Chapter 1: What does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. say about focusing during conversations?
the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day i like them but if it's just me wearing them i feel stupid why do you wear them i like it because it locks me in just locks me in. The only thing I hear is that person's voice and I can't hear Jamie's chair moving. I can't hear anything else. And it just like makes me really like focused on the conversation only.
I have ADHD. I had 11 siblings, and I have seven kids, so I can work. I can focus. No matter what? No matter what.
It's a skill. It's a thing to learn. If you're the person that can focus without distraction, you're a good person to be in the job you're at. What is it like since you've been appointed? I haven't talked to you on a podcast. I know.
It's the best job I could ever have. I feel like I was designed for the job. I just have so much fun. I mean, it's a target-rich environment, so there's so many ways that you can be effective and improve people's lives every single day. Part of that is because the agency was just such a mess. It wasn't doing healthcare.
It was doing sick care and just managing, you know, all of these perverse incentives. And have us spending $5 trillion a year two to three times per capita when any other nation spends. And we have the sickest population in the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world. And we're the best at medicine in this country. But that's when people get sick.
You'd rather get sick here than any place in the world. But you're more likely to be sick here than any place in the world. And, you know, and then it was just a big political patronage operation. And it still is. You know, we're putting an end to that now. I mean, the amount of fraud that goes through that place. We lose just in Medicaid and Medicare $100 billion a year.
And it's all just this really shocking, blatant fraud where it's become industrialized. I mean there's foreign nations like Russia. Everybody has heard of Somalia but also Cuba as this operation in Florida where it's – They open up these little – they open up these PO boxes for durable medical equipment. It's like knee braces and wheelchairs.
And then they don't have any knee braces or wheelchairs, but they have patient – identification numbers. So they just claimed to be shipping them to people. And we found one hotel, it had like 129 rooms, and everyone was a different company that was selling durable medical equipment. And we go in and shut them down, and they immediately go back to Cuba.
The whole thing is apparently run by the Cuban government, but Russia's doing the same thing with hospices. Where do they get the patient ID numbers? They can buy those numbers on the black market.
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Chapter 2: What challenges does he mention regarding the healthcare system?
The same thing that the Somalis did in Ethiopia. A lot of that money was going back to Boko Haram and terror groups over there. But they were – it was – a lot of it was based – the Medicare stuff is different and we're able to – we're going to be able to catch almost all of that now because we're using AI to do it. It was never used before. There was no effort at program integrity.
In fact, the Biden administration deliberately, purposely ordered them – they ended the program integrity office. So they went from hundreds of people to six people. And they said, we don't want you doing program integrity. We just want you doing enrollments. And so we got all this fraud.
Most of it came from these waivers that the states got, all the states got them for home care and community care. So, you know, 30 years ago, Medicaid, Medicare, if you've got a hernia operation, We paid for that. And you could tell somebody got the hernia operation because they had the scar, they used a licensed nurse, they used a licensed doctor. It was all documented.
Then some of the states said, you know, we're sending a whole lot of people to the hospital, and we don't have home care providers. So if you let us pay family members to do home care, the patient won't have to go to the hospital. They won't have to go to the emergency room, and we'll save a lot of money. So it was well-intentioned. But then what happened is people immediately started abusing it.
So today— These are services that are normally played by family members, performed by family members. Buying groceries for your grandmother and bringing them home, you now get paid for that. Balancing your grandmother's checkbook, driving her to a medical visit. So then you had this organized fraud where—and this is what happened in Minnesota—
These organized crime companies would come in and say, you designate this family, you designate all your children have autism now, even if they didn't. And we're going to now pay providers for each of them. And we'll give you a few thousand dollars to do it. But then they would collect all the money. And that's what was happening.
It's happening all over the country because there was no—it's very, very difficult. The guardrails on that system were very pervious. And anybody can defraud it. If you are inclined to do fraud, this was an irresistible opportunity.
How long was this going on for? When did this fraud begin, do you believe?
It really accelerated during the Biden administration. We expected to pay for the Minnesota program just for autism care for kids with autism. The kids need the care because they go to maybe a special school, but then they come home from school and the parents aren't there because they're working. So who's going to take care of them?
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Chapter 3: How does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. describe the state of chronic diseases in America?
So the states don't really want to do fraud detection because all that money is coming into their estate. And then every time you enroll somebody, you're registering them to vote. And so, you know, they may have had ulterior motives. Let me put it that way. But, you know, right now what we're doing is we're saying to the states, we have audited you.
We expect that—we believe that 50 percent of the program dollars you're spending were fraudulent or possibly fraudulent. You show us a corrective action that you're going to take or we're going to withdraw that money the next time. The money's not being withdrawn from individuals. We're not reimbursing the state for it until they told us. Now, the red states have all said, yeah, we'll do it.
But Maine, Minnesota, California, New York have said, no, we're not going to. Basically, they sent us corrective action that was just, you know, it was ridiculous.
So is there financial incentive? Are these people that are making all this money from fraud, are they donating to any specific groups? Like, is there a direct turnaround?
The Cubans in Florida and Florida, you know, they get mad at Trump because they say, oh, all the states you're designating are blue states. That's just because the blue states refuse to cooperate. But Florida is a red state and we're really going after them. We're shutting down all durable medical equipment reimbursements for the whole state because it was all being run.
It was probably being run by the Cuban government.
But I don't understand how no one saw it. No one from the government saw it. And would there be a reason why they weren't looking for it other than they just wanted it? They were only thinking about recruitments. But were they also was anybody making money? outside of these crime organizations? I would say no, the money was not, the states were making money.
Right, but there was a lot of talk online about donations to parties and donations to NGOs. That is probably true too, although I don't have any evidence of that. No evidence. OK.
So it really just wouldn't have, you know, even if you get those kind of donations, it's not the kind of proof that I would talk about because you cannot prove that. Right. That donation, you know, motivated the bad behavior.
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Chapter 4: What solutions does he propose for improving healthcare outcomes?
And then, you know, when I was—then I saw how they—and Trump questioned vaccines during the 2016 election. The Democratic Party, it was kind of that skepticism and the concerns were spread evenly across the party. My uncle, Ted Kennedy, was— very much on the side of medical freedom. And it was evenly spread. But as soon as Trump said that, it became part of the dogma of that party.
And then, you know, when I ran, we were, you know, it was one of the things I ran against was the Ukraine war. And the Democrats were always the anti-war party.
CIA director to speak at the Democratic Convention and it just is – the party's only agenda is we hate Trump and anything he says, we're going to do the opposite of it and it makes me very sad for the party and I don't think it's a sustainable way to operate.
No, there has to be some sort of an appeal to people in the middle that left when things went crazy. Just let us know you're not crazy anymore. Let us know you've abandoned a lot of this crazy stuff. And also, like, recognize what's good for everybody, right? Hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud is not good for any of us, the whole country. So we should all be together on this one thing.
Like, this is terrible. This is stealing from your tax money, all of our tax money. Us, American citizens, we should all be united on stopping any kind of fraud. Forget about who's the fucking president and who's going to get responsibility for it, who's going to get the accolades. Who cares? Stop fraud. We're all together.
You shouldn't have criminals from other countries living here just stealing money from Medicaid. That seems like that should be a bipartisan issue in a rational society.
And, you know, I saw this, the craziness, when we did the Tylenol findings. Because, you know, the science is really clear. And there are dozens. I read 76 studies over a weekend. And, you know, when we were looking at this. And the studies that support Tylenol safety are very weak and they have huge holes in them.
There's overwhelming science that says you shouldn't take it particularly – it's OK normally. You shouldn't take it during pregnancy and particularly the last days of pregnancy or in the perinatal period, which is immediately after pregnancy.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of regulating speech in public venues?
Concerns have been raised that debates on, for instance, gender identity or political matters could lead to staff complaints resulting in patrons being asked to leave if the behavior is deemed aggressive or harassing. It should not be misinterpreted as a ban on lawful, polite, or controversial speech. Who's to decide what's controversial, though? Third-party harassment.
Legislation focuses on addressing harassment rather than banning specific topics of conversation entirely. Just any regulation of conversation is nuts. It's one thing you're harassing the staff.
I've never known a pub owner who would allow— people to come in and harass his staff. He already has an economic and management incentive to not allow that.
It's not the kind of thing you need to legislate. But to say that someone doesn't feel safe if people are having a civil conversation about gender identity, you don't feel safe if you work there and that you're getting harassed by people's opinions that you don't agree with. Well, that's where things get weird.
Because then, as we've seen, there's a lot of people that get really triggered about a lot of things that are pretty normal for most folks. You know, microaggressions, dumb shit.
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Chapter 6: How does the government influence free speech and public safety?
There's a lot of people that just want to be offended. And if this is a law... That could lead to a lot more problem. It's just a slippery slope and they're not going in the right direction. And I don't know how they course correct if they've fallen this far that quickly. 12,000 arrests is crazy. That's a crazy amount of people go to jail for social media posts.
And it encourages self-censorship so you don't get a real sense of what people want or don't want. Because people don't want to be involved. They don't want to go to jail. They don't want to take a chance.
The framers of the Constitution – free speech was everything to them and they put it in the First Amendment because they knew all the other rights and guarantees were dependent on it. If you have a government that can silence its opponents, it has a license for any kind of atrocity.
It's just shocking that all other Western nations haven't adopted that.
Well, most of them don't have constitutions.
It's so crazy. It's just so ridiculous. It's so ridiculous that free speech, which is like we all agree, especially in America, it's one of the most important things, the only way to find out what's real and what's not. You've got to let people talk it out.
You know, I mean, when you're living in a world where the government has the power to dictate what's real and what's not real, and they don't have an obligation to be correct. You got a real problem. And if there's no consequences for them being incorrect and they've silenced correct speech. They've gotten away with something that's real slippery and real dangerous.
And when there's a lot of money involved and a lot of businesses involved... I typed it into perplexity and this gives a little context on it because the pubs were being... The same pub thing? Yeah.
Reverse is a 2013 removal of third-party harassment liability, making pubs liable if staffs overhear comments deemed harassing based on protected characteristics like sexual race. Critics call it a banter ban, fearing landlords will police conversations to avoid lawsuits, chilling speech in social venues.
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Chapter 7: What are the challenges and successes in healthcare reforms?
So they removed the pub owner being in trouble. They removed that.
Because it says it passed when I was looking it up. It said it passed a couple months ago.
So that makes pub owners liable again. So removed 2013 removal of third-party harassment liability.
That made them liable. I don't think – I think it's back to – reverses that, reverses making them liable.
No, no, no. No, it reverses the removal of the third-party harassment liability. So they removed the liability, now making pubs liable. So it now makes them liable if they overhear comments. So what this does is it encourages the pub itself to censor people. Which makes sense.
I mean, if you all of a sudden can now sue a pub that you went into and you didn't like this conversation about gender identity that was taking place next to you, you have the basis of a lawsuit now.
Yes. So now the incentive is the pub owner to go out and police all the conversations so that if anybody if anybody crosses a guardrail, you know, the pub owner now has to go in and interrupt them. And it's not a good thing.
If you weren't a charitable person, you could imagine that there are certain groups that would have people go to places, have conversations, and set up a lawsuit. You could just – you could commit fraud. If the pub is liable, you pay some kook to go in there and start yelling about transsexuals, and then next thing you know, you collect a lawsuit.
That's not outside of what I think a shady person would do. If you think about what you've just talked about with all the Medicare fraud and all the other fraud that we know has happened in the world, this is a giant loophole. This is a giant loophole for people to come in and sue people and silence everybody's speech.
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Chapter 8: How is the administration addressing pesticide use and food safety?
Big food. And these have all been, you know, those were all taboos for every administration, Democratic, Republican. There was little incremental things that you could do. under democratic administrations, but nothing like this has ever happened.
The agreement we made with the pharmaceutical industry could not have happened under any other president, the MFN agreement, the most favored nation, and the way that that worked, is we've been paying for the last 40 years the highest price in the world for medicine. And so we have 4.2% of the world's population here and over 70% of pharmaceutical profits and revenues come from the United States.
Why is that? We do buy more drugs than anybody. But it's because we pay higher prices. We pay two to three to five times what they're paying in Europe. For example, and President Trump likes to talk about this, Ozempic, the list price was $1,350 in America. You could buy the same drug in any pharmacy in London for $88. And it's made in the same factory in New Jersey.
And the reason that was allowed to happen is the Europeans just said, we're not going to allow, we're not going to pay anymore for it. They would set the price. And that was the maximum. There's a lot of drugs they don't have. There's a lot of cancer drugs they don't have in Europe because they just wouldn't pay the price. And so President Trump, you know, every president has vowed to stop this.
Clinton tried to stop it. Obama, Bush. And all of them tried, and Biden all said, we're going to get rid of the MFN price, and none of them did anything on it. And President Trump literally called me sometimes once a day, called late at night, 1130 at night, and, you know, say, where are you on MFN? And we ended up getting the, it seemed to me even, it seemed insurmountable.
But he said, I'm going to use tariffs. I'm going to force the Europeans to raise their drug prices. And because he didn't want to—we had enough leverage on the pharmaceutical companies because of our Medicaid and Medicare programs. We could pretty much force them to lower their prices. But it would put them out of business.
And he wants us to continue to be the center for innovation in this country. And he also wanted the companies— or all their production so that we're making all the drugs here and they're not making it elsewhere in the world. And so we sat down with them for months and we came to agreements with 16 of the 17 pharmaceutical companies. Now Americans are getting the lowest prices in the world.
If somebody lowers the price in Europe, we get that price or lower. And people can get that today on Trump Rx. They can go for the most popular medications and get the cheapest price in the world.
And not only that, but the pharmaceutical industry, because we gave them certainty and because President Trump forced the European countries to raise the price that their citizens pay for drugs, the companies actually did well. They increased stock values by $1.3 trillion among them. And they've all agreed to ensure their production.
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