This Past Weekend #639: w/ Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Transcript)

And I really, we really bonded. He’s a good guy and he works with both sides on the legislature. He’s got a great relationship and 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 waivers. So I think they’ve got probably one of the better 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 corn syrup content. Oh here in Tennessee, I think they’re the only state that has that now. And they’ve also banned food dyes and a couple of them and they’re going to ban the rest of them now.

THEO VON: And what are we finding out with food dyes like the food dyes?

Food Dyes and Chemical Additives

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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 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 50, 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 were 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.

THEO VON: Yeah, well, yeah, there’s 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?

The Fluoride Issue

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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. National toxicology program has done a meta analysis and they can, you know, it’s dose related. So every milligram of fluoride that you had reduce 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 and destroys your thyroid.

THEO VON: So it’s horrible for us.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It’s horrible. And it destroys IQ. So, I mean, if you have kids, would you rather have cavities or IQ?

THEO VON: Yeah, I’d rather have them have cavities. I’d rather have holes in their teeth than holes in their ideas or whatever.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Right. But the European nations abandoned, and there has been no increase in cavities. So it doesn’t make any sense for us to be putting it in.

THEO VON: 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 of 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?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, there is natural fluoride in a lot of water. It just comes from the geology, so.

THEO VON: But we’re not adding more, right?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: We’re not adding it.

THEO VON: Nice, dude. Yeah. Because what, yeah, what if you’re trying to think of something, you have two sips of water and then you’re like, God, I can’t even. Now I’m screwed. Your parents send you to take a test, 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.

Tennessee Farm Bill Controversy

THEO VON: 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 this legislative session.

And bring up a, 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.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, yeah.

THEO VON: 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.

Monsanto Lawsuits

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: The reason they’re doing this is because of my lawsuits against Monsanto.

THEO VON: Right. I remember you had that huge settlement against them a long time ago, right?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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, you know, people who’ve gotten non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma 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, a Labrador 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 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.

THEO VON: Yeah, yeah, I think I saw an article about that. Like, they’d found emails that they were like, that it was kind of ghost written or something from the.

Exposing Corporate Influence in Government Agencies

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, it was ghost written. And also the head of the pesticide division, they asked him. Monsanto asked him 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 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.

THEO VON: A gold medal in what? Just anything.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: A gold medal for, you know, killing a study that showed that it caused cancer. It showed that it grows insane.

THEO VON: But it’s at a contest level now that things like that are so, like, prolific that now it’s like there’s awards for it. You know, 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.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, glyphosate.

THEO VON: 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?

The Glyphosate Dilemma

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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 is a future that we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel there. But right now, if you ban glyphosate outright, it would put out of business 80% of our farmers.

THEO VON: Wow. So we’re kind of dependent upon something that we know makes us sick.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, we are. And, you know, we’re trying. We’re doing a lot of work in the HHS, look for other alternatives and to find a, you know, front and 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 in the soil and that causes erosion. And so it’s not a, 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? Right. Here’s that laser.

THEO VON: Oh, wow. That’s unbelievable. Laser weeding robot kills a hundred thousand weeds per hour.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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, so.

THEO VON: But if you could have a couple of those running at night through your farm, that’d be sick.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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.

THEO VON: 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.

Supporting Farmers and the MAHA Agenda

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: You know, the agricultural community has been very, very supportive of the MAHA agenda 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 diseases.

And kids and farmers are going out of business. You know, farmers usually lose money 7 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 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 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.

THEO VON: Got it? Whenever you became secretary, did it feel like you like 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?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It does, yeah.

THEO VON: Do you have to sign an NDA to have the job?

Transparency in Government

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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 ever done three or four press conferences a day like President Trump does, asking, answering any question people fire at.

THEO VON: He’s a machine.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I don’t know how many press conferences President Biden did in his entire administration.

THEO VON: He doesn’t know.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: But it’s a lot less than President Trump does in a month.

THEO VON: Yeah. Oh, for sure.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: And then, you know, we’re, we are right now using AI to revolutionize the Freedom of Information law so that people are going to be able to get Freedom of Information requests immediately.

THEO VON: Like, what do you mean, a freedom of Information requests?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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, you know, that 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.

Restructuring HHS

THEO VON: Whenever, when you got in office, there was, you guys did like a big cut down of like a lot of the divisions and stuff like that. What was. I think you went from 20 something.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: To 15 maybe we had 82,000 employees and 20,000 of them left. And they left 20,000 left.

THEO VON: Or did you guys make, like, cuts? Because I just know that you guys made like a bunch of cuts, different.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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 NIH, the focus of NIH is going to be figuring out why we’re also 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 the amount that we’re spending on research is the same that we spend, you know, in 2020, 2019.

THEO VON: 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.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It 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.

THEO VON: And how do you decide that? Is it, do you decide or is.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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 waste. 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.

THEO VON: Oh, it’s the government.

Reforming Scientific Research

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah. And we’re changing that now so that, you know, we consolidate it and we’re making it more streamlined and efficient. It’s so that we can do the job better, so we can do better research. And then the research was never replicated, 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 no, 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, 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. So their careers are, you know, endangered. It’s hard for them to get the next grant. And so a lot of them had this incentive to cheat.

THEO VON: So they have to win if they get it, if they prove it.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Hypothesis is a null hypothesis. They don’t get, you know, their whole future goes into the toilet essentially. And so because they knew that study was never going to be replicated, nobody was going to check on them. It was an incentive for them to cheat.

THEO VON: And that must have been a pipeline just for companies then to just get like, get like lopsided science or solo sided science that wasn’t, I mean.

The Alzheimer’s Research Scandal

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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 800 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 cheating, but all of them were kind of confirmatory and all of their hypothesis was 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, et cetera. And in the end, you know, we came in and this scandal was brewing. The head of Stanford University Medical School had to resign the dean because they.

THEO VON: Knew what was going on, because he.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Was involved in publishing some of these fraudulent studies. 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 so now what Jay wants to do is to spend 20% of our budget on replication so that every study gets replicated.

THEO VON: And.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Who is.

THEO VON: Okay, yeah, I know you’re talking about.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: And he was one of the guys who was censored during COVID. He was one of the top statisticians at Stanford. And he and a lot of other ones were, you know, were censored, were lost their jobs. Marty Makary, who you know also.

THEO VON: Yeah, I love his book.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: One of his books I read, he was also censored. 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 these bureau administrative jobs, and now we’ve cut that down to five. So all the cuts that we did were meant to streamline the agency so that there’s more money for research.

THEO VON: Got it. Like after the pauses on the grants and some of those things are you.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: The grants were renewed.

THEO VON: Most of the ones are the ones that you guys seemed. That you guys thought were viable.

Combating Corruption in Medical Journals

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah. On almost all of them.

THEO VON: Got it. I saw you in your speech that you gave yesterday here in Tennessee saying that there’s all kinds of temptation to cheat if you know you’re not going to get caught.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, well, that’s true in every system.

THEO VON: Yeah. Have you seen a lot of that?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I mean, the amyloid black is a really good example. Yeah, we see it everywhere. We see it everywhere in medicine. It’s everywhere. And the journals are utterly corrupt because they’re owned by the pharmaceutical companies. And so people read a journal and they think, oh, this is science. But even, you know, Marsha Engel, who 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 runs Lancet, who still runs it, says the same thing. The journals…

THEO VON: And those are the people running them.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: What happens? They make huge amounts of money.

THEO VON: Yeah.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: And they make money from advertising, which is paid for by pharmaceutical companies. And through a scheme called preprints where the pharmaceutical company plans 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, 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?

THEO VON: Yeah.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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.

The Solution: Open Source Journals

THEO VON: 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.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Oh, 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 there is no raw data published, so nobody can go in and replicate it. So to the extent possible, sometimes you can’t. You have to buy the raw data and it’s very expensive or inaccessible, so you can’t publish it, but you can publish the peer review, which is what we’re doing.

And so everybody will be able to say if they have 10 peer reviewers and they all say this article sucks, it’s got all these holes in it, then the public will be able to read that and doctors will be able to read it and the regulators will be able to read it. And so it’s basically open source. It’s, 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. And in science, you always question the expert. Yeah, you can’t.

THEO VON: There’s not an expert in science because it’s like an evolving thing. Right.

Experts and Bias

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, you know, when I did the Monsanto cases, I was part of a, you know, a big team we had. And Cheryl came to my trial a couple 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 Monsanto, 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 biostitutes. The ones that work for industry.

THEO VON: The ones that work for industry, that’s great.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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 people that decides it. As best we can.

Medicare and Medicaid Fraud

THEO VON: Right. What were some of the biggest cases of fraud? Like, when you got in there and got behind the curtain, see, like, you know, like the NIH, the EPA, just see what’s going on back there. What were some of the biggest cases of fraud that you kind of…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I mean, the biggest cases are what were… We got between Medicaid and Medicare? There’s about $100 billion stolen every year. And a lot of it is like, what’s happening in Minnesota with the Somali community and what’s happening now even worse in California.

But, you know, one of the problems is that that’s a systemic problem, is that Medicaid and Medicare now no longer… It used to be that they paid for your medical treatment, your doctor’s visit. But now they pay for the person who takes you to the doctor, and they pay for home care, and they pay for, you know, a person to come in and pay your bills. Right. So there’s all kinds of opportunities for fraud.

And a doctor recently, you know, Oz told me this, told Oz, he said there was a doctor in California that he visited, and the doctor had a patient who was a heroin addict. Heroin addict was coming to see him four times a month for some kind of a treatment. And one day 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 $600 every time she drives me.” And he said, “That’ll put you back…”

THEO VON: Together with your ex.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: “We make $3,000 a month, you know, with her driving me this, and then I drive her to hers.” 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.

THEO VON: Where was that located?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It was in California. And, you know, so they’re all just P.O. boxes. They’re not actually doing any nursing care.

THEO VON: No.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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.

THEO VON: Yeah.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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. And but that’s happening every day now. We have the ability to catch them.

Using AI to Combat Fraud

THEO VON: How are you able to adjust that sort of thing now? Like, what makes it different now?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Because first of all, under the Biden administration, I don’t want to get super partisan.

THEO VON: Yeah.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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. They’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, but so they never covered anything.

THEO VON: Oh, I see.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Now we’re not going to pay them anymore. If they’re fraudulent, they’re going to get… They’re not going to get a check. We’re going to save tens of billions of dollars just this year, and we’re going to save hundreds of billions over, you know, annually from now on.

THEO VON: And that’s because the AI is keeping track of that.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: The AI can spot the fraud.

THEO VON: Got it.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: And with Medicare, with Medicaid, which is 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.

DOGE and Government Efficiency

THEO VON: 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 to the regular…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: He was definitely involved.

THEO VON: 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?

THEO VON: The things you were just talking about, you mean. Yeah, that’s going to help a lot.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah.

THEO VON: Is DOE still active? Is that program still active? What were the outcomes of that?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, the outcomes were that a lot of, I cut my workforce by 20%. But in truth, some of those were very good cuts. I think we all agree, including Elon, that it would have been better to do targeted cuts. Cut the people who are actually causing the problem and then keep the people, a lot of the new workers who are only there for a couple of months, that it might have been better to keep some of those people and change the culture.

THEO VON: I see. So, yeah, instead of more of like a mowing, more of like a pruning kind of thing, you mean?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah.

America’s Health Crisis

THEO VON: Do you think America is sicker than ever these days?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It is sicker. We’re the sickest country in the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world. 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? 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, that 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 we need to get Americans healthy. We need to end the chronic disease epidemic. Right now we spend two to three times on our healthcare per capita what they spend in Europe, and yet we have the worst health outcomes in the world.

THEO VON: Bring up a capita chart if you can.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: We’ve dropped behind Europe by 6 years in lifespan, 10 years in some cases. And yet our health outcomes are worse. We have the highest maternal mortality. That means women dying in childbirth in the developed world. We have the highest infant mortality. How could that be with the United States? And a lot of it is because of chronic disease.

And then our diabetes rate. When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes over juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50 year career. Today, 38% of American teens is diabetic or pre-diabetic. This is unknown. Autism rates have gone from less than 1 in 10,000 in 1970 to 1 in 31 today.

THEO VON: Oh yeah, you can throw a rock and hit an autistic kid anywhere.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: And California is 1 in every 19 kids. 1 in every 12.5 boys. And so the cost to our country. 77% of American kids can’t qualify for military service.

THEO VON: How many percent?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 77% cannot get into the military because of all the reason.

THEO VON: What? That is the truth? Oh my God, bro, that’s insane.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, that should get people’s attention.

THEO VON: Bring that up. Is that true? Let me see if that’s true. Bobby probably just uploaded this stat onto 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?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Because they have chronic disease, they have asthma, they have diabetes, 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 dollars 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.

Individual Responsibility vs. Systemic Failure

THEO VON: 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.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I mean individuals have a responsibility. But the obesity, when I was a kid, 5% of children were obese.

THEO VON: Yeah. You had one kind of fat kid in your class.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah. And today it’s 15%, it’s going overweight. Is 40% adults, it’s even higher.

THEO VON: We should just have a thick military then, I think.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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.

THEO VON: Oh.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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.

THEO VON: And which agencies allowed that? I mean the EPA puts labels, the FDA. So do you feel like that’s been one of the most compromised agencies?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah. It was owned by Big Pharma and Big Food, and we’re, Marty Makary has changed that now.

The New Food Pyramid

THEO VON: So how do we know that that’s changed? As a look at the food.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Pyramid. The food pyramid. When I came into office, we were supposed to publish in January of last year.

THEO VON: Oh, yeah. The last food pyramid I saw had vapes on it. So it was getting pretty bad.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: We’re doing vapes now. You mean the food.

THEO VON: Oh, the last one. Yeah. The one that. Yeah.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: That’s funny.

THEO VON: I was like, this is getting bad.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: But the food pyramid. So when I came in, the Biden administration had prepared new dietary guidelines, and they were 453 pages long. And they were completely driven by the same mercantile impulses that put Froot Loops at the top of the food pyramid. How do you put Froot Loops, which is not a food, at the top of the food. It’s just poison.

THEO VON: Yeah.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: And that. But it was all driven by the commercial interests of the companies that controlled FDA. So when we came in, 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.

THEO VON: It took them 11 months to put this together.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, because you have to go over science. What is broccoli?

THEO VON: Right.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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, make sure that every recommendation that we made is based solidly on a foundation of gold standard science.

THEO VON: So for this, for them to create the food pyramid, it took 11 months.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah. And then we flipped it over. And we flipped it over because the category of food that you should eat most is a broad category. It includes vegetables, it includes proteins, salmon and steak.

THEO VON: And most of this is for children, right?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, no, it’s good for everybody.

THEO VON: I remember from when I was a kid, you would see it.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah. Right.

THEO VON: But I guess that’s the first point you learn about it.

Food as Medicine

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: That’s why we’re all so screwed up. But 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.

THEO VON: Yeah. At that point you’re just a drug.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Dealer. And you can get rid of the diagnosis. Not only that, but now 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. Pollan, who has cured schizophrenia with dietary changes with keto diets.

THEO VON: Is that true?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Go ahead and look it up.

THEO VON: Cure schizophrenia with keto diets.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah.

THEO VON: Well, I definitely noticed that with when I’m fasting, I get, I’m pretty smart.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, you get smarter, right?

THEO VON: Yeah. “Preliminary clinical findings, including case reports and small trials, suggest 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 so much of it is how we are operating. It just feels like we’ve been stuck in such a place where you have a food industry that doesn’t care if you’re healthy. And then you have a health care industry that doesn’t care if you get well.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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 controlled 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, the fighting, the violence drops precipitously. The use of restraints in one juvenile detention facility dropped by 75%. Usually the violence drops by 40 or 50%. And people, it caused depression, it caused anxiety. These foods, 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.

Changing Behavior and Incentives

THEO VON: Yeah. How do you get the everyday person then to adjust their psychology or their thought about taking more of an interest in themselves? Because I think it used to be you trusted the commercials. You’re like, this is great for, it was. And you believed that.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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 insurers, pharmaceutical companies, the doctors, the hospitals are making more money if you’re sick. The rehab with drug rehabs, if you come back, if you relapse, they make more money.

THEO VON: Right.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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 them for free. And that will incentivize them to do better treatment. You have 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’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.

THEO VON: What do you mean? Why not?

Medical Records and Healthcare Transparency

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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. 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 one of those forms.

THEO VON: Yeah.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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.

THEO VON: Yeah. It is ridiculous. You have to do that all the time.

Prior Authorization Reform

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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, 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.

THEO VON: 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…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It makes it so that you’ll know and so the doctor will know before you leave.

THEO VON: Got it.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: A lot of the stress, the prescription or whatever you need to do, you’ll at least know and you won’t be sitting at home.

THEO VON: And that’s actually going to happen?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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.

THEO VON: How are the patients? Are you familiar with that?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Exactly. And that’s to make you the CEO of your own health.

THEO VON: They already are supposed to do that, right?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It was a law that Trump passed 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 in a draconian way if they don’t do it. So they’re all going to be doing it by the end of this year.

THEO VON: Are they going to try to find a way to skirt around that though, I wonder? Like, are they?

Price Transparency in Healthcare

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, it’s numb and it’s so screwed up because if you go buy an automobile and the guy tells you, yeah, but I’m not going to tell you the price after you bought it.

THEO VON: Yeah, it’s insane.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: You’d be, 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, $5,003.

THEO VON: You can look and see, you can look and see. You’ll be able to go to a menu online.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It’s like Gas Buddy when you’re looking for a gas station. But you’re going to be able to…

THEO VON: Do that clean bathroom or whatever, that clean bathroom when you use that one. That one’s crazy. And they lie on there and some of them are at rest areas too. And I, 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 impersonator 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 I need to get an MRI, I can look online.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: You can look and find. And right now there’s no way to find out the price of it.

THEO VON: 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 offer you a lower rate.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yes, but they’re all playing that game and now they’re not going to be able to do it anymore.

THEO VON: How soon is that going to be released?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It’s going to be released very, very soon. The next couple of months. All the hospitals now have to come online and start reporting. And the ones that don’t do it immediately, we are going to have very, very high fines for them. So there’s going to be big incentive for them to start reporting.

But it also is going to drive down prices because why is there that absurd differential between $1,300 and $22,000?

THEO VON: Just because we don’t know.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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.

THEO VON: But won’t there be lobbyists? Aren’t there lobbyists just fighting you? I mean right here it says, here’s compiled a list of example of hospitals and childbirth costs in Nashville based on available self-pay cash bundles. Ascension St. Thomas is $4,800 to $7,800. National General is $10,000 to $15,000.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I mean why is… Yeah, it’s just chaos.

THEO VON: That’s chaos. There’s no market. 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 like, oh, it’s $70.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Or they’ll say to you, 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.

THEO VON: That’s crazy. Yeah. And they only have fluorescent light for four years at that rate. So that’s actually going to come into play.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, that will be in play.

THEO VON: And what’s that going to be called? How will we access it?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It’s called price transparency. I think we’re calling it Trumparency.

THEO VON: Really?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: No, I mean if Trump named it.

THEO VON: He would, I mean he would name that in an RV. That’s hilarious though. Trumparency, dude. Oh, it’s opaque. What does opaque mean? Actually look it up.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I don’t know if I landed. Yeah.

THEO VON: So did I land that right or not? It was somewhere in the middle.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It’s halfway transparent. Yeah.

THEO VON: There you go. Hey, what was that? That’s somebody in boots. See, that’s one of the most important things. That’s something that we’ve been talking about in here for probably like a year and a half now. Two years is the price transparency, power to the patients. That’s one of the groups that’s helping to push that. Who are the people that are lobbying so hard for these things not to happen?

Institutional Change at HHS

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: 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 the institutional culture. And it’s, 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 not allowed them to do what they want. And we need to reignite that feeling of idealism.

THEO VON: Do you feel good about it?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, I think we’re doing a really good job. I mean, I think we’ve done more this year than any health secretary has done in history, that HHS has done in a single year at any time. And I think we’re dramatically changing the relationship between Americans and their healthcare system.

But it’s like turning a giant oil tanker. You have to keep hitting it and hitting with the tugboat and the bow, and then ultimately it will start to turn. And then you hit it just enough times that don’t flip fast.

THEO VON: And things change.

Addressing Addiction

I know before you leave, there’s a lot of 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?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, I mean the problem with addiction is that the cost of the addict, we at HHS, we’re the fiduciary, the medical cost of the addict. So we can look and say, okay, if we can cure you from addiction.

I have a cousin, Patrick Kennedy, who was in Congress, but he had 17 rehabs and he was telling me during that period of his life he was at the emergency room every two weeks and he had, he had an irritated bowel syndrome and he had contusions and he had all of these other illnesses that he didn’t even associate with addiction, but they are all associated with.

THEO VON: Yeah, it gets deep.

Accountability in Addiction Treatment

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 agency of HHS together to look at that addict and then follow him over, have somebody responsible for following him over the lifespan of his addiction.

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 you don’t have anybody who’s accountable for the outcome.

And what you need to do is we’re doing these pilot programs called STREET in eight different locales to figure out how to do this, to bring all the agencies together, do early interventions, confront the addict on the street, get them out of crisis, into treatment, out of treatment, into rehab, out of rehab, into sober housing, long term care, help them find a job and to stabilize their lives and have one person who’s responsible for that whole trajectory.

THEO VON: Amen. Yeah. Because when it goes piecemeal like that, it’s just like, it’s easy for people to just hand them off.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah. And then everybody checks the boxes.

THEO VON: Yeah, everybody.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I found him a house. Okay. He’s still shooting up. He’s pulling the copper piping out to pay for his daddy. That’s not my business. Yeah. That’s law enforcement. That’s somebody else.

THEO VON: Well, thank you. I just, I think it’s amazing you care so much about that and, yeah, for the chance that people can get well and change their lives.

Trusted Leaders in Congress

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 were some other 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…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: There’s a ton of Congress people who are incredible and 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’s been really good on a lot of my issues, and there’s a lot of other ones, too.

THEO VON: What about Senator Hawley? Are you familiar with him?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah. Yeah, he’s great. 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 are not able to follow their conscience. They need to.

THEO VON: They need to ask their handlers all that.

Political Polarization

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, they need to be part of 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 in. If you have anything to do with Trump, you’re demonized and vilified. And like President Trump says, he said, “If I cured cancer, they’d still find something wrong with me.” And I think that’s true, that we’re not, you know, we’re locked in this very, very polarized space and 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 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 aisle. So we’re locked in this deadlock. And it’s very, it’s troubling, but you know that it’s just the reality of where we are.

JFK Files and Transparency

THEO VON: 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?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: No, I mean, my…

THEO VON: Like, did they give you any more unredacted statements? Like, was there anything like that?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: No. I mean, and President Trump has ordered all that stuff to be released. And in fact, it was some stuff that I asked him not to release. And he said, “Now 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 worth withholding a couple of these documents.

The reason I knew a lot about it is because my daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, who ran my campaign, is now the Deputy Director of National Intelligence. And she’s the Chief of National Intelligence at OMB. And she was given the responsibility by President Trump of releasing all the JFK files. And she’s been thinking about this for years. She was in the CIA.

THEO VON: That’s wild. Oh, I met her.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, you’ve met her.

THEO VON: But, but, so no, nobody slipped to a napkin and was like, “No, this is who did it.” It wasn’t like that.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Not on that issue.

THEO VON: Got it.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I’ve had napkins slipped to me on other issues, but not on that one.

Final Advice

THEO VON: 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. You know, I mean, I know you don’t care about that. Maybe, or you do, I don’t know.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It doesn’t matter.

THEO VON: I shouldn’t have said that. I’m just like, yeah, you just, oh, you always remind me of, like, a, just to be resilient, so thank you. That’s what I meant to say. Yeah. If you had just one thing to just tell just people, what would you tell them?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I mean, I’d say eat real food. If it comes in a package, you probably should leave it in the package. But, you know, if it comes from the ground, if it comes from the water, if it comes from the air, you know that’s going to be good for you. And food is medicine, and you can heal yourself with a good diet.

THEO VON: Amen. Cool, man. Thanks so much for hanging out, dude. And congratulations. And, yeah, keep fighting for us. We appreciate it.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Thank you, Theo. Great to see you.

THEO VON: You too, bud.

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