Shamita Basu

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, where does Kennedy stand today with the rest of his family, for one, but also his old friends and allies in the Democratic Party?

You know, I wanted to ask you, Michael, it just feels hard to ignore some aspects of the Kennedy coverage, which is the salacious ones, right?

I mean, there have been some really truly out there stories about him.

I mean, I'm talking also about during campaign times.

The worm in his brain stories, a story about the bear.

And then even more recently, the details that are coming forward about his relationship with the reporter, Olivia Newsy.

I know that you asked him to some degree about some of these stories, including the Newsy stuff, and he didn't want to comment on it.

But what do you make of all of that?

That reporting there's this other like it just feels like there's so much happening in the health sphere, which is what he's actually officially in charge of.

But then there's this other kind of sideshow to the RFK story that's happening.

The piece that you published in The Atlantic, the title was Why is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

So Convinced He's Right?

I thought that was an interesting framework to think about him as a person.

What is it that you think is underpinning his deep conviction?

Because that's something that you've described now many times over the course of this conversation, his deep conviction and his beliefs.

Did you come across anyone in the scientific community who believes that he is asking some of the right questions?

I think that there might be a complicated thing happening also where even acknowledging that many Americans are in this place of feeling distrustful toward public health institutions is somehow allowing for bad policy to be made or sort of inviting that.

Yeah.