 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. 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? I think they're selling out the public trust and you know 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 you know I wish that there were you could punish them under. I don't think there's a law that you can punish those politicians under but I 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 brothers. Yeah you gotta you have to look at the 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 was the 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 I'm you know a black kid he'll 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 do you think people who finish up because I do I I have said that um that companies that certain certain or certain entities corporate entities that habitually violate the law or whose purpose is to injure the public 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 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 uh uh liquidated the tobacco institute the tobacco institute was an institute that was created by the tobacco by philip moors and the other tobacco companies those companies knew for 60 years that their product was killing one out of every four of their customers who used the product as directed but they were lying to the public about it and they were creating hey look let me finish this because this is important for people to know you 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 it was given the corporate death penalty in new york and its assets were then distributed oh the co-brothers at that time were funding a series of think tanks that were designed to hide pollution to minimize pollution to do things that were um 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're if you say something that is fraudulent you're not protected so and i do believe that people who do that should be punished now at the time i made that the exon corporation had secret documents which we had obtained that showed that exon scientists have been informing the company that their scientists knew more brad both of them they knew more about the fate of the carbon molecule and any other scientists in the world and those scientists that concluded that global warming was real that it was going to destroy the arctic melt the arctic and they wrote memos to the uh to the senior staff at exon saying we if we keep doing what we're doing we are going to 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 and you know which was almost a perfect analogy for what the tobacco institute so i mean but do you think that you know do you think that uh you know organizations that receive funding from you know the coke brother at this point should be uh should be given the corporate death penalty no okay so and is it is it any last chilling of speech you know you were we're talking about hate right back then i didn't believe that i believe that well you just said that you were that that it's the same thing as the tobacco institute so yeah given if they if they were given if they if they're if the organization if the purpose of that organization was to deceive the public and and yeah they should uh they do we want to i mean i i guess just you know on this question of free speech uh you know 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 we have 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 and we want to preserve that and then nobody ever says that that is a uh you know that that's an inhibition of free speech 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 or suppress the platforms 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 during 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 i probably would not have made that speech and also i i'd see or you know made that statement um but i also seen you know in recent years how the you know the how the crazies of covid was manipulated and exploited by powerful interests to clamp down totalitarian controls and to um and to you know impose uh technologies on people that uh that were making them profits for which they own the ips and i'm seeing a lot of that now with uh in the carbon era i'm seeing you know the 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 um 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 oh 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 that was an excerpt from the reason interview with robert f kennedy jr who's running for president if you want to see another excerpt go here if you want to see the full thing and you should go here come back next thursday at one p.m eastern time when zack wise miller and i will be talking to somebody that you absolutely want to hear from