Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1999 - Robert Kennedy Jr.
Uploaded: 2023-06-15T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1999 - Robert Kennedy Jr.' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1999 - Robert Kennedy Jr.' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-15. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1999 - Robert Kennedy Jr.

I like them because they keep people from locking in but one of the things I
wanted to make sure
um I did in this conversation is not interrupt you because uh it's it's very
frustrating for me
when um I'm hearing people talk in these which should be long form
conversations about very
important and nuanced things and you know I think one of the things that
happens is people are very
concerned with letting you say things that is going to get them in trouble or
get their channel
in trouble like there's a there's people that are doing a lot of self-censoring
and I think they're
doing that also when they have these conversations with you because they want
to establish right away
that they have problems with you and they have problems with some of the
positions that a lot of
people have problems with I was one of those people so when I had heard of you
in the past before I had
read your book and before I'd met you I had no information on you but there was
this narrative
and this narrative was you were anti-vax and you believed in pseudoscience and
you were kind of
loony I didn't look into it at all I just took it at face value because that's
what everybody had said
and in my mind vaccines have been one of the most important medical advancements
in human history
saved countless lives protected children and I thought very strongly that they
were important
I didn't have any information on that either this was also just a narrative
that I've adopted from cursory
reading of news articles and you know not really getting into the subject at
all then the pandemic
happens and I had quite a few very reasonable liberal people rational people
people that I trusted their
mind recommend the real Anthony Fauci your book and I'm like Robert Kennedy
wrote a book about the
about Anthony Fauci like what is this gonna be about this is my initial
reaction you've got this
what I perceive to be a kind of
fringy thinking
You know almost conspiracy theorist type person that's not based in fact what
their argument was and
He had written a book on Anthony Fauci and this was right around the time where
I was
You know, I was very concerned with the way things were going that people are
just blindly trusting
That there was only one way out of this that was that was kind of bothering me
particularly what I had known that so many people had
Gotten the virus had been fine. So I'm like, well, what is what's the reality
of this?
So then I read the book
And I've talked about it multiple times on the podcast
But if what you were saying in that book was not true, I do not understand how
you are not being sued
You you you would instantly immediately be sued the book was
Very successful
It sold a lot of copies, but it was mysteriously absent from certain certain
bestseller lists
The people were not promoting that book at all
But through word of mouth and through the time that we live in
Through this time where there was so much uncertainty and people were very
confused and also suspicious
They were suspicious that they're being told a very a narrative and they were
starting to remember that. Hey, this has happened in the past
These kind of narratives about medications that these are they have happened in
the past
They just never happened where this is like the whole country is being
convinced that this is the way to do it
so I read your book and
By the end of the book it was so it was so disturbing that sometimes I had to
put it away and just read fiction for a few days
I was like, I don't want this in my head right now
You know because I listen on audio and a lot of times I'm listening in the
sauna. So I'm listening while I'm already getting tortured
Sorry, it's 185 degrees and I'm listening to this this book that if it's
telling the truth just about the AIDS crisis
Just about the AIDS crisis just about the use of AZT just about
All of it all of it
So I I had I'd seen numerous interviews with you and you know
You seemed very reasonable and very rational and
Then I was like is this possible that this is the guy that's telling the truth
is this possible that
Everyone that I know that had these strong opinions of you that most of them at
least were like me
They had formed these opinions through this a glance at a headline someone
talking about you on a on a television show and
So then we run into each other in Aspen
Just random that was the weirdest moment because we were both staring at each
other. Yeah, and we almost did it like a full 360. Yeah
Yeah
I yeah, I noticed you walking I'm like I that's yeah, it is
So I said hey, what's up?
so
So first of all, I wanted to ask you if you could just please explain how you
got into these
Controversial positions in the first place
Why how did you adopt these these opinions that people find so controversial
because you started out as
An environmental guy
right up?
Yeah, and I and I'll say one thing about that book is that it um
It is depressing to read and like my wife could not read it. She she was gonna
read it out of loyalty to me
and I just said you can't do that because
It would have depressed her so much, you know and I know this is not a good
advertisement for this book, but it's you know, she
There's so much about documentation of corruption and you know the sort of
brutality towards children and
And I didn't want her reading that her life is about making people laugh making
people joyful
You know, which is it which is its own contribution to kind of global health,
you know people who can make you laugh
Are doing you doing something for you that is gonna probably extend your
lifetime you look at?
You know, I look at Norman Lear
You know, it's like 96 years old or whatever and he he's like look like 50 and
Carl Reiner and all these people who you know
There's something about laughter that makes you know that is good for you and
um and so it you know, I admire anybody who who took it on to read that book
and and made it through I
I I I was you know kind of one of the leading environmentalists
In the country. I founded I started I went to work for commercial fishermen on
the Hudson River in 1983 when I first got sober
and I
I wanted to do something with my life that I
You know that I felt drawn to and I'd always been an outdoors person. I've
always been a fisherman and
outdoors wildlife kayaking and all that stuff and I went to work for a
commercial fishermen on the Hudson River
We began suing polluters. They purchased a patrol boat began patrolling the
river and we sued I while I was there
We sued over 500 polluters
We forced polluters to spend almost five billion dollars on remediation on the
Hudson and
And today, you know partially as a result of our work the Hudson is now the
richest waterway in the North Atlantic
It produces more biomass per gallon more pounds of fish per acre than any other
waterway in the Atlantic Ocean north the equator
the miraculous resurrection and when when when I first started working on the
Hudson and
It caught fire. It was dead. It was dead water zero dissolved oxygen for 20
miles north of New York City
20 miles south of Albany no life in it
Um
Caught fire. It was down polluted. It caught fire. It would turn colors every
week
Depending on what color they were painting the trucks at the GM plant in Tarrytown,
you know, it was really my father toured it in
1967 and it was just it was regarded as a national joke
Well today, it's an it's an international model for ecosystem protection
and the miraculous resurrection
It's the only waterway in the North Atlantic that still has strong spawning
stocks of all of its historical species of migratory fish of the
Anadromous fish like striped asturgeon, herring, alewives
blue crab, etc
um and
the
the
and the miraculous resurrection the Hudson inspired the creation of new river
keepers we copyrighted the name and
We started helping these other groups get started and today is the biggest
water protection group in the world
So we have 350 water keepers each one has a patrol boat each one patrols their
local waterway
And they sue polluters and we're in 46 countries
so in
2005 I
was representing a bunch of
Water keepers all over the United States and in the provinces of Canada
Suing coal-burning power plants and cement kilns for discharging mercury two
years before
2003
the
National Academy of Sciences and the FDA had published a report like a five-year
study
That showed that every fresh water fish in America at dangerous levels of
mercury in its flesh
the CDC
Simultaneously published a study
That showed that one out of every six American women
At levels high enough in her core blood
In or that her child would have some kind of intellectual deficiency like lost
IQ
Etc. And where's the mercury coming from? The mercury was largely
Coming from coal-burning power plants. It's in the geology in the coal and it
precipitates out
You know when there's rain if you when you burn the coal it's in the you know,
it's an element so it doesn't degrade
and when the rain comes it falls onto the landscapes and it washes off the
landscapes into the rivers and
The fish were all contaminated. We know that saltwater fish like the big predatory
species that have mercury
But the freshwater fish are just as bad
And it struck me then
That we were living in a science fiction nightmare when my children and the
children of every other American
Could now no longer engage in the seminal primal activity of American youth
that I had grown up with
Of your parents taking you to the local fishing hole and then coming home and
safely eating the fish
You can't do that anymore in the United States of America or anywhere in North
America
And so we started suing coal plants and cement kilns which were the primary
contributor
Of mercury and there were a lot of people suing coal plants back then
They were suing them for other reasons for ozone particulates for acid rain for
For carbon, etc. And we were focused the water keepers were mainly focused on
mercury
So I was also pushing legislation about mercury
lobbying
EPA to to reduce it and I was giving lectures all over the place
So these women start showing up at every lecture that I give
public lectures and
and they would come and sit in the front seat
Occupy the front they come early
Occupy the front row and then afterwards they'd stay late and they would ask to
talk to me and
They would say to me in a cut in a very respectful and by the way
These women were all very all looked kind of similar. They were very pulled
together
They were you know, they were women in childbearing years
As it turns out they were all the mothers of intellectually disabled children
and they believed
That their children had been injured by the vaccines by mercury in the vaccines
so
I
So they would say to me in kind of a
Respectful but vaguely scolding way
If you're really interested in
uh in mercury
Contamination to get exposure to children
You need to look at the vaccines now. This is something I didn't want to do
because I you know, I first of all
I'm not a public health person. I wanted to do environmental stuff
Second of all, I've been involved since I was a little kid in the whole area of
intellectual disabilities
My family was part of the dna of my family. My aunt had been intellectually
disabled. My aunt rose very mine
Yuna shriver who was my godmother
founded special olympics
In 1969, but she she was called before it was called special olympics. It was
called camp shriver
She lived 10 minutes from my house and I would go over there every weekend
To be a hugger and a coach in special olympics and then when I was in
When I was in high school because this was so much part of my family dna
I spent 200 hours in what say a humph with retarded
um, you know working doing service
So but it wasn't something I wanted to do with my life other people in my
family were devoting their lives to that my cousin anthony shriver
Started best buddies and and many other people my family had written a lot of
the legislation that protected