X Spaces: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Reclaiming Democracy June 5, 2023 Musk hosted Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on a Twitter Space discussing free speech, public health, content moderation and his campaign.
Musk hosted Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on a Twitter Space discussing free speech, public health, content moderation and his campaign.
Transcript David Sacks (host)
All right, everybody, let's get started. Introduce our co hosts here, Bobby Kennedy Jr. And Elon. I'll start by introducing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I think everyone already knows he's a nephew of President John F. Kennedy. He's the son of Senator and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated after winning the California primary in the 1968 presidential election. Before entering presidential politics, RFK Jr. Was an environmental lawyer and activist in many areas. He was most famous for cleaning up the Hudson River. He was also outspoken on indigenous rights, peace, and civil liberties. He's also the founder of Children's Health Defense, a nonprofit that protects children from toxic chemical assault from pharmaceutical drugs and environmental pollution. So with that, Bobby and Elon, I think we're all excited to hear what you guys have to say.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Elon, a real pleasure meeting you and thank you so much for hosting us.
Elon Musk
You're most welcome. Thank you. This is a great opportunity for the public to hear directly from you and really looking forward to what you have to say.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I also just want to thank you for your leadership on the. On just breaking this, the whole of the censorship. In fact, I say one thing, that Twitter was always kind of the last refuge for those of us who are trying to talk about issues that departed from the official orthodoxies that were being censored on the other platforms. And the first real effort at censorship happened in February 2019 when Adam Schiff sent a letter to all, to the heads of all the social media sites of Google, Facebook, now meta, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and others and demanding that they start censoring information about vaccines that didn't. That was non compliant with the official narratives. And the only place, the only group that resisted Schiff at that time was ahead of the intelligence committee. So that was kind of the first indicator that the intelligence apparatus had an interest in public health. And the only one of the social media sites to resist those, those imprecations was, was Twitter. When Jack was running this and he, for some reason, he was able to say no to them when the rest of them weren't. So I'm very happy. And your arrival at Twitter, Elon, has been, I think, a breath of fresh air for our country. You somehow understood, although you're from South Africa, you somehow under the tradition of free expression and how important that is to American democracy. So I'm very grateful to you.
Elon Musk
You're most welcome. Yes, I think it's absolutely essential to have a robust democracy. We must have free speech. In the absence of that, democracy simply cannot function.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, it is free speech. And the free flow of information is the water, it's the sunlight, it's the fertilizer, it's the soil. Democracy. Without it, democracy withers and dies. There's never been a time in history when we look back and say that the people who are censoring free speech were the good guys. They're always the bad guys. They're always. It's always the first step toward totalitarianism. But also, you know, it's one of the things that the constitutional framers understood that totalitarian systems have a huge advantage over democracy because they're more efficient. Democracy is sloppy, it's slow. It advances two steps and retreats one step. It is the product of a lot of debate, which is slow moving and laborious. And the only advantage, the big advantage that we have over totalitarian systems is that the ideas that mature into policies are first annealed in a furnace of debate. And the best ideas then triumph in this marketplace of ideas, which does not happen at totalitarian system. And that's one of the things that the dynamics that the framers of our constitution understood that we would be able to out compete totalitarian systems and outlast them because of this dynamic that produced policies through debate and through discussion and conversation rather than through dictation.
Elon Musk
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. The thing about democracies and free speech is that it's like washing your laundry in public. Yes, you see things that perhaps you know there's dirty laundry, but at least you see it. It's not hidden. And it's essential to have that debate, even if you disagree strongly with one side of the debate. If you don't allow such debates. The thing that I think people who are in favor of censorship really need to understand is that unless people that you don't like can say things that you don't like, it's not free speech. And if you, if you start censoring, it's only a matter of time before that censorship is turned upon you.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I mean, the First Amendment was written not for easy speech and likable speech and lovable people. It was written for hard times and to protect speech that nobody wants you to say. And I remember 977 when the Nazis wanted to march through Skokie, Illinois, which was a Jewish neighborhood. And the liberals of this country, the aclu, turned out in force to support that right, Even though they were appalled and disgusted by what the Nazis were saying and doing. Everybody agreed that we had to be willing to die for the right to do so. And that was the. That's the whole base of democracy, is that we allow people to talk about. And one of the things, you know, that. And one of the things that prompted me to run for president is what you were talking about is the end of transparency in our country. That government. There's so much going on now that it's done secretively, that where the decision making is opaque, where there are people who are. Who are making decisions, who are not necessarily elect officials at the public has fenced out. And so many Americans today feel like the promise of democracy has been a bait and switch and that we're no longer living in a democratic system where we are actually the sovereign of our own destinies, the sovereign, the deciders of our own faith, that people over whom we have no control, that money, interest, that large corporations have taken over. This kind of merger of state and corporate power that's happened in Washington, D.C. in the state capitals, has not only turned our regulatory agencies into predators against the American people, they're supposed to be our protectors, but also that all the decision making, the real decision making, has been taken from the American public. And that, you know, you see so many people. I'm in rural Pennsylvania today, and I'm surrounded by people who feel despair about our country, who are disillusioned, who are struggling with poverty for reasons that they don't understand, but they feel like they no longer are the masters of their own destiny. And I think a lot of that is because it's true. Our government has become an instrument of corporate power and it is not telling. And because of that, it has to lie to us. You know, it can't afford to be transparent because it actually told us what it was up to and why it was making certain decisions. People wouldn't put up with it. So everything has to be cloaked in fear and deception. And I think, you know, Americans, even though they don't understand it, they understand that something very wrong is happening to them.
Elon Musk
Absolutely. The thing actually I find truly bizarre and very different from the past is that it's not just large corporations and government that are in collusion, which has actually been the case for a while. I think it was Eisenhower that warned us about the military industrial conflict, for example, and he's someone who really knew about it. But the thing that I find difficult to forgive is that the legacy of traditional media is also almost entirely, with some exceptions, working in lockstep with the government and with. With corporate America. And they. It is really their obligation to question the government, not to Go along with it and be their mouthpiece in the United States. This is insane.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I mean, the function of the media traditionally is supposed as the guardians of the First Amendment. They're supposed to speak truth to power. And instead they've become propaganda vessels for the powerful, for, you know, the big. The military industrial complex, for the pharmaceutical companies or and for other large corporations. You know, one of the mechanisms by which which that media capture has taken place is buying through advertising, and particularly in the pharmaceutical realm. In 1997, we changed the law in this country. We had always forbidden the use of the media to sell pharmaceutical products. There was no direct to consumer advert of pharmaceutical products. It was against the law. FDA changed that law in 97, and it launched a tsunami of pharmaceutical dollars into the advertising space and gave the pharmaceutical companies control not only of the platform for advertising their products, but also control of content. On Nightly News, I had this weird meeting with Roger Ailes. Roger Aile, the founder of Fox News. And I had this very strange relationship with him because I spent three months in a tent with him in East Africa when I was 19 years old. And even if that was before he started Fox News, once he started Fox News, he became kind of this Darth Vader figure for me, despite the fact that all the things he was doing to our country were antithetical to what I believed. And I kept this very fond personal friendship with him. And he would allow me on his network and he would require his hosts like Hannity and Neil CAVUTO and Bill O'Reilly to put me on to talk about environmental issues. I was the only environmentalist during those years who was regularly going on Fox News. And in 2016, I had done a documentary on the mercury and vaccines. And I showed it to him and he was very interested. And he had a family member who he thought had been injured by a vaccine. And he said, unfortunately, I can't help you with this. He said that any of his hosts who allowed me on TV to talk about this, that he would be forced to fire them. And he said that of his advertising revenues for the nightly news shows were at that point coming from pharma. He told me that on average there is 22 advertisements on a nightly news show and 817 to 18 of those are typically pharmaceutical ads. And he said if any of his hosts cloud me onto their show without checking with him, he would be forced to fire them. And if he didn't, he would get a call from Rupert. What he said from Rupert within 10 minutes. And of course, he met Rupert Murdoch, who is the owner of Fox News. And that kind of gave me insight to, you know, why nobody on TV wanted to talk about these things. Because, as I said, the pharmaceutical industry not only is dictating, is using those shows, the platform to advertise its product. But there's only two countries in the world that allow direct to consumer advertising. One is New Zealand, the other is the United States. And it's largely as a result of that. We take three times the pharmaceutical drugs of any other Western nation. We have the. And we have the worst health outcomes. We pay more for health care than any other nation. And I think we're 79th in the world. We're buying, I think, Mongolia and Cuba and Costa Rica, our health outcomes and. And pharmaceutical drugs are now the third leading cause of death in our country after cancer and heart dise. And it's not just pharmaceutical companies. I was watching the other day, Good Morning America, and there was an advertisement, I think it was by General Dynamics on Good Morning America. There's nobody in the audience in Good Morning America who is buying killer drones. And so why is General Dynamics advertising on Good Morning America? Well, of course, they're doing those advertisements because they wanted to dictate the content. They want to be able to have an editorial control over the kind of overton window that Good Morning America is permitted within which discussions on Good Morning America are permitted. So they want to make sure that Americans are enthusiastic about our wars and about a belligerent national policy so that they can continue selling weapons. And unfortunately, those are the forces that are dictating a lot of the official narrative that we hear from network TV and from the corporate television.
Elon Musk
Yeah. In fact, Twitter has seen extreme pressure from advertisers as. And, you know, has at least in the west, seen a advertising boycott from a lot of companies. I would like to for sure thank those companies that have stuck with us, like Apple and Disney and many others. But. But we have in for North America and Europe seen roughly half of our advertising disappear overnight simply because we insist on free speech. So what you're talking about, I think the public does not realize the magnitude of the pressure, extreme financial pressure that is placed upon organizations to toe the line by advertisers. And I think this is fundamental corruption of democracy. And the public should be absolutely outraged by this, and something's got to be done about it. It's insane that they're literally trying to drive Twitter bankrupt.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Well, you know, I was really curious about, you know, about your decision to release the Twitter files, because that I mean, if I had been your attorney, you know, and I wouldn't be, because I'm not a corporate attorney, but I can't imagine that any attorney for Twitter told you that was a good idea. And there was a time, you know, we were suing the social media companies for the censorship. And when we heard that you were taking over Twitter, our attorneys came to us and said, you know, Elon Musk seems very sympathetic to free speech. Maybe we should tell him that we're about to sue them all. But that will drop Twitter if he releases the, you know, the records of his communications with the White House. Because, and for people who don't understand this in the audience, companies like Twitter are regarded as essentially publishing platforms. And if you're a publisher, you can print anything you want, and you can refuse to print anything you want. The government doesn't control that and nobody else does. If you're the New York Times, you have an absolute right not to print an editorial by Robert Kennedy. No, that's not censorship. Censorship is when the government tells you to do it. So Twitter. So we could not sue Instagram for deplatforming me, but if we could prove that the government pressured Mark Zuckerberg to have Instagram deplatform me, and then the First Amendment is implicated and it becomes illegal under American law, we had that proof for some of the companies. But it really, it was right on the borderline of whether judges would accept it or not. And it would have been very valuable to us at that time, the kind of information that was released in the Twitter files. But it would be. I at that time told my attorneys, I don't think Elon would do that because his attorneys are going to tell him it would be insane because it would subject Twitter to a litigation, to a liability risk. And I was so surprised and delighted when you did that on your own. And, you know, clearly you've been portrayed as somebody who's kind of this sinister agenda, but you're doing step after step that is not in your self interest, and that is clearly designed to protect freedom of speech and is designed for, you know, is coming out of some deeper place than financial self interest for you. And I just want to tell you how much I admire you for that, Elon, and how grateful I am on behalf of my country that you would come here from another country and be the key instrument for rescuing American democracy and freedom of speech during a time of, you know, when a lot of people were turning their backs on our Constitution.
Elon Musk
It definitely has been extremely difficult. If we at Twitter simply toed the line and did everything that the advertisers and especially the sort of various nonprofits that pressure the advertisers and, you know, the whole sort of GDEI movement, which is sort of having a much bigger effect on the actions of corporations than people realize. I mean, if we just simply go the line like everyone else, we would have. It's billions of dollars a year in difference. Basically. Our. Our revenue is cut in half because we didn't toe the line. So just the magnitude of this is extreme. And. And it's frankly a struggle for Twitter to break even. We're hoping to break even, but we're not there yet.
Elon Musk
But I don't care how much it costs or what it takes. If we lose free speech, lose democracy, America falls. America falls. I don't know what happens to the world, but it's not a good thing.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I mean, I'd love to hear any kind of details about. Did you. Did you talk to attorneys before you release the Twitter files? Did you talk to anybody else who told you you must be out of your mind to be doing this?
Elon Musk
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
David Sacks (host)
Everyone.
Elon Musk
I mean, every lawyer advised against it and said it was insane would get a huge trouble, and I would be sued to Helagon, and it would be massive disaster? I. Yeah, I don't care. It's like, I don't care. I mean, I just. You know, it's easy for people to take for granted the system we have here in the United States, but it really doesn't exist anywhere else, you know, not even Canada. I'm half Canadian. And you don't have the free speech rights in Canada you have in the United States. You know, perhaps a new government in Canada at some point will enact those rights, because it's incredibly important. But, you know, I think if we don't protect free speech at all costs, we don't have a functioning democracy. If we don't have a functioning democracy, nothing else matters.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Let me ask you another question. What is it in your background that you know, that you think gave you such firm convictions where you'd be willing to take this huge, massive, unspeakable economic hit on behalf of a principal for a country in which you weren't even born?
Elon Musk
Well, I should say I do very much consider myself an American.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
So what do you think it was in your background and your childhood or whatever? Were there any. Was there something that, you know, was it a civics lesson? Was it a professor? Was it.
Elon Musk
I. Well, I Love studying history, the history of civilizations, history of all kinds of. And while of course, the United States has made mistakes and it is not perfect and it has at times done things that are wrong, I am of the firm belief that the United States has been the greatest force for benevolence in world history. And this is again, not to excuse mistakes or bad things, but that is, I think the evidence for the United States being a benevolent force in the world is overwhelming. You look at things like, you know, the Marshall Plan after World War II. You know, at the end of World War II, the United States had overwhelming military might have the nuclear bomb. The United States could have taken over the world. It could have acquired whatever countries it wanted. And yet it, it didn't do any of that. In fact, it gave money to, to the, to the countries that have been fighting. I'm not sure if that has ever happened in history. It helped rebuild the United States, helped rebuild Germany and Japan, helped rebuild Japan even after things like Pearl Harbor. I mean, this is, I. One has to really. Maybe this has happened before. Actually, I'm not aware of it. And so, you know, so I'm very in favor of America. Again, it's not to say that we can't do better or, you know, we need to. We do want to do better, we want to maintain that. But anyway, so I'm a huge fan of it. And I, you know, I also want to point out I don't have any homes outside of the United States. I do not carry any other passport and I will live and die here.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Well, that's very moving and very admirable and thank you for, you know, thank you for your service and commitment to our country. You know, I've been watching you and watching the way that you've been mischaracterized by the press, mischaracterized by people in my party, the Democratic Party, as somebody who was a threat to democracy when everything that you have done has indicated a, you know, you're just incredible commitment. You know, during the revolution there were. We lost between 25,000 and 70,000 people during the revolution who died to give us our Constitution. And those people also put their livelihoods on the line. They put their property on the line. They put their financial status and their social status on the line and in a way that, you know, for principles. And you know, I've watched you do the same thing and you've been such an example to other Americans of how we ought to be behaving, even if it costs us a lot of money. And even if the risk don't seem worth the personal risk, don't seem worth it, you've done that and you've done it without, you know, having any kind of reputational benefit from it. You've been vilified for it. So I, you know, I want to thank you, Sarah. I do want to ask you a question about because I, you know, I really started admiring you when I saw an interview that you did years ago where you said that you said that we should be terrified of AI that you said, I think I quote you this, you said first it's going to take our jobs and then it's going to kill us. And so, you know, and that felt, that felt like real honesty to me from somebody who is at the center of the tech industry and even, you know, working on a stuff. And then I see what you're doing with. And it seems to me that is a technology that could potentially be really horrifically denigrating to democracy and human freedoms if it's taking the wrong direction. So what are your thoughts about that?
Elon Musk
Well, Neuralink, first of all, it's important to appreciate neuralink, which for those who are unaware of it is neuralink is developing brain to computer interfaces to allow direct communication with the brain. The neuralink will progress very slowly because anytime you have a device implanted human, the FDA requirements, I think correct correctly, are extremely difficult. You have to pass many hurdles to have that work. The first applications that we're talking about are simply enabling someone who is a quadriplegic or someone who has lost a connection from their brain to their body to be able to communicate. Say if Stephen Hawking was able to communicate as well as someone with a fully functional body, that would be incredible. So the, for many years the applications simply be to enable functionality that people have lost due to spinal or brain injuries. Long term, I think it has a, hopefully some chance of mitigating the artificial intelligence existential risk by enabling a closer symbiosis of AI and humans. And I certainly agree that this is not without risk. And you know, it's something we need to be very careful with how it's done. But I just do want to emphasize it's not going to happen suddenly. It'll happen very slowly. And at least looking at the advancement of artificial intelligence, I think we will probably have digital superintelligence before neuralink is sufficiently advanced to have high bandwidth communication between your sort of cortex and the, and the sort of the AI extension of yourself. But no question we need to be extremely careful and we will be extremely careful and it will move slowly so you'll definitely see it coming. And people have an opportunity to object and raise concerns and issues. And with neuralink, we're also trying to be extremely open book and you know, so there's nothing hidden and we are, like I said, audited extensively by the fda. So now with respect to artificial intelligence or it's like there's levels of artificial intelligence that are not dangerous. Like I don't think, you know, self driving cars are really dangerous or you know, having better autocorrect is dangerous, but it's when you have some deep intelligence that is far smarter than the smartest human, that's where things could get dangerous. No, I, I, I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole because that's a big one. But, but it, but I, it's not that I think that digital superintelligence or AI AGI is definitely a bad thing. I just think it is, it's a very powerful technology and that there is, there's certainly risk of it being a bad thing and acting in a manner contrary to the interests of humanity and that we need to be cognizant of those of that risk and we need to just be very careful and thorough and do our best to ensure that it is beneficial rather than harmful.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, if I do get in the White House, I think that's one of the things that I need to pay a lot of attention to is how do we regulate this? How do we bring in the people who are developing it and you know, immediately from all over the world and figure out a way to regulate it so, you know, so that it doesn't end up killing us all or enslaving us or whatever the heck it's going to do. But even, you know, even the, even self driving cars, I think something like 40% of the jobs in America are from, are driving jobs or involved driving. And if you get rid of those jobs, even Uber jobs which are an entry level, which we could do in the next decade or not, I mean it's going to be, it's going to be a really difficult challenge for country to figure out, you know, what, what to do with all these, and I'm using a very bad characterization, but you know, surplus humans because that's what a lot of people are going to feel like.
Elon Musk
Yeah. So I do think there is an avenue for Uber driver or drivers in general in that there'll still be a need to manage and take care of a bunch of self driving cars, almost like a shepherd tending their flock. And so I think it actually could end up being a good thing in that, you know, instead of driving one car, you can actually manage a sort of a fleet of 10 cars. And I think that's good. I'm not just saying that it will not result in disruption or changing of jobs. I'm just saying that self driving is. It, I don't think, is an existential risk to civilization. And so I think the. I think. I think it will be, in my opinion, a significant net benefit. But I do believe that we should be critiqued, we should be asked these questions. And I mean, in general, I aspire to take the set of actions that maximize the probability that the future will be good for humanity. That is not to say that I do not make mistakes, say I do, but that is at least the intention. And, but as I said, I think it's good to have critique, it's good to be questioned, it's good to be pushed on these issues. And it's very important for companies to be as open book as possible, actually. I mean, I think these are really interesting topics for people, but I think a lot of the public would love to hear about your presidential run.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Well, I would love to talk about it. Do we have any questions?
David Sacks (host)
Well, we have a bunch of questions
David Sacks (host)
We have a few people we can pull in, and then we can pull in more as well. Tulsi Gabbard's here, Balaji's here. Michael Shellenberger's here. Omid's here. Before we leave the censorship topic, you know, Bobby, one thing you mentioned that you went over really quickly was that you were just reinstated to your Instagram account and that you've been locked out for two years. And I guess they had to reinstate you because there's a law requiring it when someone runs for president. So apparently the only way to get free speech in this country is. But the crazy thing is that people on your campaign were frozen out of their accounts. Apparently anyone who signed up with the Team Kennedy email domain.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah.
David Sacks (host)
Was frozen. I guess they just got reinstated. So I guess I just want to hear about that. And then following up on what Elon said about the intense pressure that Twitter is under from advertising boycotts, I want to bring in Shellenberger, who was one of the key authors on the Twitter files and has done a lot of work on what he calls the censorship industrial complex. So it'd be great to hear from him on how this whole thing gets organized because I don't think people understand that these pressure tactics are highly organized. So I guess Bobby to you first and then let's bring in Shawn.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, so I was evicted from Instagram. I think in the summer of maybe or spring of 2020, 21, I was evicted and I had about, I had, I had at the time, the day I was convicted, I had evicted, I had about 770,000, but I had been up to 900,000. And they would cut them back. Whenever I hit 900,000, they would cut them back to 800,000 or 700,000. So I was losing followers the whole time. And they said it was because I was, I was promoting it as misinformation. But the term misinformation had nothing to do with, as we now know from the Twitter files and from the emails that meta, you know, that's on Facebook, that we've recovered from Facebook. And it had nothing to do with factual accuracy or inaccuracy. It was simply a euphemism for any statement that departed from the government orthodoxies and government proclamations would be characterized misinformation. And there's nothing on my Twitter feed that was factually inaccurate. Everything that we put up there, that I put up there was cited and sourced to peer reviewed publications or government databases. There's nothing on there that was that anybody's ever been able to point to, including Facebook. When I appealed, I tried to appeal and I, we did a lengthy memo showing that I had never put up a single factual error in that, in, you know, in my post. But they then they wouldn't let allow me to appeal. They had to be an appeal system, but they would not allow me to enter that system. And I feel confident I would have won because the people that they actually selected as judges were a really good group of people. They were law professors from mainly law professors from universities around the world. And many of them were people I was acquainted with and you know, I was a law professor at that time and I'm confident I would have gotten a fair hearing from them. So they wouldn't let me even into the appeal sales process. And then as you point out in the last since I've declared for the presidency now we have about 50 people working for the campaign and each of those people has a, had a Instagram handle which said, for example, my daughter in law Amarillis had tink and they wanted to use that handle on their Twitter, on their Instagram accounts. And Instagram would send them when they attempted to register, Instagram would send them a Flag saying you've been suspended for 180 days. And so none of them were allowed on. And of course, that's illegal under the, you know, it's called Section 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which regulates speech. It protects speech during presidential and other federal election campaigns. And so. But I think that Meta. And I don't want to, you know, I don't want to be pointing the finger at Meta right now, because I think it's time for healing in this country. And I'm happy that I've been reinstated. And they gave me back all my old posts and they gave me back all my old followers. I didn't even know if they existed anymore. So I'm very happy with that. And the people that we've been working with at Meta have been, you know, recently have been very cooperative, and they're now letting our people register. And I think it is, you know, not everybody had the foresight of Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, of saying, okay, this was really wrong and we're not going to put up with it. Even if they caught causes billions of dollars there. You know, a lot of Americans were living in fear, and they were doing things that they believed were proper and right at the time. And I think it's time that we, you know, that we focus on healing and bridging the divide. So I don't want to. I want to really thank Meta for reinstating me, and I hope this is. I hope we learn something from that process and that we can go forward and make sure that nothing like this ever happens to states in America.
David Sacks (host)
Michael, do you want to jump in here? This might be a good time to talk about what you've learned. For what it's worth, you know, I don't think.
Panelist
Yeah, that sounds great.
David Sacks (host)
Can you. Yeah, I mean, for what it's worth, I don't think that Meta, as a company wants to be censoring people. I just think that they're under incredible pressure and didn't stand up to that pressure, but. Michael, can you speak to that? What you found?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I think we lost them. Did we? Hello?
David Sacks (host)
Michael, we have you a second?
Panelist
Well, sure, I'd be happy to.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And can you hear me okay, David? Yes.
David Sacks (host)
Yeah, we can.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
We can hear.
Panelist
Good. Well, thanks so much for having me, guys. And Mr. Kennedy, it's a real honor and a privilege to hear you speak. We don't agree on everything, but you're. Oh, sorry, guys.
Audience Member
Can you hear me?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Okay, we could.
David Sacks (host)
We lost you for a second.
Panelist
Well, first, thank you so much, Mr. Kennedy. I really appreciate your strong remarks.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Can you guys hear me now? Yeah, we can hear you, but not anymore.
David Sacks (host)
You muted yourself. All right, Michael, we will go back to you. There you are.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
David, can you hear me now?
David Sacks (host)
Yeah, we can hear you.
Panelist
Great, great. Well, well, first, thanks so much, Mr. Kennedy. It's a real privilege and pleasure to hear you speak so eloquently on support. I meant just to build on. But the Twitter is under from government, and Twitter is clearly platform transparent about the censorship demand. I'm curious if you would support a call that many of us have made that there should be a mandatory requirement by voting government officials and by social media platforms to be transparent about the censorship decisions that they're making. Because so much of the problem occurs when the censorship is happening behind closed doors and there's no chance to appeal. On the other hand, it's very hard to regulate social media companies by the government, since that would infringe on the First Amendment. So I'm curious if you've thought about the need for requiring transparency by everybody involved, whether it's governments or social media companies or even advertisers who are demanding that certain content be censored at their behest.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, and actually, Michael, I think that's a really good solution. And if I'm elected, I'm going to call the heads of all of the social media companies into the Oval Office and have a conference and not walk out until we have figured out how to make this work and make it consistent with democracy. And I think you're right. I think David Sacks is right when he said that, that these companies do not want to be censoring. Honestly, they're coming under tremendous pressure from their advertisers and from, you know, very powerful government entities to participate in the censorship. And we don't even have an idea about all of the different forms of pressure that they're coming on to that they're coming because the government, of course, has big contracts with these companies that are existential. And, you know, we just don't. That's all. Not transparent. And I think the companies, if they function more as common carriers, and I'm not saying being declared common carriers, which is kind of the ultimate sanction, that if they continue to, you know, censor, that would be something that you would consider. But I think if they functioned, as you say, almost like common carriers, where all the decision making was transparent and where people felt like they had a right to see the algorithms and to understand the algorithms that were being used to censor speech and to make recommendations, etc. I think that's a really elegant solution about how to solve these issues. You know, there. There's some speech. I'm pretty much a free speech absolutist. And I think the remedy for misinformation is more. Is information. It's information. And the remedy for bad speech is more speech. It's never censorship. Censorship is by far the worst solution. There are forms of speech that are not protected. You know, inciting violence is not protected. Pedophilia. And you. Solicitations like that are not protected speech, and you can censor those. But if it's protected speech, I don't think it should be censored. But I think in any case, we should understand the logic, the algorithms, the methodologies, and we should all have access to those so that, you know, that's key because these institutions are now the public square and, you know, they are the place where speech takes place that you can talk to other Americans and. And, you know, we have to figure out a way to integrate them into our democratic value system.
Panelist
Well, that's really wonderful to hear. Thank you so much for that. It's a strong. It's a very strong endorsement of the transparency, which is, I think, something that brings together people on the left and the right. We're going to. We solve our problems with more speech, not less. And I think that's what the transparency. Mandatory transparency by everybody who's demanding censorship.
Elon Musk
That's what that would give us.
Panelist
So thank you very much.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I appreciate that.
David Sacks (host)
Let me pull in Omid Malik, who I think has done a bunch of work in the. On the corporate side on sort of boycotts and pressure. Omid, do you have a question or comment?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, absolutely.
Audience Member
Thank you so much. You know, Robert, you've spoken eloquently on regulatory capture, whether it's the cdc, the FDA or the EPA or even nih. I mean, how is it that Tony Fauci has over $10 million available to him even though he's been a bureaucrat for 50 years? These are questions that I hope an intrepid reporter would look into, But I want to just flip it on its head, which is to say, what about corporate capture? The fact that elements within the federal government are actually adversely affecting our economy. So that as we've touched on here, around speech. But it's even worse than that. I mean, the CIA, the FBI, affecting our ability to communicate with one another is through these big tech companies that are being pressured by them. But Even as you're very passionate about using OSHA unconstitutionally to try to force employees around this country for a period to take a shot that many did not want to do and making them choose between that, that and putting food on the table. So the two part question is, one, how do we prevent our Bill of Rights from being violated by private actors when the government uses them to do their dirty work? I'm not just talking about censorship here, I'm actually talking about the deprivation of economic liberty. And then secondly is how do we get wages up? And is that, then I want to ask you about that specifically. Can you get wages up finally in this country by actually having a border and restricting immigration? Thank you.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, I mean, let me just address that second issue first, which is, yeah, we need to seal our border. You know, it is a key existential function for every nation in the world to be able to control immigration at its borders. And having millions of people, or hundreds of thousands, in this case millions of people flowing across the border is not something any nation can or should put up with. And you know, worst of all, it's created a humanitarian crisis at the border. The notion that we have an open border is now a gospel around the world. So that people are flying in from all over the world, from Europe, from China, from Asia, taking from planes to Ecuador. And then there's a, you know, and being assisted by nonprofit groups and by government groups to actually make their way to the United States border. And it was in buses and, and that needs to be shut down. And one of the ways that we do, and a lot of the Latin American and Central American immigration is the direct result of bad US policies in the south. Austerity programs, the war on drugs, the funding of death squads, the installation and support of juntas, military dictatorships and genocides in those countries that have been happening for decades. And we need to address those issues. But you know, above all, we need to seal the border. I'm actually going to the border tonight. I will, I'm crossing the border, I think around 3 o' clock in the morning into Mexico. And I'll be talking with people on both sides of the border and talking to stakeholders and over the next three days be meeting with people from the border patrol and elsewhere to try to formulate policies that will seal the border permanently. You know, the flow of, we have people in this country who are poverty constricted and don't have access to, because the paucity of public assistance, don't even have access to public assistance. And you know, we need to be protecting the people in this country and our urban populations, rural populations. 10% of Americans could not put their hand on a thousand dollars if there's an emergency. We don't have the capacity to support a lot of new immigrants. This huge lot of new immigrants is coming into our cities and stressing the school systems, stressing the social service systems for people who are already, for Americans who are already struggling with. It needs to be turned off. And that's what I will do as president. I will. I am going to. And you know, there's other countries that have this issue. Israel has this issue with African populations and using a variety of different technologies at their border, some fencing, but mainly technological surveillance, they've been able to shut it down. And we need to be doing the same thing. And as president, I will do that. I will also open up legal immigration so that the immigration that we do need, that's going to be beneficial to our country and economy will continue. But we cannot have uncontrolled immigration at the border. In terms of the role of, you know, these agencies in compelling behavior from US Corporation, it is appalling and it. And as soon as I get into office, I'm going to issue an executive order forbidding the federal agencies, whether it's nih, whether it's the CIA, the FBI, from participating in any efforts to censor speech by the American public or to compel other behavior from the American public. That is not legally required. And that's what we saw during the pandemic. We saw it in the vaccine mandates and we saw it in the censorship of speech. And I will forbid that and make sure that it is that it does not happen, at least during my term in office. Immediately, the first week I'm in office, I will sign that executive order.
Audience Member
Thank you. And thank you, Elon and David for hosting this. I also will close by saying it is somewhat ironic that the Democratic Party is not permitting democracy to occur within their own party and giving a platform to Robert to at least debate Joe Biden.
David Sacks (host)
Well, that's an interesting point. We pull Tulsi into the conversation here. Tulsi is former Democratic congresswoman who I believe is now an independent. I want to get. I actually have a question for both of you guys about the evolution of the Democratic Party. Bobby, the Democratic Party of your father was the party of peace over war, the party of free speech over censorship, the party of civil liberties over the surveillance state. And today you're perhaps the only prominent Democrat who is taking that sort of dissenting side on Those issues, Tulsi, I think you feel the same on those issues too. I guess my question is what happened to the Democratic Party? To be sure, many of these afflictions are bipartisan, but there used to be a very conspicuous wing in the Democratic Party to oppose these things, and it seems like there isn't anymore. So I guess my question for both of you is what happened and can it be fixed?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I mean, I'll just answer briefly and I'd love to hear Tal's answer. You know, I watched this happen in the Democratic Party. I watched some of this happen. I mean, I think the Democratic Party became the party of war. I attribute that directly to President Biden because, you know, President Biden is always, although I've always liked him, the one part of him that I did not like is that he's always been a very in favor, very bellicose, pugnacious and aggressive foreign policy. And he believes that, that, you know, violence is a legitimate political tool for achieving America's objectives abroad. And that in many cases it is the, it's the first and most prominent tool that the federal government uses. During the Iraq war, when my uncle was fighting against that war, Joe Biden in the Democratic Party more than any other senator was the man who was promoting that war. And I think that's one of the reasons he got the support of the neocons and you know, all of these, the neocons, where people don't know what the neocons are. The neocons called neoconservatives, but they were a group of people who had departed from both Republican and Democratic parties in the, after the defeat of the Soviet, after that, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were a group of people who, prominent intellectuals who took the position that America had won the Cold War and that as victors we should enjoy the spoils. And they published a plan called a Project for New American Century that essentially argued that America should use its military domination, its military superiority now as the only superpower to impose an American hegemony and American control, to use violence to impose American control of all the countries in the world. And that group, I think 22 of those leaders ended up in the State Department and White House during the George W. Bush's administration. They orchestrated the war. They had a plan for seven wars that we would fight very quickly in order to defeat all of our non compliant countries in the Mideast, beginning with Iraq. And they launched the first preemptive war in American history. War Against a country that never did anything to our country. As I pointed out, there was a trillionthat war us this out war in its aftermath in Libya and Syria and Yemen and Afghanistan and Pakistan. It cost us 8 trillion and we got nothing. Iraq ended up in a worse place than we found it. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. We killed almost a million Iraqis. We pushed Iran Iraq into becoming a proxy to Iran, which was the foreign policy outcome that we have been trying to avoid for 40 years. We created ISIS. We drove 2 million refugees into Europe, which destabilized all the democracies in Europe probably for two generations and ended up with Brexit. That's what we got for the $8 trillion. As a result of that cataclysm politically in the United States, it became a neocon. They were in disgrace. They were exiled from all political parties. But somehow they got back into the Biden White House. And people like Victoria Nuland, whose husband Robert Kagan was the author of the Project for the Newest American Century, ended up running foreign policy. April Haynes and Anthony Blinken ended up running this very belligerent foreign policy that we're now dealing with. On the medical side. You know, I watched what happened initially. Pharmaceutical companies were on the side of the Republican Party and Democrats. They were, you know, they were required with kind of contempt by Democrats as they as the most corrupt industry in the country. They paid the four companies that, that manufacture all American vaccines, Sanofi, Glaxo and Pfizer, paid over the past decade 35 billion dozen criminal penalties more than any other industry. They paid the biggest criminal penalties in American history. They are serial felons, these companies. They keep doing the same at play over and over. And they were not well regarded in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has always had a problem is it cannot accept corporate dollars in good conscience. So the Republicans always had a lot of money. The only people the Democrats could could maintain their purity and collect money from would be trial lawyers and labor unions. But the labor unions declined precipitously. So there now they went from about 50% to 10% of the American workforce. And all that we were left with was trial lawyers. And President Obama was trying to get Obamacare passed. He shook a golden handshake with the pharmaceutical companies. He could not get it. The pharma has more lobbyists on Capitol Hill than Congress, than all the congressmen, senators, Supreme Court justices combined. They give more to lobbying twice with the next biggest industry, more than any other industry. And and President Obama, they could have Obamacare forever. So Obama needed to placate them. And the way that he did it was by making this terrible deal where the federal government could not bargain over the price of pharmaceutical products and Medicare and Obamacare. So Obamacare was going to be create this flood of money to the pharmaceutical industry to buy their products for free, for the patients, for free. But we could not bargain like you can in Canada and every other nation. You couldn't bargain with them. So they could charge anything they wanted. And that sealed the deal. And all of a sudden pharma was on the side of it became permissible morally for Democrats to accept money from pharma. And within a year, Democrats were getting more money from pharma than Republicans. And then so that put them on the side of the, you know, pro vaccine side. They were kind of, we kind of divided evenly. And then President Trump ran and three times during his presidential campaign, he made the statement that he thought that vaccines were causing autism. And that created this. That issue then became part of the culture war. It became part of the cultural divide. Democrats put that issue into the same anti science dumpster as President Trump's climate denial. And it became now a badge of your party, of your tribe. And if you ask questions about vaccines, you were a Trump Republican. And if you, if you had a just a religious belief in their efficacy and safety that could not be questioned, you were a Democrat. And so I watched that, all that play out and watched the Democrats slowly become these pro corporate, pro war, pro censorship Republicans. You know, what had once been Republicans and the Republicans that became Addie's censorship, pro civil liberties, anti war. And there's been this tremendous realignment. And I talked more than I wanted to because I really want to hear from Tulsi and hear her take on it.
Tulsi Gabbard
Thanks. Thanks, Bobby, and thanks for the question. David, so much of what you said is what drove me to leave the Democratic Party. You know, I wasn't born into a family of Democrats. My parents, frankly, were pretty independent minded people. And so when I first ran for the state House, a seat in the state House of representatives in Hawaii 20 years ago, I had to decide, you know, which party I wanted to join. And as I made that decision, I was inspired by leaders within the Democratic Party, frankly, Bobby, people like your father and your uncle, people like Martin Luther King Jr. Democratic leaders in Hawaii who had gone to the mat for the plantation workers, who were people from Hawaii, people from across Asia, people immigrants from around the world. It was Democratic leaders who came in and fought for their rights to be able to be treated, frankly, like human beings and be set free from the oppressive landowners that were Republican in Hawaii at that time. And so the ideals of, you know, freedom and civil liberties and a big tent, inclusive Democratic Party that welcomed people from all backgrounds and, you know, different ideas was really attractive to me and was, why join the Democratic Party? But fast forward to where we are today, as you said, Bobby. I mean, today's Democratic Party is a party that is under the complete control of this elitist cabal of warmongers. Not only is it being led by warmongers, but we have a situation now where, as we saw last fall, where the Congressional Progressive Caucus, you know, they had the audacity to release a public letter to President Biden very gently, very gently and with a lot of flowery words calling for diplomacy and for him to lead a diplomatic effort to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. And within 24 hours, they retracted the letter and essentially were cowering in the corner. You know, we can imagine the kind of pressure that they were under to do that and the kind of public criticism that they received for daring to call for peace. So the voices for peace within the Democratic Party have been silenced. Rather than this big, tense, inclusive Democratic Party, we now have party leaders who are focusing their efforts on dividing us, on racializing every issue, using identity politics to, you know, gain a few political points and votes, undermining fundamental freedoms, freedom of speech, advocating censorship, not only advocating for it, but trying to create government entities in order to shut us up, weaponizing the national security state to go after political opponents. The principles and ideals of the Democratic Party stands for today are directly counter to those that are fundamental and foundational to this country. And now we're at a point where President Biden has most dangerously dragged us essentially to the brink of nuclear war. And that's where. Bobby, I'd love to ask you a question. In this realm, in this vein of foreign policy, given the realities that we are facing, given, you know, we're increasingly hearing a lot of politicians, Republicans and Democrats, frankly, including President Biden, who are actively and aggressively calling for a complete decoupling of the United States and China's economies. The Biden administration is actively moving forward quickly in this direction. Elon, you recently talked about how the United States and China's interests are intertwined like conjoined twins. I think really making the point that this act of decoupling our economies would essentially be like ripping apart conjoined twins, implying the catastrophic consequences that would occur as a result for both our. Both of These countries and the world. So Bobby, what would your approach be with the United States relationship with China? Do you believe that it's actually possible to have a peaceful coexistence or even a win relationship with China? Or do you believe that it is a zero sum game where in order for the United States to win that China must lose?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, I think that's a great question, Tulsi. And my, you know, my approach to that would be let's recognize the reality that China is a very ambitious nation and that it does want to compete for us for influence in the world. But the reality is it does not want to, to compete with us militarily. It does not want to have a war with the United States. And China still, you know, is still a very poor country compared to us. They have a, the Chinese have per capita about one third the income of the United States. They want to have a better lives for their citizens. And you know, they want to compete with us in places all around the world. I think we ought to be competing, I think we ought to be competing with the, with them on an economic platform, not a military one. And I feel very, I'm not scared of the Chinese. I'm not frightened that American ingenuity is going to fall behind the Chinese. I think it will be, that kind of competition is a competition that will be good for the whole world. And it's a competition that is a collaborative piece, a collaborative world rather than a competitive world, a kind of collaborative competition, if you will. And you know, the Chinese do not want to have a war with us. We have, we spend more on our military. We're now spending 1.3 trillion a year military, including veterans benefits, which you can't cut back. But you know, we were told after the Cold War ended that we were going to get a peace dividend and we were going to cut our military budget back to 200 billion a year. Instead we've got it at 1.3 billion a year if you include, you know, veterans and national security and, and we never got that piece dividend. So we now spend more on our militaries in the top 10 next nations in the world. We spend three times, we have three times the military budget of the Chinese. The Chinese, we have five times the nuclear weapons of the Chinese. The Chinese cannot and do not want to compete with us militarily. The Chinese have about one and a half military bases in the world. We have 800. So it's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy that says, oh, the Chinese are, you know, want to be our enemy and have a military competition. They don't. What we should be doing is de. Escalating the military pressure on China. We should be talking to China, for God's sake. We haven't had a meeting with China in five years. We know what our objectives are. We want to rebuild our industrial base in the United States. We don't want the Chinese to take that from us. And any negotiations with the Chinese should not be about military swaggering. It should be about how do we have an economic relationship with you that is going to benefit all parties the way that every good economic relationship does. And here's what our objective is in the next round of negotiations is we want to rebuild our industrial base here in the United States. And any agreement that we make, any transaction that we make with the Chinese, that should be foremost in our minds. How do we do that? But I'm not, you know, the Chinese have been doing a lot better than us because they've been projecting economic power abroad and that the world likes that. We think the world is on our side, but it isn't. All we've got. The only people who are supporting this, you know, this pugnacious, bellicose relationship with China are Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Japan, Britain, Canada and the United States. And we're pretty much alone in the world. The rest of the world is looking at us and saying, what the heck are you doing? Why are you trying to create a war with China? Why are you fighting them over. Over. Why are you making Taiwan a military issue? Let's let Taiwan and China work out that issue on their own and back off militarily and try to have a. They want. They don't want war. They want peace and they want prosperity. And that cannot happen where there's a war. So let's have, you know, let's de. Escalate the war talk. Let's compete economically and let's talk to that and figure out a way that we can have a smart negotiation where we do better because of China rather than giving away the store and exporting jobs, which all the other treaties have done. Instead, let's figure out how to have an economic relation, a financial relationship with them that rebuilds the American industrial base.
Tulsi Gabbard
Thank you, Bobby. This is such an. Obviously, this issue and the broader issue of foreign policy is central to any presidential race. And it's unfortunate that traditionally, as we've seen, these issues are very rarely given the kind of attention they deserve. And yet again, this is exactly why there should be presidential primary debates for the sake of the American people to have a clear choice, a clear, informed choice on who they would like to see as our President and Commander in Chief. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your insight and thank you, Elon and David, for hosting this important conversation.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And see, you know, we haven't had. We haven't had a serious economic meeting, even a political meeting with the Chinese since 15, seven years. You know, the CIA director, Bill Burns, recently went over there to meet with the Chinese, but that's not the kind of meeting we need to have a real political and economic discussion with them. That is frank and that, you know, that where everybody puts their cards on the table and to see if there's ways that we can work with each other peacefully and keep the world at peace. Why in the world would we go and this is on. You know, this is on President. You know, President Biden has forbidden his State Department, which are run by neat, has forbidden any kind of talks or outreach to the Chinese. That is outrageous. You know, it is exactly the opposite of what Dwight Eisenhower was trying to do with, you know, to find a road to peace with the Russians, which was disrupted by the, you know, the CIA misbegotten YouTube flights. And my uncle tried to do the thing, let's have peace with the. With Russia, let's have peace with China, and let's all enjoy the prosperity of healthy economic competition.
Tulsi Gabbard
Well said. Well said, Bobby. Thank you.
Elon Musk
It's actually something that is worth. Is that on my recent trip to China, I, with the senior leadership there, I, we had, I think, some very productive discussions on artificial intelligence risks and the need for some oversight or regulation. And my understanding from those conversations is that China will be initiating AI regulation in China. So that. That was. Those were very promising discussions. And, you know, I pointed out that if, you know, if there is a digital superintelligence that is overwhelmingly powerful, developed in China, it is actually a risk to the sovereignty of the Chinese government. And I think they took that concern to heart.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, I mean, I love you saying that because it makes us understand, no matter how you feel about China, if we are not able to negotiate with our adversaries on issues like that, there are now existential threats. And it's not just AI, it's these bioweapons development where, you know, we have these labs now all over the world, in Ukraine, etcetera, that are developing all kinds of hideous and including, you know, ethnic bioweapons that kill people from certain races, et cetera, that are designed to do that. And they already have. Have them, and they're ready to escape. And you know, every country in the world has wanted to ban bioweapons. We, we initiated Richard Nixon, signed the bioweapons treaty in 1960. All the countries in the world to agree to stop developing them. But we, the CIA, continue to secretly develop them. And then after 2001, we passed the Patriot act and we relaunched the bioweapons arms race. So now every country in the world or many countries are now developing them. We should shut the whole thing down. You know, Covid was clearly a bioweapons problem. We. And you saw what that did to us. What if it was a real disease? A disease that had a 50 mortality like decay, fever, Ebola or you know, one of these other really deadly virus. They've got those in the labs too. What if that was the one that is. Let's shut it down around the world. Let's have a real shutdown of all bioweapons development, had verification of that. And then let's sit down with the other people from Iran, from. From Israel, from Russia and China and talk about. Okay. And make sure that one country does not develop a weapon that is going to kill all the rest of us. We need to. You can't just have one country regulating this. China alone cannot be regulating the development of digital. Superintendent, you need the United States and China. All of us need to be participating. All of us need to be able to. To police the research. It's happening in other countries. And we need to have transparency and protection. Otherwise we are headed down the road to a very grim dystopian future for all of humanity where we are beyond the point where we cannot. Where we can afford the luxury of not negotiating about these things with the other powers in the planet. And you know, we need a president who is aware of these threats to humanity and sees himself as the guardian of all of humanity and is thinking about this 24 hours a day. How do we avert this kind of future? A bioweapons extinction or extinction. It's beyond. We cannot afford not to negotiate about this stuff anymore. And we'll add all these agencies. The CIA is developing this stuff too. And we have no idea. They are not friendly in the America of the American system. You know, I talked to Mike Pompeo the other day and he said that. He said what he said when he was at the Agency. He was very canned and really smart about the agency. And he said when he was there, he did not do a good job of dismantling of, you know, of dismantling Agency capture at the CIA. And he said that, he said if you take the upper echo on it, at agency is made up almost entirely of people who do not believe in the institutions of the United States and democracy. And you know, so I think that's absolutely true from everything I know and I know a lot about that agency. And we've got it, you know, we have got to get off a war footing which gives these institutions the excuse to be super secret and non transparent. Pretend we're at a, you know, and put us in a security state where they can develop all these crazy technologies and see that are going to kill us all. It's crazy.
Tulsi Gabbard
It is, Bobby. And that really gets to her central point about diplomacy. And Elon, you know, your example of what can come about when we're just really willing to have a conversation. The President of the United States should be trusted by the American people to put the well being and interests of the American people at the forefront of the decisions that he or she makes. There are common threats and concerns that exist with people around the world. We don't live in vacuums. And while we may have differences with other countries, things like AI, things like the threat of nuclear war, things like protecting our environment so that we as humans on this planet have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink and that we can grow food to survive. You mentioned the bioweapons. There are so many different challenges that, that we must address together. And we need a leader who recognizes that that and puts those interests in the well being of the people ahead of the whole cabal of special interests that you've talked about.
David Sacks (host)
All right, thank you, Tulsi. By the way, Bobby, I think probably the most surreal moment of the entire Ukraine war so far has been when Victoria Nuland was testifying before Congress and admitted that there was a secret network of biolabs in Ukraine who contained materials that were so potentially dangerous that she was worried about them falling into Russian hands.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah. After the media had been characterizing that fact as disinformation, as Russian disinformation for weeks. And then, and punishing those of us who were saying, yeah, this is what's happening. And then Victoria Nuland gets in front of Congress and gets a, you know, a free question from Marco Rubio and actually is under oath and answers it honestly and says, yeah, we got bioweapons labs there and we're really scared the Russians are going to get in there and get our stuff.
David Sacks (host)
It was so weird because why in the world would we have biolabs There. It's just so, so strange.
Tulsi Gabbard
The media continued to pile on, by the way, even after she testified and answered Marco Rubio's question honestly. I cited her quote in some statements I made agreeing with you, Bob.
David Sacks (host)
Tulsi loses.
Tulsi Gabbard
Especially in a time of war where they would be vulnerable to whatever pathogens might exist in those biolabs being released and causing threats, threat to the world. Ukraine has blacklisted me from visiting their country ever again. And I was. Posts that I put on social media sites were banned or shadow banned because of this claim of misinformation, disinformation. News outlets across the country called, you know, criticized me of spreading misinformation, disinformation, even when I cited the DoD website that stated this as fact. I think it just shows, even when they speak the truth. Truth, they're apparently afraid of the truth and want to be able to continue what they're doing, no matter the risk.
Audience Member
Does Crane have a free press? Out of curiosity?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
No way. No. Oh, okay. Just wanted to confirm that.
David Sacks (host)
Well, there was an article just today in Semaphore, of all places, talking about how EDA has to be licensed by the government there.
Audience Member
That's exactly right.
David Sacks (host)
And then separately, talk about embarrassing revelations. The New York Times today has a story about how pesky Nazi insignias keep turning up on the uniforms of, you know, Ukrainian army members, and they have to keep censoring photos so that these things don't appear in the press. Of course, the New York Times says that the biggest problem with this is not that advanced Western weapons may be finding their hands into, you know, the hands of neo Nazis, but rather that this will play into Russian propaganda. But regardless of what it is, again, it's one of these embarrassing data points that show that, you know, we're constantly being fed information about this war, and then these things, you know, pop up and you realize that, you know, they may not be telling us everything.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I mean, we've been propagandized with these comic book depictions that are now formulaic, you know, that there's a bad guy, he did a bad thing, it was unprovoked. And the United States needs to go in and fix this situation by the people he's victimizing. And, you know, it's such a good testimony, the American people, that, you know, that they. That they're willing to make those sacrifices. I think in some cases, of our children, of our fortune, to go in and help other countries. But the problem is we're being victimized still by our own agencies, which are, you know, which are, are leaving out the contextual information, which are leaving out the nuance, which are leaving out the entire history in this case of us propagates, which brought us into, which brought us and also brought Ukraine into a war that is not helping Ukraine. Ukraine has now lost probably 350,000 kids and they are in much worse position than when they began, when they, okay, in February 14, 2014, in 2019, they could have signed the Banks accords and kept on boss and had nobody killed. And they're never gonna. And they're never going to get back to that place again. And as you guys understand, the Russians are not going to win this war. They cannot afford to win this war. This war is existential for Russia and it would be like us losing a war in Mexico.
David Sacks (host)
You mean Ukraine. You mean Ukraine can.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I'm sorry, Ukraine. I'm sorry, Ukraine cannot win this war. And you know, they're now, it's unclear what the ratio, the death ratio is, but there's credible information that they are suffering deaths that are seven deaths for every one Russian killed. And we are, we have turned this country into this, you know, to a slaughterhouse of the flower of Ukrainian youth to benefit the geopolitical ambitions of these, you know, of the US Nikons who want to exhaust the Russian army and exercise regime change over Vladimir Putin. Putin and, and we, and Ukraine is a victim in this war. It's a proxy war. It's a victim of Russia. Yes, it's. It was an illegal invasion and a brutal invasion that could have been avoided by Vladimir Putin. But they're equally, almost equally, at least a victim of US Policies and, you know, the ambitions and aspirations of the wanted to get into this war no matter what.
David Sacks (host)
I think the war was easily avoidable
Elon Musk
if we had been willing to use
David Sacks (host)
diplomacy and basically give a written guarantee to the Russians that Ukraine would not become part of NATO. That is what they were demanding in December of 2021. And a written ultimatum to the White House. It's what they were explicitly with our Secretary of State in January of 2022. And those negotiations ended where we said we wouldn't close NATO's door. And then like you said, the other thing we didn't do was give support to the Minsk Agreements, which would have provided some limited autonomy to the ethnic Russians and the Donbass, and that would have solved that sort of civil war that was going on there. If we had just done those two things, I think there's a really good chance that this war never would have occurred. You know, A lot of people say, well, you can't know that. But the point is we tried. We never tried taking NATO off the table. We never tried giving our support to the Minsk agreements.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, and there's a big question because zelensky ran in 2019 on a peace platform. And I've pointed out before that, you know, he was a, he's a comedian and an actor, which I'm not saying in a disparaging way because my wife is also both of those things. But he, I say that because he had no involvement in politics, and yet he won in this huge landslide with 70% of the vote because he was running on a peace platform with the promise that he would sign the Minsk Accords and settle this. And the Minsk Accords did the same thing at ultimatum did, which is they said that NATO will forever keep out of Ukraine and that. And that we, that they would. That Donbas would be made an autonomous region within the Ukraine that was still governed by the Ukraine, but would be able to retain its own language and culture and be able to protect its citizens against violent aggression and deadly aggression from forces like the Azov Battalion and, you know, and other hostile forces within the Ukrainian government. Government. And they, and by the way, the Ukraine that voted at 90 to 10 to leave the Ukraine and join Russia, which won the Russian Federation 90 to 10. And the Russian Vladimir Putin said, no, we don't want you. We want Ukraine to stay a complete country. And, and that was. And then, you know, they agreed. Russia agreed, France agreed, Germany agreed on a Minchka Corps words, which was a reasonable settlement. Keep you, keep NATO out of the Ukraine. And why, you know, my uncle, President Kennedy used to always say, if you want to, the only way to have peace is if you put your, yourself into the shoes of your adversary. And he gave this very famous speech on July or June 10, five days now, it'll be the 60th anniversary at American University. His most important speech, which was which turned the country around on the atmospheric test ban treaty. It was the first test ban. It was the first treaty of the nuclear age. It was the first treaty to ban certain use of nuclear weapons in Russia. He and Khrushchev agreed on it privately without involving the State Department. The State Department opposed it. The military opposed it, Congress and the Senate opposed it. But the American people ended up supporting it after he gave this speech and then did a national tour. But in that speech was a fascinating speech because he was explaining for the first time to the American people the role and the suffering that Russia had endured during World War II because I grew up in a generation where we were told that America had won the war against the Nazis. And, you know, we were watching shows like Combat with Vic Marvel every week on tv and that showed how Americans had been the victor. And, you know, and without America, the world went a bit lost. My uncle was telling the American people that's not true. The people who beat Hitler were the Russians. And they made a sacrifice that is unimaginable to anybody else in the world. Hitler invaded Russia through the Ukraine and then killed one out of every seven Russians and leveled the nation, one third of the nation. My uncle went during that speech. He said, imagine if all of the American continent, the continental United States case, was reduced to rubble between the east coast and Chicago. That's what happened to Russia. You've got to understand that if we're going to have peace with this country and, you know, we need to understand that today, we need to put ourselves in the shoes. By the way, it's not just Putin. The Russian leadership back in the 90s said, you know, in 92, they, we made it. They made an agreement. They said, we will pull our troops, our 400,000 troops out of East Germany and we will turn East Germany over to a hostile army, the NATO army. And the concession that we want from you for that is that you will not move NATO to the east. And President Bush famously told them, we will not move NATO 1 inch to the east. Then the leader of the Nikons, Brzezinski, the grandfather of all the 1997, laid out a plan for moving NATO into every one of the former Russian satellite states. And at that time, George Cannon, who was the most important diplomat in American history, he was the architect of the Cold War containment policy. He was a deity in terms of American statesmanship and diplomacy. He said that if you move NATO to the east, as you're pleasant event planning, it will be a calamity that will end in forcing the Russians to violence because you are intruding on their national security. Bill Perry, who at that time was the Secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, threatened to resign because he said, this is a formula for war with Russia. And put this is long before Putin came in. Bill Burns, who was the Russia, the US Ambassador to Moscow at that time, said the same thing. He said, this is a formula that is to be to force the Russians into war. Bill Burns, incidentally, is now the head of the CIA. So these were the most important diplomats who were saying, if you move in NATO to the east, you're going to force the Russians into war. And we moved it to every country except one, Ukraine. And then we said. And that was the one where Russia said, it is a red line. Bill Burns, in fact, wrote a note, a memo from Moscow in the State Department saying, ye means yet. And he said, if you move it into the Ukraine, they are going to go to war. They're not. It is a red line that you cannot cross. And yet we just, the, you know, they did as much as they could up through the Bush administration, then they were in exile and they came back in Trump and they. And what else did they do in Trump? They got rid of two nuclear treaties. So we walked away from two treaties, the intermediate nuclear weapons treaties that banned intermediate nuclear weapons stationed anywhere near Russia. And we unilaterally walked away from that. And then we installed Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland that were nuclear capable, that can fire Tomahawk missiles and get to Russia in a few minutes and decapitate the entire leadership. The Russians said, okay, you got that? We're putting up with it, but we're not going to put up with that in Ukraine because you created 400 miles, you'll be able to decoup our leadership, decapitate our leadership in seconds. And that will. That is likely to destabilize the entire region and Legion of Preemptive strike. And yet we did it anyway. And it's just, it's dumbfounding what we did, you know, the blunder. This is like sleepwalking into World War I. This is exactly what happened, you know, in World War I, where you had these great powers acting like idiots and sleepwalking into this, you know, war that accomplished nothing. Nothing. And now we're right on that. Now we have nuclear weapons and we're going up, we're picking a fight with a country that has a thousand more nuclear weapons than we do. It's just insane.
David Sacks (host)
Elon, did you want to comment there? I just thought you went off mute.
Elon Musk
I mean, I share a lot of these concerns. I, I mean, I think certainly if, if there's not some, some kind of peace or ceasefire that is figured out soon, I, I agree that we're essentially sending the flowers of Ukrainian youth and Russian youth. I think very few of those people actually want to be there to die in the trenches. And I think it's morally reprehensible if, you know, if diplomats are having fine dinners while all these kids are dying in trenches. It's just crazy. Let me ask, on the energy subject, what are your views on nuclear power.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Well, I'm hesitant to get in a fight with Michael Shellenberg here because I have been disputing this for years. But what I've always said, Eli, is that had nuclear power, I'm all for nuclear power if you can make it safe and you can make it economical. And right now it is so far from being either. And it's not me saying it's unsafe. It's the insurance industry. The insurance industry regards this nuclear power as so unsafe that they will not give an insurance policy. And, you know, we've seen their record. The record is horrific. You know, what's happened where they're, you know, now they're, they're. There's probably a square mile of these tanks that they're, they put water in every day because it's contaminated water. They're trying to keep it out of the Pacific, but there's no way to ever stop it. So they're building these huge tanks and there's, and you can look on the Internet, they go all the way to the horizon. You know, we've watched what happened at Chernobyl, etc. But putting aside the past performance of this industry, which has been cataclysmic, you just, you know, if the, if they, if suddenly they get a technology that makes them sad and get an insurance policy so that we don't have to worry about it right now, you know, they've gone to Congress, they can't get insurance, so they've gone to Congress and, you know, sleazy legislative maneuver in the middle of the night, pass the Price Anderson act, which gives them, which absolves them from liability. It gives them immunity from liability. So they're just like the vaccine industry. There's no incentive for them to behave because they don't have to pay the cost. The homeowners pay the cost. My insurance policy in my home in Mount Kisco had a provision that does not insure you against radiation from a nuclear accident. At Indian Point, it was my. So they shifted the burden to me, and industry shouldn't be allowed to do that. And then secondly, it's so catastrophically expensive to build a solar plant cost $1 billion. A gigawatt. A wind plant costs 1.1, 1.2. A coal plant costs about 3.6 billion a gigawatt. And I have nuclear power plant built, cost 15 billion a gigawatt.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And then you have to pay for the, you know, the mining of the uranium. You have to pay for the technicians, you have to pay for the outages. You have to pay for the storage of the waste for the next 30,000 years, which is five times the length of recorded human history. And no utility in the world will build a nuclear power plant unless it's fully subsidized by the public. So, you know, I believe in free market capitalists system. You. We could make energy by burning prime rib if we wanted to. But, you know, why don't we take the cheapest way to make energy, which is, you know, which is going to be some alternative that is not nuclear. If you can make nuclear competitive, I'm for it. But I am a free market absolutist, and I believe that we should take the cheapest form of energy that you. We should have no subsidies. No. And all the companies should have to internalize their cost the same way that they internalize their profits. And that means the cost of pollution. You can't have a company that can put acid rain, a coal company, acidifying every lake in the Appalachians and, you know, from Georgia to northern Quebec, putting mercury in all of our. Every freshwater fish in America, acidifying the ocean, chopping down all the mountains. They need to pay those costs to the American public. The loss of those resources have to be paid for. And if they did that, nobody would buy coal because it's supposed to be cheap. But it's the most cataclysmic, expensive form of energy that probably have been denied, except for Nuke, which is the most expensive way to boil a pot of water that anybody has ever imagined. So I just, I believe in markets, free market capitalism, and that'll apply to the energy industry. And at this point, nuke just can't compete.
David Sacks (host)
All right, guys, we have a. Just a quick time check here. I think we only got bobby for another 15 minutes. We've been going for about two hours. So I want to make sure we get in some questions from the crowd.
Elon Musk
Actually, David, I just wanted to just quickly respond to that, if I may, and then for sure. So I certainly agree that, you know, that solar power and wind are great. I'm a huge supporter of solar and wind. I also agree that the. The costs of coal power plants are underestimated. They're actually, if you add up the deaths from coal mining and the sort of the effects on people's lungs who live nearly coal plants, it's pretty bad. It's actually way worse than nuclear. So. But I do want to sort of voice my opinion that in my opinion, actually nuclear is very safe. If you look at the actual, you know, deaths from nuclear power, it is they're minuscule compared to certainly any fossil fuel power generation, that their fear of nuclear is very high. I think the. The concern, you know, it's not clear to me why the insurance companies charge so much. But. But it, you know, I think that modern nuclear plants are extremely safe. And I would actually, although this does go against the lot of people's views, I actually am a believer in nuclear vision. So I just want to state that for the record, we can move on to something else.
David Sacks (host)
All right, sounds good. Only a few more minutes. There's so much more stuff to get to. Bobby, you mentioned that your wife is an actor and comedian like Mr. Zielinski. And actually, we. We were able to. I noticed Cheryl in the room, so we brought her on stage. Cheryl, welcome. And I. I get your question, which is how do you feel about Bobby running for president? And I'm also about what all of your friends in Hollywood think about his candidacy.
Audience Member
Can you guys hear me okay?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Honey, I didn't know you were going to do that.
Audience Member
Oh, no, I didn't either. I was just sitting here minding my own wax, listening and enjoying the conversation. Oh, well, now I forgot the question. How do I feel about it?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, yeah. And how do your Hollywood friends feel about it? Put you on the spot.
Audience Member
Well, by the way, I love that they're called my Hollywood friends. They would be like, I'm sure there's not one friend of mine that considers themselves a Hollywood friend, but. Well, first of all, yes, it took a little while to get used to the idea of Bobby running. And, you know, I took some time with it. Bobby and I talked about it a lot and, and decided, yes, this is what needs to happen. And honestly, it's been really interesting and at times exciting. It's really fun for me to witness Bobby in his element. You know, I really feel confident that this is what he is meant to do. So he. He is just. I just see him in this light that's shining on him at this moment, and it's really exciting to watch. So I know at the same time, I know there will be challenges that I, you know, hope I'm. I know I'll be strong enough to face. But I. So I know there'll be challenges that we'll have to face, and, you know, we'll have. We'll get through them.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I told. Cheryl told me when she finally, you know, decided, okay, we'll go along with this. She said she. Cheryl, before she was an actor, and even while she was an early actor, she made her living, bartending. And she said that she was going to go to the Bahamas and invent a new kind of margarita that had Senate and that was going to be her solution.
Audience Member
I'm a very practical person.
David Sacks (host)
All right, well, thanks for, thanks for being a good sport. Cheryl, I saw you in the crowd, couldn't resist pulling you up here. So appreciate that.
Audience Member
It's nice to, it's nice to be acknowledged and, and thank you. Thank you guys, Elon and David for hosting and doing this. And I'll slip back into the background now.
David Sacks (host)
All right, sounds good. All right, we'll hear from Kelly Slater and there's a couple of questions from the crowd I want to take as well. But Balaji, you want to ask a question?
Audience Member
Sure. Can you hear me?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah.
Audience Member
Mr. Kennedy, I've been impressed with your sophistication on a number of issues related to peace, civil liberties, CBCs, Bitcoin. I really only have one question. It relates to our financial system. The short version of it is will you be able to dig into the devaluation of Treasuries and other government bonds by the government Federal Fed. As a little bit of background, the Fed has turned Treasuries into new toxic waste. A series of ill considered moves has turned the so called safest asset in the world into the riskiest asset in the world and set the stage for a second financial crisis. Stanford estimates the bond losses to be in the trillions. Dalio says they extend far beyond banks to pension funds, insurance companies and other institutions. Nouriel Roubini says most banks are technically near insolvency and hundreds are already fully insolvent. The Guardian says banks unrealized loss on bond portfolios are sufficiently large as to represent systemic risk. Risk And Euromoney says U.S. treasury bonds no longer meet the standards for high quality liquid assets. Right now this bond crisis is being downplayed or blamed on everyone other than the Fed and Treasury. But fundamentally, treasury sold assets in 2021 that Fed then devalued in 2022, undercutting the balance sheets of countless banks and other financial institutions. In short, Fed lied, banks died. Treasuries are the new toxic waste. The western financial system is a whole blown its bedrock asset. And the second global financial crisis of There are no obvious paths out of this that don't involve printing a lot of money. So while I recognize it's a somewhat arcane sounding topic, just like subprime and CDOs unfortunately once were, will you be able to dig into the devaluation of Treasuries and other government bonds by the
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
time, and that's your question, I wish you hadn't prefaced it by saying I had so much sophistication on every issue because my only answer is that will you please be my Treasury Secretary? Because I'd like you if you got a solution, I want to hear it.
Audience Member
I don't have lots of solutions. I can tell you what I think the problem is, is. But we can talk about it afterwards if you want.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I would love to show you all the graphs. I would love that. And I, you know, I do, you know I have a deep and long time concern about the, that has been deeply ingrained in my family for generations about just the out of control nature of the Fed and you know what, and the impact the Fed not only on the global money supply but on democracy and on personal freedoms, etc. And my uncle tried to do something about that by at least decoupling the money supply to base currency to gold and silver. He, you know, initiated during his term gold certificates and silver certificates were, which would at least have some part of the money supply that was, that could not be easily manipulated because it was attached to the base currency. But after his death we went back to a full fiat currency and that's, you know, I think that at the root of all of the issues, ultimate issues that you're talking about right now and I, you know, I do not have a high enough level of sophistication to be able to sit here and tell you that I have a simple answer to it. I've talked to a lot of people and I've gotten a lot of different answers about how do you address it. Nobody claims that there's a panacea but you know, we're about to hit a wall and you know, we're already watching people lose faith in our, in our credit, our currency. And you know, and the US Dollar is now being threat with losing its status as the world's reserve currency. Brazil has already signaled that it's moving away to the China, you know, adopting Chinese currency. Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Pakistan, many other countries are, and that will be, that will be a United States that will make the Great Depression look like a cakewalk. And so I know, I understand the emergency nature of trying to figure out a way that can, you know, to deal with this crisis and I would love to talk to you about it if you have ideas and anybod who thinks that they can help solve this problem.
David Sacks (host)
All right, sounds good. We could spend the whole show just talking about these issues. We only have a few minutes left, so I want to, I want to move on. Thanks, Balaji, and happy to connect you guys afterwards so you can talk some more about it. Bobby, a question from the crowd. We got a lot of questions on the issue of gun control. I think it's one of the biggest topics in the feed. Here's one of them from a user, Pat King. He says I need to know your detailed stance and policy on the Second Amendment amendment before you get my vote. That's likely the only thing holding me back from voting for you. What do you say to him and the other people on the issue of gun control?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
My position on the gun control is I'm not going to take away anybody's guns. I know I'm, I'm a constitutional absolutist. And he, you know, we can argue about when the Second Amendment was intended to protect guns, but that argument is now been settled by the Supreme Court and it has a very and the Supreme Court, you know, Antonine Scalia's decision is a very expansive interpretation of the right to own a gun. But more importantly, I don't get anybody who tells you that by with incremental changes or incremental laws in regulating. And by the way, I want to say this. I have two members of my family that were killed in gun violence. So, you know, I take, I understand heartbreak that this is causing to so many Americans. It's touched my family directly. And I know as president that you are going to expect me and I, I'm going to do everything I can to reduce gun violence in this country. I think one of the tools that has been taken out of my hands is taking away people's guns. I don't think it's the right thing right now because it will just polarize our country. I've lived in rural areas of this country. I know how integrated gun culture is in those areas and how important it is to them from a in the way they view the Constitution. I also know we're living in a time when the Constitution has been under attack, attack all the other amendments in an unprecedented way and how that would be seen by people who believe strongly in the, in the Second Amendment as part of a systematic assault on our Bill of Rights. And I don't want to get into that debate. I want to stop the school shootings. And if it comes down to protecting the schools the way that we protect airlines, I will do that. I do not want any more children dying in our schools. I also am going to look very closely at the role of psychiatric drugs in these events. And there are no good studies right now that that should have been done years ago on this issue, because there's a tremendous circumstantial evidence that those like SSRIs and benzos and other drugs are doing this. There's something happening in our country right now that is not happening anywhere else in the world and has never happened in human history. And you have to look at some of the. Almost all of these drug drugs, if you look at their manufacturer's inserts, they include a side effect of homicidal and suicidal behavior. And prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost no. None of these events in our country. And we've never seen them in human history where people walk into a schoolroom of children or strangers and start shooting people. There's other nations that have as many guns per capita as we do in the last school shooting was 21 years ago. We have one every 21 hours. Hours. The one thing that we have that's different than anybody in the world is the amount of psychiatric drugs our children are taking and our people are taking. And we need to look at that. And NIH should have done that years ago, but they will not do it. And they'll block other people from doing it because they are. Because they're working not for us, but for the pharmaceutical industry. And this is their major profit center today. And so nobody wants to hear none of those. You know, Pharma does not want to hear about any problems with SSRIs. But I will do those studies immediately when I get into office. And we're going to get the truth. Something is something. You know, guns, the proliferation of guns, clearly a bet, violence. But anybody who tells you that they can remove enough guns, AR15 to whatever, by tinkering at the margins and get to the kind of. The situation that they have in Western Europe is pulling your leg. It's not going to happen. We need to look now at other solutions. And we. And the only way we're ultimately going to get gun controls in this country is through consensus. And that consensus cannot happen when we're all at each other's throats. We need to assure the public, people who feel insecure about the Constitution, that our Constitution is no longer under threat, that nobody wants to come and take away their guns. And that will bring people to the table and say, okay, how do we protect our children? And that's what I'm going to try to do is put President.
David Sacks (host)
All right, thank you. Let's go to Kelly Slater. Kelly, it looks like you're on a skateboard somewhere. You have a question for Bobby?
Panelist
Yeah. Can you hear me?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yes.
Panelist
All right. Great to talk to you, Bobby. How are you, sir?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Very well, Kelly. Thank you for calling.
Panelist
All right, I appreciate it. I think I speak for everyone when I say it's so refreshing to hear you talk about all these topics, things like reaching across the aisle. It was really nice to see Tulsi on here. She's a good friend. I know what she's been through. When she went to Syria and spoke to the leader over there, she got completely attacked for it at home. But to your point earlier, regarding China, regarding Russia, other places, I mean, we need to have dialogue with these people, and I don't know why that's seen as such a bad thing. It doesn't mean you're in agreement. It means you're just trying to solve solutions, come up with solutions. But we see that at home more and more with the media. And as you've pointed out earlier, I think things get into what seems like dangerous ground when you start to talk about the implications of Big Pharma and other companies being in cahoots with media, then controlling the narrative, trying to cancel people like yourself. There's some frightening topics. So I find it really refreshing to listen to you, listen to the transparency that you have when speaking about all these different topics. And I guess that leads me back to sort of my question, because I see you as almost a Trojan horse for transparency and honesty. And it's really refreshing in this political environment. And I feel like at times, so far, you've been. They've attempted to reduce you to small talking points in the media. And I love hear you talking about all these other things, things other than them focusing on your vaccine stance, questioning medical things. But as you get into all these other topics, we learn so much. So I just wonder how you'll change that narrative for people to hear your broader message and to continue to get that out. Because there's so many challenging things, but also the way you talk about them is really inspiring.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Thank you so much, Kelly. And. And thank you for your courage. During, you know, during the pandemic, you were really one of the few people. At a time when athletes were being bullied all over the world, you were one of the few people are standing up and, you know, you came and talked to me on my podcast when literally nobody in the world would talk to me. So I won't ever forget that. And I'm, you know, I'M such an admirer of yours, not only as an athlete, was one of my favorite athletes, but also as for your moral courage and for your really gentle, sweet approach to the world, you know, and loving approach to the world, which is so inspiring. I, you know what? I don't have a good strategy other than, and I don't lead ever with vaccine stuff. I've got, you know, I've been sort of silenced on all of these issues for 18 years and I feel like I got, you know, a lot of, a lot I'm bursting with things that opinions that people may not want to hear now. I don't ever need to talk about vaccines again. But if somebody asks me about vaccines, I'm going to tell them the truth. And a lot of times people ask me about them and then they immediately want to shut me up because it's like turning on a firehose. And I, you know, I have a lot of domain knowledge, I know a lot about the issue. And, and so I would, you know, what I would say also generally to the press, if you don't want to hear about vaccines from me, don't ask me about them. And, you know, you'll never have to listen to me. But if you ask me, you shouldn't be shutting me up when I answer your question. But, you know, I think I've actually been doing pretty well, Kelly, and being able to talk about some of these issues, you know, about the Ukraine, about the censorship leadership, about the economy, about the destruction of the American middle class, about the appropriation of our foreign policy by neocons, about the appropriation of our domestic policy by Wall street and, you know, the big corporate dictators and the capture of our agencies by the industries they're supposed to regulate. And you know, I now it's been, you know, Cheryl and I have been astonished by how much traction these issues are getting. It's really been, you know, she's said that it was exciting and that I think both of us are, you know, excited that people seem to be listening and really care about these issues. So hopefully that will continue. And thanks for joining us, Kelly.
Panelist
Yeah, I appreciate it. And one last thing I wanted to say is just to mention I've seen a couple interviews where people have really wanted to challenge you but not listen to what you say. And I find that really enchanting to hear that kind of media. But you're always kind back and you give a thoughtful answer and I appreciate that because I think we all need more of that. It's a great way to approach any conversation with people that especially the ones you disagree with. So thanks a lot.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Thank you, Kelly.
David Sacks (host)
Here's a question from the crowd. Let's see here. Tanner22 asks, Is your energy policy going to continue destroying our landscapes with the seas of solar panels and windmills? And TX Frenchman asks, your stance on oil and gas, drill or no drill?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Well, I don't have an easy answer for either of those things. You know, I think, like I said said, I think we should not have that. Every energy system, every energy generator should have to internalize its cost. And so, and there's some cases, like for example, I fought for many years offshore wind in the United States. I think offshore wind makes sense in, in some in the North Atlantic and some parts of Europe. But in the United States we have great onshore wind and, and we have the best onshore wind probably anywhere in the world of any continent except for Antarctica. And we have great economic opportunities and great places to do it where it does minimal environmental damage. A lot of the corn fields of North Dakota, for example, which are huge economic boom for family farmers in North Dakota. And potentially if we have a grid system that can pick up that energy, could provide a lot of our energy. I think Montana, it's a kind of tax. Texas have enough wind to provide 100% of our energy grid. Right now people are, you know, building with highly subsidized wind power wind turbines in the Atlantic and, and we're seeing these big whale kills that appear to be related to it. And to me that's intolerable and it's not something that we should be doing. So I'm against it. But you know, everywhere energy, there's no single solution for energy. Every one of them is, is connected to a locality and you have to measure the impacts on that locality reality of, you know, how much environmental damage per kilowatt hour and that has those costs need to be internalized so that the public can then make a rational choice that is market based about what energy they want. And, and so that's how I, you know, that's how I would feel about that.
David Sacks (host)
All right, thank you. I'm being informed by Bobby's team that we have to go. We've been going for over two hours now and the times has flown by. So, so appreciate everyone who's participated, everyone who is still waiting to ask a question. We just couldn't get to everybody. But there are going to be other opportunities. I'm confident in the future to keep doing this. Bobby's been super available on podcasts and interviews. So I'm sure you'll be hearing a lot more from him. And if you want to follow his campaign, his team is telling me that you can go to his website, which is kick24.com and if you want to contribute, you can do it there or you can join the mailing list. So Kennedy, 24, is the website. Thanks so much for participating and we'll
Elon Musk
will see you guys next time.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Thank you very much, David. And thank you, Elon.
David Sacks (host)
Thanks, guys.