Why RFK Jr. Could TRANSFORM America: Bold Plans, HEALTH Reform, and an END to Corruption

What's the future of America look like according to Robert Kennedy Jr.

So the first thing to do absolutely vital is to wind down the war machine. We used to teach the trades in high school. We used to have shop classes. Those are all gone. These are the most durable jobs when AI comes. 106,000 of our kids died last year from overdoses. The first day in office, I'm going to issue an executive order banning pharmaceutical advertising on television. I want to start these recovery centers, farms that will raise their own food, organic food. I'm going to empower those entrepreneurs. I'm going to empower the doctors and farmers, and we're going to regrow this country.

You're about to have an experience of two of the most incredible men that you had the chance to be in the room with. Joe Polish is an author, He's a business consultant, he's a marketing expert. He founded the Genius Network, which is the most successful and the most highly rated association of his type. Joe says any problem that you have can be solved by creating your own Genius Network. People know that about Joe. What they don't know is the hundreds of times behind the scenes Joe is impacting someone's life by writing a check, by connecting them to somebody, by supporting them. He's a fierce friend and the thing that I find most valuable about him, he is loving and kind. He does a lot of work in the recovery movement and is one of the kindest men that I know. Bobby Kennedy Jr. Is a man for this moment. In my opinion, his entire life prepared him for this moment in time. From the tutelage of his grandfather to the tutelage of his father and his uncles, to his education, to his descent into recovery and into addiction and his 42 years of recovery, he's a seasoned man who, if you watch the attacks on him, he always responds with something that's thoughtful and kind and even loving. I'm so proud to introduce this group to Joe Polish and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Hey, Joe. Good to see you.

Thank you.

Awesome. Thank you, everybody.

Welcome, everyone. Thank you. And great to see you. How's your day been?

It's been good.

Good.

It's been long.

Yeah, I bet. All right, so I've got a list of some questions here for you. We're going to do. I'm going to ask him a handful of questions and then we're going to do some Q and A with a handful of you here. So first one is why do you think the legacy untrustable government co opted media is so scared of you?

First of all, thank you all for being here. And Joe, thank you. I always love seeing you. And the last time we did one of these was one of the, I think, the most pleasant and productive conversations I've had this kind. So I'm really, really happy to be here. And I think that the answer to that question is they should be scared of me because I'm going to hurt their revenue streams a lot. I'm going to the first day in office, I'm going to issue an executive order banning pharmaceutical advertising on telev. Roger Ailes, who was the founder of Fox News, I don't know right now, and it's hard to tell show by show. There's a way that you can purchase these, a service that will tell you how much each pharmaceutical company pays to each news division and to each television show. But I don't have that information right now. What I can tell you is that Roger Ailes told me Roger Ailes was the founder of Fox News. And I had this very odd relationship with him because When I was 19 years old, I spent three months with him in a tent in East Africa. And after that, he had just worked with the Nixon campaign, being his communications director. And he was just about to start Fox News. So he hadn't started at that time and he ended up starting Fox News. And to me, he became this kind of Darth Vader figure who embodied all of this extreme kind of right wing, manipulative stuff that Fox News was doing at that time that I thought was very bad for the country. But I still had this friendship with him and he was a very, very loyal friend to me. And he made sure that whenever I wanted to get on Fox News, I could. And I was. During the 1980s and 1990s, I was the only environmentalist who would go on Fox News. I was going on Sean Hannity all the time. I was going on Bill O'Reilly, I was going on Neil Cavuto. And whenever I had an issue that I wanted to talk about, he would make sure that they put me on. And then I came to him around 2014. I came to him with a film that we had done about mercury and vaccines. It was called Trace Amounts. And I showed it to him and I showed it to Michael Clemente, who was the second in command at Fox. And they were both blown away by it. And Roger had a, had a member of his family who he believed was vaccine injured. And he thought that this was the answer to it. Oh, he was very moved. But he said to me, I cannot, I Asked if I could go on his TV if he would, you know, get, get the host to put me on, he said, I can't do it. And he said that the, that the. That about 75% of advertising revenues for his evening news shows were coming from pharmaceutical companies. He said that. He told me that on average, there's about 22 advertisements in an evening news show, and on average, 17 of those are pharmaceutical ads. And he said, if any of my hosts allowed you on, I would have to fire them. And if they didn't, I would get a call from Rupert within 10 minutes, meaning Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News. That was a very candid, enlightening moment for me. But all of you can see, particularly the evening news shows are just bracketed one after the other by pharmaceutical ads. And I think, on average, as I remember, it's about 30 or 40% of total network advertising revenues come from pharma. But they're heavy weighted toward the evening news divisions because those are all old people and they're the ones who are buying pharmaceutical drugs. I asked my son Connor the other day, who's 28, I said to him, have you ever seen an evening news show? And he said, nope, the people who are watching those shows are baby boomers, and they're the ones who've got all the ailments that are being treated by these companies. And so you look at somebody like Anderson Cooper, and I think Anderson Cooper makes about $20 million, give or take a few million annually. I think Jake Tapper makes 12 million or whatever. And these are just estimates that I've read on Google. So I don't know whether they're true or not. But if you say he's got a $20 million salary and 75% of that or 80% of that is from the. Coming from the pharmaceutical companies. That's who his real boss is. And so long before I decided to run for president, these companies were making war on me. And I have to believe that part of that is, you know, part of it is they just. They're subsumed in these orthodoxies. They, you know, they believe a lot of the stuff that they're saying. But the other. But that also gets fortified. Upton Sinclair made this famous observation that it's so true and it's so useful, and it's very hard to persuade a man of a fact if the existence of that fact will diminish his salary. And we all tend to cement our worldview around things that. Around a superstructure that is going to fortify our own Self interest. And so I think there's a long answer to this question that these, a lot of the newscasters are directly interested in making sure those pharmaceutical revenues are going to continue. And I'm going to end them. And these networks are already in trouble. That will be a blow to them. And by the way, prior to 1997, there were no directions to consumer ads on television. FDA and FCC essentially legalized them around 1997. And, you know, we're one of only two countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers. Everybody agrees, a bad idea, everybody. And as a result of that, you know, partially, that we are the biggest consumers of pharmaceutical products in the world and they're not making us healthier. We have the highest bills, 4.3 trillion a year, and we have the worst health outcomes. We're 79th in terms of health outcomes nationally. We're behind Mongolia, we're behind Cuba, we're behind Honduras. Really bad health. And we have the best health care system. And in terms of the technology that's available to us, that's the worst health outcomes. Peter Ghosh yesterday. Peter Ghosh is one of the most important epidemiologists in the world. He's the co founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, which is a cooperative of 30,000 independent scientists who review clinical trial data of the pharmaceutical industry. So they're kind of the overseers who look and try to bring some integrity to these clinical trials, these fake clinical trials that Big Pharma does. And Peter Ghosh yesterday published an article, a study, a big study, showing that pharmaceutical drugs are now the number one cause of death in our country. Five years ago, he published another study. At that time, pharmaceutical drugs were the third leading cause of death after cancer and heart attacks. Today, they're the number one cause of death. So they're not making us healthier. And in a true free market. And if we were getting good information, we wouldn't be taking so many of them. And the job of these news organizations is to make sure that we don't have that information and that we're lied to those companies. And there's a guy called Callie Mains here who's wonderful, and he made this. And Callie, will you just stand up so people can see you? This is a guy who knows more about. Right. More about the pharmaceutical industry than anybody in our country. And he was on Tucker the other day and just made this very good observation that a true observation. And yes, they're selling a lot of ads on evening TV because they want to sell product. But really what they're doing is they're purchasing the power to dictate content. They're not just using it as a platform for selling their product, they're dictating content. They can control what Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper say, and they can make sure there's a. When we have a pandemic, there's a constant Chiron going underneath telling you how many people died today of COVID to get us all scared to death so that we comply. And so that's one of the reasons. I think they have a good reason. The other reason is that when I'm in the White House, I'm going to. I'm going to launch very, very early on a drive across the country, across the states to pass a constitutional amendment to overrule the Citizens United case. And that's a case that says political contributions are speech, and therefore corporate political contributions are a form of free speech, and therefore the government has no right to regulate them. And that was an absolute catastrophe. It's why President Biden now has $3 billion to spend on this campaign that came from corporate donors, and actually much more than that, probably 10 billion between the two parties they're just going to spend on this election, all coming from corporate donors or most of it coming from corporate donors. And that's not good for our country. Those corporations are not giving them money from a patriotic impulse or from an impulse to benefit humanity. It's an investment for them to benefit their mercantile ambitions and their commercial ambitions. It's an investment, and they expect a return on that investment. And it's a disaster. It's been a disaster for our democracy. We are no longer living in a democracy. We're living in a corporate kleptocracy. And we need. There's no country in the world that allows these kind of contributions. Well, that $10 billion a President Biden team is going to spend probably 90% of that is going to go to media purchases. So after pharmaceutical companies during election years, the biggest contributor to the media are political ads. And political ads are fine, but they shouldn't. You know, we need to get corporations out of politics. And so.

Awesome.

Awesome. Well, you know, the 4.3 trillion and the number one cause of death, I mean, in the money. I mean, it's so. Thank you. What are the three most important actions we need to take as a nation over the next four years? And how are you going to lead us there?

I mean, the three, you know, I'd say the three kind of big issues that I want to deal with very quickly are one, unwinding the war machine, winding down military expenditures. Military spending this year, I think it's 848 billion and I want to cut that to 500 billion. And with that money we can, you know, it's the same amount of money, you know, in 20, $24 as Eisenhower was spending on the military during the height of the cold war. Are this going to be enough money to arm ourselves to the teeth at home, make ourselves too expensive to ever invade, keep open the sea lanes and then neutral areas like the Antarctic to be able to have a two strike capacity anywhere in the world for, you know, somebody who has really bad behavior. But we don't need 800 bases around the world. And we're going to close a lot of those bases, we're going to bring the troops home, we're going to find ways to use that money to rebuild our industrial base at home. So the first thing to do, absolutely vital is to wind down the war machine. The other critical issue is, and again, this is a budgetary issue as well as every, you know, affecting every other aspect of our lives is to end the chronic disease epidemic. And when my uncle is president, 6% of our people had chronic disease. Today, 60% of our children do. And it's costing us $4.3 trillion a year. And it's destroying our country and it's destroying our morale, it's destroying hope, it's making us dependent on these lifetime dependence on pharmaceutical drugs. And it just is. You got a generation of kids, it's really hard to meet a child today that's my kid's age that do not have chronic disease. I can't remember when I met the last child that did not have chronic disease. It's just normalized now. You have a peanut allergy, you have adhd, you have all of these reading disorders, sleep disorders, autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile diabetes, lupus, Crohn's disease, ibuprofen, ibs, all these other exotic diseases that we didn't know about when I was a kid and nobody I knew had any of them. And today every child has one of these. It's really unusual to find a child today who's completely healthy and you know, the monetary cost and everything else and just the morale of our nation. And no other country has anything like this. We have the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world. And that's why we, one of the reasons we had the highest COVID death rate, we had 16% of the COVID deaths, we only have 4.2% of the world's population. And CDC said, well, that's not our fault. It's because you guys are so sick. And see, according to CDC, the average person who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases. They had, you know, asthma, they had diabetes, they had obesity and one other thing. And, you know, and that's what killed them. They were already hanging off the cliff, and Covid just came and stepped on their fingers. They were already there. And there's a whole generation that has just all of these diseases. And we need to stop that. I'm happy to answer the question of how I'm going to stop it, but I don't want to. I'll move on to the number third thing. I would say ending the polarization. And that is going to. Which is toxic, which is destroying our country. And that's going to require a number of things. Number one thing, it's going to require the government to stop lying to us. And I'm going to issue an executive order my first day in office saying that any government official who lies to the public in conjunction with his official duties is going to lose his job. And, you know, all of the manipulation of data. I saw this article yesterday about the new. The woman who's just been elevated to run, to run NPR is a person with all these intelligence agency background. And we're seeing that the entire span of our media is being taken over by these individuals who have these Operation Mockingbird credentials. Noah Schlachman at Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone used to be the counter, and now it's, you know, this. It's become this, you know, mouthpiece for the CIA, Daily Beast, Salon, Slate, Daily Coast, National Geographic, Scientific American, all of these kind of liberal outlets are now doing propaganda. And the people who are running them are people who have very, very, you know, dark backgrounds in the intelligence community. And you can't say, oh, the CIA put them there as part of Operation Mockingbird. But we used to have a law in this country called the Smith Munn act that forbade the CIA from propagandizing Americans. And the Biden or the Obama administration issued an executive order essentially neutralizing the Smith Munn Act. And since then, we've seen a move of the intelligence agencies to go back into positions where they can propagandize us. And it's very dangerous. The more you think about that, the more frightening it becomes. I mean, we've got a Congress now that is saying they're going to do a patriotic deed by getting rid of TikTok. TikTok is, you know, is owned by a Chinese company, and the Chinese are probably using it to find what American teenage girls are putting on their hair and stuff and really scary stuff, and Congress is flexing its muscles. Well, you know what? There's a whole generation of kids for which TikTok is an entryway business, and it's employing hundreds of thousands of people. And these are kids that don't have that many options anymore because we've created a world like that for them. And now we're getting rid of TikTok, as we say it's being used by spies. Well, guess what? So is Facebook, but it's the CIA instead of Chinese spies. But I'm just. I'm. And so is Instagram and YouTube and Google and, you know, I mean, I would ask you this question, or any of you. Are you more worried that the Chinese are spying on us and propagandizing us, or are you more worried that the CIA is spying on us and propaganda? I'm not saying I know the answer to that question. I'm saying it's something we all ought to be thinking about, because, you know, I'm just as scared of our intelligence agencies. I think they can do more damage to us. And, you know, it's like if you. If you have a. You know, if you have an abuser out of your home at school, that's pretty bad. But what if you have one inside your home? You know, so I'm.

So. I think addiction is one of the, if not the biggest, crisis today, not even just in America, but the whole world. So with addiction in America, and you have been very open about being in recovery for 40 years, what steps do we need to take as a nation to get and stay sober and heal going forward?

I mean, you know, there's a lot of things I think we need to do, including talking openly about addiction and recognizing that you know what it is. And. And. But also, I mean, one of the things I'm most excited about in this kind of my Peace Corps program, which is to launch a series of wellness farms all over, you know, rural areas in this country, which are economically among our most economically depressed parts of our country, the rural areas. The biggest industry today in many rural areas is prisons. And I want to start these recovery centers, which are farms that will raise their own food, organic food, have good food for our kids, because the food is contributing to the mental health crisis, to the depression, to the violence, to the suicidal behavior, et cetera. You know, food is food can be. Damn. Food can be poison and it can destroy your microbiome, which is our biggest organ in your body, which, you know, which controls our immune system function, but also our moods. And, you know, there are plenty of data. I saw a study the other day that said that Mark Hyman showed me that showed that girls, teenage girls who eat processed food are 1400% more likely to commit an act of violence than girls who eat organic food. And, you know, food has an impact on us. And so I'm going to, you know, we're going to have a place where kids can get good food, where they'll get away from screens, from cell phones and computers for a period of time and social media and will be, you know, forced to actually have conversations with other human beings and where people can go for free and they can learn a trade. They can learn, you know, we used to teach the trades in high school. We used to have shop classes. Those are all gone. And we need to, you know, start teaching kids how to be electricians and how to be plumbers and how to be carpenters and how to be, you know, welders and H vac technicians. These are the most durable jobs. When AI comes, AI is going to wipe out so many of our jobs in this country. And we all used to think it's going to go after the blue collar jobs, the drivers, et cetera. And my wife just got off of the strike because of what it's doing to creative people. So artists are getting wiped out, is going to be, you know, my wife is in film and now they can just, they can get, you know, make one film with her and then all the sequels they can make on their own without her. And that's what this strike was about. And accountants are going to be out of business. Many different kinds of lawyers are going to be out of business. But the one group that they're going to have a hard time getting rid of are, are tradespeople because, you know, if your, your toilet breaks in the middle of night and you, you know, you have a narrow staircase, you're not going to get a robot to go up there and fix it. You actually need a human being. And so, you know, we're going to have a place where you can come and learn those trades. You can go out with a job placement, you can stay as long as you want for free. Now, this idea is based upon something I saw in Europe at a place called San Padronano in Italy, where they have 2,000 kids who've gone there to recover from drug addiction. They stay on average about four years and they get re parented and they learn to live in communities again and they learn to tell the truth and show up on time and be responsible and talk to each other. There's benches everywhere, there's no screens, there's a lot of benches where people actually go for walks, sit down and talk to each other. And they, you know, we have a whole generation that is alienated and dispossessed and atomized and it's no wonder they're turning to drugs and we're losing them. 106,000 of our kids died last year from overdoses. And you know, it's touched my family, it's touched all of us. We all know somebody who has died from an overdose. And you know, we're losing 25, 20 year Vietnam War, we lost 56,000 kids, we're losing double that every year from overdoses. And you know, we spend trillion dollars on that war and we're doing nothing for these kids. And we need to start investing in them. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to legalize marijuana federally. Marijuana is legal in many states, most states now, but you can't pay, but it's schedule one federally so you can't pay taxes. And a lot of times the dispensaries can't even, many states can't even bank their money. They gotta keep it in cash. And it's become a huge niche industry about how to handle cash for these dispensaries safely. It's criminal targets and all these other things. And I want to change that. They can pay taxes and I want to take that tax revenue and, and make it exclusively to end drug addiction in this country, to benefit, to create these rehabs where people can come. And you know, I have family members who have gone to this place and it had this extraordinary transformational effect. It's been replicated in Salt Lake City. And I went and visited this facility a couple of weeks ago. An extraordinary facility which is, it's about four city blocks. It has 300 ex cons, most of them former drug addicts who are there. And they run the biggest storage facility in Salt Lake. They have a storage company, they have a transportation company, they have a, they have a shop that is kind of a secondhand shop that is as big as a Walmart. And the workers who come out, they have a wall that big with all the businesses in Salt Lake that listed on that wall that are looking for graduates of this program because they're regarded as the most reliable workforce in Utah. Now, people are coming from all over to try to get graduates from this program. So, you know, and it's redemptive of them. These are people who've served time in prison, and now we're giving them a second chance. They're paying taxes, they're restoring them. And, you know, we can do that all over the country. And that's, you know, what I'm going to do. And I'm going to do it without increasing our debt.

All right, last question I'll ask you is what's the future of America look like according to Robert Kennedy Jr. Paint the picture for us. What do you see?

I would say this. We have a crisis in this country now, if economic crisis, we have bad food, soil crisis, we have bad health crisis. But we are a resilient nation. And you hear politicians say that kind of thing all the time. America is tough. You know, nobody is as tough as us, et cetera, et cetera. And it's a bunch of baloney. What I'm saying to you is true. We have the worst health crisis in this country of any nation. We have the best functional medicine, doctors, integrative medicine doctors. And I have, I'm looking right at one sitting in the front row right here. We have doctors like this all over the country, these incredible doctors. And it's happening in our country more than any other country in the world. They're doing it in Europe, they're doing it in Asia, but nothing like what we have here. You know, Dr. Mark Hyman and all the, you guys all know these doctors. Extraordinary work, innovative work. We have the worst economy now. We have the highest debt, you know, the, the gdp, one of the highest debt to GDP ratios. We have the most energetic, imaginative and innovative entrepreneurs in this country of any country in the world. And everybody will tell you that we have a soil and agricultural crisis, but we also have the most innovative farmers who are doing things nobody else is doing with soil, with regenerative agricultures. And what I'm going to do as president, I'm going to empower those entrepreneurs. I'm going to empower the doctors, I'm going to empower the soil and farmers, and we're going to regrow this country. Thank you, folks. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Arizona.

Awesome.

Thank you, sir.