YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

lines on the record: 159
first: 2023-07-06
most recent: 2023-07-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't know what he believes In that book, which is, I think, 250,000 words. I never try to look inside of his head. I deal with facts. I deal with science. And every factual assertion in that book is cited and source to government databases or peer-reviewed publications. And I try not to speculate about things that I don't know about or I can't prove. And I cannot tell you what his motivations were. I mean, all of us. He's done a thing, a lot of things that I think are really very, very bad things for humanity, a very deceptive. We all have this capacity for self-deception, as I said at the beginning of this podcast. We judge ourselves on our intentions rather than our actions. And we all. I have an almost infinite capacity to convince ourselves.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to. Sit here and speak uncharitably by saying the guy. Didn't do anything, but I don't think of anything. I mean, if you tell me something that you think he did, maybe there was a drug that got licensed while he was at NIH that, you know, benefited people. That's certainly possible. He was there for 50 years. In terms of his principal programs, the AIDS programs and his COVID programs, and I think that the harm that he did vastly outweigh the benefits.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disputes and these issues that drive us apart. So me sitting here badmouthing the left or badmouthing the right is not going to advance the ball. I really want to figure out ways that what do these groups hold in common that we can all have a shared vision of what we want this country to look like.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jordan trying to get me to Badmouth a left the whole time I was in I really enjoyed my talk with He seemed to have that agenda where he wanted me to say bad things about the left. And I just, you know. That's not what my campaign is about. I want to do the opposite. I'm not going to badmouth a laugh. I was on a show this week with David Remnik from the New Yorker and he tried to get me to Badmouth Donald Trump and Alex Jones and a lot of other people just bade me to do it. Of course, there's a lot of bad things I could say about all those people, but it doesn't, you know, I'm trying to find values that hold us together that we can share in common rather than to focus constantly on these”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which has been the enemy that we've been telling them to be a bulwark against for 20 years. And two weeks after that, he said, We don't care what the United States thinks anymore. So that's what we got for spending all those trillions of dollars there. We got short-term friends. The United States, you know, policy abroad, and we have not made ourselves safer. We've made Americans, we've put Americans in more jeopardy all over the world. You know, you have to wait in lines to get through the airport. You have to. The security state is now costing us $1.3 trillion. America is unsafer and poorer than it's ever been. So we're not getting. We should be doing what President Kennedy said we ought to do and what China, the policy that China has now adopted.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now, you know, the Chinese are out competing us everywhere in the world. Everybody wants to deal with the Chinese because they come in, they build nice things for you and they... And there's no strings attached and they're pleasant to deal with. And as a result of that, Brazil is switching to the Chinese currency. Argentina is switching Saudi Arabia, our greatest partner. We put trillions of dollars into protecting the oil pipelines there. And now they're saying. We don't care what the United States thinks. That's what Ahmad bin Salam said. He said, we don't, he dropped. Oil production in Saudi Arabia. The middle of a US Inflation spiral. They've never done that to us before, to aggravate the inflation spiral. And two weeks later, and then they signed a deal.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“an incoherent violent war between Shia and Sunni desk squads. We pushed Iraq into the embrace of Iran, which has now become essentially a proxy for Iran, which is exactly the outcome that we were trying to prevent for the past 20 or 30 years. We created ISIS. We sent Two million refugees. Into Europe destabilizing all of the nations in Europe for generations. We're now seeing these riots. In France, and that's a direct result from the Syrian war that we created and our creation of ISIS. Brexit is another result of that. So for eight trillion dollars, we wrecked the world. And during that same period that we spent $8.1 trillion bombing bridges, ports, schools, hospitals, et cetera, the Chinese spent $8.1 trillion building schools, ports, hospitals, bridges, and universities.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Named and statues, named after commemorating in parks, commemorating John Kennedy in Africa and Latin America than any other president in the United States, and probably more than all the other presidents combined. And it's because he put America on the side of the poor. And that's what we ought to be doing. We ought to be projecting economic power abroad. The Chinese have essentially stolen his playbook. And we've spent $8 trillion on the Iraq war and its aftermath, the wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And what do we get for that? We got nothing for that money, $8 trillion. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. Iraq today is a much worse off than it was when Saddam was there, saying.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is incredible emotional homecoming for all of the people of Ireland. His second favorite trip was when he went to Columbia, he went to Latin America, but Colombia was his favorite country. And I think there were two million people came into Bogota to see this vast crowd and they were just delirious cheering for him. The president of Columbia Yet Escargo said to him, Do you know they love you? And my uncle said, Wyatt, he said, because they think you've put America on the side of the poor against the oligarchs. And when my uncle, after he died today. There are more avenues and boulevards and hospitals and schools”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know, today my uncle really focused on putting America on the side of the poor. Instead of our tradition of, you know, of fortifying oligarchies that were anti-communism, that was our major criteria. If you said you were against communists, of course, the people were the rich people, or aid was going to the rich people in those countries, and they were going to the military hunt us, our weapons were going to the hunt us to fight against the poor. And my uncle said, no, America should be on the side of the poor. And so he launched the Alliance for Progress. And USAID, which were intended to bring aid to the poorest people in those and build middle classes and take ourselves away. In fact, His most his favorite trip, his two favorite trips while he was present. His most favorite trip was to Ireland.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And ordered all of those men, all Americans home from Vietnam by 1965, with the first thousand coming home by December 63. And then in November, he, of course, just before that evacuation began, he was killed. And a week later, President Johnson remanded that order. And then a year after that, the Tunkin Gulf resolution, we sent 250,000, which is what they wanted my uncle to do, which he refused. And it became an American war. And then Nixon topped it off at 560,000, 56,000 Americans never came home, including my cousin, George Skakel, who died at the Tetoff And we killed a million Vietnamese and we got nothing for it.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he refused to send combat veterans soldiers abroad. He never sent a single soldier to his death abroad. And into combat, he sent 16,000. He resisted in Berlin in 62. He resisted in Laos. In sixty one he resisted. In Vietnam, Vietnam, they wanted him to put 250,000 troops. He only put 16,000 advisors, which was fewer troops. And he sent to get James Meredith into the Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. One black man he sent sixteen thousand and a month before he died he ordered them all. Actually, I think it was October 2nd, 1963. He heard that a Green Beret had died And he asked his aid for a combat, for a list of combat fatalities and the aid came back and there were 75 men had died in Vietnam at that point. And he said, That's too many. We're going to have no more any order. He signed a national security order. 263.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These huge aggregations of wealth above and widespread poverty below. And that's a configuration that is too unstable to support democracy sustainably. And we're supposed to be modeling democracy, but we're losing it. And I think we ought to have a foreign policy that restores our moral authority around the world, restores America As the embodiment of moral authority in which it was when my uncle was president. And as a purveyor of peace rather than, you know. Warlike nation, my uncle said he didn't want people in Africa and Latin America and Asia to think of when they think of America to picture a man with a gun and a bayonet. He wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the freedom of government from untoward influenced by corrupt corporate power. The end of this. Corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is now, I think, dominating our democracy, what Eisenhower warned about. against the emergence of the military-industrial complex. And then I prefer to talk about kind of the positive revision of. We should be doing in our country and globally, which is I see that the corporations are commoditizing us, are poisoning our children. Strip mining the wealth from our middle class and treating America as if it were business liquidation, converting assets to cash as quickly as possible and creating or exacerbating. There's huge disparity in wealth in our country, which is eliminating the middle class. and creating kind of a Latin American style feudal model.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say protection of the environment and the commons, you know, the air, the water, wildlife, fisheries, public lands, those assets, they cannot be reduced to private property ownership. The landscapes are Purple Mountain Majesty. The protection of the most vulnerable people in our society, people which would include children. and minorities, the restoration of the middle class and protection of labor, dignity, and decent pay for labor. bodily autonomy, a woman's right to choose or an individual's right to endure. Unwanted medical procedures, peace. The Democrats have always been anti-war, the refusal to use fear as a governing tool. FDR said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself because he recognized that tyrants and dictators could use fear to disable critical thinking. And overwhelm the desire for personal liberty.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Destroys the economic model of those alternative competitive sources of information. So that's true. But the point you make is an important point. The journalists themselves who probably didn't know about the TNI agreement, certainly I'm sure they didn't. They believe that they're doing the right thing by suppressing information that may challenge government proclamations on COVID. But I mean, there's a danger to that, and the danger is that. Once you appoint yourself an arbiter of what's true and what's not true. And there's really no end to the power that you have now assumed for yourself because And now your job is no longer to inform the public. Your job now is to manipulate the public. And if you end up manipulating the public in collusion with powerful entities, then you become the instrument.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you read their internal memorandum, including the statements of the leader of the trusted news initiative, if I think her name's Jessica, Jennifer Cecil. And you can go on our website and see her say a minute. She says, the purpose of this is that we're now look at us, they think we're competitors, but we're not. The real competitors are coming from all these alternative news sources now all over the network. Erning public trust in us and they're hurting our economic model. And they have to be choked off and crushed. And the way that we're going to do that is to. An agreement with the social media sites that if we label their information misinformation, the social media sites will deplatform it or they will throttle it or they will shadow ban it.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'm telling you is all well documented and I'm litigating on it right now so I'm part of a lawsuit against the DNI and so I know a lot about what happened and I have all this documented and people can go to our website there's a letter on my substack now to Michael Sherr of the Washington Post that outlines all this and gives all my sources. Because Michael Sherrick accused me of being a conspiracy theorist when he was actually part of a conspiracy, a true conspiracy. To suppress anybody who is departing from government orthodoxies by either censoring them completely or labeling them conspiracy theorists.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The AP and then the four media or the four social media groups, Microsoft, Twitter. Facebook and Google all signed on to the Trusted News Initiative. It was started by the BBC, organized by them, and the purpose of it was Was to make sure nobody could print anything about government that departed from government orthodox in the way it worked is the UPI, the AP, which are the news services that provide most of the news around the country. The Washington Post would decide what news was permissible to print. And a lot of it was about COVID, but also Biden's laptops, where it was impermissible to suggest that those were real or that, you know, they had stuff on there that was compromising. And by the way.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You always, the people in authority lie and they always have to be questioned and that their job was to speak with power and to be guardians of the First Amendment right to free expression. But if you look what happened during the pandemic Was the inverse of that kind of journalism where the major press organs in this country were instead of speaking truth to power, they were doing the opposite, they were broadcasting. Propaganda, they became propaganda organs for the government agencies. They were actually censoring the speech of anybody who dissensed of the powerless. And in fact, it was an organized conspiracy and it was the name of it was the Trusted News Initiative and some of the major press organs in our country signed on to it and they agreed. Not to print stories or facts that departed from government.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“have abandoned their traditional tradition of, you know, which was when I was a kid, listen, my house was filled with the greatest journalists alive at that time. People like Ben Bradley, like Anthony Lewis, Mary McGrory, Pete Hamill, Jerry, Jack Newfield, Jimmy Breslin, and many, many others. And after my father died, they started the RFK journalism awards to recognize integrity and courage, you know, journalistic integrity and courage. And for that generation of journalism, they thought, they believed that the function of journalists was to maintain this posture of fear skepticism toward any aggregation of power, including government authority.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with you, but I actually think that the entire field of journalism has. as really ashamed itself in recent years because it's become the principal newspapers in this country and the television stations, the legacy media.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Directly through I mean, there's certain press organs that have been linked to the agency that the people who run those organs, things like the Daily Beast, now Rolling Stone, editor of Note Rolling Stone, Noah Schlackman. Has a deep relationships with the intelligence community, Ceylon, Daily Coast.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they agreed at that time to disband Operation Mockingbird in'73. But there's indications they didn't do that. And they still, the CIA today is the biggest funder of journalism around the world. The biggest funder is through USAID. I'm the USA, the United States funds journalism in almost every country in the world. You know, it owns newspapers. It has journalists hundreds of thousands and thousands of journalists on its payroll. They're not supposed to be doing that in the United States. But in 2016, President Obama changed the law to make it legal now for the CIA to propagandize Americans. And I think, you know, we can't look at the Ukraine war and how that was. how the narrative has been formed in the minds of Americans. Say that the CIA had nothing to do with that.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“State secrecy agreements with the CIA, which if they even reveal that they have signed that, they can go to jail for 20 years and have their assets removed, et cetera. The influence that the agency has, the capacity to influence events at every level in our country is really frightening. And then for most of its life, the CIA was banned from propagandizing Americans. We learned that they were doing it anyway. So in 1973, during the church committee hearings, we learned that the CIA had a program called Operation Mockingbird. Where they had at least four hundred members, leading members of the United States press corps. In the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc. We were secretly working for the agency and steering news coverage to support CIA priorities.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it was seductive to them. But everybody, you know, Congress, when they first voted it in place, Congress, both political parties said. If we create this thing it could turn into a monster and it could undermine our values. And today it's so powerful and then nobody knows what its budget is. Plus it has its own investment In cuteel, which has invested, you know, made, I think 2,000 investments in Silicon Valley. Oh, it has ownership of a lot of these tech companies and a lot of the CEOs, those tech companies.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But Allan Ellis, who was essentially the first head of the agency, made a series of legislative machinations and political machinations that gave additional powers to the agency and opened up what they called the Plans Division, which is the Plans Division is the dirty tricks. It's the Black Ops fixing elections, murdering what they call executive action, which means killing foreign leaders and making small wars and bribing and blackmailing peoples stealing elections and that kind of thing. And the reason at that time, you know, we were in the middle of the Cold War. And Truman and then Eisenhower did not want to go to war. They didn't want to commit troops. And it seemed to them that this was a way of kind of fighting the Cold War secretly without and doing it at a minimal cost by changing events sort of invisibly.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which means information gathering, which is important, is to gather and consolidate information many, many different sources from all over the world and put those in reports. So the White House, the President can make good decisions based upon valid information, evidence-based decision-making.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what he said to me, so I don't know if that's true, but I know that that's significant. He's a smart person and he ran the agency and he was the Secretary of State. It's no mystery how that happened. We know the history. The CIA was originally, first of all, there was great reluctance in 1947 that we had for the first time agency in this country during World War II called the OSS. That was disbanded after the war because Congress said Having a secret supply agency is incompatible. a democracy secret spy agencies are things that, like the KGB, the Stasi and East Germany, Savak and Iran and Peep and Chile, whatever, you know, all over the world, they all have to do it. Not something that you can have, it's antithetical to democracy to have that. In 1947, we created Truman signed it in, but it was initially. Has to be an agency.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not the entire institution. My daughter-in-law is helping to run my campaign was a CIA in the clandestine services for all of her career. She was a spy in the Weapons Mass Destruction Program in the Mideast and in China. And there's 22,000 people who work for the CIA, probably 20,000 of those are patriotic Americans and really good public servants and they're doing important work for our country. But the institution is corrupt because the higher ranks of the institution. In fact, Mike Pompeo said something like this to me the other day, who was the director of the CIA. He said when I was there, I did not do a good job of cleaning up that agency. And he said the entire upper bureaucracy. Of that agency are people who do not believe in the institutions of democracy.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's riveting to read. And I recommend people who do not take my word for it and don't take anybody else's word for it. Go ahead and do the research yourself in one way to do that is probably the most efficient way is to read Douglas' books. He has all the references there.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, there's no, I mean, it's impossible to even talk about a tiny of the fraction of the evidence here. What I suggest to people, there are hundreds of books written about this, that assemble this evidence, mobilize the evidence. The best book to me for people to read is James Douglas' book, which is called The Unspeakable. And Douglas does this extraordinary scholar, and he does this amazing job of digesting and summarizing and mobilizing all of the, you know, probably a million documents and the evidence from all these confessions that have come out into a coherent story.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was a division where essentially one guy on that committee believed it was primarily the mafia. But Richard Schweitzer was the senator or head of the committee, said, you know, straight out, the CIA was involved in the murder of the president of the United States. And I've talked to most of the staff on that committee and they said, yeah, and the CIA was stonewalling us all the way through. The actual people that the CIA appointed George Johannes, who the CIA appointed as a liaison to the committee, they brought him out of retirement. He had been one of the masterminds of the assassination.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was recruited by James Jesus Angleton, who was the director of counterintelligence. And then sent on a fake defection to Russia and then brought back to Dallas. And people didn't know that. Even though it's been known for decades it never percolated into the mainstream media because they have such a, you know, they have such an allergy to anything that challenges the Warren Report. When Congress investigated my uncle's murder, In the 1970s. church committee did and they did you know two and a half year investigation and they had many many more documents and much more testimony Available to them than the Warren Commission had. And this was a decade after the Warren Commission. They came to the conclusion that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Evidence that the CIA was involved in Uncle's murder and that they were subsequently involved in the cover up and continue to be involved in the cover-up. I mean, there's still 5,000 documents that they won't release 60 years later. Is I think so insurmountable and so mountainous and overwhelming that it's beyond any reasonable doubt. Including dozens of confessions of people who were involved in the In the assassination, but every kind of document. And, you know, I mean, it came as a surprise recently to most Americans, I think. The release of these documents in which the press, the American media finally acknowledged that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset, he was recruited in 19 fifty seven he was a marine working at the Atasui Air Force Base, which was the CIA Air Force Base with a U-2 flights, which was a CIA program.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, I don't think they're not listening. I don't understand AI. Okay. I do know I can see. It's this kind of turnquetalitarianism that once you put these systems in place, you know, they can be misused to enslave people. And they can be misused in wars to subjugate, to kill, to do all of these bad things. And I don't think there's anybody on Capitol Hill who understands this. You know, we need to bring in the tech community and say, tell us what these regulations need to look like, you know, so that there can be freedom to innovate so that we can. Milk AI for all of the good things, but not fall into these traps that are going to these existential threats that pose existential threats to humanity.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get fixated on these little wars and these comic book depictions of good versus evil and we all go and go off and give them the weapons and enrich the military complex, but we're on the road to perdition if we don't end this.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we need to stop it, and we can easily, a biological weapons treaty is the easiest thing in the world to do. We can verify it, we can enforce it, and everybody wants to agree to it. Only insane people do not want to continue this kind of research. There's no reason to do it. So there are these existential threats to all of humanity now out there, like AI and biological weapons. We need to stop fighting each other, start competing on economic game fields, playing fields instead of military playing fields, which will be good for all of humanity and that we need to sit down with each other and negotiate reasonable treaties on how we regulate AI and biological weapons. And nobody's talking about this in this political race right now. Nobody's talking about it in a government.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now we should be putting all the weapons of war aside and sitting down with those guys and say, how are we going to do this? There's much more important things to do. This stuff is going to kill us if we don't figure out how to regulate it. And leadership needs to look down the road at what is the real risk here. And the real risk is that AI will enslave us for one thing and then destroy us and do all this other stuff and have a biological weapons. We're now all working on these biological weapons and we're doing biological weapons from Ebola and dengue fever and all of these other bad things and we're making ethnic bioweapons bioweapons that can only kill Russians bioweapons that the Chinese are making that can kill people who don't who don't have Chinese genes. All of this is now within reach. We're actively doing it.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can, you know, it just understands our job. Look, I know you know a lot about AI, right? And you know how dangerous it is potentially to humanity and what opportunity is it also offers. Could kill us all. I mean, Elon said Fruce is going to steal our job, then it's going to kill us, right? And it's probably not hyperbole. Actually, if it follows the laws of biological evolution, which are just the laws of mathematics, that's probably a good end point for it, a potential endpoint. So we need, it's going to happen, but we need to make sure it's regulated and it's regulated properly for safety. In every country. And that includes Russia and China and Iran.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Khrushchev took his word. Act his tanks off first and my uncle ordered Lemaid LeMay had mounted bulldozer ploughs on the front of the tanks to plow down the Berlin Wall. And the Russians had come. So it was just, you know, it was his generals trying to provoke a war. But they started talking to each other. And then after he wrote that letter, they agreed that they would install a hotline so they could talk to each other and they wouldn't have to go through intermediaries. And so at Jack's house on the Cape, there was a red phone that we knew if we picked it up, Khrushchev would And there was another one in the White House. But they knew it was important to talk to each other, you know, and you just wish that we had that kind of leadership today”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It occurs to me now that we're all on an arc and that there is not another one and that the entire fate of the planet And all of its creatures and all of the children are dependent on the decisions we make, and you and I have a moral obligation to go forward with each other as friends. And immediately after that, he said that right after the Berlin crisis in 1962, General Curtis LeMay tried to provoke a war with an incident at Checkpoint Charlie, which was the entrance and exit through the Berlin Wall in Berlin. And the Russian tanks had come to the wall, the US tanks have come to the wall, and there was a standoff. And my uncle had sent a message to Khrushchev then through Dobren and saying, my back is at the wall. I cannot. I have no place. Please back off. And then we will back off.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Georgie brought it and handed it to Pierre Salinger, folded it in the New York Times. And he gave it to my uncle, and it was this beautiful letter which he said, you know, my uncle had talked to him about the children who were played, you know, we play 29 grandchildren who were playing in his yard, and he's saying, what is our moral basis for making a decision that could kill these children so they'll never write a poem, they'll never participate in an election, they'll never run for office. How can we morally make a decision that is going to eliminate life for these beautiful kids? And he has said that to Khrushchev, and Khrushchev wrote in this letter back saying that he was now sitting as this Dacha on the Black Sea and that he was thinking about what my uncle Jack had said to him at Vienna, and he regretted very deeply not having taken the olive leaf that Jack had all offered him. And then he said, you know,”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, he used to come to her. They really liked him. He was very attractive. He was always laughing and joking. He would do rope climbing contests with my father. He would do push-up contests with my father. He could do the Russian dancing, the Cossack dancing. And he would do that for us and teach us that. And we knew he was a spy to. And this was at the time of the James Bond films were first coming out. So it was really exciting for us actual Russian spy in our house. The State Department was horrified by it. But anyway, when Khrushchev after Vienna and after the pagues, And Krushf had second thoughts And he sent this long letter to my uncle. And he didn't want to go through his State Department or his embassy. He wanted to enron them. And he was friends with Bolshevik. So he gave Georgie the”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Khrushchev and Vienna early on in his term, he went over there and Khrushchev snubbed him. Khrushchev lectured him imperiously about the terror of American imperialism. And rebuffed any, you know, they did agree not to go into Laos. They made an agreement that kept the United States, kept my uncle from sending troops to Laos. But it had been a disaster, Vienna. So then. We had a spy that used to come to our house all the time. I cut Georgie Balshagoy and he was this Russian spy. My parents had met at the embassy. They had gone to a party or a reception that Russian embassy and he had approached them and they knew he was a GRU agent and KGB, he was both.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so when he first became president, he actually agreed to meet Khrushchev in Geneva to do a summit. And by the way, Eisenhower had wanted to do the same thing. Eisenhower wanted peace. And he was going to meet in Vienna. At peace summit was blown up, he was going to try to do to end the Cold War. Eisenhower wasn't the last year of his in May of 1968. That was torpedoed by the CIA during the U two crash. You know, they sent a U-2 over the Soviet Union. It got shot down. And then they told, and then Allen told us. Old Eisenhower to deny that we had a program. They didn't know that the Russians had captured Gary Francis Powers. And so, and that blew up the peace talks between Eisenhower and Khrushchev. And so there was a lot of tension. My uncle wanted to break that tension. He agreed to meet with...”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But actually, there was a big division between Khrushchev and his joint chiefs and his intelligence apparatus. And they both at one point discovered they were both in the same situation. They were surrounded by spies and military personnel who were intent on going to war, and they were the two guys resisting it. So when my uncle had this idea of being the peace president from the beginning, he told Ben Bradley, he was one of his best friends who was one of the publisher of the Washington Post. The editor in chief at that time, he's at. Ben Bradley asked him what do you want in your gravestone? And my uncle said, he kept the peace. He said, the principal job of a president of the United States is to keep the country out of war.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They had no idea anything about Khrushchev, about how he saw the world, and they saw the Kremlin itself as a monolith, you know, this kind of, you know, the same way that we look at Putin today, that it's all they have this ambition of world conquest and it's driving them and there's nothing else they think about. They're absolutely single-minded about it.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, you know, it was the most ferocious, horrific war with people starving, people, you know, committing cannibalism, you know, eating the dogs, the cats, eating their shoe leather, easing to death by the thousands, etc. Khrushchev did not want the last thing he wanted was a war. And the last thing my uncle wanted was a war. But the CIA did not know anything about Khrushchev. And the reason for that. Is this there was a mole at Langley so that every time the CIA got a spy in the Kremlin, he would immediately be killed. So they had no eyes in the Kremlin. There were literally hundreds of Russian spies who had defected the United States and were in the Kremlin who were killed during that period.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His boat had been cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. Many of his three of his crewmen had been killed, one of them badly burned. He pulled that guy with a lanyard in his teeth six miles to an island in the middle of the night, and then they hid out there for ten days. And, you know, he came back. Like I said, he was the only president of the United States that earned the Purple Heart. Meanwhile, Khrushchev had been at Stalingrad, which was the worst place to be on the planet, you know, probably in the 20th century. And, you know, Auschwitz or one of the death camps.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source