Big Pharma
Lex Fridman (01:45:57) The bigger picture of this is you’re an outspoken critic of pharmaceutical companies, big pharma. What is the biggest problem with big pharma and how can it be fixed?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:46:07) Well, the problem could be fixed with regulation. But the pharmaceutical industry is… I don’t want to say because this is going to seem extreme that a criminal enterprise, but if you look at the history, that is an applicable characterization, for example, the four biggest vaccine makers, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer, and Glaxo, four companies that make all of the 72 vaccines that are now effectively mandated for American children. Collectively, those companies have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties and damages in the last decade. And I think since 2000, about 79 billion. So these are the most corrupt companies in the world.
(01:47:08) And the problem is that they’re serial felons. They do this again and again and again. So Merck did Vioxx, which, Vioxx, they killed people by falsifying science. And they did it. They lied to the public. They said, “This is a headache medicine and a arthritis painkiller.” But they didn’t tell people that it also gave you heart attacks.
(01:47:37) And they knew, we’ve found when we sued them, the memos from their bean counters saying, “We’re going to kill this many people, but we’re still going to make money.” So they make those calculations and those calculations are made very, very regularly. And then when they get caught, they pay a penalty. And I think they paid about $7 billion for Vioxx. But then they went right back that same year that they paid that penalty, they went back into the same thing again with Gardasil and with a whole lot of other drugs. So the way that the system is set up, the way that it’s sold to doctors, the way that nobody ever goes to jail, so there’s really no penalty that it all becomes part of the cost of doing business.
(01:48:32) And you can see other businesses that if there’s no penalty, if there’s no real… look, these are the companies that gave us the opioid epidemic. So they knew what was going to happen. And you go and see, there’s a documentary, I forget what the name of it is, but it shows exactly what happened. And they corrupted FDA. They knew that oxycodone was addictive. They got FDA to tell doctors that it wasn’t addictive. They pressured FDA to lie. And they got their way. And so far they got a whole generation addicted oxycodone. And now when they got caught, and we made it harder to get oxycodone, and now all those addicted kids are going to fentanyl and dying. And this year it killed 106,000. That’s twice as many people who were killed during the 20-year Vietnam War. But in one year, twice as many American kids. And they knew it was going to happen and they did it to make money. So I don’t know what you call that other than saying that’s a criminal enterprise.
Lex Fridman (01:49:47) Well, is it possible, within a capitalist system, to produce medication, to produce drugs at scale in a way that is not corrupt?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:49:57) Of course it is.
Lex Fridman (01:49:58) How?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:50:00) Through a solid regulatory regimen, where drugs are actually tested. The problem is not the capitalist system. The capitalist system, I have great admiration for and love for the capitalist system. It’s the greatest economic engine ever devised. But it has to be harnessed to a social purpose. Otherwise, it leads us down a trail of oligarchy, environmental destruction, and commoditizing poisoning and killing human beings. That’s what it will do. And in the end, you need a regulatory structure that is not corrupted by entanglements, financial entanglements with the industry. And we’ve set this up. The way that the system is set up today has created this system of regulatory capture on steroids.
(01:51:06) So almost 50% of FDA’s budget comes from pharmaceutical companies. The people who work at FDA are, their salaries are coming from pharma, half their salaries. So they know who their bosses are. And that means getting those drugs done, getting them out the door and approved as quickly as possible. It’s called fast track approval. 50% of FDA’s budget, about 45%, actually goes to fast track approval.
Lex Fridman (01:51:38) Do you think money can buy integrity?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:51:40) Oh yeah, of course it can. That’s not something that is controversial. Of course it will.
Lex Fridman (01:51:48) It’s slightly controversial to me. I would like to think that scientist that work at the FDA-
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:51:53) Well, it may not be able to buy your integrity. I’m talking about population wide, I’m not talking about the individual.
Lex Fridman (01:51:58) But I’d like to believe that in general, a career of a scientist is not a very high paying job. I’d like to believe that people that go into science, that work at FDA, that work at NIH are doing it for a reason that’s not even correlated with money, really.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:52:18) Yt. And I think probably that’s why they go in there. But scientists are corruptible. And the way that I can tell you that is that I’ve brought over 500 losses and almost all of them involve scientific controversies. And there are scientists on both sides in every one. And when we sued Monsanto, on the Monsanto side, there was a Yale scientist, a Stanford scientist, and a Harvard scientist. And on our side there was a Yale, Stanford and Harvard scientist. And they were saying exactly the opposite things. In fact, there’s a word for those kind of scientists who take money for their opinion, and the word is biostitutes. And they are very, very common. And I’ve been dealing them with them my whole career.
(01:53:05) I think it was Upton Sinclair, that it’s very difficult to persuade a man of a fact if the existence of that fact will diminish his salary. And I think that’s true for all of us. If we find a way of reconciling ourselves, to truths and worldviews that actually benefit our salaries. Now, NIH has probably the worst system, which is that scientists who work for NIH itself, which used to be the premier gold standard scientific agency in the world, everybody looked at NIH as that. Today, it’s just an incubator for pharmaceutical drugs. And that is that gravity of economic self-interest.
(01:53:58) Because if NIH itself collects royalties, they have margin rights for the patents on all the drugs that they work on. So with the Moderna vaccine, which they promoted incessantly and aggressively, NIH on 50% of that vaccine is making billions and billions of dollars on it. And there are at least four scientists that we know of, and probably at least six at NIH, who themselves have marching rights for those patents. So if you are a scientist who work at NIH, you work on a new drug, you then get marching rights and you’re entitled to royalties of $150,000 a year forever from that forever. Your children, your children’s children. As long as that product’s on the market, you can collect royalties.
(01:54:46) Moderna vaccine is paying for the top people at NIH. Some of the top regulators. It’s paying for their boats, it’s paying for their mortgages, it’s paying for their children’s education. And you have to expect that in those kind of situations, the regulatory function would be subsumed beneath the mercantile ambitions of the agency itself and the individuals who stand to profit enormously from getting a drug to market. Those guys are paid by us, the taxpayer, to find problems with those drugs before they get to market. But if you know that drug is going to pay for your mortgage, you may overlook a little problem or even a very big one. And that’s the problem.
Lex Fridman (01:55:38) You’ve talked about that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer, and you’ve said that you’re not anti-vaccine, you’re pro safe vaccine. Difficult question, can you name any vaccines that you think are good?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:55:55) I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective. In fact-
Lex Fridman (01:56:09) Those are big words.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:56:09) … Those are big words.
Lex Fridman (01:56:10) What about the polio? Let’s start with the-
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:56:11) Well, here’s the problem. Here’s the problem. Yeah, here’s the problem. The polio vaccine contained a virus called simian virus 40. SV40. It’s one of the most carcinogenic materials that is known to man. In fact, it’s used now by scientists around the world to induce tumors and rats and Guinea pigs in labs. But it was in that vaccine, 98 million people who got that vaccine. And my generation got it. And now you’ve had this explosion of soft tissue cancers in our generation that killed many, many, many more people than polio ever did. So if you say to me, “The polio vaccine, was it effective against polio?”
(01:56:55) I’m going to say, “Yes.”
(01:56:57) And if say to me, “Did it cause more death than avert?”
(01:57:02) I would say, “I don’t know, because we don’t have the data on that.”
Lex Fridman (01:57:06) But let’s talk. We have to narrow in on what is it effective against the thing it’s supposed to fight?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:57:12) Oh, well, a lot of them are, let me give you an example. The most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine. Diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. It was introduced in this country around 1980. That vaccine caused so many injuries that Wyeth, which was the manufacturer, said to the Reagan administration, “We are now paying $20 in downstream liabilities for every dollar that we’re making in profits, and we are getting out of the business unless you give us permanent immunity from liability.”
(01:57:45) And by the way, Reagan said at that time, “Why don’t you just make the vaccine safe?” And why is that? Because vaccines are inherently unsafe.
(01:57:58) They said, “Unavoidably unsafe, you cannot make them safe.”
(01:58:02) And so when Reagan wrote the bill and passed it, the bill says in its preambles, “Because vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.” And the Bruesewitz case, which was the Supreme Court case that upheld that bill uses that same language, vaccines cannot be made safe. They’re unavoidably unsafe. So this is what the law says.
(01:58:21) Now, I just want to finish this story because this illustrates very well your question. The DTP vaccine was discontinued in this country and it was discontinued in Europe because so many kids were being injured by it. However, the WHO and Bill Gates gives it to 161 million African children every year. And Bill Gates went to the Danish government and asked them to support this program saying, “We’ve saved 30 million kids from dying from diptheria, tetanus and pertussis.”
(01:58:59) The Danish government said, “Can you show us the data?” And he couldn’t. So the Danish government paid for a big study with Novo Nordisk, which is a Scandinavian vaccine company in West Africa. And they went to West Africa and they looked at the DTP vaccine for 30 years of data and they retained the best vaccine scientists in the world, these deities of African vaccine program. Peter Aaby, Sigrid Morganson, and a bunch of others. And they looked at 30 years of data for the DTP vaccine. And they came back and they were shocked by what they found.
(01:59:36) They found that the vaccine was preventing kids from getting diptheria, tetanus and pertussis. But the girls who got that vaccine were 10 times more likely to die over the next six months than children who didn’t. Why is that? And they weren’t dying from anything anybody ever associated with the vaccine. They were dying of anemia, bilharzia, malaria, sepsis, and mainly pulmonary and respiratory disease, pneumonia.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:00:02) Mainly pulmonary and respiratory disease, pneumonia. And it turns out that this is what research has found who were all pro-vaccine, by the way. They said that this vaccine is killing more children and than did their attendance and protected prior to the introduction of the vaccine and for 30 years nobody ever noticed it. The vaccine was providing protection against those target illnesses, but it had ruined the children’s immune systems. And they could not defend themselves against random infections that were harmless to most children.
Lex Fridman (02:00:36) But isn’t it nearly impossible to prove that link?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:00:39) You can’t prove the link, all you can do is for any particular interest, illness or death, you can’t prove the link. But you can show statistically that if you get that vaccine, you’re more likely to die over the next six months than if you don’t. And those studies unfortunately are not done for any other vaccines. So for every other medicine, in order to get approval from the FDA, you have to do a placebo controlled trial prior to licensure, where you look at health outcomes among an exposed group, a group that gets it and compare those to a similarly situated group that gets placebo. The only medical intervention that does not receive, that does not undergo placebo controlled trials prior to licensure are vaccines. Not one of the 72 vaccines that are now mandated for our children have ever undergone a placebo controlled trial prior to licensure.
Lex Fridman (02:01:38) So I should say on that point, I’ve heard from a bunch of folks that disagree with you.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:01:44) Okay.
Lex Fridman (02:01:44) Including polio. I mean, the testing is a really important point. Before licensure, placebo controlled randomized trials, polio received just that against the saline placebo control. So I’m confused why you say that they don’t go through that process. It seems like a lot of them do.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:02:10) Here’s the thing is that I was saying that for many years because we couldn’t find any. And then in 2016, in March, President Trump ordered Dr. Fauci to meet with me. Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins, and I said to them during that meeting, “You have been saying that I’m not telling the truth when I said not one of these has undergone a prior pre-licensure placebo control.” And the polio may have had one post licensing, most of them haven’t. The polio may have, I don’t know. But I said, “Our question was prior to licensure, do you ever test these? And for safety?” And by the way, I think the polio vaccine did undergo a saline placebo trial prior licensure, but not for safety, only for efficacy. So I’m talking about safety trials now. Fauci told me, he had a whole tray of files there. He said, “I can’t find one now, but I’ll send you one.”
(02:03:26) I said, “Just for any vaccines, send me one. Any of the 72 vaccines,” He never did. So we sued the HHS and after a year of stonewalling us, HHS came back and they gave us a letter saying we have no pre-licensing safety trial for any of the 72 vaccines. And that the letter from HHS, which settled our lawsuit against them because we had a FOIA lawsuit against them, is posted on CHD’s website. So anybody can go look at it. So if HHS had any study, I assume they would’ve given it to us and they can’t find one.
Lex Fridman (02:04:08) Well, let me zoom out because a lot of the details matter here, pre-licensure, what does placebo controlled mean? So this probably requires a rigorous analysis. And actually, at this point, it would be nice for me just to give the shout-out to other people much smarter than me that people should follow along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, use their mind, learn and think. So one really awesome creator, I really recommend him is Dr. Dan Wilson. He hosts the Debunk the Funk Podcast. Vincent Racaniello, who hosts This Week in Virology. Brilliant guy, I’ve had him on the podcast. Somebody you’ve been battling with is Paul Offit, interesting Twitter, interesting books. People should, understand and read your books as well. And Eric Topol has a good Twitter and good books. And even Peter Hotez, I’ll ask you about him.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:05:03) And people should, because Paul Offit published a substack recently debunking, I think my discussion with Joe Rogan. And we have published a debunk of his debunking. So if you read his stuff, you should read-
Lex Fridman (02:05:29) Read both.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:05:30) Yes, you should read… And I would love to debate any of these guys.
Peter Hotez
Lex Fridman (02:05:37) So Joe Rogan proposed just such a debate, which is quite fascinating to see how much attention and how much funding it garnered the debate between you and Peter Hotez. Why do you think Peter rejected the offer?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:05:51) I think, again, I’m not going to look into his head, but what I will say is if you’re a scientist and you’re making public recommendations based upon what you say is evidence-based science, you ought to be able to defend that. You ought to be able to defend it in a public forum and you ought to be able to defend it against all comers. So if you’re a scientist, science is rooted in logic and reason. And if you can’t use logic and reason to defend your position, and by the way, I know almost all of the studies, I’ve written books on them and we’ve made a big effort to assemble all the studies on both sides. And so, I’m prepared to talk about those studies and I’m prepared to submit them in advance and for each of the points. And by the way, I’ve done that with Peter Hotez, actually because I had this kind of informal debate several years ago with him, with a referee at that time.
(02:07:02) And we were debating not only by phone but by email and on those emails, every point that he would make, I would cite science and he could never come back with science. He could never come back with publications. He would give publications that had nothing to do with, for example, thimerosal and vaccines, mercury based vaccines. He sent me one time, 16 studies to rebut something I’d said about thimerosal. And not one of those studies, they were all about the MMR vaccine, which doesn’t contain thimerosal. So it wasn’t like a real debate where you’re using reason and isolating points and having a rational discourse. I don’t blame him for not debating me because I don’t think he has the science.
Lex Fridman (02:07:53) Are there aspects of all the work you’ve done on vaccines, all the advocacy you’ve done, that you found out that you were not correct on, that you were wrong on, that you’ve changed your mind on?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:08:09) Yeah, there are many times over time that I found that I’ve made mistakes and we correct those mistakes. I run a big organization and I do a lot of tweets. I’m very careful. For example, my Instagram, I was taken down for misinformation, but there was no misinformation on my Instagram. Everything that I cited on Instagram was cited or sourced to a government database or to peer reviewed science. But for example, the Defender, which was our organization’s newsletter, we summarized scientific reports all the time. That’s one of the things, the services that we provide. So we watch the PubMed and we watch the peer reviewed publications and we summarize them when they come out, we have made mistakes. When we make mistake, we are rigorous about acknowledging it, apologizing for it, and changing it. That’s what we do. I think we have one of the most robust fact checking operations anywhere in journalism today.
(02:09:09) We actually do real science. And listen, I’ve put up on my Twitter account where there are numerous times that I’ve made mistakes on Twitter and I apologize for it. And people say to me, “Oh, that’s weird. I’ve never seen anybody apologize on Twitter.” But I think it’s really important at the only… Of course, human beings make mistakes. My book is 230 or 40, 50,000 words. There’s going to be a mistake in there. But you know what I say at the beginning of the book, “If you see a mistake in here, please notify me. I give away that people can notify me.” And if somebody points out a mistake, I’m going to change it. I’m not going to dig my feet in and say, “I’m not going to acknowledge this.”
Lex Fridman (02:09:57) So some of the things we’ve been talking about, you’ve been an outspoken contrarian on some very controversial topics. This has garnered some fame and recognition in part for being attacked and standing strong against those attacks. If I may say, for being a martyr, do you worry about this drug of martyrdom that might cloud your judgment?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:10:22) First of all, I don’t consider myself a martyr and I’ve never considered myself a victim. I make choices about my life and I’m content with those choices and peaceful with them. I’m not trying to be a martyr or a hero or anything else. I’m doing what I think is right because I want to be peaceful inside of myself, but the only guard I have is fact-based reality. If you show me a scientific study that shows that I’m wrong, for example, if you come back and say, “Look, Bobby, here’s a safety study on polio that was done pre-licensure and used a real saline solution.” I’m going to put that on my Twitter and I’m going to say, “I was wrong, there is one out there.” But that’s all I can do.
Exercise and diet
Lex Fridman (02:11:17) All right. I have to ask, you are in great shape. Can you go through your diet and exercise routine?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:11:28) I do intermittent fasting. So I start my first meal at around noon, and then I try to stop eating at six or seven. And then I hike every day.
Lex Fridman (02:11:46) Morning, evening?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:11:47) In the morning. I go to a meeting first thing in the morning, 12, I’m eating. And then I hike uphill for a mile and a half up and a mile half down with my dogs and I do my meditations. And then I go to the gym and I go to the gym for 35 minutes. I do it short time and I’ve been exercising for 50 years. And what I’ve found is it’s sustainable if I do just the short periods and I do four different routines at the gym. And I never relax at the gym, I go in there and I have a very intense exercise. I lift, I mean, I could tell you what my routine is, but I do backs just one day, legs and then a miscellaneous. And I do 12.
(02:12:36) My first set of everything is I try to reach failure at 12 reps. And then my fourth set of everything is a strip set. I take a lot of vitamins. I can’t even list them to you here because I couldn’t even remember them at all. But I take a ton of vitamins and nutrients, I’m on an anti-aging protocol from my doctor that includes testosterone replacement. But I don’t take any anabolic steroids or anything like that. And the DRT I use is bioidentical to what my body produced.
Lex Fridman (02:13:25) What are your thoughts on hormone therapy in general?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:13:29) I talk to a lot of doctors about that stuff because I’m interested in health and I’ve heard really good things about it, but I’m definitely not an expert on it.
God
Lex Fridman (02:13:42) About God. You wrote, “God talks to human beings through many vectors, wise people, organized religion, the great books of religions, through art, music and poetry. But nowhere with such detail and grace and joy as through creation. When we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine.” What is your relationship and what is your understanding of God? Who is God?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:14:09) Well, God is incomprehensible. I mean, I guess, most philosophers would say we’re inside the mind of God. And so, it would be impossible for us to understand what’s actually God’s form is. But I mean, for me, let’s say this, when I was raised in a very deeply religious setting, so we went to church in the summer, oftentimes twice a day, morning mass. And we definitely went every Sunday. And we prayed in the morning, we prayed before and after every meal, we prayed at night, we sent a rosary, sometimes three rosaries a night. And my father read us the Bible. Whenever he was a home, we’d all get in the bed and he’d read us the Bible stories. And I went to Catholic schools, I went to Jesuit schools, I went to the nuns and I went to a Quaker school at one point. I became a drug addict when I was about 15 years old, about a year after my dad died. And I was addicted to drugs for 14 years.
(02:15:32) During that time, when you’re an addict, you’re living against conscience. And when you’re living against… I was always trying to get off of drugs, never able to. But I never felt good about what I was doing. And when you’re living against conscious, you kind of push God to the periphery of your life. So I’ll call Him, he gets recedes and gets smaller. And then when I got sober, I knew that I had a couple of experiences. One is that I had a friend of my brothers, one of my brothers who died of this disease of addiction, had a good friend who used to take drugs with us and he became a Moonie. So he became a follower of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And at that point, he had the same kind of compulsion that I had and yet it was completely removed from him.
(02:16:41) And he used to come and hang out with us, but he would not want to take drugs. Even if I was taking them right in front of him, he was immune to it. He’d become impervious to that impulse. And when I first got sober, I knew that I did not want to be the kind of person who was waking up every day in white knuckling sobriety and just trying to resist through willpower. And by the way, I had iron willpower as a kid. I gave up candy for lent when I was 12 and I didn’t need it again until I was in college. I gave up desserts the next year for lent. And I didn’t ever eat another dessert till I was in college. And I was trying to bulk up for rugby and for sports. So I felt like I could do anything with my willpower. But somehow this particular thing, the addiction was completely impervious to it. And it was cunning, baffling, incomprehensible. I could not understand why I couldn’t just say no and then never do it again like I did with everything else.
(02:17:57) And so, I was living against conscience and I thought about this guy and reflecting my own prejudices at that time in my life, I said to myself, I didn’t want to be like a drug addict who was wanting a drug all the time and just not being able to do it. I wanted to completely realign myself so that I was somebody who got up every day and just didn’t want to take drugs, never thought of them, kissed the wife and children and went to work and never thought about drugs the whole day. And I knew that people throughout history had done that. I’d read the lives of the saints. I knew St. Augustine had met a very dissolute youth and had this spiritual realignment transformation. I knew the same thing had happened to St. Paul at Damascus. The same thing had happened to St. Francis.
(02:18:55) St. Francis also had a dissolute and fun-loving youth and had this deep spiritual realignment. And I knew that that happened to people throughout history. And I thought that’s what I needed, something like that. I had the example of this friend of mine and I used to think about him and I would think this again reflects the bias and probably the meanness of myself at that time. But I said, “I’d rather be dead than be a Moonie.” But I wish I somehow could distill that power that he got without becoming a religious nuisance. And at that time, I picked up a book by Carl Yung called Synchronicity and Yung, he was a psychiatrist, he was contemporary of Freud’s. Freud was his mentor, and Freud wanted him to be his replacement. But Freud was now out atheist and Yung was a deeply spiritual man.
(02:19:58) He had these very intense and genuine spiritual experiences from when he was a little boy, from when he was three years old that he remembers biography is fascinating about him because he remembers them with such a detail. And he was interesting to me because he was very faithful scientist and I considered myself a science-based person from when I was little. And yet he had this spiritual dimension to him, which infused all of his thinking and really I think made him, branded his form of recovery or of treatment. And he thought that he had this experiment experience that he describes in this book where he ran one of the biggest sanitariums in Europe in Zurich. And he was sitting up on the third floor of this building and he’s talking to a patient who was describing her dream to him.
(02:21:01) And the fulcrum of that dream was a scarab beetle, which was an insect that is very uncommon if at all in Northern Europe, but it’s a common figure in the iconography of Egypt and the hieroglyphics on the walls of the pyramids, etc. And while he was talking to her, he heard this bing, bing, bing on the window behind him and he didn’t want to turn around to take his attention off her. But finally, he does it in exasperation. He turns around, he throws up the window and a scarab beetle flies in and lands in his head and he shows it to the woman. And he says, “Is this what you was thinking of, this is what you were dreaming about.” And he was struck by that experience which was similar to other experiences he’s had like that. And that’s what synchronicity means, it’s an incident, not a coincidence.
(02:21:56) And if you’re talking with somebody about somebody that you haven’t thought about in 20 years and that person calls on the phone, that’s synchronicity. And he believed it was a way that God intervened in our lives that broke all the rules of nature, that he had set up the rules of physics, the rules of mathematics, or to reach in and sort of tap us on the shoulder and say, “I’m here.” And so, he tried to reproduce that in a clinical setting and he would put one guy in one room and another guy in another room and have them flip cards and guess what the other guy had flipped. And he believed that if he could beat the laws of chance, laws of mathematics, that he would approve the existence of an unnatural law, a supernatural law. And that was the first step to proving the existence of a God.
(02:22:48) He never succeeds in doing it. But he says in the book, “Even though I can’t prove using an empirical and scientific tools, the existence of a God, I can show through anecdotal evidence having seen thousands of patients come through with this institution, that people who believe in God get better faster and that the recovery is more enduring than people who don’t.” And for me, hearing that was more impactful than if he had claimed that he had proved the existence of God because I wouldn’t have believed that. But I was already at a mindset where I would’ve done anything I could to improve my chances of never having to take drugs again by even 1%. And if believing in God was going to help me, whether there’s a God up there or not, believing in one a self had the power to help me, I was going to do that.
(02:23:40) So then the question is how do you start believing in something that you can’t see or smell or hear or touch or taste or acquire with your senses? And Yung provides the formula for that. And he says, “Act as if you fake it till you make it.” And so, that’s what I started doing. I just started pretending there was a God watching me all the time. And kind of life was a series of tests. And there was a bunch of moral decisions that I had to make every day. And these were all just little things that I did. But each one now for me had a moral dimension. Like when the alarm goes off, do I lay in bed for an extra 10 minutes with my indolent thoughts or do I jump right out of bed? Do I make my bed? Most important decision of the day.
(02:24:28) Do I hang up the towels? When I go into the closet and pull out my blue jeans and a bunch of those wire hangers fall on the ground, do I shut the door and say, “I’m too important to do that. That’s somebody else’s job or not?” And so, do put the water in the ice tray before I put it in the freezer? Do I put the shopping cart back in the place that it’s supposed to go in the parking lot of the Safeway? And if I make a whole bunch of those choices that I maintain myself in a posture of surrender, which keeps me open to my higher power to my God. And when I do those things right, so much about addiction is about abuse of power, abuse of all of us have some power, whether it’s our good looks or whether it’s connections or education or family or whatever.
(02:25:33) And there’s always a temptation to use those to fulfill self will. And the challenge is how do you use those always to serve instead God’s of will and the good of our community? And that to me, is kind of the struggle. But when I do that, I feel God’s power coming through me and that I can do things. I’m much more effective as a human being. That gnawing anxiety that I lived with for so many years and God, it’s gone and that I can put down the oars and hoist the sail and the wind takes me and I can see the evidence of it in my life. And the big thing, temptation for me is that when all these good things start happening in my life and the cash and prizes start flowing in, how do I maintain that posture of surrender? How do I stay surrender then when my inclination is to say to God, “Thanks God, I got it from here.” And drive the car off the cliff again.
(02:26:49) And so, I had a spiritual awakening and my desire for drugs and alcohol was lifted miraculously. And to me, it was as much a miracle as if I’d been able to walk on water because I had tried everything earnestly, sincerely and honestly for a decade to try to stop and I could not do it under my own power. And then all of a sudden, it was lifted effortlessly. So I saw that early evidence of God in my life and of the power, and I see it now every day of my life.
Lex Fridman (02:27:29) So adding that moral dimension to all of your actions is how you were able to win that Kambu battle against the absurd.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:27:38) Exactly.
Lex Fridman (02:27:38) Sisyphus with the Boulder.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:27:39) It’s all the same thing. It’s the battle to just do the right thing.
Lex Fridman (02:27:44) Now Sisyphus was able to find somehow happiness. Yeah. Well, Bobby, thank you for the stroll through some of the most important moments in recent human history and for running for president. And thank you for talking today.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (02:27:59) Thank you, Lex.
Lex Fridman (02:28:01) Thanks for listening to this conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from John F. Kennedy. “Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Instead, let us accept our own responsibility for the future.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time