Episode 033 – Three Shocking Takeaways From My Private Dinner With Robert Kennedy Jr

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

I recently sat down for dinner with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s currently campaigning as an independent for President of the United States in the 2024 election.  When I say dinner, I mean an intimate, private affair that I organized with the help of my friend Christopher McDonald where I got to sit directly across from the man and ask him questions for two and a half hours.  I wanted to get to know him more – both as a presidential contender and as a man – and learn about what he stands for, his policies, and what he has planned for the future of the United States should he win the election.  What I’m about to share with you here are some main takeaways I gleaned from my dinner with him.

Taking A Firm Stance 

I first got turned onto Bobby (I will continue to refer to him as “Bobby” or “RFK”) when I was anticipating the birth of my son, Gabriel.  I had heard that some people were suggesting that vaccines might be linked to a lot of the behavioral challenges that we’re seeing with children – from autism to ADD and ADHD – and potentially the dramatic increase in childhood allergies that we’re experiencing.  It was in doing this research that I started seeing Bobby Kennedy’s name come up as someone who took a fairly firm stance against the case for vaccines in children.  But we didn’t talk about vaccines during this dinner.

However, Bobby talked about how starting in 1989, something ubiquitous happened around the world that marked the beginning of a sharp rise in a variety of issues that are now prolific in children – autism, ADHD, ADD, neurological problems, and childhood allergies.  Bobby suggests that vaccines are partly to blame, but so are things like the presence of glyphosate and other environmental toxins that could also be responsible for the chronic disease state and the sickness state of our children. 

RFK has an interesting history, which I was unfamiliar with before digging into research about vaccines.  If you don’t know, he’s an attorney and environmentalist who’s spent the majority of his career battling the big petrochemical companies around the world and their proclivity to dump toxins and pollutants into the environment.  He’s studied the chemical methylmercury, which is often found as a toxin in pollutant dumping sights and, interestingly, is also an ingredient used as a preservative in many vaccines.  He also wrote the book The Real Anthony Fauci during the height of the coronavirus pandemic and had some interesting things to say about disease control, vaccine regulation, and political collusion.  I share all of this just to give you some background on the man, which I’ll continue to elaborate on here shortly.

Not Your Run-Of-The-Mill Politician

One of the topics we touched on frequently was corporate capture, which Bobby sees as a major problem in the current state of politics and economics.  Essentially, corporate capture is where private industry uses its political influence to take control of the decision-making apparatus of the state, such as regulatory agencies, law enforcement entities, and legislatures.  One of the big motivators driving Kennedy to run for presidency is to put an end to this trend in Congress, as he believes that the people who have been so-called “leading” us for the past few decades have been self-serving and actually operating at the detriment to the population.

Now, politics aside, I think most people can agree that regulatory organizations shouldn’t be filled with the same people who are benefiting from them and, unlike a lot of people currently in political office, RFK agrees.  That, and he’s not your run-of-the-mill politician who says one thing and does another.  Whether you agree with his viewpoints or not, Bobby is committed to the causes he cares about and doing something about them.

Back in the 90s, the U.S. Navy was using the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico as a bomb testing site.  The locals in Puerto Rico were concerned about the impact environmentally and the impact on their health from these explosives.  At the time, Bobby was involved in the protests of this – he came down and supported the Puerto Rican people.  He told me the story about how he was trying to escape from the Coast Guard and ended up hiding under the floorboards of a house.  Eventually he was found by military dogs, arrested, and spent a month in Puerto Rican prison.  Now I’m not saying that going to prison is something to be applauded, but whether you agree with someone’s policies or not, that’s a level of commitment and integrity that I think needs to be respected.

An Imperfect Man Committed To Growth

I asked Bobby about his mental and emotional resolve.  I told him that I’d watched several interviews with him in anticipation of meeting him and noticed how many people openly attack and criticize him.  They’ll say things to him that are completely untrue and meant to antagonize and agitate him.  I noticed that he kept a steely, almost stoic resolve and never took things personally.  He never reacts emotionally, but instead remains grounded and powerful in his presence.

I know that RFK has gone through a 12-step recovery program, so I asked him if his ability to stand in the face of insult and not react stems from that experience.  Before I could even finish the question, he said “Absolutely, 100%.”  He’s actually been in recovery since the 1980s, and told me that, to this day, he still goes to 9 meetings a week – NINE!  This is a guy who puts his spiritual and personal growth first – even with all the other things going on in his life.

I’m sure that RFK hasn’t lived a perfect life.  I’m sure he has character defects like the rest of us.  I’m sure he’s done things that aren’t fully in alignment with the highest values we all try to hold and share.  But one thing is for sure – Bobby Kennedy is doing the work.

Making Health The #1 Priority 

I asked Bobby what he thought was the biggest threat to America right now.  I figured he’d say something like the national debt, border security, or getting dragged into a world war.  But his response was shocking.  According to RFK, the biggest threat our country faces right now is chronic disease – especially among children.  He pointed out how something like only 1 in 10,000 70 year olds today have autism, compared to 1 out of every 34 children right now.

This is where he started explaining how children today are being bombarded with exposure to environmental toxins, food toxins, medical toxins, and a variety of other dangerous things making their way into the nervous and immune systems of America’s children.  He expressed his concerns about how the major pharmaceutical companies have seized control over the very regulatory organizations meant to keep them in check, along with our country’s universities, media, and research institutes.  He went even deeper to explain that 50% of primetime television spending comes from pharmaceutical companies – not just to advertise their products, but to control the content being put in front of the average television-watching American family.  

He expressed serious concern about how an entire generation of American children are being destroyed, essentially from within – via the foods they eat and products they use, and that nobody is doing anything about it.  He talked about the new weight loss drug Ozempic and how it’s now being treated as the frontline treatment for childhood obesity.  Why educate people and ask them to diet and exercise when a pharmaceutical company can extract $15,000 a year from every person taking their pills.

In our brief exchange about vaccines, Bobby told me that pediatricians are incentivized with a hefty bonus when over 90% of the children in their practice adhere to the recommended vaccine schedule.  Personally, I’m not planning on vaccinating my son according to the  schedule, and Carol and I were denied from the first pediatrician we sought out for our son because of it.

On Beating Big Pharma 

If he becomes president, RFK told me that he’s going to declare chronic disease as a national emergency.  I see that as a good thing that no other candidate has spoken about in all the time I’ve paid any attention to politics, dating back to my early 20s.  And that’s really one of my biggest takeaways from spending this time with Bobby – he presents very logical solutions to complex issues that most candidates steer away from completely.

He told me that he’s going to transition a lot of the research being done to develop medical products into actually understanding (and scrutinizing) their efficacy and potential harm.  He plans on creating a data set that’s going to justify what he’s anecdotally come to understand to be true based on looking at what research already exists.  From there, he’s going to leave it up to the courts to settle.

He explained to me that in his decades as an attorney, it takes a lot of justification to take down the big corporations and ban their products from the market.  The challenge right now is that it’s the corporations themselves that control the research, but as president he plans on placing stricter regulations on that fact and taking back some of that control, so that data-driven decisions can be made about healthcare and what’s truly best for the health of the nation and its children.

“Strange Times”…Indeed 

We talked about America’s southern border and the ongoing issues with illegal immigration.  I told him about an interview I’d recently seen between Joe Rogan and Dr. Phil, who were talking about how the Chinese are buying up large amounts of land in the States, much of which seems to be in close proximity to American military bases.  Apparently, there are tens of thousands of “military-aged” Chinese men coming across the southern border and taking up residence on this Chinese-owned land on American soil.  I asked Bobby what he thought about this and his response was simply: “strange times.”

I appreciated this about RFK.  When he didn’t know what to say, he didn’t say much.  He didn’t have some well-rehearsed response to every single question.  If he was educated on a subject – which he is on a wide variety of issues – he’d speak his mind, share his opinions, and lay out his proposed plan.  If he wasn’t, he’d simply acknowledge that some complex issues were just that – complex – without pretending he had an answer for everything.

I asked Kennedy about the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia, as I’ve heard him talk about how $5 billion was appropriated by Congress in partnership with the Open Society Foundation, run by George Soros, who in my opinion does not have the best interests of democracy or American society on his mind.  My understanding is that our government is partnering with Soros on international affairs – not out of peacekeeping ideals or American defense, but out of self-serving interests.  I asked Bobby what he thought about this co-opting overthrow of the Ukrainian government dating back at least a decade.  Once again, he replied with “strange times.”

The Right Man For The Job?

I found through my conversation with RFK that he’s a highly intelligent and authentic individual.  It’s my personal opinion that out of our current options, RSK is our best solution for addressing the challenging issues this country faces – and actually doing something about them, not just talking about them in circles.  He’s got a diverse background of experience, he’s well-educated on a variety of issues that play an immediate impact in the average American’s life and in our country’s position as a world power, and I believe he’s the right guy for the job to enact some real changes.

I’ve already had some people unfollow and otherwise criticize me for hosting this dinner with RFK.  Of course, you’re entitled to your opinion and you can disagree with mine and my agreement with many of the things RFK talks about and hopes to change.  But if you go back and consider the history of the United States, this country was built upon our ability to have a civil discourse around what he believed for the best of the country and who we believed was the best to lead it.  We didn’t stop being friends because of it.

My hope is that more people are going to make themselves available to having intelligent conversations, to talk about the issues, to talk openly about the people with the potential to lead us, to agree to disagree, and to stay friends.  Because when we divide ourselves over the election of our leaders, it only serves to support the division that is at the root of so many of the issues we collectively face today.