#639 - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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 And I will find a strong Good to see you, bro. Yes, good to see you secretary Secretary now you you can still call me Bobby. Okay, cool. I know each other from can I say Where we know? Yeah, sure We've been in recovery for Together for years you from was for over 40 years right? Yeah, 40 43 years That's wild Yeah, that's where we knew that's where we met each other Yeah, like 7 a.m. meetings about the bank over there. That was a good shut those down to her in COVID. I know that was heartbreaking That was almost 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 we got into the Palisades playhouse, which now it was burned down during the 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 I one week came in and I said I don't care what happens I'm going to a meeting every day. Yeah, and I said I'm not scared of a germ You know, I used the snort cocaine off of toilet seats And yeah, I know this disease will kill me right if I don't If I don't treat it, which means going from me going to meetings every day It's It's just bad for my life So for me it was it was survival And then you know that the opportunity to help another alcoholic. That's the secret sauce of the meetings and As we keep us all sober and Keeps us You know from From Self-well. Yeah, well, yeah, you get reminded I mean I go to meetings and I get reminded that other people Like I hate to say exist, but like just that other people are Just that I'm not alone. I think you know, I get like I see face. I'm like, oh yeah I care about this person. They care about me. It's like for some reason in my and my addiction It's like there's a part of me that forgets that people care about me and then I care about them And so but when I go to meetings, it's like an immediate it immediately fills that whole backlog in you know But I have to go and kind of recharge that battery a lot um You uh welcome to Tennessee Thank you. Yeah, so you were 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 effort. Easy. Yeah, I think I'm saving a seat for him. Oh, yeah Yeah, he's one of a kind man. His brother only has one leg too. You know that I met his brother Billy. I think he got the vaccine, but that's just me But anyway, he had two of 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 daddy was lost his leg And both of them became um uh ski racers So they were the time I think ten my cousin daddy was the number two Uh small obscure for on one leg and he was also very proficient so they became friends So that was interesting So he knows your cousin. Yeah, he grew up with him And they were in like a special division or no just normal division What do they call the power paralympics? Paralympics 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 his leg is cut off so high he can't really use a prosthetic He I mean, I don't know. They had it. Uh, I know a A lawnmower somebody hit him with a lawnmower. Look at that right there. Yeah His father ran him over with a tractor. Yeah. Oh, and just put him in time out But yeah, he's fine. I don't think he has the best he has the best sense of humor, you know I'm just joking. Uh, I know both those guys super well and uh, they've been great like neighbors in uh in Nashville and um Kidrog Bobby. He's done a lot of nice stuff for me over the years and stuff like that and Includes me in things and we were just texting the other day. He's got a big heart, you know Yeah, well, he spoke very highly of you. He's a nice guy. I saw you were with Bill Lee too our governor. Yeah Yeah, I met him at the he did a Fireside chat with me about a year ago at the governor's conference and I really We uh, we really bonded. He's a he's a good guy and he works with both sides on the legislature. He's got Um a great relation and he's done a bunch of good stuff in this state. He's gotten you know, he's on top of Florida. I'd they got really good Snap waiver. So I think they've got probably one of the best snap wares the snap wares the food stamp waver. So you can't spend and food stamp dollars on uh, sodas Or candy, but they also have sugar content and they have uh, uh, a corn syrup content. Oh, here in Tennessee Uh, so I think they're the only state that has that now and they've also banned food dies I meant a couple of them and they're gonna be on the rest of them now and what did we find out with food dies? Like The food dies. We've now, you know, we've told the companies. They got to get rid of all 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 Uh, approved for new vegetable dies so that they can replace them with, you know, something healthy. So we did that through FDA We're working with the industry to make sure that they can do it, but they've been very very cooperative. Most of them about 40% of the industry, you know, came to us including the entire ice cream industry came to us and said we wanted to do this But, you know, help us so we um, 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 that Europeans don't allow it. Canada doesn't allow it Uh, their 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, you know, there's a kid 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 up the stream. That's crazy. I mean, but yeah, that yeah, some of it definitely seems bonkers and what did you say about fluoride? Uh, Tennessee has a law that has to whether the water district has to inform The public about it and 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 does relate it. So every um, milligram of fluoride that you had reduced your IQ more And um, it doesn't work systemically, you know, it was put in in the 40s And because it does help with tooth decay, but the effect is all topical And back then they didn't have fluoride toothpaste in a fluoride mouth wash. 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 Destroy it. So it's horrible for us. It's horrible and it destroys IQs I mean what do we if you have kids? What do you run them cavities or or you know, or I can't yeah, I'd rather have them have cavities I don't have holes in their teeth and holes in their ideas or whatever right But the uh european nations abandoned and there's been no increase in cavities. So uh, uh, it doesn't make any sense for us to be putting it in And yeah, this is the bill known as a Tennessee fluoride free water act prohibits public water systems and Tennessee from adding fluoride or any fluoride containing compounds that drink in water Intentive for human consumption and bands of 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's just it comes from the geology. So we're not adding more Right, we're not adding it Hey, dude Yeah, because wait, 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 Of screwed your parents send you to take a test. They give you a bottle of water and you're like, god, I don't know the chance now um But thank you. Thank you for 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 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 the yeah farm bill 809 The bill is sponsored by Representative rusty grills Would limit lawsuits if a user gets sick from a pesticide Under the proposed legislation as long as a product's label was approved by the environmental protection agency a person wouldn't be allowed to sue over the labeling So actually Sean Ryan the podcaster and John rich the musician they shared this online and on the day that it was going up for vote, I believe. Yeah, right here, Tennessee State politicians side with foreign pesticide companies over people dying of cancer. Ryan posted on X alongside a video speaking out against the bill as did musician John Rich. After the pushback representative, Grills took the bill off notice, which at least delayed the vote. It's unclear why that decision was made or whether Grills has plans to bring the bill back to this legislative session and bring up just just so we know who's doing is 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, 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. 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've got not a Hodgkin Simphoma 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 the same time. They had a laboratory retriever and the dog died. Both the couples were sick. We asked the jury for a billion dollars and they gave us 2.2 billion and they did that because we were able to show them documents that showed Monsanto knew of the danger and then worked with corrupt officials, a guy called Jess Rowland inside of EPA who was the head of the pesticide division. And 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 I was ghost written and also the head of the pesticide division they asked them the Monsanto asked them secretly. And now we have these emails to kill a study by another agency called ATSDR. And he said, "I can't kill it. That's not my agency. I can kill them in EPA but not outside." And they said, "You got it to it. We can't have this study afford." 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 that study. That show that it caused cancer. That show that it grew. It's insane. But it's at a contest level now that it's, that things like that are so prolific that now it's like there's awards for it. It seems baffling. There's been a ton of lawsuits about this, right? Like about pesticides, causing diseases and sickness in people, right? Or about this glyphosate, I think it's called? Yeah, glyphosate. There's been a ton of lawsuits, but they still don't have to take this product off of the shelf. So that's the craziest thing to me. Is that right? Well, you know, it's a problem because you have all the ro-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, it makes it all the cells explode and it destroys them. And so, you know, there's a future that we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel there. But right now, if you land a glyphosate outright, it would put out a business 80% of our farmers. Got it. Well, 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 HHS. Look for other alternatives and to find a, you know, front and off ramp because the farmers don't want to be using chemicals, anyway, they're very expensive. They know, you know, they have some of the highest cancer rates of any profession and farmers care about their land. They want to leave it for their kids. It also destroys the microbiome and the soil and that caused erosion. And so, it's not, you know, it's not a good long-term solution. You know, the issue is how do you transition off of it without putting farmers out of business? Here's that laser. Wow, that's unbelievable. Laser, weeding, robot kills 100,000 weeds per hour. And it also kills insects. You can program it to kill, you know, certain insects. And you know, that machine looks pretty, that machine probably caused a million dollars. But if you could have a couple of those run it at night through your farm, that'd be sick. Oh, yeah. It would be, it's a lot better than using chemical pesticides. So, this is going to be, you know, future, but we're not there yet. We're not there yet. Wow. It's just wild that we get stuck in. It's 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. We are like, this is just kind of where we are, you know? The agricultural community has been very, very supportive of the Mahaj and they're helping us transition away from ultra-price as food, which is really the biggest issue. That's what's causing all these chronic disease and kids. And farmers are going out of business. You know, farmers usually lose money seven out of ten years. Even when they're making money, they're making, you know, a lot of them are just making for their work hours minimum wage. And we're having a hard time finding young people who will go into farming. So, that is a crisis that, you know, we need to keep into consideration. And, you know, you have people at USDA, finally, who are, you know, really intense on solving this problem, but nobody wants any farmers going out of business. Got it. Whenever you became secretary, did it feel like you like, that now you're like on the inside? Like, did it, does it feel like you go behind this curtain and now you get to see this? Yeah. It does? Yeah. Do you have to sign an "India" to have the job? No. No. And I mean, we're doing the opposite of that. We're going to be, you know, this is the most transparent administration in history. I mean, there's no president who's done ever done three or four press conferences a day, like President Trump does, asking, answering any question people fire as a machine. But we 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 law so that people aren't going to be able to get free information requests immediately. Like what do you mean to freedom of information requests? Yeah. So if somebody wants a document from the government now, it could take six months, two years. And we're going to make it so that they can get it instantaneously. And that all of our documents are going to be public, except those that are shielded under the statute for, you know, for one reason or another. And the big issue that, you know, the big problem that we're dealing with is that there is, you know, that there are names and privacy issues and you have to redact those legally. We have to do that. And we can have to make sure we don't make any mistakes. So the AI is, you know, that's all working out now. We never, when you got in office, there was, you guys did like a big cut down on like a lot of the divisions and stuff like that. What was, I think you went from 20, something to 15 maybe 20, we had 82,000 employees and 20,000 left. And they left 20,000 left. Or did you guys make like cuts? Cause I just, you guys made like a bunch of cuts. There were buy out so that people who are at the end of their career could retire early. There were rifts where people were, like 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, um, 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 trajectories of that. So the purpose of NIA, the focus of NIA 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've spent, you know, in 2020 and 2019. Well, was there like a recalibrating there? 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 caught and there was like a kind of a, I don't know if it's called a moratorium or like a pause. There was a pause and every administration does that. You need to do a review and make sure that those research projects are not, you know, or torturing beagles or, you know, or doing ti or, and how do you decide that? Is it, do you decide or is it like, oh, we go through every single grant. We had big teams going through those grants and then with their tremendous, 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 in or that are not interoperable. Oh, it's the government, yeah, and we're changing that now so that, you know, we consolidated and we're making a more streamlined and efficient, but it's so that we can do the job better. So we can do better research and then the research, you know, was never replicated and which means that that's part of science that if somebody does a paper that makes it scientific hypothesis, you don't just accept that you get somebody to replicate it and see if they come up with the same result. And that was not happening. There was no virtue, no money spent on replication and because of that, there was huge incentives to cheat because the scientists, if they have a hypothesis and they do, they get a grant, maybe hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of dollars to prove that hypothesis. And then they, once they prove it, they get it published and that's how they advance their careers. Well, if they fail to prove it, if the science says what you were thinking is not true, then they can't get published. You should publish that too because that's science, you know, but it doesn't get published. So their careers are, you know, and endangered, it's hard for them to get the next grant. And so a lot of them add this incentive to cheat. So they have to win if they get it, if they get a hypothesis, is a null hypothesis. They don't get, you know, their whole future goes into the toilet, potentially. And so because they knew that study was never going to be replicated, nobody was going to check on them. There was an incentive for them to cheat and that must have been a pipeline just for companies then to just get, like, get like, it was a lot cited, a lot cited science or solo cited science that wasn't, yeah, I mean, I'll give you an example. It was a study done about 20 years ago on Amaloid Black and that as the cause of Alzheimer's. And that study came up and said, yeah, it's the cause of Alzheimer's. Then we spent billions of dollars doing six or eight hundred studies that followed that. And they all were, as it turned out, they were all cheating. And, you know, the ones that were many of them were cheating, but all of them were kind of confirmatory. And all of their hypothesis was cause Alzheimer's was ignored, put on their 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 the end, you know, we came in and this scandal was brewing, the head of Stanford University Medical School had to resign the dean because they knew it was going on because he was involved in publishing some of these fraudulent studies. And but they did it for 20 years because nobody ever had to really replicate those original studies. And that happens all the time and you go down these scientific dead ends and so now what Jay wants to do is to spend 20% of our budget on replications. Every study gets replicated and they go with Jay Botticara, who is the, yeah, I knew you were talking about him. And he was one of the guys who was censored during COVID. He was one of the top statisticians at Stanford. And he and a lot of other ones were, you know, were censored, were lost their jobs. Marty McCarrie, you know, all of his book. One of his favorite. 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 people that criticize this science. We had 10 people doing, you know, these beard administrative jobs. And now we're, we've cut that down to five, you know, 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, were, were, were renewed. Most of the ones are the ones that you guys seem 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. The one else has access to it. With the US 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. 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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/theo. Application times may vary, rates may vary. I saw you in your speech that you gave yesterday here in Tennessee saying that there's all kinds of temptation to cheat if you know you're not going to get caught. Have you seen a lot of that? I mean, the alloyed black is a really good example, yeah, we see it everywhere, we see it everywhere and medicine is 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, Marge Angle, one that ran the New England Journal 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 are in the Lancet, who still runs it, says the same thing, that the, you know, the journals spend those people running them. Well, what happens if they make huge amounts of money and they make money from advertising which is paid for pharmaceutical companies and through a scheme called preprints where the pharmaceutical company, Lancet Story, they pay for the journal about a drug that they're trying to promote, they pay the journal to print the story and then they get a preprint, so it's a very neat looking, you know, copy of their article with the cover sheet of the New England Journal of Medicine on it and then they distribute that to their pharmaceutical reps who are like, you know, former playboy models who go out and talk to the doctors and And they give that to the doctors and say they struggle. works. You know, do you want to have lunch? Yeah. And the doctors then start prescribing the drug and they think, Oh, well, it's legitimate because it was in the New England Journal of Medicine. But it is not. It's, you know, you can't believe what's in other journals because it's all propaganda for for a farm. So how do we get away from that? Like, what are you guys doing to combat this? Or to changes? Or can this change? Or is it just awareness? And then people have to take the responsibility? No, I mean, what we're doing is open source journals. We're going to have our own journals that, you know, that people can open source and publish. But you'll have the peer review published with it. So before you publish, you give it, you give that publication to a panel of experts who then read it themselves and criticize it. And the peer review now is secret. And then there is no raw data published. So nobody can go in and replicate it. So to the extent possible, sometimes you, 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, they all say this article sucks. It's got all these holes in it. And then the public will be able to read that. And doctors will be able to read it. And the regulators will be able to read it. And so it's basically open source. It's, you know, with crowdsourcing essentially. And it, you know, that's how you get credibility inside. Science doesn't come from consensus. It comes from debate. And, you know, you, that's why you remember when they were telling us during COVID, oh, trust the experts. That's not a thing in science. Trusting the experts is the opposite of science. It's not a function of science or democracy. It's a feature of religion. And it's a feature of totalitarianism and in science, you always question the expert. Yeah, you can't, there's not an expert in science, because it's like an evolving thing, right? Oh, you know, when I did the Monsanto case, is I was part of a, you know, big team. We had, and Cheryl came to my, to my trial, a couple, you know, a couple days she sat through and watched us try the case. And Monsanto had experts from Stanford, Yale, and Harvard, or 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 then round up does it 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 than the jury's work. And so there's experts on both sides of every debate. And a lot of them are paid to be experts. They're hired guns, they're mercenaries. And we call them by institutes, the one that worked for interest, the ones that work for industry. by institutes, that's great. But you know, so there's experts out there on by, we all have biases. Everybody's got a bias. Well, you want to do when you're, you know, when you're dealing with scientists, you want to expose those biases, you want to admit them and acknowledge them. And then you want it, the science to be able to stand on its own. And that was, that's the only way really to people that decides that 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, see like, you know, like the NIH, the EPA, like all it 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, we got, we 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 won't no longer. They used to be that they, that they paid for your medical treatment for your doctor's visit. But now they pay for the person who takes you to the doctor and they pay for home care and they pay for, you know, a person to come in and pay your bills, right? So they're, so there's all kinds of opportunities for fraud. And a doctor recently, you know, Oz told me this told us, he said, and there's a doctor in California that he visited and the doctor had a patient who was heroin addict. heroin addict was coming to see him four times a month for some kind of a treatment. And one day, he looked, the doctor looked out the door and saw his ex-wife waiting for him in the car. And the doctor said, Oh, are you back together with your ex-wife? And he said, No, I hate her guts. And he said, but she drives me because she gets paid $600 every time she drives me. And he said, I don't put you back together with your ex. We make $3,000 a month, you know, with her driving me this, then I driver to hers. Wow. And so there's all kinds of those opportunities for fraud. And, you know, we found a hotel that had literally every room and it was the headquarters for a nursing group. Where was that located? It was in California. God. And, you know, so they're all just PO 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 going into the Somali community for autism care. There were these phoney autism care houses. Yeah. And a lot of it was ending up with Al Shabab in Somalia. So hundreds of millions of dollar, billions of dollars were being stolen, shipped to Somalia to fund a terrorist group. And that's happening every day. Now we have the ability to catch them. How? How are you able to adjust that sort of thing now? Like what makes a 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 blighit blind eye at all the fraud. It was mainly going to blue states. And it was an economic generator. There's money pouring into the blue states. And they just said we're going to we know a lot of it's stolen 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 deck 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 tell us whether this guy who is who we're paying has been convicted of fraud before. And we shouldn't be paying them 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 say if just this year, tens of billions of dollars and only many fraud in Medicaid. And if they used the pay it under the Biden administration, the system was called pay and chase. So if they send in a fraudulent invoice, we even if we knew it was they 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 say if it tens of billions of dollars just this year and we're going to say hundreds of billions of over, you know, annually from now on. And that's because the AI is keeping track of that. AI can spot the fraud. Got it. And then with Medicare, with Medicaid, which is, you know, a joint state federal program, it's a little bit, we don't control the rails and the states control them. And so we need state cooperation. And the red states are cooperating with us, but the blue states don'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 a dose happened, right, when dose occurred when Elon was in or he was involved or hypothetically involved, that's what it seemed like just like to the regular. He was definitely involved. He was involved. Was that successful? Was that real? Like, what was the outcomes of that? Like, did that seem like a, were you guys working together with that? Like, what was that all about? I, you know, I think even Elon has said that there would have been better ways to do it. And that we, you know, going after the systemic what we're doing now is the, you know, these large thefts, you can cut a couple of thousand people and over the long run. It's just, you know, drops of water in the ocean. Yeah. 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 that things you were just talking about. about you mean? Yeah. That's going to help a lot. Yeah. Is those still active? Is that program still active? What were the outcomes of that? Well, the outcomes were that a lot of, you know, I couldn't make work force by 20%. But, you know, 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, you know, who were only there for a couple of months. That it might have been better to keep some of those people and change the culture. I see. So yeah, instead of more like a mowing, more like a pruning kind of thing, you mean. Yeah. Do you think America is sicker than ever these days? It is sicker. We're this 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 at mismanagement. Part of it was that. But the big part, and this is what CDC says, or this sickest country in the world, that the average American who died from COVID at 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 70 not up. Bring up a capital chart if you can. We have the, you know, we've dropped behind Europe by six years in lifespan, 10 years in some cases. And yet, our health outcomes are worse with highest maternal immunity. Highest maternal mortality. That means women dying in child birth in the developed world. We have the highest infant mortality. How could that be with the United States? And a lot of it is because of chronic disease. And then, you know, our diabetes rates. When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes over a juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50 year career. Today, 38% of American teens is diabetic or pre-diabetic. God, it was unknown, autism rates have gone from, yeah, less than one in 10,000 in 1970 to one in 31 today. Oh, yeah. You can throw a rock and hit an autistic kid in there. And California is one in every 19 kids, one in every 12.5 boys. And so this, 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 I have the reason. No. Why is the truth? Yeah. And oh, my God, bro. That's insane. Yeah. Why not? That should get people's attention. Bring that up. Is that true? Let me see if that's true. Bobby probably just uploaded this stat on the internet from his phone a second ago. But still, that's okay. That's how it works. 77% of American youth can't qualify for military service. And why? Because they have chronic disease. They have asthma. They have diabetes. They have, you know, they have their obese. One of those. But when my uncle was present, I was a 10-year-old kid. We spent zero on chronic disease in the country zero. Today, we spent 4.3 trillion a year. And it's about 40 cents out of every tax dollar that is paid by you. The federal government is now going to treat chronic disease. And it's unsustainable. And it's getting worse every year. Who is it? Do you find that it falls more than it's the responsibility of the individual? We're not taking care of ourselves. Or is it that we have a health system that is allowing, I don't want to just say foods and drugs, but allowing things into us that is not maintaining our natural health. I mean, the individuals have a responsibility, but the obesity, when I was a kid, 5% of children were obese, he had one kind of fat kid in your class. Yeah. And today is, you know, 15% is going overweight as a 40% adults, it's even higher. We should have a thick military than I think. But people did not get, Americans did not get obese because they're indolent or lazy or they don't want to do exercise. They got that way because they're being mass-poisoned. And they're being mass-poisoned because the government lied to them and it lied about the food. Oh, now 70% of the food that our kids eat is ultra-processed food and it's just poison. It's not food, it's just poison. And which agencies 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 McAry has changed that now. So how do we know that that's changed? Like how do we is like a look at the food pyramid? And they, you know, the food pyramid, when I came into office, we were supposed to publish this in January of last year. Oh, yeah, the last food pyramid, I still had vapes on it. So it was getting pretty bad. We're doing vapes now. You mean the food pyramid? Oh, the last one, yeah, the one that, yeah. Yeah, that's funny. I was like, this is getting bad. But the food pyramid, so when I came in, we were, the, I'm 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. Yeah. And that, but it was all driven by the commercial interests of the companies that controlled FDA. So when we came in, we, we went, we got the best nutritionists from the best universities in our country. We basically locked them in a room. We, we thought it would take a month, but it took about 11 months as they fought over every single item on this in the food pyramid. It took them 11 months to put this together. Yeah. Because you have to go over science, you know, what is broccoli? Right. How does it relate to how much protein should you eat? How much saturated fat should you eat? What's optimal? And so they had to go through tens of thousands of scientific papers to make sure that every recommendation that we made is based subtly on a foundation of gold standard science. So for this, this, so this for them to create the food pyramid, it took 11 months. Yeah. And then we flipped it over. So we flipped it over because the category of food that you should eat, you know, most is a broad category. It includes vegetables, it includes proteins, you know, salmon and steak. And most of this is for children, right? Well, no, this is good for everybody. I mean, most diabetes, I remember from like when I was a kid, you know, you would see it, you know? Yeah. Right. But I guess that's the first point you learn about it. 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 going to have 40 hours of nutrition in school, 80% of doctors say they do not feel competent to give nutrition advice. So what are they learning? They're learning pharmacology, right? They're learning the pill. They let everybody get sick from eating the food and then tell them the pill that will treat that sickness. Yeah. That's why you're so drugged in. And 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 and a Harvard doctor, Pauline, who is, who is cured schizophrenia with dietary change with keto diets. There's a paper that I didn't set up. Is that true? Yeah. Go ahead and look at, uh, cure schizophrenia with keto diets. Yeah. Well, I definitely noticed it with, when I'm fasting, I get, I'm pretty smart. Yeah, you get smarter, right? Yeah. Preliminary clinical findings, including case reports, a small trait suggests that ketogenic therapy may improve positive and negative symptoms, cognitive performance outcomes, and individual schizophrenia is back from disorders. I mean, I believe that so much of this is true, just like that so much of it is how we are operating. Um, it just feels like we've been stuck in such a place where we have a, like, you have, 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. Everybody's making money from us be in the sec. And 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 have said you trusted the commercials you're like this is great for you know is like and you believed that you know yeah I mean the way to change be human behavior is one get information out there that's real information the other thing that you have to do is you have to change the economic incentives and right now we have perverse incentives that reimburse doctors that you know that ensures pharmaceutical companies the doctors the hospitals are more making more money if you're sick the real drug rehabs if you come back if you come back if you relapse they make more money right they shouldn't be paid that way the insurance companies should pay them one lump sum and then follow that attic for the next two years and every time it comes back you've got to treat them for free and that will incentivize them to do better treatment you have to do treatment that works and the ones that can't do that will fail and the ones that can do it get better and better at it will do it you change the economic incentives you'll change human behavior and then you have to get the information to the individual and that's what we're doing we're doing we've met we've convened for the four hundred 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 all the what do you mean why not because they would the information block you they would make sure you couldn't get them and now we've got them all to agree they're going to stop the information blocking oh your medical records will be on your cell phone and that is great for you because if you live in Nashville and you travel to Los Angeles you can hit by a car you don't want to spend an hour in the emergency room with a clipboard making out you know one of those forms yeah 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 you know previous treatments etc yeah it is ridiculous if you 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 oh that they're in charge of it and then we're doing you know we've gotten now we've changed the prior authorization we've got 80% of the insurance industry together to eliminate all unnecessary prior authorization which is going to change them the 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 we were also but does that make it any more likely that they're going to cover it or does it just make it that you're gonna know it makes it so that you'll know and so the doctor will know there before you leave got it and a lot of the stress the prescription or whatever you need to do you'll at least know and you won't be you know sitting at home and then 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 you familiar with exactly and that's just make you the CEO of your own health they already are supposed to do that right it was a law that Trump has his first term but by never enforce it so none of the hospitals do it we've now passed new regulations that is going to punish them drag pony and way if they don't do it so they're all going to be done doing it by the end of this year and try to find a way to screw it around that though I wonder like are they well there it's not and it's so screwed up because if you go by an automobile and the guy tells you yeah but I'm not going to tell you the price laughed he bought it gets insane you beat you know and right now if you're pregnant in this country you could go nine months on the phone every day trying to figure out what the child breath is going to cause you in your local hospital and and not be able to do it yeah 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 mockup two days ago for for New York and it shows a map of Manhattan and a mile mountain around Manhattan and there's 30 hospitals and it shows the price of child bird at every hospital the lowest one is 1300 the highest 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 yeah gas station but you're going to be able to do the clean bathroom or whatever that clean bathroom is that one that was 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 a Easter but he was like a Easter bunny like impersonator 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 I can see you can look and find and right now there's no way they don't know if you're out the price of an MRI to you and but if you but if you call them and say okay I'm not going to come I've had experiences where they will call you back and then we'll tell for you a little bit yes but they're all playing that game and now they're not going to be able to do it any how soon is that going to be released it's going to be released very very soon the next couple of months all the hospitals now have to come online and start reporting and the ones that don't do it immediately we are going to have very very high fines for them so they're just going to be big in the center for them to start it aren't reporting but it also is going to drive down prices because why is there that absurd differential between 1322 thousand 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 having a shop but won't it be lobbyists that are aren't they're 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's 4,800 to 7,800 national generalist 10,000 to 15,000 yeah I mean why is that yeah it's just chaos it's chaos there's no market there yeah but I mean it it's unbelievable and this happens that 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 out to $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 full rest of the life into 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 uh uh price transparency but I think we're calling it trumparency really no I mean it's Trump maybe he would maybe that in Harvey you know uh that's hilarious though Trump's parents he dude oh it's opaque what does opaque mean actually look it up I'm afraid yeah so did I land that right or not somewhere in the middle it's halfway transparent yeah you go hey 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paid advertisement that's see that's one of the most important things that's something that 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 in obstructing any kind of change and you know part of the challenge of running an agency this size is to is to change that you know that institutional culture and you know it's you're only bringing in there's in a 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 their idealistic they want to do a good job the leadership has been very bad for so long that it's you know it's not allowed them to do what they want and you know we need to reignite that feeling of idealism do you feel good about it yeah i think we're doing a really good job i mean i think we've done more this year than any how the secretary has done in history that hh has just 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 tanker you have to keep hitting it and hitting with the tugboat and the bow and then ultimately it will start to turn and then you know you hit that you hit it just enough times that don't flip flip fast and things change i know before you leave you had there's a lot of like a stuff that's focused around addiction right what do you want to say about uh 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 the problem with addiction is that the cost of the addict you know we had had hHS were the fiduciary and the medical cost of the addict so we can look and say okay if we can cure you from addiction you know i have a cousin who you know Patrick Kennedy and who was in congress but he did he had 17 rehabs and he was telling me during that period of his life he was at the emergency room every two weeks and he had oh he had a 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 it and you know that you know oh yeah i get the so and he said in 15 years that he's been sober he's never been in the emergency room once and so hHS is able to look at those costs and those trajectories and all those collateral damage in the health care system the addicts costing elsewhere a lot more money with law enforcement with broken families with you know laws 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 laborer uh odd and hHS all the agents of the HHS together to look at that addict and then follow him over if 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 health care system is that it's everybody's been financial benefit to keep that addict sick sick because everybody's making money from him and and so and he don't have anybody who's accountable for the outcome and what you need to do is you know we're doing these pilot programs called street and eight different locales to figure out how to do this to bring all the agencies together or early interventions confront the addict on the street um get them out of crisis into treatment and out of treatment into you know rehab out of rehab into sober housing long term care help them find a job and to stabilize their lives and have one person responsible for that old trajectory amen yeah because when it goes piecemeal like that it's just like it's easy for people to just off 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 the paper is that I think that's not my business yeah yeah it's law enforcement that's somebody else well thank you I just I think it's amazing you care so much about that and uh yeah I just yeah for the the chance of 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'll believe in you and I just know you as a person and I know um this is a guy at a certain points in your life I think you just have to make choice like this is a guy I believe in right like for as much as you can believe in a human being you know like acceptable levels um who were some other uh like congressman 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 congresspeople who are incredible and they're 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 um Mark Wayne Mullins um uh the president isn't crazy about Rand Paul but Rand Paul has been really really good on a lot of my issues um and you know there's a lot of other ones too so you know what about Senator Hawley have you have you for me with him yeah yeah and he's great um you know I've had tremendous support from the Senate from the Republicans and the Democrats who've been my friend of my whole lifetime are you know it's just so tribal now that um people you know are not able to follow their conscience they need to they need to ask their handlers all that well they need to be part of that you know the the clash of tribal narratives and you know my family is the same way um you know I lost a lot of family and a lot of friends and you know the Democratic senators were all my friends uh Bernie was my friend and etc but now um they are you know they're just locked in if the if you have anything to a 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 then we're not you know we're we're locked in this very very polarized phase that is not good for our country um 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 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 there was some stuff that I asked him not to release and he's and now 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 were still alive on a completely different issue. But it seemed to me that it was, you know, that it was worth withholding a couple of these documents. The reason I knew a lot about it is because my daughter-in-law, Emma Ellis 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. That's wild. She, I met her. Yeah, you've met her. But, but so, no, nobody slipped to a nat kin and was like, no, it wasn't like that. Not on that issue. Got it. And napkin slipped to me on other issues. 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. So 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. That's what I'm meant to say. Yeah, if you had just like, if you had one thing to just tell just people, like, what would you tell them? I mean, I'd say eat real food. If it comes in a package, you probably should leave it in the package. 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. Hey, man. Cool, man. Thanks so much for hanging out to it. And congratulations. And, uh, yeah, keep fighting for us. We appreciate it. Thank you for your great to see you. You too, bud. [Music]