Tim sits down with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and actress Cheryl Hines about his presidential candidacy, the genesis of the Ukraine Russia war, national parks and how his wife is handling all this.
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Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to the Tim Dylan Show00:01:34
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Tim Dylan Show.
Very excited to have RFK Jr. on today.
He's running for president and his wife, Cheryl Hines.
30 minutes into the podcast, we did have a weird blackout in the studio.
It's never happened before.
I've been podcasting about seven years.
This has never happened.
It was strange.
It happened in the middle of the episode.
We lost about 15 good minutes and then we got back to it.
But as you know, it kind of broke the, you know, we had a groove going and it was fun.
We had a dynamic and it was cool.
And when the lights went off, I think he thought someone was trying to kill him.
And, you know, because it's, again, it's the family history.
But, you know, he's a really conscientious guy.
But, you know, when those lights went down, he was like, Cheryl, like he, they were, you know, it got strange.
So he's a great guy.
I would love to see him, you know, gain traction in this race because I think he could be an incredibly amazing president, you know, when you listen to the guy talk.
And his wife is lovely and amazing and talented as well.
So they were great.
But if there is a weirdness around the middle of the episode, we do address it, but it stopped and it started.
And when that happens to a podcast, unfortunately, it does kind of break the rhythm a little bit, but they were great sports about it.
And there's some really great information in this episode.
Housing Crisis in San Francisco00:15:28
Thank you.
Here we go.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Tim Dylan Show special episode today.
RFK, Cheryl Hines, thank you guys for both coming.
I appreciate it, fellow Californians coming here.
I appreciate it.
It's a, you know, we get a lot of bad press as a state.
Some of it is deserved.
You've been living here, how long?
2014.
I moved here.
So nine years.
And what do you think of it?
Well, you know, I didn't want to move out.
I moved out for love because I actually had a, you know, I had a life and a profession in New York.
Right.
And, but Cheryl couldn't move.
And then none of my kids wanted to move.
And then we got out here and now they all love it here.
So, you know, I mean, there's, you can't beat California.
First of all, I don't know if you lived on the East Coast.
I was a New Yorker.
Born and raised.
Did you ever shovel any snow?
You know, I should have, but I didn't.
You know, usually my mother or grandmother did it.
It was good for them.
You cheered them on.
Yeah.
I mean, watched him through the window.
Yeah.
I mean, but I have occasionally, but yeah, though, you can't beat the winters here when they're nice, when they're mild.
No, it's so beautiful.
And you have the ocean and the mountains.
It's amazing.
Yeah, it is great.
And we have, I think, we're the fourth largest economy in the world behind, you know, it's like GDP.
We're the fifth.
I mean, it's a massive engine of the American economy.
Now, you're somebody who's been open about your struggles with drugs and alcohol and coming out of that.
When you see, you know, the problem in California, all over the country, but specifically because we all live here in California with people that are homeless, that are addicted to drugs.
How do you internalize that as somebody who's been through that and you're looking at people and you have compassion, but you also realize that like it's becoming a massive problem.
And every time now someone talks about California, they think about this issue where you have people that are unable to live without, you know, being, you know, really, there's mental health crisis, hopelessly addicted to substances.
Is there a way, can we do more?
I mean, there has to be a way to do more.
Well, I mean, there's two issues.
One is addiction and the other is homelessness.
And I don't think that they're necessarily connected.
My son, Connor, last night, we were talking about this issue and he said, he pointed out that in West Virginia, that there's more drug addiction per capita.
There's more poverty per capita.
And there's probably an equal amount of mental illness.
And yet there's no homelessness problem.
And it has to do with the availability of housing.
Right.
So it's not homelessness and addiction do not have to go hand in hand.
If you solve the housing issue, and one of the reasons in San Francisco that they have this terrible problem is because they have zoning laws that don't allow any high density housing.
And that that contributes to the problem.
But we were in San Francisco recently when we tried the Monsanto case.
I was there almost for a year because each of those three trials were about three.
It required about two or three months up there.
And I would go to Union Square every day to exercise.
There was an equinox there.
And I'd see the shops and you had all of the great iconic American stores.
Plus, you had Prada and Gucci and Tala Valley.
And then you had Gap and Old Navy and Levi's and Nordstrom's and Bloomingdale's and all of these.
And it's like for people who don't know San Francisco, there's a part of San Francisco that is like Fifth Avenue and it is a shopping city.
People, tourists come all over the world shop in Union Square the way they do on Fifth Avenue.
And today, I went up there.
I don't know if you've been up there recently, but I went up there a month ago and every one of those stores is boarded up.
It's just acre after acre of plywood.
It's like if you shut down Fifth Avenue, I don't think people understand what the cataclysm that has struck that city.
And it's the office space has a 65% vacancy.
So it's a 35% occupancy rate.
They built buildings five years ago for $330 million and they're now selling them for $100 million.
And it's hard to see how that city recovery, even with really good leadership, those kind of stores take a year to just a runway on them.
You have to then make commitments that are 10 or 20 years.
Well, a lot of people would say those, you know, California's Democrat-run state, very few Republicans.
San Francisco, certainly, I don't think you have any Republicans, right?
So there has to be like one or two Republicans.
There's one or two Republicans, but they're San Francisco Republicans, right?
So there's no way.
So people are saying they're going to say, you're a Democrat, you're running for president.
What is different about the way you would handle San Francisco and certain issues in Los Angeles than what Democrats have done in this state?
Well, you know, I mean, I have ideas for how to handle those issues that people can go on our website.
But, you know, one of the, I think housing is a critical issue.
And it's not just critical for people in San Francisco.
Our kids, kids, Cheryl and I have seven kids between 20 and 39.
And when I was that age, I was already thinking of, you know, buying a house or how am I going to do it, et cetera.
Where do I want to live?
And I don't know any of my kids friends who are even thinking that.
A lot of them are living with their parents.
And, you know, the chance of them actually buying a house is unless they do incredibly well with their lives is very, very slim.
And my kids are, you know, they have good jobs.
They make money, but it's not enough to buy a house.
And two years ago, you had the average price of a house was $215,000.
And even that was out of reach for a lot of people.
In America, that was the average.
That was the average across the country.
On the coast, it's much higher.
It's the average.
Today, it's $400,000.
It's two years ago.
And you're now paying, you know, you were back then you're paying maybe 3% interest.
Now you're paying 7% interest.
The house is three or four or five times expensive.
And there's no way any.
And then everybody has this experience of knowing somebody who is about to buy a house.
And then somebody comes in just before they go into escrow.
Somebody comes in with a cash offer and snatches out from under them.
And this is just now a ubiquitous experience.
And what's happening is not only are we are we suffering inflation from the constant wars, $8 trillion on war, $8 trillion that we didn't have on regime change wars since 2002.
But we're also, you have these three giant companies, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, who own, who all own each other.
You know, BlackRock has $10 trillion under management.
These are all private equity companies?
Yeah, they're the biggest companies in the world.
I think they own 88% of the S ⁇ P 500.
Those three companies, they own 88% of the S ⁇ P 500.
So they already own everything.
And now they've decided they're going to buy every single family home in America.
So they're on track now to control, to own corporate control of 60% of the single-family homes in America within six years.
So you're saying, so when somebody comes in with a cash offer, it's usually from...
Yeah, it's an LLC with some ambiguous name.
Shell Corp.
Right.
That if you, if you follow the, you know, the breadcrumbs, it'll go back to Black Road.
BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street.
And they want to own all of the.
And, you know, and I mean, ironically, and I, you know, I don't want to feed into anybody's paranoia.
Well, I want to say it's a little for that, I think.
Why do you think they tuned in?
This is our final episode on YouTube, by the way.
I feel like that is.
I feel like, you know, it's playing with matches and a dynamite, you know, shit with you in the room.
But Larry Fink, who's who is the CEO of BlackRock, is also on the board of the World Economic Forum.
Yes.
Which, you know, their mantra is, we're going to have this great reset.
What does that mean?
It means that, and these are their quotes, not mine.
You will own nothing and you will be happy.
You'll be happy.
The famous article.
I mean, now they're doing, I talked about it last week on the show.
They're running all these articles in Wall Street Journal where they go, it's now the trend to not have a dining room.
You don't need a living room.
All of these, you know, publications are coming out and they're going like Americans are they're happy with shrinking houses and less space.
And then they talk about like homebuilders are trying to figure out ways to like in a challenging real estate market, still be profitable.
What they don't mention is these homebuilders are not like mom and pop contractors.
These are, you know, D.H. Horton.
These are massive, which are all owned by BlackRock State Street Investment.
Right.
So how is this takeover of the of the American real estate market?
How can this, how is this preventable?
Well, you know what, what I would do immediately, there's a lot of things you can do.
One is you can change the tax code to make it unprofitable because our kids are now competing against BlackRock.
So BlackRock has a bottomless bank book.
It has the lowest interest rates on the planet of anybody.
And our kids now have to compete against that company.
Now, so why is their rates so are they lending themselves money?
How does it work?
Well, first of all, they own all the banks.
They own all the credit card companies.
And just because they have a huge bank book, there are safe loans.
So there's zero risk in loaning to BlackRock.
And so the banks will give them the lowest possible rates.
And our kids then have to compete.
You know, our kids who have no credit rating, who have, you know, a 600 credit rate or whatever it is, are paying not 7%, but maybe 10% interest.
Right.
And they're competing against somebody that's getting 3% interest.
It's all right.
And, you know, we have American dream in this country.
The problem is as World War II, your parents' generation, my parents' generation, if you worked hard, if you played by the rules, you could have one job, not three.
And you can own a house.
You could take a summer vacation.
You could raise a family and you could put away money for retirement.
That is just not even for anybody.
That is not true.
That's over now.
That's over.
These kids are not going to own homes.
And if you don't own a home, you don't care about your community.
You don't care about the schools.
You don't care.
You're less vested.
You're less vested.
And so you're not doing the things that homeowners do to take care of the, to invest in their community, to make it a better place to live.
And you also have no access to capital because, you know, if you are a homeowner and you want to start a small business and you want to take a risk, you get a second mortgage on your home and you have some access to capital because you have an asset that you can go to the bank with and say, look, I know this may be stupid, but I'm going to start a restaurant and I'm going to put up my home as collateral and I'm going to do it.
So, but if you don't have a home, you have no access to capital.
That's a great point.
Somebody else no way to tap the equity in your home.
You know, you're cut off from that source of money.
You're also, I think, people that are not homeowners are subject to the rising rents all the time.
You don't have any control over it.
You have no control.
And the ownership by these companies is driving up the cost of rents.
48% of the people in this country who are renting have anxiety.
And Cheryl and I talk about this all the time.
You're living paycheck to paycheck in this country.
And 57% of Americans cannot put their hands on $1,000 if they have emergency.
If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you are not fewer than half of those people are making enough money to pay for basic human needs, for food, transportation and housing.
If the end and Cheryl, you know, made this point to me about when she, you know, because she spent most of her life living paycheck to paycheck right, he said the engine light would come on in her car and it's like the apocalypse.
Yeah, you know you don't have the money to pay the mechanic, you can't put your hands on that money and you know that car is gonna die.
But you have to get to work.
You can't get to work.
What happens if you don't have a car and you can't get to work?
Yeah.
And everything then starts spiraling to you end up on the street.
Well, it's like, you know, I remember being broke, being a comedian and just trying to make it.
And like, it's tough to, you know, opening bank accounts.
It's hard.
Yeah.
You know, it's climbing out of poverty and the type of poverty that, you know, we're not talking about people that are momentarily broke.
We're talking about, in many cases, generational poverty.
People aren't inheriting homes.
They're not, you know, they're still locked out of the system in many ways.
They are.
Their credit rating is tough.
Maybe they, maybe they got busted for smoking weed or there's some, you know, criminal record that's preventing them from getting the job they want.
The Democratic Party had always styled itself as kind of the defender of working people and the defender of economic justice.
Wealth Control by Democrats00:11:51
What happened?
I mean, now I saw this data the other day and I haven't traced it down to, you know, verify it.
But I, what I read the other day was that 70% of the wealth in this country is now controlled by Democrats versus 30% by Independents and Republicans.
And so, and at the time, nine of the 10 top richest counties are now Democratic counties.
So it used to be, this is flip-flop from where it was when I was a kid, where the Republicans were the rich, were the oligarchs.
And the Democrats were, you know, working, working poor, working people.
Right.
And so it has flipped.
And, you know, and you're asking me, well, I don't know exactly.
No, I saw, I watched it happen.
Let me just finish the.
Yeah, this is interesting.
Democratic counties represent 70% of U.S. GDP.
2020 election shows.
So that's the 2020 elections, chaotic and marked by races too close to call, have nonetheless reaffirmed that, at least in Washington, the two parties now speak for markedly different segments of the U.S. economy.
Yeah, I mean, that's very interesting.
Because when you and I were growing up, the Democrats represented the poor in the middle.
That's right.
And the Republicans represented Wall Street and the oligarchy.
But one of the things that I'm going to do, I'm going to immediately create a new class of mortgages that, you know, if you have a rich uncle, you can get a much lower mortgage rate.
If he will co-sign your loan, go sign your mortgage.
You can get a, because the bank is looking at his bank book rather than yours.
And they're going to give him a better rate because there's lower risk.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to give everybody a rich uncle, which is going to be Uncle Sam.
And I'm going to get Uncle Sam to co-sign this new class of mortgages that people get for 3%.
Only first-time individual homeowners can get it.
They have to live in that community and they have to work in that community.
And I'm going to give the first 500,000 of these to teachers because we need to start supporting our teachers and allow them to live near the schools and work in those places.
And the way.
And I'm going to finance those mortgages not by increasing our debt, which we should not be doing, but rather by selling 3% bonds that are tax-free.
So the market will snap up those bonds and we'll be able to finance mortgages.
So your kids now will be paying $1,000.
It will take $1,000 a month off the typical mortgage, off the average mortgage.
And you can now get a home for $1,000 a month.
And, you know, people are paying that for rent.
And you're building a middle class.
We need to rebuild it.
And, you know, when we built the middle class in this country, after World War II, we built a middle class that became the greatest economic generator in the history of mankind.
And we owned, when I was a boy, half the wealth on the face of the earth because of the American middle class.
And now we're tearing it apart.
But it began by making sure everybody could get into a house after World War II with the GI Bill or with these other programs that allowed every American to buy a house.
And once you buy a house, you have access to capital.
You can start a business if you're entrepreneurial.
And it released the, you know, these, what, what Franklin Roosevelt called America's industrial genius, you know, the inclination for innovation, for entrepreneurship, for, you know, for business development.
You can't do that if the middle class does not have access to capital, which means if they have no equity, if they're living in a rental home, you cannot rebuild them.
You need to get them into their own homes.
How do you stop the BlackRock Vanguard State Street from cannibalizing the real estate that we have in America right now?
Well, they're doing it too with a farm real estate.
And in fact, that's one of the reasons for the Ukraine war is that they, you know, we're loaning $140 billion to Ukraine and they're paying it back by, you know, we forced them to do this through austerity programs.
And it's part of our contract where they have to put all the farmland in Ukraine up for sale.
It's called a land market.
And BlackRock is over there buying, you know, the corporations have snapped up 28% of this.
It's the richest farmland in the world.
I'm so stunned and shocked by that.
It is so, can you imagine that?
But how do you, but yeah, how do we stop that?
How do you stop that?
You do it.
You do it through the tax cut.
I mean, I believe in free market capitalism.
Sure.
I don't believe, well, we don't have, we don't have that now.
What we have is corporate crony capitalism and monopoly capitalism.
And you need to start enforcing the antitrust laws, which is one of the reasons BlackRock is getting away with murder.
They own all these industries that they've consolidated.
They've vertically integrated them.
And they shouldn't be allowed to do that.
And we're dealing with this now in Cheryl's business and my business to a lesser degree with the strike with SAG and the WGA because a lot of the streamers and the studios in Hollywood, it's also vertical integration where you have that type of cronyism where you have all those kind of fixing prices and fixing costs of labor and stuff.
And that is kills capitalism.
It kills competition.
It kills the thing that we all know is responsible for some of the great innovations we enjoy and the standard of living that we used to have.
So you're coming out because you had a lot of people during the last election cycle with Bernie Sanders that were saying they were giving up on capitalism, that they felt like, especially the younger generation, right?
Younger people are identifying more with socialism than any other generation prior to them, because I think they've looked at the rising inequality.
They've looked at how corrupt everything feels.
And I would say that one of the reasons for that is that they're looking at BlackRock and they're saying that's capitalism and we reject it.
But that's not capitalism.
No.
That's just, you know, it's plutocracy.
It's a, you know, it's a, it's this, it's a corporate kleptocracy.
That's what it is.
It's monopoly.
But so you do you cap the amount of homes that those well, you, what you do is you say, you know, you change the tax code so that they to penalize corporations who own over a certain number of homes that they, you know, you have to, and you can do that in a million different ways.
But, you know, what we should be doing is we should be lifting the regulatory burden on small business and increasing it on these on large businesses across the board on environmental regulations, on worker safety, on all of the different issues.
You need to go easier on small business.
And I'm not saying, you know, let them abuse workers or poison the environment.
I'm saying most of the problems are coming from the top.
Oh, yeah.
And they get economies of scale.
And so they get, you know, they get to buy the subsidized corn.
They are the ones who get the corn subsidies.
They're the ones that from cradle to get grave, everything they do is subsidized because they got the big lobbyists on Capitol Hill who are, you know, who are writing the rules that favor these, you know, these monopolistic incumbents and punish the little guy in our country.
And we got to dismantle that and do, you know, we listen, we lost, we lost our democracy once before.
We lost it during the Gilded Age in the 1880s and 1890s.
And we lost, we lost free market capitalism too.
You had, you know, straight out monopoly capitalism, the railroads, the sugar trust, the cotton trust, the steel trust, all of them were, you know, they had these interlocking boards.
Back then, you didn't have direct election of senators.
So the senators were chosen by the legislatures and they owned the legislatures outright.
And, you know, it was said about the Pennsylvania state legislature that none of them could be bought because John D. Rockefeller owned them all and he wouldn't sell any.
Right.
And that's how it was with all the legislatures in our country.
They were owned by these big corporations.
So they controlled the Senate.
They controlled the government.
And, you know, we had really.
Now, even though we're electing these senators directly, it feels like they're owned by the same corporate interests.
Exactly.
After the Citizens United case in 2008, we're back where we were during the 1880s.
And Citizens United basically allowed money to be looked at as free speech.
One of the things they did to break up, you know, they did a whole bunch of things in the early 1900s.
You had corporate income tax come in for the first time, the 40-hour work week.
You had, you know, unions basically legalized.
You had women get the vote.
You had bans on child labor.
And then you had the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1903.
In 1908, they passed a law making it illegal for corporations to donate to federal political campaigns.
So, and all of those reforms, and then you had Deddy Roosevelt come in.
You had these movements.
First of all, you had great journalism and you had these muck-raking journalists like Ida Tarbell and Sinclair Lewis and the person who wrote that thing about the meat factory yeah yeah, Upton Sinclair, yeah who were exposing corporate corruption.
And you know, Mcclure's Magazine was WAS, and Ida Tarbell did these uh, expose of the Standard OIL company and John D Rockefeller.
Every American was reading it.
They were all pissed off.
You had a populist movement in the countryside that popped up that was Democratic, a progressive movement in the cities that was Republican, but they all ended up getting together.
They elected Teddy Roosevelt.
He went in and bashed, you know, dismantled Standard Oil, which was the mother of all monopolies.
And, you know, we got our democracy back.
Right.
And then exactly 100 years later, I think 2008 Citizens United case is passed.
And that ruling comes down from the Supreme Court.
It throws out this 100-year law, this 100-year-old law that had said corporations can't give to the political process.
And so we threw that out in the, you know, a corporate-owned Supreme Court throws that out in 2008.
And then, or 2006, I forgot which, but then you had this just wall, the tsunami of money pouring in.
And now, you know, the Democratic Party right now has $2 billion.
Corporate Money in Politics00:03:06
Well, how do you get $2 billion?
It's with Joe Biden sitting in the basement calling, you know, billionaires and 100 millionaires.
Or someone calling on his behalf.
Or calling on his behalf, right?
And, you know, the Senate, you're not allowed to make those calls from the Senate office building, right?
Right.
So the political parties have erected buildings right next to the Senate.
And as soon as the senators vote, they go over to these call centers and they sit on the telephone and they make two or 300 calls a day.
But if that's what you're doing, you have to, each one of those donors, you have to get $10,000 from them.
And if you are doing that, you do not have time.
If you need to raise $50 million to run for Senate from $10,000 donors, you got no time to talk to the little guy.
Right.
They're living in a bubble where the only people who matter to them are the people who can write a $10,000 check.
And everybody else becomes invisible to them.
And that's why, to me, Donald Trump rolled across this country because all of these people in Pennsylvania and Ohio who are watching their lives deteriorate.
Their kids can't buy houses.
Their wells are being poisoned.
Their lives are upended.
And they're in this debt, this terrible debt.
And they know and living paycheck to paycheck, like Cheryl says.
And nobody's listening to them.
They feel like nobody is paying attention to them.
Nobody is hearing them.
Right now, the average income in this country, the average income is $5,000 less than the cost of basic human needs.
So, you know, food.
What is the average income in America?
I don't know.
I think it's around $30,000, $35,000.
I believe it's around $34,000.
And so you're saying that that, is this true?
Well, this is as of this is meant to be.
$26,000.
No, what is it saying here?
31.
31.
Okay.
So that's tough.
Yeah, but in order to live, you need 36.
Right.
So what they're doing is Americans have a 5,000 on average.
Average American has a $5,000 deficit every year.
They're putting that on their credit card.
The credit card companies are getting 22%.
And which if the mafia gave you that, they would go to jail for loan sharpening.
Right.
But that is coming from, you know, Chase Manhattan and Wells Fargo.
And the worst culprits are Visa and Master Card.
Those are these little cards that when I was really sending you a card that has a $250 activation fee to just activate the card.
And the limit might be $300.
So literally, I had one of these credit cards when I had like no money.
And, you know, you go out to dinner because you're like, okay, I have a credit card now.
And, you know, you're not making the best financial decisions, but then it like doesn't work.
Why Peace Talks Stall00:14:13
And then you go, I have room on this.
And they go, no, the activation fee is $250.
Like, and then the interest you pay is so crazy.
So that cycle of poverty is very hot and tough to escape.
Who owns Visa?
I'm going to take a guess and say BlackRock Vanguard and State Street.
So they're just, they're what they think, like a big vacuum cleaner.
Yeah.
So do BlackRock Vanguard and State Street just walk through Washington, like lighting things on fire, just parking on the lawn of the White House.
Like, okay, so we had a blackout, folks, in the middle of the episode.
We lost a lot of stuff.
We have no idea why that happens.
It's never happened ever here once that we've recorded.
And, you know, this is fun.
So we lost a lot of stuff.
And we're back and we're going to go through it again.
But it was a blackout in the studio.
And it's just fun.
You've had fire alarms in your speeches pulled.
And who knows?
Not sounding paranoid.
Not sounding paranoid.
BlackRock State Street Vanguard.
We don't know what happened.
But we'll say this.
We were in a great discussion about the Ukraine war because we spent $8 trillion on wars.
We've spent all of these all of these interventions that we had after 9-11, where all of these, the architects of them, these neoconservatives, after that, they were shut out of government, right?
They kind of left.
They were disgraced.
And now they're popping up again.
They're popping up again as Democrats.
And they are the main, a lot of them are some of the main promoters of the idea of this endless war in the Ukraine.
Yeah.
I mean, that's one of my one of the things my uncle figured out when he, four months into his administration, you know, he had been warned by Eisenhower about the emergence of the military industrial complex, which would turn America into an imperial state abroad and a surveillance state, a garrison state, a security state at home.
And, you know, Eisenhower had said the thing that our founding fathers had said, you cannot maintain democracy if you're an imperial state abroad.
You're going to, you know, you'll bankrupt the middle class.
You'll turn us into a surveillance.
My uncle, four months in, recognized that, you know, when he was lied to by the CIA, by Alan Dulles, Charles Cabell, Richard Bissell, and by the military brass about the Bay of Pigs.
And when the men were dying on the beach, you know, he took public blame for it, but he privately told his aides, I want to take the CIA, shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.
And then he fired Alan Dulles, Richard Bissell, and Charles Cabell, the guys who were directly responsible for lying to him.
But for the next thousand days of his administration, he was in a pitched battle to keep our country out of war.
They wanted the wars because that was the, he recognized that their job had devolved into providing the military industrial complex, military contractors, a constant pipeline of new wars to feed their profits.
Whoa.
And the neocons, which are neoconservatives for people who don't know, it's a movement that started in the early 1990s, around 92, when the Berlin Wall came down and they published a document called the Project for New American Century that said that because we were the victor in the Cold War,
that America now had the right to rule the world for a century or more by using its superior military power as the unit power.
So after 2001, we spent between then and now, we spent $8 trillion on wars, on regime change wars.
It was Iraq war and then all these spillover wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.
What did we get for those wars?
Here's what we got.
Iraq is now worse off than we found it.
It's an incoherent kind of battle between Shia and Sunni death squads.
We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein.
We killed between 650,000 and a million Iraqis.
We have pushed Iraq into a proxy posture with Iran, which is exactly the foreign policy outcome we've been trying to avoid for decades.
In the spillover war in Syria, we created ISIS.
We sent 2 million refugees into Europe and destabilized every democracy in Europe.
We created Brexit.
The riots that are now happening in France are a direct result of those wars.
And we bankrupted the American middle class because we didn't have the money to pay for them.
And that is what we got.
And then we're given these kind of comic book depictions each time, whether it's Gaddafi, whether it's Saddam, we're given this caricature of, okay, there's a bad guy here and there's a good guy.
We're the good guys.
We're always the good guys.
And here's the bad guy.
And it's a black and white debate.
There is no question about it.
If you side with the bad guy, if you ask questions about the action, it means you're on the side of Putin or something.
Right.
Right.
That whole game.
So what happened, I mean, the thing people should know about Ukraine war, we were told it's, you know, Putin wants to be the new Hitler.
He wants to...
He's going to invade Europe and right.
Right.
And but when you look at what actually happened, it's much more complex than that and much more nuanced.
Putin actually steadfastly resisted going to war.
He has said, and the Russians, not just Putin, but all the Russian leaderships had said since 1992, if you move NATO to the east, you're going to provoke a violent response.
Russia's been invaded three times through Ukraine.
The last time, Hitler killed one out of every seven Russians.
So it's a national security priority for them.
Ukraine cannot be under the control of a hostile foreign power.
They can't tolerate that.
And all of our greatest diplomats, George Kennan, who was the architect of the containment policy after World War II, have constantly reiterated that if you go into Ukraine with NATO, you're going to force Russians to have a violent response.
Well, so here's what happened.
In 2014, we put $5 billion into funding the Medon Rebellion, which is this uprising in Ukraine against the duly elected government of Ukraine, which was neutral and maybe leaned a little towards Russia.
We wanted them out and we paid five billion dollars to in a in a series of demonstrations that ended in a coup d'état against that regime and the installation of a Pro-american regime.
Putin wants to settle things immediately.
The first thing the new Pro-american regime did was it made it illegal to speak the Russian language in Donbas and Lukans, and it um and Russian political parties too.
Right yes, and when the when Russian ethnic Russians, which are 90 of that population.
When they began peaceful demonstrations, they were attacked violently and ultimately they it started a civil war.
14 000 were killed.
The civil war really began in 2014.
Russia tried to settle it.
The people of those provinces voted to join the Russian Union Right and and Putin said no, so this is not consistent with the portrait of him.
And then he said, we need a peace treaty that protects these people.
I don't want to go in there, but we need a peace treaty.
And he agreed.
He negotiated with France Germany, England and Um and the You and Ukraine on a peace treaty to organize a peace treaty called the Minskaccords that would have left Donbas and Lugans part of Ukraine as a semi-autonomous region able to speak their own language, and that would have permanently kept NATO out of Ukraine.
It was a reasonable settlement.
Um Zelensky, who's a comedian and an actor, campaigns in 2019 and wins.
He has no political experience, but he wins in a landslide.
70 of Ukrainians support him.
Why he went on?
One issue, peace.
He said, i'm going to sign the Minsk accords and i'm going to get it ratified in the Ukrainian parliament.
Ukrainian people did not want a war, they wanted peace.
He gets in there and suddenly he pivots.
Now why did he pivot?
Nobody knows, but I think it's fair guess that he pivoted for two reasons.
One is that ultra-nationalists in his government and the AZOV Battalion, UM told him that they would kill him if he negotiated a peace with Russia and neocons, particularly Victoria Newland in the U.s White House and State Department, told him the same thing, that he could not sign a peace accord.
So he abandons it.
Russia goes in, Putin goes in, but only with 40 000 people.
Well, he's got a lot more, he's got a million, 1.2 million reserves, but he only sends 40 000 people in there.
Why?
This is a nation of 44 million people, Ukraine?
Clearly he's not trying to conquer Ukraine with 40 000 troops.
Right, he wanted to bring us to the negotiating table so and this and this, they go in on january, in march.
Almost nobody's been killed at that point, compared to what's happened now.
Zelensky says, okay, let's negotiate peace.
He comes back to the negotiating table and they, if the?
U.s won't help him well, he has to go to Israel and Turkey to get their help negotiating a peace accord.
They negotiate a peace accord which is uh, which is Minsk Accords 2.0, with Putin.
Zelensky initials it, the Russians initial it and the Russians start withdrawing their troops from Ukraine in good faith.
What happens then?
Biden sends Boris Johnson over there, the Uk prime minister, to torpedo that peace agreement and uh, And he and Zeland forced Lenski to tear it up.
And since then, 400,000 Ukrainian kids have been killed on the front lines.
And, you know, all of those kids and mothers and every one of those lives was an unnecessary tragedy.
And, you know, you know, my son went over there and fought.
I did not know that, but I had heard something like that.
And that's amazing.
Well, he and I disagreed with the war.
You know, I have tremendous respect for him and he believed what he was doing.
He had great sympathy with Ukrainian people, which I share, which Cheryl and I share.
Of course.
People are never the ones who suffer.
Right.
And that's a badass thing for him to do.
It shows his character to go over there and fight with the Ukrainian people.
I mean, we didn't know that he was going.
Yeah, he didn't.
I would not help if Manhattan Beach was invaded.
You know what I mean?
Like, I wouldn't even do that.
So the idea of Starbucks and your lucky.
Yeah, I would tweet about it.
I go so sad the ransacking of Manhattan Beach.
I would not.
Who cares?
I'm unaffected.
I'm unaffected.
But no, that's an amazing thing.
And what is he still there?
Is he...
Oh, he's back, but he was in.
He fought in the Kharkiv offensive.
He was a machine gunner.
I mean, you tell what happened.
Yeah, I mean, well, he, he, he, he told us he was going somewhere, but wouldn't tell us where.
Yeah.
Um, because he said he didn't want us to be worried.
Yeah.
This would qualify as worry.
Yeah.
And then so after he left, of course we were worried because, you know, somebody says, don't worry.
Right.
I'm going to be okay.
It's like, what?
Well, what are you doing?
Right.
And then we started seeing some credit card charges in Poland.
And we, you know, put two and two together.
Right.
But we couldn't reach him.
We couldn't, we couldn't communicate with him.
Right.
It was really, it was very, it was very stressful.
So he was joined at the special forces unit.
He was in the Foreign Legion, Ukrainian Foreign Legion, and he fought in that offensive as a machine gunner, first as drone operator, which is the most dangerous job because the Russians can tell as soon as you turn on that drone and then they, and it's an artillery, they send artillery.
The artillery kills anything within 300 feet.
And then he became a machine gunner and he and now he's back and he's he just graduated law school.
So he's safe, thank God.
But all I talked to him yesterday and all of the people that he served with have either been killed or are hospitalized.
It's terrible, but you gave a great succinct explanation.
I think a lot of people are confused about why we're not trying to negotiate a settlement, why we're not trying to force peace talks, why that isn't something that we're requiring along with all of these donations and all of the funding and the weaponry.
But I think, you know, it's pretty clear to a lot of people that we may not want peace talks.
DNC Primary Manipulation00:04:18
Well, and, you know, there's people making a lot of money on this.
And when, you know, we committed now $140 billion, you know, if Biden gets the extra $24 billion that he's looking for.
But in March, we upped it to $113 billion.
Well, the entire budget of EPA is $12 billion.
So that's all we've got for the environment in this country.
But we have 10 times that for Ukraine.
And, you know, we're having crisis here.
Yeah, we have a lot of, we have millions of people in the U.S. that can't eat, that don't have enough that have a lot of problems.
35% of Americans are not making enough to pay for basic human needs.
And those people are on the edge of becoming homeless.
And it's a crisis.
The entire budget for CDC is 12 million.
But we got 10 times that again.
When Mitch McConnell was asked in March, why are we in the Ukraine?
Do we have enough money for this?
Where's the money coming from?
He said, don't worry about it because that money's not really going to Ukraine.
It's going to U.S. military contractors, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed.
And, you know, so he admitted it's just a big money laundering scheme to the military industrial complex.
And then if you look, who do you think actually owns all of those companies?
State Street, Vanguard, BlackRock.
Exactly.
So now you see that.
It all goes back to that.
Yeah, they're just strip mining the wealth from the American middle class and shifting it upward through all of these different mechanisms that they literally control everything.
So, I mean, and no one's talking about this, which is interesting.
The Republicans aren't talking about it.
The Democrats aren't talking about it.
You're the only candidate out there kind of bringing up these issues in this way.
The media has been kind of dismissive of you, outright hostile.
And now they're saying they want you to pay for the Democratic DNC is saying they want you to pay for primaries?
Well, that's one of the things they're talking about.
The DNC does not want me in the primary.
They have the candidate that they want who is President Biden.
They don't want him to debate.
They don't want him to do retail politics.
They don't want him to have unscripted conversations with voters.
And they definitely don't want him to debate me.
And so they look at me, I think, I feel, although I haven't spoken to them directly.
I've written them, but have not gotten reply as a colossal nuisance.
And they're trying to, they're doing everything they can to fix the results.
So one of the things they've done is they've made it so that any vote that I get in Iowa or New Hampshire will count for Biden.
And that, and they're trying to do the same thing now in Georgia.
How are they doing that?
Well, they're passing a rule that if you, any candidate who steps into the state of New Hampshire or Iowa to campaign will lose all their delegates.
And so I've campaigned in both states, so I'll lose their delegates.
But now what they're trying to do is, and we're going to know on September 14th where they actually do it, is they're trying to pass another rule that if you step foot in New Hampshire or Iowa, that any vote you get in Georgia, which is a big, big delegate state, will also count for the president and not for, you know, so they're basically disenfranchising everybody in those states.
So there's no campaign.
And they're talking about this idea of making myself and Mary Ann Williamson, who's the other Democratic candidate, to pay for all the primaries ourselves.
Are you enjoying this process, Cheryl, of running for president?
After that, doesn't that sound fun?
I mean, it sounds fun.
I mean, is this fun for you?
Polluters and National Parks00:08:48
You're an accomplished actress and comedian.
And like, you know, is this fun going all over the place and meeting people?
I'm sure it has its challenges, but is it enjoyable at all?
You know, it's interesting because I did not think that it would be fun.
Of course.
Be honest.
It's like, I don't like crowds.
I don't, you know, I don't, but she doesn't like hostile.
Of course.
Yeah.
She's a comedian.
Right.
Well, yeah.
She makes people happy.
Right.
Makes people laugh.
Yeah.
But it was interesting because I, I met Bobby in South Carolina and I thought I would just, you know, sit in the hotel room and wait till he got home.
Yeah.
But then I went out with him everywhere and it was so interesting because I don't know when in my life I would have, I would be going to like small communities in South Carolina and just meeting people, just listening to people.
And it's, it's very sweet, actually.
And it's very eye-opening, you know, because you live, a lot of people live in your space, your town, your city, wherever.
And so you get wrapped up in what's going on in your city.
And what's going on in Los Angeles is not necessarily a reflection of what's going on in Middle America.
So it's so really interesting to sit down and talk to people and hear what they're going through and what their struggles are and what their hopes are.
It's a really sort of magical way to see a man.
Connect with people.
Yeah.
And I know that you were an environmentalist for a long time.
This is a big part of your career.
People don't know that, but you were somebody who's out there trying to protect things like national parks and rivers and folks.
I don't even like national parks.
And I'm kind of anti them because everyone disappears in them.
But the reality is they have some benefits, but there's just, there's a lot of fun.
There's some downside.
There's a big downside of fish.
I said that many times about national parks.
Why?
You're in there.
It's like you're looking for a problem.
I like cities and industrial things.
You can see the crime happening.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I want more of that.
I don't like this big expansive.
But you have tried to protect the environment.
Yeah.
I mean, I ran the biggest and founded, what is now the biggest water protection group in the world, which is Waterkeeper Alliance.
I went to work in 1966 for, I mean, in 1984 for a blue-collar coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen whose lives and livelihoods were being destroyed by pollution on the Hudson.
And we started suing polluters.
And I, you know, represented them in over 500 cases against Hudson River polluters.
We forced polluters to spend $5.5 billion on penalties and remediation.
And today the Hudson is the richest waterway in the North Atlantic.
So it produces more pounds of fish per acre, more biomass per gallon than any other waterway in the Atlantic Ocean north of the equator.
It's the last major river system left that has strong spawning stocks of all of its historical species of migratory fish.
And the miraculous resurrection of the Hudson spawned the creation of now 350 water keepers all over the world.
We're in 46 countries.
We're on most of the waterways in the United States.
We have them here on Santa Monica Bay.
Each one has a patrol boat.
We patrol the waterways.
We track down polluters and we sue them.
We're a law enforcement group.
Yeah.
And it's not, and it's not just water.
I mean, I watched him and his law firm sue Monsanto because of Roundup.
So, you know, Roundup is a weed killer.
And there was one man who was a groundskeeper at a school who would wear Roundup on his back, you know, like on a tack on his back.
And he started getting lesions and reached out to Monsanto and said, is it possible that this is giving me lesions?
And so when they sued him.
And they never called him.
They never called him.
They discussed it internally and made a decision.
We better not call him back because it probably is us.
It's causing.
And so something like that where they sued Monsanto and they, you know, it's clear that Roundup did cause lesions and he got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
But just the idea of standing up against these huge corporations.
And in this case, it was on behalf of one man.
But of course, there were lots of cases all over the country.
Yeah.
But being able to say, it's not okay.
You guys knew that it was killing people.
Right.
We have, here's your email trail.
And then to win against Monsanto.
This is a huge victory.
It's a huge victory.
Yeah.
And it prevents, you know, companies like that, corporations like that, you know, in the future from, you know, utilizing those same types of dangerous chemicals.
And I mean, what about the food in this country?
The food is incredibly unhealthy and polluted.
And you go to Europe and other places, you're not allowed to put certain things in food.
Like GMOs.
Right.
And that's why a lot of people, you know, eat, we were talking the other day, eat bread or pasta in this country and they get gluten allergies, celiac disease, all these allergic reactions.
And they go to Italy and they can eat it without any consequence.
And because the food, I've been suing the agricultural industry for 40 years.
I've probably brought as many lawsuits against the big companies like Smithfield, Tyson's, Boat Pilgrim, Purdue, the big animal factories that are creating a lot of the pollution.
I probably bought more than any other attorney against those companies and won.
But I've watched the corruption and the capture of the Department of Agriculture by big agriculture.
It's just USDA was created to protect the small farmer and to ensure us a wholesome food supply.
And today the function of that agency is to destroy the small farmers to create a safe spot for Monsanto and Cargill and all of these big agricultural BMS industrial agriculture polluters and chemical agriculture.
And the food that we get from that process is not really food.
It's a filler that has all kinds of poisons in it, but it lacks almost any nutritional value.
And we're poisoning a whole generation of Americans.
We now have the highest chronic disease rate of any country in the world.
And because of that, we pay the biggest health bills.
We pay $4.3 trillion a year in healthcare.
And that's two or three or four times more per capita than any other country.
And we have the worst health results.
So we, you know, we have, I think we're 79th now in terms of health outcomes behind Mongolia, behind Cuba.
And during COVID, we had the highest COVID body count of any country in the world.
We have 4.2% of the global population, but we had 16% of the club of the deaths.
We had the highest kill rate of any country in the world and you know why they're giving people awards for that million dollar prizes, etc.
Um, when we had the worst record for caring for Americans of any nation, we had 200 times the death rate of Nigeria.
We need more regulation, it seems.
Well, what we need is less um, with guns.
You got to get rid of the agency capture.
You got to get rid of the financial entanglements and these perverse incentives right um, that give advantage to the, you know, to the uh chemical agriculture over.
You know, regenerative farming and and we we need to actually support farmers who want to take care of the soil, who want to uh produce healthy, nutritious foods for Americans.
Over-Vaccination Concerns00:14:45
And that's what you know.
That's what i'm gonna do.
I know how to do it.
This is your wheelhouse, because you guys actually met at an environmental event.
We did yes yeah, we met at a Water Keeper event.
Okay, it was a skiing, it was, it was a, it was a fundraiser, so it was a skiing event and um and Larry was on his way and he's like, you want to go with me?
And I said oh yeah okay, and then we got there and then we met Bobby and um, and that I mean I made them ski, they didn't, they didn't want to ski.
Oh, I didn't think we were going to ski yeah um, but they, they came, and then that was sick, and then both of us were married at that time right, so we didn't, you know nothing.
Um, there was no like spark turning into a flame.
But then, I think six or seven years later, Larry Um brought her back to another and I was very good friends with Larry.
I lived with him for two summers.
We went on all of our family vacations together and he had just started.
Curb the first time right, curb your enthusiasm, and that was the first time I met Cheryl and she came back six years and we were kind of friendly.
But, you know, and then it never really saw you right right, but then yeah, then I was, I was going through a divorce and he was going through a divorce and it was like, oh hi, oh hi right, how are you fun?
Yeah yeah, interesting.
And what's it like being now kind of member of the Kennedy family and this has got to be.
This is a very interesting family to to, to marry into.
Yeah, it is, it is, it is and it is interesting.
Yes on, you know, on one level they're just a family.
Yeah, everybody sits around and we play charades and it's right fun.
And is that what you guys know the Kennedys are doing?
Are they playing charades?
That's not what we thought.
Okay, all right, I realize that.
Very competitive games I, I would imagine they're competitive.
Yeah oh, my gosh yeah um, so on one hand, you know you have that and then, on the other hand, you know, I don't know, your play trivial pursuit and it's like oh, your uncle, you know, and that's weird right, because it's like this, yeah, worldwide looks like this legendary American family that you're now a part of.
Yeah yeah, I mean interesting, it's amazing.
How have the, how has the response been from the family to you running?
Is this good?
Is this mixed?
Is it?
It's a big family right, I would say if they all voted I think there was 105 of us at the Cape um, over 4th of july week and if they all had to vote, I would uh, I think I think Biden would beat me, but if my family loves him okay, that's a good family.
Yes yes, I have a lot of people who support me in our family, but probably slightly more than our, I don't know.
I mean they're, they're um uh I, you know, I feel loved by my whole family right, so I don't feel like it's.
I think that you know, but is it fair to say that there's some people in the family that are institutionalists?
And yeah, and there, you know, there's five members of my family that work for Biden in the administration, and everybody in my family that's awkward.
Yeah yeah yeah gotcha okay, so that's interesting.
I didn't realize that they were in the actual administration.
Okay, a lot of them are in the administration or have big charities like uh, you know um well anyway, you know, run big well, you know what like, maybe Special Olympics right are, you know that are very, have very strong, important relationships with NIH or with government aid, of course, and it's understandable, it's understandable.
Do you think that the inquiry uh, that the Republicans are opening up into uh, Hunter Biden, into Joe Biden, into the Ukraine, the Burisma, the energy stuff, do you think that gets to impeachment?
Oh, I don't know.
And you know what tim, I kind of stay away from Trump's legal problems and Biden's legal problems because i'm trying to focus on issues that you know right, the kind of values that people have in common, rather than the inflammatory stuff that keeps us all apart, and I, you know so, and and the other thing is, anything that I say about those issues is kind of suspect and and really doesn't advance.
You know, the understood, understood.
Well, let me, let me ask you a few more things.
I, I really do appreciate you guys coming on.
I do think that you are.
You make some very interesting points in a way that very few people are right now, about the lack of affordability uh the, the lack of housing uh, a generation that's kind of being poisoned with uh food, that's being impoverished with a lot of these um, policies that are not, that are going unchecked, where you know you have these companies being able to buy up large swaths of, of American homes um,
but let's talk for a brief moment about corporations that do good right, like the pharmaceutical industry, because we should at least mention, because there are good ones.
There are good ones, but then there are you very much um, want vaccines to be safe.
This is your whole thing.
Yeah I, i'm accused of being anti-vax and that's kind of a pejorative that is applied to me to marginalize me and to silence me that oh, he's against all vaccines and that therefore, he's crazy and you shouldn't listen to anything he says, and i've never said that and i've never felt that way.
I feel like vaccines, like other medicine.
If they work, i'm for him.
But let's make sure they're properly tested, both for safety and for efficacy.
Let's make sure that we know that, that that product is not causing more problems than it's averting.
That's right.
Is it your intention to take vaccines away from people?
No, of course not.
And I, you know, I mean, I am against mandates because I'm just against generally for bodily autonomy, whether it comes for abortion or, you know, people should be able to make up their own minds about what to put in their bodies and how to treat their bodies, et cetera.
Yeah.
We need those personal freedoms, but I don't.
But otherwise, I think that everything that I say about vaccines, if people actually heard me talk, that 99% of Americans would say, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
They should be tested in placebo-controlled trials like every other medicine is.
And they're not.
Yeah.
Outside of vaccines, or do you think we're over-medicated as a country?
Yeah, I mean, I know we're over-medicated.
We take three times the amount of pills as anybody does in Europe on average.
And medication, those pharmaceutical drugs are now the third leading cause of death in this country after heart attacks and cancer.
So they're not making us healthier.
And, you know, there are, of course, there are drugs that help people, but, you know, we are over-medicated in this country.
And part of that is because of television advertising of pharmaceuticals.
There's only two nations in the world where it's legal to advertise pharmaceutical products on television.
That's New Zealand and us.
And it's unhealthy.
We shouldn't be doing it.
It should be illegal.
It was.
Even our drugstores, if you go to another country's drugstore, there might be two or three aisles, maybe.
Our drugstores have 10 aisles of just medications and pills and potions and powders.
Well, we're also the sickest country in the world.
Right.
I have chronic disease.
We've still got that going for us.
We've still got that going for us.
We're the sickest country in the world.
I mean, that might be a good campaign slogan.
RFK, we are the sickest country in the world.
Let's fix that.
Yeah, but it is true that we take a lot of medication.
We have a lot of, you know, issues in this country, you know, in terms of mental health that we don't address, right?
Or like mental health care, just like physical health care is not great.
And I think a lot of people, you know, the root cause of some of those issues might be diet.
They might be situational.
They might be clinical.
They might be biological.
But like nobody's figuring that out.
No.
So people just throwing pills at people.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, we, you know, listen, the industry, the medical cartel and the pharmaceutical industry, which is the core of that cartel, benefit from having a sick population.
Right.
And, you know, I'm not saying there's somebody sitting somewhere, you know, with a cabal saying, let's make everybody sick.
Just like everyone's sick, great.
We're making money.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
And the more chronic disease, the more drugs they can sell.
And we've got a whole generation.
It's a feedback loop.
I mean, there's listen, there's 150 million or 120 million benzo prescriptions every year.
120 million SSRIs.
So we're talking about benzodiazepines.
We're talking about things like Xanax.
Yeah.
And everybody else does that.
And then 118 million Adderall prescriptions every year.
Yes.
And so you've got this entire.
118 million Adderall prescriptions.
And benzos.
And our kids are all like to the gills.
And a lot of that is because there's the chronic disease rates.
These kids all have not only, you know, they have physical illnesses, they've got autoimmune diseases like we've never seen before, rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile diabetes.
They've got Crohn's disease, all these things that we never heard of before, lupus.
And then they've got allergic disease, peanut allergies suddenly appeared and ubiquitous around 1989.
asthma exploded, all of these allergic diseases.
And this might be, we might be over vaccinating people.
What we do know is it happened around 1989.
Right.
And that is when the vaccine schedule exploded.
And that's when all of these diseases, all those diseases are listed as side effects on those products.
I don't think it's the, that's not the only issue.
There's a lot of other Roundup became ubiquitous around that timeline.
Neonicotoid pesticides, PFOAs, which are flame retardants, which I've litigated on, you know, extensively, and they became, every child, pajamas, all of our furniture at that time, cell phones appeared.
There's a lot of, it has to be an environmental exposure.
Right.
But it's probably just a combination of all of these.
Our kids are now swimming around in a toxic soup.
And the food they eat is contaminated.
The air they breathe is contaminated.
The water they drink is contaminated.
And it has mental health issues impacts.
It has physical impacts.
It has spiritual impacts ultimately on them.
And, you know, what NIH ought to be doing is looking at very easy for them to do.
They have a $42 billion annual budget.
They give that money to 56,000 scientists, mainly in universities, and they give them assignments and say, look at these issues.
Why aren't any of them looking at what is causing the autism epidemic?
It's just the money.
It's really the money.
Unfortunately, it's the money.
We're going to have to get people off.
I mean, that's the problem, right?
Because people are blinded by self-interest to the point where they just, and that's your challenge as, you know, as somebody running for president is basically how do you, you know, fight that innate desire of people to help themselves at the expense of others.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one of the interesting, unanticipated benefits, I believe, of what happened during COVID where they locked down the entire country is that, okay, it suddenly becomes permissible now for us to have big solutions to problems.
Right.
So if we find, you know, I would say five years ago that if you found out that glyphosate, which is the, you know, the active ingredient of Roundup was causing the, let's say, you know, we learned for sure that it's causing the celiac and gluten allergies to all of America that you're seeing now ubiquitous.
At five years ago, even if we knew that definitively, they'd still say, well, you know, it's still too important to agriculture to ban it.
Right.
Now I think you can say, hey, we just shut down the entire economy with 3.3 million businesses.
We locked down or and closed, many of them permanently bankrupt in order to prevent a disease.
So let's start preventing chronic disease that are much worse than COVID.
Right.
And you can do that with a big program now because it's kind of you, you know, it may be now easier for people to imagine banning entire product lines in order to than it would have been before COVID.
So you could go in and say, we're done or we're done with whatever the McGriddle or whatever it is.
It's not easy.
It's not live on the bottom.
The McGriddle has killed more people than COVID.
The McGriddle is.
The McGriddle is.
Junk Food vs COVID Deaths00:03:04
You know, like things like that.
I mean, we grew up eating fast food really bad.
Our parents would take us there because they kind of trusted the government in this way that like, you know, they were like, if it was that bad, you know, I'm sure they would have figured it out.
The FDA will give the kids, you know, lunchables or whatever garbage.
I mean, my generation grew up eating all this stuff because the people trusted the people in power to the extent that they were like, hey, I guess it's fine.
It was like big tobacco.
Yeah.
Big tobacco.
Big tobacco.
Yeah.
Government said, I don't, I think it's okay.
Right.
Don't worry about it.
Right.
It'll be fine.
It was killing one out of every four of its customers who use the product as directed.
Yeah.
For 60 years, nobody did anything.
Right.
And then, you know, the lawyers came in.
But, you know, one of the things that I'll do as president is people say that, well, you know, you can't ban products like that because manufacturers like Monsanto are too powerful and, you know, they'll never let you do it.
And then, but here's the thing.
If you have good science at, you know, which I can do by controlling NIH, good science that shows, okay, the reason we're having the obesity epidemic is because of high fructose corn serum.
Right.
Right.
And that's, you know, and it's causing diabetes, it's causing all these cause.
And then all even if, you know, the lobby is up there on Capitol Hill saying the agricultural lobby and the corn lobby is saying we can never stop that.
Well, guess what?
You have really clear science on the books that's showing that link.
Now the plaintiff's lawyers are going to come out of the woodwork.
You know what's really interesting?
All the body positive stuff, a lot of it that's been coming out has been actually backed by like Nestle.
Of course.
I mean, this is crazy.
Of course.
But I mean, we don't know.
I mean, it's kind of funny, but it's like, like, like when you see something crazy where it's just like people that are, you know, it's wild, you know, people, you know, and there's somebody on the cover of a magazine that should not be there.
I'm not just saying.
I'm not co-signing.
I'm not saying he's not co-signed.
Nobody's talking about it.
Okay, we're listening.
It's new.
It's new.
In your opinion.
It's new that they're there.
Can we say that?
It's new that they're there.
Now, it's a new thing.
Now, when they're there, a lot of times that you will look at some of that stuff and it is sponsored by people that are making junk food.
And I'm not a model myself.
I'm not saying, you know, I'm just saying that is true that the incentives and the people that are behind certain things would be fascinating.
It's interesting when you look at like the money behind certain campaigns that spring up supposedly organically out of nowhere, but that behind those campaigns is actual money and actual corporate interests.
Bridging Political Divides00:06:39
Yeah.
But put anyone on the cover you want.
I'm not saying that it's, you know.
Right.
That they shouldn't be there.
No, I'm not saying they shouldn't be there.
Let's just see, you know, what's behind those choices.
I just, right.
That's all I'm saying.
I know that it's hard.
I mean, listen, I get it.
You know, and do you, you guys disagree on stuff?
And that doesn't mean you don't love each other.
This is a whole thing in our country now.
Are not allowed to disagree.
People are not allowed to say hey, this person feels this way, I feel this way, but we're both like Americans, like something happened during Covid, where we just got so sexy at each other and angry at each other and and hateful the discourse is, it's one of the lowest points.
Well, you know that.
That's why, when you were asking me about going on the road, that's what I found so interesting about even going to South Carolina, because Bobby attracts crowds of Republicans and Democrats and independents.
So in one room you have hundreds of people who you know, people that I always thought would just be angry at each other just because they're in different parties.
But he's attracting people that are in different parties, that are saying yeah, i'm listening and I want to listen to how we can solve this.
So it's in and you don't always feel that like perhaps in Los Angeles.
I don't, that's right, I don't feel that so much.
I feel like it's very divided.
It must be tough for you, because I can't tell you how many people have come up to us and say, you're keeping our marriage together right?
It was a, you know, Trump person married to a Biden person.
Interesting yeah, it is interesting, but I mean, this is like I.
I think it's important for people to see that people share a ton of commonalities.
Yeah, you know that's right and and it's like, even more so than our differences.
That's exactly what we're.
Yeah, everybody want.
Nobody wants crime, everybody wants right.
Everybody wants some level of equality.
That you know, everybody get a fair shake.
They want, they love that view of America.
They want healthy kids.
They don't want.
You know the things that we all share, the desires, the aspirations for our country, for ourselves.
Everybody wants more freedom.
You ask people about these general issues and then we're.
It's almost like you know, and I I said this to Bobby Lee the other day.
I said it's almost orchestrated.
The, you know the, the anger, you know, feels orchestrated and manipulative.
That you know the anger that we're, that is, is drummed up between us, you know, over issues that affect a tiny sliver of the population and we're all fighting over this.
Right, you know whether somebody can use a bathroom or not, and it's like somebody is jangling the keys and everybody's attention is on the keys and meanwhile they're.
Those guys are robbing the bank yes, and they're telling us, look at that way right, you know who's not right.
Right, instead of these actual big structural we're all getting screwed problems, right?
Yeah, they're distracting us from getting together and say hey, wait a minute, you know you guys don't like each other remember right right remember, you guys hate each other yeah um well listen, I really appreciate both of you coming.
I really appreciate you coming on, Cheryl and and and, and you coming on as well.
I know that you have such a, you know, incredibly busy schedule and you know a lot of the people that I know Very interested in seeing what you, what you guys have to say, you know, because it's like a big, and I'm glad that you're out with him, you know, because I know in the beginning it was hard, it's hard.
Yeah, but doing your thing, yeah, but it's like it's such a big thing he's doing.
He's like running for president.
Yeah, I know.
So it's, you know what I mean?
It's like, because in the beginning, I felt like you were like, this is his thing.
He's doing his thing.
He's tinkering around.
He's running for president.
I'm gardening.
I'll be on set.
I'll be on set.
I'm acting.
But this is a big thing.
And I think, you know, like I said, everybody loves you and a lot of people love you.
So I think that's the best.
That's the best thing.
Where can people go if they want to support the campaign, see you live, donate, spread the word of what you're doing?
They can go to kennedy24.com.
Kennedy24.com.
You can follow him on Instagram and on Twitter.
X. On X.
I came in with X.
Yes.
And TikTok.
Yeah, and TikTok and everywhere.
And what's any final thing to add?
Because I mean, it does seem like you're getting more traction and you're, you know, you seem really deadly serious about this.
And like, you know, a lot of people are out there.
And it's kind of exciting because we've kind of got a mess.
If you look at the people running, I mean, it's kind of a mess.
Yeah, no, I, you know, I, you know, I mean, I, our objective from the beginning is to how do we bring people together?
How do we remind people that?
I mean, this polarization is so toxic in our country, more toxic and more dangerous than any time since the Civil War.
Right.
And we have to stop, you know, hating each other.
We need to be able to have debates that are congenial, that are mutually respectful, and be able to, you know, my uncle, Ted Kennedy, has his name on more pieces of legislation than any other senator in American history.
And the way that he did that, you know, he was on the left wing of the Democratic Party, but he was friends with all the Republicans.
Right.
He would come home on the weekends with people like Orrin Hatch, who, you know, I thought was like Darth Vader because he was so bad on my issue, the environment.
And I was like, Daddy, how can you be friends with him?
And he was like, I am, you know, and he found commonality and with Robert Byrd.
Yeah.
He'd bring these guys home and they would write songs for each other.