, yeah, keep fighting for us. We appreciate it. Thank you, Theo.

1:13:12Great to see you. You too, bud.

1:13:19I must be cornerstone Oh, but when I reach that ground I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones But it's gonna take