Transcript of #639 - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Hey, everybody. It's Theovon 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. 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. 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. 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 US 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.

Shine on me, and I will find a song I'll be singing. I love this.

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 over 40 years, right?

Yeah, 43 years. Wow. That's wild.

Yeah, that's where we met each other. At 7 AM meetings above the bank over there.

That was a good meeting. They shut those down during COVID.

I know. That was heartbreaking.

That was one of the most-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 Palestine's Playhouse, which now is burned down during during the fire, but it was a pirate group. For me, I said this when we came in and I said, I don't care what happens. I'm going to a meeting every day. I said, I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off a toilet seat. I know this disease will kill me. If I don't treat it, which means going For me, going to meetings every day, it's just bad for my life. So for me, it was survival. And then the opportunity to help another alcoholic, that's the secret sauce of the meetings. That's what keeps us all sober and keeps us from self-will.

Yeah. Well, yeah, you get reminded. 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 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. But when I go to meetings, it immediately fills that whole backlog in. But I have to go and 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 Teddy lost his leg, and both of them became ski racers. 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. That was interesting. He's interesting.

So he knows your cousin?

Yeah, he grew up with him.

They were in a special division or no, just normal division?

What did they call the Paralympics?

Paralympics. I didn't know Billy was a Paralympian. I know he's a great golfer. I mean, they're just They're a hilarious thing.

How does he go? Because 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.

Wow. His father ran him over with a tractor.

Yeah. Just put him in time out. But yeah, he's phenomenal. I don't think he breaks on it. 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 and things. And 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. 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 floor ride. They got really good Snap waiver. I think they've got probably one of the best Snap waiver. 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 did we finding out with food dyes?

The food dyes, we've now, 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 approved four new vegetable dyes so that they can replace them with something healthy. So we did that through FDA. We're working with the industry to make sure that they can do it, but they've been very 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. We're working very closely with them, and they're all getting rid of it. We should have gotten rid of it a long time ago. The Europeans don't allow it. Canada doesn't allow it. Other countries don't allow it. 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, 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, some of it definitely seems bonkers. What did you say about fluoride?

Tennessee has a law where the water district has to inform the public about it. Floride is crazy because we know it reduces IQ. There's no question. National Toxicology program has done a meta-analysis and it's dose-related. So every milligram of fluoride that you had reduce your IQ more. It doesn't work systemically. It was put in in the '40s because it does help with tooth decay, but the effect is all topical. Back then, they didn't They have fluoride toothpaste, they didn't have fluoride mouthwash. Now we do. The parents can get the fluoride for their kids. When you put it in systematically, it destroys your bone mass, it destroys your thyroid. It's horrible for us. It's horrible, and it destroys IQ. If you have kids, would you rather them cavities or lower IQ?

Yeah, I'd rather have them have cavities. I'd rather have holes in their teeth and holes in their ideas or whatever. Right.

European nations have banned it, and there has been no increase in cavities. It doesn't make any sense for us to be putting it in.

Yeah, this is the bill known as the Tennessee Floride 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. We don't have fluoride in our water here?

Well, there is natural fluoride in a lot of water. It comes from the geology.

But we're not adding Right.

We're not adding it.

Nice, dude. Yeah, because what if you're trying to think of something and 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, and 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 But this is what I was talking about here. This bill, it's Farm Bill 809. The bill is sponsored by Representative Rusty Grillz, 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. Actually, Sean Ryan, the podcaster, and John Rich, the musician, they shared this online on the day that it was going up for a 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.

Evidence from lawsuits, internal documents, and independent reports indicates that Monsanto 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 lawsuit 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 not a Hodgkins lymphoma from using Roundup. And then the second one, we won 89 million. The third one, we asked for a billion dollars from the jury. It was a couple that had both got it simultaneously. They were home gardeners, and their dog also got it at the same time. 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 that they had deliberately concealed the science, fixed the science. And now the big The big study that they used to prove safety has now been retracted.

I think I saw an article about that. They'd found emails that it was ghost written or something from the science?

Yeah, it was ghost written. Also, the head of the Pesticide Division, They asked him, the Monsanto asked them secretly, and now we have these emails, to kill a study by another agency called the ATSDR. He said, I can't kill it. That's not my agency. I can kill them in EPA, but not outside. They said, You got to do it. We can't have this study go forward. He said, Okay, I'm going to do it, but if I succeed, you got to give me a gold medal. 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 showed that it grew too much. 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. It seems baffling. There's been a ton of lawsuits about this, 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 shelves, so that's the craziest thing to me. Is that right?

Well, it's a problem because you All the rowcroppers are dependent on it right now. There's other technology that is emerging right now that actually, I looked at one yesterday. It's a a factor attachment that uses lasers to kill weeds. If they can make that affordable, particularly for smaller farmers, that will be the answer because you'll be able to... They can kill bugs and they can kill weeds. You You program this thing and it zaps the weeds with a laser. It makes all the cells explode and it destroys them. 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. We're dependent upon something that we know makes us sick.

Yeah, we are. We're doing a lot of work in the HHS look for other alternatives and to find an off-ramp because the farmers don't want to be using chemicals anyway. They're very expensive. They know they have some of the highest cancer rates of any profession. 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. 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 looks pretty… 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 It's a lot better than using chemical pesticides. So this is going to be the future.

But we're not there yet.

We're not there yet. Wow.

It's just wild that we get stuck in to something that makes us sick and we don't have a... 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 where we are.

The agricultural community has been very, very supportive of the Maha agenda, and they're helping us transition away from our process for this, which is really the biggest issue. That's what's causing all these chronic disease in kids. And farmers are going out of business. Farmers usually lose money seven out of 10 years. Even when they're making money, they're making 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 we We need to keep into consideration. You have people at USDA, finally, who are 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 like... That now you're on the inside? 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 NDA to have the job?

No. We're doing the opposite of that. This is the most transparent administration in history. There's no president who's ever done three or four press conferences a day like President Trump does, answering any question people 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, for sure. Then we are right now using AI to revolutionize the Freedom of Information Law so that People aren't going to be able to get Freedom of Information Requests immediately.

What do you mean a Freedom of Information Request? Yeah.

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. The big issue, the big problem that we're dealing What we're dealing with is that there are names and privacy issues, and you have to redact those. Legally, we have to do that, and we have to make sure we don't make any mistakes. The AI is, that's what we're working out When you got in an office, you guys did a big cut down of a lot of the divisions and stuff like that.

What was, I think you went from 20 something to 15, maybe?

We had 82,000 employees and 20,000 of them left.

And they left. 20,000 of them left? Or did you guys make cuts? Because I just know you guys made a bunch of cuts.

There were a bunch of cuts that were buyouts so that people who were at the end of their career could retire early. There were rifts where people who were very new We were let go. 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... We're changing the trajectory We saw that the purpose of NIA, the focus of NIH, is going to be figuring out why we're all so sick. Why is this chronic disease happening? What are the exposures that are causing it? What are the alternatives? How do we end it? We're shifting the focus, but the amount that we're spending on research is the same that we spent in 2020, 2019.

Was there a recalibrating there? Because I had a friend, Heather, who was working at UCLA. She was a researcher there. She said that during the DOGE period and stuff, a lot of their grants got cut, and there was a, I don't know if it's called a moratorium or a pause.

It 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 TI.

How do you decide that? Do you decide or is it like-We go through every single grant.

We had big teams going through those grants. Then there's tremendous ways. We had 40 communications departments. We had 40 different divisions studying addiction. We consolidated those. 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. 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. If somebody does a paper that makes it 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 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, but it doesn't get published. So their careers are an 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 prove it.

If the hypothesis is a null hypothesis, their whole future goes into the toilet, essentially. 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.

That must have been a pipeline just for companies then to just get like... It was lopsided science or solo-sided science that wasn't...

Yeah, I 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. That study came up and said, Yeah, it's the cause of Alzheimer's. Then we spent billions of dollars doing six or 800 studies that followed that. They all were, as it turned out, they were all cheating. The ones that were... Many of them were cheating, but all of were confirmatory, and all of their hypothesis about what caused Alzheimer's was ignored, put on their shelf. You couldn't get money for it because they said, We already know the answer. Then there were drugs developed, et cetera. 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. That happens all the time. 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. Jay who? Jay Batajara, who is the-Okay, yeah, I knew who you're talking about. 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 censored, were lost their jobs. Marty McCarry, who you know also- Yeah, I love his book. One of his book 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 de-politicize the science. We had 10 people doing Then these administrative jobs, and now we've got 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.

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.

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Unfortunately, he also had a life insurance policy because you want to be able to make sure that just tuition, childcare costs, a mortgage, if you have one, things like that, that your family will be able to go on with some comfort. 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/theo. That's E-T-H-O-S. 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.

Yeah, that's true in every system.

Yeah. Have you seen a lot of that?

I mean, the amyloid black is a really good example. Yeah, we see it everywhere. We see it everywhere. In medicine, it's everywhere. The journals are utterly corrupt because they're owned by the pharmaceutical companies. People read a journal and they think, Oh, this is science. But even Marsha Angle, the 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 are in Lancet, who still runs it, says the same thing at the journals.

And those are the people running Are they printing them?

What happens? They make huge amounts of money, and they make money from advertising, which is paid for pharmaceutical companies. And through a scheme called pre-prints, where the pharmaceutical company plants the story, they pay for the journal about a drug that they're trying to promote. They pay the journal to print the story, and then they get a preprint. It's a very neat-looking copy of their article with the cover sheet of the New England Journal of Medicine on it. Then they distribute that to their pharmaceutical reps who are former playboy models who go out and talk to the doctors, and they give that to the doctor and say, This drug works. Do you want to have lunch? 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. You can't believe what's in those journals because it's all propaganda for pharma.

How do we get away from that? 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 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. Before you publish, you give that publication to a panel of experts who then read it themselves and criticize it. The peer review now is secret. Then there's no raw data published, so nobody can go in and replicate it. 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. 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 It's basically open source. It's with crowdsourcing, essentially. That's how you get credibility in science. Science doesn't come from consensus. It comes from debate. That's why you remember when they were telling us during COVID, 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. It's a feature of totalitarianism. But 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?

When I did the Monsanto case, I was part of a big team. We had, and Sheryl came to my trial. A couple of days, she sat through and watched us try the case. Monsanto had experts from Stanford, Yale, and Harvard. They were three big experts. And they testified. And Sheryl said to me at the end of the second day, she said, Why are you guys even here? These guys are... This science is very clear that Monsanto and Roundup doesn't cause cancer. And I said, Just wait. And then our experts went on, and they were from Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and they said the opposite, and were much more convincing, and the juries were convinced. And so there's experts on both sides of every debate, and a lot of them are paid to be experts. They're hired guns, they're mercenaries. And we call them biostitudes, the one that worked for the ones that work for industry.

Biostitudes, that's great.

But there's Experts have their own bias. We all have biases. Everybody's got a bias. What you want to do 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. That's the only way, really, to de-politicize it as best we can.

What were some of the biggest cases of fraud? When you got in there and got behind the curtain and see the NIH, the EPA, just see what's going on back there. What were some of the biggest cases of fraud that you found?

I mean, the biggest cases are we got between Medicaid and Medicare, there's about 100 billion stolen every year. 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 one of the problems is that that's a systemic problem is that Medicaid and Medicare 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. There's all kinds of opportunities for fraud. A doctor recently, Oz told me this, told Oz, he said there was a doctor in California that he visited, and the doctor had a patient who was a heroin addict. Heroin One addict was coming to see him four times a month for some a treatment. One day, the doctor looked out the door and saw his ex-wife waiting for him in the car. The doctor said, Oh, are you back together with your ex-wife? He said, No, I hate her guts. He said, But she drives me because she gets paid $600 every time she drives me.

Wow.

That will 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. Wow. There's all kinds of those opportunities for fraud. 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. They're all just PO boxes. They're not actually doing any nursing care. No. They're just collecting money. As we now know, a lot of the money that was going into the Somali community for autism care, there were these phony autism carehouses. A lot of it was ending up with Al Shabbat in Somalia. 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 are you able to adjust that thing now? What makes it different now?

Because first of all, under the Biden administration, I don't want to get superpartisan, 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 estates, 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. What we've done now is with Medicare, we control Medicare. The states control a lot of Medicaid, so it's a little harder for us to detect fraud there. They started out with Medicare. We're using AI, and we're using AI which can detect the fraud. It can tell us whether this guy who we're paying has been convicted of fraud before, and we shouldn't be paying them again. It will be telling us every aspect of his business that we need to know to understand whether it's fraudulent. We're going to save just this year tens of billions of dollars in eliminating fraud in Medicaid. They used to pay it under the Biden administration. The system was called Pay and Chase. If they sent in a fraudulent invoice, we Even if 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, so they never covered anything.

Oh, I see.

Now, we're not going to pay them anymore. If they're fraudulent, 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 annually from now on.

And that's because the AI is keeping track of that?

The AI can spot the fraud. Got it. Then with Medicaid, which is a joint state federal program, we don't control the rails, and the states control them. We need state cooperation, and the red states are cooperating with us, but the blue states still won't cooperate. That's going to take some time. Then there's categories that are much easier for us to control, like medical 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, when Doge occurred, when Elon was in or he was involved or hypothetically involved, that's what it seemed like just to the regular person.

He was definitely involved.

He was involved. Was that successful? Was that real? What was the outcome of that? Did that seem like a... Were you guys working together with that? What was that all about?

I think even Elon has said that there would have been better ways to do it. Going after the systemic, what we're doing now, these large thefts, you can cut a couple of thousand people, and over the long run, it's just drops of water in the ocean. 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? Is that program still active? What were the outcomes of that?

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

I see. So yeah, instead of more of a mowing, more of a pruning thing, you mean?

Yeah.

Do you think America is sicker than ever these days?

It is sicker. We're the sickest country in the We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world. That's one of the reasons during COVID, we had 19% of the COVID deaths in our country, and we only have 4. 2% of the world's population. The question is, why did America do worse than any country in the world in 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. 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. We need to get Americans healthy. We need to end the chronic disease epidemic. Right now, we spend 2-3 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 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 maternity Immunity, our highest maternal mortality. That means women dying in childbirth. In the developed world, we have the highest infant mortality. How could that be with the United States? And a lot of it is because of chronic disease. And then our diabetes diabetes rates. When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50-year career. Today, 38% of American teens is diabetic or prediabetic. God. It's unknown. Autism rates have gone from 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 anywhere.

California is one in every 19 kids, one in every 12. 5 boys. The cost to our country, 77% of American kids can't qualify for military service. How many %? 77% cannot get into the military because of health reason. No. What? That is the truth. Oh my God, bro.

That's insane.

Yeah. 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. Why?

Because they have chronic disease. They have asthma, they have diabetes, they're obese. I'm one of those. But when my uncle was present, 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. The federal government is now going to treat chronic disease, and it's unsustainable, and it's getting worse every year.

Do you find that it falls more on it's the responsibility of the individual, we're not taking care of ourselves, or is it that we have a health system that is allowing, I don't want to just say foods and drugs, but allowing things into us that is not maintaining our natural health?

I mean, individuals have a responsibility, but you'll be See, when I was a kid, 5% of children were obese.

Yeah, you had one fat kid in your class. Yeah.

Today, it's 15%, it's going. Overweight is 40%, adults, it's even higher.

We should 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. They're being mad as poison because the government lied to them and it lied about the food. 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.

Which agency is allowed that? The EPA puts labels like the FDA. Do you feel like that's been one of the most compromised agencies?

Yeah, it was owned by big pharma and big food. Marty McCarry has changed that now.

How do we know that that's changed? How do we as like a...

Look at the food pyramid. 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 still had vapes on it, so it was getting pretty bad.

We're doing vapes now. You mean the food pyramid?

The last one, yeah. That's funny. I was like, this is getting bad.

The food pyramid. When I came in, the Biden administration had prepared new dietary guidelines, and they were 453 pages long, and they were completely driven by the same mercantile impulses that put 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. 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 a vitamin on this in the food pyramid.

It took them 11 months to put this together?

Yeah, because you have to go over science. What is broccoli? How does it relate to how much protein should you eat? How much saturated fat should you eat? What's optimal? 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.

For them to create the food pyramid, it took 11 months.

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

Most of this is for children, right?

Well, no, this is good for everybody. I mean, most diabetes-I remember from when I was a kid, you would see it.

Yeah, right. But I guess that's the first point you learn about it.

That's why we're all so screwed up. But most diabetes can be cured through diet. The doctors don't know this because they don't take... Most of them aren't taking nutrition in medical school. 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 % of doctors say they do not feel competent to give nutrition advice. So what are they learning? They're learning pharmacology. They're learning the pill. Let everybody get sick from eating the food and then tell them the pill that will treat that sickness.

At that point, you're a drug dealer.

You can get rid of the diagnosis. Not only that, but now there's really clear science that you can get rid of mental health diagnosis. That food can cure mental health problems. There's a doctor at Harvard, Dr. Paulin, who has cured schizophrenia with dietary change, with keto diets. There's a paper that- That is it.

Is that true?

Yeah. Go ahead and look it up.

Cure Schizophrenia with keto diets? Yeah. Well, I definitely notice it when I'm fasting, I'm pretty smart.

Yeah, you get smarter, right? Yeah.

Preliminary clinical findings, including case reports of small traits, suggests that ketogenic therapy may improve positive and negative symptoms, cognitive performance outcomes in individual schizophrenia spectrum disorders. I believe that so much of this is true, just that so much of it is how we are operating. It just feels like we've been stuck in such a place where you have a food industry that doesn't care if you're healthy, and then you have a healthcare industry that doesn't care if you get well.

Everybody's making money from us being sick. I'll say one other thing about this. 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 attention facility dropped by 75%. Usually, the violence dropped by 40 or 50%. It caused depression, it caused anxiety, these foods. If your kid has anxiety, look at what they're eating. You can change that in many cases by changing their diet and getting them to eat real food.

How do you get the everyday person then to adjust their psychology or their thought about taking more of an interest in themselves? Because I think you should just be you trusted the commercials. You're like, This is great for you. And you believed that.

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. Right now, we have perverse incentives that reimburse doctors, that The 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 got to treat him for free. And that will incentivize them to-To do better treatment. Yeah, to do treatment that works. And the ones If you can't do that, we'll fail. And the ones that can do it, that get better and better at it, we'll do it. You change the economic incentives, you'll change human behavior, and then you have to get the information to the individual. And that's what we're doing. We've 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 it.

What do you mean? Why not?

Because they would information block you. They would make sure you couldn't get them. 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. 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.

It is ridiculous. You have to do that all the time.

Right. 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, now we've changed the prior authorisation. We've got 80% of the insurance industry together to eliminate all unnecessary prior authorization, which is going to change the experience that every American has with the healthcare system. When you go to a doctor, he says you need a knee surgery, you may wait six months for your insurance company to approve it. You can't do anything about it. 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's going to dramatically change. We are 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 going to know? It makes it so that you'll 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.

Power to the patients. Are you familiar with that?

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 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 in a draconian way if they don't do it. So they're all going to be doing it by the end of this year.

Are they going to try to find a way to skirt around that, though? I wonder?

Like, are they-It's No, and it's so screwed up because if you go buy an automobile and the guy tells you, Yeah, but I'm not going to tell you the price until after you bought it.

It's insane.

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. We are bound to go online with a system that will make all procedures visible to every patient. I actually looked at the mockup two days ago for New York, and it shows a map of Manhattan and a mile around Manhattan, and there's 30 hospitals It shows the price of child bird at every hospital. The lowest one is 1,300. The highest is 2,000. 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 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. They lie on there. Some of them are at rest areas, too. I got a call stood by a guy who was in a, I I guess he was like an Easter Bunny, like in person or whatever. Anyway, whatever. Good to be here today. You're telling me that that's going to be a real thing. That's going to be available to us on our phone. Say if I need to get an MRI, I can look online.

You can look and find. Right now, there's no way that you can figure out the price of it.

And they'll lie to you. But if you call them and say, okay, I'm not going to come. I've had experiences where they will call you back and then we'll offer you a lower-I don't tell you.

Yes. They're all playing that game, and now they're not going to be able to do it anymore.

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. There's going to be big incentive for them to start it. It's not reporting, but it also is going to drive down prices because why is there that absurd differential between 1,322,000?

It's just because we don't know.

Because we don't know. 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 aren't there lobbyists just fighting you? I mean, right here, it says, Here's compiled a list of example of hospitals and childbirth costs in Nashville based on available self-pay cash bundles. Ascension St. Thomas is 4,800 to 7,800. National General is 10,000 to 15,000. Yeah, I mean, why is it?

It'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 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 aspirin.

Or they'll say to you, If you want, you can You spend an extra day here. You look sick. You look like you could use the rest. And you'll say, I'll do that. And then you get $100,000 bill.

That's crazy. Yeah, and they only have fluorescent lights.

You could have gone to the Four Seasons.

Yeah, for four years at that rate. That's actually going to come into play?

Yeah, that will be in play.

What's that going to be called? How will we access it?

It's called Price Transparency. I think we're calling it Trumparency.

Really?

No.

I mean, if Trump named it, he would. He would name it that in a heartbeat. That's hilarious, though. Trumparency, dude. It's opaque. What does opaque mean, actually? Look it up. I don't know if I land it.

Opake. It's transparent.

Did I land that right or not? It was somewhere in the middle.

It's halfway transparent.

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Well, there were a lot of people in the agency who were obstructing any change. Part of the challenge of running an agency this size is to change the institutional culture. You're only bringing in, there's 82,000 people. We only have 150 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 leadership has been very bad for so long that it's not allowed them to do what they want. 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 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. I think we're dramatically the changing the relationship between Americans and their health care system. But it's like turning a a giant oil tanker. You have to keep hitting it and hitting with the tugboat in the bow. Then ultimately it will start to turn, and then you hit it just enough times that don't flip fast.

Things change. I know before you leave, you had there's a lot of stuff that's focused around addiction, What do you want to say about where do you think that we're headed with that? Some of the new things that you guys are going to try to implement, like with part of your new program. 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?

The problem with addiction is that the costs of the addict, we at HHS, we're the fiduciary, the medical costs of the addict. We can look and say, Okay, if we can cure you from addiction. I have a cousin, Patrick Kennedy, who was in Congress, but he had 17 rehabs. He was telling me during that period of his life, he was at the emergency room every two weeks, and he had an irritated bowel syndrome, and he had contusions, and he had all of these other illnesses that he didn't even associate with addiction, but they were all associated with it. You know that.

Oh, yeah, it gets deep.

He said in 15 years that he's been sober, he's never been to the emergency room once. 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 lost jobs and inefficiencies, and those aren't internalized anywhere. What we're trying to do is bring together all of the agencies, the VA, labor, HUD, and all the agencies of the HHS together to look at that attic and then follow them 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 health care system is that it's everybody's financial benefit to keep that addict sick, because everybody's making money from them. And you don't have anybody who's accountable for the outcome. And what you need to do is we're doing these pilot programs called Street and eight different locales to figure out how to do this, to bring all the agencies together, do early interventions, confront the addict on the street, get them out of crisis into treatment, out of treatment into rehab, out of rehab into sober housing, long-term care, help them find a job and to stabilize their lives, and have one person who's responsible for that whole trajectory.

Amen.

Yeah, because when it goes peace You know what I mean? When you're in a meal like that, it's just like it's easy for people to just-And they hand them off, and then everybody checks the boxes.

I found him a house. Okay, he's still shooting up. He's pulling the copper rod, piping out to pay for his attic. That's not my business. That's law enforcement. That's somebody else.

Well, thank you. I think it's amazing you care so much about that. For the chance that people can get well and change their lives. Before you go, Bobby, you and I have been friends, and I've always trusted you, and I believe in you, and I just know you as a person, and I know this is a guy. At certain points in your life, I think you just have to make choice like, This is a guy I believe in, right? For as much as you can believe in a human being, acceptable levels. Who are some other congressmen and senators on either side of the aisle that you believe that regular people like me can trust?

There's a ton of congress people who are incredible, and There are actually too many to even name, to start naming, because there's so many good ones. But in the Senate, Ron Johnson, who you know, is fantastic. Roger Marshall from Kansas is fantastic. Mark Wayne Mullins. The President isn't crazy about Rand Paul, but Rand Paul has been really good on a lot of my issues. There's a lot of other ones, too.

What about Senator Hawley? Are you familiar with him?

Yeah, he's great. I've had tremendous support from the Republicans Senate. The Democrats, who 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 It would be part of the clash of tribal narratives. My family is the same way. I lost a lot of family and a lot of friends. The Democratic senators were all my friends. Bernie was my friend, et cetera. But now they're just locked in. If you have anything to with Trump, you're demonized and vilified. Then like President Trump says, he said, If I get cancer, they'd still find something wrong with me. And I think that's true. 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. He had more legislation under his name than any senator in history. 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. We're locked in this deadlock, and it's troubling.

But it's just the reality of where we are.

Whenever you got behind the curtain, was there any more information for you there about any of the assassination attempts that had happened with your family or anything like that?

No.

I mean, my-Did they give you any more unredacted statements? 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 said, No, I'm releasing all of it. The reason I didn't want it released is because 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 worth withholding a couple of these documents. The reason I knew a lot about it is because my daughter-in-law, Amorellis Fox Kennedy, ran my campaign is now the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and she's the Chief of National Intelligence at OMB. She was given the responsibility by President Trump of releasing all the JFK files. She's been thinking about this for years. She was in the CIA.

That's wild. I met her.

Yeah, you've met her.

But so no, nobody slipped you napkin and was like, This is who did it. It wasn't like that?

Not on that issue.

Got it.

I had napkins slipped 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. 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 always remind me of just to be resilient. So thank you. That's what I meant to say. If you had one thing to just tell people, what would you tell them?

I'd say eat real food. If it comes in a package, you probably should leave it in the package. But if it comes from the ground, if it comes from the water, if it comes from the air, that's going to be good for you. And food is medicine. You can heal yourself with a good diet.

Amen. Cool, man. Thanks so much for hanging out, dude, and congratulations. Keep fighting for us. We appreciate it.

Thank you, Theo. It was great to see you.

You too, bud.

Now I'm just floating on the breeze, and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must be cornerstone. But when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones. It's going to take.