Name: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #464
Uploaded: 2023-09-25T19:03:51.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #464' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #464' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-25. Transcript available.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #464

Grateful to announce that we have some new tour locations coming up.
Greenville, South Carolina, November 8th at the Peace Center.
Huntsville, Alabama, November 19th at the Von Braun Center.
And Atlanta, Georgia, November 29th and 30th at the Fox Theater.
Tickets for these shows will be available this Wednesday, September 27th at 10
a.m. local time
with the pre-sale code RATKING.
General on sale begins Friday, November 29th at 10 a.m. local.
We also have some tickets left for Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, Norfolk, V.A.,
Roanoke, V.A., and Huntington, West Virginia.
Get all your tickets through theovahn.com slash T-O-U-R to avoid secondary
sites.
Today's guest is a presidential candidate for the 2024 U.S. presidential
election.
He's an author.
He's an attorney.
He's an environmentalist.
I'm grateful to have him return to the podcast to discuss his campaign and see
what's going on.
He's a dear friend, and I'm grateful for his time.
Today's guest is Robert Kennedy Jr.
Shine that light on me
I'll sit and tell you my stories
Shine on me
And I will find a song
Thanks, man.
Yeah, I feel pretty good.
I got some vitamin D today.
I went for a run, you know.
I think I was feeling, like, overwhelmed.
So, sometimes when I feel like...
Even if I feel anything too much, it's like I feel like if I do something in
motion, it helps me.
You know, and getting some vitamin D helps me, too.
Yeah, move muscle, change the thought.
Yeah.
But I had the same experience yesterday where, you know, they had me scheduled,
like, back-to-back all day.
And I said, I just need to get...
And I just canceled one of my appointments, and I went out in the sun for an
hour, and I just...
It was transformative.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I think we forget that we're supposed to be plants like that, you know.
Yeah.
Or that we're part...
Because are humans part plants, too, do you think?
No.
No.
Although the microbiome has a lot of plants, and it's...
I guess it's part of our body, and it's a plant, I suppose.
But we are definitely...
We're a zoonotic species, rather than a plant species.
Dang.
Yeah, sometimes I guess I feel like a plant.
Or I don't know if I sit by a window, I feel good, you know.
If somebody comes up and smells me, if I smell good, I feel good, I guess.
So that's kind of like a flower, maybe.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm losing my mind.
Good to see you, man.
You too.
Yeah, you look great.
You did.
You look amazing.
Well, I feel pretty good, man.
I'm just...
I've been staying pretty busy.
I'm trying to think of what's been going on.
Have you been in Nashville?
Yeah, I've been over there a decent amount, you know.
I couldn't believe how that is growing there.
Yeah.
And there's like 20 grains above that sea.
They must have all the grains from everywhere in the United States there.
Yeah, it's been busy.
I mean, even since I just moved there like three years ago, it's like, I'll go
down the streets now, and everything's changing.
It's really nice.
One of the things I like best there, I have the best neighbors there.
My neighbors are really nice.
And it still has a really small, it has a small town vibe.
Like, you couldn't cheat on your wife there.
That's what I tell people.
You could not do it.
I mean, I think a lot of people have tried, but you could.
It's just, there's too much.
It still has like that, a little bit of that Southern gossip vibe, you know.
Yeah.
Do you have like, you know, like a little house there?
Yeah.
I got me a little house in a neighborhood.
It's pretty normal.
Nothing too fancy.
I mean, it's a nice home, but it's nothing like, I don't have like a water
slide or anything, you know, or anything like that.
Or like a.
I have an axe.
Yeah, I don't have that.
Yeah, I don't have an axe throwing.
But it's been good, man.
It's been a nice change of pace.
I feel a little bit more connected to just like regular society.
Because I think in LA, it's like, it's just a different universe out here than
like regular cities or towns in America for sure.
And there's so many people here, you know.
I think people start to feel a little bit, I don't want to say expendable, but
it's like some people, you know, you're not going to see them ever again.
So there's like a different amount of value sometimes to the interaction that
you have to put into it, you know.
Like in a smaller community, you have to have, you have to create a level of
probably more respect for people and stuff.
And like, whereas in a city, you're just going to, does that make any sense?
Yeah, I remember who was, there's a writer for the New Yorker.
I'm trying to remember his name, but he's kind of a philosopher.
And he was talking about the, that there's a formula actually that, you know,
people are rude in big cities because the chance of them ever running into you
again is more remote.
Whereas if you live in a small town, I've lived in Montgomery, Alabama, which
is really a small town and Hainville, Alabama.
And then I lived in Deadwood, South Dakota and, you know, a couple of other
small towns in my life and everybody's nice.
And when you're driving down the road and your pickup truck, everybody who
passes you on the road waves their hand like that.
But he was saying, he was telling the story that, that Mother Teresa, when she
came to New York, she tried to start one of her little, you know, monasteries
to take care of the poor in New York.
And that they eventually ended up closing it because they didn't want to put an
elevator in the place.
And they said, no, we'll just carry the sick people up the stairs ourselves.
I love that idea.
Yeah, but in New York, the public health agencies wouldn't let them do it.
So they said, okay, we're leaving.
But she at one point, Mayor Koch had a, uh, had a heart attack.
Mayor Koch?
Yeah.
Okay.
Ed Koch was, uh, he was, uh, the mayor of New York for long, long-term mayor.
And he had a heart attack and he nearly died.
And she went to visit him in his hospital bed.
And she thought it was a great kindness because, you know, she's a Catholic and
he's a Jewish mayor.
And it just was a, you know, it was kind of a spiritual act.
But when she was up there, she asked him, can you get me a parking place in
front of my, uh, in front of my building?
And, uh, as a joke or no, she wanted a parking place, but it kind of, well, of
course you would give her a parking place.
Have you got, oh, there he is, there he is with Mother Teresa.
That's hilarious.
So, uh, but she, you know, it's just the idea that she had an angle, you know,
once you go to New York, you always got to have an angle.
Yeah.
And maybe it is, you're just like, and I always feel like LA is kind of like an
air, it always feels like the whole city feels like a little bit like an
airport to me.
It's like, I feel like I never leave the airport here.
Like it just, the whole, it just, it feels like this thoroughfare of just
people going in and out, you know?
Yeah.
Um, I, sometimes I start to feel like America starts to feel like that
sometimes.
I think it starts to feel to a lot of people like, um, it almost feels like a
shell company sometimes.
Like a shopping mall.
Yeah.
Or like, it feels like an LLC for like big bit.
It starts to sometimes feel like an LLC for like big business.
Yeah.
Does that make any sense?
That makes a lot of sense.
I mean, I think that's what it's becoming.
And one of the things that like I, I'm talking about a lot now is this, um, you
know, the, is housing price.
I housing prices.
You said, yeah, you know, I was, um, I tried the Monsanto case in San Francisco
with a big team of attorneys.
And we tried three cases in a row.
So that we had about 20,000 cases and the way that, you know, the, this kind of,
um, uh, uh, multi-state litigation works.
And the case was that they were, it was poisonous, right?
Yeah.
It was, it was causing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Okay.
So we had enough science to prove that it could cause on, it did, it could
cause non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
And then we had, we ended up having 50,000 people who had gotten on the Hodgkin's
lymphoma.
And, but the way that you try the case, you try them one at a time until if you
win three or four in a row, then the company says, and Monsanto says, okay, now
we know what the value of the case.
So the first case, we got 289 million.
Yeah.
I just saw this brought that up.
Wow.
The second case we got, um, and so that was one client and that was one, that
was, uh, Dwayne Johnson, who, uh, not the rock.
You're not talking about him, not the rock.
This was African-American school superintendent.
He, you know, his job was to spray the weeds on the property and keep the, mow
the lawn and do that on a school, public school.
And he was, he had a backpack on a sprayer and it leaked all the time.
And he began getting lesions on his back and he called up Monsanto.
He called them three times and said, could this be from, uh, cause it says safe
as aspirin, nothing could happen to you.
And it has pictures.
It had pictures on the label of people spraying their weeds, wearing like Bermuda
shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.
So it was implying that you don't have to take any protection with this stuff.
Cause it's so safe.
Wow.
Oh, he thought he felt like it was coming from that, from that.
And it turned out to be non-hodulent lymphoma.
It was precancerous lesions and, but they would never return his phone call and
they knew it and they just didn't want to, you know?
So they, they, uh, they sandbagged him and he, um, and, and he, he was the
sweetest guy.
When we got him on the stand and he was married to this beautiful, uh, Hispanic
woman.
They had fallen in love the first time they saw each other at community college
and they had this wonderful marriage and he couldn't sleep in the bed with her
anymore.
Because he had so many lesions on his body and, you know, it was just, he
wouldn't go in the swimming pool.
Cause he, you know, if anybody saw him in the pool, they would think they were
going to get a disease.
So his life was, it was just so miserable.
And the jury loves him.
They gave him $289 million and then the next one, I forgot.
We, we got, I think we got around 300 million.
And then the second, the third one we asked for a bit was a couple who were
both gardeners, home gardeners, and they brought their dog with them to home
garden.
They had a Labrador retriever, a Labrador who died of non-hydrous lymphoma.
What?
He got at the same time, they did.
The couple both got at the same time and the dog got it.
The dog died first.
And then, um, the, uh, you know, then they were, uh, they were really sick.
We asked the jury for a billion dollars and we had a big argument about it.
You know, what do you ask the jury?
Cause you don't want to ask them for too much.
Cause then they think you're overreaching and they may punish you.
Oh, with the one guy who was arguing doing the closing argument, a lawyer
called Brent Wisner, very young lawyer, um, but really brilliant.
And he, uh, and we were all saying, you should ask him for 300 million.
That's what the other juries were paying us.
And he said, I'm going to ask him for a billion.
I feel like the jury likes us.
They came back with 2.2 billion.
No, we asked him for a billion.
Yeah.
And, uh, so they were pissed at Monsanto.
They were so angry because we also showed that that's the lawyer right there.
I would just walk by Brent Wisner.
Wow.
Um, God, I got to pick up some Monsanto on the way home.
Yeah.
You got to go to law school.
You know, one or the other, man, I gotta, you know, I gotta get a case like
this.
But anyway, I, I didn't mean to go off on this, but what I was saying is when
we were trying
these cases, we were trying one after the other.
So I ended up spending like the better part of a year in San Francisco.
And every morning when I was in San Francisco, before court, I would go down to
the court,
out to the, uh, to the gym in union square, union square is the center of San
Francisco.
And it's the center of commerce.
It has all the big, um, you know, Ame