 Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thanks for talking to reason. Thanks for having me. Okay, so Joe Biden currently has an approval rating that's in the low 40s. He is, it is basically the same that Donald Trump, a one-term president had at this same point. What is in his first, possibly only term, what is Joe Biden doing wrong? And how would a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidency address those main problems and make things better? Well, I would start out with the conduct of the war. We now know that in April of 2021, there was a Zelensky and Putin essentially had a peace treaty that they had signed. And that Boris Johnson was sent over there, almost certainly at the behest of the White House to disrupt that treaty. And that's not the only time that we've had opportunities for peace. The Minsk Accords also were an opportunity that we lost for peace, that the Russians had agreed to sign, that French and Germans had agreed to, the Zelensky campaign in 2019, that he would sign it, and something made him pit it. And the assumption is once he got in there, he won 70% of the vote by running as a peace candidate. And then something changed his mind. The assumption is that it was threats against his life. I right-wing nationalist within Ukraine and the intervention of Victoria Nuland and other people on the U.S. side who wanted a war with Russia. Everything we've done, every decision we've been told, this is a humanitarian crisis, which would indicate that we should shorten the war and reduce the bloodshed, but every decision that we've made, including the decision to refuse to meet with any Russian counterparts. Do you think Biden is actively trying to extend the war because it fits with his worldview or is he just incompetent at basic diplomacy? Well, I don't know. I don't know. I think he's surrounded by people who have wanted this war for a long time. And that Joe Biden has been a figure, has had a career of being a spokesperson for Warhawks, for the neocons and for the other, kind of at those parts of the federal government that are of the State Department, the CIA, the intelligence apparatus and the White House, particularly the neocons like Victoria Nuland, Robert Cade, and those who are pro-war. He was, for example, during the Iraq War roll-up, he was leading the Democrats. My uncle was aligned against him. My uncle was very close to Biden, but was very, very much against his pro-war policy. And Biden has always been like that. Are you, you know, Biden did get us out of Afghanistan. Was that the right move at the right time? Yeah, I mean, yes, it was the right move to get us out of Afghanistan. You know, reason's audience is largely made up of libertarians we believe in free minds and free markets in limiting government and increasing individual autonomy. As you're running for president and you're pulling, you know, 15%, 18% in various polls, what is a message to libertarians who believe in, you know, free minds and free markets that you can bring to them? Well, I think I'm aligned. I've always been aligned with libertarians on most issues. I mean, there's tweaks that I have. You know, as an environmentalist, I don't think libertarianism works well in the commons, at least in any way that's practical. But I, you know, and those are policy, those are assets that are not susceptible to private property ownership, like the shared assets of our community, what we call the public trust assets or the commons or the commonwealth, the air, the water, the wildlife, fisheries, public lands, aquifers, those kind of things that you do need government regulation because of an economic law called tragedy of the commons which suggests that all of us will catch the last fish in the ocean. But doesn't that also imply that we should be privatizing more of the commons because when you have clear property rights, you tend to take better care of them than they're left to be. I, you know, I've seen schemes like that, you know, particularly regulation of fisheries that have worked well in some cases, but there's something really undemocratic about it. I mean, what, you know, one of the reasons that we, that the British, you know, rose up and fought the battle of running meat was because King John tried to privatize the, you know, the rivers of England, the Thames and erect tolls on the Thames. He privatized the, you know, the game animals, the fish and the hare, which is what gave him a problem with Robin Hood, he privatized the fisheries and those assets were social safety net. So if you were a farmer and you're corrupt and come in and you could go down to the Thames and you could pull out a fish and you could feed your family, you could go into the forest and kill a deer. And, you know, there's something very democratic. In fact, the magna, the full name of the Magna Carta is Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest because it recognized that the commons belong to all of us that whether you're rich or poor, humble or noble, accurate white, European or, you know, African or wherever your origin is. If you were a citizen, you had an equal right to cross over a beach and pull out your fish. The emperor himself couldn't stop you and if you start privatizing that resources, it takes the asset away from the poor. And- Yeah, I agree. I mean, I don't think, I don't know anybody who, you know wants to bring back capital punishment for poaching in, you know, federal lands and things like that. But there are ways to either create private property rights or transferable rights that lead to surplus, right? So, but I, you know, thank you for, you know going directly at a point where there's probably some distance. Let's do a lightning round. We're going to come back to questions like environmentalism and COVID policy and foreign policy in depth in a bit. But let's do a lightning round. If you were elected president, name some of the people that you expect or you would like to appoint as secretary of state. Who do you, who for you would be a great secretary of state and what? I don't know about that. You know, I don't think I can answer that question because I don't really want to telegraph my choices like that. I mean, you know, I love Tulsi Gabbard and like her that, you know she understands the, you know the importance of disentangling, of unraveling the empire and unraveling the war machine. And I would guess. Who is the last great secretary of state? Do you think that we have? Well, I mean, there's secretaries of state in the past that I liked and I don't like everything they did. You know, it's like presidents. I mean, I, you know, I was, you know Dean Atch is in a good diplomat. Yeah, did he give my uncle good advice on the Cuban missile crisis? No, I mean, I, you know tell me a, tell me a secretary of state and I'll tell you what I like about him and what I didn't like. Fair enough, fair enough. And I know you've spoken highly of Eisenhower's military industrial complex speech and his farewell speech but I'm sure you don't agree with everything that Eisenhower stood for. Oh, and, you know, that was, you know I'll say this about Eisenhower that Eisenhower I think really did try to disentangle you know, he was very, very worried and he did think, for example he was trying to make peace with Russia. He was trying to develop the same relationship with Khrushchev that my uncle ultimately did. And, you know, he was gonna have these summits in Geneva to try to end the Cold War and create detente and those were disrupted by the CIA. You know, I think U-2 flight that was then shut down with Gary Powers and that summit had to be canceled. And then of course, Dulles got Eisenhower to lie about, you know, the U-2 flights when they didn't know that the Russians had captured Gary Powers and then when they produced them it was a huge embarrassment to Eisenhower and the whole Geneva process fell apart but I do think Eisenhower intended well but he did not, you know and Eisenhower, another interesting thing about Eisenhower is he said, it will never be a veteran soldier who gets us into the next war, you know and he was speaking basically of my uncle when he said that he had been to war Khrushchev had been to war and wanted peace Khrushchev was in the most violent battle of World War II which was Stalin grad, the worst battle of World War II I think by anybody's estimation and he did not wanna go back to that place again and he did not- So is it that Putin was not a soldier or Putin was an intelligence guy? So kind of like Nixon or LBJ, he'll get us into a next war. Well, yeah, I don't know I'm not convinced Putin wanted a war, you know I think the jury is still out on that I think that we could have avoided the war I think we did a series of provocations that, you know and this isn't just me saying this you know, speaking of great diplomats George Kennan who was, you know probably the greatest diplomat in American history was the architect of the containment policy during the Cold War. In 1992, James Baker agreed that we would not move NATO one inch to the east and the concession for that agreement that the Russians had made was the Russians had agreed to move 400,000 troops out of East Germany and allow us to consolidate both Germanies under NATO which was a foreign enemy on an adversarial army and the Russians said Orbitchak said, I'll move them out but you have to promise you're not gonna move NATO to the east after I do that. Hey, Baker, James Baker was Secretary of State under Bush famously said we will not move NATO one inch to the east and in 1997. But that, I mean, let's, this is a lightning round I understand your argument about that there's you know, you know there's, America is never blameless but you were also not the ones crossing borders right now. Can I ask, would you ban gas stoves in this lightning round we'll come back to these in depth if you would like. You know, people are talking about banning stoves the Biden administration is about talking about banning gas stoves. Yes or no? Yeah, I wouldn't ban, I would not ban gas stoves. Great. Would you ban the use of roundup herbicide? Would I ban it? I would certainly make them label it and I would do everything I could to make sure that Monsanto is honest about the injuries that it causes that people are buying now with an open, you know and with an arms like negotiation understanding that they're buying something that's deadly poisonous. Okay. Would you ban, would you ban any would you ban any major prescription or over-the-counter drugs that are now on the market? I don't, none comes to mind at the moment but you know. Would you, you have a personal history of substance abuse. Your family has, you know certain recurring motifs along that. Would you legalize drugs or what currently illegal drugs would you legalize? I would decriminalize marijuana on a federal basis and allow the states to regulate it. And I would, well I would have a federal tax on it though. I would apply that tax to building rehabilitation centers around the country and providing people with you know drug rehabilitation. What about psychedelics? Which have been decriminalized at the state level in Oregon and Colorado? Definitely decriminalized psychedelics. Okay. Would you support immigration reforms that make it easier for more people to come here and live and work legally in America? Yes I would. Okay. Would you make it impossible for people to cross the border illegally and I would open up immigration for legal immigration? Would you ban so-called assault weapons? Oh I'm not gonna take away anybody's guns. But I do, if there was a consensus where Republicans and Democrats voted a majority to do that I would sign the bill. Great. Would you pardon Ross Ulbrecht, the founder of the Silk Road, the deep web drug market? Julien Assange of WikiLeaks or Edward Snowden? I would pardon Assange immediately because he's a newspaper publisher and it is crazy. It's crazy what they're trying to do to him. It's completely anti-American. I would pardon Snowden because what Snowden did for the American people was to help restore at least some semblance of democracy and the importance of the information he released was so it's a test to the fact that Congress passed legislation on recognizing the disclosures that he had and making sure that, to try to make sure that those kinds of abuses didn't occur again. So I think he is a hero and he shouldn't be treated as a villain. With Ross Ulbrecht, I need to look into that. My understanding of Ross Ulbrecht, the way that I understand it now is that he was given two life terms for something that normally you would not be given that. And if I investigate this, which I'm gonna do very, very quickly, and I find out that he was not being punished so much for his crimes, but being punished as an example to teach a lesson or to increase the bias against Bitcoin and I will release him. Great, thank you. Yeah, thank you for working through that rapid-fire battery of questions. It helps us get a sense of where you're coming from on a bunch of issues and now we'd like to dig deeper into some of those issues. I'm sure there's a lot there that many in our audience will like, some that they won't like. I appreciate that you opened with a discussion of foreign policy and kind of singling that out as your reason for challenging Biden in the primary because foreign policy tends to be central for many libertarians on deciding the presidency. So what I'm curious about is you laid out some of your critique of Biden's approach to Ukraine, the people he's surrounded himself with, but what is the RFK junior doctrine for the proper use of military force or military assistance? That's easy. It has to be in the US national interest. And what's going on in Ukraine is not in the US national interest as you define it. No, I mean, I think it's against the US national interest. I also think it's against the Ukrainian national interest. I think Ukraine is a victim here of not only Putin, but of US policies. As I think there are people in the US government that want it to make Ukraine a pawn in a proxy war, a US proxy war against Russia. And we've been very clear about that. I mean, they have not been in big US President Biden themselves at the purpose of the war is to depose Vladimir Putin. What would be the last war when you say, you know, a war has, we would only fight wars that are in the national interest. What's the last war that was actually in the US interest, do you think? Well, you know, I would say World War II was definitely an interest. I'm gonna hold off a discussion on Korea, but I would say World War II definitely and perhaps Korea. You know, you said that the objective here is to overturn the Putin's regime. And what we've just seen unfold in Russia is that their mercenary force just marched to just over a hundred miles outside Moscow before backing off. And Russia looks a lot weaker right now than much of the world might have expected. What do you say to Americans who look at what's happening and think, well, maybe Biden's approach is actually working to achieve his objectives? And what's the objective? Is the objective to depose Vladimir Putin and is that something we really want right now? Do we know who's gonna replace him? Or is this like Sodom Hussein? Have we identified somebody that we don't like? We get rid of them and then, you know, all hell breaks us. And you're now dealing with a nation which, you know, where Putin is very, very popular, he's an extremely popular leader. And it's a nation that controls more nuclear weapons than we own. And it's very important to us to have somebody who we know, who we can predict, who is able to maintain stability in that nation. And if you do replace Putin, are you gonna replace him with somebody who is more or less likely to let those nuclear weapons get out of control? That's what we should be thinking about here. Do we really know how popular or unpopular Putin is? I mean, there's, you know, what is unfolded? Putin, you know, did initiate the invasion of Ukraine and there seems to have been some number of anti-war protests within Russia. There's lots of stuff that's, it's hard to interpret exactly what's coming out of there. There seemed to be some support on the ground for what the Wagner Group was doing, some support for, you know, to the degree they were seen as trying to bring this war conflict to an end. You know, revolutions happen within countries, even without the US, you know, putting their foot on the gas or pouring gasoline on the fire. So how do we decide, you know, what is, like, how do you interpret those events? First of all, let me ask you a question is there are lots and lots of public opinion polls in Russia and those public opinion polls indicate that Putin is popular, that the people of Russia generally don't know, of course not 100% support the war in Ukraine. And, you know, you're putting me in a position where I'm sounding like an apologist for Putin and I'm not, I'm like Vladimir Putin. And his war in the Ukraine was illegal and it was brutal and it was unnecessary. He had other options. But, you know, I do think that people in the United States should, we need to understand our role in a series and a decade of provocations that put the Russians in that position. And as I said, it's our premier diplomats like George Cannon, like William Perry, who threatened to resign as Clinton's secretary of defense if we continue to move NATO to the East, like Bill Burns, who was then the Soviet Union, who also said, if we continue to move it to the East, we are gonna provoke the Russians into a violent response. It will be beyond their capacity to do anything else. So, you know, we were warned, do not do this. There was no reason for us to do it. We won the Cold War, we should have treated Russia differently, but we continued to treat them as an enemy and continue to encircle them now. What about China in all of this? You said something else. You said that you, at least I believe what you were suggesting is that the Wagner group in Beijing of Russia had something to do with the protests against the war. And my understanding of that, which I think is pretty well informed, is that that had nothing to do with it. The Wagner group was acting out of self-interest because the chain status of Dumbass and Lugans, which are now part of Russia under the Russian constitution, it was illegal for an unincorporated mercenary group to be operating on Russian soil. So the Russian government, the Russian Federation said, we've got to incorporate the Wagner group into the Russian army. The people who are profiting enormously like Prugoshin from the Wagner group did not want an incorporated, and it was a dispute over self-interest. And the reaction of the Russian people, Prugoshin was a very, very popular figure in Russia. I do not think he is anymore. Can you clarify real quick what I was saying and then I'll let Nick move us onto the next topic here. But it was that the statements being put out by Prugoshin were that the Defense Ministry and Putin have been executing this war poorly and that at least the imagery coming out on the ground was that they were being celebrated by the people in the town they had occupied. There was images of even like flowers being stuffed into cannons and stuff like this. We don't know, you don't know how to interpret any of that, any of this could be propaganda, but that's what I was getting at with the idea that there's perhaps a war, weariness and kind of dissatisfaction with how things have actually been laid out in Russia. I believe that Wagner has been critical of the Russian conduct of the war from the beginning, but not because they object to the war in Ukraine. What they were objecting to is that the Russian government was not conquering the Ukraine in a way that was a fish and literally smart. It wasn't because they didn't like war, it was Wagner group was the front line of that war from the beginning, from beginning of the Crimea. Yes. I don't think, and by the way, 80% of the Wagner group stayed in their barracks. There's only 4,000 troops that went along with this game and the indication are that most of them did not know what they were doing, that they were lied to by precocious. So I don't think, I think it's hard to read, and by the way, the Russian front lines in Ukraine did not show any weakness. Oh, there's not, if this were really weakening Russia, you would see that Ukraine doing an offensive right now and you're not seeing that, you're not seeing any faltering on the Russian line. So I think the, or the glee in the American press that are all subsumed in this orthodoxy that it's not well informed. And I, again, I want to- I mean, there's something, something has been shown here geopolitically, and again, this has less to do with America, American intervention, although you've been, I think rightly critical of a blank check style of support to Ukraine. The fact that Russia could not, you know, actually occupy Ukraine is a sign that it's kind of a paper tiger, right? Well, I mean, I guess we're a paper tiger too, because- Absolutely, we, I mean, this is, you know- Right, it's hard- The 21st century has not been good to global superpowers, right? No, I mean, it's harder than people thought it would be to occupy countries that don't want to be occupied, like Afghanistan, like Iraq, like Yemen, like Syria, you know, and all the other places that we have, you know, illustrated our paper tigerism over the past two decades, you know- One place- Would be enough for that, for that matter. Yeah, one place of a general agreement between a lot of your statements, and I think libertarians have to do with, you know, the entwining of social media platforms, you know, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the government to suppress certain types of voices, certain types of information, disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, and the name of public health and whatnot. How would you deal with such issues? Is there something fundamentally rotten about the way that social media platforms have acted over the past, you know, 10 years or so? And how do you address that? Well, you know, what, it's a good question. What we, you know, what we saw, what we've seen is this cooperate, the disturbing thing is the cooperation between government and the social media sites in suppressing dissent against government policy. So that seems to be a direct violation of the First Amendment. And normally you would say, okay, the social media sites are private companies, and that means they're kind of analogous to publishers, and a publisher can publish anybody they want. They can de-platform anybody they want. But now there's another issue here, which is these platforms are now, are so dominant of the public discourse that they have become the public square. So the question is, should they be regulated like common carriers? So because in order to protect democracy and get conversation, debate, and discourse, and that's an issue that's kind of the ultimate nuclear option, I think, for a president. But do you think that they should be? Well, I don't know, but I think that, I think that they should be, have a special responsibility. I would rather see it continue in private hands. But I think they have a special responsibility to avoid cooperation with the government. So does that mean you're asking me what I would do, and let me be very brief about that. I think it's a problem that everybody recognized. I think more and more we're seeing that the, with the exception of Google, perhaps, which is continuing to censor people on YouTube in a way that's really outrageous. I think Twitter and Zuckerberg, the indications are they did not want to. They were resentful at what was being demanded of the government. They were in a weak position because they have contracts with the government and they're just weak as we're seeing in Europe today because the European Union is not getting up to censor people. All right, what I would do, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get them all to come to the White House and I'm gonna sit down with them and say, how do you want to do that? How do we hear the values that we share? Which is these should be open platforms and they're very important to American, American democracy. What do we need to do to protect them and what are you willing to do? Because, and if you don't have a plan for that, then I think we have to start thinking of regulating them as common carriers. I think that it was a big mistake of the tech companies to capitulate to this kind of backdoor job owning that was going on that we've talked about a lot in the stream. I don't think that people like you should have been continually de-platformed even though we've got some areas of, I think, acute disagreement that we'll get into in a little bit. What I worry about with overarching, even like the threat of like, we're gonna now regulate you like common carriers is that it prevents the exactly the kind of innovation in social media that solves a lot of these problems. I mean, we've seen so many platforms proliferates in response to these problems now. And it's like, whenever there's some sort of federal regulation like that, it becomes that only the multi-billion dollar companies are really capable of complying with those kind of regulations. How do you think about or cope with that problem that seems to occur in lots of sectors of the economy? What you're saying to me is that if there's federal regulation of the kind that I'm talking about, cooperation, that it will benefit these existing monopolies and it will be, I'm sensitive to that. I would listen to those arguments. My objective is to have untethered speech. And there's speech that's not protected. Shouting, firing, and crowded theater is not protected within the number of the First Amendment or as pedophilia or advocating violence or a lot of other kinds of illegal speech or fraud, for example. But if it's protected speech, it should be untethered. Even if it's speech I don't like. And my objective is how do we create a platform hopefully within a free market system that will serve that function? Do you like the types of laws that conservative legislatures in Florida and Texas, these laws have been signed by Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida that essentially said that social media platforms or internet companies above a certain size have to, they cannot de-platform certain types of users, political candidates and things like that. And if they do, they will face court fines. These have been held up by the courts, but do you support that kind of regulation of social media speech? Yeah, I do. Okay, and what about hate speech? Because that tends to be a right-wing solution to a perception that conservatives are being unfairly bumped from these platforms or limited or having to reach a squelch. On the left, you hear a lot of people talking about trying to ban hate speech. Is hate speech a meaningful category to you and is it something that would come in? The problem of that, the problem with that is that the interpretation of hate speech is utterly objective. It's objective. So it leaves in the hands, it puts in the hands of authority figures, presumably government officials, the capacity to regulate all speech. And my speech was called hate speech. The DHS still classifies criticism of vaccines as a form of hate speech or terrorism. And so that's not a good result because so I say I'm very, of course I don't like hate speech, but in 1977, the liberals in this country consolidated behind the idea that we needed to protect the Nazis who were marching through Skokie, Illinois, through a Jewish neighborhood. And everybody was appalled by what they were doing, but everybody understood that we have to fight to protect the right for free speech, even when that speech is utterly reputant to us. Speaking of free speech, in the past, you have called for the jailing of CEOs and climate change skeptics. We've got a clip from 2014 of you. Let's run that clip and then could you explain what was your thinking and whether or not it's changed since then? Sure. Being jail, I think they should be enjoying three hots and a cot at the hay with all the other war criminals who are there. What about politicians, people who deny, who express skepticism on it? I think they're selling out the public trust. And I think those guys who are doing the Koch brothers bidding and who are against all the evidence of the rational mind are saying that global warming doesn't exist, that they are contemptible human beings and that I wish that you could punish them under. I don't think there's a law that you can punish those politicians under, but do I think the Koch brothers should be prosecuted for reckless and dangerous? Absolutely, that's a criminal offense and they ought to be serving time for it. All right, well, thank you very much, appreciate it. Okay, do you still feel that way? Obviously we're down one Koch brother. Yeah, you gotta, you have to look at the earlier part of that clip, which you didn't show. Okay. It shows that I was being asked a question about their criminal conduct. The Koch energy at that time was, I think it was the third or fourth largest air polluter in the world. It was maintaining pet coke piles in Detroit and Chicago that were poisoning poor neighborhoods. It was, it had been criminally convicted of violating environmental, which means it did it knowingly in order to make money. And what I say earlier on the clip, I say if a black kid, be able to spend about dollars from a grocery store, he'd go to jail, but why shouldn't the Koch brothers be going to jail if they're stealing hundreds of millions of dollars? Which was, Do you think people who, Let me finish up because I do, I have said that companies that certain or certain entities, corporate entities that habitually violate the law or whose purpose is to injure the public wheel, the public interest, those corporations should be subject to the corporate death penalty. And what that means is there's a, there's a, you know, the corporations are licensed by the states, but most of the states require that the corporation in order to get a charter and it operate in the public interest. And if it departs from the public interest, in other words, if it's completely consumed by private interest that is actually damaging the public interest in the states, the secretary of state and the attorney general have the capacity in various states, the Yank that Charter in every state. You know, somebody has the ability to Yank that Charter. For example, in New York state in the 1990s, the Republican attorney general liquidated the Tobacco Institute. The Tobacco Institute was an institute that was created by the tobacco by Philip Morris and the other tobacco companies. Those companies knew for 60 years at their product was killing one out of every four of their customers who use the product as directed, but they were lying to the public about it and they were creating fake, let me finish this because this is important for people to know because I've been accused of this before. They were, the Tobacco Institute was created to deceive the public about the dangers of tobacco. And it was given the corporate death penalty in New York and its assets were then distributed. The Koch brothers at that time were funding a series of think tanks that were designed to high pollution, to minimize pollution, to do things that were dangerous to the public and that were fraudulent. Do you think that's still the case? The First Amendment does not protect, the First Amendment does not protect fraudulent speech. If you say something that is fraudulent, you're not protected. So I do believe that people who do that should be punished. Now, at the time I made that, the Exxon Corporation had secret documents which we had obtained that showed that Exxon scientists have been informing the company that their scientists knew more, Brad Moses that they knew more about the fate of the carbon molecule than any other scientists in the world. And those scientists that concluded that global warming was real and it was gonna destroy the Arctic, melt the Arctic and they wrote memos to the senior staff at Exxon saying, if we keep doing what we're doing, we are gonna melt the Arctic and that will be a bad thing for humanity. It will be a good thing for our company because there's a lot of oil under the Arctic and we can get at it. That was the information that I was dealing with at that time, which was almost a perfect analogy for what the Tobacco Institute. I mean, but do you think that organizations that receive funding from the Koch brother at this point should be given the corporate death penalty? No, okay. And is it any less chilling of speech where we're talking about hate? Back then I didn't believe that, I believe that. Well, you just said that it's the same thing as the Tobacco Institute. So... Yeah, if they were given, if the organization, if the purpose of that organization was to deceive the public and, yeah, they should. Do we want to, I mean, I guess just on this question of free speech, do we want people in positions of power to be deciding what is acceptable speech that this is misinformation or malinformation or disinformation? It just seems like that way madness lies because the government will always come up with a pretext for saying your speech is not just wrong, it's criminal and you need to be shut down. Well, yeah, I don't know, but I do believe that prosecutors and judges make decision about what's fraud all the time. And, you know, we want to preserve that and nobody ever says that that is a, you know, that hasn't any inhibition of free speech. Well, you know, what I see when I look at that clip and think of the debate, especially in the 2010s around climate change is I see a lot of parallels with the COVID debate in the 2020s because both climate change and COVID are real and they carry risks to humans, but the reality of those risks and trade-offs can be more nuanced than just saying, you know, just trust the science or the science is settled. And a lot of those who wanted to have a debate over the policy agenda, embedded in the climate change discourse or the COVID discourse were suppressed, de-platformed, called deniers, even called to be criminalized or asked that I wish there were laws to criminalize this kind of speech. Do you regret partaking in that kind of discourse after kind of going through this in the COVID era? Yeah, and I think you make a good point and having seen what happened in the COVID era, if I had known that back then, I probably would not have made that speech. And also I see or, you know, made that statement. But I also seen, you know, in recent years how the, you know, how the crazies of COVID was manipulated and exploited by powerful interests to clamp down totalitarian controls and to, you know, impose technologies on people that were making them profits, for which they own the IPs. And I'm seeing a lot of that now in the carbon era. I'm seeing, you know, this emphasis on geoengineering, which I think is very damaging to the environment. I'm seeing what's happening to the whales off the East Coast of North America. And, you know, something that I've fought very long for 30 years of putting those wind turbines out there. We have a lot of wind on land in this country. And we shouldn't be turning the oceans into industrialized zones and destroying the whales. There's a lot of things that I know now that I, you know, that I think the issue is more complex today than it seemingly was at that point. Before, let's turn to COVID and vaccines, but just to close out a discussion of environmental issues. You seem to have recently in a Twitter space discussion with Elon Musk, you've signaled that you would be open to nuclear power under certain circumstances in a way that you were emphatically anti-nuke, you know, a couple of decades ago. Is that accurate? Or what are the conditions that you would put upon nuclear energy before you would allow that to go forward? Since, you know, that is a zero carbon, you know, kind of a fix to the world that we're in. Yeah, I mean, what I've always said about nuker, I think I've said this for at least 30 years, is that I'm all for it if you can make it safe. And then if you can make it economically competitive then right now, you know, I have not seen anything that indicates that either of those are true about nuclear power. I mean, the whole power. How do you measure that though? Because, you know, what I've read is that more people were killed in Fukushima, you know, being evacuated than died from anything related to radiation. I mean, that is a popular industry, talking point at the same stuff about Chernobyl, but the answer- Well, the UN did say, I mean, after, you know, that the death count and even the environmental damage from Chernobyl was, you know, not what anybody expected. And oil and gas, I mean, all energy production has negative external effects. We don't need to argue about this. You know, the estimates of Chernobyl go from I think 3, 4, 5,000 dead to 5 million dead. So, depending on who you believe, but I personally have visited a community, a very, very large community of thousands of children in Cuba who were damaged, who were, you know, who were injured and ultimately most of them killed by because of Chernobyl. So, and, you know, they spent over there- Well, I guess, let me ask you a question, okay? Because it's an easy answer that we don't have to mitigate this issue. The answer is, as soon as they get an insurance policy, oh, the insurance industry is the ultimate arbiter of risk and the nuclear industry cannot get an insurance policy. So- I mean, there is no, I mean, nuclear energy in America from, you know, after World War II was folded into defense things. And it's run by the government. There's like not an energy sector that is more regulated by, you know, federal and state and local red tape. You have- I don't know that that's- Ask me a question. Yeah. The question is, how do I know it's not safe? Yeah, and I don't talk about efficiency and economy. Okay. The answer is it safe? My word about whether it's safe or not is meaningless. And as we've just seen, you're going to be litigated. Here's the answer. They can't get an insurance policy. If they could get, there's no insurance company in the world that will write them a policy. So they had to go to Congress in a sleazy legislative maneuver in the middle of the night and get the price of Anderson Act passed, which gives them immunity from liability. There's the same as the vaccine industry. So- Just to close this out and let's go to vaccines. But I mean, you're also talking about a massive amount of beachfront property in America that wouldn't be possible without all sorts of government interventions into insurance markets. Insurance markets are not free markets. So I don't think we can conclude this. If you're conducting, if you're like, for example, a vaccine company and you say, I can't operate unless you free me from liability, you know, that is an indication that what you're doing is not safe. And, you know, it's AIG. Now, let me just answer the second question. I'll be very quick. The nuclear, the last nuclear plant cost $14 billion a gigawatt capital expenses. And the solar plant cost $1 billion a gigawatt. A wind plant cost about $1.1, $1.2 billion a gigawatt. A coal plant cost $3.6 billion a gigawatt. We could make energy by burning prime rib if we wanted. But why would you use the most expensive? And then you got a mild uranium, which is not carbon free, and it is very, very injurious to the environment. And then you've got a higher technicians. You have to have all of these scheduled maintenance outages, which is very expensive. And you have to store the waste in the next 30,000 years, which is five times the length of recorded human history. And if you were, if they had every, every form of energy production has environmental overflows as well as rest of the world. And I believe in free markets. And yet we had a marketplace. Nuclear could not survive in it. It could not. So would you, I guess just to close this out, would you also, I mean, if you want a free market in this, would you get rid of all subsidies for renewable energy at this point? I would get rid of subsidies for all energy. The biggest, most highly subsidized energy is carbon, much more than solar wind. There's $5.2 trillion a year in subsidies for carbon. Okay. We're all alone in this country alone. It gets 1.2 trillion a year. If you ended that, you know, carbon could not survive in a marketplace. Okay, great. Let's talk, let's talk about something less contentious. Yes, which is the COVID and vaccines. And obviously you have hit a nerve because of what unfolded during the COVID years. And, you know, it was something that I was disturbed by a lot of COVID policy, including the implementation and mandating of the vaccines, although not necessarily their creation. I also think vaccines on net save a lot of lives, whether we are talking about the COVID vaccine or something like measles, which I'm just gonna pull this slide up real quick. This is showing the measles vaccine being licensed in 1963. All these sources will be in our description and on our webpage, but then you see after the licensure, the measles cases drastically decline. It was basically eliminated in the US by the year 2000 and then started coming back as people got complacent, stopped vaccinating so much. And then by 2019, there were up to a thousand, over a thousand cases. And these outbreaks occurred in places where unsurprisingly, under vaccinated communities, communities that objected to the vaccines for religious reasons and so forth or political reasons. So that is my concern. It's that I think some of your critiques of what happens during the COVID years are totally legitimate, but I worry that your rise in elevation is going to possibly accelerate the return of more diseases that here to four have been eradicated. What do you say to an independent voter like me, who's in that mindset and who has voted for Republicans, who voted for Democrats, voted for libertarians before, but has this concern hanging over my head? I mean, I'm not very vaccine, I never have been. If you show me a vaccine that works and that makes people healthier. And the MMR vaccines don't work. Well, I would like to see data that show that people, I would like to see a vaccinated versus unvaccinated study that show that people who get the MMR vaccine are healthier, a decade later. How do you explain this graph? You said many things that are a part of the kind of industry propaganda. One is that those later rises in vaccination and measles come from unvaccinated individual, come from the complacency, but vaccination rates have gone up continuously. There's no time in our country, vaccination rates have dwindled, have gone lower. So they continue to go. So there's not a time when they went lower than those that suddenly you see. You can look at isolated communities for a variety of reasons. And you have the data. And it is slipping down. This is an article showing that, kindergarten vaccination rates have been dropping, especially it started in 2019, but post COVID, it's still very high. It's in the high 90s, but it's gone from like 95 to 93%. And what I think the science shows about vaccines is that these numbers, we don't really know what the threshold is, but once you start getting below 90 and 85, then that's when, as a parent of young children, I start to get pretty nervous that we're gonna have outbreaks. Can I answer you? Yes. Okay, number one, you have to check in those outbreaks to see whether the kids who are getting the measles are actually unvaccinated and what strain it is. For example, in the Disneyland strain, we know that at least 36% of the kids who got measles were vaccine strain measles. What we're seeing is the vaccine wanes. And after 20 years, there's extreme waning. Oh, the vaccine has not been around that long. And when the generation that got measles, like myself, dies off, you're gonna see a lot of me return to measles. Now, measles mortality used to be tremendous in our country. Oh, it used to yield tens of thousands of children a year. Prior to 1964, prior to the introduction of the vaccine, that mortality dropped off. I think the year of the vaccine, it was down to about 200 or 300 people a year. Almost all those children were not nourished. The deaths from measles. So the deaths from measles were declining anyway. And there's a study that the CDC did in 2000. And it was published in, I think, Pediatrics. And they did it with Johns Hopkins. And they asked the question, did vaccines contribute to this dramatic decrease in mortalities among American children that happened in the 20th century? And after looking at all the data, they came back and said, no, the vaccine said almost nothing to do with it. What was responsible for those decline in mortalities was the engineering solutions. It was better nutrition, chlorinated water, better hygiene, good food, et cetera, and lower density housing. Now, then there's the other question. Is it beneficial to get measles on your kid? Is that beneficial? I speak as a survivor of measles, moths, and chickenpox among other childhood diseases that no longer exist. And me too. So, for example, in Europe, they don't allow the chickenpox vaccine. We make it here, and why don't they allow it? Because if you give kids chickenpox vaccine, you're much more likely to get shingles when you're older. And we now have- If you have the vaccine, that's exactly wrong, right? It's like, if you have the chickenpox as a child, you're more likely to get shingles. Or the vaccine. If we have wild chickenpox, what the wild chickenpox did is every two years it would come back. And if you got it when you were a kid, when it came back, it was a function as a booster. So you would never get shingles. The people who used to get shingles were people who were isolated from children. So they attended when I was young. Shingles was associated with old curmudgens who never went near kids. If you were near kids and you got that exposure, you wouldn't get shingles. So now that we've eliminated that annual, the biannual booster that people got, we now have a shingles epidemic. And, you know, the CDC did a study. In fact, the scientists, they did an extensive five or 10-year study in Antelope Valley, California by a scientist that they had an NIA scientist, contract scientist called Gary Goldman. And he predicted, he said, if you do this vaccine, this mass vaccination, we are gonna have massive shingle epidemic in 10 years. And that's exactly what happened. And if you go on NHS website today, the National Health Service in England, it will say on that website, on the homepage, we do not mandate the chicken box vaccine because it causes shingles epidemics. Now, with measles, well, there are lots and lots of studies out there. So if you got measles as a kid, you're much, you are, you have a heightened immunity against certain kinds of cancers, against etopic disease, against cardiac disease when you get older. So having those childhood diseases, which were essentially rashes in many cases, you, and we're, you know, self-limiting and harmless to almost all children, you, it immunizes you and it builds your immune response in the future against all kinds of really bad disease that actually kill you. There's also, you know, real risks of, you know, bad outcomes for all these diseases, whether they are measles, mumps and rubella. And, you know, it is hard to look at charts like the one I put up before or this one that has to do with polio that has a similar story, 1955. I have marked here is where the vaccine was licensed, polio plummets, we know polio and even more severe disease that I would hope none of us would want to see come back. And so I guess, first I'll just ask you, you know, are you worried about something like polio? And then secondly, what is, what would be your policy approach to these vaccines? Would you actually allow people to continue get it, people who want the vaccines to still get them or would you ban some of these vaccines outright? No, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I won't mandate vaccines. If anybody wants to get a vaccine, you get it. What I'll do is I'll make sure we have good science. That's all. And then let people make up their own minds. And by the way, 80% of the polio cases on earth today according to the WHO are vaccine-strained polio. That means people got it from vaccinated people. Can I just to drill down, because I think those cases are extremely low as you can see by this chart. So if it's 80% it's 80% of a very small number. Worldwide polio is almost eradicated. So just, you know. Can I, can I just zero in on a point? No, it is eradicated in the United States. But it's not eradicated around the world. And as I said, the WHO, it is a killer around the world. And according to WHO, 80% of it is vaccine-strained. Can I ask? If you would make sure the science is solid, what would be your method for doing that? I saw a recent report from Anna Merlan, from Vice, who watched your recent Health Policy Summit. I couldn't find the recording to review myself. So this is her reporting. She said that you would be actually, you said you would be actually issuing executive orders from the Oval Office to kind of shape health policy and also kind of target medical journals that you felt had, I don't know, been captured. Is that an accurate characterization to your approach would be to health policy from the Oval Office? Yeah, my approach will be to appoint good people who will actually do safety science. There's not one of the 72 vaccine doses now mandated for American children that have ever been through a placebo-controlled study pre-licensure. As outrageous, every other medicine has to go through pre-licensing safety studies. The vaccines are the only ones that are exempt and we're mandating them for healthy children. And all I'm saying is let's do a real safety study so that we know the risk profile on these products. We know what the benefits are and then give people the real information and we can't do that today because we do not have the safety. Why are we giving rotavirus vaccines? How many lives do those say? Can I ask, can I ask with, you know, in a RFK FDA, drugs now currently, you know, cost a billion to $2 billion to bring to market decade or more, would drug approval be easier or harder? And what has been the role of pharmaceuticals in increasing health and lifespan over the past 50 years? Pharmaceutical drugs. I mean, again, the only studies that we have on that are the McKinley and McKinley's and 77 and the two- Well, what an FDA, would your FDA approve- Let me answer that question. Peter Gohscho is the founder of the Cochrane Collaboration which is the most prestigious group of independent scientists, 30,000 scientists who review clinical data for the pharmaceutical industry has done a recently issued a report that show that pharmaceutical drugs are now the third biggest killer in America after heart attacks and cancer. So no, I do not intend to make it easier to get drugs to market. I think that drugs should have drugs that are that have a, have a, some special, whether, you know, situation where there's people dying that they should be made available to them. But no, I don't, what I think we should be doing is looking at public health and we should be looking at all forms of helping public health and boosting people's immune systems not just pharmaceutical products and not just pharmaceutical solutions. We now have, because of the way that things are done in this country, because of the corruption of these agencies we now have the sickest population on earth. We have the highest chronic disease rate of any country. Why is it that we had 16% of the COVID deaths in this country? We only have 4% of the world population. It's because our people are so sick and we've done such a miserable job at building public health. We pay more for medicine than any country in the world. We use more of it and Americans are the sickest. We're 79th in the world in terms of health outcome we're behind Mongolia, behind Cuba. We are not doing it right. We need intervention and we need people to come in with a new way of doing things in those agencies. And to be clear, just to get an answer to that earlier question, you would be using your executive power, executive orders to accomplish that goal, to make it harder for certain drugs to make it to market or certain vaccines to be. I didn't say that. What I said is I want good science. I want to keep a controlled trials that show that these drugs actually work not the kind of corrupt trials that we've had today. Okay, well, you did say that it would be harder to bring drugs to market. Well, I said, well, you know, in some cases it may be harder to bring up the market. I don't think, let me go back and say, I don't intend to make it more difficult for it to bring up the market. I think some of the, I do think that we need to look at the fast track approval process because it doesn't make any sense to me that almost 50% of FDA's budget is now coming from the pharmaceutical industry. Unless we can figure out a way to do that, that does not corrupt the public officials who are supposed to be regulating our drugs. I think a lot of them. Anyway. Could you explain the previous comments about using the Justice Department to go after medical journals? What did you mean by that? Well, the medical journals are trusted by doctors. They're relied upon by doctors for treatment regiments and treatment protocols. The medical journals are virtually all utterly corrupt right now. And it's not just me who's saying that. It's Marcia Engel, who's with the long term, I think two or three decades of the New England Journal of Medicine who says that they become propaganda vessels for the pharmaceutical industry. Richard Orton, who's the editor of the Lancet who acknowledges that most of the stuff that you read in the journals is wrong. It is fake science. And the journals evolved to that point because they're getting their money from the pharmaceutical industry. They're getting 85% for advertising and preprints or reprints. And those reprints are used by their representatives to go to the doctor's office and sell these drugs. So they do an article that they know is fake. They know it's false, like for Vioxx. And they end up killing 500,000, between 120,000 and 500,000 people because they don't show in that document that this drug that is now being used to treat arthritis and headaches also kills people from heart attacks. So the doctors don't know that who are prescribing it. They said the same thing with OxyCodo. And now we've got 110,000 kids dying in this country every year. Because FDA and the journals elaborated with the pharmaceutical industry to lie to the public and say that OxyCodone was not addictive. And so the doctors believe that journal article, they prescribe it to their patient and they kill them. And that's not the opioid epidemic or rather the epidemic of overdoses though is obviously beyond anything to do with OxyContin. Prescriptions peaked a decade ago and overdoses continue to persist. So we got a generation addicted to opioids. And when we cut back on the opioids, and now they're getting Chinese fentanyl that's coming through Mexico. Can I ask, because we're about out of time, but one of the critiques of your candidacy or even your public profile is that you traffic routinely in conspiracies and a kind of conspiracist mindset where almost everything that we take for granted is bad. So it's that the COVID vaccines, not only don't work, but they're more dangerous than COVID itself. 5G and Wi-Fi are controlling our mind. The government, aspects of the government that are supposed to be trying to help people actually into hurting them. AIDS is not primarily caused by HIV or HIV is not involved in AIDS. Atrazine is changing fraud sexuality and by implication, human sexuality. Your cousin Michael Skakel is not guilty of the murder of Martha Moxley that he was found guilty of. The 2004 election in Ohio was stolen. It kind of goes on and on. How do you answer people who say, you know, like this is the sign of somebody who's thinking is fundamentally conspiracy minded rather than kind of dealing with brute reality, that is difficult and terrible, but is not what you seem to be making of it. Well, you did something very unfair, which is you made a series of characterizations of my beliefs, of my beliefs that you've read in the newspapers, many of which are just wrong. So, you know. Which one? Well, I mean, let's go through one at a time and I'll tell you what I said and what I believe. Okay. And then you say. HIV is not the primary underlying condition in AIDS is one. But it's not a necessary condition for AIDS. Right. Well, that is not controversial. First of all, I say in my book, I believe HIV causes AIDS. Okay. All right, thank, let's take that off the table then. Yeah. Now, are there AIDS cases, are there tens of thousands of AIDS cases that do not have HIV that are not HIV? Yeah, that's not controversial. Everybody knows that. Are there people who have HIV and never get AIDS? Yes. Do you understand that what I'm saying and you know, and this is your opportunity to speak to people who are like, well, you are a conspiracy theorist and that that defines your, your thinking processes. You know, how do you, how do you respond to that? Because in a lot of ways, and I say this not to, you know, and I got you, but part of what Donald Trump, you know, part of Donald Trump's successful message and team was to say that the system is not working. The system is actually designed to keep you down to at least a percentage of the population. You seem to be channeling a similar energy. How do you convince people that you are not just, okay, well, you know, first it was vaccines, you know, then it was the 2004 election that was stolen in the state of Ohio. And you've written that, I don't think I am, you know, contradicting anything that you've said, you know, and there are other examples of this type of stuff. How do you, how do you speak to people who think that you are just a conspiracy model? Show me where I got it wrong. I mean, I, you know, I, yes, I'm willing to question public narratives. I've been taught to do that my whole life. My father taught me to do that. My father said to me, people in authority lie. And you know, that our obligation as citizens and democracy is to support our government but also to be skeptical. Is there a conspiracy or not a conspiracy? Is there a major belief that you had over the past 20 years that you have reversed your opinion on? Or you're like, oh, I actually did get that wrong. Well, show me where I got it wrong. Show me what I got wrong. Okay. And then he goes, I mean, my cousin, Michael Stakeville, after I wrote my book and found the two men who actually killed Martha Boxley and interviewed them, he was as a result released from prison. Did, did, I mean, Rolling Stone has retracted two of your stories. I mean, is it, is Rolling Stone part of- Okay, that is not true. Rolling Stone retracted one of my stories 15 years after we're after, during the pandemic, they retracted a one story that I did on the marathon vaccines. They never shown, and Rolling Stone at that time had changed ownership. Okay. It was part of the orthodoxy, but they were never ever to show a single mistake that I've made. Nobody has shown one single mistake that I made in that article. Salon didn't show it. Salon corrected four errors and Joan Walsh, the editor, wrote me a letter and apologized for her editors having made those errors. I didn't make any of the errors. Show me an error that I made. I will say now, what is your final pitch? Because this, I think this helps explain your appeal in general that, you know, we live in a, we live in a society where, yes, we recognize that, you know, our leaders lie all the time, you know, and that's political leaders, it's business leaders, it's religious leaders, you know, and, you know, so there's a general lack of faith and confidence and trust in institutions. How do you, how do you address that and how do you, you know, what is the pitch then to libertarians? Well, I mean, by, you know, by your criteria, virtually every libertarian is a conspiracy theorist. No, a lot of them are, a lot of them are. I mean, many of my best friends are. Yeah, I mean, if you question government narratives, that is our, you know, we're supposed to do that. We're supposed to have a dialogue. We're supposed to have conversation and we're supposed to, you know, be skeptical about aggregations of power. Oh, you know, and I'm not way, but I also, you know, we'll tell you this. If somebody shows me a fact that I got wrong, I'm gonna change my opinion. I'm not gonna dig in. And, you know, I get facts wrong, you know, at times, you know, I publish a lot. My book was 200, almost 250,000 words and 2200 footnotes. And today, you know, I ask at the beginning, if you find a mistake in here, tell me and we're gonna correct it. Well, let me ask you that one very specific fact then that I can demonstrate whether this is right or wrong. Do you think that the COVID vaccine, which we're in agreement should not have been mandated across society for all ages, regardless of circumstance, but do you believe that on net it saved lives, that it prevented people from dying of COVID? I think that, I mean, according to its own, you know, the Pfizer clinical trial data, the vaccine saves one life for every 22,000 vaccines administered from COVID, one life, and it takes four lives from cardiac arrest. So, and then, you know, so that's one data point. I have a whole book of data points that I call died suddenly that shows all of them, the massive data points that indicate that the vaccine actually caused more problems than it averted. So, and I'll just give you this one data point to listen to, to think about. And this isn't just positive, but there's many up, there are many that I think are. We are one of the most vaccinated, COVID vaccinated countries in the world, and we had the highest death rate in the world from COVID. Haiti, which had a 1%, 1.4% vaccination rate had a death rate one 200th of our country. Nigeria, which had a 1.3% vaccination rate had a death rate one 200th of our country. On all, if you look at the, at look at nation by nation and go through the Johns Hopkins data, which is all graphed in the first page of our book, you'll show that the real deaths came following vaccination, the excess deaths, and that's exactly what the Pfizer clinical trial predictive had. Yeah, I will say that, you know, comparing across countries like this, you have to take into account things like demographics age, health status. So it's really hard to do that. What we can say is, you know, I'll just pull up, this is the COVID weekly death rate by vaccination status. All ages in the US that orange line at the top shows unvaccinated compared to vaccinated and vaccinated with booster. And I mean, it's hard to dispute that a lot of people who would have otherwise died from COVID looking at that probably lived because of the vaccine. So again, you've got your notes. We've got some slides we pulled up today. We've got notes to sources and people can, you know, sort these things out. But I just, you know, want to make the case that it's possible to be critical of the way that the government approached this and kind of the heavy handedness with which some of the COVID vaccines were mandated while accepting that there were some serious benefits as well. And that's where I stand with this at the end of the day. I'm happy to show you graphs that show the opposite. And I'm happy to show you the public data and that, you know, is generally acknowledged now that there was not a greater death rate among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. That the greater death rate, the higher death rates were among the vaccinated. And I'll tell you one in the way that graph deceptions in that graph, it is the way they calculated vaccinated because the way they calculated it for that graph is that they, you were unvaccinated until two weeks after your second vaccine. Right, cause that's when it has full protection kicked in according to the CDC. Right, but the big death rate, if you look at all the Johns Hopkins data, the big death rate from the vaccine. And, you know, because people were getting COVID right after getting vaccinated. And the big death rates then were happening immediately after the first vaccine. So those death rates were counted among unvaccinated people even though they were fully vaccinated. And that's what your graph is picking up that artifact. So it's actually picking up that the vaccines cause excess deaths. All the vaccines, you know, don't trust me. Go and look at the graphs. Johns Hopkins graphs died suddenly and you will see that yes, that is true. And I asked just as a general closing thought and I'm gonna give you the last word here. In a RFK America would, you know, that which is not mandatory is outlawed. I mean like this part of what we're struggling with when we, you know, when we pull back a little bit is that we seem to live in a world now where either something is mandatory or it is outlawed. And I think a general libertarian perspective is that what we wanna do is give more individuals more breathing room to choose how to live, to, you know, have more autonomy in how they go about their daily business. And, you know, what is your pitch to deliver that kind of world, I guess? Well, I mean, I think that's what I've been saying throughout, I don't intend my inclination is not to mandate things but to give people a choice. You know, if somebody wants to get vaccinated, I have no problem with that. I just don't think you should mandate it and particularly for a product that has, you know, that has no insurance policy. And that carries over into a wide array of policy areas. Yeah, I believe in freedom of choice unless it's gonna hurt your neighbor or, you know, it's gonna hurt the comments. You know, people should be able to do what they want with as much freedom as possible. And the government should not be unantique. Okay. I think that's a point worth ending on. Thank you for your time and for a skirted conversation, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Thanks for having me. Give me your address and I'll send you the book and strike you guys out. We got it. Thanks, I have the book. I appreciate it.