E127: Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in conversation with the Besties

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Sacks, you're ready? You got your quick time going?

**David Sacks** (0:02)
Oh, let me do that real quick.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:04)
And just a quick note, Sacks, Mr. Kennedy doesn't have earpieces in, so we just have to be careful of the cross-talk. We're talking over each other. I'll direct questions to each person, and then follow-ups. You can obviously just use your judgment of when to insert yourself, but be gentle on the insertion there because we don't want... That came out wrong. Just be gentle when you interrupt.
There's your cold open.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:27)
At least if you did it incorrectly, it'll be quick.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:30)
Okay. Here we go. In three, two...
Welcome to the All-In Podcast. As many of you know, this podcast has gotten quite popular the last two years, typically in the top 10 or 20 each week. And we talk about politics. We've got a big following in DC.

**Erik Friedberg** (1:03)
Why are you calling me self-absorbed, Chamath? I mean, listen to how your co-host opens his show.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:07)
Calm down, everybody.

**Erik Friedberg** (1:08)
Yeah, go ahead.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:09)
And as part of that, our ongoing discussions about politics and presidential candidates has resonated in particular communities.
And today we are lucky enough to have one of the top presidential hopefuls in the 2024 election joining us, Robert Kennedy Jr. And we will be inviting all presidential candidates to come on to the All-In podcast and have candid discussions that are unfiltered, the way the audience would expect them. We're going to play with different formats, but we decided for this first one, we've got a series of topics we'd like to cover, and we're going to treat it like any other All-In podcast. With that, I'll have David Sacks, who is the most conservative of our panel, who has been also the most enthusiastic, I think, of everybody here, and one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s pursuit of the presidency of the United States. So with that, David, would you like to introduce our guest?

**David Sacks** (2:09)
Yeah, let me give Bobby a proper introduction here. So Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is entering the political arena as a candidate for the first time at the age of 69
But it's perhaps no exaggeration to say that he was destined for the mission he is now pursuing. He is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. When Bobby was 14, his dad was running for president on a platform of civil rights, civil liberties, lifting Americans out of poverty and opposing the Vietnam War. He had just won the California primary when he was tragically assassinated. RFK Jr. graduated from Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School and became an environmental lawyer who aggressively litigated against corporate polluters and government agencies that were failing to regulate them. He has always put the health and safety of the American people at the forefront of his activism. This has made him controversial at times as he has questioned the safety of some pharmaceutical products and also criticized COVID restrictions during the pandemic. For this, the mainstream media has tried to paint him as a, quote, conspiracy theorist. But given that so many conspiracy theories about COVID have been vindicated, Tablet Magazine wrote, quote, At this point, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy is the country's leading conspiracy theorist alone qualifies him to be president.
But the biggest reason why I think his candidacy is so interesting and relevant is that it harkens back to a Democratic party that believed in peace instead of war, free speech and civil liberties instead of censorship, building up the middle class instead of the donor class, and opposing corporate greed, especially in the military industrial complex, which is a message you just don't hear much anymore coming from the Democratic side of the aisle. So with that, Bobby Kennedy, welcome to the program.

**Robert F. Kennedy Jr.** (3:44)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:46)
So maybe we could start with foreign policy, something we've discussed here, specifically the Ukraine and Russia's invasion of Ukraine and our support of that war. Sacks, would you like to tee up a question for Mr. Kennedy?

**David Sacks** (4:00)
I think Bobby's tweets on the subject show that he has a really deep understanding of it.
He's been saying a lot of things that I've been saying since the beginning of the war, which is not just the fact that we're risking World War III over getting involved in a country that isn't a treaty ally of the United States, it's never been a vital interest to the United States. But I think your critique goes deeper because you actually understand the causes of how this war started. So maybe, Bobby, you could speak to that. How did we end up in this proxy war with Russia from your standpoint?