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Sept. 25, 2023 - This Past Weekend - Theo Von

01:59:08

E464 Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an attorney, author, environmentalist and 2024 candidate for the office of President of the United States of America. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joins This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von for the third time to talk about his campaign for President of the United States, his ideas for restoring the middle class, how news has changed over the course of history, recent security threats, why he thinks he can beat both Biden and Trump, and what it will take to restore people’s faith in America again. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: https://www.instagram.com/robertfkennedyjr/ ------------------------------------------------ Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com ------------------------------------------------- Sponsored By: Celsius: Go to the Celsius Amazon store to check out all of their flavors. #CELSIUSBrandPartner #CELSIUSLiveFit https://amzn.to/3HbAtPJ Füm: Head to http://tryfum.com/THEO to save an additional 10% off your order today. Ibotta: Download the Ibotta app now and use code THEO to start earning real cash back. BetterHelp: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp — go to http://betterhelp.com/theo to get 10% off your first month. DoorDash: Download the DoorDash app and enter code THEO to get 50% off your first order (up to a $20 value) and zero delivery fees. ------------------------------------------------- Music: "Shine" by Bishop Gunn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3A_coTcUek&ab_channel=BishopGunn ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: tpwproducer@gmail.com Hit the Hotline: 985-664-9503 Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: https://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Send mail to: This Past Weekend 1906 Glen Echo Rd PO Box #159359 Nashville, TN 37215 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips Shorts Channel: https://bit.ly/3ClUj8z ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach Powers https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers/ Producer: Colin Reiner https://www.instagram.com/colin_reiner/ Producer: Nick Davis https://www.instagram.com/realnickdavis/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Grateful to announce that we have some new tour locations coming up.
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	And Atlanta, Georgia, November 29th and 30th at the Fox Theater.
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	local.
	We also have some tickets left for Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, Norfolk, VA, Roanoke, VA, and Huntington, West Virginia.
	Get all your tickets through theovon.com slash T-O-U-R to avoid secondary sites.
	Today's guest is a presidential candidate for the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
	He's an author.
	He's an attorney.
	He's an environmentalist.
	I'm grateful to have him return to the podcast to discuss his campaign and see what's going on.
	He's a dear friend, and I'm grateful for his time.
	Today's guest is Robert Kennedy Jr.
	Shine that light on me I'll sit and tell you my stories Shine on me And I will find a song I'll be singing the song I'll be singing the song Thanks, man.
	Yeah, I feel pretty good.
	I got some vitamin D today.
	I went for a run, you know.
	I think I was feeling like overwhelmed.
	So sometimes when I feel like even if I feel if I feel anything too much, it's like I feel like if I do something in motion, it helps me, you know, and getting some vitamin D helps me too.
	Yeah, move muscles, change of thought.
	Yeah.
	But I had the same experience yesterday where I, you know, they had me scheduled like back to back all day.
	And I said, I just need to get out.
	And I just canceled one of my appointments and I went out in the sun for an hour.
	And I just, it was transformative.
	Yeah, it's interesting.
	I think we forget that we're supposed to be plants like that, you know?
	Yeah.
	Or that we're part, because are humans part plants too, do you think?
	No, no.
	Although the microbiome has a lot of plants and it's, I guess it's part of our body and it's a plant, I suppose.
	But we are definitely a zoonotic species rather than a plant species.
	Dang.
	Yeah, sometimes I guess I feel like a plant.
	Or I don't know.
	If I sit by a window, I feel good.
	You know, if somebody comes up and smells me, if I smell good, I feel good, I guess.
	So that's kind of like a flower, maybe.
	I don't know.
	Maybe I'm losing my mind.
	Good to see you, man.
	You too?
	Yeah, you look great.
	You look amazing.
	Well, I feel pretty good, man.
	I'm just been staying pretty busy.
	I'm trying to think of what's been going on.
	Have you been in Nashville?
	Yeah, I've been over there a decent amount, you know.
	I couldn't believe how that is growing there.
	Yeah.
	And there's like 20 cranes above that city.
	They must have all the cranes from everywhere in the United States there.
	Yeah, it's been busy.
	I mean, even since I just moved there like three years ago, it's like I'll go down streets now and everything's changing.
	It's really nice.
	One of the things I like best there, I have the best neighbors there.
	My neighbors are really nice.
	And it still has a really small town.
	It has a small town vibe.
	Like you couldn't cheat on your wife there.
	That's what I tell people.
	You could not do it.
	I mean, I think a lot of people have tried, but you could.
	It's just, there's too much.
	It still has like that, a little bit of that southern gossip vibe, you know?
	Do you have like a little house there?
	Yeah.
	I got me a little house in a neighborhood.
	It's pretty normal.
	Nothing too fancy.
	I mean, it's a nice home, but it's nothing like, I don't have like a water slide or anything, you know, or anything like that.
	Or like axe.
	Yeah, I don't have axe throwing.
	But it's been good, man.
	It's been a nice change of pace.
	I feel a little bit more connected to just like regular society because I think in LA, it's like a, it's just a different universe out here than like regular cities or towns in America for sure.
	And there's so many people here.
	You know, I think people start to feel a little bit, I don't want to say expendable, but it's like some people, you know, you're not going to see them ever again.
	So there's like a different amount of value sometimes to the interaction that you have to put into it, you know?
	Like in a smaller community, you have to have – you have to create a level of probably more respect for people and stuff and like – whereas in a city, you're just going to – Yeah, I remember who was there's a writer for the New Yorker.
	I'm trying to remember his name, but he's kind of a philosopher.
	And he was talking about the, that there's a formula, actually, that, you know, people are rude in big cities because the chance of them ever running into you again is more remote.
	Whereas if you live in a small town, I've lived in Montgomery, Alabama, which is really a small town, and Hainville, Alabama.
	And then I lived in Deadwood, South Dakota, and, you know, a couple of other small towns in my life.
	And everybody's nice.
	And when you're driving down the road in your pickup truck, everybody who passes you on the road waves their hand like that.
	But he was saying, he was telling this story that Mother Teresa, when she came to New York, she tried to start one of her little monasteries to take care of the poor in New York.
	And that they eventually ended up closing it because they didn't want to put an elevator in the place.
	And they said, no, we'll just carry the sick people up the stairs ourselves.
	I love that idea.
	Yeah, but in New York, the public health agencies wouldn't let them do it.
	So they said, okay, we're leaving.
	But she, at one point, Mayor Koch had a heart attack.
	Mayor Koch?
	Yeah.
	Ed Koch was a, he was the mayor of New York for long, long-term mayor, and he had a heart attack and he nearly died.
	And she went to visit him in his hospital bed, which he thought was a great kindness because you know she's a catholic and he's a jewish mayor and it just was a you know it was kind of a spiritual act but when she was up there she asked him can you give me a parking place in front of my uh in front of my building and uh as a joker no she wanted a parking place but
	it kind of mother teresa well of course you would give her a parking place if you got oh there he is there he is with mother teresa that's hilarious so uh but she you know it's just the idea that she had an angle you know once you go to new york you always got to have an angle yeah and maybe it is you're just like and i always feel like l a is kind of like an air it always feels like the whole city feels like a little bit like an airport to me it's like i feel like i never leave the airport here like it just the whole it just it feels
	like this thoroughfare of just people going in and out you know yeah um sometimes i start to feel like america starts to feel like that sometimes i think it starts to feel to a lot of people like um it almost feels like a shell company sometimes like a shopping mall yeah or like it feels like an llc for like big business it starts to sometimes feel like an llc for like big business yeah does that make any sense that makes a lot of sense i mean i think that's what it's becoming and one of the things that
	like i i'm talking about a lot now is this um you know the this housing price i housing prices you're saying yeah you know what i was um i tried the monsanto case in san francisco with a big team of attorneys and we tried three cases in a row so that we had about 20 000 cases and the way that you know the this kind of uh uh multi-state litigation and the case was that they were it was poisonous
	right yeah it was it was causing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma okay so we had enough science to prove that it could cause on it did it could cause non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and then we had we ended up having 50,000 people who had gotten non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and but the way that you try the case you try them one at a time until if you win three or four in a row then the company says then Monsanto says okay now we know what the value of the case so the first case we got 289 million yeah
	I just saw this brought that up wow the second case we got um and so that was one client and there's that was one that was uh Dwayne Johnson who uh not the rock you're not talking about him not the rock this was an African-American school superintendent he you know his job was to spray the weeds on the property and keep the mow the lawn and do that on a school public school and he was he had a backpack
	um uh sprayer and it leaked all the time and he began getting lesions on his back and he called up monsanto he called him three times and said could this be from the because it says safe as aspirin nothing could happen to you and it has pictures it had pictures on the label of people spraying their weeds wearing like Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt so it was implying that you don't have to take any protection with this stuff because it's so
	safe wow oh he thought he felt like it was coming from that from the and it turned out to be non-odulent lymphoma it was precancerous lesions and but they would never return his phone call and they knew it and they just didn't want to you know so they they uh they sandbagged him and he um and and he he was the sweetest guy when we got him on the sand he was married to this beautiful uh hispanic woman they had fallen in love
	the first time they saw each other at community college and they had this wonderful marriage and he couldn't sleep in the bed with her anymore because he had so many lesions on his body and you know it was just he wouldn't go in the swimming pool because he you know if anybody saw him in the pool they would think they were going to get a disease so his life was it was just so miserable and the jury loves him they gave him 280 million 289 million and then the next one i forgot we we got i
	i think we got around 300 million the second the third one we asked for it was a couple who were both gardeners home gardeners and they brought their dog with them to home garden they had a labrador retriever the labrador died of non-hodgin's foam what he got at the same time they did the couple both got it the same time and the dog got it the dog died first and then um the uh you know then they were uh they were really sick we
	asked the jury for a billion dollar and we had a big argument about it you know what do you ask the jury because you don't want to ask them for too much because then they think you're overreaching and they may punish you okay oh with the one guy who was arguing doing the closing argument a lawyer called brent wisner very young lawyer um but really brilliant and he uh and we were all saying you should ask him for 300 million that's what the other juries were paying us and he said i'm gonna ask him for a billion i feel like the jury likes
	us they came back with 2.2 billion we asked them for a billion yeah and uh so they were pissed at monsanto they were so angry because we also showed that that's the lawyer right there who just walked by brent wisner wow um god i got to pick up some monsanto on the way home yeah you got to go to law school one or the other man i gotta you know i gotta get a case like this anyway i i didn't mean to go off on this but what i was saying is
	when we were trying these cases we were trying one after the other so i ended up spending like the better part of a year in san francisco and every morning when i was in san francisco before court i would go down to the courthouse to the uh to the gym In Union Square.
	Union Square is the center of San Francisco and it's the center of commerce.
	It has all the big, you know, American, iconic American stores like Macy's and Bloomingdale's and Nordstrom and Gap and Old Navy and Levi.
	And then it has all the foreign stores like Prada and De La Valley and Gucci and Fair Maze, yeah, Ferragamo and Burberry and all of those.
	So it's like Fifth Avenue.
	It is the Fifth Avenue of, and people come from Asia all over to do their shopping there.
	So, you know, I went back three weeks ago and it was astonishing.
	Those houses are or those stores are all boarded up.
	Every one of them is closed.
	Wow.
	And they're closed because all of the homeless on the street making the chaos that's going on in the street in San Francisco makes people feel unsafe.
	Well, yes, some guy started a pop-up bar.
	Do you see that?
	A guy started a bar.
	Where, oh, a homeless bar.
	See if you can bring that up, Jack.
	Yep, I got it.
	Yeah, look at this.
	I mean, I think you're starting to see, yeah, people are like, well, I'm so homeless.
	There's obviously no zoning going on.
	So why don't I open up a Dave and Busters type of place?
	Denver Homeless Camp features pop-up bar.
	Yeah, it's wacky.
	Let's see, a decked out open air.
	There you go.
	See, look, you can see the bottles right there.
	They have a kind of VI, I wouldn't call it VIP, but I would call it maybe H-I-V-I-P.
	It looks a little dicey over there.
	Sorry.
	And I shouldn't have said that, man.
	You shouldn't have said that.
	But, you know, a lot of people have been ill.
	But yeah, this is, I mean, people are just going to start starting businesses, you know?
	Yeah.
	Like, I wonder if that's what he's doing.
	Is the tent where the owner lives?
	I think the tent, I don't know.
	That could be the pop-up Speakeasy, which features lounge chairs, umbrellas, and astro turf, has taken over the sidewalk at 23rd and Champa Streets, which the city's growing homeless population has turned into an encampment.
	I love this kind of stuff.
	So I – That's what the Denver Police Patrol Division chief said.
	Anyway, yeah, I think, but at least it's evolving.
	It's not just homeless people just being homeless.
	At least I think you're going to start to see mom and pop businesses out there.
	Here's what, you know, my son actually, because I had a lot of assumptions about why people are homeless.
	And it's, you know, there's 525,000 homeless people in this country.
	And but 50% of the unsheltered homeless are in California.
	Okay.
	California only has 12% of the population, but it's 50% of the unsheltered homeless.
	And unsheltered homeless means homeless that don't have a place to sleep at night.
	Yeah, it's people who are on the sidewalks.
	Like freelance, yeah.
	Right.
	Or they're in shelter.
	You know, they're.
	Yeah.
	Like free range.
	Yeah.
	So here's my assumptions that homelessness is linked to drug addiction.
	It's linked to mental illness.
	It's linked to poverty.
	And that people are in California.
	One of the reasons there's so many homeless in California is that everybody knows that San Francisco has this very generous kind of giving attitude towards social services.
	And so if you're homeless anywhere else in the country, you, you know, you'd like to move to good weather.
	Yeah.
	You know, you don't want to be in New York sleeping on a crate in the middle of winter when it's snowing.
	Get on a greyhound and come out to San Francisco and, you know, and celebrate.
	And I also had heard this, which turns out not to be true, that in some cities like Dallas or Nashville, if you are homeless, instead of putting you in jail, they give you a bus ticket to San Francisco.
	Oh, wow.
	So I don't know if it's true or not.
	But anyway, so my son turned me on to this writer called, my son Connor, who you know, Matthew Desmond.
	And Matthew Desmond has written these books on homelessness, and he's done these studies on homelessness.
	And in San Francisco, they actually went around and interviewed thousands and thousands of homeless people.
	And what they found is that the people who are homeless in San Francisco are from San Francisco and they're from California.
	They didn't come from somewhere else.
	So it's not a lot of people yet bust in or transplants or whatever.
	Right.
	He also says this, that it has very little to do with drug addiction.
	You know, the state like West Virginia has much more drug addiction than San Francisco, and yet it doesn't have homeless problems.
	West Virginia has much worse poverty problem than San Francisco.
	San Francisco, actually, I think it's the richest city in the country.
	I may be wrong, but I think it's the richest.
	And it doesn't.
	So, and in terms of mental illness, you have to assume they're the same.
	There's no reason.
	But also Detroit.
	Detroit has much higher drug addiction, much higher poverty, and it doesn't have a homeless problem.
	And what Matthew Desmond says is the reason for homeless, one reason, one reason is housing prices.
	It all has to do with housing prices.
	In California, we have the highest housing price in the country.
	Here in LA, where we are, the average home costs $815,000, which means you have to earn $250,000 to be able to pay for that.
	And why do they get so high?
	Is it demand that makes them so high?
	I'm going to tell you this.
	The average home in our country, two years ago, was $215,000.
	Today it's $400,000.
	And the interest rates have gone from 3% to 7%.
	So, kids today, like your kids and my kids, are never going to buy a home.
	You know, it used to be.
	So, if they're not going to buy a home, yeah, the median price of homes sold by realtors has risen sharply since the beginning of the pandemic.
	And here's why this is happening: there's three big companies, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard.
	These are the biggest companies, you know.
	And they have a monopoly on a lot of the housing market, right?
	Well, what they do, they own everything, including they own each other.
	So it's really just one big company.
	And BlackRock, that it has $10 trillion under management.
	The GDP of California is three or $10 trillion.
	The GDP of California is $3 trillion.
	And so they're three times the size of California.
	California economy is the fifth largest in the world of all nations.
	So when you have that much control, can't you just make your own universe?
	Well, so they own, those three companies own 88% of the S ⁇ P 500.
	So they basically just own everything.
	And now what they've decided is they want to own every single family home in our country.
	So they're that and they're now on track.
	There's now on trajectory.
	If we continue it on this trajectory, they will own the corporations will own 60% of the single-family homes in our country.
	And they pay nothing for money.
	So they're like, if you're the richest person in the country, BlackRock's cost of money is 30% lower than you.
	So they're competing against our kids and your kids.
	Why is it so different?
	They want it.
	Now they want to own everything.
	Why is the percentage of the cost of the value of borrowing?
	Oh, because their credit is so impeccable.
	Oh, I see.
	They have like 900.
	Yeah.
	So they got the better than the best credit rating.
	I think I got 670 or something.
	I don't know.
	What's okay?
	I don't know.
	Yeah.
	But isn't that like privatized communism or something?
	That's what it feels like.
	Well, yeah, it's like socialism for the rich.
	And, you know, this is barbaric, merciless, ruthless, savage Catholicism for the poor.
	Yeah.
	Do you think there's some trickle-down effect of that that makes people feel like, yeah, I don't know.
	I mean, I was talking, we had this guy, John Vervecky on, and he talks a lot about meaning and stuff like that, you know?
	And he said that people feeling like they're part of a country or they have like a part of a home, you know, part of a group.
	It creates a lot of meaning for them, you know, just in their life.
	And I think I notice even with my own, like, probably like our parents and stuff, I think a lot of them were very like pro-America and like, you know, they had family members that died for our country and they, you know, it meant something to them to be part of America.
	And then now I think a lot of them see this kind of unfolding or like kind of the flag kind of like fraying at the stitching, you know, and I think it's very scary because if you don't have, if you start to feel like you don't have your country, then I think then you start to feel like, okay, it's every man for himself in a way.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah.
	And, you know, and you're absolutely right.
	There's a poll that came out three weeks ago that showed that in 2013, kids between 18 and 35 years old, that 85% of young Americans said they were proud of the United States.
	And then another poll, the same poll came out three weeks ago that showed that only 17% of kids say that they're proud to be, you know, really devastating.
	But one of the things that you were saying, I think, is true, that if you own a home, you care more about your community.
	You care about the schools.
	You care about the police.
	You care about the hospitals.
	You take care of your garden.
	You make it look nice.
	Yeah, you might be more likely to help your neighbor.
	Exactly, because you're there.
	You're part of the community.
	And turning us all into, you know, and you also are a participant in the capitalist system because if you own a home, you have equity.
	Which means, let's say you want to start a business, even like a tiny business, like buying a sewing machine.
	Yeah, doing sewing.
	What else can you do?
	You can do, or, you know, if you want to start a restaurant.
	Some corn, like caramel corn.
	Exactly.
	Something like that.
	Great idea.
	Thanks.
	But you can get a loan on your house.
	You can get a loan on your house.
	And so you have an entree into the capitalist system.
	Yeah.
	And you make it, because then you're always, everything's possible.
	You could sit down with your family at night and be like, hey, mom and dad are thinking about doing this business.
	What do you guys think?
	And maybe your son's proud of you and it creates excitement in your house, you know?
	And even if, like, I remember my mom went to law school and she couldn't do it because she had too many kids and it was too much work.
	But I was still always proud of her that she tried to do it.
	You know, like, I think, yeah, having the financial ability to do stuff like that is just so important, man.
	And then otherwise you feel, yeah, if you're just a renter, if everybody's a renter, you don't care.
	Nobody, you just feel like you're like a renter by force.
	Like you don't even have a choice to be a renter, you know?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's kind of scary.
	How do we battle against that?
	And is it something that a president can do or a political official can do?
	Or it's something that, how do you, how do we turn reverse that?
	Well, I don't know.
	I mean, there's parts of their of what they're doing that, yeah, a president can do.
	For example, they own all the packing companies.
	So there's only four meat packing companies.
	And those companies have a stranglehold on farmers and consumers.
	And they should have been prosecuted a long time ago for antitrust.
	But because BlackRock is so powerful, nobody will touch them.
	Wow.
	And so.
	That's a dark arts, huh?
	Yeah.
	I mean, they're just, you know, what they're doing is they're just, they're just strip mining the wealth and equity from the American middle class.
	And you see that, you know.
	Yeah, it's sad.
	And how do we, how do you, who is it?
	Who is BlackRock?
	The head of it is the CEO is a guy called Larry Fink.
	He's also on the board of directors of the World Economic Forum.
	And the World Economic Forum, you know, meets in Davos.
	It's a billionaires boys club.
	They meet in Davos.
	They meet in Davos every year, and they try to figure out what their plans are for the rest of humanity.
	Are they greedy?
	I would say they have a bad reputation for very self-serving policies.
	Their big policy is called the Great Reset.
	And what here's Klaus Schwab says famously, he says, under the Great Reset, you will own nothing, but you will be happy.
	So that's what they believe.
	So they do have a belief.
	Their belief is that you will own nothing, but you'll be happy.
	All of us will own nothing, but they will, because they will own everything.
	And they may be a little happier.
	Who knows?
	Wow.
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	So how do we stay positive?
	How do you, what do you do to stay positive when things like this come into your brain?
	Because I think a lot of people, it, I mean, this is why you have people that start to go to conspiracy theories.
	This is why you have people that start to look like for alternate, people are looking for hope, really.
	A lot of times in a conspiracy theory, people are also looking for hope.
	They're looking for something that shows them that something that's out of what everything feels like could be possible.
	Right.
	Um, do you, uh, Do you consider yourself a conspiracy theorist?
	No.
	But I consider myself open to curiosity.
	You know, I think, yeah, I consider myself open to curiosity.
	I think it would be silly not to listen to possibility.
	And I think some of the, it's sometimes it's the curious guy who at first people are like, this guy's bananas, who ends up being bananas foster, you know, which is good if you've had it or not.
	Yeah, I haven't.
	Yeah, it's pretty good.
	I'll say that.
	Dude, one of my, I used to work at this, at this restaurant, and one of my co-workers, he's like, man, I hate seeing bananas foster on the menu because I was raised in a foster home and it makes me sad.
	Isn't that ridiculous?
	Well, yeah.
	Like just to equate like bananas foster and being raised in a foster home.
	But I was like, but he still had some every now and then and I think it made him feel pretty good.
	But yeah, I think.
	What did you ask me about?
	It is.
	I was asking about conspiracy theory.
	Yeah, I don't think, well, I think since to me, since the new, like the news started to get compromised, it feels like a few years ago.
	And one thing I do like using is that word compromise.
	That's kind of like a conspiracy theories word, you know.
	But I feel like when I was when I was a child, it felt like the news was real and it was like, this is the news and it was honest.
	I don't know if it was.
	That could have been me romancing it too, but it felt like that.
	And then at a certain point, which feels like about maybe 10 years ago, the news started to become more different.
	Did you notice that in your life?
	Yeah, I did.
	And I watched it happen because originally the like the news, you know, they going back to when they invented radio in 1928, they passed a law that was called the Fairness Doctrine.
	It was called the Communications Act.
	And they said they did a bunch of things.
	They said nobody could monopolize the news.
	So now there's five companies that own all the TV, all the radio, all the newspapers, and most of the internet content providers.
	And they didn't want that to happen because they thought then, you know, these large corporations will control what we're thinking because they're going to control the information flow.
	And that's bad for democracy.
	They said, you know, you can own no more than eight radio stations and you couldn't own a newspaper and a radio station or a television station in the same.
	That sounds like a good choice.
	That sounds like very, that seems fair to me.
	Yeah, they wanted a diversity of ownership.
	It was called the fairness doctrine.
	But they also said if you're using the public airwaves, which means radio or television, that if You make a statement, you need to give the other side a chance to respond.
	And you also need to put the news on every day at times when Americans are likely to be at home to see it.
	So they have, in order to like NBC did not own that airwave.
	It had a license to use it, and it could only use it if it benefited the public interest.
	The way that it did that is it said, okay, we are going to create a news division.
	The news divisions always lost money, but they were willing to pour money in because it was the only way they could hold on to their license.
	And they made a guy, explain that part to me.
	Sorry.
	That's what I thought.
	See, what they could say is you can use the airwave to make money by entertaining people, right?
	But you have to tell the real news, the authentic news, the important news that affects policy decisions that Americans have to make about their government.
	And you have to do it every day at a time when all Americans are going to be home, are likely to be home.
	So that's why we had a six o'clock news hour.
	It's also radio stations.
	If you probably, I don't know if you remember this or not, but it used to be even the top 40 music stations had a news break like every 15 minutes.
	There was a short news break where they would tell you the news.
	Paul Harvey, remember him?
	Exactly.
	Good day.
	Yeah.
	Exactly.
	Well, they had to do that.
	That was a legal obligation.
	Oh, wow.
	And the news divisions were separate from the rest of the operations, and they were untouchable.
	So they'd bring some, you know, really credible figure like Newton Minnow or Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley and John Chancellor, these guys who were total integrity people.
	And everybody, the most credible man, the most believed credible man in America was Walter Cronkite.
	And so, and all of those newscasters were people of extraordinary integrity.
	Then what happened is Ronald Reagan, when he ran for president in 1980, he had the support of the big studio heads in California because he'd been the California governor.
	They wanted to abolish the fairness doctrine so they could get their hands.
	It was like consolidate the entire media under monopoly control.
	And he had the Christian right.
	And the Christian broadcasting stations did not want to do, you know, the fairness.
	They didn't want to show the other side because they didn't want to show Satan's side of the argument, right?
	So they all wanted to get rid of the fairness doctrine.
	And so Reagan came in and appointed a guy, I think his name was Tom Wheeler, to run the FCC, the Federal Communication, and they threw out the fairness doctrine.
	And at that point, you saw this huge consolidation where they started buying up everything.
	You also saw the news divisions were told, okay, you know, we don't really need you to have integrity anymore.
	We need you to make money.
	So the news divisions became profit centers.
	And so you saw more and more news that was not really news.
	It was, you know, about Brad and J-Lo and it was entertainment.
	It was stuff to get eyeballs to make people and violence and war.
	And so you saw this deterioration where from highly credible people on the news to people that you have today who are just propagandists for the government and for the pharmaceutical companies.
	Muppets, man.
	Yeah, the people, people turn into Muppets.
	But so whenever they so the, it was Christian activism that made them end up making them repeal that?
	It was a combination of things.
	The Christian broadcasters, for good reason, you know, they had good reason.
	They didn't want to tell because like, for example.
	Yeah, give me an example.
	I'll give you an example.
	NBC, I think it was either NBC or ABC was having advertisements, were selling advertisements for Mustang, which is the automobile.
	Oh, yeah.
	That stand.
	Exactly.
	At that point, it was the biggest gas-gustling automobile.
	And so an asthma society of America.
	They hated Mustangs?
	Yeah, they didn't like Mustangs.
	Oh, come on, dude.
	If you have asthma, if you get a Mustang, you got a chance with the ladies, I feel like.
	But if you just show up with asthma, dude, it's a real.
	Yeah, it's not a good selling point.
	Yeah, asthma has one speed, dude.
	You know?
	Sorry, go on.
	So they wanted to do an ad saying Mustangs are bad because they're making us have asthma attacks.
	And the network didn't want to do it.
	They said, no, you know, because they want to sell Mustangs.
	We want to sell Mustangs.
	So they told the asthma society, you can't, you know, we're not going to let you, we're not going to sell you ad space.
	So they sued.
	They went to the Supreme Court.
	The Supreme Court said, you got it.
	You got to allow them to stop both sides.
	And they upheld the fairness doctrine.
	So if you applied that to Christian broadcasting and said, you got, you're using a public airwave, you know, if there's atheists out there who want to give their side of the story, maybe you'll have to do that.
	So they didn't want to.
	Wow.
	They didn't want to do that.
	So they were, you know, and you can see the rationale.
	Yeah.
	And then also that leans into more like towards, yeah, things being able to create monopolies then, it seems like, you know, yeah, well, the monopoly, exactly.
	And now we are where we are today.
	Well, you're sad.
	Every city you go to, like I go to a city, if you go as a comedian, you go to do radio sometimes before.
	And, you know, it used to be you had kind of a local radio station and now all of them are most of them are kind of clear channel, you know?
	And I'm not denouncing clear channel, I don't, but they're all like usually like part of a bigger group, you know?
	And you can't find like a local newspaper anymore.
	Like that used to be like part of the community, like getting yourself in the newspaper.
	You would get like a little trophy for, you know, you didn't do nothing really.
	Maybe you found a missing person or something and they would put you in the newspaper or something, you know, but it was like you kind of got to see like everything that was going on in your community, like baseball scores for little league games, I think things that made you feel attached to your environment, you know, and they don't have that anymore.
	It's like everything's just too big now to get it to fit into like smaller communities, you know?
	Or maybe you get a paper like once a week now or something.
	You know, it's just different.
	No, you know, I agree 100% with that.
	I think that's, you know, and I think there's a real appetite for local news.
	People want to know what the, you know, what happened in the baseball.
	I mean, like, you know, I grew up reading about, you know, kids who I was playing, you know, sports with.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And you'd read about them in the local papers.
	They were heroes to you.
	I would say you had local heroes.
	You know, it's like, yeah, now it just feels like they want all your heroes to be like from the Marvel universe or you're not even allowed to have a hero anymore, you know?
	And I don't know, maybe I'm, maybe I'm romancing that a little bit, but I definitely notice it when I go home.
	I can't find like the local news and see kind of what's going on.
	And then, so then you're not attached to it.
	You don't really.
	Where do you consider home Nashville?
	I'm from Louisiana, from Covington, Louisiana.
	So, but Covington, is that in the Delta or is up north?
	No.
	Covington is south of the delta.
	It's kind of like, let me see, southwest of the Delta.
	Yeah.
	Covington is over there.
	We had, I'll tell you something neat about Covington.
	Well, we have the tallest statue of Ronald Reagan, and you're welcome to come see it whenever you want.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	And Michael Landon was supposed to come there one time, but he couldn't make it.
	Michael Landon?
	He was supposed to stop in.
	He didn't make it.
	So that's a big selling point for the.
	Yeah, Michael Landon was almost here, I guess.
	Look at that statue though, buddy.
	Oh, I can't tell how big it is.
	It's bigger than the trees, though.
	Yeah, it's 10 feet tall.
	Or it could be, somebody said it's even 12 feet tall, but I think somebody had a bad ruler on them.
	But also, Lee Harvey Oswald went to our middle school there for a little bit.
	Oh, yeah.
	And what else?
	The Tulane Primate Facility is there, and they tested the polio vaccine.
	Actually, they made the polio vaccine that ended up giving cancer to a lot of women to like cervical cancer.
	It had a virus and a monkey virus in it called SV40.
	Yeah, that's where they tested it at.
	And some of the monkeys got out when I was a kid, and we got to get out of YMCA summer camp to help them look for them, which is pretty crazy when you think about it.
	Is that true?
	Yeah.
	They had a Kenny Rogers Rochers and we're out there wrangling chimps with a couple of local police.
	Wow.
	Pretty cool, huh?
	But anyway.
	Well, there's actually, you know, there's a book.
	You go to the escape right there.
	Oh, wow.
	There's a book called Mary's Monkey.
	Yeah.
	And it's about the, you know, the.
	Dr. Mary's Monkey.
	Is that it?
	Maybe it's just Mary's Monkey.
	Dr. Mary's Monkey.
	Dr. Mary's Monkey.
	And it's about the secret lab.
	It's about the Kennedy assassination, but it's about the Tulane lab.
	And there are people involved in that lab who were involved with Lee R. V. Oswald.
	Did you go down a lot of rabbit holes ever, like kind of searching just about information about?
	Well, you know, I feel like assassinations and stuff.
	I'm really evidence-based.
	So I don't make any presumptions, but I read everything.
	Yeah.
	And if it's that book is actually very, very well researched and very interesting.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I think, I don't know if I've read all of it, but I've definitely read a decent amount of it.
	Man, yeah, congratulations since I saw you last.
	You were running for election.
	Yeah.
	That's cool, man.
	You didn't see that coming.
	Yeah.
	I don't know, because I almost think I asked you about it.
	We'll have to go back and see if there was a clip where I asked you if you would at some point.
	Because I just thought you were so well spoken.
	I didn't have any intention.
	Was it hard to, did you have to convince your family that it was okay for you to run?
	Well, the one person I had to convince was my wife.
	My kids were like, I actually went up to Boston and I had three boys who were in Boston at that point.
	And I went out and took them out to lunch.
	And they were like, they weren't like, okay, go get them, Dad.
	They were like, okay, this is what you, you know, buy the ticket, take the ride, you know, and they, they were not, you know, I think now they're much happier about it.
	Yeah.
	Because the way it's kind of turned out.
	But they didn't know what was going to happen at that point.
	And then Cheryl, who you know, it took, she took a lot of convincing.
	But what happened is I was, you know, I thought at one point because they were censoring me.
	In fact, you got, you know, we got censored.
	Our episode got taken down.
	That's right.
	And then miraculously got put up again.
	How did that happen?
	Like a month ago.
	Oh, it came back up on YouTube.
	One of the episodes that had been taken down came back up on YouTube.
	I mean, it had been gone.
	Bobby, it had been gone.
	And then it just showed back up.
	That's weird.
	Well, we sued them.
	And I doubt if that's the reason.
	Sued YouTube?
	Yeah, they're still taking our stuff down.
	Wow.
	Good for you.
	That's cool when you're a lawyer because then you can sue somebody if you need to.
	That's a great idea.
	You guys actually made a wager whether or not that episode would be taken down RFK.
	He said it would be, and Theo bet him that it wouldn't.
	Oh, dang.
	How much is it for?
	Yeah, how much was it for?
	We have the clip.
	One sec.
	All right.
	It's going to get interesting.
	We'll see if anybody's getting paid this week right here, brother.
	God, this could be bad.
	Well, whatever it is, Bobby, we'll donate to your campaign, okay?
	How have campaign donations been?
	Oh, you have the question?
	You know, we were at the Eric Clapton concert last night.
	Let's play a question that came in actually right here from a guy for you, Bobby.
	This is live.
	This is not live.
	None of this is live, and this question isn't live.
	This is live.
	Because I want to make sure you have an option of not playing this podcast.
	Video.
	No, I think we're okay.
	Yeah.
	I mean, we, you know, I'm generally curious, and I think.
	I'm worried about your career, Tale.
	That's why.
	Oh, thanks.
	Well, the good, I feel like I own my own career until, like, I don't need a Hollywood career, you know, but it's definitely, I worry about, like, my career of, like, I guess, maybe, like, YouTube canceling us or people saying that we can't do this anymore.
	You know, that's the scary part.
	Is this on YouTube?
	Yeah, this will be on YouTube.
	So, but our last one stayed up.
	Okay, well, let's just make a bet.
	I'll bet you five bucks.
	Inflation's happened a lot.
	Let's make it 10. We were ahead of the curve.
	Big question right here from somebody that came in.
	But anyway, last night you asked about donations.
	We got, yeah, we were at Eric Clapton, and there's Steve Stills, Eric Clapton, and we did that at a private home in Brentwood, and we got $2.2 million.
	We're doing well on donations.
	How was it?
	Because you were kind of like looked at as a guy that was like a nutcase by some people, right?
	Yeah, not by me.
	I thought you were definitely curious and active, you know, and I knew you as a person, so I knew that like you seem like a, like as normal as a guy could be to me, you know?
	Were you surprised when people started to get on board, though, with you?
	Like, cause I remember I listened to you.
	I mean, I listened to you on Rogan and I thought it was one of his best episodes.
	I thought it was just, I remember you thanking him for letting him letting you speak, right?
	And it was like, you know, I remember just listening and I just got a clear layout of exactly kind of where you'd been and how you ended up where you were, you know?
	And I thought it was just awesome.
	And I thought that was such a great interview.
	Did things start to turn after that?
	Or when did things kind of start to turn, do you feel like?
	The big turn for me was a podcast I did before that called All In.
	You know that podcast?
	It's David Sachs and it's a bunch of tech people who are leaders in the kind of tech, Bitcoin community.
	They're a San Francisco-based financializer.
	David Friedberg, okay.
	And it's very, very popular.
	I mean, I can't tell you how popular.
	The reason I know how popular it is is almost every day somebody comes up to me and says, I saw you on that.
	Wow.
	No matter where I am in the country, and it's a very weird demographic because it's not, it's all kinds of people.
	Like it'll be like an old lady and, you know, young college kids.
	That's amazing.
	I'm about to check this out.
	All in with Shamaf, Jason Sachs, and Friedberger-Freidberg.
	And so, you know, I went on there and there's four guys and they all kind of grilled me.
	Yeah.
	And then, you know, then Rogan brought me on.
	Megan Kelly was really good with me.
	She had me on about three times when, you know, nobody would let me on.
	And then Fox started letting me on a lot.
	And so I could go on my, you know, the thing is that I get a lot of eyeballs when I go on.
	So they, I think they, this is what they told me because I went and met with their editorial board that, you know, it was that I was getting more eyeballs than any other guest.
	Wow.
	On Fox.
	Yeah, on Fox.
	And I think the same as CNN, but CNN won't let me on.
	The only guy who's let me on CNN was Michael Shmurkanish.
	And it was a very short interview, but he got in a lot of trouble for it.
	Wow.
	So you're running for, you're running right now, you're running for president.
	Yeah.
	With the Democratic, under the Democratic Party, right?
	At the moment.
	Okay.
	And so the, is it usual, is it normal that someone is able to run against the incumbent?
	Just, I want to make this clear from audience because some audience, I hear words a lot of times and I don't know what they mean, right?
	So like the incumbent is the guy who's already in office, right?
	So if a president has already done one term, then he's the incumbent as he goes up to do the second term, right?
	Yeah.
	And he has to run against someone who's submitted by the other party.
	Well, he ultimately has to run about the other party is going to nominate somebody to run against them.
	So the Republicans will nominate somebody to run against him.
	But if you're a Democrat, if you're popular within your own party, a lot of times you won't have a challenger from within your own party.
	So you'll only have to go to the prize fight.
	You don't have to fight all the Balookas who are coming after you.
	And who determines if they have to fight all the Balookas?
	Well, it would be me.
	I would run against them.
	But my father ran against Linda Johnson in 68. Lyndon Johnson was an incumbent Democratic president, and my father challenged him.
	And ultimately, Johnson withdrew.
	And he pulled out of the way at Rays.
	And then my father won the primaries.
	And he was killed.
	My father was killed on the night of the last night of the primaries, so June 6th.
	He won the last primaries, California, South Dakota, and a couple of others.
	And he was killed that night.
	My uncle Ted Kennedy ran in 1980 against Jimmy Carter, who was a president of his own party.
	So, yeah, it's not uncommon for people to run against a president of their own party.
	And, you know, I've had a long friendship with Biden.
	I've known President Biden for at least 40 years.
	Oh, wow.
	And, you know, he has a statue, a bust of my father behind him in the Oval Office.
	Any picture that you have of Biden, there's a bust of my father you can call it.
	And there's five members of my family who are working in the administration.
	In the Biden administration, yeah.
	Wow.
	Different, you know, different ways.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And so do you think he'll get the nomination from his party for the 2024?
	Well, I think I could beat him.
	And yeah, You can see in that middle one, the second one from the right up there, that one, there's a boss of my father behind him.
	Wow, that's awesome.
	That's so cool, man.
	That'd be cool if we're my dad.
	Yeah, it's wonderful.
	Do you think that he will get the...
	I think I can beat him if they give me a fair fight.
	Right.
	Okay.
	But before that, do you think that he'll get the nomination?
	Well, I think I could get the nomination if they gave me a fair fight.
	I see.
	Do you think that you're currently getting a fair fight?
	No.
	Why?
	Well, because they're doing, you know, the Democratic Party is supposed to be neutral.
	They're not supposed to choose favorites, but they actually endorsed him a week after he declared.
	And his campaign is being run out of the Democratic Party office.
	Which seems like convoluted, huh?
	Yeah, well, it's not.
	It's a conflict.
	The party should be separate from the president, even if they're of the same.
	They're supposed to be.
	Even if they're both Democratic.
	Yeah, the party should be neutral and say, look, we're going to be the referees in this fight.
	It's like if you went to a football game and the referee in the game was wearing the same uniform as the guys you were playing against.
	Right.
	You say, hey, hey.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So that's what they're doing.
	And what they've done is they've taken the states that voted most strongly against Biden last time around, and they've said, if anybody visits those, if I visit those states, then no vote in that state will count in the election.
	So if I go to New Hampshire, which I did, any vote that I get in New Hampshire will not count.
	Any vote?
	For me.
	So if I beat Biden in New Hampshire and I win all the delegates, those delegates will not be allowed into the convention.
	But how can they just say that?
	Isn't there like a democratic process that overrides that?
	You would think, but actually, the party makes its own rules.
	And there was Bernie Sanders, they did the same thing to Bernie Sanders.
	Yeah, they cooked me, man.
	And he sued them and said, you know, you guys rigged the game against me.
	You fixed it.
	And the court said, yes, they did fix it.
	But actually, it's a private club and they're allowed to fix it.
	They can make up any rules they want.
	They can do anything they want.
	So, see, this just leans so much more into like this stuff that people feel like their vote doesn't matter.
	Court concedes DNC had the right to rig primaries against Sanders.
	And that's Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who DNC chaired Debbie Wasserman Schultz for violating the DNC charter about rigging the Democratic presidential primaries for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders.
	And she's the one who tried to silence me when I testified before Congress a couple of weeks ago.
	Wow.
	And so anyway.
	It just feels like so it feels so dirty at every turn.
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	It feels so dirty at every turn.
	Yeah, I mean, it's bad.
	To me, it's bad for the country right now because so many people think the whole system is rigged.
	Yeah, that's what it feels like, man.
	Because my vote doesn't matter.
	And we should be, I think we should, both parties should be conducting elections that are incredibly fair.
	And everybody looks them and it says, okay, this is a model.
	America's the exemplary democracy for the world.
	Should be.
	And one thing you can say about America is it has fair elections and every vote gets counted.
	Yeah, it's starting to remind me of the articles I would read in the papers of like Venezuela, a lot of the Central American countries where there would be coups and stuff and they would be overriding the process because they thought the elections weren't fair, you know?
	Or, you know, the Soviet Union in the soviet union the communist party they said we're a democracy but the party would pick the candidate and that'd be the only guy you could vote for and that is exactly what they're doing here they're saying they're you know the good they're saying the good new badness we have a democracy but there's only one guy and everybody's got to vote for him but do they have the right to do that because he's the incumbent i understand they have the right to do it within the democratic party process okay
	and then so they you know they're gonna you know uh it's weird what's happening now theo because the press is now turning against president biden so it has been interesting to see some of that huh yeah it's the first time ever i've seen some of the headlines that are you know either bringing like his son's issues into it or um discussing impeachment i'd never seen that before you know yeah in the washington post it um there's a very
	famous journalist called david ignatius who is uh linked to the intelligence community and he kind of speaks for the if you if you you know if you if you want to talk about the deep state yeah david ignatius is the voice of the deep state and he came out and said biden's got to step down and then immediately cnn um published a went uh did a story about all biden's lies and then i think today either washington
	post or new york times oh maureen dowd well if he does a story today about all of uh his lies so that you see these attacks on biden that are that were not happening before right and you know and you wonder what what is what's going on well if he does step down i hope it's not a far step to be honest with you because i don't know if he can handle it you know i think the sad the saddest thing to me is i i feel like i feel like mr biden just isn't healthy
	he doesn't seem like mentally healthy right to me and i don't know it could be that they edit clips to look a certain way he just seems like he's he doesn't seem as healthy as he once was right and so it i feel like to me it's like a bad example that we this is what we do with our old people we put them out it's like this is like a you know somebody we're just using it just i don't know it just seems like a bad example of how to treat other people you know like if this were my father and he were to me what would seem like ailing like mentally just kind
	of either losing his uh composure that he probably once had and it could be dementia capacity his cognitive that's what i'm saying if he were losing it it would just hurt my feelings if they kept wheeling him out there you know but i don't know maybe that's what he wants and we just don't hear that part of it um but how so what is your path in to really get to the presidential nomination for 2024 is there a path for you do you feel like well if president biden steps out you know the decision kind of has to be
	made by october 15th because there's that soon yeah because you'll know before halloween yeah the um october 15th um you you have to start uh qualifying in certain states so that you have to declare whether you're a democrat or an independent or republican yeah and you can't a lot of people think well you can run as a democrat and then if you lose everything then you can just switch to independent
	and run on independent but you can't do that because a lot of states have sore loser laws that make it so that you have to choose early and you can't go you can't come in you know once you've chosen democrat you can't switch independent that's fair because every year they let odell beckham jr join another team right before the super bowl and i feel like it doesn't seem fair to anybody just i get that he's good but it doesn't seem that fair um so when do you have to so but you've already chosen that you're a democrat right i mean you've been a lifelong democrat
	is there a chance that you would run as an independent do you look at that ever like and how do you even evaluate that yeah i mean i i you know if they really shut down the process we're right now you know we're grappling with the dn say trying to get them to do the right thing but if they rig the process so that i can't possibly win which is how it's rigged right now then i would have to look at other options i would have to look at running as you know maybe
	outside of the party or something i don't know exactly what i do i'm hoping that they'll open up the process and let me run um you know we polled this week and i if if i if president biden steps down um i i i have a pretty clear path to the nomination my numbers are better than any other democrats including the vice president kamala harris um so and then uh if he stays in and they give me a you know a fair fight i
	think i can beat him yeah um so wow so it's kind of it's tough to figure out kind of you're kind of just navigating the space huh who's ahead in the national polls well he beats me among democrats in the national polls but if you could get a third of people to switch that were republicans and a third of i read it yeah that's the thing is that those polls aren't looking at the republicans who want to vote for me or the independents okay um if you can't get it run this year
	would you run in the next next one no i are you thinking that far ahead okay you're not no i'm not thinking all about that okay some people say that you are that the republican party like set you up to take do you ever hear did you hear about this yeah i hear that that i'm like a stalking horse for trump and all i can say is you know i don't believe that i'm just asking you i don't believe that well you should ask me i mean you shouldn't do it publicly like you just did but really no no i'm just kidding okay
	no you should ask me yeah yeah but here's the thing here's the problem with that first of all if the democrats make rules that say i cannot win, you know, and then they complain about me running somewhere else.
	It's like, it's like the, you know, it's like a guy who murders his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he's an orphan.
	You know, they're trying to get public sympathy for a problem that they created.
	I hate when I see Bananas Foster on the menu.
	That's how it goes.
	But no, I see what you're saying.
	It's almost like they're playing two cards that are trying to do two different things, but one of them kind of concedes that there's some truth in the other one.
	Yeah, but and then the other thing is that I take more votes from President Trump than I do from President Biden.
	Right.
	So why would that help them?
	Yeah, it's not helping them.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I thought about that.
	When you look at, do you feel like there's do you feel like that the Democratic National Party has treated you fairly like they do every other candidate?
	Do they always try to like, how does that usually work?
	I think what they do, you know, the DNC has a lot of donors.
	Okay.
	The DNC.
	Yeah, the Democratic National Committee.
	And they, you know, and the donors are BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah, the big pharmaceutical company, all the people that I assume, Monsanto, et cetera, they've got $2 billion in their bank accounts, and it comes from those donors.
	And those donors do not want to see me running as the Democratic nominee and spending their money.
	Environmentalists for sure.
	Right.
	And spending their money then to dismantle their very exploited business models.
	And so progressive candidates like me, who challenged, you know, the corporate control of our country, people like Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and me are, you know, told, we don't want you in the party.
	So that's, you know.
	And who do you get an email?
	Do you get a letter?
	It's not a text, huh?
	We just watch what they do with the rules.
	You know, how can they change the rules so that votes for me in New Hampshire don't count?
	Seats taken.
	So it's like, you know, Dennis Kucinich, who's running my campaign, who's ran for president twice himself.
	Dennis Kucinich?
	Yeah, he was the youngest mayor in the country.
	He was the boy mayor of Cleveland.
	You know, they tried to, the mafia tried to kill him when he was shot at him and stuff when he was mayor of Cleveland.
	He's a very, very progressive and man of utter complete integrity.
	But he, you know, he's been around Paula.
	He served, I think, I don't know, six or eight, maybe 10 or 12 terms in Congress.
	He was, and he ran for president twice.
	And he got bullets through his, through his, I think through his living room.
	Wow.
	It's a party.
	Dennis Kucinich.
	So anyway, he said to me, you know, when I was saying, you know, when we were talking about the Democratic Party, he said to me, what part of FU do you not understand?
	You know, they're not, they don't have to write you a letter and say, you know, go jump in the lake there.
	They're just saying.
	They're changing the rules.
	So, you know, they're rigging the game against against the democratic process.
	Does that inspire you?
	Does that inspire you a little bit that that's what's going on?
	You know, I have the same program you do.
	Yeah.
	Just live one day at a time.
	Yeah.
	Keep doing the next right thing.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, trying to maintain kind of my inner calm and not and not, you know, if God wants me to win, I'm going to win.
	I just got to keep doing the right thing.
	And nothing can stop me in that case.
	That's a great point, Wayne.
	Yeah, I feel like, I mean, I go to a meeting every day.
	I'm in a different city every day.
	And that's the one thing I always do.
	Wow.
	And I. Been to some good ones recently, anywhere in particular that kind of stood out?
	I went to one in Maine that was pretty cool a few months back.
	A gun there and the guys was like this and there.
	No, I went to one the other day where it was a guy.
	And first of all, I went to one in Barbados one time where they were talking about.
	No beer for me, man.
	They were talking about, it was like a nightset meeting and they were talking about how to take curses off of people.
	And I went to one in Belfast during the war there, which was really interesting.
	Oh, wow.
	Yeah, but I went to one the other day and they were, it was, and I went to this, it was in New Hampshire, and they were, they were, and the people, I've been to a couple times, and they, and the people in that meeting recognize me, they know who I am, most of them.
	And it's, it's a very supportive atmosphere for me.
	You know, I don't know whether Republicans or Democrats, but anyway, it's very, it's a very warm, safe kind of place.
	And I heard a guy, there was a break.
	They took at those meetings up in New England, they took a five-minute cigarette break halfway through the meeting.
	And it's from like the old, old days.
	Yeah.
	And this guy was sitting like four or five seats behind me.
	And he's, you know, one of these old people who talks really loud because he's going deaf.
	Yeah.
	And he's, you know, they compensate by talking super loud.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And he was saying, he was saying, RFK Jr.
	And he had three or four of his cronies around him talking.
	And they were whispering to him, you know, that's RFK Jr.
	And he said, he's the anti-vaxxer.
	And I, you know, I was just listening.
	I was like, you know, I can hear what you're saying.
	Anyway, yeah, well, some senior citizens, their whisper gets a little high.
	A little high in the whisper.
	And then he did speak at that meeting and he spoke about, you know, how important it was to get your jab and stuff.
	And I could tell it was directed sort of, you know, clearly it was directed toward me.
	But I'm, you know, I feel like peaceful.
	And afterward, I went up and, you know, talked to him, said hi, and smiled.
	But, you know, it makes me, my job is to stay sort of peaceful and serene.
	And anything that I've ever done in my life that is enduring, that is important, has come out of that spiritual place.
	And anything that I do that comes from frenetic activity is, you know, is just wormwood and bile.
	I know.
	I remember reading about Abraham Lincoln where he was, you know, he was the rail splitter.
	And they asked him.
	He had a bunch of cats, too.
	He had cats.
	Yeah.
	He's a big cat owner.
	Really?
	I know that he loved animals.
	I did not know about the cats.
	Some man gave him two cats.
	William Seward, right there.
	Oh, he was gifted.
	I was expecting a gift of two kittens from Secretary of State.
	He's a real cat boy.
	I've been to his home.
	You know, his home.
	Springfield?
	Yeah.
	And one cool thing that's really neat about Springfield, bring it up if you can, Nick.
	They have like the whole neighborhood, they turned into a museum.
	So you can go to his neighbor's house.
	You can go down the street.
	It's really cool.
	Yeah.
	Like you literally feel like you're in the past.
	Yeah.
	So he also, on the same subject of him and animals, he was, he killed a turkey when he was like 12 years old.
	He shot it from his cabin in Kentucky.
	Them gobblers, yeah.
	And he went out and he saw it in its final suffering.
	And he vowed that he would never kill an animal again.
	He was probably the only person in his generation that if his wagon was going down the road and it was going to run over a snake, he'd stop and get out and pick the snake up and move it.
	Which is ironic because, you know, he ran a war that killed 659,000 people.
	But Grant, Ulysses Grant, who did a lot of the killing, you know, hand-to-hand, he had the same thing.
	He never lost his temper.
	The only time that he was ever seen to lose his temper was when he saw a man beating a horse.
	Some real animal lovers.
	You know, Hooker, there was a Sergeant, Colonel Hooker.
	Yeah, General.
	General Hooker.
	That's how they got the term hookers because he brought ladies in to spend time with his troops.
	You know a lot of history, of interesting history.
	I don't know about that, but that's I know about hookers, buddy.
	I mean, unfortunately.
	But I do know that.
	Civil War.
	Yeah.
	They brought in hookers first.
	American Civil War.
	He was popularly with his men because he didn't crack the whip in terms of discipline.
	It said after a hard day on the battlefield, he would bring in prostitutes.
	But they eventually, a lot of his men got diseases from unprotected sex and killed a lot of them.
	Anyway, moving on.
	Anyway, I was saying about Lincoln.
	Lincoln said, he was asked, how do you, what would you do if you had to cut down a really big oak tree and you had five hours to do it?
	He said, I'd spend four hours sharpening the axe, which is good.
	Yeah.
	It's a metaphor for keeping yourself in kind of a good spiritual space.
	You're more efficient.
	You're more effective.
	You expend less energy.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, man.
	I definitely, that's been probably a struggle for me this year is trying to do too much, getting frenetic, and then acting.
	I'm getting a little better.
	I'm getting better at it, but acting from a place of like frenetic, you know?
	It's just, man, sometimes it just gets tough.
	It's tough, you know?
	But every time I slow it down, every time I kind of do my morning routine well and do my practices, everything's way different.
	What was one thing that sobriety, we're both sober.
	So what was one thing that sobriety kind of adjusted or changed for you in your life that you didn't expect, maybe?
	What was something that came out of it or being a part of it or around it?
	Well, it changed everything in my life because I think before I came in, I was just like a bundle of appetites, you know, and that's when you're kind of living according to self-will.
	And, you know, it's like whether it's, you know, drugs or alcohol or sex or extreme behavior or just, you know, I was always just filling that empty hole inside of me with things, trying to fix that by reaching for things outside of myself.
	And my mind is like a formulation pharmacy.
	I can turn anything into a drug.
	And, you know, and then trying to adjust your compass so that you're not living for self-will, but you're trying to do the next right thing and, you know, be of service to others.
	And that, you know, that that is what, you know, when I was a, when I, I feel like I was born an addict.
	I feel like I had just an empty hole inside of me from when I was a little kid.
	You don't think so?
	You don't think it was something really that caused it when you look at it?
	I don't think so.
	But, you know, and you hear in the program all the time, like half the people think they were born with it and others think that, you know, trauma, you know, had something to do with it.
	But, you know, I also, there's certain races like the Irish that are what?
	We know.
	There's other ones too.
	They're the most thirsty.
	The Irish, yeah.
	I mean, they're good at you.
	They make it look good.
	I mean, for I mean, we call it the Irish flu.
	Yeah.
	Because it, it's you go into a meeting and, you know, in any meeting, any place in the country, and half the people in it are, you know, Sullivan on O'Brien.
	Oh, yeah.
	A lot of Irish, yeah.
	Was alcoholism in your family?
	Was it popular?
	In my mother's family, it was back to the Neanderthals.
	Wow.
	They were all, you know.
	And of all of my mother's siblings, she was the only one that did not get it.
	Wow, that's a lot then.
	That's pretty strong.
	Yeah, it's just, it's good to have a program, man.
	I think it adds a lot.
	I think it's definitely been a saving grace for me for sure.
	Just the people I get to meet.
	Like last night, a guy texted me, a new guy.
	I've been texting in the rooms and we're texting.
	And he hit me up yesterday.
	I was like, hey, you want to go to a meeting?
	I wasn't going to go, you know?
	So next thing you know, I go and we're like over in Venice and it's 8 p.m.
	We're sitting on a porch at some guy's house, you know, listening to a guy talk about how he was in a gang and his brother got killed right next to him, you know, and how for years he was using and then finally he started to get help and gotten in the program.
	But to sit there and hear a story like that, was that real?
	That's part of the fun of going to the meeting.
	I mean, it just puts something real in your life.
	It's like I left out of there.
	Like, sure, you know, it was very sad, but it was like a real thing.
	It was like I left out of there with like, I don't know, it just, people sharing makes you feel more connected, you know.
	But, you know, when you, when you got sober, did you realize, did you, because a lot of, I know a lot of comics feel like, you know, that the alcohol and the drugs are part of what makes them funny.
	Did you, and that they have anxiety about getting sober because they think it might hurt.
	Yeah, I think I had some of that for sure.
	You know, I was in and out for a long time.
	I had three years sober and then I was in and out.
	And then finally, I just was so spiritually just empty.
	You know, I'd gotten a decent amount of popularity and I thought that that would achieve my happiness or it would do something for me.
	And it just didn't do anything.
	It was like literally getting to the top of a mountain and, or, you know, a decent ledge on a mountain.
	And you're like, dang, I'm still on a mountain.
	You know, that's what it felt like.
	And so I think that just made me realize that there was something bigger going on inside of me that I had to get some help for.
	And then just the gifts of it, like seeing other people get well, like seeing people's lives turn around, like just, it's, it's cool.
	I can go to a place every day, I can go somewhere and witness a miracle almost.
	And that's unbelievable.
	You know, people are looking for miracles and reasons to make them feel, you know?
	And so I think that's one of the reasons I go too is because it makes me feel in there.
	You know, like regular life, it was always trying to find something to make me feel.
	And I could never, I couldn't do it.
	There wasn't anything that was doing it enough.
	But man, I go in there and I see somebody who their life has changed.
	And man, it makes me feel, you know?
	And that's really what I've always been looking for.
	I've just been wanting to feel.
	And that's probably one of the most blessings of it.
	And then just getting to meet cool.
	I mean, like, you know, you and I are friends.
	I have so many, most of my friends are sober.
	Yeah.
	You know, it's kind of crazy.
	It's just how it kind of works out.
	And also, some of them used to be the biggest derelicts.
	So you get to hang out with the craziest people in the world, you know?
	I mean, alcoholics are generally kind of desperados.
	Yeah.
	They're interesting.
	You feel like a desperado in this campaign.
	I mean, one thing that I thought about was interesting about you is that nobody was in your pocket because nobody was getting on board with you.
	You know, you like, it seemed like there's no choice.
	Like, there's nothing that's like, this is who we, this is, this guy is what he is, whether you, he's not working for anybody.
	That's what it always was like.
	That's the most admirable thing to me about anything these days is like, I just want somebody who's not part of the status quo because the status quo feels very dangerous or the system feels dangerous, you know?
	Yeah.
	Does that make sense or not?
	Yeah.
	And I, you know, it's, I don't know, I think, you know, my campaign, the way it came together, it feels, I don't know, it just feels like there's some, you know, all the people who are involved in it are people who are,
	you know, on some kind of spiritual quest, you know, and it's, it's really interesting because they came from all, you know, different, but, you know, there was a early on in my campaign, we didn't have any money because most people who join, who start a campaign are their senators, governors, they've been in politics before.
	Right.
	So they have an email list and they have a huge war chest.
	They come in with $20 or $30 million and you're not allowed to raise any money until you register with the FEC, with the Federal Election Commission.
	So, you know, so you announce, I announced my campaign and I have no money in the bank.
	So nobody, you know, let's say I get 5,000 calls the next day, I want to help you.
	I got nobody to answer the phone.
	I don't have a phone because I'm not allowed to spend money until I register.
	And so we were really desperate for money at the outset.
	And a guy said, contacted me and said through a friend and said, you know, I can get $10 million for you fast.
	And I spent, I met him in my hotel.
	Was it like one of those consolidation credit card things?
	No, it was just a guy who, you know, he was an attorney who had a lot of clients in industries.
	And he said, who would give me money?
	But they were industries that I really didn't want to take money from.
	And he left.
	And I just didn't, it just didn't feel, it felt like, it just didn't feel right.
	And so I called the guy who had brought him in and I just said, I can't do it.
	And I immediately felt like, yeah, that was the right decision.
	And, you know, if we're supposed to win, we'll win.
	But, you know, whatever happens, at the end of this process, I'm going to have my integrity intact.
	And that's the only thing that really matters.
	Yeah.
	Wow, that's cool, man.
	Your wife seems so proud of you.
	I saw you on Tiger Belly.
	I felt like she seems so proud of you.
	It seemed pretty cool.
	That was wild, that show.
	Yeah, I thought at first, when I was all there, I was like, Bob, this is a different world.
	But I think, yeah, have you been on the show before?
	I've been on the show before, yeah.
	And what did you think of it?
	It's bonkers in there.
	But it's just this love.
	He's very high energy.
	But he's such a sweet.
	Yeah, Bobby's a lovable guy.
	Lovable.
	Yeah, he is.
	And he's, what is he like?
	He's had a kind of a wild life, you know.
	He's had an interesting life.
	But he's beloved by people.
	And I think part of his podcast is just being in his world and what it's like, you know.
	So I thought it was brave of you to go, but I also thought that it was cool, you know, when you got to see you and your wife.
	And I just felt like, man, I could tell your wife just seemed real proud of you.
	Maybe she's also just a good actress, but she seems to love me, but, you know, I have to keep saying she's an actress.
	How do I know?
	That's a good point.
	Yeah, one day she could just say, end scene.
	There was recently, there was like a, you guys had a, you guys had an issue with the security, right, that happened.
	This is a few days ago, maybe, where they had a guy who was like, it looked like he was, here we go, armed man arrested at RFK Jr. campaign event in Los Angeles.
	Was this guy armed and supportive of you or was he armed and it seemed like he was against you?
	Or was there, did you have any take on this?
	He showed up and he asked, he was wearing a U.S. Marshal badge.
	You can see it in some of the, he was wearing a lanyard.
	You can see the lanyard around his neck there.
	And at the end, I ended that as a badge and identified him as a U.S. Marshal.
	And then he had a federal ID on his belt.
	And you can see there.
	Yeah.
	He has some other kind of badge on his belt.
	And you see the badge around his neck.
	And that was determined to be fake.
	And somebody from my Gavin de Becker Associates, which was doing my security, they won't, you know, the White House will not give me Secret Service protection.
	So I've retained this group that's the premier security group in the country.
	And one of their guys looked at that badge and said, that's too shiny.
	It's not a real badge.
	And so then he called somebody else who was armed.
	And the two of them cornered him.
	And then they called the police and they kept him in the corner.
	They didn't want to grab him because they didn't want to start a shootout.
	And they could see that he had shoulder holsters on.
	And so then the police came and arrested me.
	He was asking for me.
	Oh, he was looking for me.
	And he had two shoulder holsters that were fully loaded pistols.
	And then he had, you can see that badge on his hip.
	Yeah, he's badged up, huh?
	Yeah.
	And then he and he had, he was also had a backpack that had another weapon in it.
	Another gun.
	Like a sword?
	He also had knives on him.
	And he had a lot of extra magazines filled with ammunition.
	So he said afterwards, apparently his brother said, oh, he heard there was a job opening for security, but you don't go to a job opening for security with all those magazines and guns and knives and two three pistols.
	His brother who brought him there also was like, you know, like an armory.
	They had all car filled with weapons.
	Wow, geez.
	I have no idea.
	I don't know what he was looking for, but I'll tell you what, the thing that you should do is go on his YouTube.
	I'm on his TikTok.
	Yeah.
	He has a TikTok site that he just opened.
	So he only has one TikTok video on it.
	And it's of him just before he comes to the same age.
	Really?
	Yes.
	Nick will find it.
	It is.
	Yeah.
	At the end of that thing, he says something to the effect of, I'm going out to do a job right now.
	And if I don't come back, you know, if I don't come back, report to your commander, Donald J. Trump, your commander-in-chief.
	So it's a very kind of, okay, you want to watch this?
	It's about a minute.
	Yeah, it's worth watching.
	Let's watch it.
	You got to turn the sound up.
	Oh, shit.
	Big homie Zorro over here.
	I think this is his brother talking to him.
	More like God's gangster.
	Shit, I hear you're the man with the plan.
	What's the word?
	I got it all.
	Actually, there's too much to tell you right now.
	So I want you guys to go over to Rumble, check out Icons 2020, Sarge.
	I will be speaking with him and Alex Collier.
	You're not retiring, homie.
	You don't fucking ask me, dog.
	I need you, Supora.
	Okay, so this guy's not doing well, huh?
	No, my name is Paul.
	And this could also be an advertisement for Rumble.
	First name, AI.
	I would see him go to something like this.
	Okay, I think I've seen enough.
	Yeah, I get it.
	So this guy's like, yeah.
	Last name, AI.
	In the end, he does this little, you know, kind of.
	Let's see the end suicide, I believe.
	Yeah, show the last.
	I don't know, 10 seconds.
	Here we go.
	If I don't make it back, call the fucking president, your commander-in-chief, Donald J. Trump.
	And where's he going?
	I didn't see a door over there when it was a wide shot.
	So that's the weird part of you just walking just over the tool chests.
	Wow.
	I mean, look, dude, just being a little bit more.
	Y'all don't have the best track record with like, oh, you know, you mean the family?
	Yeah.
	I don't want to say that, but yeah, I shouldn't have said it like that.
	But, you know, it's like, is it more scary?
	But you can't live in fear.
	What are you going to do?
	I'm not going to live in fear.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It is what it is.
	And, you know, but the White House should definitely be giving me Secret Service.
	Well, can you save your receipts?
	And if you get in there, can you get reimbursed or not?
	What?
	No.
	Oh, yeah.
	And I think that's what they're up to, that they want to bleed me white, essentially, from money perspective.
	But I'm the first candidate in history that has requested Secret Service protection.
	They haven't given to.
	But do they give it to you this early?
	Because I read some of the things.
	Here's what, because the press has been dishonest about this.
	You're entitled to it.
	They have to give it to you 120 days out before the general election.
	If what?
	What circumstances?
	Tell all candidates 120 days out.
	Well, you have to have a certain polling number, but I've surpassed all the thresholds by far.
	But like my uncle Teddy was given Secret Service protection 551 days out.
	But he was also a politician.
	He was like a lifelong politician.
	He was a politician, but he wasn't even running for president.
	He was talking about running for president against a president of his own party like me, Carter.
	But Carter said, you better protect him right away.
	Right.
	And even though he hadn't officially declared, they gave him Secret Service protection, Obama got it 450 days out.
	John McCain got it four or 500 days out.
	I think I'm like 300 days out now.
	Jesse Jackson got it.
	Shirley Chisholm.
	You go down.
	There's probably 30 of them who've all gotten it long before the 120 days.
	And I get, you know, I mean, we gave them a 68-page.
	Yeah, I remember reading about that.
	And why you should have it?
	Yeah, because I get death threats all the time.
	And, you know, I had a mentally ill person break into my house a month ago and make it to the second floor.
	No, are you at your house?
	Yeah.
	Oh, my God.
	You know, I mean, so they should, you would think that the president would.
	Yeah, if you know Biden, can't you just ask him?
	Well, we're not on talking terms at the moment.
	Okay.
	Damn, that's a bummer.
	Yeah, because you'd think you'd be able to hit him up and be like, Joey, you know, I'll trade you an ice cream for a couple of front door goons, you know?
	You know what I'm saying?
	A couple sharpshooters, dude.
	I bet you send him a box of mint chocolate chip, buddy.
	You'll get whatever you want.
	You think?
	Yeah, it could be.
	I mean, you know, I think every man loves to have a dessert.
	Do you think that Donald Trump will legally be allowed to run in the election?
	Yeah, I don't think they can stop him from running.
	Even if he was in jail.
	Yeah.
	He's still entitled to run because there's only, you know, the Constitution, the Constitution says there's only three things that you got to do to be, you have to be a citizen.
	You have to be born here, and you have to be over 35 years of age.
	And that's it.
	You can be a president.
	There's no way to block somebody because they got convicted.
	You know, it's in the Constitution, what the criteria is for being president.
	Yeah.
	It's funny because I feel like some people like Trump because he just wasn't a politician.
	He could have been anybody.
	He could have been a fragile.
	He could have been a mime.
	I think some people just want anything that's not, they just, something has to change.
	They feel like, at the very least, I'll vote for something that's not a politician.
	I just feel like people start to feel like the overall system is so corrupt, you know?
	And I think that's something that's been kind of harrowing just to voters overall.
	You know, people are suffering in this country now.
	You know, we're not, you know, like I said before, with housing, our kids are not going to get, you know, the American promise, the American dream was that this promise that if you worked hard, you played by the rules, you could afford a house, you could have a summer vacation, you could take care of your family, and you could put money aside for retirement with one job.
	Yeah.
	And there, you know, my kids, you know, I have seven kids.
	You know, six of them are in that 20, 30 range, and none of them and none of their friends are looking for a house because it's so out of reach.
	And, you know, you have a whole generation of kids who now are struggling with college debts that are, what they pay for college is seven times what I paid.
	They're never going to pay off that college debt and they're never going to own a home for most of these kids.
	And it's like, you know, the American dream is gone.
	Right.
	And so then what is it?
	If you don't have an American dream, then what do you have?
	I think it starts to get sad.
	That's one of the reasons that people are so angry at both Republicans and Democrats because there's a level of disintegration in this country and deterioration.
	I mean, I, you know, I do, I end up talking to a lot of people because of my job.
	You know, I represent a thousand families in Columbiana County, Ohio for the Norfolk Southern spill.
	Oh, yeah.
	And, you know, all of these environmental cases, I end up talking to people at every level of society, and I see the desperation that people are living in.
	It's like, you know, elderly people now are splitting their prescriptions with their drug prescriptions, cutting pills in two to make them stretch out the week so they can buy food.
	There's young couples who have a crying baby who have to wonder whether the baby is $50 sick or $100 sick or $1,500, $100 sick before they bring them to a hospital.
	There's people your age and my kid's age who are choosing between gasoline and food.
	And, you know, it's 57% of the people in this country cannot put their hands on $1,000 if they have an emergency.
	For somebody like that, if the engine light goes on in the car, it's the apocalypse.
	Because they know they can't afford that mechanic.
	They know, okay, now I can't get to work.
	I'm going to lose my job.
	Then I'm going to lose my house.
	And then I'm going to be like all those people in San Francisco who were just regular Joes.
	And They weren't drug addicts.
	They weren't mentally ill.
	They just had a string of bad luck.
	The engine light went on in their car and they couldn't find the mechanic.
	That's what I feel like.
	I feel like the engine light's on in this country.
	Yeah.
	That's what I feel like.
	Well, you know, when you're driving around with your engine on empty?
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	And you, yeah, right.
	And you can't think of anything else because you're thinking, how am I going to be able to get that gas?
	And it literally makes you stupid.
	It makes you, you lose IQ because that's all you can think about.
	Now, put two kids in the back of your car, you know, a toddler in a baby seat and another kid.
	And you're now magnifying that anxiety.
	And now you're driving through a bad neighborhood and you're starting to think of all of the bad things.
	Well, that's what it's like living paycheck to paycheck.
	And that's what Americans are doing.
	And it's like most Americans wake up every day and with that sense of impending doom.
	And it's like they're driving around empty.
	They don't know what's going to happen.
	And they're desperate.
	And nobody is listening to them.
	The politicians aren't listening to them from the Republican or the Democrats.
	And Donald Trump comes along and says, I'm going to break things.
	And they love him.
	And I get it.
	And the Democrats can't understand why are all these people liking Donald Trump?
	That's the reason.
	Because you're not listening to him.
	Yeah, I think people want anything.
	I'd have voted for, I'd vote for literally a puppet.
	I'd vote for Grover.
	I'd vote for anything that wasn't a politician, you know, that wasn't a career politician because I'm just so over it.
	And you see these shows like Painkiller and like that one on Hulu 2, the one that I can't remember.
	Yeah, what was it called?
	The one about the Sacklers.
	Yeah, yeah.
	If that shows.
	You didn't ruin your faith in taking care of people in this country.
	It's unfucking real, man.
	I hate to use that language, but it made me so mad, bro.
	It just made me so mad how compromised we are, how it feels, you know?
	Because if we're not even out here caring about each other, then what are we even doing?
	You know, that's what it starts to feel like.
	It's like, if we're not out here trying to do something, like, then what are we, we're just, then what?
	You know, I'm just out here to have a nice car.
	It's just, I don't know, man.
	Yeah, it's about, is it about, we're just here to make a big pile for ourselves and whoever dies with the most stuff wins.
	Yeah, but we've proven that there's no value in it.
	It's like it's been proven over and over again that there's no value in it.
	You know?
	When you come across people like that, right, on your campaign trail and you, like, what do you offer them?
	What type of hope do you offer them?
	Well, you know, I think that's why I have, because, I mean, I have specific things that I'm going to do to make.
	Well, I mean, like with housing, one of the things I'm going to do is I'm going to make a 3% mortgage available to every American for a single-family home.
	So if you right now, you know, you're going to pay 7% or 8% or 9%.
	I'm going to cut that down so your mortgage for the average home, $215,000 or $400,000, $1,000 a month, which people can afford.
	And it's going to allow you to compete and your kids to compete with BlackRock.
	I'm going to change the tax code to make it more difficult for them to buy up all the single-family homes, which is not good for democracy, not good for our country.
	You know, if you have a rich uncle, you can get a, who will co-sign your mortgage, but you can get a much cheaper mortgage rate because the bank is looking at his credit rating, you know, his perfect credit rating rather than your performance.
	So it's like nepotism, kind of.
	And what I'm going to do is I'm going to give everybody a rich uncle, which is Uncle Sam.
	I'm going to get the U.S. government to co-sign your mortgage.
	Now, if you default, then the government owns your house.
	So no foul, no loss.
	But it's going to allow you to stay in that house.
	And, you know, I'm going to give the first half $500,000 to teachers because we need to start supporting the teachers in this country, but to make them available to all Americans who want a single-family home, because we need widespread homeownership.
	Thomas Jefferson said American democracy can only survive if it's based on tens of thousands of independent freeholds owned by individual Americans and not big corporations, the aristocratic, the feudal model where the billionaires own the landscapes and we all are, we're no longer citizens.
	We're now, you know, we're now subjects.
	We're not, you know, we're serfs in our own country.
	Yeah, that's what it feels like.
	It feels like we're subjects and the lords won't even tell us who they are.
	Exactly.
	That's the sickest part.
	At least show your fucking face, you know?
	At least let me know who's, you know, it's like, that's what it feels like a lot of times.
	I know you went and visited the border.
	We had a border patrol security.
	We had a gentleman on here who was the head of the border patrol.
	Oh, Chris Clem.
	No, this guy, he had retired Roy Villarreal.
	Okay.
	He came on here.
	This is two years ago, and he was talking about one of the biggest issues that he was noticing at the border.
	This was in Arizona.
	That was his jurisdiction.
	Was that people were getting, the legislative branches weren't working well.
	So like they would arrest people, but they weren't prosecuting them.
	So they would get just the same people back over and over again.
	So it seemed like such a goose chase.
	Well, it's gotten 100 times worse now.
	Wow.
	Because now that people are just, I mean, I was there between 2 and 4 a.m.
	in the morning.
	I watched 300 people just walk across and then the Border Patrol brings them to the airport and, you know, they fingerprint them if they're criminal, then they go into a different, you know, line.
	But the rest of them are brought to the Yume airport, given a ticket to any place they want to go in the United States.
	And then we pay for it if they don't have the money for it.
	And, you know, they've 110,000 have landed in New York.
	And this is a humanitarian crisis.
	I talked to the people who are coming over.
	They've been exploited, extorted, beaten.
	What's happened is the whole thing's run by the Mexican Truck Cartel.
	We saw the buses.
	They have white buses, The cartel owns 55 people a bus.
	They pick them up in Mexicale and they bring them to the border and they let them out.
	The people who come out are from every country.
	They're not, you know, they're from all over.
	And they have to pay the cartels.
	They're from Asia.
	They have to pay the cartels to get through their land.
	50. Well, right, but they pay them usually up front $10,000 to $15,000 to get them across the United States.
	And the cartels are advertising all over the world.
	And they're advertising on YouTube, TikTok.
	They're telling you exactly what's going to happen to you.
	They come across.
	And then what happens is they're given by the Border Patrol.
	There's nine Border Patrol committed suicide because what they're being asked to do is not their job.
	They're just escorting people.
	7 million people have come across illegally in three years.
	And legal immigration during that period was 3.1 million.
	So the cartels are literally controlling our immigration policy.
	And what's the problem to it?
	We have a video that I made, you know, an 18-minute video that shows what happened.
	But you were only down there for what?
	How long were you down there for?
	I was there for three days.
	Okay.
	And then, you know, and then we've been dealing, you know, we made the film.
	We, you know, I've been writing a lot about it and researching it.
	And it can totally be shut down overnight.
	And what happens is people think, well, there's a big, all those people are seeing this.
	But I just wonder, is that a long enough time to go see it?
	Like three days?
	Is that a realistic?
	I had three intense days of, first of all, the first night watching all these people come and then spending the next days with local law enforcement, local sheriff's department, the ICE, the Border Patrol, all the local medical systems, the doctors, and doing interviews.
	No, it's good to talk with those people.
	That's why we wanted the guy because we kept hearing the border, but it gets like becomes like this political red rover that different parties use, and you never know what's going on.
	That's why we wanted a Border Patrol agent in so we could really see what happens.
	There's a guy called Chris Clem who was the head of the Border Patrol in Yuma.
	And he's fantastic and he's giving us advice.
	But, you know, what happens is a lot of the Democrats think, oh, we're being kind to these people by letting them in, but we're not.
	In fact, what happens is they're given a court date for seven years in the future to go to the asylum court.
	So they have seven years in this country where they have no legal status.
	So they're not allowed to work.
	So they work for five or six.
	You know, you have unscrupulous employers, five or six bucks an hour.
	And then, you know, they're employed on construction sites in New York.
	The employee of the construction company that's employing them is competing for bids against the union labor company.
	Because he's paying six bucks an hour.
	Right.
	So, but just but just as guilty as the as the people who are undermining the system, right, as they are of undermining the system.
	People can have their own like social beliefs about it, but there is guilt of undermining what the system is that's in place.
	But those the people that pay them to work are also guilty, right?
	If they're.
	Yeah, I mean, what I, you know, what I, here's what I would do.
	And first of all, you need you need to hire a thousand asylum judges, and you need to adjudicate before people come in.
	Once they come in, they're entitled to stay here.
	They get a court date.
	Put them right on the border like Judge U. Exactly.
	And they adjudicate right there.
	And then it will shut down the border.
	And most of the people, 99% of the people we interviewed didn't even have an asylum claim.
	They just said, well, I'm here to work.
	I want a job.
	And so they are not entitled.
	They have to come through the regular line like everybody else legally.
	Yeah, that's what's fair is just doing it legally because you can't keep, if you don't have accounting and inventory of your business, then you're bound to go.
	Yeah.
	You know, I'll tell you how you shut it down overnight.
	And this is what I'm going to do the day I get into office.
	I'm going to waive passport fees for all any American who can't afford it.
	Now, what that means is if you can get a passport card, I don't know if you see, I got it.
	It looks like a license, right?
	It's a federal ID with your picture on it.
	And the problem is it costs $65 and there's some paperwork attached that makes it difficult for very poor people to get them.
	And so there's a lot of people in our country who are poor, particularly in cities, who don't drive cars.
	They don't have a driver's license.
	They have no government-issued ID.
	Now, if you don't have a government-issued ID, you're a second-class citizen.
	You cannot open a bank account, which means you're using the paycheck companies that take 10% of your Social Security check to cash your check.
	You can't get on an airplane.
	You can't stay at a hotel.
	You can't visit your kids at school.
	And so what I'm going to do, there's 33,000 post office in this country.
	I'm going to make it very easy for any American citizen who can't afford it to go down to the local post office and get a passport ID.
	Once they do that, you now tell employers, you cannot hire somebody unless they have that passport ID.
	I will shut down the border overnight because nobody's going to come through if they know they cannot get a job.
	Because now you can prosecute employers.
	Right now, what they do, the employer construction firm in New York, they don't care if you're legal or illegal.
	They just want somebody who's cheap as possible and that they can check the box.
	So they ask for a social security card.
	The social security card has no picture on it.
	They're easily fabricated and they're handed, you know, passed down from person to person.
	Oh, yeah, those things are nuts.
	Right.
	And so you can't put the employer in jail because he says, hey, I got a social security card.
	But now you're telling the employer, the employer, it's illegal for the employer to do it.
	And now you're saying you've got to have a passport card or you're going to jail.
	At that point, all illegal employment dries up overnight.
	Nobody is going to employ somebody with the risk of going to prison.
	And one other thing it'll do is that it will solve a lot of The anxieties that people have, Republicans particularly, about voting, because they say, oh, you know, these people are coming in and they're voting, people are voting without ID and they're double voting, they're committing voting fraud.
	Well, now everybody has an ID and you can't have any of that kind of voting fraud.
	And the Democrats support it.
	I mean, the Democrats will support it, although Biden won't sign this bill.
	But, you know, the big civil rights leaders like Andy Young, Al Sharpton are all behind this idea.
	So we can solve all these problems and the anxieties and the debate about the voting system and whether you need ID or not to vote.
	Right now, Democrats oppose ID laws.
	And the reason they oppose it is they say if you force people to show an ID, you're disenfranchising a lot of students who don't have driver's license.
	You're disenfranchising poor people who live in the city who don't have driver's license.
	And there's other people in the country, elderly people, a lot of their licenses have lapsed, so they don't have ID.
	And you disenfranchise all of those.
	Those are all Democrats.
	So the Democrats say we shouldn't have ID laws.
	Now we've got civil rights leaders who are saying, yeah, let's have IDs to vote, but let's give everybody an ID so everybody can get one.
	Right.
	Then nobody has an excuse.
	And nobody has an excuse.
	Yeah.
	What do you say to, so some people would say that that takes away some of the old like adage and the old like romantic idea of like, you can come to America and you can make it here.
	Does that do that by making the border?
	Because what are you doing, making the border more organized?
	You're not saying there's no country in the world that has an insecure border.
	Yeah.
	I think it's we have we have to be able to control how comes in.
	Now, what I would do, I think we should have high fences, but wide gates.
	We should let a lot of people in legally, make it much easier to get citizenship, and make sure that there's plenty of people for employers, et cetera, so that we can keep our country humming.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And but we should be able to select who comes through, not have the Mexican drug cartel select.
	I agree.
	It's a good point.
	No, it's, I mean, it's disheartening.
	It's very scary to think that anybody can just come in, you know?
	I mean, I know that we're all here and we're blessed to be here.
	I just think it needs to be organized.
	Remember when Reagan had that plan that couldn't you sponsor people that were coming in?
	Well, you still can.
	You know, that people.
	That'd be awesome, bro.
	Well, you still can do that.
	I mean, legally, 3.1 million people are coming across and a lot of them are coming across on visas that require them to have a sponsor because they're employment visas.
	An employer says, we need this guy.
	We need to bring him from Uzbekistan.
	Let's bring him.
	One Hector.
	I'll sponsor.
	Hector, to sponsor your family members, submit a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Form 130.
	Each person you sponsor needs a separate Form 130.
	Let me ask you this.
	We should sponsor one as a podcast.
	How long has your family been in this country?
	Let me see.
	My father came over in 1922, I think.
	From where?
	From Nicaragua.
	And my mother, I don't know when she came.
	She's probably been here for like 100 and 200, 150 years.
	So, and what ethnic group is she?
	Let me see.
	Polish, Italian, and Nicaraguan.
	That's what I am.
	And Nicaraguan, is that Hispanic or is it Indian or Dash?
	Actually, it's a good question.
	It's a little bit of both.
	I think it's part Aztec, maybe.
	I got to check and see.
	The Mosquito Indians are down there.
	Are they?
	Oh, yeah, dude.
	That's probably me then.
	I got to see.
	But I remember my father's birth certificate.
	But have you ever done like 23andMe or anything like that?
	Yeah, I've done it.
	I don't know what they said.
	They email me so much.
	They're like, guess who's allergic to milk in your area?
	They're always sending me like weird emails now, you know?
	Yeah, I know.
	And I don't trust them, really.
	Yeah, so if it's how they get all my stuff.
	Yeah, guess who hates cinnamon rolls on your street?
	You know, they're like, what?
	What does this matter?
	Is it a cousin or not?
	I went hiking this morning with Tulsi Gabbard.
	You went hiking with her?
	Yeah, and I was asking her about her ethnic background.
	And she said she did 23. She actually did, there's a TV show where they investigate your background.
	Oh, yeah, they do it with celebrities.
	I saw, I think Barrymore was on it.
	Yeah, and she did that.
	And they said that she had the most ethnically diverse background that they'd ever run into.
	Wow.
	She is part Samoan, so she's Polynesian.
	Yeah, I like that.
	Yeah, that's fantastic.
	But then she's got everything else.
	She's got the whole, like every country in Europe.
	I wish I could be Samoan.
	I wish I could be Mexican sometimes.
	Maybe next life, you know.
	What will keep you, say you get in office, Bobby, right?
	Like what keeps you, right?
	A guy that is trying to do it his way?
	How do you get sabotaged?
	How do guys get sabotaged once they get into office?
	Like how do people get like their values and their goals and stuff get commandeered and stuff?
	Well, a lot of people, you know, that happens to them.
	But, you know, I've been fighting corporations for 40 years and I've been suing these agencies.
	So probably 20%.
	I've sued almost every one of these agencies, DOT, USDA, Department of Agriculture, EPA, NIH, FDA, sue her.
	So I, you know, I feel like I know better than anybody else about how to unravel the corporate capture.
	And, you know, I'm not interested in anything.
	They got nothing they can offer me.
	Yeah.
	You know, the only thing I'm concerned with is good government and making sure that our kids, you know, love America the way that I love and have hope for their future.
	And that's, you know, I mean, literally, I can't think of anything that anybody could give me to buy me off.
	There's nothing I want.
	You know, I have everything that I want.
	And I just, you know, I want to do the right thing.
	And I, you know, I think there's other people.
	I think Tulsi is the same Way.
	I don't think she has any personal ambition.
	I think she just, you know, she loves our country.
	And I think there's other politicians out there too who can't be bought, but most of them can.
	Do you stay with the democracy?
	And in fact, the entire political process has been bought of running to office is a training school for teaching you how to get bought.
	Yeah.
	So it's what it seems like.
	It's like, where are the fucking warriors who want to die like for something that means something?
	You know, I'm with you.
	I don't know.
	I mean, I guess I don't know.
	We all get, it's all, it's, it's hard to, it's, we live in a place where that's what we've built.
	It's part of that you, that things can be compromised.
	The last question I have is, um, where do, um, if you, how do you know if you are going to stay running with the Democratic Party or if you have to make another choice?
	Well, I have to make that choice by October 15th.
	Okay.
	So I'm just going to see what they do.
	If they open up the process, I'll stay in.
	And then, you know, and then I have to see what I have to see.
	If they don't close it, then I don't know exactly what I'll do.
	I'm proud of you, man.
	I'm just excited to know you've always been you've always just been a nice guy, man.
	You've always been someone I could rely on.
	And so I just appreciate you just being willing to come back on and spend time with us and help us learn about the election process and stuff.
	I think even if listening to you helps us, you know, a lot of people like me just learn who aren't as up to, you know, skew on politics.
	And yeah, man, certainly happy to get to spend time with you.
	And congratulations, man.
	I'm proud of you.
	Thanks for having me back.
	Yeah.
	Tell your boys it's a pleasure.
	It's always a pleasure being with you.
	Yeah.
	Thanks, Bobby.
	I'll talk to you soon.
	Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.
	I must be cornerstone.
	Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this piece of mind I found I can feel it in my bones.

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