Joe Rogan Experience Podcast #1999

AUSTIN, TX

 

[Click Here To Play Audio]

 

Intro Script: [00:00:00] Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

 

Intro Script: [00:00:05] Train by Day. Joe Rogan Podcast by night all day.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:00:08] I like them because they keep people from locking in. But one of the things that I wanted to make sure I did in this conversation is not interrupt you because it's very frustrating for me when I'm hearing people talk in these, what should be long form conversations about very important and nuanced things. And, you know, I think one of the things that happens is people are very concerned with letting you say things, that is going to get them in trouble or get their channel in trouble. Like, there's people that are doing a lot of self-censoring. And I think they're doing that also when they're having these conversations with you, because they want to establish right away that they have problems with you, and they have problems with some of the positions that a lot of people have problems with. I was one of those people. So when I had heard of you in the past, before I had read your book and before I'd met you, I had no information on you. But there was this narrative, and this narrative was you were anti-vax, and you believed in pseudoscience, and you were kind of loony. I didn't look into it at all. I just took it at face value because that's what everybody had said. And in my mind, vaccines have been one of the most important medical advancements in human history, saved countless lives, and protected children. And I thought very strongly that they were important. I didn't have any information on that either. This was also just a narrative that I adopted from cursory reading of news articles and, you know, not really getting into the subject at all.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:01:52] Then the pandemic happens, and I had quite a few very reasonable liberal people, rational people, people that I trusted their mind, recommend The Real Anthony Fauci, your book. And I'm like, "Robert Kennedy wrote a book about Anthony Fauci. Like, what is this going to be about?" This is my initial reaction. You've got this, what I perceive to be a kind of fringy thinking, you know, almost conspiracy theorist-type person that's not based in fact, what their argument was – and he had written a book on Anthony Fauci. And this was right around the time where I was, you know, I was very concerned with the way things were going, that people were just blindly trusting that there was only one way out of this. That was kind of bothering me, particularly when I had known that so many people had gotten the virus and had been fine. So I'm like, "Well, what's the reality of this?" So then I read the book. And I've talked about it multiple times on the podcast. But if what you were saying in that book was not true, I do not understand how you are not being sued. You would instantly immediately be sued. The book was very successful. It sold a lot of copies, but it was mysteriously absent from certain bestseller lists. People were not promoting that book at all, but through word of mouth and through the time that we live in, through this time, where there was so much uncertainty, and people were very confused and also suspicious.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:03:26] They were suspicious that they're being told a narrative. And they were starting to remember that, "Hey, this has happened in the past, these kind of narratives about medications, these have happened in the past. That just never happened where this is, like, the whole country is being convinced that this is the way to do it." So I read your book, and by the end of the book, it was so disturbing that sometimes I had to put it away and just read fiction for a few days. I was, like, I don't want this in my head right now, you know, because I listen on audio, and a lot of times I'm listening in the sauna, so I'm listening to you. I'm already getting tortured. So it's 185 degrees. And I'm listening to this book that, if it's telling the truth just about the AIDS crisis, just about the AIDS crisis, just about the use of AZT, just about – all of it. All of it. So I had seen numerous interviews with you, and, you know, you seemed very reasonable and very rational. And then I was, like, "Is this possible that this is the guy that's telling the truth? Is this possible that everyone that I know that had these strong opinions of you, that most of them at least were like me?" They had formed these opinions through a glance at a headline, someone talking about you on a television show. And so, and then we run into each other in Aspen. Just randomly.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:05:02] That was the weirdest moment because we were both staring at each other.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:05:04] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:05:05] And then we almost did it, like a full 360.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:05:08] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I noticed you walking. I'm like, "That's – yeah it is!" So I was like, "Hey, what's up?" So. So first of all, I wanted to ask you if you could just please just explain how you got into these controversial positions in the first place. How did you adopt these opinions that people find so controversial? Because you started out as an environmental guy. Right?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:05:40] Yeah. And I'll say one thing about that book, is that it is depressing to read. And like, my wife could not read it. She was going to read it out of loyalty to me. And I just said, "You can't do that," because it would have depressed her so much. You know, and this is not a good advertisement for this book, but it's... You know, there's so much about documentation of corruption and, you know, the sort of brutality towards children. And I didn't want her reading that. Her life is about making people laugh, making people joyful, you know, which is its own contribution to global health. You know, people who can make you laugh are doing something for you that is going to probably extend your lifetime. I look at Norman Lear, you know, who's like 96 years old or whatever, and he looked like 50. And Carl Reiner, and all these people who, you know, laugh... There's something about laughter that makes, you know, that is good for you. And so, you know, I admire anybody who took it on to read that book and made it through. I was, you know, kind of one of the leading environmentalists in the country.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:07:00] I found it, I started, I went to work for commercial fishermen on the Hudson River in 1983 when I first got sober. And I wanted to do something with my life that I, you know, that I felt drawn to. And I'd always been an outdoors person. I've always been a fisherman and outdoors wildlife, kayaking, and all that stuff. And I went to work for commercial fishermen on the Hudson River. We began suing polluters. They purchased a patrol boat and began patrolling the river. And we sued, while I was there, we sued over 500 polluters. We forced polluters to spend almost $5 billion on remediation of the Hudson. And today, you know, partially as a result of our work, the Hudson is now the richest waterway in the North Atlantic. It produces more biomass per gallon, more pounds of fish per acre than any other waterway in the Atlantic Ocean north of the equator. The miraculous resurrection. And when I first started working on the Hudson, it caught fire. It was dead water, zero dissolved oxygen for 20 miles north of New York City, 20 miles south of Albany. No life in it.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:08:15] Wow. It caught fire. It was that polluted.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:08:17] It caught fire. It would turn colors every week, depending on what color they were painting the trucks at the GM plant in Tarrytown. You know, it was really, my father toured it in 1967, and it was just, it was regarded as a national joke. Well, today it's an international model for ecosystem protection and a miraculous resurrection. It's the only waterway in the North Atlantic that still has strong spawning stocks of all of its historical species, of migratory fish, of the anadromous fish, like striped bass, sturgeon, herring, alewives, blue crab, etc. And the miraculous resurrection of the Hudson inspired the creation of new River Keepers. We copyrighted the name, and we started helping these other groups get started. And today, it's the biggest water protection group in the world. So we have 350 Water Keepers. Each one has a patrol boat. Each one patrols their local waterway, and they sue polluters. And we're in 46 countries. So in 2005, I was representing a bunch of Water Keepers all over the United States and in the provinces of Canada suing coal burning power plants and cement kilns for discharging mercury. Two years before 2003, the National Academy of Sciences and the FDA had published a report, like a five-year study, that showed that every freshwater fish in America had dangerous levels of mercury in its flesh. The CDC simultaneously published a study that showed that one out of every six American women had levels high enough in her core blood, or that her child would have some kind of intellectual deficiency like lost IQ, etc.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:10:14] And where's the mercury coming from?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:10:15] The mercury was largely coming from coal burning power plants. It's in the geology, in the coal, and it precipitates out, you know, when there's rain. If you, when you burn the coal, it's in the, you know, it's an element, so it doesn't degrade. And when the rain comes, it falls onto the landscapes, then it washes off the landscapes into the rivers, and the fish were all contaminated. We know that saltwater fish, the big predatory species, have mercury, but the freshwater fish are just as bad. And it struck me then that we were living in a science fiction nightmare where my children and the children of every other American could now no longer engage in the seminal primal activity of American youth that I had grown up with, of your parents taking you to the local fishing hole, and then coming home and safely eating the fish. You can't do that anymore in the United States of America, anywhere in North America. And so we started suing coal plants and cement kilns, which were the primary contributor of mercury. And there were a lot of people suing coal plants back then, but they were suing them for other reasons: for ozone and particulates, for acid rain, for carbon, etc. And we were, the Water Keepers were mainly focused on mercury. So I was also pushing legislation about mercury, lobbying the EPA to reduce it. And I was giving lectures all over the place. So these women start showing up at every lecture that I give – public lectures, and they would come and sit in the front seat, occupy the front.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:11:53] They'd come early, occupy the front row, and then afterwards they'd stay late, and they would ask to talk to me. And they would say to me in a very respectful way – and by the way, these women were very – all looked kind of similar. They were very pulled together. They were, you know, they were women in childbearing years. As it turns out, they were all the mothers of intellectually disabled children. And they believed that their children had been injured by vaccines, by mercury in the vaccines. So they would say to me in kind of a respectful but vaguely scolding way, "If you're really interested in mercury contamination exposures to children, you need to look at the vaccines." Now, this is something I didn't want to do, because I, you know, I... first of all, I'm not a public health person. I wanted to do environmental stuff. Second of all, I'd been involved since I was a little kid in the whole area of intellectual disabilities. My family, it was part of the DNA of my family. My aunt had been intellectually disabled, my Aunt Rosemary. My aunt Eunice Shriver, who was my godmother, founded Special Olympics in 1969. But before it was called Special Olympics, it was called Camp Shriver. She lived ten minutes from my house. And I would go over there every weekend to be a hugger and a coach in Special Olympics.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:13:25] And then, when I was in high school, because this was so much part of my family DNA, I spent 200 hours in Wassaic Home for the Retarded, you know, working, doing service. So but it wasn't something I wanted to do with my life. Other people in my family were devoting their lives to that – my cousin Anthony Shriver, started Best Buddies – and many other people. My family had written a lot of the legislation that protected people and gave rights to people with intellectual disabilities. My father had kicked down the door of Willowbrook, which was the big hospital in Staten Island. So my family was deeply involved, but it was not what I wanted to do with my life. But these women kept continually, I want to say, harassing me, but they were following me. And it was different ones at every speech. And one of them got – I was like, you know, I did enough research to show that the public health authorities were saying that these women were crazy, but they didn't look crazy to me. And they were rational. They weren't excitable, and they had done their research. And I was like, I should be listening to these people, even if they're wrong. Somebody needs to listen to them. I mean, you know, and by the way, I had worked on the Hudson River with commercial fishermen, and I'd seen so many times when the scientists were wrong, and the commercial fishermen were right about what was happening in the Hudson River.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:15:06] One time, I'll just give you an example. The commercial fishermen came to me and said, "Oh, the goldfish are dying up in the Wallkill Creek." And I went up and they said, "Will you help us get to it? Because there's a new sewer plant up there that's discharging chlorine." It's hard to kill a goldfish. They're one of the most hardy species in the world. You can pour oil on a goldfish, and it won't do anything. It won't hurt it. And I went up to the Department of Environmental Conservation, and they said, "There are no goldfish in the Hudson River." Well, these were people who I had watched them catch goldfish in the Hudson. So, anyway, that was just part of the background of my, you know, little bit of skepticism about government scientists that they're not always right, that sometimes you have to listen to people; and that human experience is valid, and that if a woman, if a woman tells you something about her child, you need, you should listen. And so then one of these women came to my home, and she found my home in Hyannis Port at a little bungalow. And her name was Sarah Bridges. She was a psychologist from Minnesota.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:16:18] And she found my home. She came to it. She took out of the trunk of her car a pile of scientific studies that was 18 inches thick. She put it on my front porch, my stoop, and then she rang the bell; and then she pointed to that pile, and she said, "I'm not leaving here till you read those." And as it turns out, her son, Porter Bridges, had been a perfectly healthy kid, got a battery of vaccines when he was two, and lost the ability to speak. He lost the ability to, he lost his toilet training. He began head banging, and engaging in other stereotypical behavior like stimming, hand flapping, toe walking, and got an autism diagnosis. And the vaccine court had awarded her $20 million for acknowledging that the child had gotten autism from the vaccines, and she didn't want it to happen to other kids. And so I started, I sat down with this pile of studies, and I'm used to reading science. I'm very comfortable reading it. I wanted to be a scientist when I was a little kid. And my life, my legal career has been about science. It's, you know, virtually all the cases that I've been involved with, hundreds and hundreds of cases, almost all of them involve some scientific controversy. And so I'm comfortable with reading science, and I know how to read it critically. I know how to look for the flaws in it and you know how to weigh, attribute weight to various studies, etc.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:17:58] And I sat down while she was there, and I read through the abstracts of these studies, one after the other, and before I was six inches down in that pile, I recognized that there was this huge delta between what the public health agencies were saying were telling us about vaccine safety and what the actual peer-reviewed, published science was saying. Then I took the next step, which is I started calling people, high level public officials, and I had access to everyone. I called Francis Collins, I called Maureen McCormick, who ran the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences. I called Kathleen Stratton at the National Academy of Sciences. There was a chief staffer, and I was asking her about these studies. And I realized during these conversations that none of these people had read any of the science. They were just repeating things that they had been told about the science. And then, and they kept saying to me, "Well, I can't answer that detailed question. You need to talk to Paul Offit." Well, Paul Offit is a vaccine developer who made an $186 million deal with Merck on the rotavirus vaccine. And it would be, it was odd to me that government regulators were saying, "You should talk to somebody in the industry." It's like, I used to talk to EPA people all the time asking them, "What does this provision mean in the permit? Why did you put it in there?" And if they said to me, "I don't know, why don't you go talk to the coal industry or this lobbyist for the coal industry, and he will tell you what we're doing."

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:19:36] I would have been very, you know, puzzled and indignant. So it was weird to me that the top regulators in the country were telling me, "Go talk to somebody who's an industry insider, because we don't understand the science." And when I talked to him, I caught him in a lie. And both of us knew that he was lying, and that both of us recognized that he was lying. And at that point, I was...

 

Joe Rogan: [00:20:03] What was the lie?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:20:05] Well, I asked him this question. I said, "Why is it that CDC and every state regulator recommends that pregnant women do not eat tuna fish to avoid the mercury, but that CDC is recommending mercury containing flu shots with huge bolus doses of mercury. I mean, massive doses to pregnant women in every trimester of pregnancy?" And he said to me, he said, "Well, Bobby," in this kind of patronizing way; and by the way, when I talked to Paul Offit, he started the conversation, he was very enthusiastic, and he said, you know, "Your father was my hero. The reason I got into public service and public health was because I was inspired by your father." So that kind of, you know, I'm susceptible like anybody else to that kind of flattery.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:21:03] So I was inclined to like the guy. But then he said this. I asked him, "How can you be, you know, telling people not to eat women, not to eat tuna fish, but giving them a flu shot that has, you know, these huge doses." And he said, "Well, Bobby, there are, there's two kinds of mercury. There's a good mercury, and there's a bad mercury." And the minute he said, and I knew there's a different kind of mercury in the vaccines – it's ethylmercury in the vaccines, and methyl mercury in the fish. But I know a lot of it. By then, you can imagine I know a lot about mercury. I've been suing people. When you sue somebody, you get a PhD in that you know more than anybody in the world. You have to or you're not going to win your lawsuit. So I knew a lot about mercury, and I knew that his argument was not with me, but it was with the periodic tables, because there's no such thing as a good mercury. And I also knew the history of why he was saying that, because, you know, mercury was added to vaccines in a form called thimerosal in 1932. And Eli Lilly, which was the manufacturer, was, because people knew then that mercury was horrendously neurotoxic. Mercury is a thousand times more neurotoxic than lead. You would never shoot lead into your baby.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:22:22] Why was thimerosal introduced into the vaccines.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:22:24] Allegedly introduced as a preservative? But it doesn't kill, it doesn't kill Streptococcus or any of the other contaminants you would be worried about. In fact, it kills brain cells at 1/30th the dose that it takes to kill Streptococcus or Staphylococcus. So it wasn't a good preservative. What NIH admitted to me in 2016, the real reason: it was there as an adjuvant. An adjuvant is a toxic material that they add to dead virus vaccines to amplify the immune response. So your body, when, I mean, this is kind of getting into the weeds, but a live virus vaccine, if they give it to you, it can spread the disease, it can mutate in you and spread the disease. That's why most of the polio today, 70% of the polio today is vaccine polio that came from the vaccines. But, so the regulators expressed a preference for dead virus vaccines. The dead virus vaccine, however, will not produce a durable or robust immune response enough to get a license. The way you get a license for a vaccine is showing that you get an antibody response for a certain amount of time, and that it's a strong antibody response. But the dead virus vaccine won't produce that. But vaccinologists figured out that if you add something horrendously toxic to the vaccine, that your body confuses that toxic product – you add it with the dead antigen, which is the viral particle – your body confuses that toxin with the viral particle and gets frightened and mounts a huge, humongous immune response.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:24:11] The next time it sees that virus, the immune response is there. So at that point, vaccinologists went around searching around the world to find the most horrendously toxic materials to add to vaccines. And there's a mantra in vaccinology that the more toxic the adjuvant, the more robust the immune response. And so that's why toxicologists and vaccinologists don't get along with each other, because the toxicologists would say to the vaccinologists, "Well, I understand it gave you your immune response, but then what is the fate of that in your body? Where is it going? Is it being excreted? Is it being lodged in the brain? Is it penetrating the blood brain barrier?" And the Vaccinologist could not answer those questions and did not want to. So they basically moved the toxicologists out of these, you know, out of the vaccine, the whole vaccine universe. Anyway, what, so when it was added in 1932, the industry said, Eli Lilly said, "Well, the reason – " because everybody was saying, "How can you put mercury into a child. Who would do that?" And they said, "Well, it's a different kind of mercury. It's ethylmercury. And the ethyl mercury is excreted very quickly so it won't stay in your body."

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:25:29] They had no science to say that, but that's what they were saying for years. And then in 2003. A CDC scientist called Pichichero did a study where he gave tuna sandwiches that were mercury contaminated to children. And they, and then measured their blood. And the mercury from the tuna sandwich was there, half-life, 64 days later. So it was still there in 64 days. Then he injected the children with mercury from a vaccine, and that mercury disappeared from their blood within a week. And this kind of confirmed what Eli Lilly had said in 1932: "Oh, it disappears really quickly from the body." And that was published, I believe, in The Lancet or Pediatrics. But immediately the journal began getting letters from people, including this famous scientist called Dr. Boyd Haley, who was the head of, he's the chair of the chemistry department of the University of Kentucky. And he said, "But what happened to the mercury?" Because Pichichero couldn't find it in the children's urine, or in their feces, or in their hair, or sweat, or nails. So where is it? And then, and NIH actually then commissioned a study, and they, because they, at that point, they were really trying to figure out whether this was dangerous. And they commissioned a very famous scientist called Thomas Burbacher up at the University of Washington in Seattle to do a study with monkeys, with macaques.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:27:05] And he did the same study Pichichero did. But he did something you can't do with children, which he then killed the monkeys. And then he looked for the mercury. And what he found was the mercury. Yes. It left their blood immediately. The ethylmercury from the vaccines was gone from their blood in a week. The methylmercury from the tuna fish was there, a month later, two months later. When he sacrificed the monkeys and did postmortems, he found that the mercury had not left their body. Instead, the reason it was disappearing from their blood is because ethylmercury crosses the blood brain barrier much easier than methylmercury. The ethylmercury from the vaccines was going directly to the brains of these animals, and it was lodging there and causing severe inflammation. And, you know, we now know it's there 20 years later. So when Offit, when I'm on the phone with Offit, and I said, he said the ethylmercury is excreted quickly. And I said, "How do you know that?" And he said, "Because the Pichichero study, because the study by Pichichero found that it was excreted quick, in a week." And I said, "But you're familiar with the Burbacher study that showed that it's gone to the brain." And there was dead silence on the phone.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:28:34] And he said to me, he kind of hemmed and hawed and said, "Well, you're right, it's not that study. It's just a whole mosaic of studies." And I said, "Can you cite any for me?" And he said, "I'll send them to you." And he never did. That's the last I heard from him. So at that point, I knew there was something wrong. And then somebody handed me a transcript of a secret meeting that took place in 1999. And, it was 1999, it might have been 2000, but it was called, it's called the Simpsonwood meeting. And what happened is, in the midnight, I mean, the history is that in 1986 – well, I'll go back a little further. In 1979 and '80, when I was a kid, I only had three vaccines. My kids got 72 vaccines. That's what you need now to get through school. 72 doses of 16 vaccines. So, and it started changing in the '80s and '90s. But in 1979, they brought out a vaccine called the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine. And that vaccine was very dangerous, and it was killing one out of, killing or giving severe brain damage to 1 in 300 kids. And it was pulled in the United States. It was pulled in Europe. And, but Bill Gates still gives it to 161 million African children every year.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:30:00] The same vaccine?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:30:01] Same vaccine. And to South Asian kids. And I'll tell you, you know, we now know what that does, because the Danish government did a study called Morgensen in 2017 that showed that African kids, and that's published in a journal called EBioPharma, and it was done by the leading deities of African vaccinology, all of them pro-vaccine, people like Peter Aaby, whose name is very famous, Sigrid Morgensen, and a bunch of others. And they went to Africa and looked at that. They had 30 years of data. And Gates had gone to the Danish government and said, "You know, give us money because we've saved millions of lives with this vaccine in Africa." And the Danish government said, "Can you show us the data?" And he couldn't. So they went to Guinea Bissau, which is a country in the west of Africa. And in Guinea Bissau, the Danes for 30 years had been paying for these very advanced health clinics, local health clinics, all over Guinea Bissau. And the clinics were weighing every child at three months and every child at six months. And in the '80s they began – or '90s – they began, or the '80s, they began giving the DTP vaccine at the first visit, at the three month visit.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:31:26] But if they didn't hit the child exactly, if they didn't have a full 90 days, you know, of age, if they were 89 days, they wouldn't give it to them to the six month visit. As it turns out, they had 30 years of data where half the kids were vaccinated and half the kids were not between two months and five months of age. So it was a perfect natural experiment. And they went in there, and they looked at it. They looked at 30 years of data, and they found the girls who got that vaccine, the DTP vaccine, were ten times more likely to die over the next three months than girls, than children, who did not. And they weren't dying of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. They were protected against those by the vaccine. They were dying of anemia, bilharzia, and malaria, and pulmonary disease. Mainly, they were dying of pneumonia. And what the researchers said is that the vaccine is almost certainly killing more children than diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis prior to the vaccine, because it was protecting them against the target illnesses, but it had ruined their immune systems, so they could not defend themselves against these other minor infections. And nobody noticed for 30 years that it was the vaccinated children who were disproportionately dying.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:32:51] And that's the problem with not doing, you know, real placebo-controlled trials. None of the vaccines are ever subjected to true placebo-controlled trials. It's the only medical product that is exempt from that prior to licensure. Anyway, what happened in the DTP vaccine when it was pulled in this country, it was pulled because so many people were suing the drug companies. Wyeth, which is now Pfizer, was the primary manufacturer. They went to the Reagan administration in 1986, and they said, "You need to give us full immunity from liability for all vaccines, or we're going to get out of the business." And Reagan actually said to them, "Why don't you?" They said, "We're losing $20 in downstream liability for every dollar we're making in profits." And Reagan said to them, "Well, why don't you make the vaccines safe?" And they said, “Because vaccines are unavoidably unsafe." That's the phrase they used. And that phrase is in the statute. And it's also in the Bruesewitz case, which is the Supreme Court decision upholding that statute. And so anybody who tells you vaccines are safe and effective, the industry itself got immunity from liability by convincing the President and Congress that vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:34:11] Now, the argument against that would obviously be, "They've prevented disease that would have killed untold numbers of children." Right? That would be the argument they would use against that.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:34:22] Exactly. And that vaccine injuries are very rare. That is the argument that is used against them. And both of those arguments, in CDC's own studies, have been severely challenged. So the CDC did a study in 2010 called Lazarus, and it was Harvard scientists who looked at one of the HMOs, the Harvard Pilgrim HMO, which is one of the top HMOs. It's actually, I think, the ninth biggest HMO. But they were testing a machine counting system that could do a cluster analysis, because right now, the only way, the only vaccine injury surveillance system they have, it doesn't work. Fewer than 1 in 100 vaccine injuries are ever reported, because it's voluntary. And this is what, you can find support for this in the Lazarus study. Lazarus actually looked and said, "How many injuries are actually happening. How many are reported?" And they said, "Fewer than fewer than 1 in 100 are ever reported." And they developed a system of machine counting, so that it doesn't rely on voluntary reporting. What you do is you look at all the vaccine records for a population and all of the medical claims, the subsequent medical claims, and you do machine counting. You do a cluster analysis, and it's very, very accurate. And they found, the CDC at that time was saying one out of a million people were being injured by the vaccine. They found 1 in 37. And so, and CDC had asked this team to design a machine counting system because their system was so heavily criticized by everybody.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:36:11] David Kessler, who was the Surgeon General, everybody was saying it's terrible, it doesn't work. And Congress had told them, "You have to accurately count vaccine injuries," and they weren't doing it. So when they did it, when they actually looked, they found that it's not 1 in 1,000,000. It's 1 in 37 kids had, you know, had potential vaccine claims. Now, you can't tell whether any of those claims were actually from the vaccine, because it's a machine counting. So it's statistical. But you can say that the number of injuries is much higher than anybody was admitting. And then in the year 2000, CDC did a study with Johns Hopkins called Guyer, because there was this emerging claim that vaccines had saved tens of millions of lives around the world. And I'm not going to tell you that they don't, because nobody should trust my word on this. You know, what I say is irrelevant. What is relevant is the science. And this is the principal effort by CDC to actually verify that claim. And what the Guyer study, and they looked at all the, you know, the history of each vaccine and health claims. And what they were trying to say is there was this huge decline in infection and mortalities from infectious disease that took place in the 20th century, an 80% drop in deaths from infectious disease. And what caused that, was it vaccines. And what they said is, no, it had very little, almost nothing to do with vaccines. The real drop happened because of, really, engineering solutions, refrigerators, you could store food, transportation systems that would get oranges up from Florida, etc.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:38:08] Roads, better housing, sanitation, the invention of chlorine, sewage treatment, but mainly nutrition. Nutrition is absolutely critical to building immune systems. And so, what was really killing these children was malnutrition. And, you know, it was the infectious disease that was kind of knocking them off at the end. But the real cause of death was malnutrition and a collapsed immune system. And that is what the Guyer study says. Now, anybody who's listening to this, you know, you can go look at this study, so don't blame me and don't say, you know, Kennedy's in denial. This is the only time CDC ever looked at this. And it's called G-U-Y-E-R. It's published, as I recall, in Pediatrics. And it's CDC and Johns Hopkins in the year 2000. And I believe the study is true. And that, and it's borne out by many, many others. There's another study from 1977 called McKinley and McKinley, and it was, and that study also said that fewer than 1% of the decline in infectious mortality deaths could be attributed to vaccines. So that study was required reading in almost every medical school in this country until the mid-1980s. So anyway, I'm just saying that that orthodoxy I think you just described, it's not an orthodoxy that should be accepted on faith. People should actually look at it. And when they have, it has not borne up. I just finished the story, and I'll try to be brief. In, because why? Because Reagan caved in.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:39:56] And it wasn't just Reagan, it was the Democrats. My uncle was chairing the Health Committee at that time, and the Democrats also went along. They passed the Vaccine Act in 1986, and the Vaccine Act gave immunity from liability to all vaccine companies. If you, for any injury for negligence, no matter how negligent you are, no matter how reckless your conduct, no matter how toxic the ingredient, how shoddily tested or manufactured the product, no matter how grievous your injury, you, your vaccine company, you cannot be sued. So this was a huge gift for this industry because the biggest cost for every medical product is downstream liabilities. And all of a sudden those have disappeared. So you're not only taking away that cost, but you're also incentivizing the production of many new vaccines. You're also disincentivizing. You're removing the incentive to make them safe, because no matter how dangerous they are, they don't care because they can't be sued. And then, but you may say, well, if they are really dangerous, then nobody's going to buy them. But the problem with that is nobody has a choice. So they not only got rid of the downstream liability, but they don't have any advertising or marketing costs, because the federal government is ordering 76 million people, essentially ordering 76 million kids to take the product a year. If you can get that on the schedule, it's like printing $1 billion for you. And so there was a gold rush. And then the other thing is they are exempt from pre-licensing safety testing.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:41:35] They don't have to be tested, and they're not. And I said this for many, many years. You know, I said not one of these 72 vaccines has ever been tested pre-licensing in a placebo-controlled trial where you're looking at vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids and looking at health outcomes. Never been done. And Tony Fauci was saying – he's lying. He's not telling the truth. This is vaccine misinformation. In 2016, Donald Trump asked me to serve on a vaccine safety commission, and I agreed to do it. And he then ordered Fauci and Collins to meet with me and, you know, Peter Marks at FDA, and all the others. And so I had meetings with all these guys. I actually went into that meeting with Fauci with three people. One was Del Bigtree, another one was Aaron Siri, the attorney, and another one was Lynn Redwood, who's a very, very famous nurse practitioner, public health official in Georgia. And during that meeting, there was a referee there from the White House and the West Wing. And I said to Fauci, I gave kind of a lecture showing what we knew. And I said to him in the middle of it, I had a PowerPoint. I said, Tony, you have said, and by the way, you know, he's known my family forever. And, you know, my uncle is chair of the Health Committee writing his salary every year, everything else like that. So and, you know, a very cooperative relationship with him. Two of the centers that are NIH are named for members of my family, for Eunice Shriver and my aunt, my grandmother.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:43:14] So, you know, I said to him, "Tony, you've been telling people I'm a liar when I say no vaccine has ever been - none of the mandated vaccines," - whether they're call recommended, they're actually mandated in many of the states. I said, "None of them have ever been tested against in a placebo-controlled trial and a safety test prior to licensing." And I said, "Can you show me one vaccine that has been subject to a safety test? Show me one study that shows that." And he made it this show of looking through a Redweld, they had brought in from NIH this big tray full of file folders. And he made a show of kind of looking through that at the time. But he couldn't find whatever he was looking for. So then he said, it's back at NIH in Bethesda, and I'll send it to you. Well, he never did. So Aaron and I sued him, sued HHS, and said, show us one study that's ever been done on, you know, pre-licensing safety testing for vaccines. And after a year of stonewalling, they finally gave us a letter and said, we don't have any. So they don't, they literally don't have it. So nobody knows what the risk profile for these products is. So they're telling people they avert more harms than they cause. But there's no science behind that statement. It's just, you know, it's just guesswork.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:44:41] But it's an amazingly effective narrative. And that narrative, the way it spread through this country, like I said, it has gotten me, and I think it gets a lot of people, and that people are terrified of being called an anti-vaxxer. It's a very dismissive pejorative. It's a very bad term. And if someone calls you that, they're like, “Oh, he's one of those.” It's kind of amazing what they've done, especially in a world where we're very aware of the side effects that were hidden from the public with other drugs, whether it's opiates, Or whether it's Vioxx, or we're very aware that deception has taken place. But for this one, for whatever reason, that one, I think maybe it has to do with protecting children, because good parents who don't, you know, they want to trust science and they want to think that medical science is the reason why people live so well today. And a lot of that's true. But they want to think that it's all connected, and that they know what they're doing. So if they say you're supposed to get 72 shots, you should get 72 shots, because they really know.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:45:51] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:45:52] And everybody just assumes that.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:45:53] And you think your doctor did the research, but he didn't.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:45:56] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:45:56] And you're absolutely right about the opioids. I mean, there's many, many other examples, but the opioids is a good one, because if anybody goes and looks at that Netflix documentary Dopesick.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:46:09] Yeah, yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:46:10] That documentary...

 

Joe Rogan: [00:46:11] It's Hulu, right?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:46:12] What.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:46:12] Is it Hulu?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:46:13] Is it Hulu?

 

Joe Rogan: [00:46:14] Is that Hulu... Whatever it is, it's fine.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:46:17] That documentary shows how this, you know, all of these subtle forces that lead to agency capture and this collusion, this corrupt collusion between the industry and the regulator, because it was the regulator who agreed to put on the label – it was FDA who agreed to put on the label, it's safe and effective, and it's not addictive, you know, about oxycodone...

 

Joe Rogan: [00:46:46] Which is crazy.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:46:46] And right. And everybody knew it was addictive. You had the entire medical community who said, "Oh, we must have been wrong, because the FDA says it's safe and effective." You can imagine if they did that for vaccines, and then you saw what they did in COVID, you know, when, and they had to continually change the goalposts. It prevents transmission. If you get it, grandma won't get sick. And, you know, and each time it won't, you'll never get sick. You know, you only have to take one. It's really effective. And then now it's two and that's it. And now it's three, and now it's four. And you know, and that, and each time they had to move the goalposts, and everybody just would go along with the next claim without ever saying, " But wait a minute, you know, why should we trust you now? Because you were, you know, you were saying was such," and by the way, the defense is, "Well, they were in the middle of a pandemic, and they had to act quickly. But, and, you know, they had to sort of do some guesswork." But they were saying it with such assurance, and they were punishing doctors of conscience who began questioning them. They were ruining their careers. They were destroying their reputations. They were taking away their livelihoods, of scientists and doctors. People who were getting injured, they were, you know, they were marginalizing, vilifying, gaslighting them, and urging others to do the same. You know, getting on TV and saying, if you didn't do this, you're a bad person and you shouldn't be treated when you go to a hospital, you know, and all of these things, which is not – something was, you know, something was really wrong.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:48:38] But it seems to be the same pattern over and over again. It's just bizarre that it takes so long to get the narrative out to people that when you get a corporation, any corporation, just any group of people that can make money unchecked, it seems to be a normal human characteristic that they do that when they're unregulated or unchecked, or when someone's not watching them, or when the people that are watching them are compromised. And then if you were literally funding media, you're funding all of these shows by, and they have to essentially self-censor, and you're seeing it. I'm sure you're aware of the YouTube videos of yourself that have been pulled now, you know, the Hotboxin' with Mike Tyson got pulled, Theo Von's podcast, he got pulled.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:49:30] Theo called me, you know, really worried and apologetic, saying, because I was going to go on his show again. And he said, "I'm worried about having you on my show." And this is just two weeks ago.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:49:40] And what was, well he's probably worried about getting another strike from YouTube.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:49:43] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:49:44] So what was the subject that you guys discussed that was such a problem?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:49:50] I, you know, I don't even know. He just said, he said, and then, somebody did an article on it, on what happened to him. Yeah, it was, I think it's a place called Free Press did an article, but it was an old, you know, it was an old, it was weird because it was a, it was a discussion. I've been on his show a bunch of times, but it was something that we did during the pandemic, and they let it stand.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:50:18] Yeah, it was up for quite a while.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:50:20] It was up for a long time. And he called me like 2 or 3 weeks ago, and said, and he was, like, shaken. And because I, he had said to me, "Why don't you come on again?" And you know, I love him, and his podcast is really fun, and it's really close to my house, And I get a really good response from it. He has kind of a very interesting audience. I think he's got a big overlap with you. But, you know, he is really, he's such a pleasant guy.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:50:48] And yeah, I love him to death. He's out here now.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:50:51] Yeah. So he, so I was looking forward to going on his podcast, but he called me and was like, “I don't think we can do it because, you know, I'm worried about my livelihood, you know?"

 

Joe Rogan: [00:51:04] Yeah, that's where the self-censoring kicks in. And so, did they give him any indication of what the subject was?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:51:10] I don't know. He was trying to find out from them, and I don't think they were being that forthcoming.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:51:16] What did you guys discuss? Did you discuss COVID?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:51:21] We had a big, we had a long discussion. We did one that was almost entirely on falconry.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:51:28] Falconry?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:51:28] Yeah, we did. Well, you know, when I went on, Mike Tyson, I spent a lot of it talking about pigeons, because I used to raise homing pigeons. And that's really why I wanted to go on his show, because I knew he was a pigeon fancier and pigeon guy.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:51:42] Wow.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:51:44] And then, Theo started, Theo found out that I, you know, train hawks, and he was interested in that. He's like a hunter in, you know, Tennessee, and so we ended up talking a lot about that. I don't remember if we talked about vaccines, but we must have at some point we must have.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:52:04] But that kind of self-censoring is, it seems to have ramped up. And when I, like I said, they deleted the Mike Tyson episode. They deleted the Theo Von episode. I'm not aware of any other ones. Are you aware of any other ones that got taken down as well?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:52:18] Well, I mean, anything I put up goes, comes down. But...

 

Joe Rogan: [00:52:21] Yeah?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:52:22] Yeah. I mean we're, you know, I'm heavily sensitive. Let me, can I just finish kind of the vaccine saga, and because you let me talk so long already, and I really don't want to talk about this, talk about other stuff, but I'll just finish this. What happened in around 1999, the vaccine schedule immediately after they passed the Vaccine Act exploded because all these companies were rushing to get new vaccines onto the schedule, many of them for diseases that weren't even casually contagious, like ridiculous diseases that are on that, like hepatitis B. Why would you give, you get hepatitis B from, you know, from sharing needles, or from like going to a really seasoned prostitute, or from you know, sort of compulsive homosexual behavior. Oh, but a baby, a baby can get it if they get it from their mom. But every mom is tested. So, you know, at the hospital, every mom, every pregnant woman is tested for it. So the baby doesn't need this.

 

Joe Rogan: [00:53:31] Is there a treatment for it when they do get it?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:53:33] Yeah, but the thing is, but why would you give it to a one-day-old baby, you know, or a three-hour-old baby, and then four more times when that baby is not going to be even subject to it for 16 years. And it may not even, I mean, originally what happened is Merck and CDC designed this for prostitutes and for male homosexuals, promiscuous male homosexuals, and they couldn't sell any, because those cohorts had other better things to do with their money. And they didn't, you know, they weren't going to buy the vaccine. So CDC went, or Merck went back to CDC and said, "We built all these plants, and we got the thing and got it approved. And we were, you know, a billion in. What are you going to do?" And CDC said, "We'll just recommend it for children." And that way they keep what they call the warm production lines. You know, they keep the vaccine. They like to have a lot of vaccines in case there's an emergency. They have a lot of lines out there that they can, you know, manufacture a pandemic response on. This is what they say. So anyway, all of these new crazy diseases, rotavirus and, you know, were all put on the schedule, and they, and then they started seeing all of this explosion in chronic disease, and particularly autism.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:54:59] So around 1995, Congress said to the EPA, what year did the autism epidemic begin? And the EPA is a captured agency, but it's captured by the coal industry, and the oil, and the pesticide industry, but not by the Pharma, because it doesn't regulate Pharma. So it actually did real science, and it said, "1989 is the year the epidemic began. It's a red line." And 1989 was the year the vaccine schedule exploded. That doesn't mean that's a correlation. It does not mean causation, but it is something that should be looked at. So, and NIH decided to look at it, because women were saying it was the vaccine, again, and again, and again, and again. And again, and again, and again. Women were coming with the same story. I had a perfectly healthy two-year-old, exceeded all my milestones, I gave them on their second birthday, or 18-month wellness visit, the full battery of 6 or 8 vaccines, and that child spikes a fever that night, has a seizure, and over the next three months, loses their language, loses their capacity to make eye contact, to finger point, social interactions and languages disappear. And it happens so many times that NIH was saying, "We got to look to see if it's the vaccine." And CDC hired a Belgian epidemiologist named Thomas Verstraeten.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:56:29] And they opened up the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which is the biggest database for vaccines for HMOs. All the top ten HMOs have all their records in there. So they have all your vaccination records and all your health claims. So you can do these kind of cluster analysis. And Verstraeten went in there, and he looked at one thing. He looked at children who got the Hepatitis B vaccine within their first month of life and compared those health outcomes in children who did not. In other words, children who got it after 30 days, or didn't get it at all. That was the second cohort. And what he found in his first run through the data is there was an 1,135% greater or elevated risk for an autism diagnosis among the kids who had gotten it in their first 30 days. At that point, they knew what caused the autism epidemic because a relative risk, it's called a relative risk, of 11.35. A relative risk of two is considered proof of causation as long as there's biological plausibility. A relative, the relative risk of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for 20 years and getting lung cancer is 10. This was 11.35. So there was a panic throughout the industry. This, you know, as people heard about this study, the CDC wanted to do a meeting with all of the big panjandrums of the industry, but they didn't want to do it on CDC campus, because then they thought it would be subject to a Freedom of Information law request.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:58:05] They wanted to do it to keep it secret. So they found this retreat center, a Methodist retreat center in Norcross, Georgia, called Simpsonwood. And they assembled. I think there was 72 people there, and they were from the W.H.O., CDC, NIH, FDA, and all the vaccine companies, and all the big academics, the people who basically develop vaccines in the academic institutions. And they were all there. And they spent the first day, they give them all a copy of the first study, but they have to give it all back, because they don't want it out there. And, then they have a day of talking about it where they're all saying, "Holy cow, this is real. And, you know, the lawyers are going to come after us. We're all in trouble." And then, they spend the second day talking about how to hide it. And how do you know this? Because somebody made a recording of it. And I got a hold of the transcripts, and I published excerpts from those transcripts in Rolling Stone. And anybody can go and read these now on our website. It's called Simpsonwood. And you can read through the whole thing, or you can read my Rolling Stone article, which is also on the website which summarizes it.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [00:59:22] And but anyway, and check, you know, if that, if you think it's true or not. But so then I, when I read that, when I read that, and I was like okay, I got it, like drop everything, and do something about this. And I published this article in Rolling Stone, and I, you know, and I was kind of shocked by that, just the power of the reaction against it of people, you know, coming after Rolling Stone and Salon, which also published, and were just bulldozed with, you know, these hate reactions. And Salon, six years later, six years later, they, by the way, there were four corrections, I think 4 or 5 corrections in the article in the next week. Right. All of those corrections were made by the editors of Salon and Rolling Stone, and they've sent me letters which are also on our website saying this none by me. But from then on, they said, "Oh, Kennedy, it was loaded with mistakes." Then six years later, Salon, under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, takes it down and says, "We found mistakes in it," but they never showed any mistakes. They have never, I've said repeatedly to them, "Show me one mistake in that published piece."

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:00:42] "Show me one." And they have not been able to do it. And then, they also forget that the four mistakes that they, that, you know, were found, that, you know, that we printed errata for, that Rolling Stone printed errata for, were all made by them. And that is because they edited my 16,000 word piece down to a 3000 word piece. And when they were doing that, they made some errors. So then, so then, you. But what happened after that is you had this explosion in chronic disease. So, so, and this is something everybody, this is the punch line. And this is what everybody needs to focus on. In the 1960s, when I was a kid, 6% of Americans had chronic disease. What do I mean by chronic disease? Basically, three categories plus obesity. One, neurological disorders, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, text read syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Autism. Autism went from 1 in 10,000. In my generation, it's still 1 in 10,000. In my generation. How old are you? 55. 55. I bet you've never met anybody with full-blown autism your age. You know, head-banging, football helmet on, non-toilet trained, non-verbal. I mean, I've never met anybody like that at my age, but in my kids' age now, one in every 34 kids has autism. And half of those are full-blown, meaning that description...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:02:20] Now, what's the conventional explanation for that?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:02:24] Well, I mean, there is no real explanation. You know.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:02:29] How do they try to...

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:02:31] They try to say, "Well, we're just noticing it more," which is ridiculous because first of all, there's all kinds of studies that say that the, you know, really good studies, like Irva Hertz-Picciotto is a very famous scientist, epidemiologist, Biostatistician, who was commissioned by the California state legislature to answer that question. She's at the UC, at the Mind Institute at UC Davis, and she came back and said, "No, the epidemic is real. It's not, you know, better diagnostic or changing diagnostic criteria." And so, and that, you know, any real scientist now, even the big backers like Paul Offit won't, I don't think even he will say that, but nobody from CDC is actually going to stand up and say that. They certainly won't debate the point. But even more so if it's not an epidemic, then where are all where are the 1 in 34, 69-year-old men who are wearing helmets and non-toilet trained. You know, if you’ve got autism, you live forever. It doesn't affect life span. You're going to, these kids are going to be around forever; and they, and but there's nobody my age who looks like that. So if it was really better recognition, you'd see it in every age group, not just in children. Not only that, but it changes every year. It gets worse and worse every year. So they can't keep saying, "Oh, we're just noticing it for the first time." And also, you know.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:04:03] How does it get worse every year?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:04:05] What?

 

Joe Rogan: [01:04:05] How does it get worse every year?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:04:06] Because, you know, the CDC releases new data. It's called the, I think it's ADDM. It's the monitoring system. And there's been all kinds of scandals with that because the CDC tries to manipulate the data, and there's all kinds of whistleblowers from the different states who say that they're pressured to not report cases and that kind of thing. So, but the CDC releases new data every year. And every year it gets worse. It goes from, you know, it's now, I think, 1 in 22 boys.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:04:37] Has the rate of vaccinations changed as the schedule changed?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:04:43] The rates of vaccinations have gone up. And, you know, mercury has been removed from a lot of the vaccines. But there's aluminum in those vaccines, which, you know, operates along the same biological pathways, and does the same kind of damage. It's extremely neurotoxic. And then there's other things, lots of other toxics in the vaccines that, you know, could be responsible. I mean, there's lots, there's hundreds and hundreds of scientific studies that looked at it, but nobody ever reports them. I did a book in which I have 450 studies that are digested in that book, you know, that I summarize and cite and 1400 references. And everybody will say, "Oh, there's no study that shows autism and vaccines are connected. That's just crazy. You know, that's people who are not looking at science. So anyway...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:05:36] But they want to say that. They want to say that. It's like it's ...

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:05:40] It's just part of the religion.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:05:41] Yes, that's exactly what it is.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:05:43] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:05:43] It really does seem like, like a religion.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:05:46] The heretics have to be burned at the stake.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:05:48] Yes.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:05:49] They have to be humiliated, silenced, destroyed. Oh, it is. You know, trust in, the "trust the experts" is not a function of science. That's the opposite of science. Trusting the experts is a function of religion. It's not – and totalitarianism – it’s not a function of science or democracy. You know, in democracies, you question people in authority and maintain a posture of skepticism toward them. The same is true in science. You don't trust the experts.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:06:22] Right. But it wasn't all the experts either. That was part of the problem.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:06:26] Oh, no, I know.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:06:27] The experts that did, including Robert Malone. These guys are maligned in such an obvious, and slandered, in such a blatant way.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:06:37] Yeah, well, you know, when they first started saying trust the experts, I was saying, "Where do they get that from?" I've been litigating for 40 years. Every case I have, there's experts on both sides. So when we brought the Monsanto case, they had an expert from Yale, Stanford, and Harvard, and we had experts from Yale on our side, Stanford, and Harvard. And they both said completely different things from each other, and they were totally credible. So that's why, you know -- and the jury decided that our experts were right, and their experts were wrong. The idea you can trust the experts... Experts get biased, too. You know, you pay experts enough money, and a lot of them will say whatever you want them to say. And the people who were saying this at the top had a lot of money and power at stake. So anyway, so I'm almost finished. The autoimmune, the second category is autoimmune diseases, and but all those neurological diseases explode in 1989. As I say, autism just exponentially exploded. And if you're my age and you're listening to this, you know, and I know you've got a younger demographic, but you will remember that you didn't know anybody who looked like this when you were, you know, in school. We didn't know kids who had diabetes. We didn't know kids who had EpiPens. The autoimmune diseases like diabetes, juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Crohn's disease, all of this stuff suddenly appeared. I didn't know any of these diseases when I was a kid.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:08:14] But they existed when you were a kid.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:08:16] Some of them did some, but you know, they were so rare. I mean, even like the allergic diseases, I didn't know anybody who had a peanut allergy. I had 11 siblings, like 70 first cousins. And, you know, I never, and a lot, a lot of friends, I never knew anybody with a peanut allergy. Why do five of my seven kids have allergies? You know, it's... And of course, we know why. Because aluminum adjuvants give you allergies. They're designed to make you, you know, to create a hyperimmune response to foreign particles. And the last category is the allergic diseases: the peanut allergies, food allergies, eczema – which I never knew anybody with eczema when I was a kid. I never – asthma, I knew people with asthma, but it wasn't one in every four Black kids like it is today. So, you know, all of those things now, we went from 6% of Americans having chronic disease. By 1986, we're starting to add the vaccines, and we get 11.8% of kids now. So it's doubled. By 2006, 54%. These are kids who are permanently disabled, and they have to be on medication their whole lives.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:09:39] So we are the sickest generation in history. There's no other country in the world that has this kind of chronic disease epidemic. We have the biggest chronic disease. And of course, this is one of the reasons we hit the highest death rate during COVID, because we have the highest chronic disease burden in the world. And, you know, listen, it's not just the vaccines. And I never have said that. Our children are swimming around in a toxic soup. What we can say is most of it started in 1989. And there are only a certain, there's a finite number of culprits that you can point to and say this. It has to come from a toxic exposure, because genes don't cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability, but you need a toxic exposure. But what is it? It could be glyphosate, it could be neonicotinoid pesticides, it could be PFOAs, which are the flame retardants that became ubiquitous, you know, around that same timeline. It could be cell phones. You know, it could be, you know, Wi-Fi radiation. So there's a certain…

 

Joe Rogan: [01:10:45] That's unlikely.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:10:46] What?

 

Joe Rogan: [01:10:46] Isn't that very unlikely, though?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:10:47] It could be ultrasound. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Well, you know, I think the Wi-Fi radiation is a lot worse than people think it is. But, you know, I don't think.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:10:57] How so?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:10:59] Well, Wi-Fi radiation does all kinds of bad things, including causing cancer.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:11:08] Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:11:10] Yeah. From your cell phone. I mean, there's cell phone tumors. You know, I mean, I'm representing hundreds of people who have cell phone tumors behind the ear. It's always on the ear that you favor with your cell phone. Oh, and you know, we have the science. So if anybody lets us in front of a jury, it will be over. You know, it's like.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:11:29] What? What is the number? Because a lot of people use cell phones.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:11:31] There are a lot of people with it. They're glioblastomas. That's the kind of cancers that they get. But cancer is not the worst thing. They also, you know, it opens up, Wi-fi radiation opens up your blood brain barrier. And so all these toxics that are in your body can now go into your brain.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:11:48] How does Wi-Fi radiation open up your blood brain barrier?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:11:52] Yeah. Now you're going beyond my expertise.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:11:56] Okay.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:11:57] But what there are there are – now, I'm going to use a number here, and you're going to think it's hyperbole, but it's not. There are tens of thousands of studies that show the horrendous danger of Wi-Fi radiation. And...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:12:13] So this is Wi-Fi, like, that's in this room.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:12:16] Yeah. It's whether you...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:12:16] Because we have Wi-Fi, the Wi-Fi routers.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:12:18] You should not be, and you should not let your kids carry their cell phones on their breasts, particularly a woman, because they're associated with breast... You know, they shouldn't be holding them in the breast pocket. If you have to, put them in your, you know, butt pocket. You should not be having them near your head when you're sleeping. You know, you need to get away and you should never put one next to your head. You should always, I will never put this next to my head. I put it on speakerphone or use earphones. But, you know, I won the case in front of, on this issue. I'm suing the FCC and FDA about it. And you know, and the court sided with me. So now they're going to have to go back to the drawing board and do it. But the Russians, you got Russians know more about Wi-Fi radiation than anybody. They developed it as a weapon. And a lot of the really good science came out of Russia. And, you know, the Russians won't let kids use cell phones in kindergarten or, you know, in grade school. A lot of the schools in Russia don't let cell phones in there because of the danger. And the levels of radiation that they allow from cell phones is like 1/100 of what, and I don't know exactly what it is, you know, so that's the number people shouldn't hold me to. But it is a tiny fraction of what we allow in this country.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:13:38] So the Wi-Fi radiation is obviously different from cell phone radiation. So you're talking about people that are just in a room with Wi-Fi are being exposed to something that's dangerous?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:13:49] Yeah. And, you know, people have different sensitivities to it. So some people are extremely sensitive. They become completely debilitated from it. And...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:14:00] Really?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:14:01] Oh, yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:14:01] From Wi-Fi.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:14:02] Yeah, we have a woman who developed an allergy to Wi-Fi. She was in the Israeli Defense Forces, and she was in their cyber warfare unit. So she was in a room with it all the time. And suddenly she developed, and she's a brilliant lawyer, and she's one of the leaders in this movement to make sure that they don't put Wi-Fi antennas on elementary schools, which they're doing now. There's no control over where people put these antennas, and...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:14:39] So what do you think Wi-Fi is doing to us, since it's everywhere, and since everyone's experiencing it, including you. What do you think it's doing to us?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:14:45] I think it degrades your mitochondria, and it, you know, opens your blood brain barrier.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:14:54] Do you see anything online of how it could open up your blood brain barrier?

 

Jamie: [01:14:58] I don't know about how, but I...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:15:01] That it does?

 

Jamie: [01:15:01] I mean, I found an article. I was trying to find the validity of it, but it has a statement on here.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:15:10] Damage to the blood brain barrier. Radiofrequency radiation exposure has been shown to affect the permeability of the blood brain barrier, as well as altering the expression of microRNA within the brain, which researchers state could lead to adverse effects such as neurodegenerative disease. Whoa! How come we don't know that?

 

Jamie: [01:15:30] There's a doctor that did a study and said that it's been expanded on [by] researchers in China and there's a published article here. But I was looking around at the page.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:15:39] They call it leaky brain.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:15:41] The findings were followed by suppression, misinformation, and a shutdown of government-funded research in the United States.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:15:48] Yeah. It's the same. It's the same play.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:15:51] Oh, we got to get rid of Wi-Fi. What the fuck, Jamie?

 

Jamie: [01:15:55] I… [cross-talk] a hard time... in this place.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:15:57] Yeah. Oh, my God. That's terrifying.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:16:01] But I'm not, I don't know, you know, I can't tell you where the chronic disease epidemic… I think it's probably cumulative.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:16:08] There's a lot going on.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:16:09] There's a lot going on. Our kids are swimming around in a toxic soup, but, you know, we're now up to more than 54% of kids now have chronic disease. And, you know, I mean, one of the things, the reason that I want to be President is to end that. And have NIH actually doing studies like this rather than suppressing them. And let's figure out what it is, why kids have chronic disease and end it. It's costing us. I mean, we had during Covid, we had, we have 4.2% of the global population. We had 16% of the Covid deaths. And that's probably a lot of reasons for that. But one of the reasons has got to be the burden that we have of chronic disease in our country. And we spent $4.3 trillion on health care every year in this country. 80% of that goes to chronic diseases. So it's bankrupting us.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:16:59] I wanted to talk to you about glyphosate, because you brought it up. And one of the things I noticed when there was a test that came out, or a study that came out recently, that showed that an enormous percentage of Americans – it was somewhere in the 90% range when they were tested, had glyphosate in their blood. And then I saw a bunch of apologists online that were saying that these numbers that they're used to detect are so minuscule. And then someone I talked to said, "Yes, but that is the average." So you're going to get some people that are exposed to tremendous amounts, and that it could be toxic levels. Then some people who are exposed to very, very little. This is the average, but there's no data on – is there data on long term, even low-dose glyphosate in your system, because...

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:17:49] There's...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:17:49] Glyphosate, we should just tell people, is Roundup.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:17:52] Glyphosate is the active ingredient of Roundup. And Roundup was used. I mean when we sued Monsanto, there's many, many diseases that are linked to glyphosate exposure, including nonalcoholic fatty liver cancers, are very, very closely linked. A lot of kidney disease is, and then severe damage to the microbiome, because it's designed to kill plants. And there are structures in your gut biome That are critical structures in your gut biome, which have plant-like metabolisms, which are destroyed by glyphosate. And so, you know, what happened is glyphosate was originally developed as a tank scalant. So, to scale the calcium and other deposits, metal deposits, rust deposits from the inside of underground tanks. And in 1973, Monsanto had to stop producing DDT, because, you know, we passed the laws at that time. And, that was his flagship product. It needed another product. And it figured out that glyphosate, somebody at some point apparently threw some glyphosate on the, you know, out in the back in the yard, and everything green died where they touched it, where it touched the glyphosate. And so, somebody said, "Oh, this will be a good herbicide, because it kills all plants." So originally Monsanto developed it as an herbicide. But the way that it was applied initially, from 1973 to 1993, was in backpack sprayers. So guys would walk down the cornfield corn rows early in the season when the corn was competing with nearby weeds for sunlight, and they would shoot the individual weeds. And then in '93, somebody figured out a way that glyphosate, there were certain bacteria that glyphosate would not kill.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:20:26] And they said we could take a gene out of that bacteria and put it into a corn seed and develop a corn that cannot be killed by glyphosate. So they developed Roundup Ready corn, and that corn, you can pour glyphosate all over it, and it will do nothing to it. So, now you could fire all of those workers who were expensive, and you hire one airplane, and they fly over the fields, they saturate the entire landscape with glyphosate, everything dies except the Roundup Ready corn. And within a couple of years, Roundup Ready corn was now on 90% of the corn. 95% of the corn in the United States is now Roundup Ready corn And so, but it was still being, and then they developed it for soybean, and for barley, for sorghum, for a lot of other plants. But it was still being applied early in the season. And then in 2000, around 2006, they discovered that if you sprayed it on wheat late in the season, it would desiccate the wheat. In other words, it would dry it out. And one of the big losses for farmers is wheat, if it rains during the harvest season, you can't harvest it because it gets moldy. And so if you can spray a desiccant on it and dry it out and kill it, you can harvest it right away and it won't get moldy. So all the wheat in our country started being sprayed that year in 2006 with glyphosate. And that's the year you saw this explosion of celiac diseases and, you know, gluten allergies, and all of this stuff that people, you know, that you may have noticed around then.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:22:07] But they also did...

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:22:08] The first time, they were, and excuse me, the first time they're spraying it directly on food, because it used to be they were spraying it early in the season, and it would, you know, it would wash off, and the corn would get higher than the weeds and you wouldn't have to do it. But now they're spraying it directly on our food. Sorry, Joe, go ahead.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:22:26] No, it's okay. So when they started doing this, there's a direct result? Like, you can see the increase in celiac disease? You can see, is this, like, documented?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:22:41] Well, no, these are, no, that's not documented. I mean,

 

Joe Rogan: [01:22:45] It's not documented.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:22:45] But these are, there's a whole range of diseases that are now, you know, that people are, that scientists, different levels of science, have linked to glyphosate exposure. Here's the thing. When you litigate, when you, when you're suing somebody for a chemical exposure, you have to go through a threshold called the Daubert hearing. And the Daubert hearing is a hearing that says, is there sufficient science that it's now considered kind of mainstream, that we can show this to a jury, and the judge has to make that decision, because the judge doesn't want people saying, you know, coming in and saying, "You know, loud noises made me crazy."

 

Joe Rogan: [01:23:37] Right.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:23:38] Right. There has to be before... And then, a good attorney might be able to convince a jury that, "Yeah, this... My client got crazy because he heard a loud noise." So the judge needs to make a threshold decision about whether there's sufficient science to show a jury. And that is a very high threshold. So of all of the diseases that are probably caused, probably almost certainly caused by glyphosate, the only one to pass that threshold was the case that we brought for Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. So at that point, we had enough rat studies, enough human studies. We had about ten of each. And we were able to go to the judge and say this, "We got enough science on this now to show that it's, that non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is being caused by glyphosate." So, those were the only cases that we brought. The other thing. But there are a lot of, you know, really interesting studies that show links between injuries to children and the and the amount of glyphosate in a woman's urine and the mother's urine, you know, including a lot of including sexual development. An endocrine disruptor. So, you know...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:24:57] Similar to phthalates.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:25:00] Phthalates are an endocrine disruptor, probably the most disturbing endocrine disruptor. And this is something we should all be looking at is atrazine.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:25:07] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:25:08] Because atrazine, which is now ubiquitous, it's everywhere. But you can take atrazine and, you know... What is his name?

 

Joe Rogan: [01:25:17] Jamie.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:25:18] Jamie.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:25:19] Young Jamie.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:25:20] You can look up, you can look up this study. I think the scientist's name is Tyler [Tyrone Hayes], I think. And that might be his first or second name, but they took atrazine, and they put it in a tank with 40 frogs for three years. They put it below the exposure levels that EPA considers acceptable to humans. And 30 of those frogs, they were all male frogs, and they were double Z, you know, male frogs. So they were super males. And 30 of those frogs were chemically castrated. Four of them turned into females and produced fertile eggs. So they took male frogs, gave them atrazine. 10% of them turned into females and produced fertile eggs. And we're subjecting our children to exposure to that every day.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:26:14] What is atrazine used for?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:26:15] It's in the water. It's a pesticide.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:26:19] Here it is. Report toxic herbicide found in many Texans' drinking water. That's it. That's from 2018, November 20th.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:26:28] And you know, what does this do to sexual development in children? Nobody knows. Because - we know what it does to frogs.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:26:36] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:26:37] But, you know, nobody knows what that does to, you know, what it's doing, those kind of persistent exposures would do to our children.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:26:46] Yeah, it's terrifying. So atrazine, microplastics, all those things are having an effect, a similar effect on reproductive systems.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:26:57] Yes.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:26:58] Yeah, we had Dr. Shanna Swan, who wrote that book Countdown, that's all about this, about the declining fertility rates, higher rates of miscarriage with women.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:27:08] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:27:13] What has this been like for you? Because up until those women came to see you speak, your life had been, I mean, obviously you went through a lot with your father being assassinated, with your uncle being assassinated, you being a part of this very public – both in service and in just being famous – family. And then you take on this thing, and even members of your own family sort of disavowed your opinions and attacked you for it. And what I find remarkable, genuinely, is the way you have been able to communicate with people who approach you with this erroneous idea of what you stand for, and that you can just rationally have a conversation with them and saying, "If I'm wrong, I'd like you to tell me where I'm wrong." And those conversations are fascinating because people would just want to shut you down. They just want you to stop talking about it. They don't want to give you the time, like you just had, to lay all this out. It's a thing people don't want to believe. What is that like, to be a person who carries around a thing that people don't want to believe, but that seems to be true...

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:28:35] First of all, I want to say this. That, what you let me do just now, which probably lost a lot of your listeners because.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:28:46] No, it didn't.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:28:47] Nobody wants to listen to this. So, it's nice that you...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:28:49] I do not think that's true at all.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:28:51] But I'm so grateful to you, because, you know, for 18 years, nobody's let me do that. I mean, actually, Jon Stewart let me do that in 2005. And you can go look at his, and Scarborough. Joe Scarborough. And you know, 2005 when my article came out and that was it. And then they immediately, a week later, were disavowing me.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:29:17] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:29:17] So,

 

Joe Rogan: [01:29:18] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:29:19] And you've been like a hero. I mean, you're an institution in this country, a critical institution of this era, because you, you know, you've allowed, you've maintained this little island of free speech in a, you know, in a sort of a desert of suppression, and of critical thinking, which is, you know, you've been a champion of critical thinking. My uncle, when my Aunt Jackie met my uncle Jack, John Kennedy. He was a senator and a confirmed bachelor. And she was a reporter, a journalist. And she did this kind of man-on-the-street interviews.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:29:59] With people, these kind of quick, kind of, interviews. And she asked him what his best quality was, and she expected him to say "courage," because he'd been a war hero and he had written a book and won a Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage. But the answer that he gave her was curiosity. And I think that is the quality that made him a great president, because he was able to put himself in other people's shoes. He had a level of empathy about other humans where he was always thinking about what it would be like. You know, why would people do things that... And act in certain ways, including Khrushchev and Castro. And when he had conversations and exchanges with those people, he was able to put himself in their shoes. And actually, his most important speech was the speech he gave 60 years ago, three days ago. It was June 10th of 1963. And it was the speech at American University about trying to persuade Americans to change their minds because they were universally against the Nuclear Atmospheric Test-Ban Treaty that he was trying to push. And that speech turned the country around. It was one of the most important, impactful speeches in history. And in that speech, he told Americans what it was like to be Russian. It was the strangest speech. And, you know, because I was raised, and most Americans of that era were raised thinking that we won World War Two.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:31:41] And he said to them, you know, we believe this. I was watching Combat – Vic Morrow with Combat, you know, every week with my brothers; it was all about how the Americans won. And he said, that's not what happened. The Russians won the war. And they paid in a way that no nation should ever have to pay. One in every seven Russians died, you know, at Hitler's hands, and a third of the Russians. He said, imagine if America, every city and every building, was leveled from the East Coast to Chicago. That's what happened to Russia. And he was telling Americans, you know, they're not evil. They're having a rational reaction when they develop a nuclear bomb. They don't want to be invaded again. And we have to somehow make them feel safe, if we're going to have peace in this world. It was just a beautiful, beautiful speech. And it came, I think, because he had that gift of curiosity. And, you know, you have that. And I think – and you have this love for critical thinking and this admiration. You have this parade of people on here, you know, like the Weinsteins and all these other people who are thinking out of the box and who are not subsumed in orthodoxies, but are able to break away from those orthodoxies, and have come and see the humanity in everybody and everything, and it's beautiful.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:33:07] So I think when the history of this time is written that you're – you will have – the role that you played in it, you know, and if we manage to get our way out of this kind of totalitarian trajectory, I think a lot of that will be because of what you did. In answer to your question – this is a roundabout answer, but about a week before, about two weeks before he died, my father gave me a book. And the book was a book by Camus, who was one of his favorite writers. My father, after my uncle's death, went through a period of kind of reassessment of his own sort of relationship with God and with the Catholic Church and religion. And he never rejected the Catholic Church. He always embraced it, but he began to look for meaning in other areas, in poetry and in Shakespeare and particularly in the existentialists. So he – and one of the existentialists was Camus. And Camus had written this book called The Plague. My father gave it to me, and he told me with this kind of peculiar intensity, "I want you to read this." And he had given me – he always gave me stuff to read and poetry and stuff. But he said this with such directness that after he died, I ended up reading that book about three times trying to figure out what kind of message he was, you know, he was trying to give me.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:34:37] And the book is about a doctor who is in a city in North Africa where there is an unnamed plague ravaging the city. It's a walled city and it's quarantined. And the city is – the plague is something nobody's ever seen before. And most of the people who get it are dying. So the huge infection fatality rate. And this is – and a lot of the book, the beginning is this conversation the doctor is having to himself as he's locked in his room. And he's trying to say, "I don't want to go out there because if I go out there, I'm going to catch it. And I can't really help these people anyway because we don't know anything about this disease. We don't know how to treat it. And everybody who gets it dies. So why don't I just stay here and wait it out." And then, in the end, he ends up leaving and he ends up just comforting people. And... Camus was an existentialist, which are kind of the legatees of the Greek and Roman tradition of stoicism. And what he was saying about this doctor is, the doctor had brought order to the chaos of this – what was happening in the city through doing his own duty and going out and being of service to other people, even at great sacrifice to himself.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:36:12] And, the iconic hero of stoicism is Sisyphus. And Sisyphus is condemned by the gods – because he does a good deed for humanity – to, for eternity, to push a rock up a hill. And then when he gets to the top of the hill, the boulder, he can never get it over the top. It always rolls back down and on top of him and kind of mangles him. And then he goes up and does it again. But in the stoic cosmology, Sisyphus is a happy man because he put his shoulder to the stone. He was given a duty and he does his duty. And that self-sacrifice that he makes brings order to a chaotic universe. And, you know, we're all living in a kind of chaotic universe. So for me to have kind of a concrete task that I know is right, and I'm open to criticism, I have a critical mind. If somebody shows me where I got it wrong, I'll change. I'm not dug in. I'm not hardheaded in that sense. But until somebody shows me that I'm going to try to help these children – and I feel like it's a gift. So, and the more people heap abuse on me, the more – the bigger the gift is in some way.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:37:35] Was the book, The Real Anthony Fauci, was that the first time? And because it happened during the pandemic, I – that was the first time I noticed a break in the narrative where more people were paying attention to you, and people weren't dismissing you as easily anymore. And the book itself was a critical hit amongst a lot.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:37:55] The book sold a million copies, I think, in three months.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:37:59] Amongst the people that haven't read it...

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:38:00] There's no reviews.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:38:02] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:38:02] And with a lot of – I mean, really, people going out of their – the mainstream corporate media going out of its way to ignore it.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:38:10] And how many copies did it sell?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:38:11] It sold a million copies in three months. And then it's all, you know, since then, I don't know how many, but it's continued to kind of hover up in the top 100 on Amazon. Most of the booksellers wouldn't sell it; like the independent booksellers; Barnes and Noble took it out of most of their stores. They wouldn't sell it in most of their stores. And the independent bookstore sellers almost all boycotted it. The only place you could really reliably get it was Amazon. It was odd, because those are people who are usually against censorship,

 

Joe Rogan: [01:38:48] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:38:48] And yet they were, you know... all of this weird stuff happened with the censorship then where people...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:38:56] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:38:56] I know. You know, you consider yourself a liberal, and most – and, you know, as do I, but...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:39:04] But what it means to be a liberal has changed in...

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:39:06] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:39:07] In a lot of ways.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:39:08] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:39:09] And it is... It's not about the social issues as much as it is about this subscribing to whatever the orthodoxy or whatever the ideology preaches. And it seems like when it comes to things like vaccines, like, that is something you never question. And this is the name that shall not be uttered.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:39:29] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:39:29] Yeah. And when you start questioning things, people get angry at you. They don't want to hear it. They don't want to talk about it, unless they know someone who's been injured. And when that happens, generally people have an open mind, and they start to change. And I think so many people know, so many people that have been injured now, that they're a little more critical. And then shows like Dopesick, and then all these different articles where you see, like, the Sackler family bought off immunity; they can't get prosecuted. They gave up, like, $6 billion out of how many whatever billions they made selling these things that they knew absolutely to be addictive. It's... There are enough people now that feel duped that they're willing to open their mind. There are still some people that have, that are dug in. And that's what's going to be interesting about this.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:40:18] It is interesting because it's unclear to me.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:40:22] If you want some tea, we got a cup right there.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:40:26] It's unclear to me how an orthodoxy unravels.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:40:32] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:40:33] You know, because, I mean, Mark Twain said it. I think it was Mark Twain, yeah, said it – that it's easier to fool somebody than to persuade... It's easier to fool a man than to persuade him that he's been fooled.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:40:45] Right.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:40:46] Once they swallow it, they don't want to relinquish it because...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:40:50] Ego.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:40:51] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:40:52] Your ego doesn't want...

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:40:53] Ego. Or it just threatens their, you know, their worldview. And there's so many things that are threatening about believing the counter-narrative that, you know, you and I now are seeing. Because then, can I trust my doctor? Can I trust the authorities, can I trust my country and all of that? And it's really this, the entire cosmology around which we've kind of weaved and constructed our lives, the whole foundations are – you have to start questioning everything. And most people don't want to do that. It's just... you know, I think it's terrifying. And I understand that... I see it in my family.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:41:34] Yeah. It's certainly bizarre. It's bizarre to witness. It's bizarre to witness because, you know, I've witnessed it with people that I – you know, I was a fan of, intellectually. And then all of a sudden, I'm seeing them buy into this, and then I see these telltale signs of them not willing to adjust with new data, with new information, and understanding that they've been duped and still digging their heels in, because they've already defended themselves once. So now they defend themselves and now they double down and now they seek out all these – I've seen people defend the natural spillover hypothesis, which at this point seems kind of ridiculous. And Michael Shellenberger actually just published something today about that, where there's even more evidence that it was from the very lab that they think it's from.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:42:24] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:42:25] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:42:25] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:42:26] Yeah. Well, those conversations to – the email conversations after it was – it had happened, and then the conversations with Fauci and Rand Paul were infuriating. Those were infuriating. They were so crazy. "Senator, you do not know what you are talking about." This appeal, appeal to authority. This trying to diminish what he's saying, when what he's saying is what people have been quietly saying that understood what was going on.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:42:55] But I mean, you – I mean, did you lose friendships, like personally?

 

Joe Rogan: [01:43:01] Yeah, but that was okay. Not much. No one I really liked. Yeah, it was...

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:43:06] Did you just discover that you didn't like them, or...

 

Joe Rogan: [01:43:08] No, I just – I knew there was a lot of cowards. I knew. I had, like, casual relationships with some cowards. And some of them attacked me. And I'm like, good. Now I don't have to talk to you anymore. I've got a lot of friends. I'm very happy.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:43:21] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:43:22] So for me, it was fine. And then most of my friends were comics, a lot of comics, and a lot of jiu jitsu guys – very like-minded in their approach to this thing. They weren't really interested in becoming an experiment, and a lot of them, because they were touring a lot, and a lot of them because they're in clubs a lot, and they were getting it and they already had it. And so this idea that even after getting it and getting over it, that somehow or another they had to get injected, and it didn't make any sense to them. They're like, why? Like, this doesn't this doesn't follow what even the studies are showing about natural immunity due to prior, previous infection, because they had a previous infection, they knew that there was supposedly at some point in time, it was the studies that were showing that it was seven times more effective than getting a vaccine. And the vaccine, the effectiveness it was showing, it was very short. And even then, people – even after I got over Covid – I had people that I liked, that I admired, they were telling me, "You should get vaccinated now." I said, "Why? Why? Make it make sense to me." Sanjay Gupta said that to me. Like, make it make sense to me. Why should I do it? Because you'd be even more protected. I got over it quick. I got over it in three. I made a video in three days and it looked too good. So CNN put a filter on it and made me look yellow on TV. Did you see that?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:44:46] No.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:44:46] You never saw that?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:44:47] No.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:44:48] Oh, it's hilarious.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:44:48] I totally believe that.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:44:49] I'm going to show it to you, just because it's so ridiculous, just so you can see it. Because it's so ridiculous. Because three days later, I had one day where I felt like shit. The next day, I felt better. And then the day after that, I make this video. And I was saying essentially that I had to cancel the shows that I was doing with Dave Chappelle that weekend. So that's – the top one is the CNN version. And the bottom one is the real version. This is me outside in Texas, so it's nice and sunny out. And look what they did to my face! They made me look like I was ill.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:45:23] That looks like a cadaver.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:45:26] It's crazy what they did.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:45:27] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:45:28] It's very bizarre. But the fact that that's a news organization that did that is so terrifying, because it's such a trivial thing – and that they concentrated on this one medication that my doctor prescribed for me, which was ivermectin. They didn't concentrate on all the other stuff that I took. They didn't concentrate on the Z-Pak, they didn't concentrate on the prednisone, they didn't concentrate on the monoclonal antibodies or the IV drip of vitamins that I did, and NAD – the NAD plus cocktail. I did a lot of stuff.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:45:58] I did all the same stuff.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:45:59] Yeah, and I got better quick.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:46:01] Yeah, me too.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:46:02] But no one cared that I got better. That was not the narrative. The narrative is, like, "Joe Rogan is taking veterinary medication." And then Rolling Stone printed an article saying that these hospital emergency rooms were getting overrun with people overdosing on horse medication and gunshot victims had to wait in line. Well, first of all, how many people are getting gunshot in Oklahoma?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:46:28] And waiting in line.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:46:28] What the fuck is going on? Yeah, and they're waiting in line? Also, when you're showing the line that they use for the graphic was people wearing winter coats. And it had nothing to do with that.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:46:38] I saw somebody – somebody tracked down where that real photo came from –

 

Joe Rogan: [01:46:42] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:46:42] And it had nothing to do with –

 

Joe Rogan: [01:46:43] Nothing to do with that.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:46:44] It's just fraud.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:46:45] But it's crazy that somehow or another that snuck through Rolling Stone.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:46:50] Oh, Rolling Stone has made a big change. You know, the guy who runs that now is a guy called Noah Schachtman. And I used to have a great relationship. You know, I grew up with Jann and his kids and stuff. And I published there a lot. But the guy who runs it now is a guy with deep connections to the intelligence community. And, you know, it is really deep, deep in the orthodoxy. It's not a counterculture magazine anymore. It's now a, it's now a culture – you know, it's in the center. But the one thing I wanted to mention to you, you know, one of the incredible studies that came out, which is not surprising, but the Cleveland Clinic study, which –

 

Joe Rogan: [01:47:31] Yeah, we talked about that recently.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:47:33] Okay. So, and it, I think I read it – I could be wrong about this, but I just was reading the abstract for somebody the other day, and it looked like, I mean, what that study shows is that the vaccine gives you some protection in the first two months, but then it wanes precipitously, and it wanes into negative efficacy after seven months. So in other words, if you got a vaccine, you're more likely to get sick. It does the opposite. But this is what Fauci said at the very beginning. If you go back and look at his tapes, it could make you actually more susceptible.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:48:08] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:48:09] And that is exactly what it does. And it – but what that study shows, the more vaccines you get, the more likely it is that you're going to get sick, and that the people who are most vaccinated have 3.5 times the rate. And I could be wrong about this, but I think this was said: 3.5 times the risk of illness than people who are unvaccinated. Oh, I mean, that's – that's not a good profile for, you know, a medical product.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:48:41] No, it's not.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:48:42] We would have done better if they'd just given everybody vitamin D.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:48:45] But what I found was really fascinating. There was a lot of people after I got sick that wanted me to immediately get vaccinated to join the team. That's what it seemed like they wanted me to do.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:48:54] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:48:55] It seemed like there was a battle for this, some sort of ideological high ground, and they wanted me to say, "Wow, I should have gotten vaccinated." I'm like, look, I've had diseases that were worse than this. I've had the flu that was worse than this. But also, I'm aware of ways to treat certain colds and flus and things that – you can actually do things to improve your immune system.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:49:17] Yeah, exactly.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:49:18] Yeah. And also –

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:49:19] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:49:20] You know, I had a maddening conversation with Peter Hotez, once.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:49:25] Well, he's – that guy is – I mean, it's hard just watching a guy sit there and tell things that he's got to know are not true.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:49:39] I don't know if he knows they're not true, but he's a strange example, because when I was talking to him, he's overweight. And I asked him, does he eat well? He doesn't. He's saying, you know, he likes junk food. He eats junk food too much. He doesn't exercise; very – walks a little, he was saying. He doesn't take vitamins. This is a crazy conversation. So you're advocating for this experimental mRNA vaccine technology, and you don't even do anything else to improve your immune system. Like, you don't do – there's all the studies on vitamins, on whether it's vitamin C, vitamin D, exposure to sunlight increases your vitamin D as well. It's very good for the immune system. There's all these studies on this. There's plenty of studies on what happens to people when they're nutrient-deficient as well, like your – all of your systems are functioning incorrectly. And there's also studies on people that got administered to the ICU with Covid that somewhere in the neigh-, it was above 70% were deficient in vitamin D.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:50:44] Yeah. Oh, I think it was over 90%.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:50:47] Yeah. It's – to have a conversation with someone who doesn't take vitamins and is telling you, “You have to take this medication,” it's like, this is a crazy conversation because you know what health is like. Metabolic health is a very nuanced thing, and there's a lot going on with it, and it has a lot to do with what you put in your body. It has a lot to do with the foods you consume. It has a lot to do with exercise and drinking water. It has a lot to do with your electrolyte balance. It has a lot to do with the nutrient content of your diet. So if you're if you're not doing any of that and you're telling everybody they got to get jabbed, this is a crazy conversation.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:51:21] Well, all that metadata that I was talking about in the Guyer study, you know, and it's really interesting that the graphs that go along with it, one of the, you know, the graphs that go through each disease and they show when the disease was killing people and then there's this huge decline and then it goes flat. So it's not killing anybody more. Then the vaccine is introduced.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:51:44] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:51:46] And it's disease after disease after disease. The same thing happened, that it was – it's all because people started getting better nutrition and their immune systems were okay. And if you look at the kids in Africa who die from measles or these other infectious diseases, they're all malnourished. In fact, the only people really dying from measles in the '60s before they introduced the vaccines, I think the death rate had gone down from, you know, tens of thousands per year to, like, a couple of hundred a year. This was by '63. And they were all kids. Most of them were kids in the Mississippi Delta, black kids, severely malnourished. And they were dying of measles. And, you know, this is before the war on poverty, before my father visited the Delta. And, you know, it's hard for a disease to kill a healthy person. It's hard for an infectious disease to kill a healthy person with a rugged immune system.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:52:45] Well, not the Spanish flu, though, right?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:52:47] Well, the Spanish flu was not a virus. And even Fauci now acknowledges that. And they, you know, there's good evidence that the Spanish flu – there's, you know, not a definitive but very, very strong evidence. The Spanish flu was vaccine-induced flu. The deaths were vaccine-induced. But the – originally they said it was a flu. But when they've gone back and actually, they have all these samples from thousands of people, they died from bacteriological pneumonia.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:53:21] So they died as a consequence of something that you could cure today with antibiotics.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:53:25] Yes. With ampicillin.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:53:27] Okay. So when we say – But they still... So what was their – So you're saying they had a compromised immune system already. But why?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:53:36] But a lot of the, you know, bacteriological illnesses can kill you.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:53:40] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:53:41] Is that a lot of the viral illnesses? You know, if you're super healthy, it's pretty hard for them to kill you. I mean, and I'm just saying this, not on an individual basis, but on a population basis. If you look at populations that are well nourished, you don't see infectious disease mortalities anymore.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:54:01] So –

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:54:02] And that's across, you know, I don't think anybody would argue with that.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:54:05] So what do you, what are you saying that the Spanish flu was, and, like, what is the documentation?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:54:12] Well, the – you know, I –

 

Joe Rogan: [01:54:14] You said that Fauci has publicly admitted that it's not a fluke.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:54:17] Fauci wrote an article in 2008 and – that I'm pretty sure it was 2008 – in which he acknowledged that it was not the flu that was killing those people. It was a bacteriological infection, and a bacteriological infection, these days, you could 100% cure all of it with an antibiotic.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:54:42] But so, but something was making them ill, and to make them vulnerable to the bacteriological infection?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:54:47] And that's unclear. And, you know, I read an article recently and you can look up these articles pretty easily, but the article that I read made a very strong case that the illness came from testing a new vaccine in Kansas, at a military base in Kansas. And again, I'm a little hazy on the details.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:55:09] But this is important to cover, right? So let's see if we can find this. "Predominant role of bacterial pneumonia as a cause of death in pandemic influenza implications."

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:55:17] That was Fauci.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:55:18] Yeah, "of pandemic influenza preparedness." So what this is saying is that bacterial pneumonia was the cause of death. But these people, obviously, were saying that they had – they were sick before this, correctly. Correct? Is that true?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:55:34] You know what? I – you know, I shouldn't talk about this, Joe.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:55:37] Okay. See, this is –

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:55:37] Because I don't remember enough about it.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:55:39] Let's read what he says. The results: "Post-mortem samples were examined from people who died of influenza during the 1918 to 1990 – 1919, rather, uniformly exhibited severe changes indicative of bacteria, bacterial pneumonia, bacteriologic and histopathologic results from published autopsy series clearly and consistently implicated secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory tract bacteria in most influenza fatalities."

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:56:11] And some people have suggested that came from getting people to wear masks.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:56:16] Oh, Jesus.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:56:17] So but, you know, I don't know.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:56:20] How would that be?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:56:21] That the masks became… 

 

Joe Rogan: [01:56:22] The bacteria.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:56:23] a medium…

 

Joe Rogan: [01:56:24] A vector.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:56:24] for bacteria.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:56:27] "Conclusion. A majority of deaths from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory tract bacteria. Less substantial data from the subsequent 1957 and 1968 pandemic are consistent with these findings. If severe pandemic influenza is largely a problem of bacterial - viral bacterial co-pathogenesis, pandemic planning needs to go beyond addressing the viral cause alone. Example: influenza vaccine vaccines and antiviral drugs." That's hilarious. "Prevention, diagnosis, prophylaxis and treatment of secondary bacterial pneumonia, as well as stockpiling of antibiotics and bacterial vaccines should be high priorities for pandemic planning."

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:57:18] He didn't remember that.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:57:20] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:57:21] But... Let me ask you something that you were talking about before, because you said a lot of the comedians, you know, were skeptical.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:57:35] Yes.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:57:35] What I saw was the opposite. I saw the comedians that should have been questioning everything, you know, that were –

 

Joe Rogan: [01:57:46] Falling in line.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:57:47] Canceling people who ask questions and including all the ones, you know, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, they kind of stopped – I thought they stopped being funny, because they – you know, comedians are funny when they're ridiculing authority. And they all had to stop doing that.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:58:05] Well, the only one I know out of that group is Jon. I know Jon and Jon's a great guy. I have not talked to him. I talked to him in the middle of it all. I haven't talked to him since. But I thought it was hilarious when he was on Colbert, and he was doing that routine.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [01:58:18] That was really good.

 

Joe Rogan: [01:58:20] Yeah, that was hilarious. I try to stay off Twitter because I generally think, especially when it comes to things like that, are high-anxiety subjects, whether it's climate change, the war in Ukraine, or Covid. I think it facilitates mental illness. And I think a lot of these people are – they fester on things, and they have high anxiety. And when you subject them to being locked inside their home and you offer them only one way out and that way is this vaccine, and they trust the science because they're smart people – smart people trust the science – and they believe that, you know, we have to all be in this together and you're a good person if you go out and get vaccinated. So you show your picture on your little Instagram page, "Got vaccinated," and everybody knows you're a good person. And then there's this sort of feedback loop. And then they start attacking people that differ from this, and then they start, you know, calling you – "My mother died from this" or "My grandmother died from this," as if you somehow or another did it – not the fucking people that did this crazy research in Wuhan, China, and then lied about it. And then we're like, no one's mad at them. The same people who are mad at comedians for questioning it were applauding Fauci, even though there was all these – there was clear conversations that showed that, yes, they were doing what we consider to be gain-of-function research there. Yes, the NIH funded this. Yes, this is all true. And when he's being confronted by Rand Paul, and you see him like he's essentially just lying in front of the American people. He's just – And the same people that generally are these critical thinkers, they were so enamored by this narrative and then so captive by it, and then also captive by their initial assertions. They're a prisoner of their initial statements on it. They didn't want to say they were wrong. It took a lot of people a long time to say, "I fucked up; that's not true. It's not. I was wrong."

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:00:21] Has anybody actually said that?

 

Joe Rogan: [02:00:23] To me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A good friend of mine. Yeah, a very good friend of mine who got really scared and got vaccinated and thought I was being an idiot. And then along the way started paying attention and got Covid really bad. And, you know, and I helped him out and sent the nurse to them and got him IV vitamins. And it's just one of those things where it's a stress test. It's a stress test for people's character. It's a stress test for anxiety levels. It's a stress test for community bonds. It's a stress test for friendships. It's a stress test. And you get to see. You get to see what it was like. And I feel honestly, even though I was in the center of it all, I felt very fortunate, because I could have no questions about how it actually works, how the system actually works, to go against people that are dissenters. I could have no questions, because I was in the middle of it. I saw it. I saw it happen. I saw the CNN thing where they made my face yellow and said I was taking horse medication, which is the most - to say that, and to repeat that over and over again, is such a clear indication that they conspired. It's such a – it's uniform, it's "horse de-wormer." Uniform. A medication that's used far more often on human beings. It's been prescribed for –

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:01:40] Billions.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:01:41] Yeah, it's insane. And the fact that –

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:01:43] And won the Nobel Prize for efficacy in humans.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:01:47] Yeah, in humans. Yeah. It was wild. It was just wild.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:01:51] But they had to do it. They had to discredit ivermectin because, you know, because there's a federal law. The federal law, that Emergency Use Authorization statute, says that you cannot issue – you cannot issue an Emergency Use Authorization to a vaccine if there is an existing medication that has been approved for any purpose, that is demonstrated effective against the target illness. So they had to destroy ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and discredit it, and they had to tell everybody it's not effective, because if they had acknowledged that it's effective in anybody, the whole $200 billion vaccine enterprise would have collapsed.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:02:36] It's a very strange and difficult-to-navigate subject because there are so many studies, and there's a lot of studies that seem to point to the fact that ivermectin doesn't work well for people that have Covid.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:02:51] Yeah, I – you know, we've looked at all the studies and we, you know, there's over 100 studies on ivermectin. And I think they're on our website, on CHD's website. And then there were a series of studies – and this is what they always do; this is what they did with autism – they designed studies to fail. So they, in fact, they designed studies, and the way they designed them to fail is by giving people lethal doses of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. And in fact, and in Brazil, the researchers were charged with homicide. And that was one of those – I forgot whether it was called the Solidarity study, but it was one of the studies that was commissioned by WHO, paid for by Bill Gates and his people, and that they were literally giving people 4 or 5 times the prescribed doses of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, in order – and, you know, these were elderly people on their deathbeds. And a lot of them could not take that level of toxicity and died. And so then they were able to say, oh, it kills people, but it wasn't killing anybody they gave the prescribed doses to. And, you know, and Gates knew what the prescribed dose was for hydroxychloroquine because his foundation gives it to hundreds of millions of people every year in Africa for malaria control. And so it wasn't – you know, it's hard to say that it was a mistake that they were overdosing these people.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:04:29] So it was a situation where you have the Emergency Use Authorization, and that won't work if you have a medication that also works. And then you have this medication that also works that happens to be generic.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:04:41] Yeah, that costs $0.05 a pill instead of $3,000 a dose like remdesivir.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:04:47] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:04:48] So remdesivir – The reason they like remdesivir is because remdesivir, you have to – you give IV in the hospital at the end of life. It's not prophylactic. They didn't want something that was prophylactic or early cure because that would have meant they would have the whole vaccine issue, you know, would have fallen apart. Remdesivir was crazy, because remdesivir in 2019 – so right before the pandemic, Fauci had remdesivir and an Ebola trial with four other drugs in Africa. And the IRB that the, you know, the safety panel that, you know, you have to have a safety panel for, it's called the Institutional Review Board for every clinical trial. The safety panel stepped in and pulled remdesivir out because it was killing so many people. It was killing more people than the Ebola. Ebola kills 53% of the people who get it. And this – and the remdesivir was doing worse. So why would you take that out of an – that got thrown out of an Ebola trial, and give it to people with a disease that has an infection fatality rate of 1%? Well, it's insane.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:06:12] I would say that's insane if I didn't know that there was a history of doing similar things to the AIDS crisis with AZT. AZT, which was initially a chemotherapy medication that was killing people in a two-week dose. They were giving them two weeks of this stuff, was killing people faster than AIDS was killing people.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:06:31] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:06:32] And they went and took that - or excuse me, well, faster than cancer was killing people. And they went and took that and started giving it to people that had.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:06:39] Too dangerous for it to treat as a cancer. Right. With cancer, you give it, you know, in the simplest terms, you're giving a chemotherapy drug that is going to kill you. 100% of the time, it's going to kill you, you know, at least in those, at that era, because it's designed to kill human tissue. Right. And you're hoping that it will kill the tumor before it kills the, you know, the person. And it was thrown out as too dangerous to use for two weeks and chemotherapy. And now they've decided, okay, we're going to give it to people, a lifetime course of it, to people with AIDS. And of course, it's going to kill, you know, anybody on it. It's going to kill.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:07:22] Well, the Arthur Ashe thing blew me away because I didn't know that Arthur Ashe was asymptomatic when he had... and then he died right after he started taking AZT.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:07:32] And he said publicly, I don't want to be on this. I think it's hurting me, but my doctor is going to get mad at me if I get off of it.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:07:45] And how many other people, how many people died from AZT?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:07:48] Nureyev, too? It's the same thing. He was completely healthy, and they put him on AZT, and he died.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:07:55] Well, how many people did die? What was the overall number for AZT?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:07:58] I've forgotten. I have to go back and read my book.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:08:01] But it's extraordinary.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:08:03] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:08:03] Yeah. And, you know, just the fact that that play book existed, they've done it this way in the past and gotten away with it. And that when they have drugs that are approved and they already have these drugs and if these drugs didn't work on that thing, they'll try them on this thing. And then they'll say, in the case of AZT, there's video of Fauci saying the reason why it's the only drug we recommend or that is prescribed is because it's safe and effective. He actually said that about AZT.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:08:36] And he knew at that time...

 

Joe Rogan: [02:08:38] Which is a crazy thing.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:08:39] That the only way I mean, one of the tricks, one of the tricks they were using is the people who were getting the AZT, they were also giving blood transfusions to... 

 

Joe Rogan: [02:08:49] Yes.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:08:49] Which were keeping them alive and making it seem... If you give somebody a blood transfusion, it's going to you know, it perks them up and keeps you alive longer. And so they were keeping those people alive artificially in order to make the drug look like it actually was efficacious.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:09:09] That's the crazy thing, is what they're allowed to do in studies. And one of the first correspondence that you and I had was we had read something where the description of why the Covid vaccines were 100% effective and what they used to make that distinction. It's not. No. Like explain that. Explain that. Because it's such a bizarre, the way they do it. It seems like it should be illegal.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:09:37] I mean, what they did with the Covid vaccine is they gave the Covid... This is the Pfizer trial. We know a lot about the Pfizer trial because that was the one, that was... Pfizer was the one to get an approved vaccine. You know, it did another trick. It got one of its vaccines approved, the Comirnaty vaccine, but that vaccine was not available in this country. But they were able to say to people, “Oh, we have an approved vaccine.” And that made it okay for the colleges and everybody else to force you to take an emergency use authorization vaccine, which is illegal. Nobody can tell you to participate in that medical experiment. And so they played this kind of shell game. But in order to get that, they had to reveal their testing. And what they did was they gave 22,000 people the vaccine, and 22,000 similarly situated people, the placebo. And after six months, and they actually they promised to do a five-year study, but then they cut it back to two months or four months and unblinded it, you know, right at the beginning. So which is total deception because now we don't know what any of the, you know, long term effects are. There's a lot of impacts from these vaccines, like every other drug that have long diagnostic horizons and long incubation periods. And if you don't have a five-year placebo-controlled trial, as Fauci himself said, you need eight years, he said, you're going to miss a lot and you could have mayhem. And that's exactly...

 

Joe Rogan: [02:11:21] So they used the excuse that this pandemic was so deadly that they had to unblind the trial and give this medication to everyone. Otherwise it would be unethical.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:11:30] Yeah, otherwise it'd be unethical.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:11:32] So you think that that was done on purpose? Do you think that was done to obscure.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:11:36] Well, I don't look in people's heads? But it's not a good... The optics are not good. So. So what they did is they had 22,000 people who got the vaccine, 22,000 that didn't, and they have six months of data. Some of that is unblinded, but it's six months. And during that six-month period in the vaccine group, one person died of Covid. And in the placebo group, two people died from Covid. So that allows Pfizer to tell the public, and FDA to tell the public, oh, this vaccine is 100% effective because two is 100% of one.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:12:15] That is insane.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:12:17] What they should have been telling Americans and what they're required to do under the law is, is to give them a number that is called the NNTV, the number needed to vaccinate to save one life. How many people do you have to vaccinate to save one life? And the answer, of course, is you need to vaccinate 22,000 people to save one life. So if you're going to vaccinate 22,000 people to save one life, you better make sure the vaccine itself is not killing anybody. Because if it kills one person for 22,000, you've now canceled out the entire benefit of the product. And when they looked at the key metric, which was all cause mortality, in other words, how many people died of not just from Covid, but of all causes in the vaccine group and how many died from all causes in the placebo group? The placebo group had 17 people die and the vaccine group had 21. So what that means is there were... More people died in the vaccine group. That means you're...

 

Joe Rogan: [02:13:33] But didn't the placebo group eventually take the vaccine because they were unblinded?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:13:37] Yeah, they were unblinded, but they still gave us the data, the six-month data for the people... So it's all... I mean, there's total information chaos...

 

Joe Rogan.: [02:13:46] It's during six months, though, right?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:13:47] Right.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:13:47] It's six months. It's six months of people that are adults.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:13:50] Some of them got it sooner, 2 or 4 months. But anyway, they gave us the six months of data for the two designated groups. And you know, it's an alarming result because there were four people who died of, 4 to 5 people who died of cardiac arrest in the placebo group, in the vaccine group, and only one in the placebo group. What that means is if you take the vaccine, you're, you know, 21% more likely to die over six months, according to this data, according to this data, which is, you know, not good data and not enough of a big group, of a large enough group to really make these kind of predictions. But it's all they gave us. So they're stuck with this number. If you take the vaccine, you're 21% more likely to die of all causes. And when you look at the data, you see that there's four cardiac arrests, 4 to 5, because one of them looks like a cardiac arrest, but it may not be. But there's at least four cardiac arrests in the vaccine group and only one in the placebo group, which means if you take the vaccine, you're 400 more. 400 percent more likely to die of a cardiac arrest over the next six months than if you didn't, so that's not a good product. You know, you wouldn't want to recommend that product, much less mandate it. And yet they did.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:15:13] You were explaining to me when we were outside before we came in here, so I said I wanted to talk about it here instead. You were explaining how instead of using the VAERS system, there's a method of analyzing a whole host of data to find out about deaths - how many coffins are ordered, how many, how many people die of heart attacks, strokes? There's another way to look at it.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:15:39] Yeah, I mean, they're - the guy who kind of showed that to the world was Ed Dowd. And Ed Dowd was a, he was a big Wall Street guy. I think he operated one of the portfolio companies for BlackRock. He grew it - and, and this you know, this needs to be checked a little, and maybe James could, but I think he grew it from, you know, under a billion to $14 billion. He was a major player on Wall Street. And the way he did that was he saw the 2008 crash coming because he's a numbers guy. He sees the world in terms of numbers. During the pandemic, he had no kind of early exposure to the medical freedom movement or anything else. He just started seeing data that made no sense to him. And it was a lot of those, was kind of the, was the all-cause mortality deaths. He started seeing people dying after vaccination that shouldn't have been dying. You know, kids on the ball fields, all of these, you know, the athletes, etc. But he was looking at these non-conventional data sources like the ones that you spoke of.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:16:57] He was looking at insurance industry actuarial and insurance industry data that showed excess deaths, particularly in younger groups spiking after the vaccine and seeing it all over the world. And he ended up doing a book on this that is designed to be read in, I think, an hour or 90 minutes. And it's a book. It's an extraordinary book because it has all of these graphs that are incredibly convincing, compelling. But it's the kind of book, if you have a skeptic and you can get them to sit down for 90 minutes with this book, when they get up, they will have converted. And it has... One part of the book has, like, maybe a thousand photos of local newspapers reporting athletes dying on playing fields. These stories never made the national news, but the local papers were, you know, because they'd happen at the local game, and the local papers were covering them. So there was no censorship in the local papers. And it's really, it's sickening. I mean, it's terrible, these, you know, these beautiful children who are dying on the playing field. And Covid was killing people, but it was old people. Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:18:20] Cause unknown. The epidemic of sudden deaths in 2021 and 2022. Edward Dowd. Yeah. Yeah. Died after first vaccine dose, dies at hospital, football, died on the field.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:18:33] None of this was reported. And there's, you know, there's now thousands and thousands of those stories, I think.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:18:38] Well, they were also kind of suppressed.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:18:41] Yeah. One of the data points - he went in and looked globally. People do die on playing fields. It's a pretty steady average of 29 per year for 30 years. And we were getting, during the, after vaccination, I think 29 per month, you know.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:18:59] So now here's the other concern. It's not just the people that died. It's the people that suffered that are alive and that have an injury and that may, it may have radically shortened their life.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:19:14] Well, there's 15 million Americans, according to the V-safe data and the Rasmussen poll, 15 million Americans sought medical help after the vaccine. That's, you know, and then, you know, VAERS, which VAERS is unreliable, but it's not unreliable because it's overestimated. It's unreliable because it's underestimated. And that's CDC's own study says it undercounts injuries by between 10 and 100% and so or 100 times, not 100%, 100 times. So I think VAERS has 17,000 deaths reported. And, you know, over a million injuries, maybe well over a million. It's something like that, I mean James can look it up. But in 1976, when they had this really bad flu shot that they did the same thing with, they did a global rollout, and everybody had to take it. And they pulled the shot after 25 deaths reported — 25. So now, I mean, there are, you know, we're living in a different universe now in terms of public health. I mean, the pharmaceutical industry has captured the regulatory structure and, you know, and just changed the entire way that people think about public health.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:20:38] What do you think could be done about that, and what do you think you could do about that?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:20:43] You know, I think I am — and I don't want this to sound self-promoting — but I'm ideally suited to do this, because I've spent so much time litigating and writing about these agencies that I know how to unravel corporate capture. I know exactly what to do when I get in there. And for a lot of them, I know the individuals that have to be moved out and the kind of individuals that need to be moved in. But also you need to get rid of these really corrupting financial entanglements between the pharmaceutical industry and the regulatory agencies that has put agency capture on steroids. For example, almost 50% of FDA's budget comes from pharmaceutical companies. They're not working for us. They're working for the pharmaceutical company with CDC. CDC has a $12 billion budget, and about almost 5 billion of that goes to buying vaccines in sweetheart deals from these four companies and then promoting them to the public. And so they're really partners with the pharmaceutical industry. And the way that you get a promotion at CDC and the way you get recognition and salary increases and good performance reviews is by increasing vaccine uptake — not by finding problems with vaccines. And it's really bad, it's no longer serving as a regulatory agency. NIH is probably even the worse. If you work at NIH, and you work on a vaccine or other medical product, you are allowed to actually pocket royalties from that product.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:22:27] So any product that you work on, you can collect royalties on, you can collect royalties that are now capped at $150,000 a year for life, forever, not just life, but for your children's lives, etc. As long as that product is sold, you have march-in rights for the patent if you worked on it at NIH. So the Moderna vaccine, which is half-owned by NIH, which means NIH will get half — billions and billions of dollars from the sales of that vaccine, which they made. They are promoting. They're telling everybody, you need to get this. But also there's either 4 or 6 individuals who were Anthony Fauci's direct deputies who themselves are collecting $150,000 a year for life, forever, from that product. So the mercantile interest in making, those are people are not going to find problems with the product, because they're paying for their boats, they're paying for their mortgages, they're paying for their kids' education, are making sure that as many of those vaccines are sold as possible. So let's make kids take them, even though there's no data that show they help kids. Let's make pregnant women take them, make everybody take them, because they're cashing in on it. And that the mercantile, you know, ambitions have completely subsumed the regulatory function of those agencies. And that has to end. You know, one of the things that we need to do too, is to get rid of pharmaceutical advertising on television.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:23:59] There's only two countries in the world that allow it – one is New Zealand, the other is our country. Everybody who is knowledgeable is against it. And it not only has compromised, you know, has compromised public health... We now, we take — largely because of that advertising, we take 3 or 4 times the amount of drugs as Europeans take. And drugs are the number three killer in our country. Pharmaceutical drugs, the number three killer, after cancer and heart attacks. They're not making us healthier. We have we spend more on health care, 4.3 trillion, than any country in the world. And we have the worst health impacts. We're behind like Mongolia, Costa Rica, Cuba, in terms of our health outcomes. So all of these drugs, the pharmaceutical industry is not making us safer. It's not making us healthier. And, you know, we changed the rule in 1997, prior to 1997, like cigarettes and liquor, you couldn't advertise on TV. We changed those rules, and the FDA allowed the pharmaceutical companies to advertise. And they not only now have a platform from which they can tell everybody, you're sick, you need this, you need that. But also, they are able to dictate content on television. So they can dictate content on the, you know, on the local news.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:25:26] And on YouTube.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:25:28] Yeah, of course.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:25:29] Yeah. That's a terrifying thing. And it's so deeply interwoven. The question that I would have to you is how do you untangle that. How could... 

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:25:43] Well that, you can do one of these things at a time. And I'm going to go in there and do it. I'm going to issue an executive order on day one saying there's no more advertising on TV. Now, FDA needs to implement that through the regulatory process. But I also know how the regulatory process works, and I know how to hasten it. I know how to make it work faster for the American people. So, you know, I'm looking forward to doing this, and I'm looking forward to telling FDA you're not taking Pharma money anymore, you can't do it.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:26:18] All these controversial opinions that you have. Have you had anyone debate you publicly about any of these?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:26:23] Nobody will debate me for 18 years. Nobody will debate me. In fact, I've scheduled many, many debates, and I've asked Hotez many, many times to debate me. And I think you've asked him here, "Why don't you debate Robert Kennedy?" And he said, because he's a cunning lawyer or something like that.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:26:40] Yeah. 

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:26:41] But I've debated Hotez on the telephone with, you know, with kind of a referee. And, you know, his science is, it is just made up. He cannot stand by it. He can't cite studies.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:26:57] Well, he was trying to tell me that vaccines don't cause autism. I said, okay, well...

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:27:01] Yeah, and his daughter has autism, and he wrote a book..

 

Joe Rogan: [02:27:04] Yeah, but I asked him...

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:27:03] [saying] that my daughter doesn't have, that didn't get her autism from a vaccine. But I've read that book and there is no science cited in that book. It's just him saying it didn't happen. And listen, I wouldn't wish that on anybody. And I, and God bless him, and God bless that little girl. And, you know, I have nothing but, you know, good energy going to them. And, you know, but it's not - he's using her as a leverage to tell people you, you know, there's no problem here.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:27:39] But this is my point, that I asked him what does, and he said, there's a few, there's environmental factors that we’re aware of. I go, “What are those?” And he couldn’t cite them.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:27:48] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:27:48] Like, how can you be so sure to say this definitely doesn't. But you're telling me there's a bunch of environmental factors that do cause it, and we're aware of those factors, but you're not aware of them, and you're an expert in this?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:28:00] Yeah.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:28:01] How is that possible? You're a... 

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:28:03] I mean, that's the main thing...

 

Joe Rogan: [02:28:04] He's a health expert.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:28:06] That's the big question that anybody who says it's not the vaccines, I'm like, okay, fine.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:28:11] But they don't want - if you say it's not the vaccines, people go, oh, good. That's what I wanted to hear. That's what I wanted to hear.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:28:18] Then, what is it?

 

Joe Rogan: [02:28:18] When you say it is the vaccines, people go, "Oh my God, I don't want to hear that." They don't want to hear it. And they get angry. They get angry at you. And they go,  "Oh, tinfoil hat, conspiracy theorist.” And, but the fact that no one will debate you speaks volumes, especially now. They can't say now that you're not popular. And what's crazy is that Biden now has decided he's not even going to debate anybody in the primary.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:28:44] I'll just tell you one story. The Connecticut state legislature was debating - had a bill to end the religious exemptions for childhood vaccines in Connecticut. And the head of the Democratic Party, the legislature, asked me to come out and debate a Yale professor in front of the legislature – and I said, “Great.” (From the Yale Medical School). And he called back and said, "There's going to be two of them, and it's against you, and they're going to get two thirds of the time and you get a third." And I said, “Fine.” And then he called back and said, “There's going to be four of them, and you each get six minutes.” And I said, ”That's all I need. And it's not fair, but it's all I need." And so I fly out on a red eye. I get to the statehouse, and it's me and four empty chairs. Somebody told them, or they all decided, I don't know, not to show up. And that's happened to me again, and again, and again, and again. I agree to debates, and it seems like somebody gets a message. But, you know, who knows? It's obscure. Nobody in 18 years has been willing to debate me.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:29:56] What is that like to carry that around. I mean, I know you kind of described it earlier, in the Sisyphus analogy, but it's, I mean, it's got to be insanely frustrating.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:30:12] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:30:13] I mean, I can't imagine. I mean, you really handle it incredibly well.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:30:19] You know, it's frustrating. But I mean, listen, I look at these, some of my friends that I've made over time, who have children who are affected, children who, you know, were perfectly healthy kids who exceeded all their milestones, and then they lost everything when they're two years. And a lot of these kids are so severely affected. They'll never, you know, hold a job. They'll never pay taxes. They'll never write a poem. They'll never throw a baseball. They'll never go out on a date with a girl or a boy, and they'll never serve in the military. You know, their lives are so constricted, and the parents’ lives are all so shattered. You know, these are, a lot of these parents, for most of them, because the children have these, you know, severe anger and violence... and they have these tactile sensitivities, and light sensitivities, and don't like strangers. The parents can't go out. They can't, you can't get a babysitter to take care of that child. And the parents just stopped going out on dates. A lot of them give up their jobs. They, almost all of them, their careers are, you know, really debilitated. And I see them going through that. And, you know, anything that I go through is like nothing, nothing. So I don't, you know, spend any time thinking of myself. I just don't get frustrated by it, because all I have to do is think, I'm here for those parents. And, you know, and I'm lucky that, you know, I don't have to fight that battle because I don't know what I would do. I don't know if I could take it.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:32:13] What pushed you to want to run for president?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:32:18] I saw, you know, I grew up so proud of this country and loving this country and being proud and you know, I grew up in a magical time in American history which economists call the "Great Prosperity." It's a time between 1947 and, like, 1980, when our country became the wealthiest country in the world. We developed the middle class like nothing that's ever been seen in history, that became this economic machine and a machine for democracy. And we were generating during that period half the wealth on the face of the earth we owned here in this country. Everybody wanted American things. America was, you know, it was a moral authority around the world. It was a leader. And everybody wanted our leadership – they don’t like our bullying, but they wanted our leadership, and they knew the difference. But they wanted - you know, I would travel in Europe when I was a kid and with my father and my mother, and people just adored our country. And people wanted blue jeans. They wanted American cars. They wanted Victrola, you know, RCA Victrolas, and, you know, our electronics. And they wanted our movies and our television. And I, you know, and they wanted our democracy. And, you know, I want my kids to grow up with that love for our country and that pride for our country. And I don't see the path from either political party getting us there at this point. I think, you know, both parties have lost their way; and my party, the Democratic Party, has become the party of war.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:34:04] It's become the party of censorship. It's become the party of pharmaceutical companies, of, you know, the Neocons, this very aggressive, belligerent foreign policy – forever wars, and then, you know, the kind of political suppression that we saw, and this really this kind of this bizarre turning our backs on the American middle class, which is the only thing that sustains democracy. If you don't have a middle class, you cannot... any political scholar, you know, political scientist will tell you that if you have a large aggregations of wealth at the top and widespread poverty below, that formulation is too unstable to support democracy. And nobody - and the middle class has just been wiped out in this country, and nobody's talking about it. It's really, you know, and I think that's why, you know, Trump was so popular. He was the one guy who was talking to those people. And, you know, and he's saying - and they're angry because nobody's listening to them. And Trump said, you know, “I'm listening to you, and I'm going to go break things for you.” And they are angry, and they want things to get broken. And I think, you know, my father used to look at Latin America, and it was the same thing back then. It was widespread poverty below, and it was wealth above. And US foreign policy was to sort of fortify those oligarchies and support with weapons, etc.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:35:49] the military juntas that were keeping those people in suppression because they were anti-communists. And my father said, there's going to be a revolution in those countries. And if we continue those policies, the communists are going to own the revolution, and they're going to own the future. And we have to give aid directly to the poor, and stop giving it to the oligarchs, and stop giving it to the military. And that's why my uncle and father started the Alliance for Progress and USAID to do something that it had never done before, which is to develop middle class by funding the development of middle class and the poor. And I would say the same thing is happening in this country today, that where the oligarchs are running things and the military, and there's going to be a revolution. And either it can be owned by Donald Trump, or we can try to, you know, marshal and mobilize that energy for a more idealistic vision of our country. And, you know, when my father ran in ‘68, he put together a populist coalition of left and right. And, you know, and he was able to do that. He was able to do that by telling the truth to people, including truths that they didn't want to hear. And he was, you know, on the last day that he died, the day he died, he won the most urban state in our country, which was California and the most rural state, which was South Dakota.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:37:24] He had bridged the gap between - and when I, you know, I was with him when he died in Los Angeles. And then we flew his body back on US TWO on Humphrey's plane, Vice President Humphrey's plane to New York. And then we waked him in Saint Patrick's Cathedral. And the crowds just, you know, it was like a flood of humanity on that street. The whole street was blocked, people were standing ten feet deep for half a mile. And then we brought him from Penn Station in Washington. He was in the caboose in the coffin. And then there was a train that we took to Union Station in Washington, DC. And the people on that train were the people who would have been probably one of the greatest governments in United States history. And that train ride was supposed to take 2.5 hours. It took 7.5 hours because there were 2 million people on the tracks. And there were, you know, there were white people. There were people in military uniforms. There were Boy Scouts standing, saluting. I remember passing a little league field where all of the people, all the kids on both sides were standing, holding their gloves and saluting. And the coaches and all the people in the stand. There were Catholic priests. There were rabbis. I remember passing in Delaware. . .

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:38:53] I was 14 at that time - a pickup truck that had 6 or 7 nuns in their habits standing in the bed of the truck. And they were waving rosaries and handkerchiefs at us. In the major urban centers, the train stations, we crept through at a crawl to avoid hitting people. But they were just jammed with people, almost all Black people in Trenton, and Newark, and Baltimore, and Wilmington. And they were singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. We had the windows open on the train, and then there were hippies in tie dyed t-shirts. You can go look at the people. There's photographs of the people lining that track. You know, you can call them up over there, James, if you find them. But anyway, when we got to Washington, President Johnson met us there and took us in a convoy. We rode past the Mall. And when we got to the Mall, my father and Martin Luther King had been talking together. And they were talking about how do we get poor people to write – you know, because the Vietnam War was sucking all the money out of the war on poverty. And they said, how do we get the poor people to get politically mobilized? And they said, we need to call them all to Washington, D.C. and have them camp here until Congress acts. And so King had died two months before. My father was now dead.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:40:25] Marian Wright Edelman had brought all these people. They're, you know, working for the two of them. And there were thousands of men that were encamped in these plastic shanties on the Mall, and they all came to the sidewalk, and they bowed their heads and held their hats to their chests. And we drove slowly past them up to Arlington Cemetery. And we buried my dad next to my uncle. Four years later, so that was ‘68, four years later in 1972, I was studying politics in Boston and American history, and I came across this demographic data that showed that the people, the white people who had lined that train track and who had supported my father in Maryland and Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey during the ‘68 campaign in the primaries, in ‘72, did not vote for George McGovern, who was very simpatico with my father on all these issues, very much aligned. But they voted instead for George Wallace, who was absolutely antithetical to everything my father believed it. He was a rampant, fierce segregationist, and I knew him very well in his old age. But it occurred to me then, and it struck me many times since, that every nation, like every individual, has a darker side and a lighter side. And the easiest thing for a politician to do is to appeal to our hatred and our bigotry and our fear, you know, and our xenophobia and our mistrust of immigrants or whatever. And that every once in a while, you know, politicians like my dad come along who have a different approach, which is to get people, persuade people, one way or another, to transcend their narrow self-interest and see themselves as part of a community, as part of a larger adventure, you know, and be willing to take risks for neighbors who don't look like them because they feel like they're part of something important, you know, part of maybe reconstructing our country and making it live up to its promises and to avoid the seduction of the notion that we can advance ourselves as a people by leaving our poor brothers and sisters behind.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:42:43] And my dad was able to do that successfully. And I think that we have that opportunity now. And, you know, I you know, that's why my father was able to do something that made people find the hero in themselves. You know, people take risks because it takes a risk to make a sacrifice or to believe in your community. And my dad was able to do that. And, you know, I would like to be able to do that to this country, for this country. And I think it's you know, it's the only way that we're going to save this country. If people can find a way to unify, you know, people from the left and the right and to build the kind of populist movement that my father was able to build in 1968.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:43:31] What has it been like? What has the experience been like for you of making the decision to run, and then now running and having, doing these interviews and seeing all these hit pieces written about you and even in The New York Times? What has this been like?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:43:48] Well, at least they're writing something about me.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:43:53] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:43:53] You know, I'll tell you what. It's been wonderful. It's been amazing. And, you know, my biggest worry is Cheryl, because she, and she's happy doing it.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:44:07] Your wife?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:44:08] Yeah. And she says to send you her love but she - but you know, it's been good. I mean, we've gotten extraordinary traction. And the thing is that I'm not going to win this by winning the sympathies of the mainstream media. I really think these podcasts have the capacity to change politics in this country this year. And, you know, it's interesting because in 1960, my uncle, President Kennedy, had, you know, realized that this new media called television, which had never been used in a political campaign before, it was a media that was very friendly to him for a variety of reasons. In other words, it was a media that he was able to master pretty well. People liked to see him on it. And it won him the election, which is the narrowest election at that time in American history. And then in 2016, Donald Trump recognized a new technology, which was Twitter, which, that he could communicate in this kind of way that was unique to him, you know, these kind of sound bites. Very powerful sound bite, you know, outrageous remarks on Twitter that got him these, you know, that built him an audience, a very loyal and everybody thought he was crazy, but he was able to take that technology and really, you know, turn it into a, and weaponize it, politically.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:45:43] Well, also that and the... Go ahead, please.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:45:46] Well, I'm not saying that's the only thing that he did. He did a lot of other stuff going for him. But he had a new media, is what I'm saying. And I think this year, the podcasts are going to be, you know, have the potential to revolutionize American politics, because for the first time, you can end-run the mainstream media. I mean, I was talking to somebody about this the other day, that CNN now has a viewership of, I think, something like 350,000 people a night. Tucker, when he was at Fox, had a viewership at the end, about 4.5 million. So he was ten times as big as CNN. And you at, you know, your top like McCullough, I think you were getting almost 40 million or something, maybe more. I don't know what it is, but you are then ten times bigger than Tucker and a hundred times bigger than CNN. And, you know, there's a lot of people out there. And this is, for me, it's a good media, you know, for a variety of reasons. And I've been able to reach a lot of people. You know, it's a very, very populist media. It reaches people who are on the far left and on the far right, and it kind of unifies them. And those are, you know, the audience that I think I'm most likely to, if, I mean, my campaign is about bringing those two groups together, the left and the right in a populist movement. And I think podcasts may be a formula for doing that.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:47:23] I think you're probably right. And I think there's a lot more that are going to be willing to have you on. The question is going to be like, what happens with those episodes on YouTube?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:47:33] Yeah,

 

Joe Rogan: [02:47:33] You know, we don't have to worry about that with this episode. But what, you know, with other people, they would people that I know would probably be interested in having you on. But, you know, YouTube dangles those strikes over your head and they also dangle demonetization over your head, which is, so say if you have an episode that's very popular but controversial, they can demonetize that episode. And if they choose to do so, you lose all the revenue which could be pretty substantial. And so people self-censor because of that.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:48:02] Yeah, the thing is that I'm not running on vaccines.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:48:06] Yeah, no, I understand that. It doesn't matter though. 

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:48:10] The only time that I will talk about vaccines is if somebody asks me about it. If you wanted to do this whole interview and never talk about vaccines, it would be fine for me. I mean, I think I'll never do an interview like this again, probably, because this is the only place I could do this and really sort of lay out the whole thing. Otherwise this would not survive for two minutes.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:48:32] Right.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:48:33] And so I don't think I'll do that, but I don't need to do that because, you know, I have a lot of other issues, and my central issue is how do you rebuild the middle class. And how do we get out of these forever wars?

 

Joe Rogan: [02:48:44] How do you get out of the Ukraine war?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:48:46] The Ukraine war is easy to get out of. I mean, the Russians have been wanting to settle that war from the beginning.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:48:51] Really?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:48:51] Yeah. I mean, the Minsk Accords was a settlement, and that was - you know, that we basically, you know, encouraged Zelensky. Zelensky ran in 2019, here's a guy who's a comedian and, you know, and an actor, which I'm not saying in a disparaging way, but he’s, you know….

 

Joe Rogan: [02:49:11] You probably should!

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:49:13] My wife says those things too.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:49:14] Yeah.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:49:15] Oh, but he - So how did he win with 70% of the vote? He won because he ran on a peace platform, promising to sign the Minsk Accords, which was an agreement that Russia, France, and Germany had all agreed to, which would have left Donbas as part of Ukraine as an autonomous region, so they can now enjoy their own language, the ethnic Russians, and they could protect themselves from attack by the central government, which was a US-installed central government, and that NATO would stay out of the Ukraine. And that's what the Russians wanted, a pledge that NATO will never go in, which we should have made for them. We shouldn't - we have no business putting NATO in the Ukraine. We promised we'd never do that. We committed to it. And we've repeatedly violated those promises. And there's people in the White House who want this war, and they've said it repeatedly. Even President Biden has said the purpose of the war is to depose Vladimir Putin.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:50:23] And what, install a puppet government?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:50:25] Well, that's the thing.

 

Joe Rogan: [02:50:25] Install their own government? Like, what happened?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:50:27] That's what the same people who got rid of Saddam Hussein which cost us $8 trillion, and Iraq is now worse off than we found it. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. We forced Iraq into this bondage to Iran, where they are now a proxy state of Iran. We've reduced that nation into a, you know, this incoherent mess that is just a battle between Shia and Sunni death squads. We created ISIS. We then had to do the Syrian war, the Yemen war, the Afghan, and Pakistan. We drove 2 million refugees into Europe and destabilized every democracy in Europe for the next two generations and created Brexit. That's what we got for that $8 trillion that, you know, and the ravaged middle class in our country. The same people who we thought, the Neocons, who ran that operation, lied to us about weapons of mass destruction, tricked us into that war, and who we thought were now out of government forever – pariahs, you know, in disgrace. They're now all back in the Biden administration with a new project. And, you know, Lloyd Austin, who's Biden's Defense Secretary, said the purpose of the war for us is to exhaust Russia and degrade its capacity to fight any place in the world. Well, that's not good for the Ukraine, because the way we're exhausting Russia is by butchering 350,000 Ukrainian kids.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:51:52] I mean, we have turned that nation into an abattoir of death for the flower of Ukrainian youth. In a geopolitical – and I'm not excusing Putin. Putin is a thug, a monster, a gangster who illegally invaded and didn't need to. But we need to take responsibility for the provocations which we have, you know, which these Neocons have been provoking for, you know, for over a decade. And by the way, the reason we're in that war is because Americans are good people. And, you know, we were convinced, granted, with using these kinds of comic book depictions that they're now, you know, the military industrial complex is now expert at sowing from us. This kind of good versus evil. You know, all this whole thing that gets us into these wars and keeps, you know, that war is a money laundering racket for the military contractors. The money is going there and then coming right back and then they all go on CNN. You know, the generals, etcetera, who if you look at their resumes, they're all working for General Dynamics and the military contractors. And they tell us we need to be in this war and tell us horror stories, etcetera.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:53:05] But we're there because Americans are good people, and they have compassion, and they want to redress a wrong. But by the way, my son went over there and fought, you know, and he joined, you know, without telling us. He left law school and a summer job. And he went over there and joined the Foreign Legion and fought as a machine gunner for a Special Forces unit during the Kharkiv offensive. So, you know, look, the Ukrainian people, the valor of those people and the, you know, the anguish that they're suffering is beyond, you know, any description. But we need to look at our role in it, and we need to look for roads to peace, you know, and not try – and try to end the killing. There are 30–80,000 Russians with kids who have died there, too. And, you know, we shouldn't be exulting over that. We should be trying to find a settlement. The US should be the grownup in the room that's saying, "How do we stop the bloodshed?" That's what we should be doing over there. And not to achieve these - And I'll just say one other thing, Joe.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:54:15] And that war has cost us $113 billion. That's the commitment so far. CDC's entire budget is 12 billion a year - or EPA's entire budget is about 12 billion. We have 57% of our people in this country cannot put their hands on $1,000 to, if they need to, if there's an emergency. 25% of Americans are hungry now and are not getting enough food. I have a friend who is a commercial fisherman who has spent his life, you know, on the fisheries, had a business, put it together, but because it's a private business, because he was working a lot for other people, he doesn't have benefits.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:55:06] He now has Disability. His son-in-law runs the business but can't support him. He has a disability, and he has been surviving on $280 worth of food stamps from the SNAP program. And that doesn't take you too far. But on March 1st, he got a robocall from the government saying your food stamps have been cut by 90%. You're now getting $25 a month. Try feeding yourself on $0.90 a day in this country. 30 million Americans got that call. These are... And that same month, we bailed out, we printed 300 billion new dollars to bail out the Silicon Valley Bank. And we tapped off the Ukraine war commitment to 113 billion. So we got lots of money for the military industrial complex, lots of money for the bankers, you know, the banksters. But we're starving Americans to death, starving them. And his, because of all the inflation, we spent 16 trillion on the lockdown - we wasted, and got nothing for it, 8 trillion on the Ukraine war. That's $24 trillion that they had to print to pay for nothing. That money, the way they're paying it back, they're not going to tell us they're raised taxes because you can't do that. It's a hidden tax called inflation. And it hits the poor and the middle class, and it has dismantled the middle class in this country. Well, my friend's food bill for basic foods like chicken, dairy, and eggs has increased 76% in two years to pay for the Iraq war -- or the Ukraine war, the Iraq war, and the lockdowns.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:56:52] His food prices are going up, and now the government is telling him, while we have plenty of money for the military and the banks, we don't have it for Americans who are, you know, hardworking people. And, you know, something is not right. We don't have... We're in a crisis in this country, we're in, you know, and we need to start looking at - we need to start unraveling the empire. We have 800 bases abroad. We were told after, in 1992 when the Soviet Union collapsed, we were told we were going to get a peace dividend, that the military expenditure was going to going to go from 600 billion a year to 200 billion, and we were going to stop making billion dollar stealth bombers that can't fly in the rain, and that we're going to take that money home and build schools with it and build infrastructure and give health care, good health care, in the inner cities. And then none of that happened. And today, instead of going down to 200 billion, it's gone up. The total military expenditure, if you include national security, is 1.3 billion [trillion] and it hasn't made us safer. It's made us worse off. You know...

 

Joe Rogan: [02:58:00] 1.3 trillion?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:58:01] 1.3 trillion if you include...

 

Joe Rogan: [02:58:03] Yeah, I think you said billion.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:58:05] No, 1.3 trillion. If you include national, you know, the security apparatus, you know, all the stuff that you have to walk through at the airport, and if you include the $300 billion to veterans, which you can't cut. You know, the veterans are, you know, are... We have 29 a day killing themselves. You know, these wars are not good for our country or our kids. And we need to stop being an empire and instead come home, rebuild the middle class, and then project economic power the way the Chinese do, who are eating our lunch because they know not to project military power, they project economic power. That's how you win the hearts and minds of the world, and national security. My uncle, John Kennedy, you know, did that. He refused to go to war. So he was surrounded by a military industrial complex. And he learned very early that an intelligence apparatus, that he realized early on that the purpose of the CIA and the intelligence apparatus was to create a constant pipeline of new wars for the military industrial complex. Three days before he took the oath of office, Eisenhower, who was the outgoing president, gave what is probably the most important speech in American history, which was, you know, where he warned against the military industrial complex.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [02:59:34] I was at my uncle's inauguration. I was in Washington that day, as you know, a six-year-old boy. And I was sitting on the stands behind him - in front of him, during his inauguration. And he understood that. And two months later, the military and intelligence came to him and said, "We’ve got to invade Cuba." And he was like, "I'm not going into Cuba, and I'm not going to let the military in." And they said, "Well, we got all these Cubans trained, and they're going to go attack Castro." And he said, “Well, we can't, the US government can't be doing that. We can't be attacking. I don't like what Castro is doing down there, but it's not the United States' job to dictate what kind of governments other countries have." And they said, "Well, as soon as they land, there's going to be a big revolution. Everybody's going to rise up, and they're going to overthrow Castro." And he said, "Well, you can't use the US military." And they ended up bringing those guys over with United Fruit boats. And in the middle of it, in the night, they came to him and said, "They're getting wiped out on the beach, and you need to send in the military and invade." And he said, "We're not going to do it."

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [03:00:46] And he stepped out of that meeting, and he realized they had been lying to him and trying to trick him. And he said, "I want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." And then, you know, for the next 1000 days of his presidency, he was at war with his military and intelligence apparatus. They tried to get him to go into Laos. He said, "No." They tried to get him to go into Vietnam with combat troops. They said, "We need 250,000 combat troops." He refused. Everybody around him wanted him to go into Vietnam. He sent 16,000 military advisors. That's fewer people than he sent to get James Meredith into Ole Miss in Jackson, Mississippi, to get one Black man into school. He sent fewer to Vietnam. They weren't allowed to fight, and many of them did. They violated the rules of engagement. In October of 1963, he heard that some of his Green Berets had been killed over there. And he said, "I want a total casualty list from Vietnam." And his aide came to him and said, "75 Americans have died." He said, "That's too many." And he signed that day a national security order ordering all troops out of Vietnam, US troops, the first thousand over the next month, and then the rest by the beginning of 1965.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [03:02:15] And then, a month later he was killed. So, but what his view was is that he believed that the view of Americans abroad should not be, you know, a soldier with a gun. It should be a Peace Corps volunteer building wells, and it should be USAID helping poor people, and it should be Alliance for Progress building the middle class. And that's what he did. And he started the Kennedy Milk program to, you know, give nutrition to poor kids all over the world. As a result of that, in Africa today, there are more statues to John Kennedy, more boulevards named after him, more hospitals, schools, universities, avenues, and all the major cities named after him than any other president. And that is... The Chinese have taken that template and done the same thing now. And they are, you know, all these countries that were supposedly allied with us are now realigning with the Chinese, and they're switching to their currency because the Chinese are not there to kill people. They're there, you know, to build roads, to build universities, to build colleges. And it turns out that people like that a lot more. And, you know, we should be projecting economic power around the globe and not military power. It will make us much stronger.

 

Joe Rogan: [03:03:42] But what do you think happens when you get into office? Like if you're talking about your uncle who was assassinated, and you believe the intelligence agencies were a part of that, what happens to you?

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [03:03:56] Well, I got to be careful. I'm aware of that. And I'm not, you know, I'm aware of that danger. And, you know, I don't live in fear of it, you know, at all. But I'm not stupid about it. And I take precautions. So, you know, I do things that I don't want to do in order, and I live my life now, you know, in ways that I don't want to. I like to be out, you know, shaking hands with people and going alone into communities, and, you know, there's things I can't do anymore, you know. So, I do it because I know. I know those risks exist, and I know that I, you know, pose a big threat to many vested interests that, you know, and that there is a danger in that.

 

Joe Rogan: [03:04:59] Well, I think we'll wrap it up here. That was three hours.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [03:05:06] Joe, thank you so much.

 

Joe Rogan: [03:05:07] Thank you. Thank you very much. I really appreciate talking to you. I appreciate your courage and your conviction and just the way you think. Appreciate it very much.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [03:05:18] Likewise.

 

Joe Rogan: [03:05:18] Thank you.

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: [03:05:19] Thank you.

 

Joe Rogan: [03:05:20] All right. Bye everyone.