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第 388 期·中文精讀

小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪：中情局、權力、腐敗、戰爭、自由與意義

Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning

肯尼迪家族後人談中情局在美國政治中的角色、權力與腐敗、戰爭的代價以及自由的意義。

小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪··官方文稿·精讀約 1.8 萬字 · 閱讀 40 分鐘
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中文精讀由 AI 基於原始訪談改寫，非官方翻譯，可能存在偏差或錯誤；表述以原音訊與官方文稿為準。說明

1962 年 10 月，古巴導彈危機最緊張的那幾天，美國法警來到小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪（Robert F. Kennedy Jr）家門口，準備把孩子們送往弗吉尼亞藍嶺山脈深處的一座地下城。那裡有麥當勞，有能容納整個聯邦政府及其家屬的全套設施。八歲的他非常興奮，因為終於能看到學校防災演習裡反覆提到的那個地方。

父親從白宮打來電話，讓他別去。理由是：你們要是從學校消失，鄰居會恐慌，我需要你做個好士兵，照常上課。掛電話之前，父親還說了另一句話，他記了六十年。如果真打核戰，死在死人堆裡比活著更好。

他當時不信。他已經替自己想好了在廢墟里活下去的辦法，抓小龍蝦，烤泥狗子，什麼都能幹。

這是 Lex Fridman 播客第 388 期，錄製日期 2023 年 7 月 4 日，美國獨立日。對話持續兩個半小時，從自由的定義談到卡繆的西西弗斯，從烏克蘭戰場談到中情局，從大型製藥談到疫苗爭議，最後落在上帝、成癮，以及每天早上要不要疊被子。

把它當成一篇競選訪談來讀會浪費。它更像一個人用六十九年時間，把家族記憶、解密檔案、法庭卷宗和個人救贖縫在一起的世界觀自述。有些段落嚴密得讓人點頭，有些段落明顯站不住，Lex 在節目裡幾次當場頂回去。下面挑最值得細讀的部分。

自由要用每一代人的血來續費

Lex 引了 Hunter S. Thompson 那句話：自由是一種如果不被使用就會死去的東西。

Kennedy 同意，然後給出自己的定義。自由不意味著混亂，也不意味著無政府。它必須伴隨自我約束（self restraint），才能真正兌現承諾。落到實處，自由是人發揮和實現創造能量的能力，儘可能少受政府限制。

他接著搬出傑斐遜那句著名的話：自由之樹必須用每一代人的血來澆灌。他的解讀是，我們沒法靠美國革命的餘蔭過日子。那一代人死了兩萬五千到七萬人，交出生命、財產、地位，換來權利法案。權利法案簽署的那一刻，社會內部就有力量開始一點點侵蝕它，這在每一代都會發生。守住這些自由，是每一代人的義務，沒法外包，也沒法繼承。

這一段是他整場對話的底層邏輯。制度不會自動執行，每一代人都得重新付賬。

Lex 追問卡繆那句“對付一個不自由的世界，唯一的方式是讓自己變得絕對自由，以至於你的存在本身就是一種反抗”。Kennedy 把卡繆和斯多葛學派放在一起讀。世界是荒誕的，活著這個任務本身就無法完成，人類能回敬神明的唯一方式，是擁抱它、享受它、盡力做好它。

《西西弗斯神話》最後一句，是卡繆想象西西弗斯面帶微笑。Kennedy 的解釋很樸素。他的任務無法完成，但他把肩膀頂在石頭上，所以他是個快樂的人。快樂來自頂著石頭這個動作，跟石頭最終有沒有停在坡頂沒有關係。這個意象在訪談最後還會回來。

父親留給他的那道題

Kennedy 出生在二戰結束九年後。他那一代美國人的共識是，德國人身上有某種問題，特別容易接受煽動家，特別容易把殘忍工業化，特別容易跟著一個強人走向深淵。

他父親不同意。羅伯特·肯尼迪的說法是，這跟德國這個民族沒關係，同樣的事會發生在我們所有人身上，我們離野蠻只有幾英寸。讓人保持安全的只有制度和憲法，天性靠不住，必須被約束。

然後是他從小被問的那道題。如果安妮·弗蘭克來敲你家的門，你是藏她的那類人，還是把她交出去的那類人。

所有孩子都會說當然藏。可這個問題一直懸在他腦子裡。如果美國真的出現極權體制，他父親認為完全可能，那我會是抵抗的那個，還是順從的那個。我會不會是那個站在火車站，看見人被押上列車，然後低下頭假裝沒看見的人。因為談論它會毀掉我的事業、我的自由，甚至我的命。

我們都有能力欺騙自己。我們都傾向於用自己的意圖，而不是自己的行動來評判自己。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

Lex 在這裡補了一句很誠實的話。我們大多數人都希望相信自己會抵抗，現實是多數人不會。

這段的重要性在於，它給後面所有議題設了一個前提。Kennedy 不相信人性本善，也不相信制度可以一勞永逸。他相信的是一套需要每天重新維護的東西，靠一代又一代人做具體的選擇來維持。這套前提既讓他對權力保持警惕，也讓他在某些議題上過度懷疑官方敘事。

好奇心救了世界一次

傑奎琳·布維爾（Jacqueline Bouvier）還沒成為肯尼迪夫人時，是報社記者，有一個做人物短訪的專欄。她採訪當時還是參議員的約翰·肯尼迪，問他覺得自己最強的品質是什麼。她以為他會說勇氣。他是戰爭英雄，是唯一獲得紫心勳章的美國總統，還寫過《當仁不讓》（Profiles in Courage）拿過普利策獎，那本書講的正是政客在仕途受損時堅持原則的案例。

他回答的是好奇心。

Kennedy 認為這個回答精確概括了他叔叔的政治能力。好奇心讓他能把腳放進對手的鞋子裡。他反覆說，要有和平，就必須能站在對手的位置上理解對方的行為和處境，理解他為什麼這麼做，而不只是他做了什麼。

這條能力在豬灣事件裡救了他一次。中情局和軍方要他派埃塞克斯號航母進去，他上任才兩個月，說了不。他把自己放進卡斯特羅和赫魯曉夫的位置上，判斷一定有別的解法。

古巴導彈危機期間，執行委員會（EXCOM）十三個人裡有十一個主張轟炸和入侵。站在總統這邊的只有傑克、他父親和國防部長麥克納馬拉。他們透過大使多勃雷寧（Anatoly Dobrynin）和赫魯曉夫達成秘密交易：蘇聯撤走古巴的導彈，美國在六個月內撤走部署在土耳其的朱庇特導彈。條件是赫魯曉夫不能對外透露這個交易，一旦走漏訊息，協議作廢。

Kennedy 強調，這個決定救了世界。做出決定的兩個人，都親眼見過戰爭。肯尼迪的魚雷艇被日本驅逐艦切成兩半，三個船員死了，一個重度燒傷，他用牙咬著救生帶把人拖了六英里，在島上躲了十天。赫魯曉夫經歷過斯大林格勒，那是二十世紀地球上最慘的地方之一，人吃狗、吃貓、吃鞋皮，成百上千地餓死。

艾森豪威爾有句話，發動第三次世界大戰的不會是軍人，因為真正見過戰爭的人知道那有多糟。

這一段裡有個容易被跳過的細節。中情局當時對赫魯曉夫幾乎一無所知。蘭利有內鬼，中情局在克里姆林宮發展的每一個間諜都立刻被處死。他們沒有眼睛，只能把克里姆林宮看成一個鐵板一塊的怪物，跟今天看普京的方式一模一樣。

真實情況是，赫魯曉夫和他的軍方、情報系統之間也有巨大分歧。他和肯尼迪都是被一群想打仗的人圍著、獨自抵抗的那兩個人，兩邊都不知道對方也在抵抗。

更讓人後背發涼的是三十年後哈瓦那會議上才公開的事實。當時核彈頭已經就位，發射授權下放到了每個發射組指揮官手上。六十個人，任何一個人覺得受到攻擊，就有權按下按鈕。Kennedy 說，你只能相信其中至少有一個會按下。

軍方當時給出的戰爭預判是，三千萬美國人死亡，但我們能殺死一億三千萬蘇聯人，所以我們贏。肯尼迪後來對助手說，那些胸前掛滿勳章的將軍根本不在乎，因為戰爭之後世界由他們掌管。

烏克蘭：一條可查的時間線，和一個有爭議的結論

Lex 把 empathy 這個方法用到當下，問俄羅斯為什麼在 2022 年 2 月入侵烏克蘭。

Kennedy 的開場是讓步。普京本可以避免這場戰爭，入侵是非法的、不必要的、殘暴的。他緊接著轉向另一面，把普京描繪成一個瘋狂的、想恢復蘇聯帝國的漫畫反派，無助於理解現實。

他給出的時間線大致是這樣。1990 年，戈爾巴喬夫從東德撤走四十萬蘇軍，對布什開出條件：你可以讓統一的德國留在北約，但要承諾北約不向東擴一英寸。國務卿詹姆斯·貝克（James Baker）的回答是，我們不會向東移動一英寸。1997 年，布熱津斯基（Zbigniew Brzezinski）推出一份方案，把北約向東推進一千英里，吸納十四個國家，直抵俄羅斯邊境。喬治·凱南（George Kennan）當時公開反對，說這是瘋了，會激起俄羅斯的暴力反應。時任國防部長威廉·佩裡（William Perry）威脅辭職。時任駐蘇大使、現任中情局局長威廉·伯恩斯（William Burns）說，把北約推進烏克蘭是俄羅斯的紅線，他們無法接受。美國隨後在羅馬尼亞和波蘭部署了可攜帶核彈頭的導彈系統，單方面退出了兩個中程核導彈條約。

他的類比很直接。如果墨西哥允許中國或俄羅斯在其邊境部署導彈系統，然後殺死了十萬多美國僑民，我們會直接出兵。

他還提到 2014 年美國參與支援的烏克蘭政變，提到頓巴斯地區以九十比十投票脫離時普京拒絕接收，堅持讓烏克蘭保持完整、但要求籤署明斯克協議，提到 2022 年 4 月澤連斯基和普京已草簽和平協議、鮑里斯·約翰遜飛到基輔把它攪黃。

然後是兩份原話。拜登被問為什麼在烏克蘭，回答是推翻普京。國防部長奧斯汀 2022 年 4 月說，要削弱俄羅斯的作戰能力，耗盡俄軍，讓他們無法在世界其他地方作戰。

人道主義任務這個說法經不起對照。我們被告知的版本也經不起對照。擺在面前的是一場消耗戰，設計目的是把這個小國變成絞肉機，用烏克蘭青年的精華去推進白宮裡某些人的地緣政治野心。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

Lex 在這裡做了整場對話裡最紮實的一次反駁。他說自己去過烏克蘭，2022 年 8 月的赫爾松，士氣極高，所有人都以能為國而戰為榮，這場戰爭讓烏克蘭人團結起來，明白了什麼叫“我是烏克蘭人”。

Kennedy 承認這一點，還說他的兒子正是被烏克蘭人的勇氣感召才去參戰的。他認為這恰恰讓整件事更悲劇。本來有很多結束戰爭的機會，烏克蘭人也想結束它。澤連斯基 2019 年以七成得票當選，競選綱領就是和平、籤明斯克協議，上任後突然轉向。他猜測是國內極端民族主義者的威脅，加上維多利亞·紐蘭（Victoria Nuland）這類新保守派的施壓。

關於戰場判斷，他引用了幾組數字。俄烏傷亡比七比一，俄軍火炮對北約力量十比一，烏克蘭特種部隊指揮官四個月前說他的部隊八成六陣亡或受傷、無法重建。烏克蘭在用強徵隊填戰線，適齡男性在想盡辦法出境。

認為烏克蘭能在一場戰爭中打敗俄羅斯，就像認為墨西哥能打敗美國。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

他對普里戈任（Prigozhin）兵變的解讀也一樣。瓦格納兩萬人裡只有四千人跟他走，很快被攔下，俄羅斯軍方、寡頭、政治系統沒有一個人支援他。美國媒體告訴你的卻是普京末日的開始。

這些判斷裡有可核實的事實，有合理的歷史脈絡，也有明顯被立場牽引的選擇性敘述。可他在節目裡補了一句應該被單獨拎出來的話。這並不意味著要完全放下戒備，而是像肯尼迪總統那樣一步一步來，先單方面降低敵意，看對方是否對等回應。

把一個有核國家逼到牆角

Lex 問，權力導致腐敗，絕對權力絕對腐敗，普京掌權二十多年，你覺得他被腐蝕了嗎。

Kennedy 的回答分兩層。第一層，從我能看到的證據看，他是個會殺人的，會毒殺敵人，面對這些指控的反應是笑一笑帶過。他的政權裡當然有腐敗。

第二層：

但改變俄羅斯政府不在我們職責範圍內。任何認為在俄羅斯搞政權更迭是好主意的人，我覺得都是不負責任的。俄羅斯手裡的核武器比我們多。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

他提到普京那句“我們不會活在一個沒有俄羅斯的世界裡”，說這句話講得很清楚，他講的是他自己，而他手放在一個能給整個星球帶來末日審判的按鈕上。

然後是那段被反覆引用的表態。

我們為什麼要去招惹這個。改變那個政權不該由我們來做。我們應該和俄羅斯人交朋友，而不是把他當敵人。現在我們把他推進了中國的陣營，這對我們國家不是好事。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

還有一句值得單獨劃出來。我們現在做的這些，看起來一點也沒有削弱普京。俄國民調顯示他的支援率接近九成，民眾支援這場戰爭。Kennedy 承認民調有侷限，但趨勢是一致的。

他提到看到林賽·格雷厄姆（Lindsey Graham）在電視上說，只要能殺俄羅斯人，我們的錢就花得值。他的回應是，那些是別人的孩子，我們應該對他們有同情。這場戰爭不該打，應該透過談判和外交解決。

一個原本不該存在的機構

Lex 把話題拉回 1963 年，問如果中情局真的參與刺殺，它怎麼可能積累這麼大的權力，是個別人，還是整個機構。

Kennedy 的回答很清楚。整個機構並不腐敗。他的兒媳在中情局秘密行動部門工作了一輩子，在中東和中國做過大規模殺傷性武器專案。中情局有兩萬二千人，其中兩萬是愛國的、做重要工作的公務員。問題出在上層，機構的性質由上層決定。

他引了邁克·蓬佩奧（Mike Pompeo）當面對他說的話。我在中情局的時候，沒能好好清理那個機構，整個上層官僚體系裡的人不相信民主制度。Kennedy 說他不知道這話準不準，但一個管過那個機構、又當過國務卿的人這麼說，分量不輕。

然後是歷史梳理。1947 年之前，美國在和平時期沒有秘密情報機構。二戰時的 OSS 戰後被解散，國會當時的理由是：一個秘密間諜機構與民主不相容，那是克格勃、斯塔西、薩瓦克才有的東西。1947 年杜魯門簽署法案建立中情局，最初定位是情報彙總，把世界各地來源的資訊整合成報告，讓總統基於可靠證據做決策。

艾倫·杜勒斯（Allen Dulles）透過一系列立法和政治操作擴大了它的權力，開設了計劃處（Plans Division），也就是黑行動：操縱選舉、暗殺（他們叫“行政行動”）、發動小規模戰爭、行賄、勒索、竊取選舉。

當時為什麼會被接受。冷戰正酣，杜魯門和艾森豪威爾都不想派地面部隊去打大仗，這看起來是一種低成本、隱蔽地改變歷史程序的方式。國會兩黨在投票時都警告過，這個東西會長成怪物，會侵蝕我們的價值觀。

今天的情況是，預算不公開，它有自己的風險投資基金，在矽谷做了大約兩千筆投資，持有大量科技公司股份。很多科技公司 CEO 和中情局簽了國家保密協議，光是透露自己簽了這個協議，就可能面臨二十年監禁和資產沒收。

1973 年教會委員會（Church Committee）聽證會揭露了“知更鳥行動”（Operation Mockingbird）。至少四百名主流媒體的骨幹記者秘密為中情局工作，包括《紐約時報》《華盛頓郵報》、ABC、CBS、NBC，任務是引導新聞報道方向。當時承諾解散。

Kennedy 說，中情局今天仍然是全世界新聞業最大的資助者，主要透過 USAID。美國資助了幾乎所有國家的新聞業，擁有報紙，讓成千上萬記者在編。這些在國內本來是禁止的，直到 2016 年奧巴馬修改了法律。

如果我們看著烏克蘭戰爭的敘事是如何在美國人腦子裡形成的，然後說中情局與此毫無關係，我做不到。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

Lex 追問機制，是間接影響還是直接資助。Kennedy 的回答是直接資助，點名了 Daily Beast、Rolling Stone 主編 Noah Shachtman、Salon、Daily Kos 等與情報界有深厚關係的媒體。

Lex 說他的困惑是，記者的本職就是保持操守，讓觀點不被收買。

從對權力說真話，到替權力說話

Kennedy 把回答轉向了新聞業整體的墮落。他小時候家裡坐滿了當時最優秀的記者，本·布拉德利（Ben Bradlee）、安東尼·劉易斯（Anthony Lewis）、瑪麗·麥格羅裡（Mary McGrory）、皮特·哈米爾（Pete Hamill）、傑克·紐菲爾德（Jack Newfield）、吉米·佈雷斯林（Jimmy Breslin）。他父親死後，家人創辦了 RFK 新聞獎，表彰新聞的操守和勇氣。

他那一代記者相信的職業信條是：對任何權力聚集保持恐懼式懷疑，包括政府權威；當權者會撒謊，必須永遠被質詢；記者要做的就是對權力說真話。

他說疫情幾年發生的是這件事的反面。主流媒體沒有對權力說真話，反而變成了政府機構的宣傳工具，還審查異見。他點名“可信新聞倡議”（Trusted News Initiative），由 BBC 發起，華盛頓郵報、美聯社、合眾國際社，加上微軟、Twitter、Facebook、Google 簽署，約定不刊登偏離政府正統敘事的報道和事實。

他說自己正在就此打官司，網站上有給《華盛頓郵報》記者 Michael Scherer 的公開信，列了所有來源。Scherer 指控他是陰謀論者，而他本人正參與一場真實的、壓制異見的合謀。

Lex 在這裡做了一個很關鍵的平衡動作。他能理解這種做法的初衷，大流行病期間，錯誤資訊的風險是真實的。可這是一道滑坡，一旦滑下去，新聞操守就被徹底犧牲，之後再想回到真相就很難了。

Kennedy 同意，然後引了 TNI 負責人在內部會議上的原話。外界以為我們是競爭對手，這個判斷已經過時，真正的競爭對手是網路上那些替代性新聞來源，他們在損害公眾對我們的信任，損害我們的商業模式，必須掐斷、碾碎。做法是跟社交平臺達成協議，我們標記他們的資訊為錯誤資訊，平臺就下架、限流、影子封禁，從而摧毀這些替代信源的經濟模式。

一旦你自封為真假仲裁者，你給自己假設的權力就沒有邊界了。你手上的活從告知公眾換成了操縱公眾。

記者一旦把自己封為真假仲裁者，接下來假設給自己多大的權力，就沒有邊界了。手裡那件事的性質也從告知公眾換成了操縱公眾。一旦操縱公眾成為習慣，又跟強大實體形成合謀，記者這個身份就變成了威權統治的工具，站到了自己的反面。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

這段話值得停下來想一想。它描述的是一個很具體的機制：一開始只是判斷某條資訊可能有害，然後決定不傳播，然後跟平臺約定一個標記的流程，然後標記被用來處理不方便的資訊，然後不方便的範圍越來越大。每一步都有說得通的理由，合起來卻是一條從守門人到審查者的路。

Kennedy 在節目裡說，他相信很多簽了這個倡議的記者並不知道全貌，他們真心認為壓制可能挑戰政府宣告的資訊是在做對的事。這句話其實比指控更有殺傷力。它說明問題不出在人的惡意上，出在結構上。一個人只要接受了自己有資格判斷別人該看什麼，剩下的只是程度問題。

關於疫苗，Lex 做了三次追問

這是整場訪談最需要讀者自己動腦的部分。

第一問，Lex 請他給對手做最強辯護。福奇對世界最大的正面貢獻是什麼。

Kennedy 說他一件也想不出來。緊接著補了兩句，我不想坐在這裡不公平地說這個人什麼都沒做，可能在他任職 NIH 期間有某個藥物獲批幫到了人，這完全可能，他在那裡五十年。然後才是他的判斷，就他的主要專案而言，造成的傷害遠大於收益。

第二問，你覺得他相信自己是在為世界做好事嗎。

我不知道他相信什麼。那本書二十五萬字，我從未試圖窺視他的內心。我處理事實，處理科學，書中每一個事實性論斷都標註了政府資料庫或同行評審文獻來源。我儘量不去推測我不知道、也無法證明的東西。我無法告訴你他的動機是什麼。他做了很多我認為對人類非常糟糕、非常具有欺騙性的事。但我們都有自我欺騙的能力。就像我在這期節目開頭說的，我們用自己的意圖來評判自己，我們有近乎無限的能力說服自己正在做的事是對的。不是每個人都過一種審視過的生活。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

這段話是整場對話裡最剋制的一段。他沒有給福奇貼“壞人”這個標籤，轉而把問題抬到一個更普遍的位置：人如何審視自己的動機，世界又可能如何體驗你自稱的善意。這個視角其實也可以反過來用在他自己身上。

但下一輪他又收回去了。Lex 問，這份工作本身是否可能做好，一個集中化的科學政策中樞，是不是制度性的缺陷。他答得很直接，不，我認為他就是一個真正壞的人。那個部門多年來有很多很多好人，伯尼斯·埃迪（Bernice Eddy）、約翰·安東尼·莫里斯（John Anthony Morris），一個接一個，NIH 歷史上最偉大的科學家被他毀掉了職業生涯，因為他們想說真話。

然後他自己意識到這段話可能被怎麼聽。聽我說這些的人，可能會覺得我 bitter，或者我教條。可你們真的應該去讀我的書，那很難總結，我儘量做到有條理，不謾罵，只講發生了什麼。

那家被稱為犯罪企業的公司

Lex 問，在資本主義制度內，有可能以不被腐敗的方式大規模生產藥物嗎。

Kennedy 說當然可能，透過一個健全的監管體系，藥物真的被測試。問題不在資本主義，他對資本主義有極大的敬意，那是人類設計出的最強經濟引擎。可它必須被套上社會目的，否則會把我們帶向寡頭統治、環境破壞、把人商品化、毒害和殺死人。

他給的數字是硬的。四家最大的疫苗製造商，賽諾菲、默克、輝瑞、葛蘭素史克，生產美國兒童事實上被強制接種的全部七十二種疫苗，過去十年合計支付了三百五十億美元刑事罰款和賠償，2000 年以來約七百九十億美元。這些公司一直在重複違法，交的錢變成了經營成本的一部分。

默克在萬絡（Vioxx）上的內部備忘錄被訴訟挖出來，會計在紙上算，我們會殺死這麼多人，但仍然賺錢。賠了大約七十億美元，同年就接著做加德西（Gardasil）和其他藥物。這些人搞出了阿片類藥物流行，他們知道羥考酮會成癮，讓 FDA 告訴醫生它不成癮，施壓 FDA 撒謊，他們得逞了，讓整整一代人上癮。等被抓住、我們讓羥考酮更難開，那些上癮的孩子轉向芬太尼，今年死掉十萬六千人，是一年內死亡的美國年輕人數量，是二十年越南戰爭陣亡人數的兩倍。他們知道會發生，為了賺錢還是做了。

關於監管俘獲，他說 FDA 近一半預算來自制藥公司，員工的薪水一半來自藥企。所以他們知道自己的老闆是誰，這意味著要讓藥物儘快出門、儘快獲批。這套東西叫快速通道審批，FDA 大約四成五的預算流向快速通道。

Lex 問，錢能買到操守嗎。

Kennedy 說當然能，這沒有爭議。Lex 說他覺得這有點爭議，他願意相信在 FDA 工作的科學家選擇這條路，和錢沒什麼關係。Kennedy 的回應劃了一條線。

它可能買不到你的操守。我說的是人群層面的，個體層面另說。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

然後他引了厄普頓·辛克萊（Upton Sinclair）那句話。要說服一個人相信某件事，而那件事的存在會削減他的薪水，是極其困難的。

他把 NIH 單獨拎出來說，因為它有一個最壞的機制。NIH 自己對所參與藥物的專利持有許可權，可以收版稅。莫德納疫苗五成權益歸 NIH，至少四到六位 NIH 科學家本人持有專利許可權，每年可以拿十五萬美元版稅，終身，子子孫孫，只要產品還在市場上。所以莫德納疫苗在為 NIH 高層的一些人付遊艇、付房貸、付孩子的學費。

那些人是納稅人付錢請他們在藥物上市前找問題的。如果你知道這個藥會付你的房貸，你可能會忽略一個小問題，甚至一個非常大的問題。這就是問題所在。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

上市前有沒有做過安慰劑對照

這段是整場對話裡最需要讀者自己動手核實的地方。

Lex 問，你能舉出任何一個你認為好的疫苗嗎。

Kennedy 說，一些減毒活疫苗可能避免的問題比造成的問題多。然後他說，沒有一種疫苗是安全有效的。

Lex 直接頂回去，這是很重的話。

Kennedy 舉了脊髓灰質炎疫苗的例子。疫苗裡含有 SV40 病毒，是已知最強的致癌物之一，全世界科學家現在用它給大鼠和豚鼠誘發腫瘤。九千八百萬人接種了那個疫苗，他這一代人接種了。他們這代人軟組織癌症的爆發，殺死的人比脊髓灰質炎殺死的多得多。所以問脊灰疫苗對脊灰有效嗎，他說有效。問它殺死的人比避免的多嗎，他說不知道，因為沒有資料。

Lex 把問題收窄，我們只談它是否對它所針對的疾病有效。

Kennedy 換了個例子。DTP 疫苗（白喉、破傷風、百日咳）1980 年前後在美國推廣，傷害太多，製造商惠氏告訴里根政府，我們每賺一美元要賠二十美元，除非給永久免責，否則退出這個行業。里根問，你們為什麼不把疫苗做安全。回答是，它們本質上是不可避免的不安全（unavoidably unsafe），你沒法讓它們安全。這句話寫進了法案前言，也寫進了布魯塞維茨案（Bruesewitz）的最高法院判決。

然後他講了丹麥政府資助、在西非做了三十年資料的研究。DTP 疫苗確實預防了三種目標疾病，可接種的女孩在隨後六個月裡的死亡率是未接種者的十倍，死因跟任何直接關聯疫苗的東西都不沾邊，是貧血、血吸蟲病、瘧疾、敗血症，主要是肺炎。研究人員本身都支援疫苗。結論是疫苗破壞了兒童的免疫系統，讓他們無法抵禦對大多數孩子無害的普通感染。

Lex 追問，這種因果鏈幾乎不可能證明吧。

Kennedy 承認無法針對個體的具體疾病或死亡證明因果，但可以統計性地顯示，接種者在隨後六個月內死亡機率更高。然後他給出最重要的一個指控。所有其他藥物上市前都要做安慰劑對照試驗，只有疫苗不用。現在強制兒童接種的七十二種疫苗，沒有一種在上市前做過安慰劑對照的安全性試驗。

Lex 在這裡做了一件事，整場對話裡最有分量的一次反駁。

關於這一點我得說，我從很多人那裡聽到過反對意見，包括脊灰疫苗。上市前的安慰劑對照隨機試驗，脊灰疫苗就是對著生理鹽水安慰劑做的。所以我困惑的是，你為什麼說它們不經過這個流程。看起來很多是經過的。（Lex Fridman）

Kennedy 的回應是，他很多年是這麼說的，因為找不到。2016 年 3 月特朗普讓福奇和弗朗西斯·柯林斯見他，他當面問，你們一直說我不說實話，那麼上市前的安慰劑對照，到底做沒做過。福奇端著一整盤檔案說，我現在找不到，但我寄給你一份。他說，隨便哪一種，七十二種裡任何一種都行。福奇從沒寄來。他們起訴 HHS，被拖延一年後，HHS 回了一封信，說七十二種疫苗沒有任何一種有上市前的安全性試驗。這封信和解了他們的資訊公開訴訟，掛在 CHD 網站上。

然後他做了一次讓步和澄清。脊灰疫苗可能確實做過生理鹽水對照試驗，可那是為了有效性，不是為了安全性。他現在說的是安全性試驗。

這段交鋒是整場對話裡最需要讀者自己動手的部分。Lex 在節目裡點了名，請聽眾去看公開反對 Kennedy 的幾個人，Dan Wilson（Debunk the Funk 播客）、Vincent Racaniello（This Week in Virology）、Paul Offit、Eric Topol、Peter Hotez。Kennedy 說他也歡迎辯論，Paul Offit 最近發了一篇 Substack 駁斥他和 Joe Rogan 的對話，他們寫了一篇駁斥那個駁斥。

你應該兩個都讀。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

關於 Peter Hotez 拒絕在 Rogan 節目與他辯論，Kennedy 說他不猜對方動機。可一個科學家如果基於自稱證據科學的公共建議做推薦，就應該能在公開場合為自己辯護，能面對所有挑戰者。他提到幾年前和 Hotez 有過一次有裁判的非正式辯論，透過電話和郵件進行，他每提一個點就引用文獻，Hotez 始終無法用科學回應。有一次 Hotez 給他發了十六項研究駁斥他關於硫柳汞的說法，十六項全都是關於 MMR 疫苗的，而 MMR 里根本不含硫柳汞。

你怕不怕自己成了殉道者

Lex 問，在你做的所有疫苗工作和倡導裡，有沒有哪些地方你後來發現自己錯了，改變了看法。

Kennedy 說有，很多次，他們會糾正錯誤。他運營一個大組織，發很多推文，但他很小心。他的 Instagram 曾因錯誤資訊被下架，可裡面每一條都標註了政府資料庫或同行評審文獻來源。他的組織通訊《 Defender》會總結 PubMed 上的同行評審文獻，也犯過錯，犯了就承認、道歉、改正。他說他們有一個新聞界最健全的事實核查流程之一。

然後他補了一句，他在 Twitter 上多次公開為錯誤道歉，很多人說從沒見過有人在 Twitter 上道歉。他說這很重要，人是會犯錯的。

Lex 接著問了一個更尖銳的問題。你因為在這些極具爭議的話題上唱反調而出名，一部分名聲來自被攻擊和頂住攻擊，可以說來自某種殉道者形象。你擔心這種殉道者的毒品會影響你的判斷嗎。

我不認為自己是殉道者，也從不認為自己是受害者。我為自己的生活做選擇，我對這些選擇滿意、平靜。我想當的是某種英雄，那個想法本身就很可笑。我做我認為對的事，因為我想內心平靜。我唯一的護欄是事實。如果你給我看一份研究證明我錯了，比如你說，Bobby，這裡有一份脊灰疫苗上市前的安全性研究，用了真正的生理鹽水，我會把它發到我的 Twitter 上，說，我錯了，確實有一份。這是我能做的全部。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

這句話可以信到什麼程度，取決於你去讀了多少他引用的東西，以及讀了多少反對他的人引用的東西。他自己給的檢驗標準其實很公平：有證據就改。問題在於，這個標準對雙方都成立，而雙方都更擅長找支援自己的證據。

兩個八萬億

Kennedy 在節目裡做過一組對比，這組對比比任何論證都更有衝擊力。

美國在伊拉克戰爭及其後續、敘利亞、葉門、利比亞、阿富汗、巴基斯坦的戰爭中花了八萬億美元。得到了什麼。他說，什麼也沒有。

我們殺死的伊拉克人比薩達姆殺死的還多。今天的伊拉克比薩達姆時代更糟，是什葉派和遜尼派死亡小隊之間一場說不清的暴力戰爭。我們把伊拉克推進了伊朗的懷抱，它現在基本是伊朗的代理人，而這正是過去二三十年我們想阻止的結果。

我們製造了 ISIS。我們把兩百萬難民送進歐洲，讓歐洲各國幾代人陷入動盪。法國現在的騷亂是敘利亞戰爭的直接後果，英國脫歐也是。

我們用八萬億美元毀了世界。同一時期，中國花八點一萬億美元建學校、港口、醫院、橋樑、大學。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

結果是中國在全世界跟我們競爭。大家都想跟中國打交道，因為他們來了就建好東西，不附加條件，好相處。巴西在切換貨幣，阿根廷在切換，沙烏地阿拉伯，那個我們花了數萬億美元保護其輸油管道的最大夥伴，穆罕默德·本·薩勒曼說，我們不再在乎美國怎麼想了。

他提到沙特在美國通脹螺旋中間減產石油，這是從未做過的事。提到沙特和伊朗簽了單方面和平協議，而伊朗正是過去二十年我們讓沙特對抗的敵人。兩週後薩勒曼說，我們不在乎美國了。

他的結論是，我們花掉數萬億美元，換來的只是短期朋友，而且沒有讓自己更安全。我們讓美國人在全世界陷入更大危險。你要在機場排隊，安全機構每年花掉一點三萬億美元，美國比歷史上任何時候都更不安全、更貧窮。

把美國放在窮人這一邊

同一期節目裡，他講另一端時最有畫面感。

肯尼迪總統任內最喜歡的出訪是愛爾蘭，那場回訪讓整個愛爾蘭沸騰。第二喜歡的是哥倫比亞，波哥大有二百萬人上街看他。哥倫比亞總統萊拉斯·卡馬戈（Lleras Camargo）問他，你知道他們為什麼愛你嗎。

肯尼迪說，為什麼。

卡馬戈說，因為他們認為你把美國放在了窮人這一邊，對抗寡頭。

Kennedy 說，他死後到今天，非洲和拉丁美洲以約翰·肯尼迪命名的大道、醫院、學校、雕像、公園，比任何其他美國總統都多，可能比其他總統加起來還多。原因就是他讓美國站在窮人一邊。

他叔叔的兩個政策抓手是“進步聯盟”（Alliance for Progress）和 USAID，目的是把援助送到最窮的人手裡，培養中產階級。此前的標準是“你是否反共”，錢和武器送給富裕階層和軍政府，用來對付本國的窮人。

我叔叔說，他不希望非洲、拉美、亞洲的人想到美國時，腦子裡是一個拿著槍和刺刀的人。他希望他們想到的是和平隊志願者。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

然後是一串具體數字。他拒絕向海外派遣戰鬥部隊，任內沒有送一個士兵去國外戰死。1961 年在寮國頂住了，1962 年在柏林頂住了，越南問題上軍方要他派二十五萬，他只派了一點六萬顧問。為了把一個黑人學生詹姆斯·梅雷迪斯（James Meredith）送進密西西比大學，他派了一點六萬國民警衛隊。

1963 年 10 月 2 日，他聽說一名綠色貝雷帽在越南陣亡，要助手統計戰鬥死亡人數，助手回來說是七十五人。他說，太多了，不能再有。他簽署了國家安全行動備忘錄第 263 號，命令所有美國人 1965 年前撤出越南，第一批一千人 1963 年 12 月回國。

11 月，撤離開始前，他被殺了。一週後約翰遜總統撤銷了那道命令。一年後東京灣決議，二十五萬人被派過去，正是他們當初要求他做、他拒絕的事。尼克松把它加到五十六萬。五點六萬美國人沒能回來，包括他的表兄喬治·斯卡克爾（George Skakel），死於春節攻勢。我們殺了一百萬越南人，什麼也沒得到。

喬丹·彼得森託人問的那個問題

Lex 轉達了喬丹·彼得森託他問的一個問題。鑑於你說的這一切，左派什麼時候走得太遠了。他猜彼得森指的是文化議題和身份政治。

喬丹在我跟他聊天的時候一直想讓我說左派壞話。我很享受和他的對話，可他似乎有這個議程。這不是我競選的主題。我要做的是相反的事。我不會說左派壞話。這周我上了 David Remnick 的節目，他試圖引誘我說特朗普和 Alex Jones 的壞話。當然我可以對這些人說很多壞話，可我在努力尋找把我們維繫在一起的共同價值，而不是持續聚焦於那些把我們分開的爭議。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

這個回答可以讀成政客的迴避，也可以讀成一種方法論。他在整場對話裡確實貫徹了它，每次被問到對手的個人動機，他都說我不猜他心裡想什麼。

當 Lex 請他談左派價值時，他給了一張清單。環境保護和公共資源，空氣、水、野生動物、漁業、公共土地，這些不能被還原為私有產權。保護社會中最脆弱的人，包括兒童和少數群體。重建中產階級，保護勞動尊嚴和體面報酬。身體自主權。和平，民主黨歷來反戰。拒絕把恐懼當作治理工具，羅斯福說我們唯一需要恐懼的是恐懼本身，因為他知道暴君可以用恐懼讓人喪失批判性思維，壓過對個人自由的需求。讓政府擺脫腐敗的企業權力影響，終結國家權力與企業權力的腐化合謀，這正是艾森豪威爾警告軍工複合體時說的。

然後他描述了自己看到的經濟圖景。企業在把我們商品化，在毒害孩子，從中產階級身上剝離財富，把美國當成一家清算中的公司來經營，儘快把資產變現，製造或加劇貧富差距，消滅中產階級，形成一個拉美式的脆弱結構，上面是鉅額財富聚集，下面是普遍貧困。這種結構太不穩定，撐不起可持續的民主。

上帝是不可理解的

訪談最後二十分鐘轉向最私人的部分。

Kennedy 引用過自己寫的一段話。上帝透過很多渠道對人說話，智者、組織化宗教、宗教經典、藝術、音樂、詩歌，可沒有任何渠道比創造更細緻、更優雅、更喜悅。當我們破壞自然，我們感知神聖的能力就減弱了。

關於上帝是什麼，他的回答是，上帝不可理解，我們身處上帝的心智之中，所以不可能理解上帝的形式。

他從小在極深的宗教環境里長大，夏天一天兩次彌撒，飯前飯後禱告，晚上念玫瑰經，有時一晚上三遍。父親在家時會把所有孩子叫到床上，讀聖經故事。他上天主教學校、耶穌會學校，也上過貴格會學校。

十五歲那年，父親遇刺一年後，他成了吸毒者。成癮持續了十四年。

當你違背良知生活，你會把上帝推到生活的邊緣。他會退後，會變小。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

他說自己一直想戒，一直戒不掉。他一直有極強的意志力，十二歲時為大齋期戒糖，一直戒到上大學，第二年戒甜點，也戒到上大學。他覺得憑意志力什麼都能做到。可成癮對意志力完全免疫，狡猾、令人困惑、不可理喻。他不明白為什麼別的都能說戒就戒，這件就是不行。

轉機來自一個觀察。他一個弟弟死於成癮，弟弟有個朋友以前跟他們一起吸毒，後來成了文鮮明的信徒。那個人身上同樣的強迫性徹底消失了，即使 Kennedy 當著他的面吸毒，他也毫無反應，對那種衝動完全免疫。Kennedy 當時想，我寧願死也不願變成統一教信徒，但我希望能提煉出他獲得的那種力量，又不變成一個宗教討厭鬼。

那時他讀到榮格（Carl Jung）的《共時性》（Synchronicity）。榮格是弗洛伊德的門徒和指定接班人，弗洛伊德是無神論者，榮格是個極有靈性的人，從三歲起就有強烈而真實的靈性體驗，同時又是一位極其嚴謹的科學家。這個組合吸引 Kennedy，因為他從小就把自己看作一個基於科學的人。

書裡那個著名的故事是這樣的。榮格在蘇黎世一家療養院三樓，聽一位女病人描述她的夢，夢的核心是一隻聖甲蟲。他背對著窗，聽到窗玻璃上叮、叮、叮，忍了一會兒，終於不耐煩地轉身推開窗，一隻聖甲蟲飛進來落在他手上。他把蟲子遞給病人，問，這是你夢到的那個嗎。

榮格對這種事的定義是，它屬於共時性，超出了巧合的範疇。這是上帝突破自己設定的物理規則、數學規則，伸手拍拍你的肩膀說，我在。

榮格試圖在臨床環境中復現這件事，把兩個人分在兩個房間，翻牌猜對方翻到什麼，如果他能打敗機率法則，就證明了超自然法則的存在，那就是證明上帝存在的第一步。他從沒成功。

可他在書裡說了一句對 Kennedy 影響更大的話。

即使我無法用經驗性的、科學的工具證明上帝存在，我可以透過幾千個病人的案例，用軼事證據說明，相信上帝的人康復得更快，而且康復更持久。（卡爾·榮格，轉述）

Kennedy 說，這比榮格聲稱自己證明了上帝更有說服力，因為如果榮格那樣說，他反而不會信。當時他的心態是，只要能讓我不再吸毒的機率提高百分之一，我什麼都願意試。如果相信上帝有用，那麼不管天上有沒有上帝，相信本身就有力量，那我就幹。

接下來的問題是怎麼相信一個看不見、摸不著、聞不到、嘗不到的東西。榮格給的公式是，假裝，直到成真。

每天早上那碗冰格里的水

於是他開始假裝有個上帝一直看著他，生活是一連串考驗，每天有一堆道德選擇要做。

都是極小的事。鬧鐘響了，是再躺十分鐘任由思緒遊蕩，還是立刻起來。被子疊不疊。毛巾掛不掛回去。從衣櫃裡抽牛仔褲，一堆鐵絲衣架掉到地上，是關上門說“我太重要了，這是別人的活”，還是彎腰撿起來。製冰盒放回冷凍室之前，加不加水。在 Safeway 超市停車場，購物車推不推回原位。

他說，如果他做對這些小事，就把自己維持在一種臣服（surrender）的姿態裡，向更高力量保持敞開。成癮的核心問題就是濫用權力。每個人都有某種權力，相貌、人脈、教育、家庭，總有一種誘惑把它們用來滿足自我意志。挑戰在於如何始終把這些用於服務共同體，而不是服務自己。

然後是他描述的那種狀態。當我這麼做的時候，我感到一股力量穿過我，我作為一個人的效率高得多。那種啃噬了我很多年的焦慮消失了。我可以放下槳，升起帆，風帶著我走，我能在生活裡看到證據。

最大的誘惑是反過來的。當好事開始發生，現金和獎賞開始流進來，我怎麼維持那個臣服的姿態。我的傾向是對上帝說，謝謝，接下來我自己開。然後又把車開下懸崖。

我有過一次靈性覺醒，我對毒品和酒精的渴望被奇蹟般地移除了。對我來說，這和能在水上行走一樣是奇蹟，因為我認真、真誠、誠實地試了十年，靠自己的力量做不到。然後突然，它毫不費力地被拿走了。（小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪）

Lex 在最後把這條線和西西弗斯連起來。給所有行動加上道德維度，就是他在對抗荒誕的戰役裡贏下來的方式。

Kennedy 的回答只有一句。是一回事。就是做正確的事的那場戰鬥。

偶爾也談點身體

訪談中段有個輕鬆轉折。他七十歲，狀態極好，Lex 問他怎麼做的。

間歇性斷食，中午吃第一頓，晚上六七點停止進食。每天早上先開個會，中午吃飯。飯後帶狗上山，上坡一英里半、下坡一英里半，做冥想。然後去健身房三十五分鐘。他說自己鍛鍊了五十年，發現短時間才可持續。四套不同的訓練計劃，進去就是高強度，從不放鬆。第一天背，第二天腿，然後雜項。每組第一組做到十二次力竭，第四組是遞減組。

吃大量維生素，具體多少種他說記不住。在醫生指導下做抗衰老方案，包括睪酮替代，但不用任何合成類固醇，用的是與身體自身分泌相同的生物同源激素。Lex 問他對激素療法的總體看法，他說跟很多醫生聊過，因為他對健康感興趣，聽說過很好的效果，可他絕對不是這方面的專家。

這段很短，卻讓整場對話落了地。一個每天做十二次力竭組、把購物車推回原位、中午才吃第一頓飯的人，和他談的上帝、成癮、核戰爭，是同一個人的同一套生活，中間沒有切換。

這場對話到底在問什麼

讀完這兩個半小時，有幾件事值得單獨拿出來想。

第一，他最強的能力是把對手放回歷史語境裡。古巴導彈危機裡，他能說清赫魯曉夫為什麼要在古巴放導彈。烏克蘭問題上，他能列出 1990 年貝克那句話、1997 年布熱津斯基那份方案、凱南和伯恩斯的警告。這套方法在肯尼迪家族裡傳了三代，傑克·肯尼迪靠它頂住了軍方，羅伯特·肯尼迪靠它頂住了冷戰敘事。

第二，同一套方法在他手裡也會過度使用。把對手放回語境，容易滑向給對手找理由。他在烏克蘭問題上給出的因果鏈，北約東擴、2014 年政變、明斯克協議被破壞、約翰遜飛基輔，每一條都有可查的公開材料，把它們串成一個“這場戰爭是白宮新保守派想要的”的完整敘事，就跳過了很多同樣可查的反面材料：普京 2021 年底給北約的兩份條約草案要求了什麼，布查發生了什麼，烏克蘭人自己在 2014 年和 2022 年做了什麼選擇。Lex 在節目裡唯一一次真正頂住他，就在這個方向上。

第三，他對機構的判斷是分層級的。中情局兩萬二千人，兩萬是好的公務員，上層是腐敗的。FDA 的員工有科學理想，可預算結構決定了他們的行為。製藥公司的科學家可能真心相信自己在救人，可會計在紙上算過會死多少人。這套框架的鋒利之處在於，它不安慰人，也不把人一棍子打死。它要求你去問，這個人處在什麼激勵結構裡做判斷。

第四，他自己也在這套結構裡。他運營一個組織，寫二十五萬字的書，發大量推文，打五百多場官司。他說自己唯一的護欄是事實，犯了錯就公開道歉、改正。這話可以信到什麼程度，取決於你讀了多少他引用的東西，以及讀了多少反對他的人引用的東西。Lex 在節目開頭和結尾都做了同一件事，推薦你去讀 Kennedy，也推薦你去讀 Vincent Racaniello、Dan Wilson、Paul Offit、Eric Topol、Peter Hotez。

是分歧，而不是趨同，把人類的長弧彎向真相和智慧。在這個分歧的過程中，每個人都能教你一課，我們需要有謙遜去聽、去學。（Lex Fridman）

第五，他給出的最終答案，是一件極小的事。

兩個半小時裡，他談了核戰爭、政權更迭、中情局、八萬億美元、跨國藥企、審查聯盟。最後他落到鬧鐘響了要不要立刻起、被子疊不疊、衣架掉了撿不撿、購物車推不推回去。

這不是雞湯。這是他在十四年成癮之後找到的唯一可操作的路徑。把每一件小事都放進道德維度裡，用一連串微小的臣服，把自己維持在一種不濫用自己的權力的姿態中。因為他很清楚，成癮的本質是濫用權力，人一旦覺得自己已經好了，就會對上帝說謝謝、接下來我自己開，然後把車開下懸崖。

這和他講的西西弗斯是同一件事。石頭每天都會滾下來，任務永遠完不成，快樂來自把肩膀頂上去這個動作，跟石頭最終停在哪裡無關。

Lex 在節目最後引了約翰·肯尼迪的一句話。

我們不該去尋找共和黨的答案或民主黨的答案，該去尋找正確的答案。我們不該執著於追究過去的責任，該承擔起自己對未來的責任。（約翰·F·肯尼迪）

這句話放在這期節目的結尾，有一層額外的意味。說這話的人，六十年後仍有五千份關於他死亡的檔案沒有公開。而坐在對面回答問題的，是他的侄子。

如果你只帶走幾件事

  • 去讀原話，別讀二手轉述。Kennedy 在這場訪談裡明確說，每個事實性論斷都能在政府資料庫或同行評審文獻裡找到出處，也明確說“不要相信我的話，自己去做研究”。他推薦詹姆斯·道格拉斯的《難以言說》作為 JFK 刺殺案的入口。
  • 同時讀反方。Lex 點名推薦了 Dan Wilson 的 Debunk the Funk、Vincent Racaniello 的 This Week in Virology，以及 Paul Offit、Eric Topol、Peter Hotez 的書和 Twitter。Kennedy 自己說兩個都讀，還說歡迎和其中任何一位公開辯論。要形成判斷，只能兩邊都看，再核對原始文獻。
  • 把“這個人為什麼這麼想”和“這個人說得對不對”拆成兩個問題。Kennedy 最擅長第一個，把對手放回歷史語境和激勵結構裡。這套方法很有解釋力，也最容易滑向給任何行為找理由。每次他用這套方法，你都該追問一句：同樣的語境，能不能支撐另一個結論。
  • 遇到“上市前有沒有做過安慰劑對照安全性試驗”這類具體爭議，去查一手檔案。那封信是否真的存在，是否真的掛在 CHD 網站上，HHS 的原始措辭是什麼，脊灰疫苗 1954 年那次現場試驗的設計包含哪些終點，這些問題都有確定答案，而且不需要專業背景就能核實。整場對話裡最有價值的部分，恰恰是 Lex 那幾次具體的、直接的追問。
  • 想理解他對烏克蘭的判斷，就按時間順序讀 1990 年貝克與戈爾巴喬夫的會談記錄、1997 年布熱津斯基那篇文章、喬治·凱南當年的公開表態、威廉·伯恩斯 2008 年那封著名郵件，以及 2022 年 4 月伊斯坦布林談判的公開報道。他給的時間線是可查的，每一條的權重和解讀方式都有爭議。自己排一遍時間線，比記住任何人的結論都有用。
  • 對最後那段個人轉變有興趣，去讀榮格的《共時性》和《回憶·夢·思考》。Kennedy 給的路徑有具體操作層，不依賴你信不信神。核心是假裝有一個更高的視角在看著你，然後每天做對一串極小的事。
  • 最可操作的一條：挑一件你今天就會做、但一直做得不對的小事，把它放進道德維度裡。鬧鐘響了立刻起，被子疊好。就這麼小。Kennedy 的說法是，這維持的是一種姿態，而姿態決定了你在更大的誘惑面前，會不會把車開下懸崖。
文稿來自 Lex Fridman 官網公開發布的官方 Transcript（含說話人與時間戳）。
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:00:00): It’s not our business to change the Russian government. And anybody who thinks it’s a good idea to do regime change in Russia, which has more nuclear weapons than we do, is I think irresponsible. And Vladimir Putin himself has had… We will not live in a world without Russia and it was clear when he said that, that he was talking about himself and he has his hand on a button that could bring Armageddon to the entire planet. So why are we messing with this? It’s not our job to change that regime, and we should be making friends with the Russians. We shouldn’t be treating him as an enemy. Now we’ve pushed him into the camp with China. That’s not a good thing for our country. And by the way, what we’re doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all. Lex Fridman (00:00:56): The following is a conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, candidate for the President of the United States, running as a Democrat. Robert is an activist, lawyer and author who has challenged some of the world’s most powerful corporations seeking to hold them accountable for the harm they may cause. I love science and engineering. These two pursuits are, to me the most beautiful and powerful in the history of human civilization. Science is our journey, our fight for uncovering the laws of nature and leveraging them to understand the universe and to lessen the amount of suffering in the world. Some of the greatest human beings I’ve ever met, including most of my good friends, are scientists and engineers. Again, I love science, but science cannot flourish without epistemic humility, without debate, both in the pages of academic journals and in the public square, in good faith, long form conversations. Lex Fridman (00:01:56): Agree or disagree, I believe Robert’s voice should be part of the debate. To call him a conspiracy theorist and arrogantly dismiss everything he says without addressing it diminishes the public’s trust in the scientific process. At the same time, dogmatic skepticism of all scientific output on controversial topics like the pandemic is equally, if not more dishonest and destructive. I recommend that people read and listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, his arguments and his ideas. But I also recommend, as I say in this conversation, that people read and listen to Vincent Racaniello from This Week in Virology, Dan Wilson from Debunk The Funk, and the Twitter and books of Paul Offit, Eric Topol, and others who are outspoken in their disagreement with Robert. Lex Fridman (00:02:50): It is disagreement, not conformity that bends the long arc of humanity toward truth and wisdom. In this process of disagreement, everybody has a lesson to teach you, but we must have the humility to hear it and to learn from it. This is The Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Lex Fridman (00:03:18): It’s the 4th of July, Independence Day. So simple question, simple, big question. What do you love about this country, the United States of America? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:03:27): I would say there’s so many things that I love about the country, the landscapes and the waterways and the people, et cetera. But on the higher level, people argue about whether we’re an exemplary nation, and that term has been given a bad name, particularly by the neocons, the actions, the neocons in recent decades who have turned that phrase into a justification for forcing people to adopt American systems or values at the barrel of a gun. But my father and uncle used it in a very different way, and they were very proud of it. I grew up very proud of this country because we were the exemplary nation in the sense that we were an example of democracy all over the world. When we first launched our democracy in 1780, we were the only democracy on earth. And there was Civil war, by 1865, there were six democracies. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:04:35): Today there’s probably 190, and all of them in one way or another are modeled on the American experience. And it’s extraordinary because our first serious and sustained contact with the European culture and continent was in 1608 when John Winthrop came over with his Puritans in the sloop Arbella and Winthrop gave this famous speech where he said, “This is going to be a city on a hill. This is going to be an example for all the other nations in the world.” And he warned his fellow Puritans. They were sitting at this great expanse of land and he said, “We can’t be seduced by the lure of real estate or by the carnal opportunities of this land. We have to take this country as a gift from God and then turn it into an example for the rest of the world of God’s love, of God’s will and wisdom.” And 200 years later, 250 years later, a different generation, they’re mainly [inaudible 00:05:59], are people who had a belief in God, but not so much a love of particularly religious cosmologies. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:06:13): The Framers of the Constitution believe that we were creating something that would be replicated around the world, and that it was an example in democracy. There would be this kind of wisdom from the collective that… And the word wisdom means a knowledge of God’s will, and that somehow God would speak through the collective in a way that he or she could not speak through totalitarian regimes. And I think that that’s something that even though Winthrop was a white man and a Protestant, that every immigrant group who came after them adopted that belief. And I know my family, when my family came over, all of my grandparents came over in 1848 during the potato famine, and they saw this country as unique in history is something that was part of a broader spiritual mission. And so I’d say that from a 30,000-foot level, I grew up so proud of this country and believing that it was the greatest country in the world, and for those reasons. Lex Fridman (00:07:34): Well, I immigrated to this country. And one of the things that really embodies America to me is the ideal of freedom. Hunter S. Thompson said, “Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used.” What does freedom mean to you? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:07:47): To me, freedom does not mean chaos, and it does not mean anarchy. It means that it has to be accompanied by restraint if it’s going to live up to its promise in self-restraint. What it means is the capacity for human beings to exercise and to fulfill their creative energies unrestrained as much as possible by government. Lex Fridman (00:08:20): So this point that Hunter S. Thompson has made is, “Dies unless it’s used.” Do you agree with that? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:08:28): Yeah, I do agree with that, and he was not unique in saying that. Thomas Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty had to be watered with the blood of each generation. And what he meant by that is that we can’t live off the laurels of the American Revolution. That we had a group, we had a generation where between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans died. They gave their lives, they gave their livelihoods, they gave their status, they gave their property, and they put it all on the line to give us our Bill of Rights and that, but those Bill of Rights, the moment that we signed them, there were forces within our society that began trying to chip away at them, and that happens in every generation. And it is the obligation of every generation to safeguard and protect those freedoms. Lex Fridman (00:09:26): The blood of each generation. You mentioned your interest, your admiration of Al Albert Camus, of Stoicism, perhaps your interest in existentialism. Camus said, I believe in Myth of Sisyphus, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” What do you think he means by that? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:09:49): I suppose the way that Camus viewed the world and the way that the Stoics did and a lot of the existentialists, it was that it was so absurd and that the problems and the tasks that were given just to live a life are so insurmountable that the only way that we can get back the gods for giving us this impossible task of living life was to embrace it and to enjoy it and to do our best at it. To me, I read Camus, and particularly in The Myth of Sisyphus as a parable that… And it’s the same lesson that I think he writes about in The Plague, where we’re all given these insurmountable tasks in our lives, but that by doing our duty, by being of service to others, we can bring meaning to a meaningless chaos and we can bring order to the universe. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:11:01): And Sisyphus was the iconic hero of the Stoics, and he was a man because he did something good. He delivered a gift to humanity. He angered the gods and they condemned him to push a rock up the hill every day, and then it would roll down. When he got to the top, it would roll down and he’d spend the night going back down the hill to collect it and then rolling it back up the hill again. And the task was absurd, it was insurmountable. He could never win, but the last line of that book is one of the great lines, which is something to the extent that I can picture as of his smiling, because Camus’ belief was that even though his task was insurmountable, that he was a happy man and he was a happy man because he put his shoulder to the stone. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:11:59): He took his duty, he embraced the task and the absurdity of life, and he pushed the stone up the hill. And that if we do that, and if we find ways of being service to others, that is the ultimate, that’s the key to the lock, that’s the solution to the puzzle. Lex Fridman (00:12:21): Each individual person in that way can rebel against absurdity by discovering meaning to this whole messy thing. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:12:28): And we can bring meaning not only to our own lives, but we can bring meaning to the universe as well. We can bring some kind of order to life and the embrace of those tasks and the commitment to service resonates out from us to the rest of humanity in some way. Lex Fridman (00:12:51): So you mentioned The Plague by Camus. There’s a lot of different ways to read that book, but one of them, especially given how it was written, is that The Plague symbolizes Nazi Germany and the Hitler regime. What do you learn about human nature from a figure like Adolf Hitler, that he’s able to captivate the minds of millions, rise to power and take on, pull in the whole world into a global war? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:13:24): I was born nine years after the end of World War II, and I grew up in a generation with my parents who were fixated on that, on what happened, and my father. At that time, the resolution in the minds of most Americans, and I think people around the world, is that there had been something wrong with the German people, that the Germans had been particularly susceptible to this kind of demagoguery and to following a powerful leader and just industrializing cruelty and murder. And my father always differed with that. My father said, “This is not a German problem. This could happen to all of us. We’re all just inches away from barbarity.” And the thing that keeps us safe in this country are the institutions of our democracy, our constitution. It’s not our nature. Our nature has to be restrained, and that comes through self-restraint. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:14:38): But also, the beauty of our country is that we devise these institutions that are designed to allow us to flourish, but at the same time, not to give us enough freedom to flourish, but also create enough order to keep us from collapsing into barbarity. So one of the other things that my father talked about from when I was little, he would ask us this question, “If you were the family and Anne Frank came to your door and asked you to hide her, would you be one of the people who hid her, risk your own life, or would you be one of the people who turned her in?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:15:24): And of course, we would all say, “Well, of course we would hide Anne Frank and take the risk,” but that’s been something kind of a lesson, a challenge that has always been near the forefront of my mind, that if a totalitarian system ever a occurs in the United States, which my father thought was quite possible, he was conscious about how fragile democracy actually is, that would I be one of the ones who would resist the totalitarianism or would I be one of the people who went along with it? Would I be one of the people who was at the train station in crack hour, or even Berlin and saw people being shipped off to camps and just put my head down and pretend I didn’t say it because talking about it would be destructive to my career and maybe my freedom and even my life? So that has been a challenge that my father gave to me and all of my brothers and sisters, and it’s something that I’ve never forgotten. Lex Fridman (00:16:39): A lot of us would like to believe we would resist in that situation, but the reality is most of us wouldn’t, and that’s a good thing to think about, that human nature is such that we’re selfish even when there’s an atrocity going on all around us. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:16:57): And we also have the capacity to deceive ourselves, and all of us tend to judge ourselves by our intentions and our actions. Lex Fridman (00:17:08): What have you learned about life from your father, Robert F. Kennedy? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:17:12): First of all, I’ll say this about my uncle because I’m going to apply that question to my uncle and my father. My uncle was asked when he first met Jackie Bouvier, who later became Jackie Kennedy. She was a reporter for a newspaper and she had a column where she’d do these pithy interviews with both famous people and man in the street interviews. And she was interviewing him and she asked him what he believed his best quality was, his strongest virtue? And she thought that he would say courage because he had been a war hero. He was the only president who… And this is when he was Senator, by the way, who received the Purple Heart. And he had a very famous story of him as a hero in World War II. And then he had come home and he had written a book on moral courage among American politicians and won the Pulitzer Prize, that book Profiles and Courage, which was a series of incidents where American political leaders made decisions to embrace principle even though their careers were at stake, and in most cases were destroyed by their choice. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:18:37): She thought he was going to say courage, but he didn’t. He said curiosity, and I think looking back at his life that the best, it was true, and that was the quality that allowed him to put himself in the shoes of his adversaries. And he always said that if the only way that we’re going to have peace is if we’re able to put ourselves in the shoes of our adversaries, understand their behavior and their contact, not context. And that’s why he was able to resist the intelligence apparatus and the military during the Bay of Pigs when they said, “You’ve got to send in the Essex, the aircraft carrier.” And he said, “No.” Even though he’d only been two months in office, he was able to stand up to them because he was able to put himself in the shoes of both Castro and Khrushchev and understand there’s got to be another solution to this. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:19:40): And then during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was able to endure it when the narrative was okay, Khrushchev acted in a way as an aggressor to put missiles in our hemisphere. How dare he do that? And Jack and my father were able to say, “Well, wait a minute. He’s doing that because we put missiles in Turkey and Italy, and the Turkish ones right on the Russian border.” And they then made a secret deal with Do Brennan, with Ambassador Do Brennan and with Khrushchev to remove the missiles in Turkey if he moved the Jupiter missiles from Turkey, so long as Khrushchev removed them from Cuba. There were 13 men on what they called the [inaudible 00:20:36] Committee, which was the group of people who were deciding what the action was, what they were going to do to end the Cuban Missile Crisis. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:20:45): And virtually, and of those men, 11 of them wanted to invade and wanted to bomb and invade, and it was Jack. And then later on, my father and Bob McNamara, who were the only people who were with him, because he was able to see the world from Khrushchev’s point of view of view, he believed that there was another solution. And then he also had the moral courage. So my father, to get back to your question, famously said that, “Moral courage is the most important quality and it’s more rare,” and courage on the football field or courage in battle than physical courage. It’s much more difficult to come by, but it’s the most important quality in a human being. Lex Fridman (00:21:33): And you think that kind of empathy that you referred to, that requires moral courage? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:21:37): It certainly requires moral courage to act on it, and particularly in any time that a nation is at war, there’s a momentum or an inertia that says, “Okay, let’s not look at this from the other person’s point of view.” And that’s the time we really need to do that. Lex Fridman (00:22:03): Well, if we’re can apply that style of empathy, style of curiosity to the current war in Ukraine, what is your understanding of why Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:22:16): Vladimir Putin could have avoided the war in the Ukraine. His invasion was illegal. It was unnecessary, and it was brutal, but I think it’s important for us to move beyond these kind of comic book depictions of this insane, avaricious Russian leader who wants to restore the Soviet Empire, and who made unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine. He was provoked and we were provoking him and we were provoking him since 1997. And it’s not just me that’s saying that. And before Putin never came in, we were provoking Russia, the Russians in this way unnecessarily. And to go back that time in 1992 when the Russians moved out of… When the Soviet Union was collapsing, the Russians moved out of East Germany and they did that, which was a huge concession to them. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:23:27): They had 400,000 troops in East Germany at that time, and they were facing NATO troops on the other side of the wall. Gorbachev made this huge concession where he said to George Bush, “I’m going to move all of our troops out, and you can then reunify Germany under NATO,” which was a hostile army to the Soviet… It was created with hostile intent toward the Soviet Union. And he said, “You can take Germany, but I want your promise that you will not move NATO to the east.” And James Baker, who was his Secretary of State famously said, “I will not move NATO. We will not move NATO one inch to the east.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:24:07): So then five years later in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the “father of the neocons,” who was a Democrat at that time, served in the Carter administration, he published a paper, a blueprint for moving NATO right up to the Russian border, a 1,000 miles to the east and taking over 14 nations. And at that time, George Kennan, who was the deity of American diplomats, he was arguably the most important diplomat in American history. He was the architect of the containment policy during World War II. And he said, “This is insane and it’s unnecessary. And if you do this, it’s going to provoke the Russians to a violent response. And we should be making friends with the Russians. They lost the Cold War. We should be treating them the way that we treated our adversaries after World War II, with a Marshall Plan to try to help them incorporate into Europe and to be part of the brotherhood of man and of western nations. We shouldn’t continue to be treating them as an enemy and particularly surrounding them at their borders.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:25:26): William Perry, who was then the Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton, threatened to resign. He was so upset by this plan to move NATO to the east. And William Burns, who was then the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who is now at this moment, the Head of the CIA, said at the time, the same thing. “If you do this, it is going to provoke the Russians toward a military response.” And we moved all around Russia. We moved to 14 nations, a 1,000 miles to the east, and we put ageist missile systems in two nations, in Romania and Poland. So we did what the Russians had done to us in 1962 that would’ve provoked an invasion of Cuba. We put those missile systems back there, and then we’d walk away, unilaterally, walk away from the two nuclear missile treaties, the intermediate nuclear missile treaties that we had with the Soviet, with Russia, and neither of us would put those missile systems on the borders. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:26:31): We walk away from that and we put ageist missile systems, which are nuclear capable. They can carry the Tomahawk missiles, which have nuclear warheads. So the last country that they didn’t take was the Ukraine. And the Russians said, and in fact, Bill Perry said this, or William Burns said it, now the Head of the CIA, “It is a red line. If we bring NATO into Ukraine, that is a red line for the Russians. They cannot live with it. They cannot live with it. Russia has been invaded three times through the Ukraine. The last time it was invaded, we killed, or the Germans killed one out of every seven Russians.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:27:11): My uncle described what happened to Russia in his famous American university speech in 1963, 60 years ago this month, or or last month, 60 years ago in June, June 10th, 1963. That speech was telling the American people, “Put yourself in the shoes of the Russians. We need to do that if we’re going to make peace.” And he said, “All of us have been taught that we won the war, but we didn’t win the war. If anybody won the war against Hitler, it was the Russians. Their country was destroyed, all of their cities.” And he said, “Imagine if all of the cities from the East Coast to Chicago were reduced to rubble and all of the fields burns, all of the forests burns. That’s what happened to Russia. That’s what they gave so that we could get rid of Adolf Hitler.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:28:08): And he had them put themselves in their position, and today there’s none of that happening. We have refused repeatedly to talk to the Russians. We’ve broken up, there’s two treaties, the Minsk Agreements, which the Russians were willing to sign, and they said, “We will stay out.” The Russians didn’t want the Ukraine. They showed that when the Donbas region voted 90 to 10 to leave and go to Russia. Putin said, “No, we want Ukraine to stay intact, but we want you to sign Minsk Accords.” The Russians were very worried because of the US involvement and the coup in Ukraine in 2014, and then the oppression and the killing of 14,000 ethnic Russians, and Russia hasn’t had the same way that if Mexico would ageist missile systems from China or Russia on our border and then killed 14,000 expats American, we would go in there. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:29:13): Oh, he does have a national security interest in the Ukraine. He has an interest in protecting the Russian-speaking people of the Ukraine, the ethnic Russians, and the Minsk Accords did that. It left Ukraine as part of Russia. It left them as a semi-autonomous region that continued to use their own language, which is essentially banned by the coup, by the government we put in 2014, and we sabotaged that agreement. And we now know in April of 2022, Zelenskyy and Putin had inked a deal already to another peace agreement, and that the United States and Boris Johnson, the neocons in the White House and Boris Johnson over to the Ukraine to sabotage that agreement. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:30:03): … Boris Johnson over to the Ukraine to sabotage that agreement. What do I think? I think this is a proxy war. I think this is a war that the neocons and the White House wanted. They’ve said for two decades they wanted this war and that they wanted to use Ukraine as a pawn in a proxy war between United States and Russia, the same as we used Afghanistan. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:30:26): And in fact, they say it, “This is the model. Let’s use the Afghanistan model.” That was said again and again. And to get the Russians to overextend their troops and then fight them using local fighters and US weapons. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:30:40): And when President Biden was asked, “Why are we in the Ukraine?” He was honest. He says, “To depose Vladimir Putin. Regime change for Vladimir Putin.” And when his defense secretary Lloyd Austin in April 2022 was asked, “Why are we there?” He said, “To degrade the Russians’ capacity to fight anywhere… To exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight elsewhere in the world.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:31:05): That’s not a humanitarian mission. That’s not what we were told. We were told this was an unprovoked invasion and that we’re there to bring humanitarian relief to the Ukrainians. But that is the opposite. That is a war of attrition that is designed to chew up and turn this little nation into an abattoir of death for the flower of Ukrainian youth in order to advance a geopolitical ambition of certain people within the White House. And I think that’s wrong. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:31:39): We should be talking to the Russians the way that Nixon talked to Brezhnev, the way that Bush talked to Gorbachev, the way that my uncle talked to Khrushchev. We need to be talking with the Russians, we should, and negotiating. And we need to be looking about how do we end this and preserve peace in Europe. Lex Fridman (00:31:58): Would you as president sit down and have a conversation with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy separately and together to negotiate peace? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:32:07): Absolutely. Absolutely. Lex Fridman (00:32:09): What about Vladimir Putin? He’s been in power since 2000. So as the old adage goes, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Do you think he has been corrupted by being in power for so long, if you think of the man, if you look at his mind? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:32:27): Listen, I don’t know exactly. I can’t say because I don’t know enough about him or about… The evidence that I’ve seen is that he is homicidal. He kills his enemies or poisons them. And the reaction I’ve seen to that, to hit those accusations from him have not been to deny that but to kind of laugh it off. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:32:58): Oh, I think he’s a dangerous man and that, of course, there’s probably corruption in his regime. But having said that, it’s not our business to change the Russian government. And anybody who thinks it’s a good idea to do a regime change in Russia, which has more nuclear weapons than we do, is I think irresponsible. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:33:22): And Vladimir Putin himself has said, “We will not live in a world without Russia.” And it was clear when he said that he was talking about himself. And he has his hand on a button that could bring Armageddon to the entire planet. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:33:40): So why are we messing with this? It’s not our job to change that regime. We should be making friends with the Russians. We shouldn’t be treating him as an enemy. Now we’ve pushed him into the camp with China. That’s not a good thing for our country. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:33:55): And by the way, what we’re doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all. Putin now, if you believe the polls that are coming out of Russia, they show him… the most recent polls that I’ve seen show him with an 89% popularity that people in Russia support the war in Ukraine, and they support him as an individual. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:34:25): And I understand there’s problems with polling and you don’t know what to believe, but the polls consistently show that. And it’s not America’s business to be the policemen of the world and to be changing regimes in the world. That’s illegal. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:34:41): We shouldn’t be breaking international laws. We should actually be looking for ways to improve relationships with Russia, not to destroy Russia, not to destroy, and not to choose its leadership for them. That’s up to the Russian people, not us. Lex Fridman (00:35:00): Step one is to sit down and empathize with the leaders of both nations to understand their history, their concerns, their hopes, just to open the door for conversation so they’re not back to the corner. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:35:12): Yeah. And I think the US can play a really important role, and a US president can play a really important role by reassuring the Russians that we’re not going to consider them an enemy anymore, that we want to be friends. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:35:26): And it doesn’t mean that you have to let down your guard completely. The way that you do it, which was the way President Kennedy did it, is you do it one step at a time. You take baby steps. We do a unilateral move, reduce our hostility and aggression, and see if the Russians reciprocate. And that’s the way that we should be doing it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:35:50): And we should be easing our way into a positive relationship with Russia. We have a lot in common with Russia, and we should be friends with Russia and with the Russian people. Apparently, there’s been 350,000 Ukrainians who have died, at least, in this war. And there’s probably been 60,000 or 80,000 Russians. And that should not give us any joy. It should not give us any… Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:36:21): I saw Lindsey Graham on TV saying something to the extent of, “Anything we can do to kill Russians is a good use of our money.” It is not. Those are somebody’s children. We should have compassion for them. This war is an unnecessary war. We should settle it through negotiation, through diplomacy, through state graft, and not through weapons. Lex Fridman (00:36:50): Do you think this war can come to an end purely through military operations? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:36:55): No. I mean, I don’t think there’s any way in the world that the Ukrainians can beat the Russians. I don’t think there’s any appetite in Europe… I think Europe is now having severe problems. In Germany, Italy, France, you’re seeing these riots. There’s internal problems in those countries. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:37:12): There is no appetite in Europe for sending men to die in Ukraine. And the Ukrainians do not have anybody left. The Ukrainians are using press gangs to fill the ranks of their armies. Military-age men are trying as hard as they can to get out of the Ukraine right now to avoid going to the front. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:37:35): The Russians apparently have been killing Ukrainians in a 7:1 ratio. My son fought over there, and he told me… He had firefights with the Russians mainly at night, but he said most of the battles were artillery wars during the day. And the Russians now outgun the NATO forces 10:1 in artillery. They’re killing at a horrendous rate. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:38:06): Now, my interpretation of what’s happened so far is that Putin actually went in early on with a small force because he expected to meet somebody on the other end of a negotiating table once he went in. And when that didn’t happen, they did not have a large enough force to be able to mount an offensive. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:38:32): And so they’ve been building up that force up till now, and they now have that force. And even against the small original force, the Ukrainians have been helpless. All of their offenses have died. They’ve now killed the head of the Ukrainian special forces, which was probably, arguably, by many accounts, the best elite military unit in all of Europe. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:39:01): The commandant, the commander of that special forces group gave a speech about four months ago saying that 86% of his men are dead or wounded and cannot return to the front. He cannot rebuild that force. And the troops that are now filling the gaps of all those 350,000 men who’ve been lost are scantily trained, and they’re arriving green at the front. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:39:36): Many of them do not want to be there. Many of them are giving up and going over to the Russian side. We’ve seen this again and again and again, including platoon-sized groups that are defecting to the Russians. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:39:48): And I don’t think it’s possible to win. Of course, I’ve studied World War II history exhaustively, but I saw… There’s a new… I think it’s a Netflix series of documentaries that I highly recommend to people there. They’re colorized versions of the black-and-white films from the battles of World War II, but it’s all the battles of World War II. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:40:15): So I watched Stalingrad the other night. And the willingness of the Russians to fight on against any kind of odds and to make huge sacrifices of Russians, the Russians themselves who are making the sacrifice with their lives, the willingness of them to do that for their motherland is almost inexhaustible. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:40:40): It is incomprehensible to think that Ukraine can beat Russia in a war. It would be like Mexico beating the United States. It’s impossible to think that it can happen. And Russia has deployed a tiny, tiny fraction of its military so far. And now it has China with its mass production capacity supporting its war effort. It’s a hopeless situation. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:41:11): And we’ve been lied to. The press in our country and our government are just promoting this lie that the Ukrainians are about to win and that everything’s going great and that Putin’s on the run. And there’s all this wishful thinking because of the Wagner Group- Lex Fridman (00:41:30): Prigozhin. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:41:30): … Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, that this was an internal coup, and it showed dissent and weakness of Putin. And none of that is true. That insurgency, which wasn’t even an insurgency… Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:41:44): He only got 4,000 of his men to follow him out of 20,000. And they were quickly stopped. And nobody in the Russian military, the oligarchy, the political system, nobody supported it. But we’re being told, “Oh yeah, it’s the beginning of the end for Putin. He’s weakened. He’s wounded. He’s on his way out.” And all of these things are just lies that we are being fed. Lex Fridman (00:42:07): To push back on a small aspect of this that you kind of implied, so I’ve traveled to Ukraine, and one thing that I should say, similar to the Battle of Stalingrad, it is not only the Russians that fight to the end. I think Ukrainians are very lucky to fight to the end. Lex Fridman (00:42:24): And the morale there is quite high. I’ve talked to nobody… This was a year ago in August with Kherson. Everybody was proud to fight and die for their country. And there’s some aspect where this war unified the people, gave them a reason and an understanding that this is what it means to be Ukrainian and, “I will fight to the death to defend this land.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:42:48): I would agree with that, and I should have said that myself at the beginning. That’s one of the reasons my son went over there to fight because he was inspired by the valor of the Ukrainian people and this extraordinary willingness of them. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:43:02): And I think Putin thought it would be much easier to sweep into Ukraine, and he found a stone wall of Ukrainians ready to put their lives and their bodies on the line. But that, to me, makes the whole episode even more tragic, is that I don’t believe… I think that the US’s role in this has been… There were many opportunities to settle this war, and the Ukrainians wanted to settle it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:43:34): Volodymyr Zelenskyy, when he ran in 2019, here’s a guy who’s a comedian, he’s an actor. He had no political experience, and yet he won this election with 70% of the vote. Why? He won on a peace platform, and he won promising to sign the Minsk accords. And yet something happened when he got in there that made him suddenly pivot. And I think it’s a good guess what happened. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:44:02): I think he came under threat by ultra-nationalists within his own administration and the insistence of neocons like Victoria Nuland and the White House, that we don’t want peace with Putin. We want a war. Lex Fridman (00:44:20): Do you worry about nuclear war? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:44:22): Yeah, I worry about it. Lex Fridman (00:44:25): It seems like a silly question, but it’s not. It’s a serious question. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:44:29): Well, the reason it’s not is just because people seem to be in this kind of dream state that it’ll never happen, and yet it can happen very easily and it can happen at any time. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:44:48): And if we push the Russians too far, I don’t doubt that Putin, if he felt like his regime or his nation was in danger, that the United States was going to be able to place a quisling into the Kremlin, that he would use nuclear torpedoes and these strategic weapons that they have. And that could be it. Once you do that, nobody controls the trajectory. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:45:24): By the way, I have very strong memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis and of those 13 days when we came closer to nuclear war. And particularly, I think it was when the U-2 got shot down over Cuba. And nobody in this country… There’s a lot of people in Washington, D.C., who, at that point, thought that they very well may wake up dead, that the world may end at night. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:45:55): 30 million Americans killed 130 million Russians. This is what our military brass wanted. They saw a war with Russia, a nuclear exchange with Russia as not only inevitable but also desirable because they wanted to do it now while we still had superiority. Lex Fridman (00:46:14): Can you actually go through the feelings you’ve had about the Cuban Missile Crisis? What are your memories of it? What are some interesting- Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:46:21): I was going to school in Washington, D.C. to Our Lady of Victory, which is in Washington, D.C. I lived in Virginia across the Potomac, and we would cross the bridge every day into D.C. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:46:38): And during the crisis, U.S. Marshals came to my house to take us, I think around day eight. My father was spending the night at the White House. He wasn’t coming home. He was staying with the EXCOM committee and sleeping there. And they were up 24 hours a day. They were debating and trying to figure out what was happening. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:47:00): But we had U.S. Marshals come to our house to take us down… They were going to take us down to White Sulphur Springs in Southern Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where there was an underground city, essentially, a bunker that was like a city. And apparently, it had McDonald’s in it and a lot of other… It was a full city for the U.S. Government and their families. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:47:29): U.S. Marshals came to our house to take us down there. And I was very excited about doing that. And this was at a time when we were doing the drills. We were doing the duck-and-cover drills once a week at our school, where they would tell you when the alarms go off, then you put your head under the table, you remove the sharps from your desk, put them inside your desk, you put your head under the table, and you wait. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:47:56): And the initial blast will take the windows out of the school. And then we all stand up and file in an orderly fashion into the basement where we’re going to be for the next six or eight months or whatever. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:48:08): But in the basement where we went occasionally, those corridors were lined with freeze-dried food canisters from floor to ceiling. We were all preparing for this. And it was Bob McNamara, who was a friend of mine, and was one of my father’s close friends, the Secretary of Defense, he later called it mass psychosis. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:48:34): And my father deeply regretted participating in the bomb shelter program because he said it was part of a psychological psyop trick to teach Americans that nuclear war was acceptable, that it was survivable. My father, anyway, when the Marshals came to our house to take me and my brother Joe away, we were the ones who were home at that time, my father called, and he talked to us on the phone. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:49:05): And he said, “I don’t want you going down there because if you disappear from school, people are going to panic. And I need you to be a good soldier and go to school.” And he said something to me during that period, which was that if a nuclear war happened, it would be better to be among the dead than the living, which I did not believe. Okay? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:49:31): I had already prepared myself for the dystopian future. And I knew… I spent every day in the woods. I knew that I could survive by catching crawfish and cooking mudpuppies and would do whatever I had to do. But I felt like, okay, I can handle this. And I really wanted to see this underground city. But anyway, that was part of it for me. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:50:01): My father was away the last days of it. My father got this idea because Khrushchev had sent two letters. He sent one letter that was conciliatory. And then he sent a letter that after his joint chiefs and the warmongers around him saw that letter and they disapproved of it, they sent another letter that was extremely belligerent. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:50:25): And my father had the idea, “Let’s just pretend we didn’t get the second letter and reply to the first one.” And then he went down to Dobrynin. He met Dobrynin in the Justice Department. And Dobrynin was the Soviet ambassador. And they proposed this settlement, which was a secret settlement, where Khrushchev would withdraw the missiles from Cuba. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:50:52): Khrushchev had put the missiles in Cuba because we had put missiles, nuclear missiles, in Turkey and Italy. And my uncle’s secret deal was that if Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba within six months, he would get rid of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:51:10): But if Khrushchev told anybody about the deal, it was off. So if news got out about that secret deal, it was off. But that was the actual deal. And Khrushchev complied with it, and then my uncle complied with it. Lex Fridman (00:51:25): How much of that part of human history turned on the decisions of one person? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:51:31): I think that’s one of the… Because that, of course, is the perennial question. Right? Is history on automatic pilot? And human decisions and the decisions of leaders really only have a marginal or incremental bearing on what is going to happen anyway. And historians argue about that all the time. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:51:57): I think that that is a really good example of a place in human history that, literally, the world could have ended if we had a different leader in the White House. And the reason for that is that there were, as I recall, 64 gun emplacements, missile emplacements. Each one of those missile emplacements had a crew of about 100 men, and they were Soviets. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:52:29): We didn’t know whether… We had a couple of questions that my uncle asked the CIA. And he asked… Dulles was already gone. But he asked the CIA. And he asked his military brass. Because they all wanted to go in. Everybody wanted to go in. And my uncle asked to see the aerial photos, and he examined those personally. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:52:53): And this is why it’s important to have a leader in the White House who can push back on their bureaucracies. And then he asked them, “Who’s manning those missile sites? And are they Russians? And if they’re Russians and we bomb them, isn’t it going to force Khrushchev to then go into Berlin?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:53:20): And that would be the beginning of a cascade effect that would highly likely end in a nuclear confrontation. And the military brass said to my uncle, “Oh, we don’t think he’ll have the guts to do that.” My uncle was like, “That’s what you’re betting on?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:53:42): And they all wanted him to go in. They wanted him to bomb the sites and then invade Cuba. And he said, “If we bomb those sites, we’re going to be killing Russians. And it’s going to force… it’s going to provoke Russia into some response. And the obvious response is for them to go into Berlin.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:54:02): But the thing that we didn’t know then, that we didn’t find out until, I think it was a 30-year anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Havana, what we learned then from the Russians who came to that event… It was like a symposium where everybody on both sides talked about it. And we learned a lot of stuff that nobody knew before. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:54:30): One of the insane things, the most insane thing that we learned was that the weapons were already… the nuclear warheads were already in place, they were ready to fire, and that the authorization to fire was delegated to each of the gun crew commanders. So there were 60 people who all had authorization to fire if they felt themselves under attack. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:54:59): So you have to believe that at least one of them would’ve launched, and that would’ve been the beginning of the end. And if anybody had launched, we knew what would happen. My uncle knew what would happen. Because he asked again and again, “What’s going to happen?” And they said, “30 million Americans will be killed, but we will kill 130 million Russians, so we will win.” And that was a victory for them. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:55:28): And my uncle later said, he told Arthur Schlesinger and Kenny O’Donnell, he said, “Those guys…” He called them the salad brass, the guys with all of this stuff on their chest. And he said, “Those guys, they don’t care. Because they know that if it happens, they’re going to be in charge of everything. They’re the ones who are going to be running the world after that.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:55:51): So for them, there was an incentive to kill 130 million Russians and 30 million Americans. But my uncle, he had this correspondence with Khrushchev. They were secretly corresponding with each other. And that is what saved the world, is that both of them had been men of war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:56:10): Eisenhower famously said, “It will not be a man of war, it will not be a soldier who starts World War III. Because a guy who’s actually seen it knows how bad it is.” And my uncle had been in the heat of the South Pacific. His boat had been cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:56:30): Three of his crewmen had been killed, one of them badly burned. He pulled that guy with a lanyard and his teeth, six miles to an island in the middle of the night. And then they hid out there for 10 days. And he came back. Like I said, he was the only President of the United States that earned the Purple Heart. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:56:50): Meanwhile, Khrushchev had been at Stalingrad, which was the worst place to be on the planet, probably in the 20th century, other than in Auschwitz or one of the death camps. It was the most ferocious, horrific war with people starving, people committed cannibalism, eating the dogs, the cats, eating their shoe leather, easing to death by the thousands, etc. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:57:19): Khrushchev did not want… The last thing he wanted was a war. And the last thing my uncle wanted was a war. But the CIA did not know anything about Khrushchev. And the reason for that is there was a mole at Langley so that every time the CIA got a spy in the Kremlin, he would immediately be killed. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:57:43): So they had no eyes in the Kremlin. There were literally hundreds of Russian spies who had defected to the United States and were in the Kremlin who were killed during that period. They had no idea anything about Khrushchev, about how he saw the world. And they saw the Kremlin itself as a monolith. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:58:06): The same way that we look at Putin today, they have this ambition of world conquest and it’s driving them. And there’s nothing else they think about. They’re absolutely single-minded about it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:58:18): But actually, there was a big division between Khrushchev and his joint chiefs and his intelligence apparatus. And they both, at one point, discovered they were both in the same situation. They were surrounded by spies and military personnel who were intent on going to war, and they were the two guys resisting it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:58:39): My uncle had this idea of being the peace president from the beginning. He told Ben Bradlee, one of his best friends who was the publisher of The Washington Post or the editor-in-chief at that time. He said Ben Bradlee asked him, “What do you want on your gravestone?” And my uncle said, “He kept the peace.” He said, “The principal job of the President of the United States is to keep the country out of war.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:59:11): So when he first became president, he actually agreed to meet Khrushchev in Geneva to do a summit. And by the way, Eisenhower had wanted to do the same thing. Eisenhower wanted peace, and he was going to meet in Vienna. But that peace summit was blown up. He was going to try to end the Cold War. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (00:59:37): Eisenhower was in the last year of his… in May of 1960. But that was torpedoed by the CIA during the U-2 crash. They sent a U-2 over the Soviet Union, it got shot down. And then Allen Dulles told Eisenhower to deny that we had a program. They didn’t know that the Russians had captured Gary Francis powers. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:00:00): …France’s powers. And that blew up the peace talks between Eisenhower and Khrushchev and there was a lot of tension. My uncle wanted to break that tension. He agreed to meet with Khrushchev in Vienna early on in his term. He went over there and Khrushchev snubbed him. Khrushchev lectured him imperiously about the terror of American imperialism, and rebuffed any… They did agree not to go into Laos. They made an agreement that kept the United States, kept my uncle, from sending troops to Laos, but it had been a disaster in Vienna. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:00:48): So then, we had a spy that used to come to our house all the time, a guy called Georgi Bolshakov, and he was this Russian spy my parents had met at the embassy. They had gone to a party or a reception at the Russian Embassy, and he had approached them and they knew he was a GRU agent and KGB, he was both, oh, he used to come to our house. They really liked him. He was very attractive. He was always laughing and joking. He would do rope climbing contests with my father. He would do pushup contests with my father. He could do the Russian dancing, the Cossack dancing, and he would do that for us and teach us that. And we knew he was a spy too, and this was at the time of the James Bond films were first coming out, so it was really exciting for us to have an actual Russian spy in our house. The State Department was horrified by it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:01:44): But anyway, when Khrushchev, after Vienna, and after the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev had second thoughts and he sent this long letter to my uncle, and he didn’t want to go through his state department or his embassy, he wanted to end run them. And he was friends with Bolshakov, so he gave Georgi the letter, and Georgi brought it and handed it to Pierre Salinger, folded in the New York Times. And he gave it to my uncle. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:02:21): And it was this beautiful letter, which he said, my uncle had talked to him about the children who had played, we played, 29 grandchildren who were playing in his yard. And he’s saying, what is our moral basis for making a decision that could kill these children? So they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never participate in election, they’ll never run for office. How can we morally, make a decision that is going to eliminate life for these beautiful kids? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:02:52): And he had said that to Khrushchev, and Khrushchev wrote them this letter back saying that he was now sitting as this dacha on the Black Sea, and that he was thinking about what my uncle Jack had said to him at Vienna. And he regretted very deeply not having taken the olive leaf that Jack had offered him. And then he said, it occurs to me now that we’re all on an arc and that there is not another one, and that the entire fate of the planet, and all of its creatures and all of the children are dependent on the decisions we make. And you and I have a moral obligation to go forward with each other as friends. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:03:34): And immediately after that, he sent that right after the Berlin crisis in 1962, General Curtis LeMay had tried to provoke a war with an incident at Checkpoint Charlie, which was the entrance and exit, through the Berlin Wall in Berlin. And the Russian tanks had come to the wall. The US tanks had come to the wall and there was a standoff. And my uncle had sent a message to Khrushchev then through Do Brennan saying, my back is at the wall. I have no place to back to, please back off, and then we will back off. And Khrushchev took his word, backed his tanks off first, and then my uncle ordered LeMay back. He had, LeMay had mounted bulldozer plows on the front of the tanks to plow down the Berlin wall, and the Russians had come, so it was these generals trying to provoke a war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:04:44): But they started talking to each other then. And then after he wrote that letter, they agreed that they would install a hotline, so they could talk to each other and they wouldn’t have to go through intermediaries. And so at Jack’s house on the Cape, there was a red phone that we knew if we picked it up, Khrushchev would answer. And there was another one in the White House. But they knew it was important to talk to each other. And you just wish that we had that kind of leadership today, that just understands our job. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:05:21): Look, I know you know a lot about AI, and you know how dangerous it is, potentially to humanity, and what opportunities is it also offers, but it could kill us all. I mean, Elon said, first it’s going to steal our job, then it’s going to kill us. Right? And it’s probably not a hyperbole. Actually, if it follows the laws of biological evolution, which are just the laws of mathematics, that’s probably a good endpoint for it, a potential endpoint. It’s going to happen, but we need to make sure it’s regulated, and it’s regulated properly for safety, in every country. And that includes Russia and China and Iran. Right now, we should be putting all the weapons of war aside and sitting down with those guys and say, how are we going to do this? There’s much more important things to do. This stuff is going to kill us, if we don’t figure out how to regulate it. And leadership needs to look down the road at what is the real risk here. And the real risk is that AI will enslave us, for one thing, and then destroy us, and do all this other stuff. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:06:42): And how about biological weapons? We’re now all working on these biological weapons, and we’re doing biological weapons for Ebola, and Dengue Fever, and all of these other bad things. And we’re making ethnic bio-weapons, bio-weapons that can only kill Russians, bio-weapons that the Chinese are making that can kill people who don’t have Chinese genes. So all of this is now within reach. We’re actively doing it, and we need to stop it. And a biological weapons treaty is the easiest thing in the world to do. We can verify it, we can enforce it, and everybody wants to agree to it. Only insane people do not want to continue this kind of research, there’s no reason to do it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:07:33): So there are these existential threats to all of humanity now out there, like AI and biological weapons. We need to stop fighting each other, start competing on economic game fields, playing fields, instead of military playing fields, which will be good for all of humanity. And we need to sit down with each other, and negotiate reasonable treaties on how we regulate AI and biological weapons. And nobody’s talking about this in this political race right now. Nobody’s talking about it in a government. They get fixated on these little wars, and these comic book depictions of good versus evil, and we all go, hoorah and go off to and give them the weapons and enrich the military industrial complex, but we’re on the road to perdition if we don’t end this. Lex Fridman (01:08:29): And some of this requires to have this kind of phone that connects Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy that cuts through all the bureaucracy, to have this communication between heads of State, and in the case of AI, perhaps heads of tech companies where you can just pick up the phone and have a conversation. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:08:46): Yes. Lex Fridman (01:08:46): Because a lot of it, a lot of the existential threats of artificial intelligence, perhaps even bio-weapons, is unintentional. It’s not even strategic- Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:08:56): Exactly. Lex Fridman (01:08:56): -intentional effects, so you have to be transparent and honest about, especially with AI, that people might not know what’s the worst that’s going to happen once you release it out into the wild? And you have to have an honest communication about how to do it, so that companies are not terrified of regulation, overreach regulation. And then government is not terrified of tech companies, of manipulating them in some direct or indirect ways, so there’s a trust that builds versus a distrust. Basically, that old phone, where Khrushchev can call John F. Kennedy, is needed. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:09:35): And I don’t think there’s… Listen, I don’t understand AI. I do know, I can see from all this technology, how it’s this turnkey totalitarianism, that once you put these systems in place, they can be misused to enslave people, and they can be misused in wars, and to subjugate, to kill, to do all of these bad things. And I don’t think there’s anybody on Capitol Hill, who understands this. We need to bring in the tech community and say, tell us what these regulations need to look like, so that there can be freedom to innovate, so that we can milk AI for all of the good things, but not fall into these traps that pose existential threats to humanity. Lex Fridman (01:10:31): It seems like John F. Kennedy is a singular figure, in that he was able to have the humility to reach out to Khrushchev, and also the strength and integrity to resist the, what did you call them, the salad brass and institutions like the CIA, so that makes it particularly tragic that he was killed. To what degree was CIA involved, or the various bureaucracy involved in his death? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:11:00): The evidence that the CIA was involved in my uncle’s murder, and that they were subsequently involved in the coverup, and continue to be involved in the coverup, I mean, there’s still 5,000 documents that they won’t release 60 years later, is I think, so insurmountable and so mountainous and overwhelming, that it’s beyond any reasonable doubt, including dozens of confessions of people who were involved in the assassination. But every kind of document, and I mean, it came as a surprise recently to most Americans, I think, the release of these documents in which the press, the American media, finally acknowledged that, yeah, Lee Harvey Oswald was the CIA asset, that he was recruited in 1957. He was a Marine working at the Atsugi Air Force Base, which was the CIA Air Force base with the U2 flights, which was a CIA program. And that he was recruited by James Jesus Angleton, who was the director of counterintelligence and then sent on a fake defection to Russia and then brought back to Dallas. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:12:34): And people didn’t know that, even though it’s been known for decades, it never percolated into the mainstream media, because they have such an allergy to anything that challenges the Warren Report. When Congress investigated my uncle’s murder in the 1970s, the Church committee did, and they did a two and a half year investigation, and they had many, many more documents, and much more testimony available to them than the Warren Commission had, and this was a decade after the Warren Commission. They came to the conclusion that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy. And there was a division where essentially one guy on that committee believed it was primarily the mafia, but Richard Schweitzer was the senator at head of the committee, said straight out, the CIA was involved in the murder of the President of the United States. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:13:42): I’ve talked to most of the staff on that committee, and they said, yeah, and the CIA was stonewalling us the whole way through. And the actual people that the CIA appointed, George Johanedees, who the CIA appointed as a liaison to the committee, they brought him out of retirement, he had been one of the masterminds of the assassination. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:14:06): I mean, it’s impossible to even talk about a tiny of the fraction of the evidence here. What I suggest to people, there are hundreds of books written about this, that assemble this evidence and mobilize the evidence. The best book to me, for people to read is James Douglass’s book, which is called, The Unspeakable. And he, Douglass does this extraordinary. He is an extraordinary scholar, and he does this just an amazing job of digesting and summarizing and mobilizing all of them, probably a million documents, and the evidence from all these confessions that have come out, into a coherent story. And it’s riveting to read. And I recommend people, do not take my word for it, and don’t take anybody else’s word for it, go ahead and do the research yourself. And one way to do that is probably the most efficient way, is to read Douglas’s book. He has all the references there. Lex Fridman (01:15:08): So if it’s true that CIA had a hand in this assassination, how is it possible for them to amass so much power? How is it possible for them to become corrupt? And is it individuals, or is it the entire institution? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:15:22): No, it’s not the entire institution. My daughter-in-law, who’s helping to run my campaign was a CIA, in the clandestine for all her career. She was a spy in the Weapons of Mass Destruction program in the Middle East and in China. And there’s 22,000 people who work for the CIA, probably 20,000 of those are patriotic Americans and really good public servants, and they’re doing important work for our country. But the institution is corrupt, and because the higher up ranks the institution. And in fact, Mike Pompeo said something like this to me the other day. He was the director of the CIA. He said, “When I was there, I did not do a good job of cleaning up that agency.” And he said, “The entire upper bureaucracy of that agency, are people who do not believe in the institutions of democracy.” This is what he said to me. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know that that’s significant. He’s a smart person, and he ran the agency and he was the Secretary of State. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:16:32): But it’s no mystery how that happened. We know the history. The CIA was originally…First of all, there was great reluctance in 1947, that for the first time, we had a secret spy agency in this country during World War II, called the OSS. That was disbanded after the war, because Congress said, having a secret spy agency is incompatible with a democracy. The secret spy agency are things like the KGB, the STASI in East Germany, SAVAK in Iran, and PEEP, and Chile and whatever, all over the world, they’re all have to do with totalitarian governments. They’re not something that you can have that, it’s antithetical to democracy to have that. But in 1947, we created, Truman signed it in, but it was initially an espionage agency, which means information gathering, which is important. It’s to gather and consolidate information from many, many different sources from all over the world, and then put those in reports for the White House, so the president can make good decisions based upon valid information, evidence-based decision making. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:17:57): But Alan Dulles, who was essentially the first head of the agency, made a series of legislative imaginations and political imaginations, that gave additional powers to the agency, and opened up what they called then the plans division, which is the plans division is the dirty tricks, it’s the black ops, fixing elections, murdering, what they call executive action, which means killing foreign leaders, and making small wars, and bribing, and blackmailing, people stealing elections, and that kind of thing. And the reason, at that time, we were in the middle of the Cold War and Truman, and then Eisenhower did not want to go to war. They didn’t want to commit troops. And it seemed to them that this was a way of fighting the Cold War secretly, and doing it at minimal cost by changing events sort of invisibly. And so it was seductive to them. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:19:08): But everybody, Congress, when they first voted it in place, Congress, both political parties said, if we create this thing, it could turn into a monster and it could undermine our values. And today it’s so powerful, and then nobody knows what its budget is. Plus it has its own investment fund In-Q-Tel, which has invested, made I think, 2000 investments in Silicon Valley. So it has ownership of a lot of these tech companies, and a lot of the CEOs of those tech companies have signed state secrecy agreements with the CIA, which if they even reveal that they have signed that, they can go to jail for 20 years and have their assets removed, et cetera. The influence that the agency has, the capacity to influence events at every level in our country, is really frightening. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:20:03): And then for most of its life, the CIA was banned from propagandizing Americans, but we learned that they were doing it anyway. So in 1973, during the Church Committee hearings, we’ve learned that the CIA had a program called Operation Mockingbird, where they had at least 400 members, leading members of the United States press corps, on the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, et cetera, who were secretly working for the agency, and steering news coverage to support CIA priorities. And they agreed at that time to disband Operation Mockingbird in ’73. But there’s indications they didn’t do that. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:20:56): And they still, the CIA today, is the biggest funder of journalism around the world. The biggest funder is through USAID. The United States funds journalism in almost every country in the world. It owns newspapers, it has journalists on it, thousands and thousands of journalists, on its payroll. They’re not supposed to be doing that in the United States. But in 2016, president Obama changed the law to make it legal now for the CIA to propagandize Americans. And I think, we can’t look at the Ukraine War and how the narrative has been formed in the minds of Americans, and say that the CIA had nothing to do with that. Lex Fridman (01:21:46): Well, what is the mechanism by which the CIA influences the narrative? Do you think it’s indirectly? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:21:51): Through the press. Lex Fridman (01:21:52): Indirectly through the press, or directly by funding the press? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:21:55): Directly through. I mean, there’s certain press organs that have been linked to the agency, that the people who run those organs, things like the Daily Beast, now Rolling Stone, editor of Rolling Stone, Noah Shachtman, has deep relationships with the intelligence community, Salon, Daily Kos. Lex Fridman (01:22:19): But I wonder why they would do it. From my perspective, it just seems like the job of a journalist is to have an integrity where your opinion cannot be influenced or bought. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:22:30): I agree with you, but I actually think that the entire field of journalism has really shamed itself in recent years, because it’s become, the principle newspapers in this country and the television stations, the legacy media, have abandoned their tradition of… When I was a kid, listen, my house was filled with the greatest journalists alive at that time, people like Ben Bradley, like Anthony Lewis, Mary McGrory, Pete Hamil, Jack Newfield, Jimmy Breslin, and many, many others. And after my father died, they started the RFK Journalism Awards to recognize integrity and courage, journalistic integrity and courage. And for that generation of journalism, they thought, they believed that the function of journalists, was to maintain this posture of fear-skepticism toward any aggregation of power, including government authority, that people in authority lie, and that they always have to be questioned, and that their job was to speak truth to power, and to be guardians of the First Amendment to free expression. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:23:57): But if you look what happened during the pandemic, was the inverse of that kind of journalism, where the major press organs in this country were, instead of speaking truth to power, they were doing the opposite. They were broadcasting propaganda. They became propaganda organs for the government agencies. And they were actually censoring the speech of dissent, anybody who dissent, of the powerless. And in fact, it was an organized conspiracy, and the name of it was the Trusted News Initiative. And some of the major press organs in our country signed onto it, and they agreed not to print stories or facts, that departed from government orthodoxy. So the Washington Post was the signature of the UPI, the AP, and then the four social media groups, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Google, all signed on to the Trusted News Initiative. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:24:59): It was started by the BBC, organized by them. And the purpose of it, was to make sure nobody could print anything about government that departed from governmental orthodox. And the way it worked is, the UPI, the AP, which are the news services that provide most of the news news around the country, and the Washington Post, would decide what news was permissible to print. And a lot of it was about COVID, but also Hunter Biden’s laptops, it was impermissible to suggest that those were real, or that they had stuff on there that was compromising. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:25:39): And by the way, what I’m telling you is all well documented, and I’m litigating on it right now, so I’m part of a lawsuit against the TNI, and so I know a lot about what happened, and I have all this documented and people can go to our website. There’s a letter on my sub-stack now, to Michael Scherer of the Washington Post that outlines all this, and gives all my sources, because Michael Scherer accused me of being a conspiracy theorist, when he was actually part of a conspiracy, a true conspiracy, to suppress anybody who is departing from government orthodoxies, by either censoring them completely, or labeling them conspiracy theorists. Lex Fridman (01:26:26): I mean, you can understand the intention and the action, the difference between as we talked about, you can understand the intention of such a thing being good, that in a time of a catastrophe, in a time of a pandemic, there’s a lot of risk to saying untrue things. But that’s a slippery slope that leads into a place where the journalistic integrity that we talked about, is completely sacrificed, and then you can deviate from truth. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:26:54): If you read their internal memorandum, including the statements of the leader of the Trusted News Initiative, I think her name’s Jessica, Jennifer, Cecil and you can go on our website and see her statement. She says, the purpose of this is that we’re now… Actually, she says, when people look at the us, they think we’re competitors, but we’re not. The real competitors are coming from all these alternative news sources now all over the network, and they’re hurting public trust in us, and they’re hurting our economic model, and they have to be choked off and crushed. And the way that we’re going to do that, is to make an agreement with the social media sites, that if we say, if we label their information misinformation, the social media sites will de platform it, or they will throttle it, or they will shadow-ban it, which destroys the economic model of those alternative, competitive sources of information. So that that’s true. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:27:58): But the point you make, is an important point. That the journalists themselves, who probably didn’t know about the TNI agreement, certainly I’m sure they didn’t, they believe that they’re doing the right thing by suppressing information that may challenge government proclamations on COVID. But I mean, there’s a danger to that. And the danger is that, once you appoint yourself an arbiter of what’s true and what’s not true, then there’s really no end to the power that you have now assumed for yourself, because now your job is no longer to inform the public. Your job now is to manipulate the public. And if you end up manipulating the public in collusion with powerful entities, then you become the instrument of authoritarian rule, rather than the opponent of it. And it becomes the inverse of journalism and a democracy. Lex Fridman (01:29:05): You’re running for president as a Democrat, what to you are the strongest values that represent the left-wing politics of this country? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:29:18): I would say protection of the environment, and the commons, the air, the water, wildlife, fisheries, public lands, those assets, they cannot be reduced to private property ownership, the landscapes, our purple mountain majesty, the protection of the most vulnerable people in our society, people which would include children and minorities, the restoration of the middle class, and protection of labor, dignity, and decent pay for labor, bodily autonomy, a woman’s right to- Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:30:03): … bodily autonomy, a woman’s right to choose or an individual’s right to endure unwanted medical procedures. Peace. The Democrats have always been anti-war. The refusal to use fear is a governing tool. FDR said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” because he recognized that tyrants and dictators could use fear to disable critical thinking and overwhelm the desire for personal liberty. The freedom of government from untoward influenced by corrupt corporate power. The end of this corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is now I think, dominating our democracy. It’s what Eisenhower warned about when he warned against the emergence of the military industrial complex. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:31:07): And then I prefer to talk about the positive vision of what we should be doing in our country and globally, which is I see that the corporations are commoditizing us are poisoning our children, are strip mining the wealth from our middle class and treating America as if it were business in liquidation, converting assets to cash as quickly as possible and creating or exacerbating this huge disparity in wealth in our country, which is eliminating the middle class and creating a Latin American style futile model. There’s these huge aggregations of wealth above and widespread poverty below, and that’s a configuration that is too unstable to support democracy sustainably. And we’re supposed to be modeling democracy, but we’re losing it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:32:11): And I think we have ought to have a foreign policy that restores our moral authority around the world. Restores America as the embodiment of moral authority, which it was when my uncle was president. And as a purveyor of peace rather than a war-like nation. My uncle said he didn’t want people in Africa and Latin America and Asia when they think of America to picture a man with a gun and a bayonet. He wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer, and he refused to send combat soldiers abroad. He never sent a single soldier to his death abroad and into combat. He sent 16,000. He resisted in Berlin in ’62. He resisted in Laos in ’61. He resisted in Vietnam. Vietnam, they wanted him to put 250,000 troops. He only put 16,000 advisors, which was fewer troops. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:33:22): And he sent to get James Meredith into the universe to Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. One black man, he sent 16,000. And month before he died, he ordered them all home. I think it was October 2nd, 1963, he heard that a Green Beret had died. And he asked his aid for a list of combat fatalities. And the aid came back and there was 75 men had died in Vietnam at that point. And he said, “That’s too many. We’re going to have no more.” And he signed a national security order, 263, and ordered all of those men, all Americans, home from Vietnam by 1965 with the first thousand coming home by December ’63. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:34:13): And then in November he, of course, just before that evacuation began, he was killed. And a week later, president Johnson remanded that order. And then a year after that, the Tonkin Gulf resolution, we sent 250,000, which is what they wanted my uncle to do, which he refused. And it became an American war. And then Nixon topped it off at 560,000. 56,000 Americans never came home, including my cousin George Skakel, who died at the Tet Offensive. And we killed a million Vietnamese and we got nothing for it. Lex Fridman (01:34:51): So America should be the symbol of peace? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:34:57): My uncle really focused on putting America on the side of the poor, instead of our tradition of fortifying oligarchies that were anti-communism. That was our major criteria. If you said you were against communists, and of course the people were with the rich people, our aid was going to the rich people in those countries and they were going to the military juntas. Our weapons were going to the juntas to fight against the poor. And my uncle said, “No, America should be on the side of the porn.” And so he launched the Alliance for Progress and USAID, which were intended to bring aid to the poorest people and those, and build middle classes, and take ourselves away. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:35:42): In fact, his two favorite trips while he was president. His most favorite trip was to Ireland, this incredible, emotional homecoming for all of the people of Ireland. But his second favorite trip was when he went to Colombia, he went to Latin America, but Colombia was his favorite country. And I think there were 2 million people came into Bogota to see him, this vast crowd. And they were just delirious cheering for him. And the president of Columbia, Lleras Camargo, said to him, “Do you know why they love you?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:36:22): And my uncle said, “Why?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:36:24): And he said, “Because they think you’ve put America on the side of the poor against the oligarchs.” And my uncle, after he died, today, there are more avenues and boulevards and hospitals and schools and statues and parks commemorating John Kennedy in Africa and Latin America than any other president in the United States, and probably more than all the other presidents combined. And it’s because he put America on the side of the poor. And that’s what we ought to be doing. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:37:01): We ought to be projecting economic power abroad. The Chinese have essentially stolen his playbook and we’ve spent $8 trillion on the Iraq war and its aftermath. The wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And what do we get for that? We got nothing for that money. $8 trillion. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. Iraq today is much worse off than it was when Saddam was there. It’s an incoherent, violent war between Shia and Sunni death squads. We pushed Iraq into the embrace of Iran, which now become essentially a proxy for Iran, which is exactly the outcome that we were trying to prevent for the past 20 or 30 years. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:37:53): We created ISIS, we sent 2 million refugees into Europe, destabilizing all of the nations in Europe for generations. And we’re now seeing these riots in France, and that’s a direct result from the Syrian war that we created and our creation of ISIS. Brexit is another result of that. So for $8 trillion, we wrecked the world. And during that same period that we spent $8.1 trillion bombing bridges, ports, schools, hospitals, the Chinese spent 8.1 trillion building schools, ports, hospitals, bridges, and universities. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:38:42): And now the Chinese are out-competing us everywhere in the world. Everybody wants to deal with the Chinese because they come in, they build nice things for you, and there’s no strings attached and they’re pleasant to deal with. And as a result of that, Brazil is switching the Chinese currency. Argentina is switching. Saudi Arabia, our greatest partner that we put trillions of dollars into protecting our oil pipelines there. And now they’re saying, “We don’t care what the United States think.” That’s what Mohammed bin Salman said. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:39:24): He dropped oil production in Saudi Arabia in the middle of a US inflation spiral. They’ve never done that to us before, to aggravate the inflation spiral. And then they signed a deal, a unilateral peace deal with Iran, which has been the enemy that we’ve been telling them to be a bulwark against for 20 years. And two weeks after that, he said, “We don’t care what the United States thinks anymore.” So that’s what we got for spending all those trillions of dollars there. We got short term friends. And we have not made ourselves safer. We’ve put Americans in more jeopardy all over the world. You have to wait in lines to get through the airport. The security state is now causing us $1.3 trillion, and America is unsafer and poorer than it’s ever been. So we should be doing what President Kennedy said we ought to do, and the policy that China has now adopted. Lex Fridman (01:40:37): So that’s a really eloquent and clear and powerful description of the way you see US should be doing geopolitics and the way you see US should be taking care of the poor in this country. Let me ask you a question from Jordan Peterson that he asked when I told him that I’m speaking with you. “Given everything you’ve said, when does the left go too far?” I suppose he’s referring to cultural issues, identity politics. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:41:10): Well, Jordan trying to get me to badmouth the left the whole time I was in, I really enjoyed my talk with him, but he seemed to have that agenda where he wanted me to say bad things about the left and that’s not what my campaign is about. I want to do the opposite. I’m not going to badmouth the left. I was on shows this week with David Remnick from the New Yorker, and he tried to get me to badmouth Donald Trump and Alex Jones and a lot of other people, and baiting me to do it. And of course there’s a lot of bad things I could say about all those people, but I’m trying to find values that hold us together and we can share in common, rather than to focus constantly on these disputes and these issues that drive us apart. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:42:07): So me sitting here badmouthing the left or badmouthing the right is not going to advance the ball. I really want to figure out ways that what do these groups hold in common that we can all have a shared vision of what we want this country to look like. Lex Fridman (01:42:25): Well, that’s music to my ears. But in that spirit, let me ask you a difficult question then. You wrote a book harshly criticizing Anthony Fauci. Let me ask you to steelman the case for the people who support him. What is the biggest positive thing you think Anthony Fauci did for the world? What is good that he has done for the world, especially during this pandemic? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:42:48): I don’t want to sit here and speak unfairly by saying the guy didn’t do anything, but I can’t think of anything. If you tell me something that you think he did, maybe there was a drug that got licensed while he was at NIH that benefited people, that’s certainly possible. He was there for 50 years. And in terms of his principle programs of the AIDS programs and his COVID programs, I think that the harm that he did vastly outweighed the benefits. Lex Fridman (01:43:29): Do you think he believes he’s doing good for the world? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:43:31): I don’t know what he believes. In fact, in that book, which is I think 250,000 words, I never try to look inside of his head. I deal with facts. I deal with science and every factual assertion in that book is cited in source to government databases or peer reviewed publications. And I try not to speculate about things that I don’t know about or I can’t prove. And I cannot tell you what his motivations were. He’s done a lot of things that I think are really very, very bad things for humanity and very deceptive. But we all have this capacity for self-deception. As I said at the beginning of this podcast, we judge ourselves on our intentions rather than our actions. And we all have an almost infinite capacity to convince ourselves that what we’re doing is right. And not everybody lives an examined life. And it is examining their motivations and the way that the world might experience their professions of goodness. Lex Fridman (01:44:45): Let me ask about the difficulty of the job he had. Do you think it’s possible to do that kind of job well or is it also a fundamental flaw of the job, of being the central centralized figure that’s supposed to have a scientific policy? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:44:58): No. No. I think he was a genuinely bad human being. And that there were many, many good people in that department over the years. Bernice Eddy is a really good example. John Anthony Morris. Many people whose careers he destroyed because they were trying to tell the truth. One after the other, the greatest scientists in the history of NIH were run out of that agency. But people listening to this, probably will, in hearing me say that, will think that I’m bitter or that I’m doctrinaire about him, but you should really go and read my book. And it’s hard to summarize. I try to be really methodical, to not call names, to just say what happened. Lex Fridman (01:45:57): The bigger picture of this is you’re an outspoken critic of pharmaceutical companies, big pharma. What is the biggest problem with big pharma and how can it be fixed? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:46:07): Well, the problem could be fixed with regulation. But the pharmaceutical industry is… I don’t want to say because this is going to seem extreme that a criminal enterprise, but if you look at the history, that is an applicable characterization, for example, the four biggest vaccine makers, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer, and Glaxo, four companies that make all of the 72 vaccines that are now effectively mandated for American children. Collectively, those companies have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties and damages in the last decade. And I think since 2000, about 79 billion. So these are the most corrupt companies in the world. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:47:08): And the problem is that they’re serial felons. They do this again and again and again. So Merck did Vioxx, which, Vioxx, they killed people by falsifying science. And they did it. They lied to the public. They said, “This is a headache medicine and a arthritis painkiller.” But they didn’t tell people that it also gave you heart attacks. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:47:37): And they knew, we’ve found when we sued them, the memos from their bean counters saying, “We’re going to kill this many people, but we’re still going to make money.” So they make those calculations and those calculations are made very, very regularly. And then when they get caught, they pay a penalty. And I think they paid about $7 billion for Vioxx. But then they went right back that same year that they paid that penalty, they went back into the same thing again with Gardasil and with a whole lot of other drugs. So the way that the system is set up, the way that it’s sold to doctors, the way that nobody ever goes to jail, so there’s really no penalty that it all becomes part of the cost of doing business. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:48:32): And you can see other businesses that if there’s no penalty, if there’s no real… look, these are the companies that gave us the opioid epidemic. So they knew what was going to happen. And you go and see, there’s a documentary, I forget what the name of it is, but it shows exactly what happened. And they corrupted FDA. They knew that oxycodone was addictive. They got FDA to tell doctors that it wasn’t addictive. They pressured FDA to lie. And they got their way. And so far they got a whole generation addicted oxycodone. And now when they got caught, and we made it harder to get oxycodone, and now all those addicted kids are going to fentanyl and dying. And this year it killed 106,000. That’s twice as many people who were killed during the 20-year Vietnam War. But in one year, twice as many American kids. And they knew it was going to happen and they did it to make money. So I don’t know what you call that other than saying that’s a criminal enterprise. Lex Fridman (01:49:47): Well, is it possible, within a capitalist system, to produce medication, to produce drugs at scale in a way that is not corrupt? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:49:57): Of course it is. Lex Fridman (01:49:58): How? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:50:00): Through a solid regulatory regimen, where drugs are actually tested. The problem is not the capitalist system. The capitalist system, I have great admiration for and love for the capitalist system. It’s the greatest economic engine ever devised. But it has to be harnessed to a social purpose. Otherwise, it leads us down a trail of oligarchy, environmental destruction, and commoditizing poisoning and killing human beings. That’s what it will do. And in the end, you need a regulatory structure that is not corrupted by entanglements, financial entanglements with the industry. And we’ve set this up. The way that the system is set up today has created this system of regulatory capture on steroids. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:51:06): So almost 50% of FDA’s budget comes from pharmaceutical companies. The people who work at FDA are, their salaries are coming from pharma, half their salaries. So they know who their bosses are. And that means getting those drugs done, getting them out the door and approved as quickly as possible. It’s called fast track approval. 50% of FDA’s budget, about 45%, actually goes to fast track approval. Lex Fridman (01:51:38): Do you think money can buy integrity? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:51:40): Oh yeah, of course it can. That’s not something that is controversial. Of course it will. Lex Fridman (01:51:48): It’s slightly controversial to me. I would like to think that scientist that work at the FDA- Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:51:53): Well, it may not be able to buy your integrity. I’m talking about population wide, I’m not talking about the individual. Lex Fridman (01:51:58): But I’d like to believe that in general, a career of a scientist is not a very high paying job. I’d like to believe that people that go into science, that work at FDA, that work at NIH are doing it for a reason that’s not even correlated with money, really. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:52:18): Yt. And I think probably that’s why they go in there. But scientists are corruptible. And the way that I can tell you that is that I’ve brought over 500 losses and almost all of them involve scientific controversies. And there are scientists on both sides in every one. And when we sued Monsanto, on the Monsanto side, there was a Yale scientist, a Stanford scientist, and a Harvard scientist. And on our side there was a Yale, Stanford and Harvard scientist. And they were saying exactly the opposite things. In fact, there’s a word for those kind of scientists who take money for their opinion, and the word is biostitutes. And they are very, very common. And I’ve been dealing them with them my whole career. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:53:05): I think it was Upton Sinclair, that it’s very difficult to persuade a man of a fact if the existence of that fact will diminish his salary. And I think that’s true for all of us. If we find a way of reconciling ourselves, to truths and worldviews that actually benefit our salaries. Now, NIH has probably the worst system, which is that scientists who work for NIH itself, which used to be the premier gold standard scientific agency in the world, everybody looked at NIH as that. Today, it’s just an incubator for pharmaceutical drugs. And that is that gravity of economic self-interest. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:53:58): Because if NIH itself collects royalties, they have margin rights for the patents on all the drugs that they work on. So with the Moderna vaccine, which they promoted incessantly and aggressively, NIH on 50% of that vaccine is making billions and billions of dollars on it. And there are at least four scientists that we know of, and probably at least six at NIH, who themselves have marching rights for those patents. So if you are a scientist who work at NIH, you work on a new drug, you then get marching rights and you’re entitled to royalties of $150,000 a year forever from that forever. Your children, your children’s children. As long as that product’s on the market, you can collect royalties. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:54:46): Moderna vaccine is paying for the top people at NIH. Some of the top regulators. It’s paying for their boats, it’s paying for their mortgages, it’s paying for their children’s education. And you have to expect that in those kind of situations, the regulatory function would be subsumed beneath the mercantile ambitions of the agency itself and the individuals who stand to profit enormously from getting a drug to market. Those guys are paid by us, the taxpayer, to find problems with those drugs before they get to market. But if you know that drug is going to pay for your mortgage, you may overlook a little problem or even a very big one. And that’s the problem. Lex Fridman (01:55:38): You’ve talked about that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer, and you’ve said that you’re not anti-vaccine, you’re pro safe vaccine. Difficult question, can you name any vaccines that you think are good? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:55:55): I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective. In fact- Lex Fridman (01:56:09): Those are big words. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:56:09): … Those are big words. Lex Fridman (01:56:10): What about the polio? Let’s start with the- Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:56:11): Well, here’s the problem. Here’s the problem. Yeah, here’s the problem. The polio vaccine contained a virus called simian virus 40. SV40. It’s one of the most carcinogenic materials that is known to man. In fact, it’s used now by scientists around the world to induce tumors and rats and Guinea pigs in labs. But it was in that vaccine, 98 million people who got that vaccine. And my generation got it. And now you’ve had this explosion of soft tissue cancers in our generation that killed many, many, many more people than polio ever did. So if you say to me, “The polio vaccine, was it effective against polio?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:56:55): I’m going to say, “Yes.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:56:57): And if say to me, “Did it cause more death than avert?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:57:02): I would say, “I don’t know, because we don’t have the data on that.” Lex Fridman (01:57:06): But let’s talk. We have to narrow in on what is it effective against the thing it’s supposed to fight? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:57:12): Oh, well, a lot of them are, let me give you an example. The most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine. Diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. It was introduced in this country around 1980. That vaccine caused so many injuries that Wyeth, which was the manufacturer, said to the Reagan administration, “We are now paying $20 in downstream liabilities for every dollar that we’re making in profits, and we are getting out of the business unless you give us permanent immunity from liability.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:57:45): And by the way, Reagan said at that time, “Why don’t you just make the vaccine safe?” And why is that? Because vaccines are inherently unsafe. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:57:58): They said, “Unavoidably unsafe, you cannot make them safe.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:58:02): And so when Reagan wrote the bill and passed it, the bill says in its preambles, “Because vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.” And the Bruesewitz case, which was the Supreme Court case that upheld that bill uses that same language, vaccines cannot be made safe. They’re unavoidably unsafe. So this is what the law says. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:58:21): Now, I just want to finish this story because this illustrates very well your question. The DTP vaccine was discontinued in this country and it was discontinued in Europe because so many kids were being injured by it. However, the WHO and Bill Gates gives it to 161 million African children every year. And Bill Gates went to the Danish government and asked them to support this program saying, “We’ve saved 30 million kids from dying from diptheria, tetanus and pertussis.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:58:59): The Danish government said, “Can you show us the data?” And he couldn’t. So the Danish government paid for a big study with Novo Nordisk, which is a Scandinavian vaccine company in West Africa. And they went to West Africa and they looked at the DTP vaccine for 30 years of data and they retained the best vaccine scientists in the world, these deities of African vaccine program. Peter Aaby, Sigrid Morganson, and a bunch of others. And they looked at 30 years of data for the DTP vaccine. And they came back and they were shocked by what they found. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:59:36): They found that the vaccine was preventing kids from getting diptheria, tetanus and pertussis. But the girls who got that vaccine were 10 times more likely to die over the next six months than children who didn’t. Why is that? And they weren’t dying from anything anybody ever associated with the vaccine. They were dying of anemia, bilharzia, malaria, sepsis, and mainly pulmonary and respiratory disease, pneumonia. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:00:02): Mainly pulmonary and respiratory disease, pneumonia. And it turns out that this is what research has found who were all pro-vaccine, by the way. They said that this vaccine is killing more children and than did their attendance and protected prior to the introduction of the vaccine and for 30 years nobody ever noticed it. The vaccine was providing protection against those target illnesses, but it had ruined the children’s immune systems. And they could not defend themselves against random infections that were harmless to most children. Lex Fridman (02:00:36): But isn’t it nearly impossible to prove that link? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:00:39): You can’t prove the link, all you can do is for any particular interest, illness or death, you can’t prove the link. But you can show statistically that if you get that vaccine, you’re more likely to die over the next six months than if you don’t. And those studies unfortunately are not done for any other vaccines. So for every other medicine, in order to get approval from the FDA, you have to do a placebo controlled trial prior to licensure, where you look at health outcomes among an exposed group, a group that gets it and compare those to a similarly situated group that gets placebo. The only medical intervention that does not receive, that does not undergo placebo controlled trials prior to licensure are vaccines. Not one of the 72 vaccines that are now mandated for our children have ever undergone a placebo controlled trial prior to licensure. Lex Fridman (02:01:38): So I should say on that point, I’ve heard from a bunch of folks that disagree with you. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:01:44): Okay. Lex Fridman (02:01:44): Including polio. I mean, the testing is a really important point. Before licensure, placebo controlled randomized trials, polio received just that against the saline placebo control. So I’m confused why you say that they don’t go through that process. It seems like a lot of them do. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:02:10): Here’s the thing is that I was saying that for many years because we couldn’t find any. And then in 2016, in March, President Trump ordered Dr. Fauci to meet with me. Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins, and I said to them during that meeting, “You have been saying that I’m not telling the truth when I said not one of these has undergone a prior pre-licensure placebo control.” And the polio may have had one post licensing, most of them haven’t. The polio may have, I don’t know. But I said, “Our question was prior to licensure, do you ever test these? And for safety?” And by the way, I think the polio vaccine did undergo a saline placebo trial prior licensure, but not for safety, only for efficacy. So I’m talking about safety trials now. Fauci told me, he had a whole tray of files there. He said, “I can’t find one now, but I’ll send you one.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:03:26): I said, “Just for any vaccines, send me one. Any of the 72 vaccines,” He never did. So we sued the HHS and after a year of stonewalling us, HHS came back and they gave us a letter saying we have no pre-licensing safety trial for any of the 72 vaccines. And that the letter from HHS, which settled our lawsuit against them because we had a FOIA lawsuit against them, is posted on CHD’s website. So anybody can go look at it. So if HHS had any study, I assume they would’ve given it to us and they can’t find one. Lex Fridman (02:04:08): Well, let me zoom out because a lot of the details matter here, pre-licensure, what does placebo controlled mean? So this probably requires a rigorous analysis. And actually, at this point, it would be nice for me just to give the shout-out to other people much smarter than me that people should follow along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, use their mind, learn and think. So one really awesome creator, I really recommend him is Dr. Dan Wilson. He hosts the Debunk the Funk Podcast. Vincent Racaniello, who hosts This Week in Virology. Brilliant guy, I’ve had him on the podcast. Somebody you’ve been battling with is Paul Offit, interesting Twitter, interesting books. People should, understand and read your books as well. And Eric Topol has a good Twitter and good books. And even Peter Hotez, I’ll ask you about him. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:05:03): And people should, because Paul Offit published a substack recently debunking, I think my discussion with Joe Rogan. And we have published a debunk of his debunking. So if you read his stuff, you should read- Lex Fridman (02:05:29): Read both. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:05:30): Yes, you should read… And I would love to debate any of these guys. Lex Fridman (02:05:37): So Joe Rogan proposed just such a debate, which is quite fascinating to see how much attention and how much funding it garnered the debate between you and Peter Hotez. Why do you think Peter rejected the offer? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:05:51): I think, again, I’m not going to look into his head, but what I will say is if you’re a scientist and you’re making public recommendations based upon what you say is evidence-based science, you ought to be able to defend that. You ought to be able to defend it in a public forum and you ought to be able to defend it against all comers. So if you’re a scientist, science is rooted in logic and reason. And if you can’t use logic and reason to defend your position, and by the way, I know almost all of the studies, I’ve written books on them and we’ve made a big effort to assemble all the studies on both sides. And so, I’m prepared to talk about those studies and I’m prepared to submit them in advance and for each of the points. And by the way, I’ve done that with Peter Hotez, actually because I had this kind of informal debate several years ago with him, with a referee at that time. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:07:02): And we were debating not only by phone but by email and on those emails, every point that he would make, I would cite science and he could never come back with science. He could never come back with publications. He would give publications that had nothing to do with, for example, thimerosal and vaccines, mercury based vaccines. He sent me one time, 16 studies to rebut something I’d said about thimerosal. And not one of those studies, they were all about the MMR vaccine, which doesn’t contain thimerosal. So it wasn’t like a real debate where you’re using reason and isolating points and having a rational discourse. I don’t blame him for not debating me because I don’t think he has the science. Lex Fridman (02:07:53): Are there aspects of all the work you’ve done on vaccines, all the advocacy you’ve done, that you found out that you were not correct on, that you were wrong on, that you’ve changed your mind on? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:08:09): Yeah, there are many times over time that I found that I’ve made mistakes and we correct those mistakes. I run a big organization and I do a lot of tweets. I’m very careful. For example, my Instagram, I was taken down for misinformation, but there was no misinformation on my Instagram. Everything that I cited on Instagram was cited or sourced to a government database or to peer reviewed science. But for example, the Defender, which was our organization’s newsletter, we summarized scientific reports all the time. That’s one of the things, the services that we provide. So we watch the PubMed and we watch the peer reviewed publications and we summarize them when they come out, we have made mistakes. When we make mistake, we are rigorous about acknowledging it, apologizing for it, and changing it. That’s what we do. I think we have one of the most robust fact checking operations anywhere in journalism today. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:09:09): We actually do real science. And listen, I’ve put up on my Twitter account where there are numerous times that I’ve made mistakes on Twitter and I apologize for it. And people say to me, “Oh, that’s weird. I’ve never seen anybody apologize on Twitter.” But I think it’s really important at the only… Of course, human beings make mistakes. My book is 230 or 40, 50,000 words. There’s going to be a mistake in there. But you know what I say at the beginning of the book, “If you see a mistake in here, please notify me. I give away that people can notify me.” And if somebody points out a mistake, I’m going to change it. I’m not going to dig my feet in and say, “I’m not going to acknowledge this.” Lex Fridman (02:09:57): So some of the things we’ve been talking about, you’ve been an outspoken contrarian on some very controversial topics. This has garnered some fame and recognition in part for being attacked and standing strong against those attacks. If I may say, for being a martyr, do you worry about this drug of martyrdom that might cloud your judgment? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:10:22): First of all, I don’t consider myself a martyr and I’ve never considered myself a victim. I make choices about my life and I’m content with those choices and peaceful with them. I’m not trying to be a martyr or a hero or anything else. I’m doing what I think is right because I want to be peaceful inside of myself, but the only guard I have is fact-based reality. If you show me a scientific study that shows that I’m wrong, for example, if you come back and say, “Look, Bobby, here’s a safety study on polio that was done pre-licensure and used a real saline solution.” I’m going to put that on my Twitter and I’m going to say, “I was wrong, there is one out there.” But that’s all I can do. Lex Fridman (02:11:17): All right. I have to ask, you are in great shape. Can you go through your diet and exercise routine? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:11:28): I do intermittent fasting. So I start my first meal at around noon, and then I try to stop eating at six or seven. And then I hike every day. Lex Fridman (02:11:46): Morning, evening? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:11:47): In the morning. I go to a meeting first thing in the morning, 12, I’m eating. And then I hike uphill for a mile and a half up and a mile half down with my dogs and I do my meditations. And then I go to the gym and I go to the gym for 35 minutes. I do it short time and I’ve been exercising for 50 years. And what I’ve found is it’s sustainable if I do just the short periods and I do four different routines at the gym. And I never relax at the gym, I go in there and I have a very intense exercise. I lift, I mean, I could tell you what my routine is, but I do backs just one day, legs and then a miscellaneous. And I do 12. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:12:36): My first set of everything is I try to reach failure at 12 reps. And then my fourth set of everything is a strip set. I take a lot of vitamins. I can’t even list them to you here because I couldn’t even remember them at all. But I take a ton of vitamins and nutrients, I’m on an anti-aging protocol from my doctor that includes testosterone replacement. But I don’t take any anabolic steroids or anything like that. And the DRT I use is bioidentical to what my body produced. Lex Fridman (02:13:25): What are your thoughts on hormone therapy in general? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:13:29): I talk to a lot of doctors about that stuff because I’m interested in health and I’ve heard really good things about it, but I’m definitely not an expert on it. Lex Fridman (02:13:42): About God. You wrote, “God talks to human beings through many vectors, wise people, organized religion, the great books of religions, through art, music and poetry. But nowhere with such detail and grace and joy as through creation. When we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine.” What is your relationship and what is your understanding of God? Who is God? Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:14:09): Well, God is incomprehensible. I mean, I guess, most philosophers would say we’re inside the mind of God. And so, it would be impossible for us to understand what’s actually God’s form is. But I mean, for me, let’s say this, when I was raised in a very deeply religious setting, so we went to church in the summer, oftentimes twice a day, morning mass. And we definitely went every Sunday. And we prayed in the morning, we prayed before and after every meal, we prayed at night, we sent a rosary, sometimes three rosaries a night. And my father read us the Bible. Whenever he was a home, we’d all get in the bed and he’d read us the Bible stories. And I went to Catholic schools, I went to Jesuit schools, I went to the nuns and I went to a Quaker school at one point. I became a drug addict when I was about 15 years old, about a year after my dad died. And I was addicted to drugs for 14 years. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:15:32): During that time, when you’re an addict, you’re living against conscience. And when you’re living against… I was always trying to get off of drugs, never able to. But I never felt good about what I was doing. And when you’re living against conscious, you kind of push God to the periphery of your life. So I’ll call Him, he gets recedes and gets smaller. And then when I got sober, I knew that I had a couple of experiences. One is that I had a friend of my brothers, one of my brothers who died of this disease of addiction, had a good friend who used to take drugs with us and he became a Moonie. So he became a follower of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And at that point, he had the same kind of compulsion that I had and yet it was completely removed from him. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:16:41): And he used to come and hang out with us, but he would not want to take drugs. Even if I was taking them right in front of him, he was immune to it. He’d become impervious to that impulse. And when I first got sober, I knew that I did not want to be the kind of person who was waking up every day in white knuckling sobriety and just trying to resist through willpower. And by the way, I had iron willpower as a kid. I gave up candy for lent when I was 12 and I didn’t need it again until I was in college. I gave up desserts the next year for lent. And I didn’t ever eat another dessert till I was in college. And I was trying to bulk up for rugby and for sports. So I felt like I could do anything with my willpower. But somehow this particular thing, the addiction was completely impervious to it. And it was cunning, baffling, incomprehensible. I could not understand why I couldn’t just say no and then never do it again like I did with everything else. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:17:57): And so, I was living against conscience and I thought about this guy and reflecting my own prejudices at that time in my life, I said to myself, I didn’t want to be like a drug addict who was wanting a drug all the time and just not being able to do it. I wanted to completely realign myself so that I was somebody who got up every day and just didn’t want to take drugs, never thought of them, kissed the wife and children and went to work and never thought about drugs the whole day. And I knew that people throughout history had done that. I’d read the lives of the saints. I knew St. Augustine had met a very dissolute youth and had this spiritual realignment transformation. I knew the same thing had happened to St. Paul at Damascus. The same thing had happened to St. Francis. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:18:55): St. Francis also had a dissolute and fun-loving youth and had this deep spiritual realignment. And I knew that that happened to people throughout history. And I thought that’s what I needed, something like that. I had the example of this friend of mine and I used to think about him and I would think this again reflects the bias and probably the meanness of myself at that time. But I said, “I’d rather be dead than be a Moonie.” But I wish I somehow could distill that power that he got without becoming a religious nuisance. And at that time, I picked up a book by Carl Yung called Synchronicity and Yung, he was a psychiatrist, he was contemporary of Freud’s. Freud was his mentor, and Freud wanted him to be his replacement. But Freud was now out atheist and Yung was a deeply spiritual man. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:19:58): He had these very intense and genuine spiritual experiences from when he was a little boy, from when he was three years old that he remembers biography is fascinating about him because he remembers them with such a detail. And he was interesting to me because he was very faithful scientist and I considered myself a science-based person from when I was little. And yet he had this spiritual dimension to him, which infused all of his thinking and really I think made him, branded his form of recovery or of treatment. And he thought that he had this experiment experience that he describes in this book where he ran one of the biggest sanitariums in Europe in Zurich. And he was sitting up on the third floor of this building and he’s talking to a patient who was describing her dream to him. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:21:01): And the fulcrum of that dream was a scarab beetle, which was an insect that is very uncommon if at all in Northern Europe, but it’s a common figure in the iconography of Egypt and the hieroglyphics on the walls of the pyramids, etc. And while he was talking to her, he heard this bing, bing, bing on the window behind him and he didn’t want to turn around to take his attention off her. But finally, he does it in exasperation. He turns around, he throws up the window and a scarab beetle flies in and lands in his head and he shows it to the woman. And he says, “Is this what you was thinking of, this is what you were dreaming about.” And he was struck by that experience which was similar to other experiences he’s had like that. And that’s what synchronicity means, it’s an incident, not a coincidence. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:21:56): And if you’re talking with somebody about somebody that you haven’t thought about in 20 years and that person calls on the phone, that’s synchronicity. And he believed it was a way that God intervened in our lives that broke all the rules of nature, that he had set up the rules of physics, the rules of mathematics, or to reach in and sort of tap us on the shoulder and say, “I’m here.” And so, he tried to reproduce that in a clinical setting and he would put one guy in one room and another guy in another room and have them flip cards and guess what the other guy had flipped. And he believed that if he could beat the laws of chance, laws of mathematics, that he would approve the existence of an unnatural law, a supernatural law. And that was the first step to proving the existence of a God. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:22:48): He never succeeds in doing it. But he says in the book, “Even though I can’t prove using an empirical and scientific tools, the existence of a God, I can show through anecdotal evidence having seen thousands of patients come through with this institution, that people who believe in God get better faster and that the recovery is more enduring than people who don’t.” And for me, hearing that was more impactful than if he had claimed that he had proved the existence of God because I wouldn’t have believed that. But I was already at a mindset where I would’ve done anything I could to improve my chances of never having to take drugs again by even 1%. And if believing in God was going to help me, whether there’s a God up there or not, believing in one a self had the power to help me, I was going to do that. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:23:40): So then the question is how do you start believing in something that you can’t see or smell or hear or touch or taste or acquire with your senses? And Yung provides the formula for that. And he says, “Act as if you fake it till you make it.” And so, that’s what I started doing. I just started pretending there was a God watching me all the time. And kind of life was a series of tests. And there was a bunch of moral decisions that I had to make every day. And these were all just little things that I did. But each one now for me had a moral dimension. Like when the alarm goes off, do I lay in bed for an extra 10 minutes with my indolent thoughts or do I jump right out of bed? Do I make my bed? Most important decision of the day. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:24:28): Do I hang up the towels? When I go into the closet and pull out my blue jeans and a bunch of those wire hangers fall on the ground, do I shut the door and say, “I’m too important to do that. That’s somebody else’s job or not?” And so, do put the water in the ice tray before I put it in the freezer? Do I put the shopping cart back in the place that it’s supposed to go in the parking lot of the Safeway? And if I make a whole bunch of those choices that I maintain myself in a posture of surrender, which keeps me open to my higher power to my God. And when I do those things right, so much about addiction is about abuse of power, abuse of all of us have some power, whether it’s our good looks or whether it’s connections or education or family or whatever. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:25:33): And there’s always a temptation to use those to fulfill self will. And the challenge is how do you use those always to serve instead God’s of will and the good of our community? And that to me, is kind of the struggle. But when I do that, I feel God’s power coming through me and that I can do things. I’m much more effective as a human being. That gnawing anxiety that I lived with for so many years and God, it’s gone and that I can put down the oars and hoist the sail and the wind takes me and I can see the evidence of it in my life. And the big thing, temptation for me is that when all these good things start happening in my life and the cash and prizes start flowing in, how do I maintain that posture of surrender? How do I stay surrender then when my inclination is to say to God, “Thanks God, I got it from here.” And drive the car off the cliff again. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:26:49): And so, I had a spiritual awakening and my desire for drugs and alcohol was lifted miraculously. And to me, it was as much a miracle as if I’d been able to walk on water because I had tried everything earnestly, sincerely and honestly for a decade to try to stop and I could not do it under my own power. And then all of a sudden, it was lifted effortlessly. So I saw that early evidence of God in my life and of the power, and I see it now every day of my life. Lex Fridman (02:27:29): So adding that moral dimension to all of your actions is how you were able to win that Kambu battle against the absurd. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:27:38): Exactly. Lex Fridman (02:27:38): Sisyphus with the Boulder. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:27:39): It’s all the same thing. It’s the battle to just do the right thing. Lex Fridman (02:27:44): Now Sisyphus was able to find somehow happiness. Yeah. Well, Bobby, thank you for the stroll through some of the most important moments in recent human history and for running for president. And thank you for talking today. Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:27:59): Thank you, Lex. Lex Fridman (02:28:01): Thanks for listening to this conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from John F. Kennedy. “Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Instead, let us accept our own responsibility for the future.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

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