Robert F Kennedy Jr

Robert F. Kennedy Jr

It’s not our business to change the Russian government. And anybody who thinks it’s a good idea to do regime change in Russia, which has more nuclear weapons than we do, is I think irresponsible. And Vladimir Putin himself has had… We will not live in a world without Russia and it was clear when he said that, that he was talking about himself and he has his hand on a button that could bring Armageddon to the entire planet. So why are we messing with this? It’s not our job to change that regime, and we should be making friends with the Russians. We shouldn’t be treating him as an enemy. Now we’ve pushed him into the camp with China. That’s not a good thing for our country. And by the way, what we’re doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all.

The following is a conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, candidate for the President of the United States, running as a Democrat. Robert is an activist, lawyer and author who has challenged some of the world’s most powerful corporations seeking to hold them accountable for the harm they may cause. I love science and engineering. These two pursuits are, to me the most beautiful and powerful in the history of human civilization. Science is our journey, our fight for uncovering the laws of nature and leveraging them to understand the universe and to lessen the amount of suffering in the world. Some of the greatest human beings I’ve ever met, including most of my good friends, are scientists and engineers. Again, I love science, but science cannot flourish without epistemic humility, without debate, both in the pages of academic journals and in the public square, in good faith, long form conversations.

Agree or disagree, I believe Robert’s voice should be part of the debate. To call him a conspiracy theorist and arrogantly dismiss everything he says without addressing it diminishes the public’s trust in the scientific process. At the same time, dogmatic skepticism of all scientific output on controversial topics like the pandemic is equally, if not more dishonest and destructive. I recommend that people read and listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, his arguments and his ideas. But I also recommend, as I say in this conversation, that people read and listen to Vincent Racaniello from This Week in Virology, Dan Wilson from Debunk The Funk, and the Twitter and books of Paul Offit, Eric Topol, and others who are outspoken in their disagreement with Robert.

It is disagreement, not conformity that bends the long arc of humanity toward truth and wisdom. In this process of disagreement, everybody has a lesson to teach you, but we must have the humility to hear it and to learn from it. This is The Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. US history

It’s the 4th of July, Independence Day. So simple question, simple, big question. What do you love about this country, the United States of America? Robert F. Kennedy Jr

I would say there’s so many things that I love about the country, the landscapes and the waterways and the people, et cetera. But on the higher level, people argue about whether we’re an exemplary nation, and that term has been given a bad name, particularly by the neocons, the actions, the neocons in recent decades who have turned that phrase into a justification for forcing people to adopt American systems or values at the barrel of a gun. But my father and uncle used it in a very different way, and they were very proud of it. I grew up very proud of this country because we were the exemplary nation in the sense that we were an example of democracy all over the world. When we first launched our democracy in 1780, we were the only democracy on earth. And there was Civil war, by 1865, there were six democracies.

Today there’s probably 190, and all of them in one way or another are modeled on the American experience. And it’s extraordinary because our first serious and sustained contact with the European culture and continent was in 1608 when John Winthrop came over with his Puritans in the sloop Arbella and Winthrop gave this famous speech where he said, “This is going to be a city on a hill. This is going to be an example for all the other nations in the world.” And he warned his fellow Puritans. They were sitting at this great expanse of land and he said, “We can’t be seduced by the lure of real estate or by the carnal opportunities of this land. We have to take this country as a gift from God and then turn it into an example for the rest of the world of God’s love, of God’s will and wisdom.” And 200 years later, 250 years later, a different generation, they’re mainly [inaudible 00:05:59], are people who had a belief in God, but not so much a love of particularly religious cosmologies.

The Framers of the Constitution believe that we were creating something that would be replicated around the world, and that it was an example in democracy. There would be this kind of wisdom from the collective that… And the word wisdom means a knowledge of God’s will, and that somehow God would speak through the collective in a way that he or she could not speak through totalitarian regimes. And I think that that’s something that even though Winthrop was a white man and a Protestant, that every immigrant group who came after them adopted that belief. And I know my family, when my family came over, all of my grandparents came over in 1848 during the potato famine, and they saw this country as unique in history is something that was part of a broader spiritual mission. And so I’d say that from a 30,000-foot level, I grew up so proud of this country and believing that it was the greatest country in the world, and for those reasons.

Well, I immigrated to this country. And one of the things that really embodies America to me is the ideal of freedom. Hunter S. Thompson said, “Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used.” What does freedom mean to you? Robert F. Kennedy Jr

To me, freedom does not mean chaos, and it does not mean anarchy. It means that it has to be accompanied by restraint if it’s going to live up to its promise in self-restraint. What it means is the capacity for human beings to exercise and to fulfill their creative energies unrestrained as much as possible by government.

So this point that Hunter S. Thompson has made is, “Dies unless it’s used.” Do you agree with that? Robert F. Kennedy Jr

Yeah, I do agree with that, and he was not unique in saying that. Thomas Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty had to be watered with the blood of each generation. And what he meant by that is that we can’t live off the laurels of the American Revolution. That we had a group, we had a generation where between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans died. They gave their lives, they gave their livelihoods, they gave their status, they gave their property, and they put it all on the line to give us our Bill of Rights and that, but those Bill of Rights, the moment that we signed them, there were forces within our society that began trying to chip away at them, and that happens in every generation. And it is the obligation of every generation to safeguard and protect those freedoms.

The blood of each generation. You mentioned your interest, your admiration of Al Albert Camus, of Stoicism, perhaps your interest in existentialism. Camus said, I believe in Myth of Sisyphus, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” What do you think he means by that? Robert F. Kennedy Jr

I suppose the way that Camus viewed the world and the way that the Stoics did and a lot of the existentialists, it was that it was so absurd and that the problems and the tasks that were given just to live a life are so insurmountable that the only way that we can get back the gods for giving us this impossible task of living life was to embrace it and to enjoy it and to do our best at it. To me, I read Camus, and particularly in The Myth of Sisyphus as a parable that… And it’s the same lesson that I think he writes about in The Plague, where we’re all given these insurmountable tasks in our lives, but that by doing our duty, by being of service to others, we can bring meaning to a meaningless chaos and we can bring order to the universe.

And Sisyphus was the iconic hero of the Stoics, and he was a man because he did something good. He delivered a gift to humanity. He angered the gods and they condemned him to push a rock up the hill every day, and then it would roll down. When he got to the top, it would roll down and he’d spend the night going back down the hill to collect it and then rolling it back up the hill again. And the task was absurd, it was insurmountable. He could never win, but the last line of that book is one of the great lines, which is something to the extent that I can picture as of his smiling, because Camus’ belief was that even though his task was insurmountable, that he was a happy man and he was a happy man because he put his shoulder to the stone.

He took his duty, he embraced the task and the absurdity of life, and he pushed the stone up the hill. And that if we do that, and if we find ways of being service to others, that is the ultimate, that’s the key to the lock, that’s the solution to the puzzle.

Each individual person in that way can rebel against absurdity by discovering meaning to this whole messy thing. Robert F. Kennedy Jr

And we can bring meaning not only to our own lives, but we can bring meaning to the universe as well. We can bring some kind of order to life and the embrace of those tasks and the commitment to service resonates out from us to the rest of humanity in some way. Hitler and WW2

So you mentioned The Plague by Camus. There’s a lot of different ways to read that book, but one of them, especially given how it was written, is that The Plague symbolizes Nazi Germany and the Hitler regime. What do you learn about human nature from a figure like Adolf Hitler, that he’s able to captivate the minds of millions, rise to power and take on, pull in the whole world into a global war? Robert F. Kennedy Jr

I was born nine years after the end of World War II, and I grew up in a generation with my parents who were fixated on that, on what happened, and my father. At that time, the resolution in the minds of most Americans, and I think people around the world, is that there had been something wrong with the German people, that the Germans had been particularly susceptible to this kind of demagoguery and to following a powerful leader and just industrializing cruelty and murder. And my father always differed with that. My father said, “This is not a German problem. This could happen to all of us. We’re all just inches away from barbarity.” And the thing that keeps us safe in this country are the institutions of our democracy, our constitution. It’s not our nature. Our nature has to be restrained, and that comes through self-restraint.

But also, the beauty of our country is that we devise these institutions that are designed to allow us to flourish, but at the same time, not to give us enough freedom to flourish, but also create enough order to keep us from collapsing into barbarity. So one of the other things that my father talked about from when I was little, he would ask us this question, “If you were the family and Anne Frank came to your door and asked you to hide her, would you be one of the people who hid her, risk your own life, or would you be one of the people who turned her in?”

And of course, we would all say, “Well, of course we would hide Anne Frank and take the risk,” but that’s been something kind of a lesson, a challenge that has always been near the forefront of my mind, that if a totalitarian system ever a occurs in the United States, which my father thought was quite possible, he was conscious about how fragile democracy actually is, that would I be one of the ones who would resist the totalitarianism or would I be one of the people who went along with it? Would I be one of the people who was at the train station in crack hour, or even Berlin and saw people being shipped off to camps and just put my head down and pretend I didn’t say it because talking about it would be destructive to my career and maybe my freedom and even my life? So that has been a challenge that my father gave to me and all of my brothers and sisters, and it’s something that I’ve never forgotten.

A lot of us would like to believe we would resist in that situation, but the reality is most of us wouldn’t, and that’s a good thing to think about, that human nature is such that we’re selfish even when there’s an atrocity going on all around us. Robert F. Kennedy Jr

And we also have the capacity to deceive ourselves, and all of us tend to judge ourselves by our intentions and our actions.

What have you learned about life from your father, Robert F. Kennedy? Robert F. Kennedy Jr

First of all, I’ll say this about my uncle because I’m going to apply that question to my uncle and my father. My uncle was asked when he first met Jackie Bouvier, who later became Jackie Kennedy. She was a reporter for a newspaper and she had a column where she’d do these pithy interviews with both famous people and man in the street interviews. And she was interviewing him and she asked him what he believed his best quality was, his strongest virtue? And she thought that he would say courage because he had been a war hero. He was the only president who… And this is when he was Senator, by the way, who received the Purple Heart. And he had a very famous story of him as a hero in World War II. And then he had come home and he had written a book on moral courage among American politicians and won the Pulitzer Prize, that book Profiles and Courage, which was a series of incidents where American political leaders made decisions to embrace principle even though their careers were at stake, and in most cases were destroyed by their choice.

She thought he was going to say courage, but he didn’t. He said curiosity, and I think looking back at his life that the best, it was true, and that was the quality that allowed him to put himself in the shoes of his adversaries. And he always said that if the only way that we’re going to have peace is if we’re able to put ourselves in the shoes of our adversaries, understand their behavior and their contact, not context. And that’s why he was able to resist the intelligence apparatus and the military during the Bay of Pigs when they said, “You’ve got to send in the Essex, the aircraft carrier.” And he said, “No.” Even though he’d only been two months in office, he was able to stand up to them because he was able to put himself in the shoes of both Castro and Khrushchev and understand there’s got to be another solution to this.

And then during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was able to endure it when the narrative was okay, Khrushchev acted in a way as an aggressor to put missiles in our hemisphere. How dare he do that? And Jack and my father were able to say, “Well, wait a minute. He’s doing that because we put missiles in Turkey and Italy, and the Turkish ones right on the Russian border.” And they then made a secret deal with Do Brennan, with Ambassador Do Brennan and with Khrushchev to remove the missiles in Turkey if he moved the Jupiter missiles from Turkey, so long as Khrushchev removed them from Cuba. There were 13 men on what they called the [inaudible 00:20:36] Committee, which was the group of people who were deciding what the action was, what they were going to do to end the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And virtually, and of those men, 11 of them wanted to invade and wanted to bomb and invade, and it was Jack. And then later on, my father and Bob McNamara, who were the only people who were with him, because he was able to see the world from Khrushchev’s point of view of view, he believed that there was another solution. And then he also had the moral courage. So my father, to get back to your question, famously said that, “Moral courage is the most important quality and it’s more rare,” and courage on the football field or courage in battle than physical courage. It’s much more difficult to come by, but it’s the most important quality in a human being.