Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast.
Speaker 2: You can't predict anything.
Speaker 1: The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
Speaker 1: Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
Speaker 1: for el First Light has performance apparel to support every
Speaker 1: hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
Speaker 1: dot com, f I R S T L I t
Speaker 1: E dot com. What you guys are about to hear
Speaker 1: and watch in some cases is an interview with a politician,
Speaker 1: or at least an aspiring politician. It's Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Speaker 1: Who's making a bid for the White House. We do
Speaker 1: not have a hell of a lot of politicians on
Speaker 1: the show, but it does happen now and then by
Speaker 1: the best of our recollection.
Speaker 3: And Karinn and I texted about this.
Speaker 1: We've done over five hundred episodes and had on seven
Speaker 1: elected officials. That list includes five Republicans and two Democrats,
Speaker 1: as well as a politician's kid. And don't go looking back,
Speaker 1: it wasn't Chelsea Clinton. Now Kennedy here is an independent.
Speaker 1: So that's a third party category. So our first third
Speaker 1: party category independent category, and I'll point out I think
Speaker 1: it is a welcome category because I get a little
Speaker 1: fed up with the two party system that has enjoyed
Speaker 1: a monopoly on the office of the President of the
Speaker 1: United States of America since get this eighteen fifty six. Now,
Speaker 1: I understand, we've got a hotly contested presidential race coming
Speaker 1: up here, and we have candidates who have entirely different
Speaker 1: world old views, entirely different priorities, entirely different personalities. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't want anyone to get their panties in a
Speaker 1: bunch about us having on one candidate and not the others.
Speaker 1: All Right, So I'm telling you this. If you don't
Speaker 1: hear from Trump or Biden on the Meat Eater Podcast,
Speaker 1: it ain't our fault. I would love to have them
Speaker 1: on if they come on. If you come on, I
Speaker 1: promise a friendly conversation. All you gotta do is reach
Speaker 1: out to our producer Krin, which is what RFK Juniors
Speaker 1: people did, and we will have you on. We'll have
Speaker 1: a friendly conversation that sticks to personal background, the outdoors
Speaker 1: and natural resources issues. If you jam some other stuff
Speaker 1: in there, you'll probably be okay. But we're gonna try
Speaker 1: to focus on those three things. Now, let's get out
Speaker 1: at the show and learn some stuff right about pollution,
Speaker 1: assassination and the ways in which our future. Let me
Speaker 1: put this way, the ways in which decisions we make
Speaker 1: now are going to impact the future of natural resources
Speaker 1: and the management of the lands and waters where you
Speaker 1: hunt and fish. That's what we're going to talk about now.
Speaker 1: And we will be looking for our emails from the
Speaker 1: Trump and Biden campaign, and when they reach out, they
Speaker 1: will come on the show.
Speaker 3: It'll be all kinds of fun. Thank you everybody.
Speaker 1: Today we're joined by independent presidential candidate Robert F.
Speaker 3: Kennedy Junior, who has been every morning I.
Speaker 1: Read the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times,
Speaker 1: and I've been admiring how much heat you get from
Speaker 1: the left and the right.
Speaker 3: That's got to feel good.
Speaker 1: So it comes, it comes like an equal It comes
Speaker 1: with equal intensity from from each side.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now it is. I was getting it much worse
Speaker 2: from the left until about I'd say three weeks ago.
Speaker 2: And at that point, I think Trump organization was looking
Speaker 2: at some of the polls which show that I was
Speaker 2: taking more votes away from conservatives than it was from liberals,
Speaker 2: and I think then you know they turned out me. Oh,
Speaker 2: you know, I think you're right. It's you know what,
Speaker 2: I sticked out a position in the middle. I said
Speaker 2: that when I announced a year ago, I said, I'm
Speaker 2: not I said, you know, we have this toxic polarization
Speaker 2: in the country that is more dangerous than at any
Speaker 2: time since the American Civil War. It's it's amplified by
Speaker 2: the social media algorithms, which have learn the way to
Speaker 2: keep eyeballs on the site is to four to five
Speaker 2: people's worldviews, and that fees into this polarization because if
Speaker 2: you're a Republican and you live next door to a
Speaker 2: Democrat and you ask the same question of Google, you're
Speaker 2: likely to get a different answer because they know that
Speaker 2: if they reinforce what you already believe, you're going to
Speaker 2: stay on that site longer. So they're feeding you. They're
Speaker 2: manipulating us all with these algorithms, and those algorithms, which
Speaker 2: are now no longer even under the control of Google
Speaker 2: or any of these other sites, are feeding this polarization.
Speaker 2: And to me, it's very, very dangerous because you can't
Speaker 2: see any good end to it. And so what I
Speaker 2: said is when I announced, is that I was not
Speaker 2: going to feed into the polarization. I was not going
Speaker 2: to vilify and marginalize my opponents. I was going to
Speaker 2: instead of focusing on these sort of cultural worry issues
Speaker 2: that are used to keep us all apart, and I
Speaker 2: was going to try to identify the shared values at
Speaker 2: unite Americans and make people forget that they're either Democrat
Speaker 2: or Republican, and make us all remember that were all Americans.
Speaker 2: And I think I've been pretty successful at doing that.
Speaker 2: My favorability ratings are better than President Trump's, President Biden's.
Speaker 2: I have the best highest favorability of any political leader
Speaker 2: in the country than anybody else they measured. And Zogby
Speaker 2: just did this huge poll that's twenty six thousand people,
Speaker 2: that's ten times the size of any other polled on
Speaker 2: It has a margin bror of practically zero, and it
Speaker 2: shows that and I head to head race, I beat
Speaker 2: President Trump narrowly about three electoral votes. And I had
Speaker 2: to head race, I beat President Biden by a landside
Speaker 2: thirty nine states. He wins eleven. And so I think
Speaker 2: there's a lot of Americans who would like to vote
Speaker 2: for me, but they're the strategy of the Trump campaign
Speaker 2: and the Biden campaign is to make you hate the
Speaker 2: other guy, make you fear that if Biden gets elected,
Speaker 2: it's going to be the end of the Republic. If
Speaker 2: Trump gets elected, it's going to be the end of
Speaker 2: the Republic. You can't you can't vote for anybody else
Speaker 2: except for the Democratic or Republican nominee. And that's you know,
Speaker 2: that's something I have to over the next five and
Speaker 2: a half months. I have to persuade Americans that they
Speaker 2: can vote for Hope instead of voting out of fear.
Speaker 1: One of the things I had read and just as
Speaker 1: I was kind of following your campaign in preparation of
Speaker 1: having a chance to talk to you, and trust me,
Speaker 1: I want to. I'd love to get into and we
Speaker 1: will get into a lot of the areas that are
Speaker 1: a particular interest to our listeners, which is habitat issues,
Speaker 1: environmental issues.
Speaker 3: Outdoor adventure. I'd love to talk about all that.
Speaker 1: But one of the things I noticed that the Times
Speaker 1: had these sort of back to back pieces, and one
Speaker 1: was about signature gathering, which seemed like very far removed
Speaker 1: from that seemed like personal decisions made by people out
Speaker 1: in the field, rather than like very far removed from
Speaker 1: any direction from the campaign around a signature gathering issue,
Speaker 1: and the other was this, uh, this health issue about
Speaker 1: a parasite. And I thought that was very funny because
Speaker 1: I'm riddled with parasites. And one of my colleagues who
Speaker 1: I was with today, we both had trick and osis.
Speaker 1: And when I heard that, I felt like it made
Speaker 1: me like you more because it just makes me feel
Speaker 1: like someone makes me feel like someone from the from
Speaker 1: the trenches man, like, like you know, it's like outside
Speaker 1: of a coddled existence, like when you travel and stuff,
Speaker 1: you just expose the things. So when I saw that,
Speaker 1: I didn't have any I didn't have any sense of
Speaker 1: I didn't have any sense of a want. And I
Speaker 1: saw the nighttime comedy whatever you call them, the nighttime
Speaker 1: TV hosts having a field day with it, and I
Speaker 1: just felt like, I don't know, man, I reminded me
Speaker 1: of my own things, that my own stuff I've encountered
Speaker 1: from traveling in the developing world.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anybody who travels in Latin America or Africa particularly
Speaker 2: or South Asia is going to end up with parasites.
Speaker 2: And I, like you, I'm riddled with parasites. But I
Speaker 2: had this, you know, this is thirteen years ago. The
Speaker 2: Times found out about my so called brainworm because it
Speaker 2: came up somehow in a deposition that I was doing
Speaker 2: during my divorce thirteen years ago. And I mean, briefly,
Speaker 2: it's not an interesting story, but I was getting the
Speaker 2: severe brain fog and I was having trouble with word retrieval,
Speaker 2: a short term memory and even long term memory. And
Speaker 2: a friend of mine, I was in prison for the
Speaker 2: summer of two thousand and one in maximum security prison
Speaker 2: in Puerto.
Speaker 3: Rico, and my well, that was around viks right.
Speaker 2: Ice elmate was the head of the biggest labor union
Speaker 2: in North America, which was SEIU, which and he was
Speaker 2: hospital workers, the hospital Workers Union. And I happened to
Speaker 2: be with him when I was, you know, worried about
Speaker 2: this issue, and I started talking to him about it,
Speaker 2: and he was deeply concerned, and he immediately got me
Speaker 2: down to Columbia Presbyterian and they did an MRI on
Speaker 2: me and they found this this black spot in my brain.
Speaker 2: And my uncle had just died from glioblastoma and he
Speaker 2: had had surgery on the gleia, which is a brain tumor,
Speaker 2: and so and because my uncle Teddy was the chairman
Speaker 2: of the Health Committee in the United States Senate for
Speaker 2: fifty years. We knew, my family knew every doctor, you know,
Speaker 2: every great doctor at least in North America and really
Speaker 2: all around the world. And Teddy had had when he
Speaker 2: got his glioblasphema as a very complex tumor. It looks
Speaker 2: like a spider web in your brain. And he got
Speaker 2: a list of these, you know, the best surgeons in
Speaker 2: the world, and they were all on speed dial. And
Speaker 2: then he passed away. And this is a few months
Speaker 2: after his death, and I found out about this thing,
Speaker 2: and so we had all of these great euro surgeon
Speaker 2: on speed dial, and we sent the films to all
Speaker 2: of them and they all said, yeah, it's a tumor
Speaker 2: you got, so you have to have surgery. So I
Speaker 2: was going to use Teddy's surgeon who was down at
Speaker 2: Duke in North Carolina. And I was not believed me
Speaker 2: looking forward to it. And you know, when Teddy got
Speaker 2: his surgery, he was awake during the whole thing, and
Speaker 2: they just they took off the top of his his
Speaker 2: skull and they would the doctor would press the flat
Speaker 2: part of the scalpel against certain parts of his brain
Speaker 2: where the tumor was, and then he'd ask him a
Speaker 2: series of mathematical and language questions and if he could
Speaker 2: answer those questions, he'd cut out that little piece of brain.
Speaker 2: What yeah, and if he couldn't. It was like Silence
Speaker 2: of the Lambs. Did you ever see that box? It was?
Speaker 2: It was very much like reminiscent of that. And that's
Speaker 2: how they do it. So I was going to go
Speaker 2: to that same guy, and I went down. I was
Speaker 2: supposed to get my surgery on a Tuesday morning, and
Speaker 2: I went down to Columbia Presbyterian to pick up my films.
Speaker 2: It was a young Irish doctor. Remember every great doctor
Speaker 2: in the world said that's definitely a tumor. You need
Speaker 2: to getst surgery. And it was a young Irish doctor
Speaker 2: in the office. And he and I struck up a
Speaker 2: conversation with him, because you know, he was from Ireland
Speaker 2: and we were talking about all and then he said,
Speaker 2: what are you doing here? And I said, I've got
Speaker 2: to go get brain surgery. I got a tumor. I'm
Speaker 2: here picking him my films. And he said to he
Speaker 2: might if I take a look at him. I said,
Speaker 2: not at all. And there was a light box in
Speaker 2: the room, and he put one of the pictures up
Speaker 2: in the light box and he looked at it a
Speaker 2: long time, and then he turned to me and he said,
Speaker 2: I don't think you've earned surgery. And I said, tell
Speaker 2: me more, and he said, I don't think there's a tumor.
Speaker 2: And he said, what you ought to do is we
Speaker 2: ought to take very precise measurements of it and then
Speaker 2: come back in six weeks and see if he has
Speaker 2: grown at all. And I did that in six weeks
Speaker 2: it was exactly the same size. And he said, come
Speaker 2: back in another six weeks, and we did it again.
Speaker 2: It was exactly the same size. And that's when he said,
Speaker 2: this is this is a parasite. It's eaten part of
Speaker 2: your earth brain and then died. Oh and I remember
Speaker 2: seeing that Twilight Zone when I was a kid, about
Speaker 2: the about the you know, the earwing curls and the
Speaker 2: guys and then they and they finally get it out,
Speaker 2: but then they discovered it was a female and it
Speaker 2: had laid eggs in there. So I was one of those,
Speaker 2: you know, those classic Twilight Zunes. But anyway, it's gone.
Speaker 2: And then what I found out after that is that
Speaker 2: my mercury levels were off the chart. There are ten
Speaker 2: times with Heba considered safe. Because I eat a lot
Speaker 2: of freshwater fish and a lot of saltwater fish. I
Speaker 2: had mercury off the charts, and I fished, you know,
Speaker 2: in the summer almost every day. Oh and I eat
Speaker 2: the fish, and you know I just had and their
Speaker 2: predatory fish, the freshwater fish in this country are having huge,
Speaker 2: huge mercury levels, And so I get the mercury key
Speaker 2: laid out. My brain fog went away. So I don't
Speaker 2: think it had anything to do with the braine worm.
Speaker 2: But anyway, it was good copy for a couple of days.
Speaker 1: And then one of our colleagues upstairs he had that
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago because he ran into that
Speaker 1: he had we had been spearfishermen in Hawaii, but he
Speaker 1: also had a bunch of hal a bit and stuff
Speaker 1: from Alaska, and he eats a ton of walleye fresh
Speaker 1: water fish and him and he got and he said,
Speaker 1: I think what he's I think He said something like
Speaker 1: he thought he had eaten about twenty meals in a
Speaker 1: row of like pocivorous fish. Yeah, and developed that and
Speaker 1: it started with some dexterity, some dexterity stuff.
Speaker 3: And then yeah, and he had some, he.
Speaker 1: Had some he'd call people forget why he called him,
Speaker 1: but it went away pretty quick. But that's one of
Speaker 1: the that's one of the earliest, Like, that's one of
Speaker 1: those areas where you know, you spent a whole career
Speaker 1: on water quality issues and spent a career defending fishermen
Speaker 1: and natural resources.
Speaker 3: That was one of the first. One of my first.
Speaker 1: Introductions to how uh water quality issues impact people is
Speaker 1: growing up in the Great Lakes and becoming aware of
Speaker 1: the consumption advisories and we ate tons of fish the
Speaker 1: Great Lakes and becoming aware of that. And then one
Speaker 1: of my childhood mentors and one of my dad's best
Speaker 1: friends going into University of Michigan for these batteries of
Speaker 1: tests because he had been consuming freshwater fish his whole life,
Speaker 1: and he was part of some broad study of memory
Speaker 1: loss in people who had consumed.
Speaker 3: Whatever threshold of Great Lakes fish.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then that is funny because in that area,
Speaker 1: it's just not a thing people discussed. I lived in
Speaker 1: Seattle for a while and we would fish Lake Washington,
Speaker 1: and there were people that people were there just kind
Speaker 1: of more aware, different time whatever, and there'd be people
Speaker 1: who wouldn't eat you know, they wouldn't eat the fish
Speaker 1: that we were fixing for him because of concerns about
Speaker 1: you know, concerns about mercury in the water. And then
Speaker 1: it's been explained to me too that even though we've
Speaker 1: reduced how much mercury we're putting.
Speaker 3: In the water, the ship never gets out of the system.
Speaker 3: There's very slow to get out of the system.
Speaker 2: It's slow to get out. I mean, it doesn't there's
Speaker 2: no half life on mercury. There's a half life in
Speaker 2: your body and your blood. There's a half life of
Speaker 2: sixty four days in your blood from you know, the
Speaker 2: from methyl mercury, which is the kind of mercury and
Speaker 2: fish that there was a the National Academy of Sciences
Speaker 2: and the FDA did a study in two thousand and
Speaker 2: three and they looked at every freshwater fishing with America.
Speaker 2: Every fish that they sampled had dangerous levels of mercury.
Speaker 2: And every single fish. Oh and you know, of course
Speaker 2: the predatory fish like well i and and you know
Speaker 2: trout like trout, those kind of fish that are eating
Speaker 2: that are high end editors are have have just you know,
Speaker 2: and have what they call bullis doses really, you know,
Speaker 2: just very very high dose, doesn't It occurred to me
Speaker 2: when that study came out that we are now living
Speaker 2: in the science fiction nightmare where my children and the
Speaker 2: children of every other American and now no longer engage
Speaker 2: in the seminole primal activity of American youth, which is
Speaker 2: to go fishing with their father mother in the local
Speaker 2: fishing hole and then come home and safe eat the fish.
Speaker 2: And you know that is It's just it's when you
Speaker 2: think of when I thought about it that age, I
Speaker 2: was breath taking. I see that the same thing today
Speaker 2: with lime disease. Lime disease is you know, I spend
Speaker 2: I go, you know, I'm in the woods every day,
Speaker 2: right and my whole life I've done that, you know,
Speaker 2: training hawks and stuff. You have to fly them every day.
Speaker 3: Oh I go.
Speaker 2: You know, I lived in Melcisco, New York when the
Speaker 2: deer tickets began appearing, and you know they you know,
Speaker 2: we now that the strongest evidence is that those that
Speaker 2: that disease came from Plumb Island, from the military, you know,
Speaker 2: the USDA slash do o D Department of Defense bio
Speaker 2: weapons labs on Plumb Island. And the story of how
Speaker 2: it actually got to the mainland is, you know, is
Speaker 2: another one of these incredible stories. You have them developing
Speaker 2: a military weapon there and and then just poisoning everybody,
Speaker 2: American ruining it. There's not a single Faulkner that I
Speaker 2: know that does not have lime disease, you know, and
Speaker 2: you can't think of any I remember coming home one day,
Speaker 2: standing in the bath. I've been taking twenty nine deer
Speaker 2: ticks off myself and you know, in the springtime, I'd
Speaker 2: get them every single day. And it's just you know,
Speaker 2: the woods used to be for me, were a safe
Speaker 2: place to go, and now you know, you have to
Speaker 2: think twice before you go in the woods.
Speaker 1: My boy got he contracted lime when he was three
Speaker 1: in Hudson Valley, New York.
Speaker 3: We were fishing bluegills.
Speaker 1: So there you get like you know, like I said,
Speaker 1: you get the double I guess you get the double
Speaker 1: hit of heavy metals and lime, fishing bluegills and Hudson.
Speaker 1: But he developed a facial paralysis. You know, I went
Speaker 1: through limes.
Speaker 3: He's not.
Speaker 2: My son got that too, got ballast balls. Yeah, six
Speaker 2: months and we didn't know if you and you look
Speaker 2: at your kid when he's got that, and you know,
Speaker 2: he goes from a very handsome kid to not a
Speaker 2: very handsome kid and he you know, they have this,
Speaker 2: and you know, we didn't know every day whether he
Speaker 2: was ever going to recover from it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he would sip milk. It was this kind of
Speaker 1: the thing that scarred us as a little bit. He
Speaker 1: would sip.
Speaker 3: Milk and it would run out the corner his mouth.
Speaker 1: And it was it was so that era that was
Speaker 1: so scary and I got I got infected as well
Speaker 1: and had to do the intravenous treatment.
Speaker 3: But it was so that period was so scary that.
Speaker 1: My wife and I put him to bed and we
Speaker 1: would routinely at night just cry. I mean, like embarrassing
Speaker 1: to say it, but like we would cry at night.
Speaker 2: How old was.
Speaker 1: He He was three, but he got he responded very
Speaker 1: quickly to treatment.
Speaker 3: But man, it was it was. It was a horrifying deal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, speaking of kids, there's the thing I wanted to
Speaker 1: ask you as well, And I didn't really I didn't
Speaker 1: know this about until yesterday.
Speaker 3: Uh what was it?
Speaker 1: I didn't know that you went and met with and
Speaker 1: talked to the met with and talked to the man
Speaker 1: that was involved than your father's death in a pressor
Speaker 1: what was that meeting?
Speaker 3: I mean, what was that?
Speaker 2: You know, I always listened. I always from when I
Speaker 2: was a little kid, my uncle. The story about his
Speaker 2: assassination was always strange to me. In fact, I was
Speaker 2: in the White House when my uncle when I was
Speaker 2: in the White House with my uncle's casket in the
Speaker 2: east room, and my whole family was in there, and
Speaker 2: I was, you know, at a nine year old kid,
Speaker 2: and I remember President Johnson coming in and I was
Speaker 2: standing next to my aunt Jackie and my mother and
Speaker 2: my dad, and President Johnson told them that that a
Speaker 2: man had just shot Lee Harvey Oswald. And I said
Speaker 2: to my mom when you know, when the conversation ended,
Speaker 2: I said to my mom, why did he shoot you know,
Speaker 2: the man who killed uncle Jim act that he did?
Speaker 2: He love our family? Because even then my mind was like,
Speaker 2: you know, this is a bizarre story. And and that story,
Speaker 2: you know, of course, was never adequately explained. And Jack Ruby,
Speaker 2: the man who Shotley R. V. Oswold, was an associate
Speaker 2: of the of the of the Chicago Outfits, which is
Speaker 2: Samjan Connor's mob. But he was directly associated with Carlos Marcello,
Speaker 2: who was involved in the Kennedy assassination, and who was
Speaker 2: you know, he was one of the three big mob bosses.
Speaker 2: There were three mob bosses who were recruited, recruited by
Speaker 2: the CIA to kill Castros santostraf Conte in Tampa, Carlos
Speaker 2: Marcela in Dallas and New Orleans, and then Sam and
Speaker 2: Conne in Chicago. And the reason they targeted these three
Speaker 2: is they all had casinos in Havana. And so then
Speaker 2: the CIA basically became one organization with these you know,
Speaker 2: with these mob families, and that there's so much evidence
Speaker 2: now on the you know, the agency involvement in my
Speaker 2: uncle's death. There's hundreds of books written about it, and
Speaker 2: you know, there's millions of pages of evidence, and there's
Speaker 2: in probably over the thirty confessions by people who were involved.
Speaker 2: So I always assumed that my uncle was, you know,
Speaker 2: that his death and Congress when they actually looked at it,
Speaker 2: you know that of course, the Warrant Commission was run
Speaker 2: by Alan Dallas, who's the head of the CIA, who
Speaker 2: my uncle had fired. So they, you know, they said, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's just one shooter, Lee Arvy Oswald. But then five
Speaker 2: years later, Congress reinvestigated in the Congressional Committee, the House
Speaker 2: Select Committee on Assassination said no, his death was from
Speaker 2: a conspiracy, so and that you know, most Americans believe that,
Speaker 2: and the evidence is now overwhelming. But I always believed.
Speaker 2: I always believed that my father had been killed by
Speaker 2: Surhan and then a man who one of my dad's
Speaker 2: best friends, a guy called Paul Scharade. He was a
Speaker 2: United Auto Workers deputy director and he had recruited Shaves
Speaker 2: to the labor movement, and he had introduced my father
Speaker 2: to Shaves, and that had become one of the most
Speaker 2: important political relationships and personal friendships that my father had.
Speaker 2: All Charde was walking next to my father when my
Speaker 2: father was shot and Paul and they were walking into
Speaker 2: the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel. Al Sharade was walking
Speaker 2: beside him, about a foot behind him and Surhan and
Speaker 2: they were being led to the ambush site to where
Speaker 2: Surhan was ending in front of the steam table. Surhan
Speaker 2: fired two shots at my father and one of those
Speaker 2: shots hit Paul sch Rate in the head. He said
Speaker 2: he felt like he was being electrocuted. He didn't know
Speaker 2: what it was. He just felt like he had stepped
Speaker 2: on an electric wire and and he went down, but
Speaker 2: he lived to be almost ninety years old. He died
Speaker 2: about two years ago. And then the other shot that
Speaker 2: Turrnan fired at my father went past my father and
Speaker 2: hit a door jam, a wooden door jam behind him,
Speaker 2: and it was later removed. The bullet was later removed
Speaker 2: by the LAPD. Then Sir Ann was grabbed by five
Speaker 2: men by you know, Rosie Greer.
Speaker 3: George the writer, George Plimpton too.
Speaker 2: George Climpton was on that dog pile on Rafer Johnson,
Speaker 2: who was in nineteen sixty the Catalon champion, was very
Speaker 2: close to my father. It was kind of acting as
Speaker 2: my father's bodyguard. Back then, the candidates did not get
Speaker 2: the Secret Service protection until you got a nomination, so
Speaker 2: my father wasn't entitled to it. And Jay Edgar Hoover
Speaker 2: offered to protect him, but he knew JEdgar who would
Speaker 2: be spying on him, so he said no thanks. And
Speaker 2: then the LAPD had a very bad reputation at that
Speaker 2: time for racism, and oh they were they were not.
Speaker 2: They were not part of it. So he was being
Speaker 2: protected essentially by football players, by the fearsome forceome guys
Speaker 2: from the Dallas Cowboys and from the Oakland Raiders, and
Speaker 2: they chased down or they immediately grabbed her hand after
Speaker 2: the second shot, and they took his hand and they
Speaker 2: they they bent him over the steam table on his back,
Speaker 2: and they took his gun hand and they pointed it
Speaker 2: in the opposite direction away from my father. So and
Speaker 2: ray For Johnson later told me that he, you know,
Speaker 2: Rave was a big guy. He's like six foot four
Speaker 2: and he'd been the best athlete in the world, and
Speaker 2: he said he was and Sir Hann is this tiny,
Speaker 2: tiny little guy, but he said he had superhuman strength
Speaker 2: and they could not get that gun out of his hand.
Speaker 2: Sir Ann was able to. It was a revolver twenty
Speaker 2: two revolver and there were eight shots in it, and
Speaker 2: Sir Ann was able to squeeze off six more shots
Speaker 2: and empty the you know, the viral and uh and
Speaker 2: those shots all hit people. So one person, I think
Speaker 2: an ABC reporter, got hit twice, once through his pant's
Speaker 2: leg and another time in the istomic. But all those
Speaker 2: shots hit people. So we know what happened to every
Speaker 2: single shot in Sir Han's gun. And he never had
Speaker 2: a chance to reload. My father was killed by four
Speaker 2: shots from behind. And the reason I know this is
Speaker 2: be guyse Paul Schrey ten years ago told me, you
Speaker 2: got to come to my house and pacity and read
Speaker 2: the autopsy report, which was Tomas Neagucci, the most important
Speaker 2: coroner in American history. And he did the and so
Speaker 2: and I did. It's not something I wanted to do,
Speaker 2: to read the autopsy report from my dad, but Paul Shrey,
Speaker 2: I couldn't really say no to him. He'd been shot
Speaker 2: with my dad. He was his loyal friend. So I
Speaker 2: sat down and read it. And if you read it,
Speaker 2: you're like he innescally escapable conclusions that her hand could
Speaker 2: not have killed my father, which is what Nagucci concluded
Speaker 2: Nogucci when he did the autopsy. He knew what had
Speaker 2: happened in Dallas with the autopsy was all you know,
Speaker 2: the critique of that autopsy is is notorious. So he
Speaker 2: wanted to make sure that he did an autopsy that
Speaker 2: nobody would ever criticize. So he called it chief Corners
Speaker 2: all the five branches of the arm services and had
Speaker 2: them sitting in the theater observing him. And in the
Speaker 2: medical literature, his autopsy in my dad is called the
Speaker 2: perfect autopsy, and what he found is my father was
Speaker 2: shot four times from behind and all of them. One
Speaker 2: of the shots passed harmlessly through the shoulder pad of
Speaker 2: his suit jacket, two of them hit him in the back,
Speaker 2: and then one of them was fired from directly behind
Speaker 2: his ear into his head, and all of them were
Speaker 2: contact shots.
Speaker 3: Were all those twenty two Those are all twenty two
Speaker 3: Capri twenty two.
Speaker 2: But the bullets don't match. And the police efforts to
Speaker 2: fix the ballistics are very well documented. The deception that
Speaker 2: they tried. You know, one of the ballistics expert in
Speaker 2: the police department was involved in a deception. Oh the
Speaker 2: and if you listen, there's two audio tapes of what
Speaker 2: happened that night, and they showed that there were thirteen
Speaker 2: shots fired. There were thirteen distinct booms on that and
Speaker 2: all of the shots were contact shots, meaning that the
Speaker 2: barrel of the gun was either touching my father's skin
Speaker 2: or less than a half inch or quarter inch from
Speaker 2: the skin, because they all left carbon tattoos on his body,
Speaker 2: and they were all fired at an upward angle, in
Speaker 2: other words, that somebody was standing right behind him concealing
Speaker 2: a gun and holding it, you know, against him, but
Speaker 2: slightly upward, and all of them were fired at that.
Speaker 2: And then the guy who almost certainly fired those shots
Speaker 2: was a guy I'm called Eugene Thane Sazar, who was
Speaker 2: a He worked for a security agency, he called a
Speaker 2: security and he had gotten the job only two or
Speaker 2: three days before, after my father's schedule was already known,
Speaker 2: and he was the one who grabbed my father by
Speaker 2: the elbow and then walked him toward the ambush where
Speaker 2: Sir Hann was raided waiting. And the opposition is that
Speaker 2: when Sir Hann was firing those shots and all eyes
Speaker 2: were upon him, there were seventy seven people in the room,
Speaker 2: and he drew his gun and was actually firing the
Speaker 2: kill shots. And when my father fell, he fell backwards
Speaker 2: onto Saysar. But he must have known that he was
Speaker 2: being shot from behind because he twisted around and he
Speaker 2: grabbed Seesar's tie and it was a pull clip on
Speaker 2: high and if you see the pictures of my father,
Speaker 2: the initial pictures of him lying on the ground, he
Speaker 2: has that clip on tye in his head. Azar got up,
Speaker 2: pushed my father off, and got up from under him
Speaker 2: with his gun visible. There's a dozen eyewitnesses that showed
Speaker 2: his gun was drawn. His gun was drawn, which says
Speaker 2: or never denied, and the police has some weeks later,
Speaker 2: I was your gun drawn? He changes history many times,
Speaker 2: you know, he said he was firing and my father,
Speaker 2: I mean firing at sir hand, which of course he wasn't.
Speaker 2: And as it turns out, there's a woman, an historian
Speaker 2: called Lesippes who's done a deep dive on saysar and
Speaker 2: and his his employer was was uh Hughes Aircraft, which
Speaker 2: is a defense contractor, you know, which was owned by
Speaker 2: a Hour to Use who is deeply involved with with
Speaker 2: the Las Vegas mob and then Bowing or Lockey. He
Speaker 2: worked at a locky plant in la and he had
Speaker 2: top secret clearance and he identifies himself as a CIA employee.
Speaker 2: And he openly hated my father. He thought that my
Speaker 2: father was going to turn the country over to black people,
Speaker 2: which he complained about a lot. So I actually tried
Speaker 2: to interview him. I tried to go meet with him.
Speaker 2: He left the country after that and he went to
Speaker 2: live in the Philippines, and I contacted him and said,
Speaker 2: you know, would you be willing to sit down and
Speaker 2: talk to me. And he initially said I'll do it
Speaker 2: for ten thousand dollars, and then he raised it. When
Speaker 2: I said okay, he said fifteen thousand. And then when
Speaker 2: I was, you know, planning my trip, he said twenty
Speaker 2: five thousand. I realized that he was that dude. This
Speaker 2: was an andless game that he was going to play.
Speaker 2: And and then he died during the pandemic. I mean, I
Speaker 2: don't know why he died. You know, I don't mean
Speaker 2: to imply that he died of COVID, but he died
Speaker 2: during lockdowns.
Speaker 1: When you we can move on after the after this
Speaker 1: just one clarification.
Speaker 3: When you when you went, how long did you talk
Speaker 3: to him?
Speaker 2: For I was there probably about four hours?
Speaker 1: Was he.
Speaker 3: What was what was his attitude towards you?
Speaker 2: He was deeply, deeply grateful, He cried, He apologized to me.
Speaker 2: For he doesn't he now no longer believes that he
Speaker 2: killed my father. He is no memory of that night.
Speaker 2: I mean, his history is very interesting because he was
Speaker 2: working at a racetrack that was owned by one of
Speaker 2: the top mobsters in l a. Mickey Cohen and Johnny Rizzelli.
Speaker 2: And you know, the story is his lawyer was Johnny
Speaker 2: Rizselli's attorney who suddenly appeared the night he killed my
Speaker 2: father and said I'm representing him. And he was the
Speaker 2: one who persuaded who would not look at the listics evidence,
Speaker 2: and then persuaded Sirin to plead guilty. Sir is when
Speaker 2: they were when he was working at that they they
Speaker 2: got him to go on a horse one time, which
Speaker 2: is crazy. He'd never been on a horse, and they
Speaker 2: asked him to put him on. He five feet tall, right,
Speaker 2: he's tiny.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one hundred and thirty pounds or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's tiny guy. And he's yeah, I mean, if
Speaker 2: you if you see him, he's a very sweet old man.
Speaker 2: And he just kept he kept crying, telling me every
Speaker 2: time I saw a picture of your mother and with
Speaker 2: all of you kids, and you know, I realized my
Speaker 2: part and in the death of her husband. It you know,
Speaker 2: broke my heart. So he just, you know, he was
Speaker 2: I feel like he was being honest with me. I
Speaker 2: feel like he doesn't really have any guile, you know,
Speaker 2: he's he kind of by then. I think he was
Speaker 2: almost eighty years old, seventy seven or something, and he uh,
Speaker 2: and he's been in prison for six years. Oh, in
Speaker 2: the story of you know, of his story is interesting,
Speaker 2: but you know, I know we got other things to
Speaker 2: talk about. But anyway, it's uh, how how he uh
Speaker 2: you know, his road is a really interesting road.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: But I just couldn't when I was reading about that,
Speaker 1: I just couldn't picture from your perspective, what would be
Speaker 1: like to sit across the room with someone who had
Speaker 1: whatever happened that night was there with the intention he
Speaker 1: was your father, and the desire to reach across and
Speaker 1: strangle that guy, you know, would be strong for me.
Speaker 1: You know you uh, you've done all kinds of first
Speaker 1: descents like you're you You became a you're like you're
Speaker 1: a white water enthusiast. Yeah, did your and then you've
Speaker 1: worked like I said, you worked on behalf of fishermen
Speaker 1: against polluters who are polluting waterways, destroying fisheries. Were you
Speaker 1: Did you come into that love of water through environmental
Speaker 1: work or did you come into that love of water
Speaker 1: through outdoor experience?
Speaker 2: Outdoors I was when I was I think I was
Speaker 2: probably ADHD. I would go into a classroom, I it
Speaker 2: was like they were talking in different language. I went
Speaker 2: to school for the first grade at five years old.
Speaker 2: I've never been in nursery school, and I just I
Speaker 2: didn't know what they were. You know, I had no clue.
Speaker 2: I was like non compistments, and all I was doing
Speaker 2: was thinking of the woods. How I was going to
Speaker 2: get you know, what I was going to do after school.
Speaker 2: I was going to go in the woods. I was
Speaker 2: going to check my traps. I was going to you know,
Speaker 2: turn over rocks, climb trees, take a baby, grow, all
Speaker 2: this kind of stuff that I was doing. Catching snakes.
Speaker 2: I had My room was filled with aquariums with animals
Speaker 2: that I caught, and from when I was little, that's
Speaker 2: what I wanted to do. So and then my father,
Speaker 2: you know, was brought us, taught us how to kayak
Speaker 2: Askma role and we were very very young kids. We
Speaker 2: went on all the big western whitewater rivers at the time,
Speaker 2: and you know, that's pretty common now. I think we
Speaker 2: were told that we were among the first two or
Speaker 2: three hundred people to go down the Colorado River. We
Speaker 2: went with Hatch Brothers Expeditions, which was the first whitewater company,
Speaker 2: and we did the Colorado, We did a little Colorado,
Speaker 2: we did the middle fork of the zam and my
Speaker 2: dad took us on the amp.
Speaker 3: But they multiday trips.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, week long trips.
Speaker 3: Camping on gravel bars.
Speaker 2: Yeah huh. We did the sam and the Snake is
Speaker 2: really the Upper Hudson, which we did. I did the
Speaker 2: Upper Husband with my dad in March during a blizzard
Speaker 2: and that was the coldest up all that time that
Speaker 2: I'd ever been in my life. And we swam, you know,
Speaker 2: there was ice in the river and my brother and
Speaker 2: I tipped our we had a tobo duo kayak and
Speaker 2: we tipped it over and you know, uh and this
Speaker 2: way that was really cold, and so you know, I
Speaker 2: he got us into that whitewater from when we were
Speaker 2: really young, and then we did a lot of backcountry skiing.
Speaker 2: We were my dad really loved the wilderness and I
Speaker 2: and then I started training hawks. I was raising homing
Speaker 2: pigeons from when I was seven years old, and I
Speaker 2: was like a serious uh hobby or sport where I
Speaker 2: you know, where I lived. And then when I was nine,
Speaker 2: I got my hawk. I got a read Tellahawk and
Speaker 2: I had read a book. You know, my uncle was
Speaker 2: president and there was books around about Camelot and there
Speaker 2: was a book by T. H. White called The Once
Speaker 2: Future King and I read it. EH White was a
Speaker 2: brilliant author, but he was also a fulconer, and he
Speaker 2: was a British falconer, and he has a chapter and
Speaker 2: the Once a Future King is about the young King Arthur.
Speaker 2: It was a chapter in it about Arthur apprenticing as
Speaker 2: a fulconer when he's a little boy. And I read
Speaker 2: that and I said, this is what I got to do.
Speaker 2: And I told my dad. My dad knew of a
Speaker 2: falconer who lived about a mile from my house. He
Speaker 2: was I called Alvin. I was one of the pioneers
Speaker 2: of American falconry, and he had been an All American
Speaker 2: football player at Penn State. He had then gone to
Speaker 2: work designing jets for the Pentagon. But the state department
Speaker 2: knew about him because whenever there was visiting Arab dignitaries,
Speaker 2: they'd always send them over to fly birds with them,
Speaker 2: because the Arabs are crazy for Fulton. And so my
Speaker 2: dad knew about him, and my dad took me over
Speaker 2: there and then I apprenticed under him, and I, you know,
Speaker 2: I became a master faulk and ear at a young age.
Speaker 2: I actually wrote the exam that people take seriously, Yeah,
Speaker 2: what was bird? My first was a red tallowk. But
Speaker 2: I'll tell you what I got. I got I think
Speaker 2: probably one of the first Harris Hawks that anybody ever trained.
Speaker 2: That Harris hawk is now the preferred hawk or globally
Speaker 2: for ground quarry. If you if you train hawks, which
Speaker 2: is what I actually prefer, you're taking ground quarry or
Speaker 2: or you know, they can catch a pheasant on the rise,
Speaker 2: or you know, occasionally occasionally, if they're really lucky, a
Speaker 2: duck on the rise, but they could never catch it
Speaker 2: in a tailchain. Duck flies ninety miles an hour. They
Speaker 2: they can't nothing could take take it in a tail chase.
Speaker 3: Like once that thing's off the water, you know, once.
Speaker 2: They're they're like a bullet once they once they get
Speaker 2: off the water, and they usually won't get off the
Speaker 2: water if there's a hawk in the air. So you
Speaker 2: have to have a dog, and it has to be
Speaker 2: a very small pond like a golf course or something.
Speaker 2: And but I I but Harris hawks are now the
Speaker 2: preferred The people who trent hawks are called lost stringers,
Speaker 2: and the preferred bird for them nowadays in every country
Speaker 2: in the world are Harris hawks, because they're the only
Speaker 2: hawk that flies that hunts communally. And in fact, when
Speaker 2: Audubon first saw them in the desert Southwestn't he named
Speaker 2: him after his friend, who is, you know, an ornithologist
Speaker 2: named Harris. He assumed they were carrying eaters, because there's
Speaker 2: no other predatory bird that eats in packs. I didn't
Speaker 2: know this, Yeah, and and and so you'd see six
Speaker 2: of them down on a quarry like a jack rabbit
Speaker 2: or something, and you assumed they were you know.
Speaker 3: Carries look like a bunch of vultures on there exactly.
Speaker 2: And and that, but now you know, we know they
Speaker 2: actually hunt in packs like wolves. And because they're communal there,
Speaker 2: they're very very good companions for human beings. They understand
Speaker 2: the relationship between the human and the dog and the
Speaker 2: you know, the whole interaction is comes very naturally to
Speaker 2: them because they understand the dynamics of hunting in a
Speaker 2: pack and hunting and hunting cooperatively and with kind of
Speaker 2: communicated strategies to each other. If you see that, if
Speaker 2: you're hunting the squirrels, you'll see them ladder up. One
Speaker 2: will ladder up from the bottom up, you know, up
Speaker 2: the up, the branches and the other one will ladder
Speaker 2: down and squeeze the squirrel. They can't catch the squirrel
Speaker 2: on it and it's on the tree because they don't
Speaker 2: have a tight enough turning radius, and the squirrel will
Speaker 2: the bark look behind him and keep an eye on
Speaker 2: where the hawk is, and right before the hawk hits him,
Speaker 2: they'll go to the other side of the bark, the
Speaker 2: other side of the tree, and the hawk can there's
Speaker 2: no hawk that has that kind of turning radius. They
Speaker 2: can dodge hawks a whole day just by staying on
Speaker 2: that trunk. So for a hawk to catch the squirrel,
Speaker 2: that has to get it off the trunk and onto
Speaker 2: a branch. And so that's what they'll do. You'll see
Speaker 2: them do it. And all of a sudden, the Harris
Speaker 2: hawks are so smart, like I've hunted red taillahawks my
Speaker 2: whole life. And if it red tellahawks, he's a squirrel
Speaker 2: going to a squirrel dray right the nest. What do
Speaker 2: you call the dray, Yeah, squirrel tray. So he sees
Speaker 2: them going to the dray for the red taillahawk, which
Speaker 2: has been here for you know, at least since the
Speaker 2: place is seen in ice age is probably a million
Speaker 2: years before that. But that squirrel in the in the
Speaker 2: mind of Red Tallahawk, that squirrel just disappeared, and that's
Speaker 2: the end of it. Harris Hawk. If he ever sees
Speaker 2: the squirrel going to a squirrel dray, he knows that
Speaker 2: that animal is still.
Speaker 3: In there and highly vulnerable, and he'll.
Speaker 2: Go jump on the top of it like a like
Speaker 2: a trampoline to try to get it to come out.
Speaker 2: And then from then on, anytime he sees a squirrel dray,
Speaker 2: he'll go jump on it to see if there's a squirrel.
Speaker 2: So they're very they're very enjoyable. But I got one
Speaker 2: in a pet store when I was a kid, at
Speaker 2: the pet store in Southeast Washington, and I brought him
Speaker 2: home and he got it. He got untethered. And I
Speaker 2: had a pheasant run and I had some exotic pheasants
Speaker 2: in They're like golden pheasants, silver pheasants. I just gotta think,
Speaker 2: and the pheasants would eat all the grass inside them
Speaker 2: run and they just stick their head out of it.
Speaker 2: I had turkey wire which is about the diameter of
Speaker 2: the pheasants had so they can squeeze their head to
Speaker 2: that turkey wire to get the tall grass that you
Speaker 2: couldn't get with them more there was you know, tight
Speaker 2: up against the side of the pheasant run. They'd eat
Speaker 2: that that deep green grass and they stick their heads
Speaker 2: were there to get it. But because it was a
Speaker 2: tight fit, they couldn't pull their head right out immediately.
Speaker 2: They had to kind of, you know, work it out.
Speaker 2: And that Harris hawk went to the and and it
Speaker 2: sat in a tree above that pheasant run, and one
Speaker 2: at a time he took the head off of every
Speaker 2: one of my pheasants. And I came home from the
Speaker 2: school and all my peasants were dead in the peasant run,
Speaker 2: and I realized what happened, and I was like, I
Speaker 2: got to catch that hawk and train it, because this
Speaker 2: is like a really smart bird.
Speaker 1: How do you catch something like that? I mean, he
Speaker 1: used to It probably wasn't that regulated then.
Speaker 2: It was no In fact, when I until nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 2: hawks raptors were vermin species in twenty one states. So
Speaker 2: the and they paid bounties on them, and they you know,
Speaker 2: if there were an annual hawks shoots that were they
Speaker 2: were sponsored by the Audubon Society up and the people
Speaker 2: would go up on the right, Yeah, because they thought
Speaker 2: they were killing songbirds, and people didn't understand ecology at
Speaker 2: that point. They just thought, okay, hawks are the enemies
Speaker 2: of farm you know, of chickens, so exterminating them is
Speaker 2: a good thing. And they didn't realize the hawks were
Speaker 2: also controlling the rodents and controlling you know. They just
Speaker 2: didn't understand the kind of the complexity sure of ecosystems,
Speaker 2: and they still don't, by the way, you know, otherwise
Speaker 2: we wouldn't be using so many petticides. But yeah, the
Speaker 2: Audubon Society and the game clubs and hunting clubs, the
Speaker 2: the conservation apartments would sponsoring these hawkshits every year so
Speaker 2: we could go out and just drap hawks and fly them.
Speaker 2: And then the Eastern paragrine went extinct in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: three and people started worrying about them then, and in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy two they passed the Migratory Birds Treaty Act.
Speaker 1: The hormit I didn't realize this. The peregrines that are
Speaker 1: in the East, now there was an Eastern.
Speaker 2: There was an Eastern, the Eastern in the Eastern and
Speaker 2: Adams peregrine. It was.
Speaker 3: That one extinct that one extinct. So paragons that have
Speaker 3: repopulated have come from different regions.
Speaker 2: You know what if they're mainly there were some paragrines
Speaker 2: in captivity and we learned around nineteen sixty nine, we
Speaker 2: learned to breed them, and before that they had never
Speaker 2: been bred in captivity, and so and then you know,
Speaker 2: Faulkners were the only ones breeding them. And there was
Speaker 2: a guy called Heinzmanng who is one of my mentors,
Speaker 2: who was the first scientists to breed a raptor in captivity.
Speaker 2: And then we figured out how to double clutch them,
Speaker 2: which is you get the bird to lay a clutch
Speaker 2: of eggs, three eggs. Take that away from them, she'll
Speaker 2: she'll recycle, lay three more, take those away, and she'll
Speaker 2: recycle a third time. And then so you have nine
Speaker 2: eggs from the same bird every year, and you can
Speaker 2: then incubate those and you can get the mother to
Speaker 2: raise them because you're you're you know, handling handing her
Speaker 2: unlimited food, so she can take care of nine offspring.
Speaker 2: And we started mass producing them and then releasing them
Speaker 2: to the wild. So the arrogrants that you see now
Speaker 2: on the East coast are they're a little bit of
Speaker 2: hybridized from some of the other subspecies, but you know
Speaker 2: there are still there's a lot of them. Are you
Speaker 2: know pure bread Eastern atoms? There were bread and captivity
Speaker 2: and then released.
Speaker 1: If walk through how you got how you transitioned into
Speaker 1: environmental law and focused on the Hudson and then focused
Speaker 1: on a widening bunch of rivers and then became aligned
Speaker 1: with fishermen and fisheries restoration.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I got. I was a Heroinagton for fourteen years.
Speaker 2: I got somber in nineteen eighty three, and then I
Speaker 2: rethought my life and I had gone into the DA's
Speaker 2: office and I kind of had this you know life
Speaker 2: that was almost kind of trying to follow my father's footsteps.
Speaker 2: I had gone to the same law school, the same college.
Speaker 2: I had gone into prosecution the way that he and I.
Speaker 2: I realized that I was not authentic for me, that
Speaker 2: I really belonged doing something in the woods and in
Speaker 2: the waterways, and you know that that's where I was
Speaker 2: happy and that's what I wanted to do with my life.
Speaker 2: When I was a kid, I wanted to be a
Speaker 2: scientist or a vet or to do you know, something
Speaker 2: like a field biologist. It's somebody who was outside all
Speaker 2: the time. And so I decided to take you know,
Speaker 2: my legal education and meld it with you know, in
Speaker 2: some way with doing environmental environmental protection, environmental advocacy, and
Speaker 2: I ended up working for a blue collar coalition of
Speaker 2: commercial and recreational fishermen on the Hudson River and who
Speaker 2: were trying to reclaim the Hudson from its polluters. We
Speaker 2: have on the Hudson the oldest commercial fishery in North America.
Speaker 2: It's three hundred and fifty years old. Many of the
Speaker 2: people that I represent come from families that have been
Speaker 2: fishing the river continuously since Dutch colonial times. It's a
Speaker 2: traditional gear fishery, so they use the same fishing methods
Speaker 2: that were taught by the Algonquin Indians city the original
Speaker 2: Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, and then passed down through
Speaker 2: the generations and one of enclaves. But the commercial fishery
Speaker 2: is a little village called Crotonville, New York.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I've been there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's thirty miles north of New York City on
Speaker 2: the east bank of the river. And the people who
Speaker 2: live there in nineteen sixty six were not your kind
Speaker 2: of prototypical affluent environmentalists. They were factory workers, carpenters, lay,
Speaker 2: there's electricians. Half the people in Crotonville made their living
Speaker 2: or at least some part of the living fishing or
Speaker 2: crabbing the river. You have a big beautiful picture of
Speaker 2: a basket of blue crabs Chesapeake Bay. But we have
Speaker 2: the same fishery in the Hudson. You know, the blue
Speaker 2: crabs come up to the Hudson as well. We have a
Speaker 2: lot of the anagmus fish come up to the Hudson, include.
Speaker 3: Shad, historic sturgeon, sturgeon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have a sturge in the river that are
Speaker 2: twelve feet long. Two hundred pounds of cavy are in them.
Speaker 2: It's a very very big fishery, very gugre fishery for
Speaker 2: a lot of people. Striped bass, and then the smaller
Speaker 2: fisheries harrying ale wives, blue crab, and there's a little
Speaker 2: bit of shrimp in the river, and and and then
Speaker 2: there's some odd odd fisheries like shrimp and goldfish, you know,
Speaker 2: and and there's carp There used to be a big
Speaker 2: carb fishery for gefilter fish. The Jewish population during certain
Speaker 2: Jewish holidays, it is a popular. So we have a
Speaker 2: mixture of freshwater fish, saltwater fish, and an adremus fish
Speaker 2: and an amus fish, the fish that evolved in fresh water,
Speaker 2: but they figured out how to go to the salt
Speaker 2: water to feed themselves in fat and they but their
Speaker 2: eggs will not survive in saltwater. They have to come
Speaker 2: back up into the freshwater their natal stream to spawn
Speaker 2: because the eggs would die if they were in salt water.
Speaker 2: And so and those are called a nadumant fish. And
Speaker 2: they're also admous fishing, the HUDs, and those are fish
Speaker 2: American American eel, of course, and they have the oddest
Speaker 2: life cycle because they go out to the middle of
Speaker 2: the North Atlantic to the Sargasso Sea and they meet
Speaker 2: their European cousins there and then they breed and they
Speaker 2: all go back to their natal streams. And you know,
Speaker 2: of course an eel can breed air as well as water,
Speaker 2: so they that's why you find them in ponds when
Speaker 2: there's rainy, whether they go across the landscapes, you know,
Speaker 2: at night during the rain and get in isolated ponds
Speaker 2: and places. The incidentally, carp can also breed air and
Speaker 2: catfish can you know the bullhead's kind of you. If
Speaker 2: you ever if you leave a bullhead or a catfish
Speaker 2: in two inches of water and there were four inches
Speaker 2: of water in the bottom of your of your you know,
Speaker 2: bait bucket, it will it will drought, it will die
Speaker 2: asphyxiate because it'll use up the option. But if you
Speaker 2: leave it, and if you just take all the water
Speaker 2: out and throw it in there, it will live because
Speaker 2: it can breed air. Yeah, it just like a lot
Speaker 2: of carp can do that too. But anyway, that's a
Speaker 2: real serious digression. I went on in nineteen sixty six
Speaker 2: and Central Railroad began vomiting oil from a four and
Speaker 2: a half foot pipe in the Croton Harmon rail yard,
Speaker 2: and the oil went up the river and the tides
Speaker 2: and blackened the beaches, and it made the shad taste
Speaker 2: of diesel. The fishermen couldn't sell them in New York City.
Speaker 2: The fload and fish market and all of the people
Speaker 2: in Crotonville came together and the only public building in
Speaker 2: the town, which was the American Legion Hall. This was
Speaker 2: a very patriotic community.
Speaker 1: Most of it speaks to the blue collar nature of
Speaker 1: what you talk about, that that form of like blue
Speaker 1: collar environmentalism exactly.
Speaker 3: And the.
Speaker 2: Almost all the original members and founders and board members
Speaker 2: of Riverykeeople were former Marines. They were combat veterans from
Speaker 2: World War Two, mainly from Korea. Also, I'm from Vietnam.
Speaker 2: And they came back to the river, you know, to
Speaker 2: fish again, and they found it was up polluted. They
Speaker 2: came together that night in March of nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 2: and there were three hundred people in the Parker Bale
Speaker 2: American Legion, all leaning against the rifle racks hanging from
Speaker 2: the rafters, men and women, furious about what was being
Speaker 2: stolen from them, because then, you know, the Hudson was everything.
Speaker 2: It was there. It was there, not just their recreation,
Speaker 2: it was their livelihoods, it was their property values, it
Speaker 2: was it was their backyard, and it was being stolen
Speaker 2: from them by these large corporate entities over whom they
Speaker 2: had no control. And they had been to the government
Speaker 2: agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution, to
Speaker 2: the Corps of Engineers, the State Conservation Apartment in the
Speaker 2: Coast Guard, and they were given the bombs rush. Richie Garrett,
Speaker 2: who was the first president of the of what was
Speaker 2: then called the Hudson Fishermen's Association later became River Keep.
Speaker 2: He was a grave digger from Austin, New York, and
Speaker 2: he was a combat veteran from Korea. Really yeah, and
Speaker 2: he used to say about it. He used to say
Speaker 2: to his new fellers, I'll be the last to let
Speaker 2: you down. Because he was a grave digger, but he
Speaker 2: was also he was He went with another another marine
Speaker 2: named Mark Glalco, who was at that point an Eastern
Speaker 2: Airlines pilot. He went to the corp of Engineers a
Speaker 2: dozen times, begging the core Colonel to do his job
Speaker 2: and shut down the Penn Central Pipe, and the core
Speaker 2: colonel finally told them an exasperation, these are important people.
Speaker 2: We can't treat them that way, speaking of the Penn
Speaker 2: Central Board of Directors. Oh. By this evening in March
Speaker 2: of nineteen sixty six, virtually everybody in Crodenville had come
Speaker 2: to the conclusion that government was in Cahouesi with the pluters,
Speaker 2: and the only way they were going to reclaim the
Speaker 2: river for themselves is if they confronted the polluters directly.
Speaker 2: Somebody suggested that they put a match to the oil
Speaker 2: slick coming out of the Pen Central pipe. And burnt
Speaker 2: up the pipe. Somebody else said they should roll a
Speaker 2: mattress up and jam it up the pipe and flood
Speaker 2: the rail yard with its own waist. And then somebody
Speaker 2: else said they should float a raft of dynamite into
Speaker 2: the intake of the Indian Point power Plant, which at
Speaker 2: that time was killing a million fish a day on
Speaker 2: its intake screens and taking food off their family tables.
Speaker 2: And a guy stood up whose name was Bob Boyle,
Speaker 2: and he was a famous fly fisherman and spin fisherman.
Speaker 2: He written dozens of book books on fly He has
Speaker 2: a bunch of flies named after him. He was the
Speaker 2: outdoor editor of the Sports Illustrated for sixty sixty five years.
Speaker 2: He was a combat veteran from Vietnam. He actually was
Speaker 2: at at the training camp. He was a roommate of
Speaker 2: Robert Bork this, you know, the federal judge. But he
Speaker 2: had been he was a first lieutenant, had eighty percent
Speaker 2: mortality in Korea, and he had come back from Korea.
Speaker 2: And he wrote about sports, mainly outdoor sports, for Sports
Speaker 2: Illustrated for sixty five years. Two years earlier he'd written
Speaker 2: an article about angling in the Hudson. There's some real
Speaker 2: odd balls who fish in the HUDs. And there's these
Speaker 2: sewer fishing clubs in Manhattan, you know that fished through
Speaker 2: the Greats. And he was writing about all these these
Speaker 2: weird sort of cultures of people who found, you know,
Speaker 2: wilderness experience in the HUDs and you know, walked off
Speaker 2: a pavement in New York and were renewing themselves spiritually
Speaker 2: and in all these other ways through this contact with
Speaker 2: the water. And it was a beautiful article. And in
Speaker 2: researching that article, he came across an ancient navigational statue
Speaker 2: called the eighteen eighty eight Rivers in Harbors Act. That
Speaker 2: statute said it was illegal to pollute any waterway in
Speaker 2: the United States. You had to be a big penalty
Speaker 2: if you got caught. But also there was a bounty
Speaker 2: provision that said that anybody who turned in the polluter
Speaker 2: got to keep half the fine. And Boyle was stunned
Speaker 2: when he read this, and he sent a copy of
Speaker 2: it to the libel lawyer, said Time magazine, Time Ink,
Speaker 2: which owned Sports Illustrated, And he knew those guys, they
Speaker 2: were the only lawyers he knew, And he said, is
Speaker 2: this still good law? And they sent him a memo
Speaker 2: back saying it's still good law, but in eighty years
Speaker 2: it's never been in force. And that evening, when all
Speaker 2: these men and women were talking about violence, he stood
Speaker 2: up in front of him with a copy of that
Speaker 2: memo and he said, we shouldn't be talking about breaking
Speaker 2: the law. We should be talking about in force here.
Speaker 2: And they resolved that night they were going to start
Speaker 2: a group that was then called the Hudson River Fishermen's
Speaker 2: Association later became a River Keeper, and they were going
Speaker 2: to go out and track down and prosecute every polluter
Speaker 2: on the Hudson. Eighteen months later, they shut down the
Speaker 2: Penn Central Pipe, elected the first bounty in the United
Speaker 2: States history against the corporate polluter. They got to keep
Speaker 2: two thousand dollars, which was a huge amount of money.
Speaker 2: In Crotonville, New York in nineteen sixty eight, they were
Speaker 2: two weeks of wild celebration in the town and they
Speaker 2: used the money that was left over to go after
Speaker 2: see Baguygee tuc tape, Standard brand, American cyanimid the biggest
Speaker 2: corporations in the country and winning, collecting tens of thousands
Speaker 2: of dollars in bounties, and then in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 2: they collected the highest penalty in the United States history
Speaker 2: against the corporate polluter. They got two hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 2: from Aniconda Iron Cable for dumping toxics at Hastings, New York.
Speaker 2: They used the money to build a boat, which they
Speaker 2: called the River Keeper, and they began patrolling the Hudson,
Speaker 2: tracking down polluters and litigating against them. And then they
Speaker 2: hired using bounty money. In nineteen eighty three, they hired
Speaker 2: their first full time river keeper, a commercial fisherman named John,
Speaker 2: and he hired me a year later using bounty money
Speaker 2: as the first attorney and a full time attorney for them.
Speaker 2: And I, you know, I started a clinic at a
Speaker 2: local law school called Pace where my students were allowed
Speaker 2: to practice law under my supervision. I got a special
Speaker 2: court order, and you know, we just started litigating against
Speaker 2: hundreds of polluters. We brought over five hundred lawsuits against
Speaker 2: hundred river polluters. We forced polluters, just meant five and
Speaker 2: a half billion dollars remediating the Hudson. Today, the Hudson
Speaker 2: River is an international model for ecosystem protection. There's a
Speaker 2: river when you know, when I started working on it.
Speaker 2: It was dead water for twenty miles stretches zero dissoltd
Speaker 2: auction from New York City north and twenty miles from
Speaker 2: New York City south, I mean from Albany south. It
Speaker 2: was dead water, no auction, you know, essentially no auction
Speaker 2: breathing life, and it caught fire. It turned color every
Speaker 2: week depending on what colors they were painting the trucks
Speaker 2: at the GM plant and Arytown. And today the Hudson
Speaker 2: is the richest waterway in the North Atlantic. It produces
Speaker 2: more pounds of fish per acre, more biomass per gallon
Speaker 2: than any of the waterway in the Atlantic Ocean north
Speaker 2: of the Equator, on both sides of the Atlantic. It's
Speaker 2: the last major rivers has some left on both sides
Speaker 2: of the Atlantic, and all throw it in the Mediterranean
Speaker 2: and the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Marmer Sea,
Speaker 2: all these other waterways. There's only one river left that
Speaker 2: still has strong splilnting stocks of all of its historical
Speaker 2: species of migratory fish. And the Hudson is Noah's Ark.
Speaker 2: It's a species warehouse. It's the last refuge for many
Speaker 2: of these animals that are going extinct elsewhere. The miraculous
Speaker 2: resurrection the Hudson inspired the creation of river keepers elsewhere.
Speaker 2: So we had a bunch of commercial fishermen come down
Speaker 2: and ask me to seho the you know, all of
Speaker 2: the sewer plants in Connecticut. There were stor destroying the
Speaker 2: oyster fisheries. And I issued every city. I sued Greenwich, Norwalk, Branford, Stanford,
Speaker 2: and all the way up down, all the way up
Speaker 2: and down, you know the rail line. I sued every
Speaker 2: city on the coast of Connecticut, and we started collecting
Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands dollars from them. We started Long Island Soundkeeper,
Speaker 2: the commercial fishermen there. We got the surfers coming from
Speaker 2: the West coast, you know, with the same thing, and
Speaker 2: within a few years we had a couple of hundred
Speaker 2: river keepers. We started a new group called water Keeper
Speaker 2: Alliance to manage the licensing of these new groups, to
Speaker 2: make sure we can protect the brand. And today we
Speaker 2: have five hundred water We're the biggest water protection group
Speaker 2: in the world. We have five hundred water keepers from
Speaker 2: forty six countries and and you know there are there.
Speaker 2: It's a law enforcement group. Most countries have laws that
Speaker 2: forbid water pollution. The water belongs to people. It doesn't
Speaker 2: belong to the government. It doesn't belong to you know,
Speaker 2: corporations or big ag or you know the mining companies.
Speaker 2: It belongs to the people. Everybody has a right to
Speaker 2: use it. Nobody can use it in a way that
Speaker 2: diminishes or injures. It's used in enjoyment by others. This
Speaker 2: is an ancient law, goes back to Roman times. It's
Speaker 2: in the Code of Justinian, it's in the Magna Carta,
Speaker 2: and it's in the laws of most countries. The problem
Speaker 2: is those laws are almost never enforced. And what we do,
Speaker 2: a function we serve and water keeper is, you know,
Speaker 2: is to enforce those laws on behalf of people who
Speaker 2: are injured by pollution.
Speaker 3: When you look at if you were in the White.
Speaker 1: House and you looked at let's start with we can
Speaker 1: start with priorities for EPA. If you have opinions on
Speaker 1: what you do around Interior department, priorities for the Interior Department.
Speaker 3: Who you'd like to see as Secretary of Interior.
Speaker 2: How'd you like that job? Would you seriously would you
Speaker 2: take would you look at taking a job?
Speaker 3: I would? I would love to take it. I have
Speaker 3: some people that would consult with.
Speaker 1: And I was telling the other day if I ever
Speaker 1: got into politics, I would do and I heard you
Speaker 1: do it earlier. I would first make a list of
Speaker 1: every bad thing I.
Speaker 3: Ever did and make it a Google Drive doc and
Speaker 3: hit share with the country.
Speaker 1: And that's what I did. I was addicted to her
Speaker 1: one fourteen years. No one's gonna dig that.
Speaker 2: I said. When I announced, I said, you know, I said,
Speaker 2: I didn't expect to run for president and I and
Speaker 2: if I did, I would have lived a very very
Speaker 2: different life. I led a very reckless life and you know,
Speaker 2: high risk, a high risk individual. And I said, I am.
Speaker 2: I told Eryl, I said, I've got I've got. I've
Speaker 2: got so many skeletons in my closet. And if they
Speaker 2: could vote, I could get elected king of the world.
Speaker 1: Which one of those you want to Which one of
Speaker 1: those you want to start with? If you really look
Speaker 1: at like, what what would you what will be a
Speaker 1: set of priorities for you with the e p A
Speaker 1: or what would be a set of priorities.
Speaker 2: Here's what I have. I have been working on environmentalities
Speaker 2: for forty years and I found out from them from
Speaker 2: the beginning that you need to be able to talk
Speaker 2: to people. I you know, my whole thing was bringing
Speaker 2: hundreds of hooking bullet of people into the environmental moment
Speaker 2: who were left out because in the eighties when I
Speaker 2: was doing this, the hooking Bullet people felt that, you know,
Speaker 2: they felt alienated from you know, from the mainstream environmentalists.
Speaker 2: They felt they didn't you know, there was a lot
Speaker 2: of antagonism. There was a lot of antagonism of our
Speaker 2: public lands issues in the world West. And you know,
Speaker 2: whether you know, public lands should be managed exclusively for
Speaker 2: game or wi should they be managed for hunting and fishing,
Speaker 2: and you know, and these were all farming or ranching,
Speaker 2: These were all areas of conflicts. And then there was
Speaker 2: you know, you know, a lot of environmentalists were kind
Speaker 2: of liberal and you know, and and maybe leaned a
Speaker 2: little bit towards antique gun and so you had that conflict,
Speaker 2: you had those areas of antagonism.
Speaker 1: I think that that's why you wound up. These words
Speaker 1: have their own etymology in their own use case, but
Speaker 1: I think that's why you wound up eventually with people
Speaker 1: who would identify as environmentalists and you have people that
Speaker 1: would identify as the conservations. Yeah, right, So there's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're within each of these, whether you describe yourself as
Speaker 1: one or the other.
Speaker 3: I often describe myself as a conservationists.
Speaker 1: There's a I don't know eighty percent overlap right between
Speaker 1: those views, you know.
Speaker 3: But yeah, they just they just but.
Speaker 1: Became comfortable with different terms even though they were largely talking.
Speaker 3: About the same things. Yeah, but it's I think it's
Speaker 3: it's that to avoid.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, like Ducks Unlimited's not consider itself
Speaker 2: part of the environmental movement at all, right, and they
Speaker 2: should have and that.
Speaker 3: Well if you they are a leader of the environmental of.
Speaker 2: Course, of course, but they weren't talking to you know,
Speaker 2: you know, in our DC and EDS and to see
Speaker 2: Era club. They were not. It was It's very it
Speaker 2: was very and what I wanted.
Speaker 3: They were litigating as much, right, either.
Speaker 2: They were less litigious, but they were just I don't
Speaker 2: know why, but it you know, there was they didn't
Speaker 2: They they felt alienated and lot of my kind of
Speaker 2: mission was to bring those groups in and I I started,
Speaker 2: you know, I always tried to talk in a way
Speaker 2: that was inclusive of those groups. And today, you know,
Speaker 2: if you want to, I think one of the big
Speaker 2: mistakes of the environmental movement has made. The biggest mistake
Speaker 2: is to become the kind of carbon fundamentalists and to
Speaker 2: forget about the issues that made us all environmentalists, which is,
Speaker 2: you know, saving the oceans and saving the soils and
Speaker 2: saving habitat and keeping our kids safe from toxins. And
Speaker 2: if you talk about climate today, you're gonna you're gonna
Speaker 2: cause a fistfight. And because you know, and with good reason,
Speaker 2: one is because it's a it's an issue. You know,
Speaker 2: I found this for the fishermen very early on, and
Speaker 2: they didn't really want to talk about it. Because if
Speaker 2: you're being asked to give up to something because of
Speaker 2: a line that somebody shows you on a graph that
Speaker 2: says you're going to be daddy here, and they're asking
Speaker 2: you to give up income, you know that's going to
Speaker 2: help your family, You're going to push back against that.
Speaker 2: But if you ask somebody to make a sacrifice to
Speaker 2: keep toxics out of their food, to keep their water
Speaker 2: clean so there's no mercury in the fish, they will
Speaker 2: pay anything to do that. And you know, when we
Speaker 2: were fighting the lead contamination in the water in Flint, Michigan,
Speaker 2: we had Hell's Angels standing shoulders shoulder with urban blacks.
Speaker 2: When we went to you know, at Standing Rock, we
Speaker 2: had business people, Republicans, union people, democrats, every kind of
Speaker 2: person was at Standing Rock for the Keystone pipeline. Because
Speaker 2: we didn't market it as a climate isge. He marked
Speaker 2: protecting sacred places, and you know, purple mountains, majesties and
Speaker 2: Americans will do anything to protect their sacred place. You know,
Speaker 2: I've been fighting the coal industry for forty years, but
Speaker 2: I don't focus on climate. I focus on things that
Speaker 2: are tangible to people. I focus on, you know, the
Speaker 2: destruction of the Appalachian Mountains. The Appalachians are the ridges
Speaker 2: ecoism terrestrial ecosistm in North America. And the reason for
Speaker 2: that is during the places in ice age, when they
Speaker 2: were two and a half miles of ice over where
Speaker 2: my house was in Mount Kisso, New York, the forest
Speaker 2: disappeared in America. North American continent turned into a tundrad,
Speaker 2: and the forest disappeared almost all together except in a
Speaker 2: couple of tiny refuge ins, and the biggest one of
Speaker 2: those was Appalasia. Oh and then when the ice melted
Speaker 2: and withdrew all of North America was receded from the
Speaker 2: Appalachian Mountains. So that's why you know, if you go
Speaker 2: up to a forest and you know in upstate New
Speaker 2: York or the Hudson Valley or New England, there's typically
Speaker 2: three dominant species and an applash there's eighty six dominant species.
Speaker 2: You know, the diversity is extraordinary. We're exploding I think
Speaker 2: twenty eight hundred tons of ammonia nitrate explosives a week.
Speaker 2: It's the equivalent of a Hirosima bomb once a week
Speaker 2: by by these big companies Pebity Coso Massacre. They're blowing
Speaker 2: the tops off the mountains to get at the coal
Speaker 2: seams beneath. There's they've leveled one point four million acres.
Speaker 2: That's bigger than the state of Delaware. If you drive
Speaker 2: in West Virginia today, you drive on a road and
Speaker 2: you'll see these beautiful mountain sides and eats either side.
Speaker 2: But if you fly over it in a helicopter, they're
Speaker 2: just Hollywood sets behind them. There's just one hundred square
Speaker 2: miles of devastation. It looks like a open quarry. And
Speaker 2: they can never refill them. They can never rebuild them.
Speaker 2: And if Americans knew what was happening, there would be
Speaker 2: a revolution about it because people don't want to see that.
Speaker 2: These are the landscapes where you know Daniel Boone and
Speaker 2: Davy Krock It came into bluegrass music came out of it.
Speaker 2: Nests are racing, so much of our culture has tied
Speaker 2: up in this Purple Mountain's majesty. They filled twenty two
Speaker 2: hundred miles of rivers and streams with mining tailings and
Speaker 2: you know, destroyed the water, destroy the fisheries, destroyed the
Speaker 2: you know, the health of the population. It's the sickest,
Speaker 2: sickest people in our country. And you don't need to
Speaker 2: ever talk about climate. You talk, you know, you talk
Speaker 2: about asset rain as it rain has destroyed the forest
Speaker 2: cover on the Appalachians from Georgia to northern Quebec. You know,
Speaker 2: I grew up in the Adirondacks, which is the oldest
Speaker 2: protected wilderness on Earth. It's it's it was protected since
Speaker 2: eighteen agers the Lincoln protect that it or you know,
Speaker 2: since the eighteen eighties it's been protected. And I'm thinking
Speaker 2: of Yosemite with Lincoln, but the Adirondeck since eighteen eighties.
Speaker 2: You know, when Roosevelt was governor, it got protected, and
Speaker 2: we had an expectation of rite to believe that the
Speaker 2: Appalachian Mountains would be unspoiled for ever. It's called forever
Speaker 2: while that's the act. And I, you know, I grew
Speaker 2: up believing my children, then their children, their children would
Speaker 2: be able to enjoy it. But today twenty percent of
Speaker 2: the lakes and the Adirondacks is sterilized from acid rain
Speaker 2: and nobody wants that, right. And you know, we're losing
Speaker 2: the oyster fisheries in Washington where you've lived in Oregon,
Speaker 2: because the oceans are now becoming so acidic that the
Speaker 2: bivalves like oysters and mobilized calcium out of the water
Speaker 2: column to build their shells. And this is this is terrifying.
Speaker 2: And and then we have mercury and all the fish
Speaker 2: in our country and nobody wants that and that so
Speaker 2: if you all you're going to talk about is carbon
Speaker 2: And then you know, we just went through COVID a
Speaker 2: lot of Americans and they saw out totalitarian elements within
Speaker 2: our society. Kind of elites use these crazies to clamp
Speaker 2: down totalitary and top down totalitarian controls and to and
Speaker 2: to shift wealth upward, and you know, the same thing
Speaker 2: is happening with climate, you know, and I see it
Speaker 2: with you know, even with with what Biden's done in
Speaker 2: the Inflation Reduction Act, which is his big climate Act,
Speaker 2: that the money is going to carbon capture projects hundreds
Speaker 2: of billions of dollars, which are just a scam. It's
Speaker 2: a boondoggle for the oil industry, for the methane industry.
Speaker 2: And then to offshore wind farms which are producing energy
Speaker 2: at five times the couse of onshore wind farms, and
Speaker 2: they were exterminating the whales and the marine mammals that
Speaker 2: you know, we all we were drawn to the environmental
Speaker 2: moment out of love, not out of fear, out of
Speaker 2: love for these creatures. And you know, and we're now
Speaker 2: sacrificing those on the altar of carbon fundamentalism. And the
Speaker 2: real way to deal with the carbon is is is
Speaker 2: to deal with soils, is to restore our soils, because
Speaker 2: they we got to. If we do regenerate agriculture across
Speaker 2: this country, we absorb one hundred percent of our carbon budget.
Speaker 2: That's what we ought to be focusing on. And so
Speaker 2: I'm not you know, I think climate change is existential
Speaker 2: I think it's linked to carbon, but I, you know,
Speaker 2: I do only insist you believe that, and I think
Speaker 2: the approach should be more words, we're habitat protection, reducing toxics,
Speaker 2: restoring our soils, and then using markets to regulate our
Speaker 2: you know, using markets to regulate energy use. So instead
Speaker 2: of top down controls, we get rid of the subsidies.
Speaker 2: We're giving five point two trillion dollars at subsidies to
Speaker 2: carbon every year. We should get rid of. We should
Speaker 2: get of all subsidies to you know, to mature industries
Speaker 2: and then let let you know, let the different energy sources,
Speaker 2: of generation sources compete in the marketplace, and we'll get
Speaker 2: the cheapest energy and we'll get the most environmentally sound
Speaker 2: energy policy. People's say free market capitalis capitalism is the
Speaker 2: enemy of the environment. It's not in it. We don't
Speaker 2: have free market capitalism. We have corporate chrony capitalism, and
Speaker 2: we have capitalism for the rich, and this very kind
Speaker 2: of or socialism for the rich, and that's very brutal,
Speaker 2: kind of barbaric capitalism for the poor. In a true
Speaker 2: free market, you can't make yourself rich without making your
Speaker 2: neighbors rich, and without it rich in your community. A
Speaker 2: true free market which promote efficiency, and efficiency means the
Speaker 2: elimination of ways and pollution is ways. In a true
Speaker 2: free market, we would be required to properly value our
Speaker 2: natural resources. And it's the undervaluation of those resources that
Speaker 2: cause us to use them wastefully. And like I said,
Speaker 2: in a true free market, if you want to make
Speaker 2: yourself rich, you're going to make your neighbors rich too,
Speaker 2: in your community rich. What polluters do is they make
Speaker 2: themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards
Speaker 2: of living with themselves by lowering quality of life for
Speaker 2: everybody else. And they do that by escaping the discipline
Speaker 2: of the free market. You show me a polluter, I'll
Speaker 2: show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat
Speaker 2: using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market,
Speaker 2: force the public to pay his production costs. That's what
Speaker 2: all pollution is. It's always somebody who's getting a subsidy.
Speaker 2: You know, a General Electric dumped its PCBs into the Hudson.
Speaker 2: It was escaping the discipline of the market. The market.
Speaker 2: A true free market, every actor in the marketplace should
Speaker 2: pay one hundred percent of the costs up bringing his
Speaker 2: product to market, and that includes the cost of cleaning
Speaker 2: up your mess, which was the lesson we were all
Speaker 2: supposed to learn the Kindergarten. What polluters do is they
Speaker 2: figure out a way to externalize those costs and get
Speaker 2: the public shoulder their costs. So General Electric dump its
Speaker 2: piec of bees in the river. It it. You know,
Speaker 2: when the State of New York said we don't want
Speaker 2: you to do that anymore, that gee said to the governor,
Speaker 2: Governor Carry and Governor Rockefellery, if you don't let us
Speaker 2: do that, we're going to move our plant to New Jersey.
Speaker 2: It'll get the taxes, it'll get the employment, and you're
Speaker 2: still going to get the pollution because we're going to
Speaker 2: do it from that side of the river. And so
Speaker 2: they caved into them, and then you know, twenty years later,
Speaker 2: General Electric left the Hudson Valley, left New York. They
Speaker 2: don't have a single employee left in New York. They're
Speaker 2: not paying any any tax revenues. They left behind a
Speaker 2: four point five billion dollars cleanup problem that nobody in
Speaker 2: the Hudson nobody can afford to clean up. And you know,
Speaker 2: everybody in the Hudson Valley is General Electrics PCBs and
Speaker 2: our flesh and our organs. They put out a business
Speaker 2: all of my clients. You know, when I started, we
Speaker 2: had a twenty five hundred fishing families in the river.
Speaker 2: Today there's one left, you know, and the Hudson. The
Speaker 2: abundance of the Hudson has never been more better. You
Speaker 2: can't eat the fish because they got PCBs in them.
Speaker 2: And you know, so they stole those fish from us.
Speaker 2: We paid to clean up the river, and General Electric
Speaker 2: privatize the Hudson. And now you know the Constitution of
Speaker 2: New York says the people that stayed on the Hudson,
Speaker 2: they own all the fish in the Hudson. But we
Speaker 2: don't own them anymore. The General Electric Company owns them
Speaker 2: because they privatize them. And that's what all pollution is.
Speaker 2: It's somebody making a grab to privatize part the commons,
Speaker 2: you know, part of the commonwealth, is part of the
Speaker 2: public trust, and privatize it. And that's a subsidy. I
Speaker 2: want to give rid of the subsidies. And that if
Speaker 2: you talk about pollution that way, everybody nodds their head,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, I imagine, yeah, it's it frames it in
Speaker 1: the way, like you said earlier, frames it in the
Speaker 1: way it frames environmentalism in a way where people understand
Speaker 1: the implication for the battle for rural people, the implication
Speaker 1: of the battle for you know, people who live closer
Speaker 1: to the land, rather than viewing it as some mechanism
Speaker 1: that is desirous to end their way of life.
Speaker 2: Right or leads grabbing control of your your freedoms and
Speaker 2: your property.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and not seeing it as in some ways a
Speaker 1: way to defend your way of life, defending your access
Speaker 1: to clean water, defending your access to a stable fishery,
Speaker 1: clean fish that you can eat, you know, clean water
Speaker 1: you can enjoy. We talked I'd mentioned the Interior Department recently,
Speaker 1: sitting in the same seat you're in. We had an
Speaker 1: individual on who it was with the Nature Conservancy and
Speaker 1: we were talking about offshore wind.
Speaker 3: On the episode.
Speaker 1: When we talked about offshore wind, I had shared a
Speaker 1: fear of mind, and it's a fear of a lot
Speaker 1: of my friends and associates who are who are involved
Speaker 1: in the conservation movement, who are public lands advocates, and
Speaker 1: it's a growing.
Speaker 3: Fear that.
Speaker 1: In the pursuit of alternatives, alternative energy, there we could
Speaker 1: have some hasty maneuvers that takes some of our last
Speaker 1: vestiges of grassland, you know, grassland ecosystems, sagebrush ecosystems. Move
Speaker 1: it to a alternative. We went to solar arrays, wind farms,
Speaker 1: and then a fear that we're gonna do this, We're
Speaker 1: gonna make these compromises. Everybody's gonna do it. I think
Speaker 1: it's the right thing. We're gonna exploit a bunch of
Speaker 1: Bureau of Land Management properties, and then ten years down
Speaker 1: the road, twenty years down the road, thirty years down
Speaker 1: the road, we will see that we have not moved
Speaker 1: the needle on carbon, and we will have developed and
Speaker 1: industrialized portions of our landscape. That's a roundabout way of
Speaker 1: asking that, how if we pursue moving away from coal,
Speaker 1: if we pursue moving away from oil, how do you
Speaker 1: picture doing it where we don't need to have a
Speaker 1: net new or a radically net new usage of landscape
Speaker 1: to generate.
Speaker 2: Let me ask you get this. I presume the Nature
Speaker 2: Conservancy guy that you were talking to was shared your
Speaker 2: point of values, or was he saying, no, we need
Speaker 2: to do you know, untethered wind offshore win.
Speaker 3: I don't want to miss current help me out.
Speaker 1: I don't want to missstate his perspective, but his perspective
Speaker 1: was this is the best the offshore being the best
Speaker 1: option we have.
Speaker 2: Okay, well that's just not true. I mean, the offshore
Speaker 2: is a cataclysm. And I've been fighting offshore win for
Speaker 2: probably thirty years. You know. The big the first big
Speaker 2: one was in Nantucket Sound and I was representing the
Speaker 2: commercial fisherman there, and you know the problems. It destroys
Speaker 2: the commercial fishery and we have a sustainable commercial fishery
Speaker 2: and Nantucket Sound, you know, we have we have small
Speaker 2: business people who are the heart and soul of America,
Speaker 2: who've been the oldest industry in our country, three hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty year old industry. And you know, you put
Speaker 2: up these turbines and first of all, it kills the whales,
Speaker 2: It kills the zeals. There's no doubt that that's what's happening.
Speaker 2: You know, we're seeing these around.
Speaker 1: It sure seems it, sure seems like it. I think
Speaker 1: that there's a there's ways you can obfuscate that, or
Speaker 1: ways you can act like there's a little bit of
Speaker 1: a question.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but if.
Speaker 2: There's a question, there's a precautionary principle. There's only a
Speaker 2: couple of hundred right whales left in the world, you know,
Speaker 2: so uh and and you know, you there there's such
Speaker 2: a precise time correlation between them doing the you know,
Speaker 2: the hammering for the uh to put these turbines into
Speaker 2: the into the you know, with these giant nomadic hammers
Speaker 2: which make these reverberations, and then the whales all beach
Speaker 2: with their ears bleeding, you know, and uh. And it's
Speaker 2: it's happening so reliably and so consistently around all the
Speaker 2: places where there's this construction. It's just a cataclysm. And
Speaker 2: then the other thing is it's non market base. It's
Speaker 2: all the subsidy based. Nobody would be buying that. Nobody
Speaker 2: would be building these if they actually had a market,
Speaker 2: if we had a free market. They're buying them because
Speaker 2: you know, President Biden is giving them hundreds of billions
Speaker 2: of dollars of free money to build these very lucrative towers.
Speaker 2: And then they're charging a minimum three times the price
Speaker 2: I'm on shore win and usually six times the price.
Speaker 2: So it's going to turn the whole public against green
Speaker 2: power because they're going to be paying more for electricity
Speaker 2: than they are today. None of it makes any sense,
Speaker 2: you know. And I, by the way, I know a
Speaker 2: lot about this. I know because I built power plants.
Speaker 2: I was on the board of them or as a
Speaker 2: partner in the biggest green tech venture capital firm in
Speaker 2: the country for a decade, and we built the ivanpap plant,
Speaker 2: which is the biggest solar thermal plant in North America.
Speaker 2: Another of my company has built the PVC plan at
Speaker 2: I mean not the BVC, but the solar plant at
Speaker 2: as Susanne Marie, which is the biggest you know, solar
Speaker 2: panel plant in the in then North America. And I've
Speaker 2: I've participated in wind power in all kinds. My brother,
Speaker 2: you know, sells wind power for a living. I know
Speaker 2: what the cauts are. And the price of wind power
Speaker 2: on shore wind power right now is about eleven cents
Speaker 2: of killo white hour and these offshore plants are you know,
Speaker 2: are getting forty or more forty cents a kilo hour
Speaker 2: or more. And nobody wants to pay that for energy.
Speaker 2: It's destructive. So you know what I think is everything
Speaker 2: should be market based. I think COLS should have to
Speaker 2: internalize its costs and if it did, it be the
Speaker 2: most meaning internalized.
Speaker 3: That's clean up in mitigation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that you know, you can't have these piles of
Speaker 2: you know, of at every stage coal is getting subsidized.
Speaker 2: You know the roads that in West Virginia are twenty
Speaker 2: two inches of asphalt that we pay for because the
Speaker 2: coal trucks weighed ninety thousand pounds. But they're not paying
Speaker 2: for that if they were, if that was affected, you know,
Speaker 2: they can sell coal or you know, ten or twelve
Speaker 2: cents of gill one hour in North Carolina cold cold
Speaker 2: on energy and everybody thinks this is really cheap. If
Speaker 2: it actually had to internalize the cause it wouldn't be cheap.
Speaker 2: It would be the most catastrophically expensive way to boil
Speaker 2: a pot of water that's ever been devised. Because you know,
Speaker 2: because if they actually had to pay the real costs
Speaker 2: of the acid rain of the mercury in our fish
Speaker 2: of half trillion dollars a year in respiratory injuries from
Speaker 2: hozone in particulates destructure of the Appalachians that you know,
Speaker 2: the destruction of habits that if those were quantified and
Speaker 2: then build their account. You know, the coal burning energy
Speaker 2: costs forty to fifty cents, I'll kill one hour. Nobody
Speaker 2: could be using it. There's no single solution to this.
Speaker 2: The mining that's associated with these new technologies is extremely destructive,
Speaker 2: and you know, with the rare earth minerals, et cetera,
Speaker 2: it is extremely disruptive to some of the most beautiful
Speaker 2: habitat place like the Congo, these like Alaska, you know,
Speaker 2: which are going to get devastated by rare earth mining.
Speaker 2: And those costs have to be assessed and they have
Speaker 2: to be internalized. And then if you do that, you know,
Speaker 2: and that's the way to do it. And what what
Speaker 2: we'll get is we'll get a lot of localized power production.
Speaker 2: We'll get you know, not one big bullet solution, but
Speaker 2: we'll get a lot of smaller solution. And then there's
Speaker 2: you know, listen, I'm not you know, I've always said
Speaker 2: about nuclear power that.
Speaker 3: This is good because this is my next this is
Speaker 3: my next question.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm not a subject matter expert.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I I just I'm so far from a
Speaker 1: subject matter expert. I just can't help though, with thinking
Speaker 1: that we need to be reinvesting there in terms of footprint, right,
Speaker 1: in terms of footprint.
Speaker 2: Well, let me let me tell you. First of all,
Speaker 2: what I think, you know my thinking about nuclear power,
Speaker 2: and I no longer consider myself a subject matter expert
Speaker 2: because I'm told that there are technological improvements that have
Speaker 2: happened since I was litigating, you know, against nuclear power plants,
Speaker 2: which I've done a lot of. But what I've always
Speaker 2: said is I'm I am for nuclear power if they
Speaker 2: ever make it safe and if they ever make it economical.
Speaker 3: Is that heavily subsidized.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is the most heavily subsided so that.
Speaker 3: But nowhere can put the seed money up to get
Speaker 3: that going.
Speaker 2: There's not a single utility in the world that will
Speaker 2: build a nuclear power plant unless it's fully subsidized. But
Speaker 2: they also they have a bill called the Price Anderson
Speaker 2: Act because you know, if they say they're safe, but
Speaker 2: they can't get an insurance policy, the insurance industry won't
Speaker 2: write them a policy. And so it's not a bunch
Speaker 2: of hippies and tied eyed T shirts who are saying
Speaker 2: you're unsafe. It's guys in suits on Wall Street who
Speaker 2: say we're not going to assure you, and you know
Speaker 2: until they can buy an insurance. So they had to
Speaker 2: go to Congress and get this act pass called the
Speaker 2: Price Anderson Act, and a sleazy legislative maneuver in the
Speaker 2: middle of the night to give them immunity from liability.
Speaker 2: So if they're they're plant blows up, yeah, and you're
Speaker 2: you go look at your home owners policy. You'll have
Speaker 2: a line in it. This policy is not protect you
Speaker 2: from from from nuclear radiation from powerful And I lived
Speaker 2: eighteen miles from Indian points, so I saw that and
Speaker 2: it was a possibility. This is going to happen and
Speaker 2: I lose everything and I'm self insured for that insurance company.
Speaker 2: You're not gonna pay me. Oh that's you know. What
Speaker 2: I would say, don't get show is that you can
Speaker 2: get an insurance policy like other industries and then we'll
Speaker 2: believe you're safe. But you know, because nobody wants to
Speaker 2: argue it with you, just get the insurance policy like
Speaker 2: everybody else does, and then you know, I mean, the
Speaker 2: other problem is they don't really know what to do
Speaker 2: with the ways it's they it keeps when they when
Speaker 2: they first said they said, we'll figure that out by
Speaker 2: the time we need to, but they never have. And
Speaker 2: there's you know, they have to set you have to
Speaker 2: store this stuff now for thirty thousand years, which is
Speaker 2: five times the length of recorded human history. So how
Speaker 2: could that be economical? Right, You're just shifting the cost
Speaker 2: to a future generation. And but I understand there's new
Speaker 2: technologies that are promising and if that happens, what I
Speaker 2: would say to you, what I will do as present
Speaker 2: is the big problem in our country is we don't
Speaker 2: have a market markets or energy real markets. Oh, in
Speaker 2: North Dakota. You, North Dakota is one of the windiest
Speaker 2: places on Earth at the sea level. There's enough Scientific
Speaker 2: American to a study that showed there's enough harnessable to
Speaker 2: wind in North Dakota, Montana, and Texas to provide one
Speaker 2: hundred percent in the North American energy grid. Now, there
Speaker 2: is enough solar energy in the desert in an area
Speaker 2: seventy five miles by seventy five miles in the desert
Speaker 2: southwest provide one hundred percent of the energy. You wouldn't
Speaker 2: do that because if a cloud passed over Arizona, you'd
Speaker 2: black out the country, right, But it shows you that
Speaker 2: it's out there and available.
Speaker 3: And if you have the technology, if you.
Speaker 2: Store it and deliver it, really you don't even need
Speaker 2: so much storage technology. If you have transportation technology. So
Speaker 2: if you have a grid that is a national grid
Speaker 2: with DC grid that can do long haul transportation of electrons,
Speaker 2: it reduces your need to store because you can manage
Speaker 2: the whole system like an orchestra. Conductor manages an orchestra.
Speaker 2: Because the wind in our country tends to blow at night,
Speaker 2: and the sun of course shines during the day, and
Speaker 2: the sun shines the period you wanted the sun. But
Speaker 2: you know, the twelve o'clock is peak energy use, and
Speaker 2: that's the time you're getting peak sunshine. So it actually
Speaker 2: and then if you throw in a lot of rooftop
Speaker 2: solar and everybody is feeding into a marketplace, you have
Speaker 2: abundance of energy to manage the system. And let me
Speaker 2: let me just you know, finish this kind of thought.
Speaker 2: In North Dakota, I think the revenue typicult revenue from
Speaker 2: an acre of corn is about maybe two hundred dollars
Speaker 2: a year. You're gonna get revenue if you have a
Speaker 2: if you have a winter termine on that acre of corn.
Speaker 1: I got to interrupt you here to point out for
Speaker 1: people too, that when we're talking about corn there, we're
Speaker 1: all talking about corn that goes a lot of that
Speaker 1: corn goes to energy, yeah, of course.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I just want people to be clear.
Speaker 1: It's not like it's not necessarily moving food to energy
Speaker 1: because you do an ethanol productions not.
Speaker 2: Food in any case, it's commodity.
Speaker 1: It's not even you know, it's energy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So but if you have a wind turbine on
Speaker 2: that property, that farmer is making eight thousand dollars a year. Right,
Speaker 2: So every farmer in North Dakota wants to put a
Speaker 2: wind wind farms on this property, you can't do it
Speaker 2: because there's not an energy grid that can get those
Speaker 2: electrons to markets in you know, Cleveland, Cincinnati, New Orleans,
Speaker 2: New York, et cetera. Because the current system is antiquated.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's underbuilt, under extended, and it's it's incapable.
Speaker 2: It's an AC grid that's incapable of doing a long
Speaker 2: haul transportation of electrons if you had the grid there.
Speaker 2: There are huge amounts of capital from you know, General Electric, Seamens, Vestas,
Speaker 2: all these giant companies that want to pour my capital
Speaker 2: into building, into renting turbine, building turbines on those farmers lands.
Speaker 2: So the capital is there to do it, and it
Speaker 2: would provide a huge source of revenue for American farm families,
Speaker 2: which we want to keep on the farm. We want
Speaker 2: to keep them on the land and make sure that
Speaker 2: they're prosperous. And you know that Main Street is prosperous,
Speaker 2: et cetera. We have three different energy grids in our country.
Speaker 2: They're not unified, and they none of them are capable
Speaker 2: of doing these things that we need them to do.
Speaker 2: We need to build that energy grid and that, you know,
Speaker 2: the same way that we built a canal system in
Speaker 2: this kind. We built a canal system in eighteen twenty five,
Speaker 2: and you know, within a few years New York went
Speaker 2: from a backwater to being the biggest port in the
Speaker 2: world because you could the Erie Canal allowed Midwestern farmers
Speaker 2: to put their produce on a barge and it would
Speaker 2: never get off a boat until it went to Europe.
Speaker 2: So all of a sudden, you didn't have to haul
Speaker 2: stuff over the Appalachians. The government built that canhouse system,
Speaker 2: the government built the highway system.
Speaker 1: And I was going to make before you mentioned, I
Speaker 1: was going to bring up people people. I think kind
Speaker 1: of feel like the interstate system sort of fell from
Speaker 1: the sky.
Speaker 3: No, it was it was like in the post.
Speaker 1: You know, not just the advent of the car, but
Speaker 1: realizations we had during World War Two. It was a
Speaker 1: like a very deliberately constructed system.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it was for national security reasons and for
Speaker 2: commercial reasons and to bring us together as a country,
Speaker 2: et cetera. And it was you know, I watched a
Speaker 2: build when I was a kid. It was horrifying to
Speaker 2: me because they know, plowed over the flora the pond
Speaker 2: where you know, I went fishing every day, and you know,
Speaker 2: but and it was but they did it, and it's
Speaker 2: brought tremendous prosperity to our country. And so we need
Speaker 2: to invest in building this grid system and we need
Speaker 2: to you know, right now, we have an energy market
Speaker 2: that is I'm governed by fifty public utility commissions, one
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty control districts with these byzantine rules, this
Speaker 2: very bulk and high system that operates under under rules
Speaker 2: that were written by the incumbents by coal and oil
Speaker 2: to reward. The dirty is filthy, is most poisonous, most toxic.
Speaker 2: War mongering feels from hell. Other than the cheap glean green,
Speaker 2: A wholesome and patriotic feel feels from heaven. Well, we
Speaker 2: need to create a market that. Now, I'll give you
Speaker 2: an example. I had a house in Mount Kisco, New York,
Speaker 2: and I had a state of the art solar system
Speaker 2: on the roof, and I had a geothermal system in
Speaker 2: the basement. Every day of the year at home was
Speaker 2: producing more energy than I was using. Why can't I
Speaker 2: sell that access back onto the grid and get the
Speaker 2: same price the utilities are getting, right, Why can't every
Speaker 2: American do that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was gonna I wanted to ask you about
Speaker 1: that when this subject first came up. Is that when
Speaker 1: you see those little bits of legislation come up basically
Speaker 1: saying if you do a solar ray on your house,
Speaker 1: it's a you can't sell back.
Speaker 3: Is that?
Speaker 1: Is there any argument for that other than them protecting monopoly?
Speaker 2: There's no, there's no monopolies. That's what they're doing.
Speaker 3: There's no other reason why.
Speaker 2: Okay, and what we wanted to that And it would
Speaker 2: democracize our country because you turn every American into a
Speaker 2: into an energy entrepreneur, you turn every home into a
Speaker 2: power plant. You can give people a chance to get
Speaker 2: revenue from their homes to help pay their mortgage, et cetera.
Speaker 2: And why do.
Speaker 3: They ever get why do they ever get legislative assistance
Speaker 3: on those bills that prevent people.
Speaker 2: From those bills are all the state law lawmakers who
Speaker 2: are passing them, and they're all, you know, owned by
Speaker 2: the utilities. The utilities are given all the money. And
Speaker 2: you can buy a state legislature very very cheap in
Speaker 2: this country, and you can get that stuff past.
Speaker 3: And in most citizens this is not on their radar.
Speaker 3: They just start on their.
Speaker 2: Radar and and you know, it's it's so important for
Speaker 2: democracy because the political systems of countries tend to reflect
Speaker 2: their economic organization. And if you have the economy controlled
Speaker 2: by a few large energy producers oil coal utilities, the
Speaker 2: political system will tend also towards sort of a more
Speaker 2: totalitarian model. Whereas if the energy system is controlled by
Speaker 2: two hundred million American homeowners, if they're your generators, you're
Speaker 2: going to democratize the country as well. And you know,
Speaker 2: we have such a pundan energy resources. We have some
Speaker 2: of the best solo in the world in this country.
Speaker 2: We have the best wind of any big nation in
Speaker 2: the world, and we ought to be exploiting that, but
Speaker 2: we can't do it until we build an energy grid.
Speaker 2: And let me give you an example of what's going
Speaker 2: to happen. We built an Arbaet grid for the Internet
Speaker 2: in the Defense Department. Dart pub built the Arpanet grid,
Speaker 2: which is was the beginning of the Internet in this
Speaker 2: country in nineteen seventy nine. A year after we built it.
Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty, the CEO of IBM said that IBM
Speaker 2: was getting out of the personal computers because he said
Speaker 2: it was a dead end technology. Dell did that. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of other companies that got out of the
Speaker 2: business then because they didn't see what was about to happen.
Speaker 2: Within a few years, virtually every American has a personal computer.
Speaker 2: And what happened because we built a grid, we built
Speaker 2: a marketplace. And what happens happened to the cost of information.
Speaker 2: It went to zero. Oh imagine you asked me it
Speaker 2: was important for some reason for me to find out
Speaker 2: the answer to some obscure question, like, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: what was Malose Tongue's typical lunchtime, favorite lunchtime meal. Let's
Speaker 2: say I.
Speaker 3: Had to get you pre internet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, look, okay, yeah, you'd have to go to Washington,
Speaker 2: spend a week going through the library of Congress of
Speaker 2: the stacks to dig that out, and you may or
Speaker 2: may not find it today. You can probably type it
Speaker 2: into Google. It'll come right up.
Speaker 1: I used a joke as a writer and I got
Speaker 1: going before definitely not pre Internet, but for widespread, you know,
Speaker 1: internet use. And I used to joke that I was
Speaker 1: very anti Internet because I had a competitive advantage that
Speaker 1: I was good at finding shit out with the card
Speaker 1: catalog at the library, you know. And then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, I was like, now any idiots can find
Speaker 1: out whatever they want.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: And you say I liked it better when you had
Speaker 3: to work for that.
Speaker 2: You're irrelevant now, So your skills are irrelevant your big gift.
Speaker 2: So so if the cause of information went to zero,
Speaker 2: and that's what's going to happen to electrons if we
Speaker 2: build an energy grid. The same thing happened with telecommunications.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety six, President Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act,
Speaker 2: and he forced all the baby Bells to consolidate their
Speaker 2: grid system and create a marketplace with lowest cost provider
Speaker 2: would prevail. In the marketplace, you couldn't exclude people anymore.
Speaker 2: And that created a telecom revolution, and all these little
Speaker 2: devices that we now have, like self, are the offspring
Speaker 2: of that revolution. But what happened to the cause of
Speaker 2: phone calls and went to zero? Yeah? I worked in
Speaker 2: a university, you know, at law school, and.
Speaker 3: I've tried, I've tried to explain to my kids.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the thing that would happen of that your parents
Speaker 1: would present you with a phone bill.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you would need to go through circling.
Speaker 1: You would need to go through circling, you know, And
Speaker 1: you're like, really, that was a seven.
Speaker 2: Dollars when I called that guy. Oh, I remember making
Speaker 2: a five minute call to England that was seventy four dollars.
Speaker 2: At my university looks a law school, there was only
Speaker 2: one professor in the law school that was allowed to
Speaker 2: have a phone that made international calls. His name was
Speaker 2: William Vese and he was the international law professor. Any
Speaker 2: of the other professors who wanted to call internationally had
Speaker 2: to go knock on his door and Tay, can I
Speaker 2: use your phone? It was great, That's what it was like, right,
Speaker 2: And now that call is free, and it's because we
Speaker 2: built the marketplace, and that's what's going to happen to
Speaker 2: electronsity as soon as we do this. My solution is
Speaker 2: a bigger solution rather than hand picking you know, wind, solar, hydro, nuke.
Speaker 2: What we do is we create a market and let
Speaker 2: the market pick it, and we we get rid of
Speaker 2: the subsidies we enforced. We make sure you can't pollute
Speaker 2: the environment because that's a subside, and then we take
Speaker 2: the lowest costs form of energy in each you know,
Speaker 2: in each district that that and and that is going
Speaker 2: to you know, create an economic boom the way that
Speaker 2: the Internet did, but we got to invest in that
Speaker 2: in that marketplace.
Speaker 1: It's funny you're you're articulated concept to me that. I uh,
Speaker 1: I'm almost embarrassed that it hadn't occurred to me before.
Speaker 1: The way you're putting it would be these this idea
Speaker 1: of looking at polluters as the subsidy, being like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: we gave you that river and all of the fish
Speaker 1: in it.
Speaker 3: You use that.
Speaker 1: I used that up, yeah exactly, and putting a value
Speaker 1: and being like, and since you used.
Speaker 2: That up, yeah, here's the bill.
Speaker 1: Had it hadn't occurred to me, uh yeah, I know
Speaker 1: you've mentioned hydro. I know you've worked on projects around.
Speaker 3: Protecting rivers from hydro development. And damning.
Speaker 1: You spend a bunch of time, you know, as you
Speaker 1: laid out with your work on the Hudson River. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's jump over for a minute to the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 3: Based on your expertise, there is Well, let me let
Speaker 3: me put it a different way. If I came to
Speaker 3: you and said, you have.
Speaker 1: All the power in the world, within all the power
Speaker 1: in the country, within practical consideration, is there any hope
Speaker 1: for Pacific salmon in you know, south of Alaska?
Speaker 2: Yeah, like you mean the Snake River runs sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's just let's just talk about the Columbia. Solet's
Speaker 1: talk about the Columbia Snake salmon, right, like the Columbia Waterway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's all the damming, Like yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: mean there is, you know, but there is, but it's
Speaker 1: a conservation. It's become a conservation dependent resource. Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: we have salmon now because we spend a lot of
Speaker 1: money to have salmon.
Speaker 2: Right, because we put them in elevators and lift them
Speaker 2: up at the top of the dam. So, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm any big dam you know there there I've seen
Speaker 2: a lot of headwaters dams actually work with minimal environmental damage.
Speaker 2: And you know, provide really good local sources of energy
Speaker 2: the people if you put them, you know, these smaller
Speaker 2: dams that you put up in the headwater before there's
Speaker 2: any you know, complex ecosystems in that waterway, and it
Speaker 2: really uh and they're very very functional and you know,
Speaker 2: I think really efficient the big dams. I you know,
Speaker 2: my inclination is to take dams down, but I'm most
Speaker 2: mindful of competing interests, So I would I don't know
Speaker 2: enough about all of the Columbia River dams to see
Speaker 2: which one should be removed, which ones you know can
Speaker 2: and then what happens when you remove him, because now
Speaker 2: they've got all this sentiment that's you know, forty or
Speaker 2: fifty feet high behind him, And what does that do
Speaker 2: to the river when you just when you blow the
Speaker 2: dam and release all.
Speaker 3: That there's a bit of a ripping off the band
Speaker 3: aid effect on some of that stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I don't know. I'd have to look and see.
Speaker 2: My inclination would be to try to figure out ways
Speaker 2: to take all those dams apart, you know, without causing
Speaker 2: economic cataclysms to you know, to other stakeholders.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a can you remember who we have on
Speaker 1: the representative from Idaho talking about his If you're ever
Speaker 1: in the White House, you gonna want to look this guy.
Speaker 3: Up, That guy Mike uh An Idaho representative. He had
Speaker 3: that very complicated, not complicated. I don't want to discredit it.
Speaker 3: He had a proposal on the Columbia about damn removal.
Speaker 2: Oh did he want the damns removed? Yeah?
Speaker 1: But like you said, I mean, you have everything from
Speaker 1: you know, you have kind of the Western bread basket, right,
Speaker 1: so Mike's yeah, Mike's we had Mike Simpson on Tom
Speaker 1: But but I mean you mentioned, you know, things is shipping. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have all that wheat production which is going out,
Speaker 1: you know, so by you know, you have to move stuff,
Speaker 1: barge traffic down to.
Speaker 3: Convert to rail.
Speaker 1: It's a yeah, you know, it takes three days to
Speaker 1: talk to that one.
Speaker 2: Well, you know what they say about Western water that
Speaker 2: you know, whiskeys for drinking and waters for fighting. And
Speaker 2: anytime you start talking about Western water, you're you know,
Speaker 2: people want to kill you because there's so much economic
Speaker 2: equity by you know, built into perverse economic systems, systems
Speaker 2: that are encouraging people to do bad things with resources
Speaker 2: just because of the way the West was settled, you know,
Speaker 2: it was first in use, first, first in time, first
Speaker 2: and right and all these other rules that and then
Speaker 2: use it or lose it. So you know, if you're
Speaker 2: if you're an agricultural interest, and you don't use your
Speaker 2: entire water allocation, you use it, so it encourages you
Speaker 2: to use the most wasteful water, wasteful you know, grow
Speaker 2: cotton and alfalfa in the desert because so you you know,
Speaker 2: I mean if you if you had to design it
Speaker 2: from the start, you would not design those rules. And
Speaker 2: now you know, now you've got one hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: years of development that's based upon these perverse incentives, and
Speaker 2: you have entire municipalities and you know, like Scottsdale and
Speaker 2: Phoenix and that are all essentially unsustainable.
Speaker 3: The thing I've tried to follow.
Speaker 1: And I in the amount of time I have to
Speaker 1: devote to reading to it, I can't come to an
Speaker 1: understanding of it is.
Speaker 3: Where are you on getting on all.
Speaker 1: The state ballots? And what are the hurdles you have
Speaker 1: to get on state ballots? I keep, you know, I
Speaker 1: read like small lists of states, but then signature gathering efforts.
Speaker 1: Is there a pathway to is there a path.
Speaker 3: Not possible?
Speaker 2: Well, it's you know, they just designed it to be.
Speaker 3: Insurmountable for you for a third party.
Speaker 2: A third party, the other guys don't have to do it, right,
Speaker 2: they don't have to do it. They're already on the
Speaker 2: Democrat and Republican already have automatic ballot line. So if
Speaker 2: you get on their ballots, you're you're in. But I
Speaker 2: have to do it, and then I also have to
Speaker 2: pay for my own security because they won't let me
Speaker 2: have a secret service, and that's a big cost.
Speaker 3: And so I don't know this.
Speaker 1: This is probably maybe of only marginal interest to our listeners.
Speaker 1: So maybe there's a quick way of doing it.
Speaker 3: What's what the.
Speaker 1: Security think like, Well, I'm the first the third party
Speaker 1: is ineligible for security.
Speaker 2: No, no, I would be eligible. I'm the first candidate.
Speaker 2: And you know, before my dad was killed, there was
Speaker 2: no secret service until you got a party nomination. Then
Speaker 2: at that that year they started giving it to everybody.
Speaker 2: So they gave it. George Wallace was running that year
Speaker 2: as an independent, you know, George McGovern, I mean, Hubert Humphrey,
Speaker 2: Jean McCarthy all got it immediately. As soon as my
Speaker 2: father was shot and Congress passed the law is saying
Speaker 2: everybody is entitled to it who gets certain poll numbers
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty days outside of the election from
Speaker 2: the election. In other words, one hundred and twenty days.
Speaker 2: We're now we're now five months in eighteen days, so
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty days is what that's four months? Right?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, four months. Oh I'm five months and eighteen
Speaker 2: days out. So in a month in eighteen days, I
Speaker 2: should bet a title. But it's discretionary, so the president
Speaker 2: can give it to anybody, and they've never refused it
Speaker 2: to anybody, and they've given it to thirty three candidates
Speaker 2: prior to the one hundred and twenty days. And I've
Speaker 2: had a lot of you know, sort of dangerous things
Speaker 2: happened during my campaign. I've had, you know, I've had
Speaker 2: four housebreak ins. One occasion, you know, the intruder got
Speaker 2: to my second floor with my family all home. And
Speaker 2: on another occasion, a guy showed up at my at
Speaker 2: one of my rallies in Los Angeles, and he had
Speaker 2: he was you know, he was covered with concealed weapons.
Speaker 2: He had two shoulder holsters with loaded magazines. He had
Speaker 2: a backpack filled with guns, including a laser sighted pistol
Speaker 2: that was fully loaded, a couple dozen extra ammunition clips,
Speaker 2: and a lot of other weapons, knives and all this
Speaker 2: other stuff he had.
Speaker 1: He was like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the end of that
Speaker 1: movie Commando, and he's got the stuffel bags exactly.
Speaker 2: That's how he's outfitted. And he had a he had
Speaker 2: a federal ID, so he had a federal US Marshall badge,
Speaker 2: he had federal idea.
Speaker 3: On his what was his? What was his?
Speaker 2: Before he left home that day, he made a TikTok
Speaker 2: tape saying, I'm going out on a mission now. If
Speaker 2: I don't come back from this, report to your commander
Speaker 2: in Chief, Donald J. Trump, you know. And he was
Speaker 2: kind of like a he looked like a motorcycle bandit
Speaker 2: kind of it. And that's the only TikTok he's ever made.
Speaker 2: And then, you know, luckily one of my security to
Speaker 2: look at took a close look at his his US
Speaker 2: Marshall badge and just said, something looks wrong with it.
Speaker 2: It looks too shiny. He was demanding to see me
Speaker 2: in the the the green room. And so my guys thought,
Speaker 2: is a US Marshall badge looked too shiny, and they
Speaker 2: detained him, and then they found all these other weapons
Speaker 2: on him, and they called the police. The police came
Speaker 2: in and arrested him and released him, you know, the
Speaker 2: next day. So despite the fact he had all all
Speaker 2: this fake idea on them. And so there's been a
Speaker 2: number of things like that that have happened, and you know,
Speaker 2: President Biden has made a decision not to give me
Speaker 2: Secret Service protection. And I'm pretty sure the reason, although
Speaker 2: I don't like to look into other people's minds, is
Speaker 2: that they know this is, you know, my security team
Speaker 2: is causing our campaign a million dollars a month, and
Speaker 2: they'd rather be spending that on security than on you know,
Speaker 2: advertising on ballot access. The answer to your original question,
Speaker 2: they've tried to make it insurmountable. We have an amazing team,
Speaker 2: and we have now one hundred thousand volunteers. We have
Speaker 2: more volunteers out there than any other campaign. And people
Speaker 2: are very, very very happy about signing my signatures. In fact,
Speaker 2: the professional ballot the professional signature gatherers, and there's a
Speaker 2: whole industry that that's all they do. They charged typically
Speaker 2: about ten bucks to fifteen bucks a signature, and it's
Speaker 2: a big industry, and they're all saying that this is
Speaker 2: the easiest campaign that they've ever done for any purpose,
Speaker 2: commercial campaigns, referendums, that people are you know that there's
Speaker 2: an enthusiasm for signing to give me on the ballot.
Speaker 2: Whether people want to vote for me or not, I
Speaker 2: don't know, but they people want to see me on
Speaker 2: the ballot. So we've done the two hardest states. We've
Speaker 2: done California, the three hardest we've done Texas, which is
Speaker 2: the hardest of all. We only have forty six states
Speaker 2: to get one hundred and I think one hundred and
Speaker 2: thirteen thousand signatures in forty six days, and we got
Speaker 2: a quarter million.
Speaker 3: And then it's helpful to overshoot it so that they have.
Speaker 2: To because the DNZ, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party
Speaker 2: are going to come in and go through every signature
Speaker 2: and try to find a problem with it. And so
Speaker 2: we need to get you know, at least a sixty
Speaker 2: percent and cushion. We try to get two and a
Speaker 2: half times. We're going to get on every ballot. All right, Oh.
Speaker 3: Uh, if.
Speaker 1: Trump or Biden came on the show, what would be
Speaker 1: the number one question you think I should ask them.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm curious about the lockdowns, about how they
Speaker 2: feel about that right now, you know, shutting down every
Speaker 2: business in this country for a year with no due process,
Speaker 2: no scientific citation, no you know, no public hearings, no
Speaker 2: environmental impact statement, and you know how they're going to
Speaker 2: make sure that never happens again. They you know, they
Speaker 2: destroyed the middle class in our country. They shifted four
Speaker 2: trillion dollars upward to this new oligarchy of billionaires. They
Speaker 2: created a billionaire a day in five hundred days, you know,
Speaker 2: and they just devastated a lot of these all businesses
Speaker 2: that they with the hard and soul of our country,
Speaker 2: you know, are gone and they're never coming back. Forty
Speaker 2: percent of black owned businesses, you know, will never reopen.
Speaker 2: Many of them had three generations of equity in them.
Speaker 2: And you know, we're turning now from a ownership society
Speaker 2: into a into a into a rental society. And you know,
Speaker 2: when we do that, we're going from being citizens to
Speaker 2: being subjects. People don't have homes if they don't have equity,
Speaker 2: access equity where they can pursue their entrepreneurial impulses. You know,
Speaker 2: our country is then on a feudal model. It's not
Speaker 2: a colonial model, not you know, not American democracy anymore.
Speaker 2: And you know, I would really I would love to
Speaker 2: if I was on a debating stage with them, you know,
Speaker 2: I would drill down on that issue. And you know,
Speaker 2: why in the world would they close the business press?
Speaker 2: And Trump knew that it was wrong, he said it,
Speaker 2: he said, I'll never do that, and then you know,
Speaker 2: he went ahead and did it for a year, and
Speaker 2: they did it for five hundred days, the two of them,
Speaker 2: and it was just agony for small business people. So
Speaker 2: you know, that's I guess. I mean, there's a million
Speaker 2: other things that you know, I think the issue with
Speaker 2: President Trump Prisent Biden is that they're very different. People
Speaker 2: have different dispositions, they different personalities, they have different ideologies,
Speaker 2: they're rhetoric. The whole way they interact with the public,
Speaker 2: with the world is you know, it couldn't be more different.
Speaker 2: But the actual issues that they that they're disputing each
Speaker 2: other on, it's a really narrow Overton window. It's like guns, abortion, order, security,
Speaker 2: trans rights, et cetera. It's all you know, they're all
Speaker 2: important issues, but they're kind of marginal with accepted to
Speaker 2: the border, which I think is really a big, big issue.
Speaker 2: But the existential issues, the issues that are critical to
Speaker 2: our survival is a nation. They never talk about that.
Speaker 2: You know, we have a thirty four trillion dollar debt
Speaker 2: now and we're spending more on our national We spend
Speaker 2: more servicing that debt every year than our defense budget.
Speaker 2: Within five years, fifty cents that have every dollar that's
Speaker 2: collected in taxes, we'll go to the servicing the debt
Speaker 2: within ten years one hundred percent is existential and nobody
Speaker 2: you'll never hear President find or President Trump talk about
Speaker 2: what they're going to do. Why is that because they
Speaker 2: ran up the debt in each of them four years
Speaker 2: off as half of that debt belongs to them a president.
Speaker 1: But I mean, that problem too has become talking about
Speaker 1: solving that problem is almost like talking about trying to
Speaker 1: stop the sun from rising.
Speaker 2: I don't think that's true, Really, I don't think that's true.
Speaker 2: I think they're you know, look, we've got to wind
Speaker 2: down the military. We've got to cut the military budget
Speaker 2: in half. We can't be the policeman of the world anymore.
Speaker 2: We're not, you know, doing global hegemony. We need to
Speaker 2: harmor ourselves the teeth at home. We need to protect
Speaker 2: the sea lanes and you know, the neutral areas and
Speaker 2: have it. And we need to be able to fight
Speaker 2: the wars the future. We're right now spending nine and
Speaker 2: a half nine you know, half a trillion and a
Speaker 2: half billion, nine hundred and fifty billion dollars a year
Speaker 2: preparing for wars that will never be fought again. And
Speaker 2: you know the whole and it's wrong, and we need
Speaker 2: it's existential. If we don't solve the debt. We have
Speaker 2: the biggest area that we can have saving this is
Speaker 2: the chronic disease epidemic that's costing US four point three
Speaker 2: trillion dollars. We can end that very very quickly, four
Speaker 2: point three trillion dollars, five times our military. But when
Speaker 2: my uncle the president, six percent of Americans had chronic disease.
Speaker 2: Today is sixty percent to why is that? Why did
Speaker 2: autism go from one in ten thousand in my generation
Speaker 2: today one in every ten thousand seventy year old man
Speaker 2: has autism and my kids generation one in every twenty
Speaker 2: two boys. Why did that happen? And why did obese
Speaker 2: that he go from thirteen percent when my uncle was president,
Speaker 2: of fifty percent of our kids today? Why is diabetes?
Speaker 2: When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician saw one
Speaker 2: case of diabetes in a fifty year career. Today, one
Speaker 2: out of every three kids who walks through his office
Speaker 2: door is pre diabetic or diabetic. Why is that happening?
Speaker 2: Nobody's answering those questions. Why did food allergies suddenly appear?
Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty nine? I have eleven brothers and sisters.
Speaker 2: I had seventy first cousins. Nobody, nobody I knew had
Speaker 2: a peanut allergy? Why do five my seven kids have
Speaker 2: food allergies? Something happen and we know the year it
Speaker 2: happened because EBA answered that question nineteen eighty nine. Something
Speaker 2: happened that year that ruined our health. And we have
Speaker 2: the highest chronic disease burden in the world today. Nobody
Speaker 2: else has this happening like us. We had sixteen percent
Speaker 2: of the COVID deaths in our country, the highest body
Speaker 2: count on earth. We only have four point two percent
Speaker 2: of the world's population. What were we doing? Whatever we
Speaker 2: did was wrong? And CDC says, well, it's just because
Speaker 2: Americans are so sick. Well, that's you know, why aren't
Speaker 2: they telling us why the CDC's had The average American
Speaker 2: who died from COVID had three point eight chronic diseases.
Speaker 2: They had obesity, they had diabetes, they had asthma, and
Speaker 2: one other thing. Why do we have then nobody else
Speaker 2: in the world has that, And you know, we know
Speaker 2: it was something that happened in nineteen eighty nine or
Speaker 2: there a ballots. And there's a very famous toxicologist in
Speaker 2: New York who I've used as an expert in many
Speaker 2: of my cases. His name's Phil Landrigan. He's looked at
Speaker 2: this issue and he said, it's there's only about thirteen
Speaker 2: things it could be. It has to be an environmental
Speaker 2: toxin because genes don't cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability,
Speaker 2: but you need an environmental exposure. And he said, here's
Speaker 2: what it could be. It could be life estate from roundup,
Speaker 2: which follows that timeline near nicotoid pessis. It's follow that
Speaker 2: timeline aches in, which is another pestis on all of
Speaker 2: our water, seventy percent of our water. Now, it follows
Speaker 2: that timeline pfoas and PFAS is a class of what
Speaker 2: they call forever chemicals. I litigated on them. They made
Speaker 2: a movie out of my case called Dark Waters or
Speaker 2: in Mark Ruffalo. If those are those chemicals are in
Speaker 2: all of our furniture. They're in our child pajamas, you know.
Speaker 2: And get around that timeline high fruitose corns here, okay,
Speaker 2: follows that and nobody else allowed.
Speaker 3: It became the leading ingredient for everything, yeah.
Speaker 2: For everything, right, cell phone radiation.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 2: And then the vaccine schedule, of course, which went from
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty nine. It was a big change here,
Speaker 2: but we went from the three vaccines I got as
Speaker 2: a kid that the seventy two vaccines my kids got.
Speaker 2: And if you look at the manufacturers insorts inserts for
Speaker 2: those products, all of those disease are listed. The the
Speaker 2: neurological disease add ADHD, speech delay, language LA tixt or
Speaker 2: at syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, autism, the autoimmune disease like rheumatoid
Speaker 2: Arthur wright Is, juvenile diabetes loop is Groan's disease. All
Speaker 2: these exotic autoimmune disease suddenly appeared. And then the allergic
Speaker 2: these punt allergies, food allergies, EXMA. I never knew anybody
Speaker 2: what ezma. Every classroom has kids with EXEA now asthma
Speaker 2: and uh anaphylaxis and then obesity. All of those are
Speaker 2: listed as side effects, so you have to look at those.
Speaker 2: Part of it. Probably what's happening is all of those exposures.
Speaker 2: Our kids are swimming around in the toxics of today
Speaker 2: and we're there. Their immune systems are constantly being challenged
Speaker 2: and rechallenged because a lot of these toxics operate along
Speaker 2: those same biological pathways. Oh and it's the kids probably
Speaker 2: who have poor mitochondrial function to start off with. The mitochondrials,
Speaker 2: the energy systems are asel and if you if you
Speaker 2: if you target them enough, it paralyzed them and you
Speaker 2: go into a cascading effect where you end up with
Speaker 2: brain damage or with autoimmune disease or whatever. So we're
Speaker 2: probably challenging and reaching challenge and the kids who just
Speaker 2: have a weaker system who were born with you know,
Speaker 2: mitochondrial dysfunctions which would never show in typically human but
Speaker 2: if you challenge them enough, they're assault their immune sism
Speaker 2: enough that's going to happen. And so you know, I
Speaker 2: know how to fix it, and I'm going to fix
Speaker 2: it very very quickly. And you know, you fix it
Speaker 2: by doing real science, and i AGE by doing good science.
Speaker 2: And i AGE when I was a kid, was the
Speaker 2: premiere scientific agency in the world. It was gold standard.
Speaker 2: There's no other country in the world that has anything
Speaker 2: like it. And they were doing, you know, groundbreaking on
Speaker 2: every issue. And in nineteen eighty we passed a law
Speaker 2: that said called the Blood Bidole Act, that allowed NIAGE
Speaker 2: scientists to collect royalties on any product that they regulated.
Speaker 2: If you can imagine that. So, for example, and i
Speaker 2: AGE itself, the more dear in a vaccine was created
Speaker 2: by NIH and they own half of it. So they're
Speaker 2: making billions of dollars on sales of a product that
Speaker 2: they're promoting, that they're mandating. They're telling you you can't
Speaker 2: go to work unless you take this product, and they're
Speaker 2: not telling you they're making billions of dollars on it.
Speaker 2: The sixth top scientists at an ihe are making one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year personally on that product.
Speaker 2: So they're paying for their mortgages, their boats, their schools,
Speaker 2: that their kids' education, their alimonies, and you know, these
Speaker 2: are the guys who are supposed to be funding problems
Speaker 2: in those products and protecting us from them. Instead they're
Speaker 2: you know, they're they're getting rich on them. And when
Speaker 2: you have those kinds of conflicts of interest, therese perverse incentives.
Speaker 2: They it makes people turn a blind eye to some
Speaker 2: of the problems. So I'm going to go into NIH
Speaker 2: my first week in office. I'm going to get all
Speaker 2: of that and what happened. And they after they passed
Speaker 2: that act, NIH went from doing this cutting edge science,
Speaker 2: tell us why you know how to keep ourselves well?
Speaker 2: And they became an incubator for new pharmaceutical products. I
Speaker 2: think it was in twenty twenty sixteen. There was two
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty new drugs or something like that approved
Speaker 2: by FDA, and one hundred percent of them came We're
Speaker 2: incubated through NIH. So NIAH is now just a drug
Speaker 2: development company. And what I'm going to do is go
Speaker 2: over there and say we're going to give drug development
Speaker 2: a break for if they have they have a budget
Speaker 2: of forty two billion dollars, they distribute that to fifty
Speaker 2: six thousand scientists at universities who also collect royalties on
Speaker 2: new drugs. And I'm going to say, from now on,
Speaker 2: we're not going to do anything until we figure out
Speaker 2: why we have the sickest kids on earth, and what
Speaker 2: are the products that are causing that, And then you know,
Speaker 2: I'm going to generate enough science on those to make
Speaker 2: sure that we can put an end to those exposures.
Speaker 2: Now you're gonna say to yourself, see that even if
Speaker 2: you figured out that high fruitose corn syrup was the culprit,
Speaker 2: and you still could never get rid of it because
Speaker 2: the forces behind it are so powerful. It's Monsanto, it's Cargill,
Speaker 2: a million farmers who are tied up in its production,
Speaker 2: and you know, entire industries and all that's true. But
Speaker 2: the way that you do it is you produce enough
Speaker 2: science enough in different kinds of science, epidemiological studies, clinical studies,
Speaker 2: observational animal studies and and you know, and patriotage studies,
Speaker 2: all of those. Once you get enough science, then the
Speaker 2: lawyers come in and they do the work for you,
Speaker 2: because then they come in if you prove high fruitose
Speaker 2: corn syrup is behind the childhood diabetes epidemic, and the
Speaker 2: lawyers were round up ten thousand kids with childhood diabetes
Speaker 2: to the company and that's the end of the show.
Speaker 2: That's what I did with Monsanto. Everybody said you'll never
Speaker 2: you'll never get rid of Claife essay. But we had
Speaker 2: forty thousand clients, all of them a home gardeners, almost
Speaker 2: all home gardeners, who had gotten non Hodgkinson foma from
Speaker 2: using roundup.
Speaker 1: And I remember not to I remember in my adult life,
Speaker 1: individuals from ARS Agricultural Research Services.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the division of the USDA.
Speaker 1: Individuals from there telling me that roundup had the toxicity
Speaker 1: of coffee.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well that's what in my adult life.
Speaker 2: Well, that's what Monsanto was telling the public. And we
Speaker 2: got forty thousand people who said I got cancer, you know,
Speaker 2: Don Johnson's of this particular kind of cancer from spring roundup.
Speaker 2: We soon round up. And the way that multi district
Speaker 2: litigation works is you get forty thousand kids, You try
Speaker 2: each one individually, one after the other, back to back,
Speaker 2: until somebody says uncle and comes to the negotiating table.
Speaker 2: The first case, we won two hundred and eighty nine
Speaker 2: million from Monsanto. The second case we won eighty nine million.
Speaker 2: The third case, we asked the jury for a billion
Speaker 2: and they came back with two point two billion. At
Speaker 2: that point, Monsanto came to negotiating tables and we want
Speaker 2: to end this. They settled the case for thirteen billion
Speaker 2: dollars for all of the cases, and they agreed to
Speaker 2: take life and say out of home gardening products. So
Speaker 2: you can stop them. You just need the right science
Speaker 2: because once you get the right science, the courts will
Speaker 2: allow them to be you know, you go to front
Speaker 2: of a jury. And that's what I'm going to do
Speaker 2: with all of these different exposures. There's only thirteen of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, plans are coming on today. I'm getting the I'm
Speaker 1: getting the times up symbol. I appreciate the conversation.
Speaker 2: Man, it was really fun talking to you.
Speaker 3: I appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 2: I hope maybe if you can, if you get a
Speaker 2: chance in the autumn, when the falcony season's up, and
Speaker 2: so maybe you'll come all.
Speaker 3: So I would yeah, I would like to do that.
Speaker 3: It'll be fun.
Speaker 1: Do you have one last question? Do you ever fix
Speaker 1: up the if you get do you ever like cook
Speaker 1: rabbits and stuff?
Speaker 3: Do you get it?
Speaker 2: You always give it to my wife Cheryl.
Speaker 1: That's what I was going to start the show by
Speaker 1: telling you how much I'm in love with your wife,
Speaker 1: but I don't want.
Speaker 2: To get off now. She's very lovable.
Speaker 1: That that that that uh, you know, I know she's
Speaker 1: done many things.
Speaker 2: But I'll tell you what if.
Speaker 1: I was going to measure like like, uh, the highest
Speaker 1: laughs per minute thing in my life is is Curber
Speaker 1: just like that?
Speaker 3: And she plays such a.
Speaker 1: She does such a quiet show stealing job on that show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she plays common sense and it makes everything on time.
Speaker 1: It's like it's it's it's so quietly her. It's so
Speaker 1: quietly brilliant how she plays that role.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean Larry. I lived with Larry for two
Speaker 2: years and during the summertimes and then we have vaccasional together.
Speaker 2: And that's how I met Cheryl when he was still
Speaker 2: doing the Seinfeld. But he there was one season when
Speaker 2: he got divorced from Cheryl, and the next season he
Speaker 2: shot in New York and that was the season when
Speaker 2: they shot the producers and Cheryl was not on that season,
Speaker 2: and then he and the next season she came back
Speaker 2: and I asked Larry about it, and he said, I
Speaker 2: couldn't do it. She makes me funny, which is and
Speaker 2: I'll tell you one thing she will not allow, which
Speaker 2: is a dead rabbit in the house or a dead
Speaker 2: dead squirrel.
Speaker 3: Oh no, I don't love her anymore. Tell her it's
Speaker 3: over between us, all right. Thank you very much for
Speaker 3: coming on this right.
Speaker 2: Thank you St.