#639 - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Hey everybody, it's Theo Vaughn here, and I got a question. When it comes to soda, are you really picking a zero sugar cola that you actually prefer, or are you just settling for what you've always had? That's the question. And I'll say this, when it comes to taste, I find that nothing beats Pepsi Zero Sugar. But you don't just have to take my word for it. That would be ridiculous. Pepsi has been doing blind taste tests for years. No labels, no brand names, just taste. And last year, they brought back the Pepsi challenge and the results were clear. 66% of people agreed and said that Pepsi Zero Sugar tastes better than Coca-Cola Zero Sugar. In fact, Pepsi Zero Sugar won in every market they tested. So if you're grabbing a Zero Sugar soda, go with the one people keep choosing when taste is the only thing that matters. Go out and try Pepsi Zero Sugar today. Let Your Taste Decide. Just wanted to let you know our episodes are now available in video on Spotify as well. Today's guest is the Secretary for Health and Human Services for the U.S. government. He's an attorney. He's an environmentalist. And he's my friend. I'm so thankful that he is joining us. Today's guest is Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Good to see you, bro. Yes, good to see you. Secretary. Secretary now. You can still call me Bobby. Okay, cool. I know each other from, can I say where we know each other? Yeah, sure. We've been in recovery together for years. You for almost over 40 years, right? Yeah, 43 years. Wow. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah, that's where we met each other. At like 7 a.m. meetings above the bank over there. They shut those down during COVID. I know. That was heartbreaking. We still did live meetings every day during COVID. We moved from the bank. There was about 15 of us who moved from the bank, and we got into the Palisades Playhouse, which now is burned down during the fire. But it was kind of a pirate group. And, you know, I mean, for me, I – you know what? I said this when we came in, and I said, I don't care what happens. I'm going to a meeting every day. And I said, I'm not scared of a germ. You know, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats. And I know this disease will kill me. Right. If I don't if I don't treat it, which means going for me, going to meetings every day. It's it's just bad for my life. So for me, it was it's it was survival. And then, you know, that the opportunity to help another alcoholic, that's the secret sauce of the meetings. And that's what keeps us all sober and keeps us from self-will. Yeah. Well, yeah, you get reminded. I mean I go to meetings and I get reminded that other people – I hate to say exist, but just that other people are – just that I'm not alone I think. I get like – I see face. I'm like, oh, yeah, I care about this person. They care about me. It's like for some reason in my addiction, it's like there's a part of me that forgets that people care about me and that I care about them. And so – but when I go to meetings, it's like it immediately fills that whole backlog in. But I have to go and kind of recharge that battery a lot. Welcome to Tennessee. Thank you. Yeah, I saw you were with Kid Rock. Yeah. Pretty cool, dude, that freaking – he used to say he used to have cocaine and oysters. I'm like, that's a meal. That's a meal, dude. That's an aphrodisiac, I think. I'm saving a seat for him still. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's one of a kind, man. His brother only has one leg, too. You know that? I met his brother, Bill. I think he got the vaccine, but that's just me. But anyway, he had two a few years ago. That's all I'm saying. But he lost his leg when he was a kid at around the same time my cousin's leg. He lost his leg. And both of them became ski racers. So they were the top. I think my cousin Teddy was the number two slalom skier on one leg. And he was also very proficient. So they became friends. So that was interesting. So he knows your cousin? Yeah, he grew up with him. And they were in like a special division or no, just normal division? What are they called? The Paralympics? Paralympics. I didn't know Billy was a Paralympian. I know he's a great golfer. I mean, they're just so – they're hilarious. How does he golf? Because he doesn't – his leg is cut off so high. He can't really use a prosthetic. I mean, I don't know. They had it – I know a lawnmower. Somebody hit him with a lawnmower. Look at that right there. His father ran him over with a tractor. Yeah. Just put him in timeout. But, yeah, he's phenomenal. And he has the best sense of humor. I'm just joking. I know both those guys super well, and they've been great neighbors in Nashville. Kid Rock, Bobby, he's done a lot of nice stuff for me over the years and stuff like that and includes me in things. We were just texting the other day. He's got a big heart. Yeah, well, he spoke very highly of you. He's a nice guy. I saw you were with Bill Lee, too, our governor. Yeah. Yeah, I met him. He did a fireside chat with me about a year ago at the governor's conference, and we really bonded. He's a good guy, and he works with both sides on the legislature. He's got a great relationship. He's done a bunch of good stuff in this state. He's on top of fluoride. They've got really good SNAP waivers. So I think they've got probably one of the best SNAP waivers. The SNAP waiver is the food stamp waiver. So you can't spend food stamp dollars on sodas or candy. But they also have sugar content and they have corn syrup content. Oh, here in Tennessee? Yeah. I think they're the only state that has that now. And they've also banned food dyes. They banned a couple of them and they're going to ban the rest of them now. And what are we finding out with food dyes? The food dyes, we've now, you know, we've told the companies they've got to get rid of all of them. There's nine of them. And the worst four, we already banned. The other five, I think by the end of this year, everybody should have stopped using them. And then we rapid approved four new vegetable dyes so that they can replace them with, you know, something healthy. So we did that through FDA. were working with the industry to make sure that they can do it, but they've been very, very cooperative. Most of them, about 40% of the industry came to us, including the entire ice cream industry, came to us and said, we want to do this, but help us. So we're working very closely with them, and they're all getting rid of it. I mean, we should have gotten rid of it a long time ago. The Europeans don't allow it. Canada doesn't allow it. other countries uh you can buy fruit loops in this country that are just loaded with chemicals and you can buy same company makes fruit loops for canada and mexico that don't have the chemicals yeah well yeah there's a kid on on there's a kid on tiktok and he was eating fruit loops and then his poop was glowing in the dark you see that i'm like dang that thing will swim upstream that's crazy i mean but yeah that is yeah some of it definitely seems bonkers and what did you say about fluoride uh tennessee has a law that has to where the water district has to inform the public about it fluoride is crazy because we know it reduces iq there's no question the national toxicology program has done a meta-analysis and they can you know it's dose related so every um milligram of fluoride that you add reduce your iq more and um and it doesn't work systemically and it was put in in the 40s and because it does help with tooth decay but the effect is all topical and back then they didn't have fluoride toothpaste they didn't have fluoride mouthwash now we do the parents can get the fluoride for their kids and they don't when you put it in systematically it destroys your bone mass and destroys your thyroid for us it's horrible and it destroys IQs. I mean, if you have kids, would you rather have cavities or lower IQ? Yeah, I'd rather have them have cavities. I'd rather have holes in their teeth than holes in their ideas or whatever. Right, but the European nation's abandoned and there has been no increase in cavities. So it doesn't make any sense for us to be putting it in. And yeah, this is the bill known as the Tennessee Fluoride Free Water Act prohibits public water systems in Tennessee from adding fluoride or any fluoride containing compounds of drinking water intended for human consumption and bans the sale of bottled water with added fluoride so we don't have fluoride in our water here well there is natural fluoride in a lot of water it just it comes from the geology so we're not adding more right we're not adding it nice dude yeah because what yeah what if you're trying to think of something you have two sips of water and then you're like god i can't even i'm screwed your parents send you to take a test they give you a bottle of water and you're like God, I don't have a chance now. But thank you. Thank you for leading the charge on a lot of these things. Thank you for caring about a lot of these things. I think I just want to say that. I know that you do care about so many of these things. I did see there's a Tennessee Farm Bill, and there's a lot of stuff you want to talk about too, and we'll get into some of it for sure. But this is what I was talking about here. This bill, it's Farm Bill 809. The bill is sponsored by Representative Rusty Grills would limit lawsuits if a user gets sick from a pesticide. Under the proposed legislation, as long as a product's label was approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, a person wouldn't be allowed to sue over the labeling. So actually Sean Ryan, the podcaster, and John Rich, the musician, they shared this online and on the day that it was going up for vote, I believe. Yeah, right here. Tennessee state politicians side with foreign pesticide companies over people dying of cancer. Ryan posted on X alongside a video speaking out against the bill. As did musician John Rich. After the pushback, Representative Grills took the bill off notice, which at least delayed the vote. It's unclear why that decision was made or whether Grills has plans to bring the bill back to this legislative session. And bring up – just so we know who's doing this, bring up a picture of Mr. Grills. Oh, there you go. Well, I mean, look, if you're a farmer and you get sick from using a pesticide that you didn't know would make you sick, that you wouldn't have recourse against a pesticide company that did know that they caused illness because these companies knew that these caused illnesses. Yeah. Yeah, evidence from lawsuits, internal documents, and independent reports indicates that Monsanto had information suggesting potential risk to human health from some of its pesticides, yet worked for years to downplay or obscure those risks in public and regulatory arenas. I mean, that's just wild. The reason they're doing this is because of my lawsuits against Monsanto. Right, I remember you had that huge settlement against them a long time ago, right? Yeah, I think it was maybe 2019 we finally settled it. But I did three of the trials in San Francisco. And the first one we won, I think, $289 million for people who got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from using Roundup. And then the second one we won $89 million. The third one we asked for a billion dollars from the jury was a couple that had both got it simultaneously. They were home gardeners, and their dog also got it at the same time. They had a Labrador retriever, and the dog died. Both the couples were sick. We asked the jury for a billion dollars, and they gave us $2.2 billion. And they did that because we were able to show them documents that showed Monsanto knew of the danger and then worked with corrupt officials, a guy called Jess Rowland, inside of EPA, who was the head of the pesticide division, and that they had deliberately concealed the science, fixed the science. And now the big study that they used to prove safety has now been retracted. Yeah. Yeah, I think I saw an article about that. Like they'd found emails that they were like, that it was kind of ghost written or something from the science? Yeah, it was ghost written. And also the head of the pesticide division, they asked him, the Monsanto asked him secretly, and now we have these emails, to kill a study by another agency called ATSDR. And he said, I can't kill it. That's not my agency. I can kill them in EPA, but not outside. And they said, you got to do it. We can't have this study go forward. And he said, okay, I'm going to do it, but if I succeed, you've got to give me a gold medal. And we had all of that, and we were able to show it to the jury, and they were angry, and that's why they gave us that huge judgment. A gold medal in what? Just anything? A gold medal for killing a study that showed that it caused cancer. That's insane that it's at a contest level now, that things like that are so prolific that now it's like there's awards for it. You know, it seems baffling. There's been a ton of lawsuits about this, right? Like about pesticides causing diseases and sickness in people, right? Or about this glyphosate, I think it's called? Yeah, glyphosate. There's been a ton of lawsuits, but they still don't have to take this product off of the shelf. So that's the craziest thing to me. Is that right? Well, you know, it's a problem because you have all the row croppers are dependent on it right now. And there's other technology that is emerging right now that actually, you know, I looked at one yesterday. It's a tractor attachment that uses lasers to kill weeds. And that, you know, if they can make that affordable, particularly for smaller farmers, that will be the answer because you'll be able to think they can kill bugs and they can kill weeds. You program this thing and it zaps the weeds with a laser. laser, it makes all the cells explode and it destroys them. And so there's a future that we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel there. But right now, if you band glyphosate outright, it would put out of business 80% of our farmers. Got it. Wow. So we're kind of dependent upon something that we know makes us sick. Yeah, we are. And, you know, we're trying, we're doing a lot of work in the HHS to look for other alternatives and to find a, you know, find an off ramp because the farmers don't want to be using chemicals anyway. They're very expensive. They know, you know, they have some of the highest cancer rates of any profession. And farmers care about their land. They want to leave it for their kids. It also destroys the microbiome in the soil and that causes erosion. And so it's not a good long-term solution. The issue is how do you transition off of it without putting farmers out of business? Here's that laser. Wow, that's unbelievable. Laser weeding robot kills 100,000 weeds per hour. Yeah, and it also kills insects. You can program it to kill certain insects. That machine probably costs a million dollars. But if you could have a couple of those running at night through your farm, that'd be sick. Yeah, it would be. It's a lot better than using chemical pesticides. So this is going to be, you know, the future. But we're not there yet. We're not there yet. Wow. It's just wild that we get stuck in something that makes us sick and we don't have a, you know, it's like, I don't know. It just feels like such a conundrum. It must be like that for you guys a lot where you're like, this is just kind of where we are, you know. the agricultural community has been very very supportive of the Maha agenda and they're helping us transition away from ultra processed foods which is really the biggest issue that's what's causing all these chronic disease in kids and farmers are going out of business you know farmers usually lose money 7 out of 10 years even when they're making money they're making you know a lot of them are just making for their work hours minimum wage and there and we're having a hard time finding young people who will go into farming so that is a crisis that you know we need to uh we need to keep into consideration and you know you have people at usda finally who are you know really intent on solving this problem but nobody wants any farmers going out of business got it whenever you became secretary did it feel like you that now you on the inside Does it feel like you go behind this curtain and now you get to see this It does Yeah Do you have to sign an NDA to have the job No No And I mean, we're doing the opposite of that. You know, this is the most transparent administration in history. I mean, there's no president who's ever done three or four press conferences a day like President Trump does, answering any question people would fire at. He's a machine. I don't know how many press conferences President Biden did in his entire administration. He doesn't know. But it's a lot less than President Trump does in a month. Yeah. Oh, for sure. And then, you know, we're – we are right now using AI to revolutionize the freedom of information laws so that people are going to be able to get freedom of information requests immediately. Like what do you mean a freedom of information request? Yeah. So if somebody wants a document from the government, now it could take six months, two years. And we're going to make it so that they can get it instantaneously and that all of our documents are going to be public except those that are shielded under the statute for one reason or another. and the big issue that you know the big problem that we're dealing with is that uh there is you know that there there are names and privacy issues and you have to redact those legally we have to do that and we have to make sure we don't make any mistakes so the ai is you know that's what we're working out now whenever when you got in office there was you guys did like a big cut down of like a lot of the divisions and stuff like that what was i think you went from 20 something to 15 maybe 20 we we had 82 000 employees and 20 000 of them left and they left 20 000 left or did you guys make like cuts because i just know you guys made like a bunch of cuts cuts that were buyouts so that people who are at the end of their career could retire early um there were riffs where people who were very new were let go. And it was about reducing the workforce, but it was reducing the bureaucracy. We weren't reducing, we weren't getting rid of research or anything like that. We didn't touch that, except if there were certain categories of research, like DEI research, or there were other categories that were just, it was not real science. And it was not, you know, we're changing the trajectory so that the purpose of NIA, the focus of NIH is going to be figuring out why we're also sick. You know, why is this chronic disease happening? What are the exposures that are causing it? What are the alternatives? How do we end it? And so we're shifting the focus. But the amount that we're spending on research is the same that we spent, you know, in 2020 and 2019. Well, was there like a recalibrating there? Because like I had a friend, Heather, who was working at UCLA. She was a researcher there. And she said that like a lot of the during like a doge period and stuff, a lot of their grants got cut. And there was like a like a kind of a moratorium or like a pause. There was a pause, and every administration does that. You need to do a review and make sure that those research projects are not torturing beagles or doing TEI. And how do you decide that? Do you decide? We go through every single grant. We have big teams going through those grants. And then there's tremendous ways. We had 40 communications departments. We had 40 different divisions studying addiction. And so we consolidated those. So there was, you know, you have 10 people doing the same job and not talking to each other with computers that are not interoperable. Oh, it's the government. Yeah, and we're changing that now so that we consolidate it and we're making it more streamlined and efficient. But it's so that we can do the job better, so we can do better research. And then the research was never replicated, which means that that's part of science. that if somebody does a paper that makes a scientific hypothesis, you don't just accept that. You get somebody to replicate it and see if they come up with the same result. And that was not happening. There was virtually no money spent on replication. Because of that, there was huge incentives to cheat. Because scientists, if they have a hypothesis, and they do, they get a grant, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars to prove that hypothesis. And then they, once they prove it, they get it published. And that's how they advance their careers. Well, if they fail to prove it, if the science says what you were thinking is not true, then they can't get published. You should publish that, too, because that's science, you know, but it doesn't get published. So their careers are, you know, endangered. It's hard for them to get the next grant. and so a lot of them had this incentive to cheat so they had to win if they get it if they hypothesis is a null hypothesis they don't get they you know their whole future goes into the toilet potentially and uh and so because they they knew that study was never going to be replicated nobody was going to check on them it was an incentive for them to cheat and and that must have been a pipeline just for companies then to just get like get like well it was also sided uh lopsided science or solo sided science that wasn't um yeah i mean i'll give you an example there was a study done about 20 years ago on amyloid plaque and that as the cause of alzheimer's and that study came up and said yeah it's the cause of alzheimer's but then we spent billions of dollars doing six or eight hundred studies that followed that. And they all were, as it turned out, they were all cheating. And, you know, the ones that were many of them were cheating, but all of them were kind of confirmatory. And all of their hypothesis about what's caused Alzheimer's was ignored, put on the shelf. You couldn't get money for it because they said we already know the answer. And then there were drugs developed, et cetera. And in the end, we came in and this scandal was brewing. The head of Stanford University Medical School had to resign the dean. Because they knew what was going on? Because he was involved in publishing some of these fraudulent studies. But they did it for 20 years because nobody ever had to really replicate those original studies. and that happens all the time and you go down these scientific dead ends and uh and so now what jay wants to do is to spend 20 of our budget on replication so that every study gets replicated and we know jay bodichara who is okay yeah i know you're talking about and he was one of the guys who was censored during covid he was one of the top um statisticians at stanford and he and a lot of other ones were censored, lost their jobs. Marty McCary, who you know, also. Yeah, I love his book. One of his books I read. He was also censored. Oz was censored. And they're now running the agency. So these are people who want to do real science and not politicize it, to depoliticize the science. We had 10 people doing these administrative jobs. And now we've cut that down to five. So all the cuts that we did were meant to streamline the agency so that there's more money for research. Got it. Like after the pauses on the grants and some of those things, are you? The grants were renewed. Most of the ones are the ones that you guys thought were viable? Yeah, almost all of them. Got it. When I want to add some Bitcoin, MoonPay is usually the first app that I reach for. You don't need to buy a full Bitcoin, and the whole process is clean, simple, and easy to understand. MoonPay has been a major partner of the show, and I've actually chosen to take my compensation from them in Bitcoin. The Bitcoin lives in my personal MoonPay wallet, and it's fully in my control. No one else has access to it. With the U.S. dollar constantly moving up and down, this felt like a smart way for me to diversify a bit and potentially get more long-term value out of the partnership. Just keep in mind, even though MoonPay makes it easy to buy crypto, you should always do your own research and understand what you're getting into. Crypto can be volatile, and there's always the possibility of losing money. MoonPay is a tool to facilitate your transactions, not a source of financial advice. Trade responsibly. Earlier this year, I had a friend that passed away, and there was fundraising for him to help have finances to take care of his family moving forward, to help with some things. And fortunately, he also had a life insurance policy, you know, because you want to be able to make sure that just tuition, child care costs, mortgage, if you have one, things like that, that your family will be able to go on with some comfort. And that's where ethos comes in. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. There's no complicated process. It's 100% online. No medical exam required. You just answer a few health questions, get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, and you can get up to $3 million in coverage. As of March 2025, business insider named Ethos the number one no medical exam instant life insurance provider. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash Theo. that's e-t-h-o-s dot com slash t-h-e-o application times may vary rates may vary i saw you uh in your speech that you gave yesterday here in tennessee saying that like there's all there's all kinds of temptation to cheat if you know you're not going to get caught yeah well that's true in every system yeah have you seen a lot of that like um i mean the amyloid Black is a really good example. Yeah, we see it everywhere. We see it everywhere. In medicine, it's everywhere. And the journals are utterly corrupt because they're owned by the pharmaceutical companies. And so people read a journal and they think, oh, this is science. But even, you know, Marsha Engel, one that ran the New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years, has said, you can't believe anything in the journals anymore. But they're just propaganda vessels for the pharmaceutical company. Richard Horton, who were in Lancet, who still runs it, says the same thing at the journals. And those are the people running them? What happens? They make huge amounts of money. Yeah. And they make money from advertising, which is paid for pharmaceutical companies. And through a scheme called Preprints, where the pharmaceutical company lands the story, they pay for the journal about a drug that they're trying to promote. So they pay the journal to print the story, and then they get a preprint. So it's a very neat-looking copy of their article with the cover sheet of the New England Journal of Medicine on it. And then they distribute that to their pharmaceutical reps who are like former Playboy models who go out and talk to the doctors, and they give that to the doctors and say, this drug works. Do you want to have lunch? Yeah. And the doctors then start prescribing the drug and they think, oh, well, it's legitimate because it was in the New England Journal of Medicine. But it is not. It's, you know, you can't believe what's in those journals because it's all propaganda for pharma. So how do we get away from that? Like, what are you guys doing to combat this or to change this? Or can this change? Or is it just awareness and then people have to take the responsibility? No, I mean, what we're doing is open source journals. We're going to have our own journals that people can open source and publish, but you'll have the peer review published with it. So before you publish, you give that publication to a panel of experts who then read it themselves and criticize it. And the peer review now is secret. And then there is no raw data published, so nobody can go in and replicate it. So to the extent possible, sometimes you can't. You have to buy the raw data, and it's very expensive or inaccessible, so you can't publish it. But you can publish the peer review, which is what we're doing. And so everybody will be able to say if they have 10 peer reviewers and they all say this article sucks, it's got all these holes in it. Then the public will be able to read that, and doctors will be able to read it, and the regulators will be able to read it. And so it's basically open source. It's crowdsourcing, essentially. And that's how you get credibility in science. Science doesn't come from consensus. It comes from debate. And that's why you remember when they were telling us during COVID, oh, trust the experts. That's not a thing in science. Trusting the experts is the opposite of science. It's not a function of science or democracy. It's a feature of religion, and it's a feature of totalitarianism. In science, you always question the expert. Yeah, you can't. There's not an expert in science because it's like an evolving thing, right? Well, you know, when I did the Monsanto cases, I was part of a big team. We had – and Cheryl came to my trial. A couple days, she sat through and watched us try the case. and monsanto had experts from stanford yale and harvard three big experts and they testified and cheryl said to me at the end of the second day she said why are you guys even here these guys are you know this science is very clear that monsanto that roundup doesn't cause cancer and i said just wait and then our experts went on and they were from harvard stanford and yale and they said the opposite and were much more convincing and the juries were convinced and so there's experts on both sides of every debate and a lot of them are paid to be experts they're hired guns they're mercenaries and uh we call them by ostitutes the one that that worked for industry the ones that work for industry that's great uh but you know so there's experts have their own bias we all have biases everybody's got a bias what you want to do when When you're dealing with science, you want to expose those biases. You want to admit them and acknowledge them. And then you want the science to be able to stand on its own. And that's the only way really to depoliticize it as best we can. Right. What were some of the biggest cases of fraud? Like when you got in there and got behind the curtain and see like the NIH, the EPA, just see what's going on back there. What were some of the biggest cases of fraud that you kind of found? I mean, the biggest cases are what we're – between Medicaid and Medicare, there's about $100 billion stolen every year. And a lot of it is like what's happening in Minnesota with the Somali community and what's happening now, even worse, in California. But, you know, one of the problems is that that's a systemic problem is that Medicaid and Medicare now no longer. It used to be that they paid for your medical treatment, your doctor's visit. But now they pay for the person who takes you to the doctor and they pay for home care and they pay for a person to come in and pay your bills. Right. So there's all kinds of opportunities for fraud. And a doctor recently, you know, Oz told me this, told Oz, he said that there was a doctor in California that he visited. And the doctor had a patient who was a heroin addict. Heroin addict was coming to see him four times a month for some kind of a treatment. And one day, the doctor looked out the door and saw his ex-wife waiting for him in the car. And the doctor said, oh, are you back together with your ex-wife? And he said, no, I hate her guts. And he said, but she drives me because she gets paid $600 every time she drives me. And he said, I don't want to put you back together with your ex. We make $3,000 a month with her driving me this, and then I drive her to hers. And so there's all kinds of those opportunities for fraud. And we found a hotel that had literally every room in it was the headquarters for a nursing group Where was that located It was in California God And you know so they all just P boxes They're not actually doing any nursing care. No. They're just collecting money. And as we now know, a lot of the money that was, you know, was was going into the Somali community for autism care. There were these phony autism care houses. Yeah. And a lot of it was ending up with Al-Shabaab in Somalia. So hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars were being stolen, shipped to Somalia to fund a terrorist group. But that's happening every day. Now we have the ability to catch them. How? How were you able to adjust that sort of thing now? Like what makes it different now? Because first of all, under the Biden administration, I don't want to get super partisan. Yeah. But the Biden administration turned a blind eye to all the fraud. It was mainly going to blue states, and it was an economic generator. There's money pouring into the blue states, and they just said we know a lot of it's stolen and illegal, but we're going to let it happen because it's coming to us. It's coming to our state. and so what we've done now is with medicare we control medicare the states control a lot of medicaid so it's harder a little harder for us to detect fraud there we've started out with medicare we're using ai and we're using ai which can detect the fraud you know it can detect it can tell us whether this guy who is who we're paying has been convicted of fraud before and you know we shouldn't be paying him again. And it will be telling us every aspect of his business that we need to know to understand whether it's fraudulent. So we're going to save just this year tens of billions of dollars in limiting fraud in Medicaid. And they used to pay it under the Biden administration. The system was called pay and chase. so if they sent in a fraudulent invoice we even if we knew it was the hhs knew it was fraudulent they would pay it and then they would put the inspector general to go claw it back and of course it wasn't there but they so they never covered anything oh i see now we're not going to pay them anymore if they're fraudulent they're going to get they're not going to get a check we're going to save tens of billions of dollars just this year and we're going to save hundreds of billions over annually from now on. And that's because the AI is keeping track of that? The AI can spot the fraud. Got it. And with Medicare, with Medicaid, which is a joint state-federal program, we don't control the rails, and the states control them. And so we need state cooperation, and the red states are cooperating with us, but the blue states still won't cooperate. So that's going to take some time. And then there's categories that are much easier for us to control, like medical devices. We can do that quickly on our own. But there's other categories that are going to be much more difficult. But we will get it done within the next three years. Whenever Doge happened, right? When Doge occurred, when Elon was in or he was involved or hypothetically involved, that's what it seemed like just like to the regular person. He was definitely involved. He was involved. Was that successful? successful was that real like what was the outcomes of that like did that seem like a were you guys working together with that like what was that all about i you know i think even elon has said that um there would have been better ways to do it and that we you know going after the systemic what we're doing now this is the you know these large thefts you can cut a couple a thousand people and over the long run it's just you know drops of water in the ocean yeah oh that's not going to save us huge amounts of money over the long term but what we're doing now is going to the things you were just talking about you mean yeah that's going to help a lot yeah is those still active that program still active what were the outcomes of that well the The outcomes were that a lot of – I cut my workforce by 20 percent. But in truth, some of those were very good cuts. I think we all agree, including Elon, that it would have been better to do targeted cuts. Cut the people who were actually causing the problem and then keep the people – a lot of the new workers who were only there for a couple of months. that it might have been better to keep some of those people and change the culture. I see. So yeah, instead of more of like a mowing, more of like a pruning kind of thing, you mean? Yeah. Do you think America is sicker than ever these days? It is sicker. We're the sickest country in the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world. and that's one of the reasons during COVID we had 19% of the COVID deaths in our country and we only have 4.2% of the world's population and so the question is why did America do worse than any country in the world and COVID was it mismanaging part of it was that but the big part and this is what CDC says we're the sickest country in the world that the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases. And that's really what was killing them. It was very hard to die from COVID if you were healthy. And so, you know, we need to get Americans healthy. We need to end the chronic disease epidemic. Right now, we spend two to three times on our health care per capita what they spend in Europe. And yet we have the worst health outcomes in the world. We're 79. Bring up a capital chart if you can. We've dropped behind Europe by six years in lifespan, 10 years in some cases. And yet our health outcomes are worse. We have the highest maternal mortality. That means women dying in childbirth in the developed world. We have the highest infant mortality. How could that be with the United States? and a lot of it is because of chronic disease and then, you know, our diabetes rate. When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes over – juvenile diabetes over a 40- or 50-year career. Today, 38% of American teens is diabetic or pre-diabetic. God, it's unknown. autism rates have gone from less than 1 in 10,000 in 1970 to 1 in 31 today. Oh, yeah. You can throw a rock and hit an autistic kid anywhere. And California is 1 in every 19 kids, 1 in every 12.5 boys. And so the cost to our country, 77% of American kids can't qualify for military service. How many percent? 77%. cannot get into the military because of mouth reason. What? That is the truth. Yeah. Oh, my God, bro. That's insane. That should get people's attention. Bring that up. Is that true? Let me see if that's true. Bobby probably just uploaded this stat on the Internet from his phone a second ago, but still, that's okay. That's how it works. 77% of American youth can't qualify for military service. Yeah. And why? Why? Because they have chronic disease. They have asthma. They have diabetes. They have, you know, they're obese. One of those. But when my uncle was president, I was a 10-year-old kid. We spent zero on chronic disease in this country. Zero. Today, we spend $4.3 trillion a year. and it's about 40 cents out of every tax dollar that is paid by you to the federal government is now going to treat chronic disease and it's it's unsustainable and it's getting worse every year and who's is it is it do you find that it falls more on it's the responsibility of the individual we're not taking care of ourselves or is it that we have no a health system that is allowing uh i don't want to just say foods and drugs but allowing things into us that is not maintaining our natural health i mean individuals have a responsibility but you'll be see when when i was a kid five percent of kid children were obese you had one kind of fat kid in your class yeah and today it's uh you know 15 percent it's going overweight is 40 percent adults it's even higher we should just have a thick military then i think but people did not get americans did not get obese because they're indolent or lazy or they don't want to do exercise they got that way because they're being mass poisoned and they're being mass poisoned because the government lied to them and it lied about the food oh um now 70 of the food that our kids eat is ultra processed food and it's just poison it's not food it's just poison and which agencies allowed that i mean the epa puts labels like the fda yeah so do you feel like that's been one of the most compromised agencies yeah it was owned by big pharma and big food and we're you know marty mccary has changed that now so how do we know that that's changed like how do we as like a look at the food pyramid and they you know the food pyramid when i came into office we were supposed to publish in january of last year oh yeah the last food pyramid i saw had vapes on it so it was getting pretty bad we're doing vapes now you know you mean the food pyramid oh the last one yeah the one that's funny i was like this is getting bad uh the food pyramid so when i came in we were the the administration had prepared new dietary guidelines and they they were 453 pages long and they were completely driven by the same mercantile impulses that put fruit loops at the top of the food pyramid. How do you put fruit loops, which is not a food, at the top of the food pyramid? It's just poison. But it was all driven by the commercial interests of the companies that controlled FDA. So when we came in, we went, we got the best nutritionists from the best universities in our country. We basically locked them in a room. We thought it would take a month, but it took about 11 months. They fought over every single item on this in the food pyramid. It took them 11 months to put this together? Yeah, because you have to go over to science. You know, what is broccoli? Right. How does it relate? How much protein should you eat? How much saturated fat should you eat? What's optimal? And so they had to go through tens of thousands of scientific papers to make sure that every recommendation that we made is based solidly on a foundation of gold standard science. So for this, for them to create the food pyramid, it took 11 months. Yeah. And then we flipped it over. So we flipped it over because the category of food that you should eat most is a broad category. It includes vegetables. It includes proteins. you know, salmon and steak and, and most of this is for children, right? Well, no, this is good for everybody. I mean, most diabetes, I remember from like when I was a kid, you know, you would see it, you know? Yeah, right. But I guess that's the first point you learn about it. That's, and that's why we're all so screwed up. But the, you know, most diabetes can be cured through diet. And the doctors don't know this because they don't take, Most of them aren't taking nutrition in medical school. And we're now requiring or we're working with the medical, with the accreditors and with the testing, the people who do the MCAT to make sure there's tests on nutrition. We're working with all the medical colleges to make sure that now doctors are going to have 40 hours of nutrition in school. Eighty percent of doctors say they do not feel competent to give nutrition advice. so what are they learning they're learning pharmacology right they're learning the pill you let everybody get sick from eating the food and then tell them the pill that will treat that sickness yeah at that point you're just a drug dealer you can get rid of the diagnosis not only that but now you know there's there's really clear science that you can get rid of mental health diagnoses that food can cure mental health problems there's a doctor at harvard dr paul and who is who has cured schizophrenia with dietary changes, with keto diets. There's a paper that... Is that true? Go ahead and look it up. Cure schizophrenia with keto diets? Yeah. Well, I definitely notice that when I'm fasting, I get... I'm pretty smart. Yeah, you get smarter, right? Yeah. Preliminary clinical findings, including case reports, and small traits suggest that ketogenic therapy may improve positive and negative symptoms, cognitive performance outcomes, and individual schizophrenia spectrum disorders. I mean I believe that so much of this is true, just like that so much of it is how we are operating. It just feels like we've been stuck in such a place where you have a – like you have a food industry that doesn't care if you're healthy and then you have a healthcare industry that doesn't care if you get well. Well, everybody is making money from us being sick. I'll say one other thing about this. There are all these – there are dozens and dozens of studies and you can look them up. of their case-controlled studies of juvenile detention facilities and prisons, where they change, for example, in one wing, the diet to real food, and they leave the other diet in there, and that the disciplinary, the fighting, the violence drops precipitously, the use of restraints in one juvenile detention facility dropped by 75%. Usually the violence drops by 40 or 50%. and you know people it caused depression it caused anxiety these foods you know if your kid has anxiety look at what they're eating and you can change that in many cases by changing their diet and getting them to eat real food yeah how how do you get the everyday person then to adjust their psychology or like their thought like about taking more of an interest in themselves You know, because I think you should be you trusted the commercials. You're like, this is great for you. You know, it's like and you believed that, you know. Yeah. I mean, the way to change human behavior is one, get information out there that's real information. The other thing that you have to do is you have to change the economic incentives. And right now we have perverse incentives that reimburse doctors, that insurers, pharmaceutical companies, the doctors, the hospitals are making more money if you're sick. The drug rehabs, if you come back, if you relapse, they make more money. They shouldn't be paid that way. The insurance company should pay them one lump sum and then follow that addict for the next two years. And every time he comes back, you've got to treat him for free. And that will incentivize them to do better treatment. Yeah, to do treatment that works. And the ones that can't do that will fail. And the ones that can do it, get better and better at it will do it. You change the economic incentives. You'll change human behavior. And then you have to get the information to the individual. And that's what we're doing. we're doing we've um met we've convened the 400 top tech companies before this administration you could not get your own health records so you own your health records but you couldn't see them you can't get a hold of what do you mean why not because they would information block you they would make sure you couldn't get them and now we've got them all to agree they're going to stop the information blocking, your medical records will be on your cell phone. And that is great for you because if you live in Nashville and you travel to Los Angeles, you get hit by a car, you don't want to spend an hour in the emergency room with a clipboard making out one of those forms. You hand your cell phone to the doctor. He puts it in AI and he knows what your blood type is, what your allergies are, what your contraindications, previous treatments, et cetera. Yeah, it is ridiculous. You have to do that all the time. Right. So what President Trump said to me is he said, I want to make every American the CEO of their own health, that they're in charge of it. And then we're doing, you know, we've got now we've changed the prior authorization. We've got 80 percent of the insurance industry together to eliminate all unnecessary prior authorization, which is going to change the experience that every American has with the healthcare system is when you go to a doctor, he says you need a knee surgery. You may wait six months for your insurance company to approve it. You can't do anything about it. And now, by the end of this year, you will know at the point of care, that means before you leave your doctor's office, you'll know whether your insurance company will cover that. And that's going to dramatically change it. We are also... does that make it any more likely that they're going to cover it or does it just make it that you going to know It makes it so that you know and so the doctor will know there before you leave Got it And the doctor will change the prescription or whatever you need to do You'll at least know, and you won't be sitting at home. And that's actually going to happen? That's happening, yeah. And then the other thing that we're doing is we're doing price transparency so that every hospital will have to publish its prices for every procedure. How are the patients? Are you familiar with that? Exactly, and that's to make you the CEO of your own health. They already are supposed to do that, right? It was a law that Trump passed in his first term, but Biden never enforced it, so none of the hospitals do it. We've now passed new regulations that is going to punish them draconian way if they don't do it. So they're all going to be doing it by the end of this year. Are they going to try to find a way to skirt around that, though, I wonder? Well, it's so screwed up because if you go buy an automobile and the guy tells you, Yeah, but I'm not going to tell you the price until after you bought it. It's insane. And right now, if you're pregnant in this country, you could go nine months on the phone every day trying to figure out what the childbirth is going to cost you in your local hospital and not be able to do it. And we are bound to go online with a system that will make all procedures visible to every patient. So I actually looked at the mock-up two days ago for New York, and it shows a map of Manhattan and a mile around Manhattan, and there's 30 hospitals. And it shows the price of childbirth at every hospital. The lowest one is $1,300. The highest is $22,000, and it's everything in between $9,000, $5,000, $3,000. You can look and see. You can look and see. You'll be able to go to a menu online. It's like Gas Buddy when you're looking for a gas station, but you're going to be able to do that. A clean bathroom or whatever that clean bathroom. That one's crazy. And they lie on there. And some of them are at rest areas too. And, yeah, I got accosted by a guy who was in a – I guess he was like an Easter bunny impersonator or whatever. Anyway, whatever. Good to be here today. So you're telling me that that's going to be a real thing. That's going to be available to us on our phone. So say if you – I need to get an MRI. I can look online. You can look and find. And right now, there's no way that you can figure out the price of an MRI. And they'll lie to you. But if you but if you call them and say, OK, I'm not going to come. I've had experiences where they will call you back and then we'll offer you a lower. Yes, they're all playing that game. And now they're not going to be able to do it. How soon is that going to be released? It's going to be released very, very soon in the next couple of months. All the hospitals now have to come online and start reporting. And the ones that don't do it immediately, we are going to have very, very high fines for them. So there's going to be big incentive for them to start our reporting. But it also is going to drive down prices because why is there that absurd differential between $1,300 and $22,000? It's because we don't know. Because we don't know. So there's no market. So they do whatever the hell they want. And now there's going to be competition because people will be able to shop. But won't there be lobbyists that are – aren't there lobbyists just fighting you? I mean right here it says here's compiled a list of example of hospitals and childbirth costs in Nashville based on available self-pay cash bundles. Ascension St. Thomas' $4,800 to $7,800. National General is $10,000 to $15,000. Yeah, I mean why is it? Yeah. That's just chaos. That's chaos. There's no market there. Yeah, but I mean it's unbelievable. And this happens at every – it can be something as small as getting like an aspirin when you're in the hospital. It can be anything where they just bill you later and like, oh, it's a $70. Or they'll say to you, you know, if you want, you can spend an extra day here. Right. You look sick. You look like you could use the rest. And you'll say, I'll do that. And then you get a hundred thousand dollar bill. That's crazy. Yeah. And they only have fluorescent lights. You could have gone to the four seasons. Yeah. For, yeah, for four years at that rate. So that's, so that's actually going to come into play. Yeah, that will be in play. And what's that going to be called? How will we access it? It's called price transparency. I think we're calling it Trump-arency. Really? No. I mean, if Trump named it, he would. I mean, he would name that in a heartbeat, you know. Oh, that's hilarious, though. Trump-arency, dude. Oh, it's opaque. 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For more information, go to forthepeople.com slash Theo or click the link in the description below. That's F-O-R, thepeople.com slash Theo. Or click the link in the description below to let them know I sent you. This is a paid advertisement. See, that's one of the most important things. That's something that we've been talking about in here for probably like a year and a half now, two years, is the price transparency, power to the patients. That's one of the groups that's like helping to push that, I know. Who are the people that are lobbying so hard for these things not to happen? Well, there were a lot of people in the agency who were obstructing any kind of change. And part of the challenge of running an agency this size is to change that institutional culture. And you're only bringing in – there's 82,000 people. We only have 250 political appointees. They have to be good leaders. They have to be able to work with the bureaucracy. You need the bureaucracy. A lot of these people are very gifted. They're idealistic. They want to do a good job. The leadership has been very bad for so long that it's not allowed them to do what they want. And we need to reignite that feeling of idealism. Do you feel good about it? Yeah, I think we're doing a really good job. I mean, I think we've done more this year than any health secretary has done in history. that HHS has done in a single year at any time. And I think we're dramatically changing the relationship between Americans and their health care system. But, you know, it's like turning a giant oil tank. You have to keep hitting it and hitting with the tugboat and the bow. And then ultimately it will start to turn. And then, you know, you hit that. You hit it just enough times that don't flip fast. And things change. I know before you leave your head, there's a lot of like stuff that's focused around addiction. Right. What do you want to say about where do you think that we're headed with that? Some of the new things that you guys are going to try to implement, like with with part of your new program. Like what are some of the new implementations or some of the new focuses that you want to have people look at when they look at addiction? Yeah, I mean, the problem with addiction is that the cost of the addict, you know, we at HHS were the fiduciary, the medical cost of the addict. So we can look and say, OK, if we can cure you from addiction, you know, I have a cousin, you know, Patrick Kennedy, who was in Congress, but he did. he had 17 rehabs and he was telling me during that period of his life he was at the emergency room every two weeks and he had oh he had an irritated bowel syndrome and he had contusions and he had all of these you know other illnesses that he didn't even associate with addiction but they're all associated with and you know that you know oh yeah it gets deep so and he said in 15 years that he's been sober, he's never been to the emergency room once. And so HHS is able to look at those costs and those trajectories and all those collateral damage in the healthcare system. The addict's costing elsewhere a lot more money with law enforcement, with broken families, with lost jobs and inefficiencies, and those aren't internalized anywhere. And what we're trying to do is bring together all of the agencies, the VA, Labor, HUD, and HHS, all the agencies of HHS together to look at that addict and then follow him over, have somebody responsible for following him over the lifespan of his addiction. And nobody does that. And so now it's the same problem that we have with the healthcare system is that it's everybody's financial benefit to keep that addict sick because everybody's making money from them. And so you don't have anybody who's accountable for the outcome. And what you need to do is, you know, we're doing these pilot programs called Street in eight different locales to figure out how to do this, to bring all the agencies together, do early interventions, confront the addict on the street, get them out of crisis into treatment, out of treatment into, you know, rehab, out of rehab into sober housing, long-term care. Help them find a job and stabilize their lives and have one person who's responsible for that whole trajectory. Amen. Yeah, because when it goes piecemeal like that, it's just like it's easy for people to just – And they hand them off. Yeah. And then everybody checks the boxes. Yeah. Everybody – I found him a house. Okay. He's still shooting up. he's pulling the copper one you know piping out to pay for his dad that's not my business yeah that's law enforcement that's somebody else well thank you i just i i think it's amazing you care so much about that and uh yeah i just yeah for the the chance that people can get well and change their lives uh before you go bobby um you and i've been friends and i've always trusted you and i've always you know i believe in you and i just know you as a person and i know um this is a guy at certain points in your life i think you just have to make sure he's like this is a guy i believe in Right. Like for as much as you can believe in a human being, you know, like acceptable levels. Who are some other like congressmen and senators on either side of the aisle that you believe that we can that regular people like me can trust? People that I there's a ton of Congress people who are incredible and actually too many to even name to start naming because there's so many good ones. But in the Senate, Ron Johnson, you know, is fantastic. Roger Marshall from Kansas is fantastic. Mark Wayne Mullins. The president isn't crazy about Rand Paul, but Rand Paul has been really good on a lot of my issues. And, you know, there's a lot of other ones, too. What about Senator Hawley? Are you familiar with him? Yeah. Yeah, he's great. I've had tremendous support from the Senate, from the Republicans. The Democrats have been my friend my whole lifetime. It's just so tribal now that people are not able to follow their conscience. They need to – Ask their handlers, all that? Well, they need to be part of the clash of tribal narratives. And, you know, my family is the same way. You know, I lost a lot of family and a lot of friends. And, you know, the Democratic senators were all my friends. Bernie was my friend, et cetera. But now they are, you know, they're just locked in. If you have anything to do with Trump, you're, you know, you're demonized and vilified. and like president trump says he said if i cured cancer they'd still find something wrong with me and i think that's true that we're not you know we're we're locked in this very very polarized space that is not good for our country when my uncle was in there everything he did was bipartisan he was there for 50 years and you know he did he had more legislation under his name than any senator in history and it's because he was able to work across the aisles but no matter who you are now you can't work across the aisles so we're locked in this deadlock and it's very it's um it's troubling um but you know that it's just the reality of where we are whenever you kind of got behind the curtain was there any more information for you there about um any of the assassination attempts that had happened with your family or anything like that no i mean my like did they give you any more like unredacted statement like was there anything like that no i mean the president trump has ordered all that stuff to be released and in fact it was some stuff that i asked him not to release and he said no i'm releasing all of it and the reason i didn't want to release is because there was um there was information in some of the telegrams that could have jeopardized people who are still alive on a completely different issue. But it seemed to me that it was worth withholding a couple of these documents. The reason I knew a lot about it is because my daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, who ran my campaign is now the deputy director of national intelligence. And she's the chief of national intelligence at OMB. And she was given the responsibility by President Trump of releasing all the JFK files. And she's been thinking about this for years. She was in the CIA. Wow, that's wild. Oh, I met her. Yeah, you've met her. um but but so no nobody slipped to a napkin and was like no this is who did it it wasn't like that not not on that issue got it and then napkins slipped to me on other issues but not on that one before you go and thanks so much man i appreciate it it's great to see you you look great and i'm so proud of you you know i mean i know you don't care about that maybe or you do i don't know it doesn't matter i shouldn't have said that i'm just like yeah you just oh you're oh you always remind me of like a just to be resilient so thank you um that's what i meant to say um yeah if you had just like if you had one thing to just tell just people like what would you tell them i mean i'd say eat real food if it comes in a package you probably should leave it in the package but you know if it comes from the ground if it comes from the water if it comes from the air, you know, that's going to be good for you. And food is medicine. And you can heal yourself with a good diet. Amen. Cool, man. Thanks so much for hanging out, dude. And congratulations. And yeah, keep fighting for us. We appreciate it. Thank you. Great to see you. You too, bud. Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found. I can feel it in my bones. But it's gonna take a little.