Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exposes $100B in annual Medicaid/Medicare fraud, including Russian/Cuban schemes via Florida hotels and LA’s inflated hospice care, blaming the Biden administration’s reduced oversight for political gains like voter registration. He details healthcare reforms under Trump—drug price cuts (e.g., Ozempic from $1,350 to $88), FDA-approved natural dyes, and psychedelic therapy progress (Ibogaine success rates at 80–90%)—while criticizing glyphosate’s health risks and Biden’s border policies, which he claims enabled 10–20 million crossings and politicized ICE. Kennedy Jr. warns of censorship laws like the UK’s "banter ban" and partisan hypocrisy, urging unified solutions to systemic corruption and public health crises. [Automatically generated summary]
And Russia does the same thing in Los Angeles with hospice care.
So there's more hospice care in Los Angeles than the entire rest of the country combined.
It's all fraudulent.
And we're just pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into these fraudulent operations.
The same thing that the Somalis did in Ethiopia.
A lot of that money was going back to Bo Go Herang and terror groups over there.
But they were, it was a lot of it was based.
The Medicare stuff is different.
And we're able to, we're going to be able to catch almost all of that now because we're using AI to do it.
It was never used before.
There was no effort at program integrity.
In fact, the Biden administration deliberately, purposely ordered them, they ended the program integrity office.
So they went from hundreds of people to six people.
And they said, we don't want you doing program integrity.
We just want you doing enrollments.
And so we got all this fraud.
Most of it came from these waivers that the states got, all the states got them for home care and community care.
So, you know, 30 years ago, Medicaid, Medicare, if you've got a hernia operation, we paid for that.
And you could tell somebody got the hernia operation because they had the scar.
They used a licensed nurse.
They used a licensed doctor.
It was all documented.
Then some of the states said, you know, we're sending a whole lot of people to the hospital and we don't have home care providers.
So if you let us pay family members to do home care, the patient won't have to go to the hospital.
They won't have to go to the emergency room and we'll save a lot of money.
So it was well-intentioned.
But then what happened is people immediately started abusing it.
So today, if you, these are services that are normally played by family members, performed by family members, buying groceries for your grandmother and bringing them home, you now get paid for that.
Balancing your grandmother's checkbook, driving her to a medical visit.
So then you had this, you know, organized fraud where, and this is what happened in Minnesota.
These organized crime companies would come in and say, you designate this family, you designate all your children have autism now, even if they didn't.
And we're going to now pay providers for each of them, and we'll give you a few thousand dollars to do it, but then they would collect all the money, and that's what was happening.
It's happening all over the country because there was no, it's very, very difficult.
The guardrails on that system were very pervious, and anybody can defraud it.
If you are inclined to do fraud, this was an irresistible opportunity.
It really accelerated during the Biden administration.
We expected to pay for the Minnesota program just for autism care for kids who have autism.
The kids need the care because they go to maybe a special school, but then they come home from school and the parents aren't there because they're working.
So who's going to take care of them?
So in legitimate circumstances, you would want to pay for that.
But what happened is they just started this wholesale fraud.
We expected the cost of that program to be about $3 million a year in Minnesota and Minneapolis.
They told specifically, they told people in my agency, and I've talked to them, we don't want to do program integrity anymore.
We now just want to focus everything on enrollments.
In other words, enrolling more people in Obamacare and the programs.
And, you know, you could say there was bad motives there because one, the states don't pay.
The states pay a tiny fraction of it, but it all goes to the federal government.
So the states don't really want to do fraud detection because all that money is coming into their state.
And then every time you enroll somebody, you're registering them to vote.
And so, you know, they may have had ulterior motives, let me put it that way.
But, you know, right now, what we're doing is we're saying to the states, we have audited you.
We expect that we believe that 50% of the program dollars you're spending were fraudulent or possibly fraudulent.
You show us a corrective action that you're going to take, or we're going to withdraw that money the next time.
The money's not being withdrawn from any individuals.
We're not reimbursing the state for it until they told us.
Now, the red states have all said, yeah, we'll do it.
But Maine, Minnesota, California, New York have said, no, we're not going to basically sent us corrective action that was just, you know, it was ridiculous.
You wouldn't have, you know, even if you get those kind of donations, it's not the kind of proof that I would talk about because you cannot prove that that donation motivated the bad behavior.
But it just really highlights how ideologically captured some people are, that because it's the right wing going after this Medicaid fraud, that somehow or another that fraud is okay.
And that fraud's not that big a deal.
I mean, what's the all-told number that's been stolen from this stuff over the, if you had to take a wild guess.
That anybody would not want to stop that kind of crime because it's attached to the wrong party is it just shows you how weird this country is right now.
And, you know, one of the things, and then I, you know, now I'm kind of, first of all, it's illegal for me now to vote in any state.
So I don't really have a party affiliation because, you know, they challenge.
I was a New York state resident when I was running.
They sued me and they said, oh, you don't really live in New York.
You live in California.
I said, yeah, but my driver's license is from New York, my law license is from New York.
I have an address in New York.
My car is registered in New York.
My falconry license is in New York.
My hunting license is in New York.
My fishing license is in New York.
And I intend to return to New York.
And there were hundreds of cases, just blackletter laws saying the only measure is if you intend to return there at some point.
We got crooked judges, and they said, no, you're not a New York resident.
I'd already said I'm not a California resident.
I don't intend to stay there.
So now I'm not, you know, I'm not legally allowed to vote in any state.
But, you know, I saw this with the party.
My father hated partisanship because he thought it was dishonest.
And he said, he always told us you should buff with the man, not the party.
Or, you know, he said the man, because at that time it was predominantly men.
But I saw this when Trump, you know, I grew up in a Democratic Party that was very anti-NAFTA.
So it was against working people and labor unions.
Then Trump said that he was anti-NAFTA.
All of a sudden, the Democratic Party was pro-NAFTA.
And that's what turned my head the first time.
And then, you know, when I was, then I saw how they, when Trump questioned vaccines during the 2016 election, the Democratic Party was, it was kind of that skepticism and the concerns were spread evenly across the party.
My uncle, Ted Kennedy, was very much on the side of medical freedom.
And it was evenly spread.
But as soon as Trump said that, it became part of the dogma of that party.
And then, you know, when I ran, we were, you know, it was one of the things I ran against was the Ukraine war.
And the Democrats were always the anti-war party.
But as soon as Trump questioned that war, they became the pro-war party.
And they invited the CIA director to speak at the Democratic Convention.
And it just is, it's the entire party's only agenda is we hate Trump.
And anything he says, we're going to do the opposite of it.
And, you know, on the, you know, I saw this, the craziness when we did the Tylenol findings because, you know, the science is really clear.
And there are dozens.
I read 76 studies over a weekend.
And when, you know, when we were looking at this, and the studies that support Tylenol safety are very weak and they have huge holes in them.
There's overwhelming science that says you shouldn't take it, particularly, you know, it's okay normally.
You shouldn't take it during pregnancy and particularly the last days of pregnancy or in the perinatal period and perinatal period, which is immediately after pregnancy.
You don't want to take it because the association with Tylenol usage at that point and neurodevelopmental disease is very, very high and pretty clear.
And so we issued a warning.
We didn't ban Tylenol.
We just sent a letter out to all doctors saying, be careful about, we didn't want to ban it during pregnancy because as bad as it is, it's the best thing.
Rise syndrome is a rare but serious condition causing sudden brain swelling and liver damage, primarily in children and teens recovering from viral infections like flu or chickenpox become very rare due to reduced aspirin use in kids.
And also just outraging you, just outraging you all the time.
I've been off it for a while now, and it's like it frees your brain.
It's like all the weirdness of thinking about nonsense in the world, you're aware of it peripherally, but it's not in your face all day, which I think most people are dealing with a lot more even than I was.
And they're just bombarded by sensation, bombarded by anger and frustration and angst.
I genuinely thought when you joined forces with Trump and then Tulsi did as well, I was like, okay, maybe this will unite us more and make more people realize that there's a lot of people that are being left out that are in the center of all this.
And we can all come together and work together.
That's what I thought naively.
You know, obviously, once you guys got in there, it was you guys were MAGA and like health is bad and don't stop the dies.
Like no matter what it was, people were ideologically opposed to you being correct about anything because now you're connected with Trump.
So it's like I was watching liberals, the people that are always worried about food ingredients, just dismissing all of this talk about preservatives and glyphosate and red dye and all these different things.
And then there's a bunch of people that are commenting that aren't even real people.
There's that too.
There's a lot of manipulation that's going on on social media where who knows who's doing it?
There's a bunch of different groups doing it.
But they're not real people that are outraged.
They're not real human beings that are saying these things.
And they can kind of shift a narrative into a certain direction sometimes.
It's a fascinating time to be alive.
You know, as far as what you thought this job was going to be before you get in, before you got in, and what it became, what was your expectations when you got in?
I mean, you know, I try to go into every part of my life without expectations and just focus on really narrowly on what I'm doing day by day.
And that actually makes me a lot more resilient because if you don't have expectations, you never get disappointments.
And so you can never get crushed.
But I would say that, you know, I had not spent a lot of my life hanging out with Republicans.
And what I imagine that they were talking about is exactly the opposite of, you know, now I'm in an administration that surrounded by immensely talented people.
And they're immensely idealistic.
And, you know, nobody, I always imagined the Republicans would get together and they'd be thinking about how do we screw the poor and how do we, you know, reduce the tax on the rich.
And all they're, they're just narrowly focused on how do we solve these big problems and how do we make our country work.
And the level of idealism that I see at every level in the White House and my agency is inspiring.
And then the level of the capabilities, just the, you know, the competence of the people who I'm surrounded with.
I think the thing that shocked me most was how bad the agency was, how, you know, just how inefficient, how nobody seemed to care that people were getting sicker and sicker.
Nobody was taking accountability of the fact we're the health agency and yet we have the worst health and we have the richest health agency in the world.
You know, I think HHS is the sixth biggest country in the world if you look at its budget.
It's got the biggest budget in the federal government, bigger than the defense budget.
And yet we are absolutely miserable at what we did.
I mean, you know, we're literally presiding over this cliff where every American is getting, where people are just, 77% of American kids can't qualify for military service.
And nobody's asking why is that happening?
When I was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50 year career.
Today, 38% of teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic.
So one out of every three kids who walks through his office door.
Why isn't anybody noticing?
As the autism rates have gone from one in 10,000 in 1970 and people knew what autism was.
They knew what it looked like in 1970.
They did the biggest epidemiological study in history to answer the question, what is the percentage?
And To me, it's weird because I know Democrats are human beings and they care about the same things that I do.
I've known all of these guys, almost all of them, for many of them for 40 years.
Bernie Sanders, I've known for 40 years.
Their only solution is more money to the system, a system that is broken, that is making us sicker and sicker.
And what President Trump wants to do is he wants to fix the system.
Stop.
Most of that money is not going to the patients.
It's going to the insurance companies and the PBMs and all of these middlemen that are, you know, are milking the system.
And that's why President Trump says, you know, the answer is to not pay the insurance company.
It's to pay the consumer directly and put him, make him the CEO of his own healthcare so that he can spend money.
He's now incentivized to do prevention and to maybe do holistic medicine or take vitamins or take vitamin D, which, you know, is, as you know, it's kind of miraculous.
Or to do alternatives, you know, to do preventative care.
And he wants to say, he's going to want to save money.
Right now, nobody is in that position of accountability.
We need to make them the CEO of their own health so that they have responsibility and they're going to pay the costs if they get sick.
Government pays, but they then decide to allocate that, how to allocate that money.
And then we need to make the system transparent.
And that's, you know, one of the things that we're doing.
During his first term, Trump passed a transparency bill.
But because Trump had passed, everybody wanted transparency.
If you're a woman, you're pregnant, you want to know how much it's going to cost to have that baby.
There's no way you can find that out for most of them.
You can go nine months on a phone every day, how much it's going to cost, and you'll never get a straight answer.
And so, you know, in New York, for example, what we're doing now is we're going to make all of the hospitals and all the providers post a menu of their prices so that are available to everybody and that are available on a website that we're creating.
So if you want an MRI and there's 40 places around your home that offer MRIs, you can't right now figure out what they cost.
Now you're going to be able to go and look out of them all on a single page and figure out what the cheapest one is.
If you go to a restaurant, the prices are on the menu.
If you go to buy a car and the guy said to you, yeah, you can buy the car, but I'm not going to tell you how much it costs till after you buy it.
Nobody would operate that way, but that's how our medical system operates.
So I looked at, we have a mock-up of this website.
We're right now, during the Biden administration, because Trump had passed that law, the Biden administration just refused to enforce it.
So we're in the same position now where there's no transparency.
We're changing that now.
We've sent out over 1,000 letters to hospitals, you know, warning letters.
This says, you've got to post them right now.
And we just finalize new regulations.
If they don't do that, they're going to pay a huge fine.
So I saw the mock-up of the website.
And I said, I asked the question, how much does it cost in the hospitals within a mile of Manhattan to have a baby?
One of them was, there were about 30 hospitals that I could visualize on one page.
One of them was $1,300.
That was the lowest.
The highest was $22,000.
In Detroit, it is the cheapest place to have a baby is about $5,000.
And the most expensive is $60,000.
And it's the same service, the same quality care.
Nothing changes except that price.
Why do we have that information chaos?
We have it because the industry wants to hide what it's doing.
And so there's no market.
There's no ability for people to make good choices.
And when, you know, I was staying with Dr. Oz during the transition at his house in Florida.
And one day, Prime Minister Rudd, who was the former Prime Minister of Australia, came by.
And after he was Prime Minister, he had been appointed to run a commission to reduce healthcare costs and improve quality.
And they were very successful.
But he said the number one thing that they did that changed everything was price transparency, was showing people the price of what they're going to pay.
And, you know, now we also have to shift all of that money away from the insurance companies and put it in the hands of the public so that they are incentivized, maximum incentivized to make good choices.
So as far as making good choices with food, I like what you guys did.
I love what you guys did with the food pyramid.
You essentially flipped it on its head, which is kind of crazy that for the longest time, we are being told that the most important things, the primary diet should be grains and rice and wheat.
And now it's things that we've known for a long time.
It's whole food, actual real food.
That's what you're supposed to be eating.
The problem is getting people to change their habits and change their ways.
And if people don't start eating good food and if people don't start taking care of their body, what other things can you even imagine would shift this trend?
So what we did is we got the best nutritionists in the country.
We got Mark Hyman and we got the nutritionists from the best universities in the country and we put them all in a room.
And I thought it was going to take a month.
It took 11 months because they fought over every recommendation and everything is cited in the source so that we know we have good science.
But, you know, some of the stuff was raped because of regulatory malpractice all these years.
Some of the studies simply haven't been done.
So there are knowledge gaps which we should not have.
So now we have a food pyramid.
And because of the old food pyramid, people didn't like the food on it, and they were going to ultra-processed food, which was okay on the food pyramid.
So now 70% of the food that our kids eat is ultra-processed food, 70% of the calories they get.
And it's just poisoning them.
And they took off the good stuff like whole milk, which is nutrient-dense, which is feeding their brain.
We have two generations of kids that grew up without milk, without the proper nutrients for their brain.
We have the first country in the face of the earth that has chronic obesity, and in the same people, malnutrition.
So you have immensely obese people, and they're malnourished.
They're medically malnourished.
And it's because the food pyramid was so messed up.
So what's going to happen now, Joe, is that we are going to be able to drive that.
We're going to be able to change dietary culture.
Just the food pyramid is going to change dietary culture.
And here's how.
Brooke Rollins, who's an incredible USDA secretary, she administers $405 million a day that she gives out to food subsidies, her school lunches, the WICS program, the SNAP program, Indian health services, and all of these other programs.
And so those programs now are going to get good food because the dietary guidelines dictate what they can and cannot feed kids.
The military and the VA also are changing.
Now, this week I met with a guy, Chef Robert Irvine, who is a television chef.
He's been hired by Pete Hegseth to come in and change all the military meals.
Military, and he's already on five bases.
By the end of this month, he'll be on 20.
What he's done is the food that we give our military is so bad, they won't eat it.
So they're going out and they're spending their money on fast food.
And fast food is not cheap.
A Big Mac meal costs $12 to $14.
It's not a cheap meal.
You can get a really good food for that price.
You could feed yourself the whole day for that price with good food.
Mark Hyman's new book has a diet, $10 a day diet, three meals, great food.
Anyway, Robert Irvine has gone into these places and he gives them all fresh food, almost all of it locally sourced.
As it turns out, it's cheaper.
The military is spending $18 a day for three meals for each soldier.
He's spending $10 a day and giving them real food, good food.
And the lines now are around the block and nobody's going to fast food.
Everybody's fighting to get in.
And what he says is it doesn't cost more.
We don't need any more money.
We just need to buy smarter and to be smarter about how we do it.
And, you know, we're going to be able to do that.
One of the things that we're doing with the dietary guidelines is the SNAP program.
SNAP, we have 20 states now that have applied for SNAP waivers and have been granted so that you can no longer get candy on SNAP.
You can no longer get it.
Soda.
That was 18% of SNAP purchases.
So we are taking the 63 million poorest kids in our country, giving them taxpayer-funded diabetes, and then 78% of them end up on Medicaid.
Many of them are being treated for diabetes.
We're paying to give them the disease and then we're paying to treat it for the rest of their lives.
And we're changing that.
And one of the things that Brooke is doing is she's going to require that any retailer that accepts food stamps has to double the amount of real food in their establishment.
We're working with farmers.
We're working with entrepreneurs to make sure every American can get high-quality food that is affordable.
So what strategies, if any, could you ever imagine that could be implemented that would kind of unite people on these things and get them to stop being so partisan about one of the most important aspects of being a human being is staying healthy.
It's like love and health.
Those are the top ones that we all want.
It just seems insane that we would choose this as a battleground.
And it seems insane that it's connected to one party or another.
It shouldn't be.
It should just, we should all be united on at least this.
And I think if people were a little healthier and they were a little more fit, they'd probably have a lot less anxiety, probably a lot less conflict when it comes to political disagreements.
Things could probably be worked out more amicably, especially among friends.
It's like having good health improves virtually every aspect of your life.
I mean, you know, there are now, there's a big paper about to come out on losing a bipolar diagnosis, a bipolar diagnosis.
Kids who lose bipolar diagnosis simply by changing their diet.
We know that ADHD is driven by all these food ties and stuff, and that's very well documented.
But there's all of these, you go on the internet and you look for studies that show what happens when you change the food in prisons and juvenile detention facilities.
And they, you know, they'll put it in one wing of the prison, they'll put good food, and then they'll put the standard food in the other.
And the level of violence goes down by 40, 45, 50%.
The use of restraints in juvenile detention facilities goes down 75%.
The number of incidents dramatically drops.
And so it's a public safety issue in the prisons.
And, you know, I've been meeting now with all the prisons.
Prisons have a real problem because they're allocated, the state prisons are allocated to 60 cents a day to feed the prisoners.
And it's all for them, it's all about shelf life.
So they're just feeding them the worst kind of poison that you could possibly, it's all just chemicals.
And the other thing, the answer to your first question about how do you sort of, you know, mitigate the polarization, I would say the only way that you do that is by getting people to start talking to each other.
And, you know, that's one of the things that you do that is so great, which is you bring a lot of people on here who you disagree with and you have a civil conversation about them.
And you show your curiosity about them.
And you get to hear their rationale.
And a lot of times, I'll listen to somebody on this show.
I'll say, I don't like this guy.
And then I'll listen to his rationale and I'll think, oh, actually, he's making a lot of sense.
And we have to stop hating people because of the label on them and start listening.
And it's really important we do that now because these algorithms are designed to drive us all apart.
And we've always had political polarization in this country.
I mean, I grew up during the 60s and there were bombs going off and people being shot.
And it was very, very violent and vitriolic when my dad was running.
And the polarization probably was the worst since the American Civil War.
But today, when it is amplified by the algorithms, it's hard to see where it's going to end up in a good place unless we start learning to talk to each other.
I'll tell you one of the most important things that we're doing right now as part of the Maha legislation from my agency.
We're going state by state and we're asking them to do bell-to-bell legislation so that and 26 states have now already done it.
So more than half the states so that kids can't use cell phones in schools.
I went to a school in Loudoun County the other day and the states love them.
I went to Loudoun County and the students had fought and fought against this against getting their cell phones.
So the way they do it, all of the schools, school districts and states do it differently.
But in that state, they can bring their cell phones to school, but they have to leave it in their backpack.
And if the parent calls and needs to talk to them, they can do it.
But I walked into cafeteria, 600 kids in that cafeteria, and they're all talking to each other.
They're sitting across the table.
Nobody's looking at their labs.
The parents came that day.
I polled the students and I said, how many of you think this is a good idea?
And they all put their hands up and they said, we all hated it for the first two weeks and now we love it.
The parents said, it's the best thing that ever happened.
My kid is not driving with their cell phone in the car anymore because they know they can live without it.
Or eating dinner with the family and we're actually having conversations.
And then the teachers in the schools love it because the disciplinary problems go down and the test scores go through the roof because they're focusing on work.
So it's just like a no-brainer.
But again, the blue states are the hardest to convince to do it because they see it as a Trump, a part of the demonization of Trump being the tyrant or whatever.
It's just so stupid to not recognize the kids are distracted.
It's just one of those things.
Why does that have to be a right or a left issue?
It's stupid.
This is a United States issue.
The best way to have a group of people that succeed in this world is make it as clear a path for them as possible.
And as soon as you allow them to use their phone all day, it's too addictive.
No one can put them down.
You're going to lose 30% of your concentration or more easily, I would imagine.
The fact that that would be a partisan thing is just nuts.
It just shows how goofy we are.
I don't know how you get people to talk, though.
I mean, other than, I mean, I do it on a podcast, but that's my job.
I don't know how many conversations I'd be having with people who I was politically opposed to or ideologically opposed to or just didn't see eye to eye with them and wanted to know how they think.
I don't know how many opportunities I would ever even get to do that.
And now, you know, there's a thousand people imitating you.
Many really good podcasts.
But it's teaching people to have conversations.
I mean, you are the best teacher, mentor on that.
And people admire you.
I have seven kids, and they grew up with devices and stuff.
And I would look, you know, I had slap them out of their hand.
And also they couldn't concentrate on long, you know, long points, long conversations.
They're like, get to the point.
You know, I only got five seconds.
You got to make your point.
And then I see them sitting for three and a half hours and listening to a Rogan podcast.
That was a cultural phenomenon.
That was a cultural change.
This generation of kids, I have so much hope for because they grew up with that.
And, you know, they want it.
So I do have a lot of hope that we're going to be able to do this.
And then, you know, I think Charlie Kirk did that too, as an example to a lot of those kids.
Because whether you agree with him or not, and he had very strong opinions that people, you know, consider terrible.
But the one thing that he really did is he talked to people he didn't agree with.
And he always gave them the microphone and allowed them to amplify their voice.
And then he had a civility.
And he talked to them.
And he used logic a lot of times destructively, but not in an angry way.
And so I think, you know, he was teaching people how to have conversations again.
You're teaching people how to have conversations again.
And it's, you know, I think that's, you know, one of the big hopes that I have for the future, that people learn to talk to each other with people with whom they disagree.
But there's also a real genuine problem today in the marketplace of outrage and that a lot of people, a lot of their podcasts are just focused almost entirely on outrage and of like having arguments and screaming matches with people and putting people down and not having civil discourse, but trying to win, trying to dominate someone in an argument, trying to squash people.
And I guess in a sense, some of that is really good because it exposes bad ideas, but it just encourages that kind of discourse where if someone's ideologically opposed to you, they are the enemy and you want to destroy them.
And I'm like, okay.
They're just a human being.
Like find out why they got to where they are that is a different perspective than you have and why you got to where you are and try to figure out if there's some middle ground in there.
Like what do you believe?
Why do you believe that?
And find out why and ask them.
And don't cut them off.
Let them talk.
Let them express themselves.
Help them if you can.
Try to figure out what makes someone actually think.
Instead of just thinking that your ideas are a part of you, they're just ideas.
Like they're not you.
Like some ideas you can hold in your mind and they're bad for you.
They're bad.
You haven't examined them.
You're acting on them like they're doctrine.
And then you're stuck with that idea because you've already espoused it so many times.
You don't want to be a flip-flopper.
And so people get mad.
And you get this weird cycle of shitty communication and nobody ever breaks out of it and nothing ever gets done.
And there's no common ground is ever achieved.
And the only way you're going to ever break that is to stop talking to people like that.
You got to just talk to them.
Instead of talk to them like they're the enemy, just talk to them like they're a fellow human being about some ideas and just treat them with respect.
Talk to them like a person that, you know, in any other circumstance, maybe even could be your friend.
Just talk to them.
People can do that.
It's possible.
It just takes discipline.
You have to learn how to do it.
Took me a while.
Took me a long time to learn how to talk to people better.
But as prevalent as that kind of vitriol is in the podcast world, It's it is incomparable to what's happening on television because there are no conversations on television, right?
Is there's some shows that do that, but like some of these CNN shows, it's just these crazy ideological battles.
And yet, also, guys, pro tip: you can't have fucking six people at a table all yelling out for seven minutes.
You don't have enough time to get a real point across, and it becomes a battle of like who's got the best prepared sound bites or who's got the best snarky quip.
It's stupid, it's a stupid way to talk about things.
It wasn't like, like you say, you know, like let's have a congenial conversation with people and allow them to express themselves and to be fun and funny.
Yes, yeah, well, just have a conversation with someone.
If you disagree with them about certain things, like they disagree with her, it would have been far more productive to have a one-on-one conversation instead of this gaggle of hens squawking all at her.
It's just like you see it over and over again when they oppose somebody.
It's like they're all chiming in, and it's just not the way you could ever like thoroughly cover a subject.
And they're limited by their format.
That format is very limiting.
It's a shitty format where you go to a commercial at predetermined times, period, no matter what.
Like maybe you got a little leeway here or there, but you've got to get that commercial in.
And that's crazy because if you're in the middle of talking, a lot of points take a long time to flesh out.
Like, just think about all the stuff you just explained about Medicaid.
Imagine if you try to do that.
And you can't.
You can't do it.
And they would try to stop you.
You're too in the weeds.
No one's going to pay attention to this.
It's like, I don't think that's true.
And I think we've learned that because of podcasts, because there was no production, there was no executives.
There was no one there.
People were just putting on a webcam and talking.
And so we realized, like, well, people actually do like conversations still.
They just don't get a lot of them.
Not real ones.
You know, you get interviews where someone has like a sheet of questions.
You know, you get where someone is, you know, playing a role.
You're playing a role of a person who interviews people.
You don't really give a shit about what this person has to say.
But people do want connection.
They still do.
And the fact that we don't get it from social media, but most of our time is in social media, is just accelerating this detachment we have from each other.
But, you know, he would just have a conversation with you.
You know, and I think people have a hunger for that.
And a lot of this infighting comes from no face-to-face communication.
I think when people get a chance, especially if it's not performative, that's part of the problem like the Charlie Kirk stuff or some of the other things that people do in front of a crowd.
Things become very performative when there's a bunch of people watching and cheering, and then you know how the audience feels and you play to them a little bit.
Like, that's probably not the best way to talk about stuff.
And I think human beings naturally understand one-on-one conversations.
We've had them for all of human history.
And so when you get a chance to hear people talk one-on-one for hours at a time, it expands your understanding of the world.
Now I know how you feel about things.
I know, at least for this brief three-hour conversation, I get more of a sense of how you approach things.
And then people put that into their own mind and go, maybe I should approach things a little bit differently.
Maybe I should think about things a little bit differently.
You know, it was less of a conversation and more of a being in the ring.
You know, it was like being in the ring.
But it's a lot better than what's happening elsewhere, which is just blanket censorship of people and not any willingness to just shutting people down and canceling them.
That's another weird thing that that's a Democratic Party impulse because it was the opposite of the Democratic Party I grew up with, you know, which was unafraid of any debate.
My uncle, my father, said we should be able to debate.
We should be able to win these debates and the marketplace ideas.
And, you know, the unfortunate shift in that, it's just like, you know, I remember during the Bush administration when the FCC was going after Howard Stern.
It was this huge thing.
They were trying to close down Howard Stern because Howard Stern was very critical of Bush.
And it was like he was the guy out there fighting for free speech, and they were getting fined, like enormous fines, enormous fines for things that he had said, you know, they deemed to be obscene.
You know, and that was a right-wing thing.
And we always thought of it as a right-wing thing.
And when you see what's happening today, just like any, the wanting silence of your political opponents is the dumbest way to cut off your own hand.
It's so dumb.
Because if you can't see that this could be used against you if someone else gets into a position of power, if all of a sudden some enormous right-wing corporation buys these social media platforms and only pushes right-wing agendas and silences all left-wing agendas, like, do you know how fucking crazy that is?
To just give that kind of power willingly to an anonymous group of people that you supposedly align to because you're in the same tribe?
It's the dumbest thing ever.
And the fact that people on the left weren't outraged when they read the Twitter files and found out how much involvement there was in silencing real information and removing people who were from standards.
Well, it's just strange that they couldn't do anything to stop that from happening and that anybody with anybody that's reasonable would be willing to let that happen because their side is imposing it.
That seems like an existential threat to all critical thinking, all communication and debate.
As soon as you start arresting people for opinions, that's crazy.
You're getting nuts.
Like anything that you deem might incite violence or like outrage, people are outraged.
They have a right to be outraged.
If you can put them in a cage because they're outraged, that's nuts.
Point free speech in UK pubs, employer responsibilities.
It requires employers to take reasonable steps to prevent staff from experiencing harassment by third parties, such as customers.
Well, that's normal, right?
You don't want to be harassed by a couple.
Concerns have been raised that debates on, for instance, gender identity or political matters could lead to staff complaints, resulting in patrons being asked to leave if the behavior is deemed aggressive or harassing.
It should not be misinterpreted as a ban on lawful, polite, or controversial speech.
Who's to decide what's controversial, though?
Third-party harassment.
Legislation focuses on addressing harassment rather than banning specific topics of conversation entirely.
But to say that someone doesn't feel safe if people are having a civil conversation about gender identity, you don't feel safe if you work there and that you're getting harassed by people's opinions that you don't agree with.
Well, that's where things get weird.
Because then, as we've seen, there's a lot of people that get really triggered about a lot of things that are pretty normal for most folks.
You know, microaggressions, dumb shit.
There's a lot of people that just want to be offended.
And if this is a law, that could lead to a lot more problems.
It's just a slippery slope, and they're not going in the right direction.
And I don't know how they course correct if they've fallen this far that quickly.
12,000 arrests is crazy.
That's a crazy amount of people go to jail for social media posts.
And it encourages self-censorship, so you don't get a real sense of what people want or don't want.
It's so ridiculous that free speech, which is like we all agree, especially in America, it's one of the most important things.
The only way to find out what's real and what's not.
You got to let people talk it out.
You know?
I mean, when you're living in a world where the government has the power to dictate what's real and what's not real, and they don't have an obligation to be correct, you've got a real problem.
And if there's no consequences for them being incorrect and they've silenced correct speech, they've gotten away with something that's real slippery and real dangerous.
And when there's a lot of money involved and a lot of businesses involved.
Reverses a 2013 removal of third-party harassment liability, making pubs liable if staffs overhear comments deemed harassing based on protected characteristics like sex or race.
Critics call it a banter ban, fearing landlords will police conversations to avoid lawsuits, chilling speech in social venues.
No, it reverses the removal of the third-party harassment liability.
So they removed the liability, now making pubs liable.
So it now makes them liable if they overhear comments.
So what this does is it encourages the pub itself to censor people, which makes sense.
I mean, if you all of a sudden can now sue a pub that you went into and you didn't like this conversation about gender identity that was taking place next to you, you have the basis of a lawsuit now.
Yeah, so now the incentive is the pub owner to go out and police all the conversations so that if anybody crosses the guardrail, you know, the pub owner now has to go in and interrupt them.
If you weren't a charitable person, you could imagine that there are certain groups that would have people go to places, have conversations, and set up a lawsuit.
You could just, you could commit fraud.
If the pub is liable, you pay some kook to go in there and start yelling about transsexuals, and then next thing you know, you collect a lawsuit.
That's not outside of what I think a shady person would do.
If you think about what you're just talking about with all the Medicare fraud and all the other fraud that we know has happened in the world, this is a giant loophole.
This is a giant loophole for people to come in and sue people and silence everybody's speech.
And the fact that this is not being recognized, it's very disturbing that people don't understand human behavior.
It's very weird that they're willing to accept this kind of stuff.
When you look at the challenges of getting things done, what has been the most frustrating in terms of what you wanted to get done and what you were actually able to get done or in the process of getting done?
And these have all been, you know, those were all taboos for every administration, Democratic, Republican.
There was little incremental things that you could do under Democratic administrations, but nothing like this has ever happened.
You know, I mean, the agreement we made with the pharmaceutical industry could not have happened under any other president of the MFN agreement, the most favored nation.
And the way that that worked is, you know, we've been paying for the last 40 years the highest price in the world for medicine.
And so we have 4.2% of the world's population here, and over 70% of pharmaceutical profits and revenues come from the United States.
Why is that?
We do buy more drugs than anybody, but it's because we pay a higher prices.
We pay two to three to five times what they're paying in Europe.
For example, and President Trump likes to talk about this, Ozempic, the list price was $1,350 in America.
You could buy the same drug in any pharmacy in London for $88.
And it's made in the same factory in New Jersey.
And the reason that was allowed to happen is the Europeans just said, we're not going to allow, we're not going to pay anymore for it.
They would set the price.
And that was the maximum.
There's a lot of drugs they don't have.
There's a lot of cancer drugs they don't have in Europe because they just wouldn't pay the price.
And so President Trump, you know, every president has vowed to stop this.
Clinton tried to stop it.
Obama, Bush, all of them tried, and Biden all said we're going to get rid of the MFN price, and none of them did anything on it.
And President Trump literally called me sometimes once a day, called late at night, 11.30 at night, and say, where are you on MFN?
And we ended up getting the, it seemed to me even it seemed insurmountable.
But he said, I'm going to use tariffs.
I'm going to force the Europeans to raise their drug prices.
And because he didn't want to, he didn't, we had enough leverage on the pharmaceutical companies because of our Medicaid and Medicare programs.
We could pretty much force them to lower their prices.
But it would put them out of business.
So, and he didn't mind, he wants us to continue to be the center for innovation in this country.
And he also wanted the companies to reshore all their production so that we're making all the drugs here and they're not making it elsewhere in the world.
And so we sat down with them for months and we came to agreements with 16 of the 17 pharmaceutical companies.
Now Americans are getting the lowest prices in the world.
If somebody lowers a price in Europe, we get that price or lower.
And people can get that today on Trump RX.
They can go for the most popular medications and get the cheapest price in the world.
And not only that, but the pharmaceutical industry, because we gave them certainty and because President Trump forced the European countries to raise the price that their citizens pay for drugs, the companies actually did well.
They increased stock values by 1.3 trillion among them.
And they've all agreed to onshore their production.
So Lilly is building six plants here, new plants, including one of the biggest API facilities in the world.
The API are the pharmaceutical ingredients that we ran out of during COVID.
We need to be making them here because otherwise other countries can blackmail us.
Pfizer, Merck, they're all building big facilities here, and drug production is now going to come to the United States.
We are going to be the center of the world in terms of drug production.
And those negotiations were very, very tough, and they were extraordinarily complex.
We have a really good suite of talented individuals, high-caliber individuals who've left billion-dollar businesses.
One of them is a guy called Chris Klump, who's immensely talented.
He walked away from a company that does data management for 85% of the hospitals in this country.
And he walked away from a billion-dollar company.
He divested it, lost a lot of money to come just because he wants to improve things.
He ran the negotiations, and the pharmaceutical companies fell in love with him because they realized they could trust him.
And we worked out this extraordinary agreement where now Americans have gone from paying the most in the world for drugs to the least in the developed world for drugs.
And that's going to change everybody's experience.
So, and it's going to allow, you know, women, one out of every three women in this country does not have as many children as she wants, and she can't have more.
And IVF is going to be really important because our birth rates just dropped.
And that's, you know, another thing that we did, again, through convenient two things that we did through convening industry because of President Trump's convening power, we fixed the prior authorization.
So one of the most frustrating things that people go through when they encounter the healthcare system is that they have to wait for prior authorization from their insurance company.
So you go in, your doctor tells you you need a knee replacement, and then it gets you, it takes you six months for the company to approve, for the insurance company to approve the surgery.
And, you know, it was infuriating for people and really devastating and heartbreaking for a lot of them.
And we got, we got the biggest insurance companies representing 80% of the American public all voluntarily agree to eliminate prior authorization for almost all their procedures.
It's a very small number now.
I think 15% of the procedures still have it.
And those are procedures we want prior authorization because there's a potential for abuse.
For example, spinal surgeries.
A lot of people don't need the surgery.
And Medicaid and Medicare wants to make sure that they actually need that surgery and it's beneficial to them.
But for all the other ones, you will now know at point of care whether or not you're insurance.
So you go to your doctor.
He says you need a knee surgery.
Before you leave his office, you'll know whether the insurance company approves of it or not.
And that's going to dramatically change the medical experience.
Another thing that we did, again, through convening industry, is we originally got 63, the top tech companies together, and we ended up final agreement with 405 of them to agree to stop information blocking.
So your medical records are owned by you, but you can't get access to them a lot of times, most of the time.
The data company won't give them to you.
And so we've got them all to agree to stop doing that.
So by the end of this year, every American will be able to get their medical records on their cell phone.
And that's going to dramatically change the medical experience.
It's going to save lives because if you get hit, you know, you live in New Jersey, you get hit by a car in Portland, Oregon, you go to the hospital and you spend the first two hours while you're bleeding out, you know, making out clipboards.
Now, or you come in unconscious and they don't know what to do with you.
They don't know anything about you.
Now your medical records are on your cell phone.
They can see if you have allergies.
They can see what your blood type is.
They can look at all of your previous medical records and make good decisions about how to treat you.
And also, you're going to be able to sync that with food purchases apps so that you'll be able to go into a grocery store and the app will tell you this one is bad for you.
This choice is bad for you and offer you a better choice, et cetera.
And there's an app like that, Yucca Now, but there's a lot of them coming online.
You go into the grocery store and you put it on the barcode and then it rates each of the products about whether or not they're, you know, whether it's good or a healthy one.
And then it makes you a recommendation for a healthier one if it's bad for you.
And that is going to change the food culture in our country because the company's already changing their ingredients so that they can get better scores from the Yucca app and from other apps that are like it.
Well, I mean, first of all, we're not going to take processed foods away from people, but we're going to, I think we're going to change the amount of processed foods.
One is by April, we will have a federal definition of ultra-processed foods, first time in history.
And as soon as we do that, we're going to do front-of-package food labeling.
So every food in your grocery store will have a label on it.
It'll have maybe a green light, a red light, or yellow light, telling you whether or not it's going to be good for you.
I've used them myself and used them with really good effect on a couple of injuries.
What happened was there were 19 peptides that you can, just so people understand, there was a law written that to allow compounding pharmacies to make compounds that were part of approved drugs.
So, you know, part of approved ingredients of approved drugs to make them individually for patients who did not have access to the particular formulation that they needed to fit them.
Maybe they had an allergy to the commercial brand or whatever.
And the compounding pharmacies, and peptides was part of that group.
There were 19 peptides that were widely formulated by compounding pharmacies during the Biden administration.
They illegally moved those to category two, which says do not formulate.
It was illegal because they're not supposed to do that unless there's a safety signal.
And they didn't have a safety signal.
They're not allowed to look at efficacy.
They're not allowed to say, well, we don't believe these are efficacious or whatever.
They can only look at safety.
They move those to category two, which means do not formulate.
What happened?
There was huge demand for peptides.
And so a black market came out.
And the black market is run by companies that say that they're making the peptides for animal use or for research purposes.
And that peptide now basically completely replaced the legal market.
The legal market for peptides, the pharmacies, the compounding pharmacies were getting those peptides from FDA-inspected facilities.
And some of them in India and China, but they were the same one that the pharmaceutical industries are buying.
I mean, we inspect those.
You know, you're getting a good product.
You know, you're getting what you bought, what was advertised.
With the gray market, you have no idea.
And a lot of this stuff that we've looked at is just, you know, is very, very substandard.
Oh, I'm very anxious to move not probably not all of those peptides.
Some of them are in litigation, but about 14 of them back to making them more accessible.
And FDA is in the middle of, I think within a couple of weeks, we will have announced some kind of new action.
And my hope is that they're going to end up with, they're still looking at the science.
My hope is that they're going to get moved to a place where people have access from ethical suppliers.
And I know that in particular, Ibogaine, what's going on in Texas with the Ibogaine Initiative, where former Governor Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard have been helping a lot of veterans, a lot of people with serious opioid addictions.
And this is the plan to have this and run some programs where you have this very effective way of getting people off addictions that we have, for some reason, banned in America up until these initiatives.
I think there's some stuff that can help a lot of people.
I mean, how many people are addicted to opioids in this country?
I don't know enough, and I don't think it's well documented enough about whether it's a long-term impact on addiction.
But in terms of just sort of the field of psilocybin and MDMA, there are lots and lots of good studies now that clearly demonstrate that or strongly suggest that it is effective against PSDD.
And so I would say everybody in my agency and over at VA at Doug Collins agency is very anxious to get a rule out there that will allow these kind of studies, will allow access under therapeutic settings, particularly to the military soldiers who have suffered these injuries to get access to these products.
We're working through that process now.
You have Marty McCary.
I mean, we're all working on it and trying to make it happen.
And, you know, if you can if you can treat depression and, you know, without using SSRIs, putting somebody a lifetime sentence to SSRIs, you can treat them.
There's a number of things, not just psychedelics, but a number of interventions that we're looking at that are rapid interventions that are more transformative than the way that psychedelics seem to rewire your brain.
And so we're looking at that as an entire category of interventions that people ought to be able to study.
They ought to have good access to, and we should get it out to the public as quickly as possible.
Would it be somewhere that— Well, for some of them, you know, for some of them, it would be that you can do, you know, to encourage more clinical trials.
In others, it would be, there would be very strong guidelines.
I mean, this is what we're envisioning, so I can't tell you exactly what we're going to do.
But very, very strong guidelines for therapeutic guidelines.
So how they're applied, what kind of follow-up, because a lot of these things rewire your brain.
If you don't do follow-up, it doesn't work, or you have a failure rate.
So those kind of protocols are all stuff that we've been developing and studying.
And I think most of the people in the administration are anxious to make this happen as quickly as possible.
And I know Doug Collins over at the VA already has, I think, 21 studies going over there.
Also, some people are on medications and they should be very aware that this medication would go really badly with X amount of whatever the substance is.
And so would you envision a place like that, like once it's implemented, where someone who's suffering from depression or PTSD, regardless of whether they're a soldier or cop or just a regular person, could be able to go to a place like that and get treatment?
Yeah, that is a, these are very powerful tools you're working with.
It's like everything else.
You can do it wrong.
But it just makes sense that if you had less depressed people, more happy people, more people connected, more people that can kind of let go of whatever traumatic experience they went through and just live a more joyful, productive life, which many people that have taken these substances have experienced.
You shouldn't have a soldier who has given everything for the country, who has suffered terribly, who has to go to Tijuana to get these treatments, who has to leave our country in order to get the treatments.
No, it doesn't, especially when so many of them have come back with these stories.
Guys Sean Ryan, a bunch of my friends have done it.
And I had a good friend who, my friend Ed Clay, who runs the CPI down in Tijuana, the Cellular Performance Institute, which is an amazing stem cell clinic down there, he went down there because he hurt his back and he got on pills and he couldn't get off him.
Yeah, I mean, I had a family member whose life was transformed by it.
And, you know, I've been in recovery for 43 years.
So, and I go to a meeting every day.
So it's pretty hard to convince me that you can fix what's wrong with you by taking something outside of you.
But I have seen so much overwhelming anecdotal evidence, but also clinical studies at a test who, you know, to the effect that is under some circumstances with some people or these medicines.
You know, and I think you've got Jay Bhattachara at NIH and Marty McCary at FDA who are all, you know, doing whatever they can to make this happen.
Well, I sincerely hope that more people consider it.
And I think one of the big hopes that we have is when you have someone like former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who's a Republican, looking at this instead of from like for the longest time, that was a left-wing perspective, right?
Legalized marijuana, legalized psychedelics.
You didn't hear about it from former Republican governors like Rick Perry.
But when he sees the benefit that it has with veterans, which he cares very deeply about the veteran community, he's like, no, this is not something to ignore just because it's connected to hippies.
You know, I don't know if you remember this, but Hunter Thompson during whatever election he covered in fear and loathing on the campaign trail, it's 73.
When he put out that rumor that Ed Muskie was addicted to Ibergane.
Brazilian witch doctors were coming in and giving him Ibogaine.
It ruined that guy's career.
But it's so funny that he chose that drug because it's like no one's addicted to that.
That's not the risk.
The risk is heart attacks.
The risk is you have to have your heart monitored while you're doing it.
It's like it's very stressful for a lot of people.
But on a clinical setting, it's shown to be incredibly effective.
And I don't think we should ignore these things.
I think it's foolish.
And I think that is one that seems to have a bipartisan agreement on because a lot of people on the left have always been in favor of some kind of psychedelic therapy just based on experiences they've had that were positive.
But seeing it from the right is very encouraging because I think it's something for human beings.
It's not for everybody, but it's something, it's a tool that I have seen benefit many, many people.
And we should use every tool that could help us be healthier and happier, period.
And, you know, I didn't know when I came in, I didn't know the president that well.
So, you know, but from the beginning, he was empowering me.
And, you know, I never made an agreement with him about anything.
But the first time he asked me whether I wanted to be HHS secretary, I said, I don't think so.
I wanted to do some, I wanted to be maybe a health czar in the White House.
And then I thought about it for a while and thought, no, I really won't be effective unless I'm in this agency and can actually, you know, get into the weeds.
And it has 82,000 employees and the biggest budget in government.
And that would actually give me the power to change the system.
And so then I went back to him and I said, you know, I want HHS.
And he said, fine.
And then he allowed me to appoint all of my sub agency heads, which no president has ever done with an HHS secretary in history.
He allowed me to appoint Marty McCary, choose Marty McCary at FDA, Jay Bhattachara, Dr. Oz, and CMS, and everybody else below them.
So nobody's ever been able to do that.
And then he gave me a very prominent job on the transition committee to set this all in motion.
And then once I got in, he supported me on everything.
And that, I think, was allowed me to do things more.
I think, I mean, I don't want to sound like, you know, vain or something, but because of the great team that we have and because this is where the president, we've been able to accomplish more in one year than I think any other HHS secretary has done in history in four years.
I'm pleased with what we've done, but there's still, I mean, it's 20% of our economy.
And so it's a huge agency and there's, you know, it's in everything and there's a lot to do.
I would say, yeah, if you put this on the table and said, you're going to have this, you know, the first day I got into office, I would snatch it off and say, I'll take it.
I was on the EO, which is an executive order from the president saying that we're going to make the ingredients for glyphosate in this country and for elemental phosphorus.
And, you know, I've, listen, I've spent 40 years fighting pesticides.
It was, you know, I was part of the trial team on the Monsanto case, which was the team that, you know, we won three cases in a row and then got an $11 billion settlement with Monsanto, which is now Bayer.
By the end of our trial, Bayer-owned Monsanto.
But, you know, pesticides are poison.
They're designed to kill all life.
It's not a good thing to have in your food.
But I also, so it's not something that I was particularly happy with.
Let me put it that way mildly.
But I also understand the president's point of view.
The president didn't create this system.
He's dealing with a problem that was created long before over the past 60 years when, you know, through federal policies and subsidies and the management of farming in this country, the agricultural management, we have addicted our farmers to these pesticides, and particularly glyphosate.
Glyphosate is the foundational pesticide of our food production system.
So 97% of corn in this country is produced with glyphosate and can't be produced without it.
98% of, you know, you could do it.
You could change it.
There's organic corn producers in this country.
It's like 3%.
98% of soy is produced with glyphosate.
If you banned glyphosate overnight or if you got rid of it or if somebody else cut off our supply, it would destroy the American food system.
We had Will Harris from White Oak Pastures on here, and he showed us the literal line in the river between his organic farm and the next-door neighbor's farm.
We could see this clear line where all the runoff is going into the river.
It took him 20 years, and it's not applicable to every farmer.
He understands the problem, too.
We all understand that this is a huge problem.
So the president was dealing with national security, and they did something that I really don't like, which is to support there's a lawsuit about that's now before the Supreme Court, but in the lower court they supported, is asked for federal preemption.
So that would mean that if the federal label says that this is safe, that these state lawsuits now cannot be brought.
So it would throw out a lot of the state lawsuits and me effectively gives them immunity from liability, which is, you know, to me, it's not good to give any company immunity from liability.
It takes away all incentive for them to make the product safer.
Again, the president is dealing with bigger issues, which is the company that's making this has paid $11 billion to, you know, in my lawsuit, they're just about to sign another $7.6 billion settlement.
There's 65,000 cases out there, and they've said, we're getting out of this business, you know, if we don't get relief.
So the president is hearing that.
The farmers are hearing that.
And they're saying, you know, this is a temporary fix.
We're putting huge amounts of money into studying the impacts of glyphosate right now in my agency.
I'm doing that.
And we're doing, and the president has made a big commitment, a billion-dollar commitment, not only to regenerate farming, but also to developing new ways of chemical, of dramatically reducing the amount of chemicals in our agriculture.
I met this week with three farmers who are using this new system of lasers, which is now the cheapest way to control weeds in the vegetable fields.
So, you know, vegetables, lettuce, celery, all of these vegetables now they're using a lot of them.
You know, you're going to see a very quick transition.
It's an attachment that's dragged by a tractor.
It kills the weeds at every stage of their life.
It identifies their species and kills them instantly all the way down through their root system by exploding them with this laser.
Well, there's a lot of anecdotal stories about people going to Italy or Spain and France, eating bread over there, not having any problem with it at all and being so confused.
And then also people coming from Europe and eating in America and getting sick.
And I know that a lot of it is, again, A lot of propaganda, a lot of these narratives trying to push people into thinking that things aren't dangerous because right-wing people believe in them and that it's nonsense.
And it's just, I don't know what that pathway is when you're dealing with monocrop agriculture and you have these enormous farms and you say 98% is based on glyphosate use or whatever it is.
How do we get those people to ultimately transition?
And if they do, could they even produce enough of their product to stay viable?
Do you envision a possibility, a real possibility of a country that is all regenerative agriculture with no pesticides?
Is that even possible?
That we could get to a point, whether it's a decade from now or two decades from now, where we've completely eradicated the uses of these harmful chemicals.
That's a little more difficult, particularly in some parts of the country.
You need nutrients in the soil, but there's ways of growing.
And Harris has shown this, where you can dramatically reduce the amount of petroleum-based fertilizers that you're using, dramatically, almost eliminate them.
And then we have a president who has, you know, never stops working, and he's up till 11, 12 at night, you know, which you can get a call at that point.
He says, were you sleeping 2 o'clock in the morning?
Well, that's why this time with you in office has been encouraging.
I mean, you doing the things that you wanted to do was to me the most interesting thing about this administration going in because I knew your conviction.
I had read your Fauci book, and I'm like, if anybody could do something about this, it's you.
And I'm kind of amazed at how much you have been able to do.
And also, you know, watching the struggle, the difficulties of getting things pushed through that should have been pushed through easily with rational thinking.
It's a fascinating time because we are in a time of change.
You know, here's the background of my kind of assumptions.
During the last 10 years of his life, I worked very closely with Cesar Chavez.
And I worked with he had two issues.
He had pesticides, which were a huge issue with him, and that's what I worked with him on, on the dangers that, you know, his workers were experiencing from pesticides.
And the other issue he had was immigration.
He wanted to shut down the border because he saw the way that it was impairing this huge influx of illegal migration across the border.
It was impairing his ability to get, to bargain, to leverage good wages and conditions for his workers.
When I grew up, the Democratic Party was against immigration.
And it was the Republican Party who wanted it because the big corporations wanted cheap labor.
The Chamber of Commerce was firmly embedded in the Republican Party, and they were all about open borders.
Today, the Chamber of Commerce is with the Democratic Party.
And so it's one of these switches that is kind of inexplicable to me.
But I think, again, it happened because President Trump said, I'm going to fix it with the wall.
And that became, you know, it suddenly became open borders, suddenly became a calling card for the Democratic Party.
But there's a reason, you know, and I see it in my agency, the cause that it's imposing on our country.
And, you know, on health care, diminishing health care for Americans and housing and jobs and all of these places where it hurts that we need workers in here and we need legal immigrants in here, but they should come in legally.
And every country has to do that.
President Trump ran on this issue.
He's now, and he ran that he's going to enforce it and deport, particularly the bad people.
This is what you don't hear.
70% of the people that they've arrested have criminal records.
What the Democrats are always saying is, oh, only 14% of them have been convicted of a violent crime.
Well, they've been convicted.
But a lot of them, the other ones, have been arrested and they just haven't been convicted yet because they jumped bail or they jumped their warrants.
The other 30%, a lot of them are gang members.
When they go looking for an immigrant, they're not just randomly searching restaurants.
They're going after particular people who they've gotten their names from local law enforcement and from others.
During the Biden administration or during the Obama administration, President Obama deported more people than President Trump did, most in history.
Nobody cared.
And there were 76 people shot during that process.
During the Biden administration, none of it made headlines.
About half of those people were killed.
None of it made the news.
Now, because it's Trump doing it, you have the entire Democratic Party and the media establishment saying, oh, look at the horrible things.
He's a dictator, but he's doing what he promised to do to the American people.
It's very disturbing watching what you see on TV.
The thing that makes it most disturbing is because there's so much interaction with protesters, which is weird that the Democrats are telling protesters to go out there and stop law enforcement from doing its job.
If you, that's not how protests usually work.
If you don't like U.S. drug policy, which you don't, you know, and a lot of people don't, a lot of people don't like the war on drugs at all.
They think it's counterproductive.
You wouldn't send people to try and interfere with people who are arresting a drug dealer.
And when you have thousands and thousands of people doing that, there's going to be thousands of interactions, and some of those are going to end badly because you have armed people doing dangerous things.
And when you have crowds doing that, it's going to blow up.
And so, you know, I see this, you know, nobody is happy with the way that things have looked, particularly in Minnesota.
But a lot of it is because of this capacity of the press to take Trump derangement syndrome and amplify it into public outrage and set up a situation.
I mean, if you were, you're a dad, I wouldn't send my kids out to interfere with a law enforcement operation.
There's other ways to protest.
But so I think that, you know, I think now they're pulling out of Minnesota.
They're going to do this, you know, in other states where they're not going to get that kind of crowd interaction.
But a lot of the people that they're arresting are not.
You know, they're people who are actually, you know, have, like I said, 70% of criminal records.
And to have that happen all at once is pretty crazy.
I think what disturbs people is, again, obviously these violent interactions.
What should disturb them is that these are not organic protests.
These protests are organized and paid for.
And that's crazy.
When you find that out and you find out that people can actually be paid to protest and that they provide them with signs, they tell them what they do.
It's organized.
They have signal chats.
There's been a lot of people online talking about being paid to protest in certain places.
And that's kind of insane that that's even legal, that you can organize a mob and pay them to go and make a bunch of noise.
And that it has to do with it just happened to take place in the place where hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud was being exposed.
So then the narrative completely shifts away from the fraud and onto this unnecessary violence with ICE.
And then there's the natural thing that people have, this distrust of people wearing masks.
They don't like that.
They don't like officers wearing masks.
But on the other side, they have to wear masks because they're being doxxed and their families are being threatened and you're filming everything they do and you're these organized instigators.
So if it wasn't for organized protest, I wonder if those particular interactions would have even happened, would have even taken place.
And I know you're saying that they don't, that they're targeting specific people.
They're going after bad people.
But also they're showing up at Home Depot and just grabbing people too and trying to find out if someone is a bad guy or a good guy.
So there's probably a lot of people that are just people that got duped into coming to this country thinking they're going to be welcomed.
And then they come over here and they're trying to get jobs and now they're getting arrested and deported.
You know, it wasn't their fault that they were encouraged and brought into this country, but they did break the law.
And I understand.
I understand that perspective.
But it's kind of insane that no one is pointing the blame at the fact that they let at least 10 billion people or 10 million people into this country over the last four years, at least, being charitable.
So it was just— And at the same time, you have legitimate people that are doing it the right way that have to go through a long and difficult, lengthy process to attain citizenship and to come here or get a green card and come here.
It was just a policy that law enforcement always cooperated with each other.
Now, because Trump's in there, they're saying, okay, we would rather take the side of a criminal than take the side of the president.
So they're choosing sides.
It's like the other day during the State of the Union speech when President Trump said, he was talking about immigration, and he said, please stand up if you think that law enforcement should protect the American people over illegal immigrants.
It just, it really disturbs people when you see massed people grabbing people and arresting people, and a lot of them turn out to be American citizens.
You know, that's part of the problem, too.
But I did look at a chart recently because I thought it was fascinating, the number of American citizens that were arrested, what percentage during what Obama did versus during Trump.
It's actually, I think, higher.
More American citizens were arrested during this Obama thing.
You just never heard about it.
Also, if you hear Obama talk about immigration, if you hear Hillary talk about immigration, or if you hear Bill talk about immigration, you would swear they were running for president as a Republican.
Like if you listen to the things they were saying back then, it was very much the Republican perspective.
Bernie even said that it's like open borders are a Republican idea.
They want cheap labor.
Yeah.
So, all right.
Anything else?
Before we wrap this up, listen, thank you very much for all your hard work.
And it's really, it's very exciting for me to have someone like you doing what you're doing because I do know that you really want to push for meaningful change that's genuinely going to help.
And I think, you know, so far you're on a good path.
So I hope we can get all the other stuff done, too.