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TRANSCRIPT:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:18 - US history
7:34 - Freedom
9:28 - Camus
12:51 - Hitler and WW2
22:03 - War in Ukraine
45:24 - JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis
1:10:31 - JFK assassination conspiracy
1:20:06 - CIA influence
1:29:04 - 2024 elections
1:40:49 - Jordan Peterson
1:42:30 - Anthony Fauci
1:45:57 - Big Pharma
2:05:37 - Peter Hotez
2:11:17 - Exercise and diet
2:13:42 - God

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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 said, 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.

And we should be making friends with the Russians.

We shouldn't be treating them as an enemy.

Now we've pushed them into the camp with China.

And by the way, what we're doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all.

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.

These 2 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.

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.

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 Recaniello 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.

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.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

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?

I would say, well, there's so many things that I love about the country.

You know, 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 of 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 By the Civil War, by 1865, there were 6 democracies.

And all of them, in 1 way or another, are modeled on the American experience.

And it's kind of extraordinary because sort of our first contact with, 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 Slough Barbella, and Winthrop gave this famous speech where he said, this is gonna be a city on a hill.

This is gonna 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 then 200 years later, 250 years later, they, a different generation, they were mainly deists.

They were people who had a belief in God, but not so much a love of particularly religious cosmologies.

You know, the framers of the Constitution believed 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, you know, 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 kind of adopted that belief.

And I know my family, when, you know, 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, as something that, you know, that was part of kind of a broader spiritual mission.

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.

Well, I immigrated to this country and 1 of the things that really embodies America to me is the ideal of freedom.

Hunter Thompson said, freedom is something that dies unless it's used.

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 and 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.

So this point that Hannah Rastafarian made is dies unless it's used.

Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of liberty had to be watered with the blood of each generation.

What he meant by that is that we can't live off the laurels of the American Revolution.

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.

You mentioned your interest, your admiration of 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.

I suppose the way that Camus viewed the world and the way that the Stoics did and a lot of the existentialists was that it was so absurd and that the problems and the tasks that we're given just to live a life are so insurmountable that the only way that we can kind of get back to 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.

I mean, to me, I read Camus and particularly in the myth of Sisyphus, as a kind of, 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.

And Sisyphus was kind of 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 even 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 can never win But the last line of that book is 1 of the great lines, which is something to the extent that, you know, I can picture Sisyphus 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.

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 of service to others, that is the ultimate.

That's the key to the lock, that's the solution to the puzzle.

Each individual person in that way can rebel against absurdity by discovering meaning to this whole messy thing.

And we can bring meaning not only to our own lives, but we can bring meaning to the universe as well.

The embrace of those tasks and the commitment to service resonates out from us to the rest of humanity in some way.

There's a lot of different ways to read that book, but 1 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 pulling the whole world into a global war.

I was born 9 years after the end of World War II.

And I grew up in a generation that was, you know, with my parents who were fixated on that, on, you know, what happened.

And my father, at that time, the, you know, the kind of 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 to industrializing cruelty and murder.

My father said, this is not a German problem.

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.

And that comes through self-restraint, but it also, you know, 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, you know, 1 of the other things that my father talked about from when I was little, you know, 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 1 of the people who hit her, at risk to your own life, or would you be 1 of the people who turned her in?

And of course we would all say, well, of course we would hide Anne Frank and take the risk.

But, you know, 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 occurs in the United States, which my father thought was quite possible.

He was conscious about how fragile democracy actually is.

And would I be 1 of the ones who would resist the totalitarianism?

Or would I be 1 of the people who went along with it?

Would I be 1 of the people who was at the train station in, you know, Krakow, or, you know, even Berlin, and saw people being shipped off to camps and just put my head down and pretend I didn't see it because talking about it would be destructive to my career and maybe my freedom and even my life.

So, you know, 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.

A lot of us would like to believe we would resist in that situation, but the reality is most of us wouldn't.

That human nature is such that we're selfish, even when there's an atrocity going on all around us.

And we also, you know, we have the capacity to deceive ourselves.

And all of us tend to kind of judge ourselves by our intentions and our actions.

What have you learned about life from your father, Robert F.

First of all, I'll say this about my uncle, because I'm gonna 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.

She had a column where she'd do these pithy interviews with both famous people and kind of men in the industry in 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, and this is when he was a 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 on the Pulitzer Prize, that book, Profiles in 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.

She thought he was going to say courage, but he didn't.

I think looking back at his life, that the best, that it was true.

That was the quality that allowed him to put himself in the shoes of his adversaries.

He always said that 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 context, and that's why he was able to, you know, during the, 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 S6, the aircraft carrier.

He said no, even though he'd only been in 2 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.

And then during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was able to do it.

The narrative was, okay, Khrushchev acted in a way as an aggressor to put missiles in our hemisphere.

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 that were right on, you know, the Turkish ones right on the Russian border.

And they then made a secret deal with Dobranin, with Ambassador Dobranin and, you know, 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 the executive, on the end, what they call the ENCOG committee, which was the group of people who were deciding, you know, what the action was, what they were gonna do to end the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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 then 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, he believed that there was another solution.

So my father, you know, to get back to your question, famously said that moral courage is the most important quality and it's more rare than 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.

And you think that kind of empathy that you referred to, that requires moral courage?

It certainly requires moral courage to act on it.

You know, and particularly, you know, in, you know, any time that a nation is at war, there's kind of 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.

Well, if you 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,

Vladimir Putin could have avoided the war in the Ukraine.

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 that that's why, and who made an unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine.

And we were provoking him, and we were provoking him for, since 1997.

I mean, when, and before Putin ever came in, we were provoking 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.

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 gonna 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.

He said, you can take Germany, but I want your promise that you will not move NATO to the east.

James Baker, who was the Secretary of State famously said, I will not move NATO, we will not move NATO 1 inch to the east.

So then 5 years later in 1997, so big Nobrizinski who was kind of the father of the neocons, who was a Democrat at that time, served in the Carter administration.

He said he published a paper, a blueprint for moving NATO right up to the Russian border, a thousand miles to the east, and taking over 14 nations.

At that time, George Kennan, who was the kind of the deity of American diplomats, he was probably 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 gonna provoke the Soviet, I mean, the Russians to a violent response.

We should be treating them the way that we treated our adversaries after World War II, like with a Marshall Plan to try to help them incorporate into Europe and to be part of the brotherhood of, you know, of man and of Western nations.

We shouldn't continue to be treating them as an enemy and particularly surrounding them at their borders.

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's now at this moment, the head of the CIA, said at that time the same thing.

If you do this, it is going to provoke the Russians toward a military response.

And we moved it, we moved all around Russia.

We moved to 14 nations, a thousand miles to the east, and we put Aegis missile systems in 2 nations, in Romania and Poland.

So we did what, you know, what the Russians had done to us in 1962 that would have provoked an invasion of Cuba.

We put those missile systems back there and then we walk away unilaterally, walk away from the 2 nuclear missile treaties, the intermediate nuclear missile treaties that we had with the Soviet Union, with Russia, and when neither of us would put those missile systems on the borders, We walk away from that and we put Aegis 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, so now the head of the CIA.

If we go into, if we bring NATO into Ukraine, that is a red line for the Russians.

Russia has been invaded 3 times through the Ukraine.

The last time it was invaded, we killed, or the Germans killed 1 out of every 7 Russians.

They destroyed, my uncle described what happened to Russia in his famous American University speech in 1963, 60 years ago this month, or he said, or last month, 60 years ago in June, June 10th, 1963.

He told, 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.

The Russians, if anybody won the war against Hitler, it was the Russians, their country was destroyed.

They, they, all of their cities, and he said, imagine if all of the cities on the east coast of Chicago were reduced to rubble and all of the fields burned, all of the forests burned.

That's what they gave so that we could get rid of Adolf Hitler.

And he had them put themselves in their position.

And, you know, today there's none of that happening.

We have refused repeatedly to talk to the Russians.

We've broken up, there's 2 treaties, the Minsk agreements, which the Russians were willing to sign, and they said, 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 amends accords to, you know, they, the Russians were, were very worried because of the US involvement in the coup in Ukraine in 2014.

And then the oppression and the killing of 14, 000 ethnic Russians.

And Russia hasn't met the same way that if Mexico would Aegis missile systems from China or Russia on our border and then killed 14, 000 expats American, we would go in there.

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 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 in 2014.

And we now know in April of 2022, Zelensky and Putin had inked a deal already to another peace agreement, and that the United States sent Boris Johnson, the neocons in the White House, sent Boris Johnson over to the Ukraine to sabotage that agreement.

I think this is a war that the neocons in the White House wanted.

They've said for 2 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.

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.

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, you know, 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.

We were told this was an unprovoked invasion, and that we're there to bring a humanitarian relief to the Ukrainians.

That is a war of attrition that is designed to chew up, to 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.

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.

Would you, as president, sit down and have a conversation with Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky separately and together

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.

I can't say because I just, I don't know enough about him or about you know I might the evidence that I've seen is that he is homicidal he kills his enemies or poisons them and you know 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.

I think he's a dangerous man, and that, of course, you know, there's probably corruption in his regime, but having said that, it's not our business to change the Russian government.

We shouldn't be treating him as an enemy.

Now we've pushed him into the camp with China.

Putin now, you know, if you believe the polls that are coming out of Russia, they show him, you know, the most recent polls that I've seen, show him with that 89% popularity that people in Russia support the war in Ukraine, and they support him as an individual.

So, 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 policeman of the world and to be changing regimes in the world.

We shouldn't be breaking international laws.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #388