Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. Before this he was a presidential candidate, attorney and environmentalist.
RFK Jr. joins Theo to talk about going from an outsider to the head of HHS, how much fraud he uncovered in existing government agencies, and the research that went into developing the new food pyramid.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: https://www.instagram.com/robertfkennedyjr/
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Hey, everybody, it's Theo Vaughn here, and I got a question.
When it comes to soda, are you really picking a zero sugar cola that you actually prefer?
Or are you just settling for what you've always had?
That's the question.
And I'll say this, when it comes to taste, I find that nothing beats Pepsi Zero Sugar.
But you don't just have to take my word for it.
That would be ridiculous.
Pepsi has been doing blind taste tests for years.
No labels, no brand names, just taste.
And last year, they brought back the Pepsi challenge, and the results were clear.
66% of people agreed and said that Pepsi Zero Sugar tastes better than Coca-Cola Zero Sugar.
In fact, Pepsi Zero Sugar won in every market they tested.
So if you're grabbing a zero sugar soda, go with the one people keep choosing when taste is the only thing that matters.
Go out and try Pepsi Zero Sugar today.
Let your taste decide.
Just wanted to let you know our episodes are now available in video on Spotify as well.
Today's guest is the Secretary for Health and Human Services for the U.S. government.
He's an attorney.
He's an environmentalist, and he's my friend.
I'm so thankful that he is joining us.
Today's guest is Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Good to see you, bro.
Yes, good to see you too.
Secretary.
Secretary now.
You can still call me Bobby.
Okay, cool.
7 A.M. Meetings Above the Bank00:04:30
You and I know each other from, can I say where we know?
Yeah, sure.
We've been in recovery for together for years.
You for almost over 40 years, right?
Yeah, 40, 43 years.
Wow.
That's wild.
Yeah, that's where we knew.
That's where we met each other at 7 a.m. meetings above the bank over there.
That was amazing.
You shut those down during COVID.
I know.
That was heartbreaking.
We still did live meetings every day during COVID.
We moved from the bank.
There was about 15 of us who moved from the bank and we got into the Palisades Playhouse, which now was burned down during the fire, but it was kind of a pirate group.
And, you know, I mean, for me, I, you know what?
I said this when we came in and I said, I don't care what happens.
I'm going to a meeting every day.
Yeah.
And I said, I'm not scared of a germ.
You know, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.
And I know this disease will kill me.
Right.
Like if I don't, if I don't treat it, which means going for me going to meetings every day, it's just bad for my life.
So for me, it was survival.
And then, you know, that the opportunity to help another alcoholic, that's the secret sauce of the meetings.
And that's what keeps us all sober and keeps us, you know, from self-will.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, you get reminded.
I mean, I go to meetings and I get reminded that other people like, I hate to say exist, but like just that other people are just that I'm not alone, I think, you know?
I get like, I see face.
I'm like, oh yeah, I care about this person.
They care about me.
It's like for some reason, in my in my addiction, it's like there's a part of me that forgets that people care about me and that I care about them.
And so, but when I go to meetings, it's like an immediate, it immediately fills that whole backlog in, you know?
But I have to go and kind of recharge that battery a lot.
You welcome to Tennessee.
Thank you.
Yeah, I saw you with Kid Rock.
Yeah.
Pretty cool, dude.
That freaking, he used to say he used to have cocaine and oysters.
I'm like, that's a meal.
That's a meal, dude.
That's an aphrodisiac, I think.
I'm saving a seat for him still.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, he's one of a kind, man.
His brother only has one leg, too.
You know that?
I met his brother Bill.
I think he got the vaccine, but that's just me.
But anyway, he had two a few years ago.
That's all I'm saying.
But he lost his leg when he was a kid.
At around the same time, my cousin Teddy lost his leg.
And both of them became ski racers.
So they were the top.
I think my cousin Teddy was the number two slalom skier on one leg.
And he was also very proficient.
So they became friends.
So that was interesting.
So he knows your cousin?
Yeah, he grew up with him.
And they were in like a special division or no, just normal division?
What do they call the Paralympics?
Paralympics.
I didn't know.
Billy was a Paralympician.
I know he's a great golfer.
I mean, they're just so hilarious.
How does he golf?
Because he doesn't, his, his leg is cut off so high, he can't really use a prosthetic.
I mean, I don't know.
They had it.
I know a lawnmower.
Somebody hit him with a lawnmower.
Look at that right there.
Wow.
His father ran him over with a tractor.
Yeah.
Just put him in timeout.
But yeah, he's funny.
He has the best sense of humor.
I'm just joking.
I know both those guys super well.
And they've been great neighbors in Nashville.
And Kid Rock, Bobby, he's done a lot of nice stuff for me over the years and stuff like that and includes me in things.
And we were just texting the other day.
He's got a big heart, you know?
Yeah, well, he spoke very highly of you.
He's a nice guy.
I saw you were with Bill Lee too, our governor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I met him at the, he did a fireside chat with me about a year ago at the governor's conference.
And I really, we, we really bonded.
He's a, he's a good guy, and he works with both sides on the legislature.
He's got a great relationship.
Monsanto's Pesticide Controversy00:11:51
He's done a bunch of good stuff in this state.
He's gotten, you know, he's on top of fluoride.
They got really good snap waiver.
So I think they've got probably one of the best snap waivers.
The snap waivers, the food stamp waiver.
So you can't spend food stamp dollars on sodas or candy, but they also have sugar content and they have a corn syrup content.
Oh, here in Tennessee?
Yeah.
So I think they're the only state that has that now.
And they've also banned food dyes.
They banned a couple of them and they're going to ban the rest of them now.
And what are we finding out with food dyes?
Well, the food dyes, we've now, you know, we've told the companies they got to get rid of all of them.
There's nine of them.
And the worst four we already banned.
The other five, I think by the end of this year, everybody should have stopped using them.
And then we rapid approved four new vegetable dyes so that they can replace them with, you know, something healthy.
So we did that through FDA.
We're working with the industry to make sure that they can do it, but they've been very, very cooperative.
Most of them, about 40% of the industry came to us, including the entire ice cream industry, came to us and said, we want to do this, but, you know, help us.
So we're working very closely with them and they're all getting rid of it.
I mean, we should have gotten rid of it a long time ago.
The Europeans don't allow it.
Canada doesn't allow it.
Other countries, you can buy fruit loops in this country that are just loaded with chemicals.
And you can buy same company makes fruit loops for Canada and Mexico that don't have the chemicals.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, there's a kid on there was a kid on TikTok and he was eating fruit loops and then his poop was glowing in the dark.
You see that?
I'm like, dang, that thing will swim upstream.
That's crazy.
I mean, but yeah, that, yeah, some of it definitely seems bonkers.
And what did you say about fluoride?
Tennessee has a law that has to, where the water district has to inform the public about it.
Fluoride is crazy because we know it reduces IQ.
There's no question.
The National Toxicology Program has done a meta-analysis and they can, you know, it's dose-related.
So every milligram of fluoride that you add reduced your IQ more.
And it doesn't work systemically.
You know, it was put in in the 40s and because it does help with tooth decay, but the effect is all topical.
And back then, they didn't have fluoride toothpaste.
They didn't have fluoride mouthwash.
Now we do.
The parents can get the fluoride for their kids.
And they don't, when you put it in systematically, it destroys your bone mass.
It destroys your throat.
It's horrible for us.
It's horrible.
And it destroys IQ.
So, I mean, if you have kids, would you run them cavities or IQ?
Yeah, I'd rather have them have cavities.
I'd rather have holes in their teeth than holes in their ideas or whatever.
Right.
But European nations have banned it, and there has been no increase in cavities.
So it doesn't make any sense for us to be putting it in.
And yeah, this is the bill known as the Tennessee Fluoride Free Water Act prohibits public water systems in Tennessee from adding fluoride or any fluoride containing compounds to drinking water intended for human consumption and bans the sale of bottled water with added fluoride.
So we don't have fluoride in our water here.
Well, there is natural fluoride in a lot of water.
It just comes from the geology.
But we're not adding more.
Right.
We're not adding it.
Nice, dude.
Yeah, because, yeah, what if you're trying to think of something and you have two sips of water and then you're like, God, I can't even, I'm screwed.
Your parents send you to take a test and they give you a bottle of water and you're like, God, I don't have a chance now.
But thank you.
Thank you for leading the charge on a lot of these things.
Thank you for caring about a lot of these things.
I think I just want to say that.
I know that you do care about so many of these things.
I did see there's a Tennessee Farm Bill and there's a lot of stuff you want to talk about too.
And we'll get into some of it for sure.
But this is what I was talking about here.
This bill, it's a yeah, Farm Bill 809.
The bill is sponsored by Representative Rusty Grills, would limit lawsuits if a user gets sick from a pesticide under the proposed legislation.
As long as a product's label was approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, a person wouldn't be allowed to sue over the labeling.
So actually, Sean Ryan, the podcaster, and John Rich, the musician, they shared this online and on the day that it was going up for vote, I believe.
Yeah, right here.
Tennessee state politicians side with foreign pesticide companies over people dying of cancer.
Ryan posted on X alongside a video speaking out against the bill, as did musician John Rich.
After the pushback, Representative Grills took the bill off notice, which at least delayed the vote.
It's unclear why that decision was made or whether Grills has plans to bring the bill back to this legislative session.
And bring up a, just let us, just so we know who's doing this, bring up a picture of Mr. Grills.
Oh, there you go.
Well, I mean, look, if you're a farmer and you get sick from using a pesticide that you didn't know would make you sick, that you wouldn't have recourse against a pesticide company that did know that they caused illness because these companies knew that these caused illnesses.
Yeah.
Yeah, evidence from lawsuits, internal documents, and independent reports indicates that Monsanto had information suggesting potential risk to human health from some of its pesticides, yet worked for years to downplay or obscure those risks in public and regulatory arenas.
I mean, that's just wild.
The reason they're doing this is because of my lawsuits against Monsanto.
Right.
I remember you had that huge settlement against them a long time ago, right?
Yeah, I think it was 20, maybe 2019, we finally settled it.
But I did three of the trials in San Francisco.
And the first one, we won, I think, $289 million for people who've gotten non-Hodgkin's infomer from using Roundup.
And then the second one, we won $89 million.
The third one, we asked for a billion dollars from the jury.
It was a couple that had both got it simultaneously.
They were home gardeners.
And their dog also got it at the same time at a laboratory retriever, and the dog died.
Both the couples were sick.
We asked the jury for a billion dollars, and they gave us 2.2 billion.
And they did that because we were able to show them documents that showed Monsanto knew of the danger and then worked with corrupt officials, a guy called Jess Rowland inside of EPA, who is the head of the pesticide division.
And that they had deliberately concealed the science, fixed the science.
And now the big study that they use to prove safety has now been retracted.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I saw an article about that.
Like they'd found emails that they were like, that it was kind of ghostwritten or something from the ghost written.
And also the head of the pesticide division, they asked him, Monsanto asked them secretly, and now we have these emails to kill a study by another agency called ATSDR.
And he said, I can't kill it.
That's not my agency.
I can kill them in the EPA, but not outside.
And they said, you got to do it.
We can't have this study go forward.
And he said, okay, I'm going to do it.
But if I succeed, you've got to give me a gold medal.
And we had all of that.
And we were able to show it to the jury.
And they were angry.
And that's why they gave us that huge judgment.
A gold medal in what, just anything?
A gold medal for killing a study that showed that it caused cancer.
It showed that it grows.
That's insane.
That it's at a contest level now.
That things like that are so prolific that now it's like there's awards for it.
It seems baffling.
There's been a ton of lawsuits about this, right?
Like about pesticides causing diseases and sickness in people, right?
Or about this glyphosate, I think it's called?
Yeah, glyphosate.
There's been a ton of lawsuits, but they still don't have to take this product off of the shelf.
So that's the craziest thing to me.
Is that right?
Well, you know, it's a problem because you have all the row croppers are dependent on it right now.
And there's other technology that is emerging right now that actually, you know, I looked at one yesterday.
It's a tractor attachment that uses lasers to kill weeds.
And that, you know, if they can make that affordable, particularly for smaller farmers, that will be the answer because you'll be able to, they can kill bugs and they can kill weeds.
You program this thing and it zaps the weeds with a laser.
It makes all the cells explode and it destroys them.
And so that, you know, there's a future that we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel there.
But right now, if you banned glyphosate outright, it would put out of business 80% of our farmers.
Got it.
Wow.
So we're kind of dependent upon something that we know makes us sick.
Yeah, we are.
And, you know, we're trying to, we're doing a lot of work in the HHS to look for other alternatives and to find a, you know, find an off-ramp because the farmers don't want to be using chemicals anyway.
They're very expensive.
They know, you know, they have some of the highest cancer rates of any profession.
And farmers care about their land.
They want to leave it for their kids.
It also destroys the microbiome and the soil and that causes erosion.
And so it's not, you know, it's not a good long-term solution.
You know, the issue is how do you transition off of it without putting farmers out of business?
Here's that laser.
Oh, wow, that's unbelievable.
Laser weeding robot kills 100,000 weeds per hour.
Yeah, and it also kills insects.
You can program it to kill, you know, certain insects.
And, you know, that machine looks that machine probably costs a million dollars.
But if you could have a couple of those running at night through your farm, that'd be sick.
Yeah, it would be, it's a lot better than using chemical pesticides.
So this is going to be, you know, the future, but we're not there yet.
We're not there yet.
Wow.
It's just wild that we get stuck into something that makes us sick and we don't have a, you know, it's like, I don't know.
It just feels like such a conundrum.
It must be like that for you guys a lot where you're like, this is just kind of where we are, you know?
The agricultural community has been very, very supportive of the Mahaj and they're helping us transition away from ultra-processed foods, which is really the biggest issue.
That's what's causing all these chronic disease in kids.
And farmers are going out of business.
You know, farmers usually lose money seven out of 10 years.
Even when they're making money, they're making, you know, a lot of them are just making for their work hours, minimum wage.
And there's, and we're having a hard time finding young people who will go into farming.
So that is a crisis that, you know, we need to we need to keep into consideration.
And, you know, you have people at USDA finally who are, you know, really intent on solving this problem, but nobody wants any farmers going out of business.
Research Replications Crisis00:10:16
Got it.
Whenever you became secretary, did it feel like you like now that now you're like on the inside?
Like, did it, does it feel like you go behind this curtain and now you get to see this?
Yeah.
It does?
Yeah.
Do you have to sign an NDA to have the job?
No.
No.
And I mean, we're doing the opposite of that.
We're going to be, you know, this is the most transparent administration in history.
I mean, there's no president who's done ever done three or four press conferences a day like President Trump does, asking, answering any question people fire at.
He's a machine.
I don't know how many press conferences President Biden did in his entire administration.
He doesn't know.
But it's a lot less than President Trump does in a month.
Yeah.
Oh, for sure.
And then, you know, we're we are right now using AI to revolutionize the freedom of information laws so that people are going to be able to get freedom of information requests immediately.
Like, what do you mean a freedom of information requests?
Yeah.
So if somebody wants a document from the government now, it could take six months, two years.
And we're going to make it so that they can get it instantaneously and that all of our documents are going to be public except those that are shielded under the statute for, you know, for one reason or another.
And the big issue that, you know, the big problem that we're dealing with is that there is There are names and privacy issues and you have to redact those.
Legally, we have to do that and we have to make sure we don't make any mistakes.
So the AI is, you know, that's what we're working out now.
When you got in office, there was, you guys did like a big cutdown of like a lot of the divisions and stuff like that.
What was, I think you went from 20 something to 15, maybe?
We had 82,000 employees and 20,000 of them left.
And they left.
20,000 left?
Or did you guys make like cuts?
Because I just know that you guys made like a bunch of different cuts that were buyouts so that people who are at the end of their career could retire early.
There were rifts where people were, people who were very new were let go.
And it was about reducing the workforce, but it was reducing the bureaucracy.
We weren't reducing, we weren't getting rid of research or anything like that.
We didn't touch that except if there were certain categories of research like DEI research or there were other categories that were just, it was not real science and it was not science.
You know, we're changing the trajectory so that the purpose of NIA, the focus of NIH is going to be figuring out why we're all so sick.
You know, why is this chronic disease happening?
What are the exposures that are causing it?
What are the alternatives?
How do we end it?
And so we're shifting the focus, but we're the amount that we're spending on research is the same that we spent, you know, in 2020, 2019.
Well, was there like a recalibrating there?
Because like I had a friend, Heather, who was working at UCLA, she was a researcher there.
And she said that like a lot of the, during like the Doge period and stuff, a lot of their grants got cut and there was like a like a kind of a, I don't know if it's called a moratorium or like a pause.
There was a pause.
And every administration does that.
You need to do a review and make sure that they're that those research projects are not, you know, torturing beagles or, you know, or doing DEI or And how do you decide that?
Is it, do you decide or is it like?
We go through every single grant.
We had, you know, big teams going through those grants.
And then with there's tremendous, there's tremendous ways.
We had 40 communications departments.
We had 40 different divisions studying addiction.
And so we consolidated those.
So there wasn't, you know, you have 10 people doing the same job and not talking to each other with computers that are internet that are not interoperable.
Oh, it's the government.
Yeah.
And we're changing that now so that, you know, we consolidate it and we're making it more streamlined and efficient.
But it's so that we can do the job better, so we can do better research.
And then the research, you know, was never replicated.
And which means that that's part of science, that if somebody does a paper that makes a scientific hypothesis, you don't just accept that.
You get somebody to replicate it and see if they come up with the same result.
And that was not happening.
There was virtually no money spent on replication.
And because of that, there was huge incentives to cheat.
Because scientists, if they have a hypothesis and they do, they get a grant, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars to prove that hypothesis.
And then they, once they prove it, they get it published.
And that's how they advance their careers.
Well, if they fail to prove it, if the science says what you were thinking is not true, then they can't get published.
You should publish that too, because that's science, you know, but it doesn't get published.
Their careers are, you know, and endangered, it's hard for them to get the next grant and so a lot of them had this incentive to cheat.
So they have to win.
If they get it, if they hypothesis is a null hypothesis they don't get they, you know, their whole future goes into the toilet potentially and uh and so because they, they knew that study was never going to be replicated, nobody was going to check on them, there was an incentive for them to cheat and and that must have been a pipeline just for companies then to just get it like, get like well,
it was all lopsided science or or solo-sided science that wasn't.
Um yeah, I mean, i'll give you an example.
There was a study done about 20 years ago on amyloid plaque and that as the cause of alzheimer's, and that study came up and said yeah, it's the cause of alzheimer's.
Then we spent billions of dollars doing six or eight hundred studies that followed that and they all were.
As it turned out, they were all cheating and you know the ones that were, many of them were cheat cheating, but all of them were kind of confirmatory and all of their hypothesis about what's caused alzheimer's was ignored, put on the shelf.
You couldn't get money for it because they said we already know the answer.
And then there were drugs developed, etc.
And um and the.
In the end, you know, we came in, we and this scandal was brewing.
The head of Stanford University Medical School had to resign the dean because they knew what was going on, because he was involved in publishing some of these fraudulent studies and um, but they did it for 20 years because nobody ever had to really replicate those original studies.
And that happens all the time and you go down these scientific dead ends and uh.
And so now what Jay wants to do is to spend 20 of our budget on replication so that every study gets replicated.
And we know a Bottachara who is okay yeah, I know you're talking about and he was one of the guys who was censored during Covet.
He was one of the top um statisticians at Stanford and he and a lot of other ones were, you know, were censored or lost their jobs.
Marty Mccary, who you know, also one of his guys, he was also censored.
Um Oz was censored and they're now running the agency.
So these are people who want to do real science and not politicize it.
To depoliticize the science.
We had 10 people doing, you know these administrative jobs and now we're we've cut that down to five, you know.
So uh, all the cuts that we did were meant to streamline the agency so that there's more money for research.
Got it like, after the pauses on the grants and uh, and some of those things are you?
The grants were were, were renewed.
Most of the ones, or the ones that you guys seemed that you guys thought were viable yeah, on almost all of them, got it.
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You know, earlier this year, I had a friend that passed away and there was fundraising for him, you know, to help just help have finances to take care of his family moving forward, to help with some things.
And fortunately, he also had a life insurance policy.
You know, because you want to be able to make sure that just tuition, childcare costs, a mortgage, if you have one, things like that, that your family will be able to go on with some comfort.
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I saw you in your speech that you gave yesterday here in Tennessee saying that like there's all there's all kinds of temptation to cheat if you know you're not going to get caught.
Yeah.
That's true in every system.
Yeah.
Have you seen a lot of that?
Like I mean, the Amy Black is a really good example.
Yeah, we see it everywhere.
We see it everywhere.
In medicine, it's everywhere.
And the journals are utterly corrupt because they're owned by the pharmaceutical companies.
And so people read a journal and they think, oh, this is science.
But even, you know, Marsha Engel, the one that ran the New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years, has said, you can't believe anything in the journals anymore.
They're just propaganda vessels for the pharmaceutical company.
Richard Horton, who are in Lancet, who still runs it, says the same thing.
The journals of the United States.
And those are the people running them?
What happens?
They make huge amounts of money.
And they make money from advertising, which is paid for the pharmaceutical companies.
And through a scheme called Preprints, where the pharmaceutical company lands the story, they pay for the journal about a drug that they're trying to promote.
They pay the journal to print the story.
And then they get a preprint.
So it's a very neat-looking copy of their article with the cover sheet of the New England Journal of Medicine on it.
And then they distribute that to their pharmaceutical reps who are like, you know, former Playboy models who go out and talk to the doctors and they give that to the doctor and say, this drug works.
You know, do you want to have lunch?
Yeah.
And the doctors then start prescribing the drug and they think, oh, well, it's legitimate because it was in the New England Journal of Medicine, but it is not.
It's, you know, you can't believe what's in those journals because it's all propaganda for pharma.
So how do we get away from that?
Like, what are you guys doing to combat this or to change this?
Or can this change?
Or is it just awareness and then people have to take the responsibility?
No, I mean, what we're doing is open source journals.
We're going to have our own journals that, you know, that people can open source and publish, but you'll have the peer review published with it.
So before you publish, you give it, you give that publication to a panel of experts who then read it themselves and criticize it.
And the peer review now is secret.
And then there is no raw data published, so nobody can go in and replicate it.
So to the extent possible, sometimes you can't.
You have to buy the raw data and it's very expensive or inaccessible.
So you can't publish it.
But you can publish the peer review, which is what we're doing.
And so everybody will be able to say, if they have 10 peer reviewers and they all say this article sucks, it's got all these holes in it.
Then the public won't be able to read that and doctors will be able to read it and the regulators will be able to read it.
And so it's basically open source.
It's, you know, it's crowdsourcing, essentially.
And it, you know, that's how you get credibility in science.
Science doesn't come from consensus.
It comes from debate.
And, you know, that's why you remember when they were telling us during COVID, oh, trust the experts.
That's not a thing in science.
Trusting the experts is the opposite of science.
It's not a function of science or democracy.
It's a feature of religion.
And it's a feature of totalitarianism.
But in science, you always question the expert.
Yeah, you can't.
There's not an expert in science because it's like an evolving thing, right?
Well, you know, when I did the Monsanto cases, I was part of a big team.
We had, and Cheryl came to my trial.
You know, a couple of days she sat through and watched us try the case.
And Monsanto had experts from Stanford, Yale, and Harvard.
They're three big experts.
And they testified.
And Cheryl said to me at the end of the second day, she said, why are you guys even here?
These guys are, you know, this science is very clear that Roundup doesn't cause cancer.
And I said, just wait.
And then our experts went on and they were from Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.
And they said the opposite and were much more convincing.
And the juries were convinced.
And so there's experts on both sides of every debate.
And a lot of them are paid to be experts.
They're hired guns.
They're mercenaries.
And we call them biostites, the one that worked for industry, the ones that work for industry.
Biostites, that's great.
But, you know, so there's experts have their own bias.
We all have biases.
Everybody's got a bias.
What you want to do when you're, you know, when you're dealing with science, you want to expose those biases.
You want to admit them and acknowledge them.
And then you want the science to be able to stand on its own.
And that's the only way really to depoliticize it as best we can.
Right.
What were some of the biggest cases of fraud?
Like when you got in there and got behind the curtain to see like, you know, like the NIH, the EPA, like just see what's going on back there.
What were some of the biggest cases of fraud that you kind of found?
The biggest cases are what we're we get between Medicaid and Medicare.
There's about a hundred billion stolen every year and a lot of it is um, like what's happening in Minnesota with the Somali community and what's happening now, even worse, in California.
But you know, one of the problems is that that's a systemic problem, is that um, Medicaid and Medicare now no longer.
It used to be that they that they paid for your medical treatment, your doctor's visit, but now they pay for the person who takes you to the doctor and they pay for home care and they pay for um, you know a person to come in and pay your bills right, so they're there.
So there's all kinds of opportunities for fraud.
And a doctor recently, you know Oz, told me this.
Told Oz, he said, and there's a doctor in California that he visited and the doctor had a patient who was a heroin addict.
Heroin addict was coming to see him four times a month for some kind of a treatment.
And one day he looked, the doctor looked out the door and saw his ex-wife waiting for him in the car.
And the doctor said oh, are you back together with your ex-wife?
And he said no, I hate her guts and he said, but she drives me because she gets paid six hundred dollars every time she drives me wow.
And he said, you're back together with your ex.
We make three thousand dollars a month, you know, with her driving me this and then I drive her to hers, wow.
And so there's all kinds of those opportunities for fraud.
And you know, we found a hotel that had literally every room in it was the headquarters for a nursing group.
Where was that located?
It was in California God, and you know.
So they're all just p.O.
Boxes.
They're not actually doing any nursing care.
They're just collecting money.
And as we now know, a lot of the money that was, you know, was going into the Somali community for autism care.
There were these phony autism care houses.
Yeah.
And a lot of it was ending up with al-Shabaab in Somalia.
So hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars were being stolen, shipped to Somalia to fund a terrorist group.
But that's happening every day.
Now we have the ability to catch them.
How?
How are you able to adjust that sort of thing now?
Like what makes it different now?
Because first of all, under the Biden administration, I don't want to get super partisan.
Yeah.
But the Biden administration turned a blind eye to all the fraud.
It was mainly going to blue states and it was an economic generator.
There's money pouring into the blue states and they just said, we're going to, we know a lot of it's stolen and illegal, but we're going to let it happen because it's coming to us.
It's coming to our state.
And so what we've done now is with Medicare, we control Medicare.
The states control a lot of Medicaid.
So it's harder, a little harder for us to detect fraud there.
We've started out with Medicare.
We're using AI and we're using AI, which can detect the fraud.
It can tell us whether this guy who we're paying has been convicted of fraud before.
And we shouldn't be paying him again.
And it will be telling us every aspect of his business that we need to know to understand whether it's fraudulent.
So we're going to save just this year tens of billions of dollars in eliminating fraud in Medicaid.
And they used to pay it under the Biden administration.
The system was called pay and chase.
So if they sent in a fraudulent invoice, even if we knew it was, the HHS knew it was fraudulent, they would pay it.
And then they would put the inspector general to go claw it back.
And of course, it wasn't there.
So they never recovered anything.
Oh, I see.
Now we're not going to pay them anymore.
If they're fraudulent, they're not going to get a check.
We're going to save tens of billions of dollars just this year.
And we're going to save hundreds of billions over, you know, annually from now on.
And that's because the AI is keeping track of that?
The AI can spot the fraud.
Got it.
And then with Medicare, with Medicaid, which is, you know, a joint state-federal program, it's a little bit, we don't control the rails and the states control them.
And so we need state cooperation.
And the red states are cooperating with us, but the blue states still won't cooperate.
So that's going to take some time.
And then there's categories that are much easier for us to control, like medical devices.
We can do that quickly on our own.
But there's other categories that are going to be much more difficult, but we will get it done within the next three years.
Whenever Doge happened, right?
When Doge occurred, when Elon was in or he was involved or hypothetically involved, that's what it seemed like just like to the regular.
He was involved.
Was that successful?
Was that real?
Like, what was the outcomes of that?
Like, did that seem like a were you guys working together with that?
Like, what was that all about?
I, you know, I think even Elon has said that there would have been better ways to do it.
And that we, you know, going after the systemic, what we're doing now, these large thefts, you can cut a couple of thousand people and over the long run, it's just, you know, drops of water in the ocean.
Yeah.
So that's not going to save us huge amounts of money over the long term.
But what we're doing now is going to.
The things you were just talking about, you mean?
Yeah.
That's going to help a lot.
Yeah.
Is Doge still active?
Is that program still active?
What were the outcomes of that?
Well, the outcomes were that a lot of, you know, I cut my workforce by 20%.
But, you know, in truth, some of the some of those were very good cuts.
I think we all agree, including Elon, that it would have been better to do targeted cuts, you know, cut the people who were actually causing the problem and then keep the people, a lot of the new workers who, you know, who were only there for a couple of months, that it might have been better to keep some of those people and change the culture.
I see.
So yeah, instead of more of like a mowing, more of like a pruning kind of thing, you mean?
Yeah.
Do you think America is sicker than ever these days?
It is sicker.
We're the sickest country in the world.
We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world.
And that's one of the reasons during COVID, we had 19% of the COVID deaths in our country.
And we only have 4.2% of the world's population.
And so the question is, why did America do worse than any country in the world in COVID?
Was it mismanagement?
Part of it was that.
But the big part, and this is what CDC says, we're the sickest country in the world.
The average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.
And that's really what was killing them.
It was very hard to die from COVID if you were healthy.
And so, you know, we need to get Americans healthy.
We need to end the chronic disease epidemic.
Right now, we spend two to three times on our health care per capita, what they spend in Europe.
And yet we have the worst health outcomes in the world.
We're 79.
Bring up a capital chart if you can.
We have the, you know, we've dropped behind Europe by six years in lifespan, 10 years in some cases.
And yet our health outcomes are worse.
We have the highest maternal immunity, highest maternal mortality.
That means women dying in childbirth in the developed world.
We have the highest infant mortality.
How could that be with the United States?
And a lot of it is because of chronic disease.
And then, you know, our diabetes rates.
When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes over juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50 year career.
Today, 38% of American teens is diabetic or pre-diabetic.
God, it's unknown.
Autism rates have gone from less than one in 10,000 in 1970 to 1 in 31 today.
Oh, yeah.
You can throw a rock and hit an autistic kid anywhere.
And California is one in every 19 kids, one in every 12.5 boys.
And so the cost to our country, 77% of American kids can't qualify for military service.
How many percent?
77% cannot get into the military because health reasons.
No.
That is the truth.
Yeah.
Oh, my God, bro.
That's insane.
Yeah.
Obesity's Impact on Military Service00:15:07
That should get people's attention.
Bring that up.
Is that true?
Let me see if that's true.
Bobby probably just uploaded this stat on the internet from his phone a second ago, but still, that's okay.
That's how it works.
77% of American youth can't qualify for military service.
And why?
Because they have chronic disease.
They have asthma.
They have diabetes.
They have, you know, they're obese.
One of those.
But when my uncle was president, I was a 10-year-old kid.
We spent zero on chronic disease in this country.
Zero.
Today we spend $4.3 trillion a year.
And it's about 40 cents out of every tax dollar that is paid by you to the federal government is now going to treat chronic disease.
And it's unsustainable and it's getting worse every year.
Do you find that it falls more on it's the responsibility of the individual?
We're not taking care of ourselves.
Or is it that we have a health system that is allowing, I don't want to just say foods and drugs, but allowing things into us that is not maintaining our natural health.
I mean, individuals have a responsibility, but the obesity, when I was a kid, 5% of children were obese.
Yeah, you had one kind of fat kid in your class.
Yeah.
And today it's, you know, 15%.
It's going overweight is 40%.
Adults, it's even higher.
We should just have a thick military then, I think.
But people did not get Americans did not get obese because they're indolent or lazy or they don't want to do exercise.
They got that way because they're being mass poisoned.
And they're being mass poisoned because the government lied to them and it lied about the food.
Oh, now 70% of the food that our kids eat is ultra-processed food and it's just poison.
It's not food.
It's just poison.
And which agencies allow that?
I mean, the EPA puts labels on the FDA.
So do you feel like that's been one of the most compromised agencies?
Yeah, it was owned by big pharma and big food.
And we're, you know, Marty McCary has changed that now.
So how do we know that that's changed?
Like, how do we, as like a.
Look at the food pyramid.
And they, you know, the food pyramid.
When I came into office, we were supposed to publish in January of last year.
Oh, yeah.
The last food pyramid I saw had vapes on it.
So it was getting pretty bad.
We're doing vapes now.
You mean the food pyramid?
Oh, the last one.
Yeah.
The one that, yeah, years ago.
That's funny.
I was like, this is getting bad.
But the food pyramid.
So when I came in, we were the Eiden administration had prepared new dietary guidelines.
And they were 453 pages long.
And they were completely driven by the same mercantile impulses that put fruit loops at the top of the food pyramid.
How do you put fruit loops, which is not a food, at the top of the food pyramid?
It's just poison.
Yeah.
And that, but it was all driven by the commercial interests of the companies that controlled FDA.
So when we came in, we went, we got the best nutritionists from the best universities in our country.
We basically locked them in a room.
We thought it would take a month, but it took about 11 months.
They fought over every single item on this in the food pyramid.
It took them 11 months to put this together?
Yeah, because you have to go over science.
You know, what is broccoli?
Right.
How does it relate to how much protein should you eat?
How much saturated fat should you eat?
What's optimal?
And so they had to go through tens of thousands of scientific papers to make sure that every recommendation that we made is based solidly on a foundation of gold standard science.
So for this, for them to create the food pyramid, it took 11 months.
Yeah.
And then we flipped it over.
So we flipped it over because the category of food that you should eat, you know, most is a broad category.
It includes vegetables.
It includes proteins, you know, salmon and steak.
And most of this is for children, right?
Well, no, this is good for everybody.
I mean, most diabetes.
I remember from like when I was a kid, you know, you would see it, you know?
Yeah.
Right.
But I guess that's the first point you learn about it.
And that's why we're all so screwed up.
But the, you know, most diabetes can be cured through diet.
And the doctors don't know this because they don't take most of them aren't taking nutrition in medical school.
And we're now requiring or we're working with the medical, with the accreditors and with the testing, the people who do the MCAT to make sure there's tests on nutrition.
We're working with all the medical colleges to make sure that now doctors are going to have 40 hours of nutrition in school.
80% of doctors say they do not feel competent to give nutrition advice.
So what are they learning?
They're learning pharmacology.
They're learning the pill.
Let everybody get sick from eating the food and then tell them the pill that will treat that sickness.
Yeah, at that point, you're so drug dealer.
And you can get rid of the diagnosis.
Not only that, but now, you know, there's really clear science that you can get rid of mental health diagnoses, that food can cure mental health problems.
There's a doctor at Harvard, Dr. Paulin, who is who has cured schizophrenia with dietary changes, with keto diets.
There's a paper that is that true?
Yeah, go ahead and look it up.
Cure schizophrenia with keto diets?
Yeah.
Well, I definitely noticed that when I'm fasting, I get, I'm pretty smart.
Yeah, you get smart it, right?
Yeah.
Preliminary clinical findings, including case reports of small traits, suggests that ketogenic therapy may improve positive and negative symptoms, cognitive performance outcomes in individual schizophrenia spectrum disorders.
I mean, I believe that so much of this is true, just that, like, that so much of it is how we are operating.
Um, it just feels like we've been stuck in such a place where you have a like you have a food industry that doesn't care if you're healthy, and then you have a healthcare industry that doesn't care if you get well.
Well, everybody's making money from us being sick.
I'll say one other thing about this: there are all these, there are dozens and dozens of studies, and you can look them up of their case-control studies of juvenile detention facilities and prisons where they change, for example, in one wing the diet to real food and they leave the other diet in there.
And that the disciplinary fighting, the violence drops precipitously.
The use of restraints in one juvenile detention facility dropped by 75%.
Usually, the violence drops by 40 or 50 percent.
And, you know, people, it caused depression, it caused anxiety, these foods.
You know, if your kid has anxiety, look at what they're eating.
And you can change that in many cases by changing their diet and getting them to eat real food.
Yeah.
How do you get the everyday person then to adjust their psychology or like their thought, like about taking more of an interest in themselves?
You know, because I think it used to just be you trusted the commercials.
You're like, this is great for you.
And you believed that, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, the way to change human behavior is one, get information out there that's real information.
The other thing that you have to do is you have to change the economic incentives.
And right now we have perverse incentives that reimburse doctors that, you know, that insurers, pharmaceutical companies, the doctors, the hospitals are more making more money if you're sick.
The react with drug rehabs.
If you come back, if you come back, if you relapse, they make more money.
They shouldn't be paid that way.
The insurance company should pay them one lump sum and then follow that addict for the next two years.
And every time he comes back, you got to treat him for free.
And that will incentivize them to do better treatment.
Yeah, to do treatment that works.
And the ones that can't do that will fail.
And the ones that can do it, that get better and better at it will do it.
You change the economic incentives, you'll change human behavior.
And then you have to get the information to the individual.
And that's what we're doing.
We're doing, we've met, we've convened the 400 top tech companies before this administration.
You could not get your own health records.
So you own your health records, but you couldn't see them.
You can't get a hold of them.
What do you mean?
Why not?
Because they would information block you.
They would make sure you couldn't get them.
And now we've got them all to agree they're going to stop the information blocking.
Oh, your medical records will be on your cell phone.
And that is great for you because if you live in Nashville and you travel to Los Angeles, you get hit by a car.
You don't want to spend an hour in the emergency room with a clipboard making out, you know, one of those forms.
You hand your cell phone to the doctor.
He puts it in AI, and he knows what your blood type is, what your allergies are, what your contraindications, previous treatments, et cetera.
Yeah, it is ridiculous.
You have to do that all the time.
Right.
So what President Trump said to me is he said, I want to make every American the CEO of their own health, that they're in charge of it.
And then we're doing, you know, we've got now we've changed the prior authorization.
We've got 80% of the insurance industry together to eliminate all unnecessary prior authorization, which is going to change the experience that every American has with the healthcare system.
When you go to a doctor, he says you need a knee surgery.
You may wait six months for your insurance company to approve it.
You can't do anything about it.
And now, by the end of this year, you will know at the point of care.
That means before you leave your doctor's office, you'll know whether your insurance company will cover that.
And that's going to dramatically change.
We are also.
Does that make it any more likely that they're going to cover it?
Or does it just make it that you're going to need to?
It makes it so that you'll know.
And so the doctor will know there before you leave.
Got it.
And if you change the prescription or whatever you need to do, you'll at least know and you won't be, you know, sitting at a home.
And that's actually going to happen?
That's happening.
Yeah.
And then the other thing that we're doing is we're doing price transparency so that every hospital will have to publish its prices for every procedure.
Power to the patients.
Are you familiar with that?
Exactly.
And that's to make you the CEO of your own health.
They already are supposed to do that, right?
There was a law that Trump passed in his first term, but Biden never enforced it.
So none of the hospitals do it.
We've now passed new regulations that is going to punish them draconian way if they don't do it.
So they're all going to be doing it by the end of this year.
Are they going to try to find a way to skirt around that, though?
I wonder.
Well, it's no, and it's so screwed up because if you go by an automobile and the guy tells you, yeah, but I'm not going to tell you the price till after you bought it.
Yeah, it's insane.
You'd be, you know, and right now, if you're pregnant in this country, you could go nine months on the phone every day trying to figure out what the childbirth is going to cost you in your local hospital and not be able to do it.
And we are bound to go online with a system that will make all procedures visible to every patient.
So I actually looked at the mock-up two days ago for New York, and it shows a map of Manhattan and a mile around Manhattan.
And there's 30 hospitals.
And it shows the price of childbirth at every hospital.
The lowest one is $1,300.
The highest is $22,000.
And it's everything in between $9,000, $5,300,000.
You can look and see.
You can look and see.
You'll be able to go to a menu online.
It's like Gas Buddy when you're looking for a gas station, but you're going to be able to do that.
Clean bathroom or whatever, that clean bathroom.
That one, that one's crazy.
And they lie on there.
And some of them are at rest areas too.
And yeah, I got accosted by a guy who was in a, I guess he was like an Easter, but he was like an Easter bunny, like impersonated or whatever.
Anyway, whatever.
Good to be here today.
So you're telling me that that's going to be a real thing.
That's going to be available to us on our phone.
So say if you, I need to get an MRI.
I can look online.
You can look and find.
And right now, there's no way that the price of anything.
And they'll lie to you.
But if you call them and say, okay, I'm not going to come.
I've had experiences where they will call you back and then we'll offer you a lower rate.
Yes.
But they're all playing that game and now they're not going to be able to do it anymore.
How soon is that going to be released?
It's going to be released very, very soon in the next couple of months.
All the hospitals now have to come online and start reporting.
And the ones that don't do it immediately, we are going to have very, very high fines for them.
So there's going to be a big incentive for them to start reporting.
But it also is going to drive down prices because why is there that absurd differential between $1,300 and $22,000?
It's just because we don't know.
Because we don't know.
So there's no market.
So they do whatever the hell they want.
And now there's going to be competition because people will be able to shop.
But won't there be lobbyists that are, aren't there lobbyists just fighting you?
I mean, right here, it says, here's compiled a list of examples of hospitals and childbirth costs in Nashville based on available self-pay cash bundles.
Ascension St. Thomas is $4,800 to $7,800.
Nashville General is $10,000 to $15,000.
Yeah, I mean, why is it?
Yeah.
It's just chaos.
That's chaos.
There's no market there.
Yeah, but I mean, it's unbelievable.
And this happens at every sick.
It can be something as small as getting like an aspirin when you're in the hospital.
It can be anything where they just bill you later.
And they're like, oh, it's a $70.
Or they'll say to you, you know, if you want, you can spend an extra day here.
Right.
You look sick.
You look like you could use the rest.
And you'll say, I'll do that.
And then you get a $100,000 bill.
That's crazy.
Yeah, and they only have fluorescent lights.
It's on to the four seasons.
For four years at that rate.
So that's actually going to come into play.
Yeah, that will be in play.
And what's that going to be called?
How will we access it?
It's called price transparency.
I think we're calling it trumparency.
Price Transparency Puzzle00:04:08
Really?
No.
I mean, if Trump named it, he would.
He would name that an RV, you know?
Oh, that's hilarious, though.
Trumparency, dude.
Oh, it's opaque.
What does opaque mean, actually?
Look it up.
I don't know if I landed.
So did I land that right or not?
It was somewhere in the middle.
It's halfway transparent.
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Yep, that's right.
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That's, see, that's one of the most important things.
Price Transparency Push00:04:58
That's something that we've been talking about in here for probably like a year and a half now, two years, is the price transparency, power to the patients.
That's one of the groups that's like helping to push that, I know.
Who are the people that are lobbying so hard for these things not to happen?
Well, there were a lot of people in the agency who were obstructing any kind of change.
And part of the challenge of running an agency this size is to change that, you know, the institutional culture.
And, you know, you're only bringing in, there's 82,000 people.
We only have 250 political appointees.
They have to be good leaders.
They have to be able to work with the bureaucracy.
You need the bureaucracy.
A lot of these people are very gifted.
They're idealistic.
They want to do a good job.
The leadership has been very bad for so long that it's, you know, it's not allowed them to do what they want.
And, you know, we need to reignite that feeling of idealism.
Do you feel good about it?
Yeah, I think we're doing a really good job.
I mean, I think we've done more this year than any house secretary has done in history that HHS has done in a single year at any time.
And I think we're dramatically changing the relationship between Americans and their healthcare system.
But, you know, it's like turning a giant oil tank.
You have to keep hitting it, hitting with the tugboat and the bow.
And then ultimately it will start to turn.
And then, you know, you hit that.
You hit it just enough times that don't flip fast.
And things change.
I know before you leave your head, there's a lot of like stuff that's focused around addiction, right?
What do you want to say about where do you think that we're headed with that?
Some of the new things that you guys are going to try to implement, like with part of your new program.
Like what are some of the new implementations or some of the new focuses that you want to have people look at when they look at addiction?
Yeah, I mean, the problem with addiction is that the costs of the addict, you know, we at HHS, we're the fiduciary, the medical costs of the addict.
We can look and say, okay, if we can cure you from addiction, you know, I have a cousin who, you know, Patrick Kennedy, and who was in Congress, but he did, he had 17 rehabs.
And he was telling me during that period of his life, he was at the emergency room every two weeks and he had irritated bowel syndrome and he had contusions and he had all of these other illnesses that he didn't even associate with addiction, but they were all associated with it.
And you know that, you know, from that.
So, and he said in 15 years that he's been sober, he's never been to the emergency room once.
And so HHS is able to look at those costs and those trajectories and all those collateral damage in the healthcare system.
The addict's costing elsewhere a lot more money with law enforcement, with broken families, with lost jobs and inefficiencies.
And those aren't internalized anywhere.
And what we're trying to do is bring together all of the agencies, the VA, labor, HUD, and HHS, all the agencies that HHS together to look at that addict and then follow him over, have somebody responsible for following him over the lifespan of his addiction.
And nobody does that.
And so now it's the same problem that we have with the healthcare system, is that it's everybody's financial benefit to keep that addict sick because everybody's making money from them.
And so you don't have anybody who's accountable for the outcome.
And what you need to do is, you know, we're doing these pilot programs called STREET and eight different locales to figure out how to do this, to bring all the agencies together, do early interventions, confront the addict on the street,
get them out of crisis, into treatment, out of treatment, into, you know, rehab, out of rehab, into sober housing, long-term care, help them find a job and stabilize their lives and have one person who's responsible for that whole trajectory.
Amen.
Yeah, because when it goes piecemeal like that, it's just like it's easy for people to just.
And they hand him off and then everybody checks the boxes.
Yeah.
I found him a house.
Okay.
He's still shooting up.
He's pulling the copper wad, you know, piping out to pay for his addict.
That's not my business.
That's law enforcement.
That's somebody else.
Working Across Aisles00:04:01
Well, thank you.
I just, I think it's amazing you care so much about that.
And yeah, I just, yeah, for the chance that people can get well and change their lives.
Before you go, Bobby, you and I have been friends and I've always trusted you and I've always, you know, I believe in you and I just know you as a person and I know this is a guy at certain points in your life.
I think you just have to make choice like this is a guy I believe in, right?
Like for as much as you can believe in a human being, you know, like acceptable levels.
Who are some other like congressmen and senators on either side of the aisle that you believe that we can, that regular people like me can trust?
People that I, there's a ton of Congress people who are incredible.
And there are actually too many to even name, to start naming because there's so many good ones.
But in the Senate, Ron Johnson, who, you know, is fantastic.
Roger Marshall from Kansas is fantastic.
Mark Wayne Mullins.
The president isn't crazy about Rand Paul, but Rand Paul has been really good on a lot of my issues.
And there's a lot of other ones, too.
So, you know, what about Senator Hawley?
Are you familiar with him?
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's great.
You know, I've had tremendous support from the Senate, from the Republicans.
And the Democrats, who've been my friend my whole lifetime, are, you know, it's just so tribal now that people, you know, are not able to follow their conscience.
They need to, they need to ask their handlers, all that.
Well, they need to be part of the, you know, the clash of tribal narratives.
And, you know, my family is the same way.
You know, I lost a lot of family and a lot of friends.
And, you know, the Democratic senators were all my friends.
Bernie was my friend, et cetera.
But now they are, you know, they're just locked.
And if you have anything to do with Trump, you're, you know, you're demonized and vilified.
And like President Trump says, he said, if I cured cancer, they'd still find something wrong with me.
And I think that's true that we're not, you know, we're, we're locked in this very, very polarized space that is not good for our country.
When my uncle was in there, everything he did was bipartisan.
He was there for 50 years.
And, you know, he did, he had more legislation under his name than any senator in history.
And it's because he was able to work across the aisles.
But no matter who you are now, you can't work across the aisles.
So we're locked in this deadlock.
And it's very, it's, um, it's troubling.
But, you know, that it's just the reality of where we are.
Whenever you kind of got behind the curtain, was there any more information for you there about any of the assassination attempts that had happened with your family or anything like that?
No, I mean, my.
Like, did they give you any more like unredacted statements?
Like, was there anything like that?
No.
I mean, President Trump has ordered all of that stuff to be released.
And in fact, there was some stuff that I asked him not to release.
And he said, no, I'm releasing all of it.
And the reason I didn't want it released is because there was information in some of the telegrams that could have jeopardized people who are still alive on a completely different issue.
But it seemed to me that it was, you know, that it was worth withholding a couple of these documents.
The reason I knew a lot about it is because my daughter-in-law, Amarillas Fox Kennedy, who ran my campaign, is now the deputy director of national intelligence.
Withholding Information00:01:54
And she's the chief of national intelligence at OMB.
And she was given the responsibility by President Trump of releasing all the JFK files.
And she's been thinking about this for years.
She was in the CIA.
Wow, that's wild.
Oh, I met her.
Yeah, you've met her.
But so, no, nobody slipped you a napkin and was like it.
It wasn't like that.
Not on that issue.
Got it.
I've had napkins slipped to me on other issues, but not on that one.
Before you go, and thanks so much, man.
I appreciate it.
It's great to see you.
You look great.
And I'm so proud of you.
I mean, I know you don't care about that.
Maybe, or you do.
I don't know.
It doesn't matter.
Essentially, said that.
I'm just like, yeah, you just, oh, you're, oh, you always remind me of like a, just to be resilient.
So thank you.
That's what I meant to say.
Yeah, if you had just like, if you had one thing to just tell just people, like, what would you tell them?
I mean, I'd say eat real food.
If it comes in a package, you probably should leave it in the package.
You know, if it comes from the ground, if it comes from the water, if it comes from the air, you know, that's going to be good for you.
And food is medicine.
And you can heal yourself with a good diet.
Amen.
Cool, man.
Thanks so much for hanging out, dude.
And congratulations.
And yeah, keep fighting for us.
We appreciate it.
Thank you, Theo.
Great to see you.
You too, bud.
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 peace of mind I found.