Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 560: RFK Jr. on Polluters, Falconry, and Assassinations
Transcript
- 0:08Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
- 0:13Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast.
- 0:18Speaker 2: You can't predict anything.
- 0:20Speaker 1: The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
- 0:23Speaker 1: Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
- 0:26Speaker 1: for el First Light has performance apparel to support every
- 0:29Speaker 1: hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
- 0:32Speaker 1: dot com, f I R S T L I t
- 0:35Speaker 1: E dot com. What you guys are about to hear
- 0:41Speaker 1: and watch in some cases is an interview with a politician,
- 0:45Speaker 1: or at least an aspiring politician. It's Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
- 0:50Speaker 1: Who's making a bid for the White House. We do
- 0:53Speaker 1: not have a hell of a lot of politicians on
- 0:56Speaker 1: the show, but it does happen now and then by
- 0:59Speaker 1: the best of our recollection.
- 1:00Speaker 3: And Karinn and I texted about this.
- 1:03Speaker 1: We've done over five hundred episodes and had on seven
- 1:07Speaker 1: elected officials. That list includes five Republicans and two Democrats,
- 1:14Speaker 1: as well as a politician's kid. And don't go looking back,
- 1:18Speaker 1: it wasn't Chelsea Clinton. Now Kennedy here is an independent.
- 1:25Speaker 1: So that's a third party category. So our first third
- 1:29Speaker 1: party category independent category, and I'll point out I think
- 1:34Speaker 1: it is a welcome category because I get a little
- 1:37Speaker 1: fed up with the two party system that has enjoyed
- 1:42Speaker 1: a monopoly on the office of the President of the
- 1:46Speaker 1: United States of America since get this eighteen fifty six. Now,
- 1:51Speaker 1: I understand, we've got a hotly contested presidential race coming
- 1:57Speaker 1: up here, and we have candidates who have entirely different
- 1:59Speaker 1: world old views, entirely different priorities, entirely different personalities. Now,
- 2:04Speaker 1: I don't want anyone to get their panties in a
- 2:06Speaker 1: bunch about us having on one candidate and not the others.
- 2:12Speaker 1: All Right, So I'm telling you this. If you don't
- 2:16Speaker 1: hear from Trump or Biden on the Meat Eater Podcast,
- 2:21Speaker 1: it ain't our fault. I would love to have them
- 2:25Speaker 1: on if they come on. If you come on, I
- 2:28Speaker 1: promise a friendly conversation. All you gotta do is reach
- 2:34Speaker 1: out to our producer Krin, which is what RFK Juniors
- 2:37Speaker 1: people did, and we will have you on. We'll have
- 2:40Speaker 1: a friendly conversation that sticks to personal background, the outdoors
- 2:46Speaker 1: and natural resources issues. If you jam some other stuff
- 2:50Speaker 1: in there, you'll probably be okay. But we're gonna try
- 2:52Speaker 1: to focus on those three things. Now, let's get out
- 2:57Speaker 1: at the show and learn some stuff right about pollution,
- 3:02Speaker 1: assassination and the ways in which our future. Let me
- 3:10Speaker 1: put this way, the ways in which decisions we make
- 3:13Speaker 1: now are going to impact the future of natural resources
- 3:18Speaker 1: and the management of the lands and waters where you
- 3:22Speaker 1: hunt and fish. That's what we're going to talk about now.
- 3:24Speaker 1: And we will be looking for our emails from the
- 3:27Speaker 1: Trump and Biden campaign, and when they reach out, they
- 3:30Speaker 1: will come on the show.
- 3:32Speaker 3: It'll be all kinds of fun. Thank you everybody.
- 3:42Speaker 1: Today we're joined by independent presidential candidate Robert F.
- 3:47Speaker 3: Kennedy Junior, who has been every morning I.
- 3:52Speaker 1: Read the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times,
- 3:55Speaker 1: and I've been admiring how much heat you get from
- 3:58Speaker 1: the left and the right.
- 3:59Speaker 3: That's got to feel good.
- 4:02Speaker 1: So it comes, it comes like an equal It comes
- 4:05Speaker 1: with equal intensity from from each side.
- 4:08Speaker 2: Yeah, now it is. I was getting it much worse
- 4:11Speaker 2: from the left until about I'd say three weeks ago.
- 4:16Speaker 2: And at that point, I think Trump organization was looking
- 4:22Speaker 2: at some of the polls which show that I was
- 4:24Speaker 2: taking more votes away from conservatives than it was from liberals,
- 4:30Speaker 2: and I think then you know they turned out me. Oh,
- 4:35Speaker 2: you know, I think you're right. It's you know what,
- 4:38Speaker 2: I sticked out a position in the middle. I said
- 4:42Speaker 2: that when I announced a year ago, I said, I'm
- 4:45Speaker 2: not I said, you know, we have this toxic polarization
- 4:48Speaker 2: in the country that is more dangerous than at any
- 4:51Speaker 2: time since the American Civil War. It's it's amplified by
- 4:56Speaker 2: the social media algorithms, which have learn the way to
- 5:01Speaker 2: keep eyeballs on the site is to four to five
- 5:04Speaker 2: people's worldviews, and that fees into this polarization because if
- 5:09Speaker 2: you're a Republican and you live next door to a
- 5:12Speaker 2: Democrat and you ask the same question of Google, you're
- 5:16Speaker 2: likely to get a different answer because they know that
- 5:19Speaker 2: if they reinforce what you already believe, you're going to
- 5:23Speaker 2: stay on that site longer. So they're feeding you. They're
- 5:27Speaker 2: manipulating us all with these algorithms, and those algorithms, which
- 5:30Speaker 2: are now no longer even under the control of Google
- 5:34Speaker 2: or any of these other sites, are feeding this polarization.
- 5:38Speaker 2: And to me, it's very, very dangerous because you can't
- 5:42Speaker 2: see any good end to it. And so what I
- 5:45Speaker 2: said is when I announced, is that I was not
- 5:49Speaker 2: going to feed into the polarization. I was not going
- 5:51Speaker 2: to vilify and marginalize my opponents. I was going to
- 5:57Speaker 2: instead of focusing on these sort of cultural worry issues
- 6:01Speaker 2: that are used to keep us all apart, and I
- 6:06Speaker 2: was going to try to identify the shared values at
- 6:10Speaker 2: unite Americans and make people forget that they're either Democrat
- 6:13Speaker 2: or Republican, and make us all remember that were all Americans.
- 6:17Speaker 2: And I think I've been pretty successful at doing that.
- 6:23Speaker 2: My favorability ratings are better than President Trump's, President Biden's.
- 6:27Speaker 2: I have the best highest favorability of any political leader
- 6:31Speaker 2: in the country than anybody else they measured. And Zogby
- 6:37Speaker 2: just did this huge poll that's twenty six thousand people,
- 6:40Speaker 2: that's ten times the size of any other polled on
- 6:43Speaker 2: It has a margin bror of practically zero, and it
- 6:48Speaker 2: shows that and I head to head race, I beat
- 6:51Speaker 2: President Trump narrowly about three electoral votes. And I had
- 6:56Speaker 2: to head race, I beat President Biden by a landside
- 7:00Speaker 2: thirty nine states. He wins eleven. And so I think
- 7:05Speaker 2: there's a lot of Americans who would like to vote
- 7:07Speaker 2: for me, but they're the strategy of the Trump campaign
- 7:12Speaker 2: and the Biden campaign is to make you hate the
- 7:14Speaker 2: other guy, make you fear that if Biden gets elected,
- 7:19Speaker 2: it's going to be the end of the Republic. If
- 7:20Speaker 2: Trump gets elected, it's going to be the end of
- 7:22Speaker 2: the Republic. You can't you can't vote for anybody else
- 7:26Speaker 2: except for the Democratic or Republican nominee. And that's you know,
- 7:30Speaker 2: that's something I have to over the next five and
- 7:33Speaker 2: a half months. I have to persuade Americans that they
- 7:36Speaker 2: can vote for Hope instead of voting out of fear.
- 7:40Speaker 1: One of the things I had read and just as
- 7:44Speaker 1: I was kind of following your campaign in preparation of
- 7:47Speaker 1: having a chance to talk to you, and trust me,
- 7:50Speaker 1: I want to. I'd love to get into and we
- 7:52Speaker 1: will get into a lot of the areas that are
- 7:53Speaker 1: a particular interest to our listeners, which is habitat issues,
- 8:00Speaker 1: environmental issues.
- 8:01Speaker 3: Outdoor adventure. I'd love to talk about all that.
- 8:05Speaker 1: But one of the things I noticed that the Times
- 8:07Speaker 1: had these sort of back to back pieces, and one
- 8:09Speaker 1: was about signature gathering, which seemed like very far removed
- 8:15Speaker 1: from that seemed like personal decisions made by people out
- 8:19Speaker 1: in the field, rather than like very far removed from
- 8:21Speaker 1: any direction from the campaign around a signature gathering issue,
- 8:24Speaker 1: and the other was this, uh, this health issue about
- 8:29Speaker 1: a parasite. And I thought that was very funny because
- 8:31Speaker 1: I'm riddled with parasites. And one of my colleagues who
- 8:35Speaker 1: I was with today, we both had trick and osis.
- 8:38Speaker 1: And when I heard that, I felt like it made
- 8:41Speaker 1: me like you more because it just makes me feel
- 8:44Speaker 1: like someone makes me feel like someone from the from
- 8:47Speaker 1: the trenches man, like, like you know, it's like outside
- 8:50Speaker 1: of a coddled existence, like when you travel and stuff,
- 8:53Speaker 1: you just expose the things. So when I saw that,
- 8:55Speaker 1: I didn't have any I didn't have any sense of
- 8:58Speaker 1: I didn't have any sense of a want. And I
- 9:00Speaker 1: saw the nighttime comedy whatever you call them, the nighttime
- 9:04Speaker 1: TV hosts having a field day with it, and I
- 9:07Speaker 1: just felt like, I don't know, man, I reminded me
- 9:10Speaker 1: of my own things, that my own stuff I've encountered
- 9:13Speaker 1: from traveling in the developing world.
- 9:15Speaker 3: Man.
- 9:15Speaker 2: Yeah, anybody who travels in Latin America or Africa particularly
- 9:21Speaker 2: or South Asia is going to end up with parasites.
- 9:24Speaker 2: And I, like you, I'm riddled with parasites. But I
- 9:28Speaker 2: had this, you know, this is thirteen years ago. The
- 9:32Speaker 2: Times found out about my so called brainworm because it
- 9:38Speaker 2: came up somehow in a deposition that I was doing
- 9:41Speaker 2: during my divorce thirteen years ago. And I mean, briefly,
- 9:48Speaker 2: it's not an interesting story, but I was getting the
- 9:53Speaker 2: severe brain fog and I was having trouble with word retrieval,
- 10:00Speaker 2: a short term memory and even long term memory. And
- 10:04Speaker 2: a friend of mine, I was in prison for the
- 10:06Speaker 2: summer of two thousand and one in maximum security prison
- 10:09Speaker 2: in Puerto.
- 10:09Speaker 3: Rico, and my well, that was around viks right.
- 10:14Speaker 2: Ice elmate was the head of the biggest labor union
- 10:18Speaker 2: in North America, which was SEIU, which and he was
- 10:22Speaker 2: hospital workers, the hospital Workers Union. And I happened to
- 10:26Speaker 2: be with him when I was, you know, worried about
- 10:29Speaker 2: this issue, and I started talking to him about it,
- 10:33Speaker 2: and he was deeply concerned, and he immediately got me
- 10:36Speaker 2: down to Columbia Presbyterian and they did an MRI on
- 10:40Speaker 2: me and they found this this black spot in my brain.
- 10:44Speaker 2: And my uncle had just died from glioblastoma and he
- 10:48Speaker 2: had had surgery on the gleia, which is a brain tumor,
- 10:52Speaker 2: and so and because my uncle Teddy was the chairman
- 10:55Speaker 2: of the Health Committee in the United States Senate for
- 10:59Speaker 2: fifty years. We knew, my family knew every doctor, you know,
- 11:03Speaker 2: every great doctor at least in North America and really
- 11:07Speaker 2: all around the world. And Teddy had had when he
- 11:11Speaker 2: got his glioblasphema as a very complex tumor. It looks
- 11:14Speaker 2: like a spider web in your brain. And he got
- 11:20Speaker 2: a list of these, you know, the best surgeons in
- 11:23Speaker 2: the world, and they were all on speed dial. And
- 11:26Speaker 2: then he passed away. And this is a few months
- 11:28Speaker 2: after his death, and I found out about this thing,
- 11:33Speaker 2: and so we had all of these great euro surgeon
- 11:37Speaker 2: on speed dial, and we sent the films to all
- 11:41Speaker 2: of them and they all said, yeah, it's a tumor
- 11:42Speaker 2: you got, so you have to have surgery. So I
- 11:45Speaker 2: was going to use Teddy's surgeon who was down at
- 11:47Speaker 2: Duke in North Carolina. And I was not believed me
- 11:50Speaker 2: looking forward to it. And you know, when Teddy got
- 11:53Speaker 2: his surgery, he was awake during the whole thing, and
- 11:57Speaker 2: they just they took off the top of his his
- 12:00Speaker 2: skull and they would the doctor would press the flat
- 12:05Speaker 2: part of the scalpel against certain parts of his brain
- 12:09Speaker 2: where the tumor was, and then he'd ask him a
- 12:11Speaker 2: series of mathematical and language questions and if he could
- 12:14Speaker 2: answer those questions, he'd cut out that little piece of brain.
- 12:17Speaker 2: What yeah, and if he couldn't. It was like Silence
- 12:20Speaker 2: of the Lambs. Did you ever see that box? It was?
- 12:24Speaker 2: It was very much like reminiscent of that. And that's
- 12:27Speaker 2: how they do it. So I was going to go
- 12:30Speaker 2: to that same guy, and I went down. I was
- 12:33Speaker 2: supposed to get my surgery on a Tuesday morning, and
- 12:36Speaker 2: I went down to Columbia Presbyterian to pick up my films.
- 12:42Speaker 2: It was a young Irish doctor. Remember every great doctor
- 12:45Speaker 2: in the world said that's definitely a tumor. You need
- 12:47Speaker 2: to getst surgery. And it was a young Irish doctor
- 12:52Speaker 2: in the office. And he and I struck up a
- 12:56Speaker 2: conversation with him, because you know, he was from Ireland
- 12:58Speaker 2: and we were talking about all and then he said,
- 13:02Speaker 2: what are you doing here? And I said, I've got
- 13:03Speaker 2: to go get brain surgery. I got a tumor. I'm
- 13:06Speaker 2: here picking him my films. And he said to he
- 13:07Speaker 2: might if I take a look at him. I said,
- 13:10Speaker 2: not at all. And there was a light box in
- 13:12Speaker 2: the room, and he put one of the pictures up
- 13:15Speaker 2: in the light box and he looked at it a
- 13:18Speaker 2: long time, and then he turned to me and he said,
- 13:20Speaker 2: I don't think you've earned surgery. And I said, tell
- 13:24Speaker 2: me more, and he said, I don't think there's a tumor.
- 13:28Speaker 2: And he said, what you ought to do is we
- 13:31Speaker 2: ought to take very precise measurements of it and then
- 13:34Speaker 2: come back in six weeks and see if he has
- 13:37Speaker 2: grown at all. And I did that in six weeks
- 13:40Speaker 2: it was exactly the same size. And he said, come
- 13:43Speaker 2: back in another six weeks, and we did it again.
- 13:45Speaker 2: It was exactly the same size. And that's when he said,
- 13:47Speaker 2: this is this is a parasite. It's eaten part of
- 13:50Speaker 2: your earth brain and then died. Oh and I remember
- 13:55Speaker 2: seeing that Twilight Zone when I was a kid, about
- 13:57Speaker 2: the about the you know, the earwing curls and the
- 14:00Speaker 2: guys and then they and they finally get it out,
- 14:05Speaker 2: but then they discovered it was a female and it
- 14:07Speaker 2: had laid eggs in there. So I was one of those,
- 14:10Speaker 2: you know, those classic Twilight Zunes. But anyway, it's gone.
- 14:16Speaker 2: And then what I found out after that is that
- 14:19Speaker 2: my mercury levels were off the chart. There are ten
- 14:22Speaker 2: times with Heba considered safe. Because I eat a lot
- 14:24Speaker 2: of freshwater fish and a lot of saltwater fish. I
- 14:28Speaker 2: had mercury off the charts, and I fished, you know,
- 14:31Speaker 2: in the summer almost every day. Oh and I eat
- 14:35Speaker 2: the fish, and you know I just had and their
- 14:37Speaker 2: predatory fish, the freshwater fish in this country are having huge,
- 14:42Speaker 2: huge mercury levels, And so I get the mercury key
- 14:47Speaker 2: laid out. My brain fog went away. So I don't
- 14:50Speaker 2: think it had anything to do with the braine worm.
- 14:52Speaker 2: But anyway, it was good copy for a couple of days.
- 14:56Speaker 1: And then one of our colleagues upstairs he had that
- 14:58Speaker 1: a couple of years ago because he ran into that
- 15:02Speaker 1: he had we had been spearfishermen in Hawaii, but he
- 15:05Speaker 1: also had a bunch of hal a bit and stuff
- 15:07Speaker 1: from Alaska, and he eats a ton of walleye fresh
- 15:10Speaker 1: water fish and him and he got and he said,
- 15:14Speaker 1: I think what he's I think He said something like
- 15:18Speaker 1: he thought he had eaten about twenty meals in a
- 15:21Speaker 1: row of like pocivorous fish. Yeah, and developed that and
- 15:25Speaker 1: it started with some dexterity, some dexterity stuff.
- 15:29Speaker 3: And then yeah, and he had some, he.
- 15:31Speaker 1: Had some he'd call people forget why he called him,
- 15:34Speaker 1: but it went away pretty quick. But that's one of
- 15:37Speaker 1: the that's one of the earliest, Like, that's one of
- 15:40Speaker 1: those areas where you know, you spent a whole career
- 15:44Speaker 1: on water quality issues and spent a career defending fishermen
- 15:49Speaker 1: and natural resources.
- 15:50Speaker 3: That was one of the first. One of my first.
- 15:53Speaker 1: Introductions to how uh water quality issues impact people is
- 16:00Speaker 1: growing up in the Great Lakes and becoming aware of
- 16:05Speaker 1: the consumption advisories and we ate tons of fish the
- 16:09Speaker 1: Great Lakes and becoming aware of that. And then one
- 16:13Speaker 1: of my childhood mentors and one of my dad's best
- 16:15Speaker 1: friends going into University of Michigan for these batteries of
- 16:21Speaker 1: tests because he had been consuming freshwater fish his whole life,
- 16:28Speaker 1: and he was part of some broad study of memory
- 16:31Speaker 1: loss in people who had consumed.
- 16:35Speaker 3: Whatever threshold of Great Lakes fish.
- 16:38Speaker 1: Yeah, and then that is funny because in that area,
- 16:43Speaker 1: it's just not a thing people discussed. I lived in
- 16:46Speaker 1: Seattle for a while and we would fish Lake Washington,
- 16:48Speaker 1: and there were people that people were there just kind
- 16:50Speaker 1: of more aware, different time whatever, and there'd be people
- 16:53Speaker 1: who wouldn't eat you know, they wouldn't eat the fish
- 16:57Speaker 1: that we were fixing for him because of concerns about
- 17:03Speaker 1: you know, concerns about mercury in the water. And then
- 17:05Speaker 1: it's been explained to me too that even though we've
- 17:08Speaker 1: reduced how much mercury we're putting.
- 17:10Speaker 3: In the water, the ship never gets out of the system.
- 17:14Speaker 3: There's very slow to get out of the system.
- 17:15Speaker 2: It's slow to get out. I mean, it doesn't there's
- 17:19Speaker 2: no half life on mercury. There's a half life in
- 17:21Speaker 2: your body and your blood. There's a half life of
- 17:24Speaker 2: sixty four days in your blood from you know, the
- 17:27Speaker 2: from methyl mercury, which is the kind of mercury and
- 17:30Speaker 2: fish that there was a the National Academy of Sciences
- 17:35Speaker 2: and the FDA did a study in two thousand and
- 17:39Speaker 2: three and they looked at every freshwater fishing with America.
- 17:44Speaker 2: Every fish that they sampled had dangerous levels of mercury.
- 17:48Speaker 2: And every single fish. Oh and you know, of course
- 17:51Speaker 2: the predatory fish like well i and and you know
- 17:56Speaker 2: trout like trout, those kind of fish that are eating
- 17:59Speaker 2: that are high end editors are have have just you know,
- 18:06Speaker 2: and have what they call bullis doses really, you know,
- 18:10Speaker 2: just very very high dose, doesn't It occurred to me
- 18:13Speaker 2: when that study came out that we are now living
- 18:15Speaker 2: in the science fiction nightmare where my children and the
- 18:19Speaker 2: children of every other American and now no longer engage
- 18:25Speaker 2: in the seminole primal activity of American youth, which is
- 18:28Speaker 2: to go fishing with their father mother in the local
- 18:30Speaker 2: fishing hole and then come home and safe eat the fish.
- 18:33Speaker 2: And you know that is It's just it's when you
- 18:37Speaker 2: think of when I thought about it that age, I
- 18:39Speaker 2: was breath taking. I see that the same thing today
- 18:44Speaker 2: with lime disease. Lime disease is you know, I spend
- 18:49Speaker 2: I go, you know, I'm in the woods every day,
- 18:51Speaker 2: right and my whole life I've done that, you know,
- 18:54Speaker 2: training hawks and stuff. You have to fly them every day.
- 18:58Speaker 3: Oh I go.
- 18:59Speaker 2: You know, I lived in Melcisco, New York when the
- 19:02Speaker 2: deer tickets began appearing, and you know they you know,
- 19:06Speaker 2: we now that the strongest evidence is that those that
- 19:11Speaker 2: that disease came from Plumb Island, from the military, you know,
- 19:17Speaker 2: the USDA slash do o D Department of Defense bio
- 19:22Speaker 2: weapons labs on Plumb Island. And the story of how
- 19:28Speaker 2: it actually got to the mainland is, you know, is
- 19:31Speaker 2: another one of these incredible stories. You have them developing
- 19:35Speaker 2: a military weapon there and and then just poisoning everybody,
- 19:40Speaker 2: American ruining it. There's not a single Faulkner that I
- 19:45Speaker 2: know that does not have lime disease, you know, and
- 19:48Speaker 2: you can't think of any I remember coming home one day,
- 19:52Speaker 2: standing in the bath. I've been taking twenty nine deer
- 19:55Speaker 2: ticks off myself and you know, in the springtime, I'd
- 19:58Speaker 2: get them every single day. And it's just you know,
- 20:02Speaker 2: the woods used to be for me, were a safe
- 20:04Speaker 2: place to go, and now you know, you have to
- 20:08Speaker 2: think twice before you go in the woods.
- 20:10Speaker 1: My boy got he contracted lime when he was three
- 20:15Speaker 1: in Hudson Valley, New York.
- 20:16Speaker 3: We were fishing bluegills.
- 20:19Speaker 1: So there you get like you know, like I said,
- 20:20Speaker 1: you get the double I guess you get the double
- 20:22Speaker 1: hit of heavy metals and lime, fishing bluegills and Hudson.
- 20:26Speaker 1: But he developed a facial paralysis. You know, I went
- 20:30Speaker 1: through limes.
- 20:31Speaker 3: He's not.
- 20:31Speaker 2: My son got that too, got ballast balls. Yeah, six
- 20:35Speaker 2: months and we didn't know if you and you look
- 20:38Speaker 2: at your kid when he's got that, and you know,
- 20:41Speaker 2: he goes from a very handsome kid to not a
- 20:43Speaker 2: very handsome kid and he you know, they have this,
- 20:47Speaker 2: and you know, we didn't know every day whether he
- 20:50Speaker 2: was ever going to recover from it.
- 20:52Speaker 1: Yeah, he would sip milk. It was this kind of
- 20:54Speaker 1: the thing that scarred us as a little bit. He
- 20:57Speaker 1: would sip.
- 20:58Speaker 3: Milk and it would run out the corner his mouth.
- 21:00Speaker 1: And it was it was so that era that was
- 21:02Speaker 1: so scary and I got I got infected as well
- 21:05Speaker 1: and had to do the intravenous treatment.
- 21:08Speaker 3: But it was so that period was so scary that.
- 21:13Speaker 1: My wife and I put him to bed and we
- 21:15Speaker 1: would routinely at night just cry. I mean, like embarrassing
- 21:19Speaker 1: to say it, but like we would cry at night.
- 21:22Speaker 2: How old was.
- 21:23Speaker 1: He He was three, but he got he responded very
- 21:27Speaker 1: quickly to treatment.
- 21:28Speaker 3: But man, it was it was. It was a horrifying deal.
- 21:31Speaker 1: Yeah, speaking of kids, there's the thing I wanted to
- 21:44Speaker 1: ask you as well, And I didn't really I didn't
- 21:46Speaker 1: know this about until yesterday.
- 21:49Speaker 3: Uh what was it?
- 21:52Speaker 1: I didn't know that you went and met with and
- 21:54Speaker 1: talked to the met with and talked to the man
- 21:58Speaker 1: that was involved than your father's death in a pressor
- 22:04Speaker 1: what was that meeting?
- 22:06Speaker 3: I mean, what was that?
- 22:07Speaker 2: You know, I always listened. I always from when I
- 22:10Speaker 2: was a little kid, my uncle. The story about his
- 22:14Speaker 2: assassination was always strange to me. In fact, I was
- 22:18Speaker 2: in the White House when my uncle when I was
- 22:22Speaker 2: in the White House with my uncle's casket in the
- 22:25Speaker 2: east room, and my whole family was in there, and
- 22:28Speaker 2: I was, you know, at a nine year old kid,
- 22:31Speaker 2: and I remember President Johnson coming in and I was
- 22:36Speaker 2: standing next to my aunt Jackie and my mother and
- 22:39Speaker 2: my dad, and President Johnson told them that that a
- 22:45Speaker 2: man had just shot Lee Harvey Oswald. And I said
- 22:50Speaker 2: to my mom when you know, when the conversation ended,
- 22:55Speaker 2: I said to my mom, why did he shoot you know,
- 22:58Speaker 2: the man who killed uncle Jim act that he did?
- 23:01Speaker 2: He love our family? Because even then my mind was like,
- 23:05Speaker 2: you know, this is a bizarre story. And and that story,
- 23:10Speaker 2: you know, of course, was never adequately explained. And Jack Ruby,
- 23:17Speaker 2: the man who Shotley R. V. Oswold, was an associate
- 23:22Speaker 2: of the of the of the Chicago Outfits, which is
- 23:28Speaker 2: Samjan Connor's mob. But he was directly associated with Carlos Marcello,
- 23:33Speaker 2: who was involved in the Kennedy assassination, and who was
- 23:36Speaker 2: you know, he was one of the three big mob bosses.
- 23:40Speaker 2: There were three mob bosses who were recruited, recruited by
- 23:43Speaker 2: the CIA to kill Castros santostraf Conte in Tampa, Carlos
- 23:50Speaker 2: Marcela in Dallas and New Orleans, and then Sam and
- 23:54Speaker 2: Conne in Chicago. And the reason they targeted these three
- 23:56Speaker 2: is they all had casinos in Havana. And so then
- 24:02Speaker 2: the CIA basically became one organization with these you know,
- 24:07Speaker 2: with these mob families, and that there's so much evidence
- 24:10Speaker 2: now on the you know, the agency involvement in my
- 24:13Speaker 2: uncle's death. There's hundreds of books written about it, and
- 24:17Speaker 2: you know, there's millions of pages of evidence, and there's
- 24:21Speaker 2: in probably over the thirty confessions by people who were involved.
- 24:24Speaker 2: So I always assumed that my uncle was, you know,
- 24:30Speaker 2: that his death and Congress when they actually looked at it,
- 24:33Speaker 2: you know that of course, the Warrant Commission was run
- 24:35Speaker 2: by Alan Dallas, who's the head of the CIA, who
- 24:39Speaker 2: my uncle had fired. So they, you know, they said, yeah,
- 24:43Speaker 2: it's just one shooter, Lee Arvy Oswald. But then five
- 24:46Speaker 2: years later, Congress reinvestigated in the Congressional Committee, the House
- 24:50Speaker 2: Select Committee on Assassination said no, his death was from
- 24:53Speaker 2: a conspiracy, so and that you know, most Americans believe that,
- 25:00Speaker 2: and the evidence is now overwhelming. But I always believed.
- 25:03Speaker 2: I always believed that my father had been killed by
- 25:06Speaker 2: Surhan and then a man who one of my dad's
- 25:11Speaker 2: best friends, a guy called Paul Scharade. He was a
- 25:16Speaker 2: United Auto Workers deputy director and he had recruited Shaves
- 25:22Speaker 2: to the labor movement, and he had introduced my father
- 25:25Speaker 2: to Shaves, and that had become one of the most
- 25:29Speaker 2: important political relationships and personal friendships that my father had.
- 25:34Speaker 2: All Charde was walking next to my father when my
- 25:38Speaker 2: father was shot and Paul and they were walking into
- 25:44Speaker 2: the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel. Al Sharade was walking
- 25:48Speaker 2: beside him, about a foot behind him and Surhan and
- 25:52Speaker 2: they were being led to the ambush site to where
- 25:56Speaker 2: Surhan was ending in front of the steam table. Surhan
- 26:00Speaker 2: fired two shots at my father and one of those
- 26:06Speaker 2: shots hit Paul sch Rate in the head. He said
- 26:11Speaker 2: he felt like he was being electrocuted. He didn't know
- 26:13Speaker 2: what it was. He just felt like he had stepped
- 26:15Speaker 2: on an electric wire and and he went down, but
- 26:19Speaker 2: he lived to be almost ninety years old. He died
- 26:23Speaker 2: about two years ago. And then the other shot that
- 26:28Speaker 2: Turrnan fired at my father went past my father and
- 26:32Speaker 2: hit a door jam, a wooden door jam behind him,
- 26:34Speaker 2: and it was later removed. The bullet was later removed
- 26:38Speaker 2: by the LAPD. Then Sir Ann was grabbed by five
- 26:42Speaker 2: men by you know, Rosie Greer.
- 26:45Speaker 3: George the writer, George Plimpton too.
- 26:47Speaker 2: George Climpton was on that dog pile on Rafer Johnson,
- 26:51Speaker 2: who was in nineteen sixty the Catalon champion, was very
- 26:56Speaker 2: close to my father. It was kind of acting as
- 26:58Speaker 2: my father's bodyguard. Back then, the candidates did not get
- 27:03Speaker 2: the Secret Service protection until you got a nomination, so
- 27:05Speaker 2: my father wasn't entitled to it. And Jay Edgar Hoover
- 27:09Speaker 2: offered to protect him, but he knew JEdgar who would
- 27:11Speaker 2: be spying on him, so he said no thanks. And
- 27:14Speaker 2: then the LAPD had a very bad reputation at that
- 27:18Speaker 2: time for racism, and oh they were they were not.
- 27:24Speaker 2: They were not part of it. So he was being
- 27:26Speaker 2: protected essentially by football players, by the fearsome forceome guys
- 27:33Speaker 2: from the Dallas Cowboys and from the Oakland Raiders, and
- 27:36Speaker 2: they chased down or they immediately grabbed her hand after
- 27:42Speaker 2: the second shot, and they took his hand and they
- 27:47Speaker 2: they they bent him over the steam table on his back,
- 27:51Speaker 2: and they took his gun hand and they pointed it
- 27:53Speaker 2: in the opposite direction away from my father. So and
- 27:58Speaker 2: ray For Johnson later told me that he, you know,
- 28:01Speaker 2: Rave was a big guy. He's like six foot four
- 28:04Speaker 2: and he'd been the best athlete in the world, and
- 28:06Speaker 2: he said he was and Sir Hann is this tiny,
- 28:09Speaker 2: tiny little guy, but he said he had superhuman strength
- 28:13Speaker 2: and they could not get that gun out of his hand.
- 28:16Speaker 2: Sir Ann was able to. It was a revolver twenty
- 28:18Speaker 2: two revolver and there were eight shots in it, and
- 28:22Speaker 2: Sir Ann was able to squeeze off six more shots
- 28:26Speaker 2: and empty the you know, the viral and uh and
- 28:34Speaker 2: those shots all hit people. So one person, I think
- 28:39Speaker 2: an ABC reporter, got hit twice, once through his pant's
- 28:42Speaker 2: leg and another time in the istomic. But all those
- 28:46Speaker 2: shots hit people. So we know what happened to every
- 28:49Speaker 2: single shot in Sir Han's gun. And he never had
- 28:51Speaker 2: a chance to reload. My father was killed by four
- 28:55Speaker 2: shots from behind. And the reason I know this is
- 28:59Speaker 2: be guyse Paul Schrey ten years ago told me, you
- 29:04Speaker 2: got to come to my house and pacity and read
- 29:08Speaker 2: the autopsy report, which was Tomas Neagucci, the most important
- 29:13Speaker 2: coroner in American history. And he did the and so
- 29:17Speaker 2: and I did. It's not something I wanted to do,
- 29:19Speaker 2: to read the autopsy report from my dad, but Paul Shrey,
- 29:23Speaker 2: I couldn't really say no to him. He'd been shot
- 29:26Speaker 2: with my dad. He was his loyal friend. So I
- 29:28Speaker 2: sat down and read it. And if you read it,
- 29:31Speaker 2: you're like he innescally escapable conclusions that her hand could
- 29:36Speaker 2: not have killed my father, which is what Nagucci concluded
- 29:42Speaker 2: Nogucci when he did the autopsy. He knew what had
- 29:45Speaker 2: happened in Dallas with the autopsy was all you know,
- 29:48Speaker 2: the critique of that autopsy is is notorious. So he
- 29:54Speaker 2: wanted to make sure that he did an autopsy that
- 29:57Speaker 2: nobody would ever criticize. So he called it chief Corners
- 30:01Speaker 2: all the five branches of the arm services and had
- 30:05Speaker 2: them sitting in the theater observing him. And in the
- 30:10Speaker 2: medical literature, his autopsy in my dad is called the
- 30:13Speaker 2: perfect autopsy, and what he found is my father was
- 30:17Speaker 2: shot four times from behind and all of them. One
- 30:22Speaker 2: of the shots passed harmlessly through the shoulder pad of
- 30:28Speaker 2: his suit jacket, two of them hit him in the back,
- 30:31Speaker 2: and then one of them was fired from directly behind
- 30:35Speaker 2: his ear into his head, and all of them were
- 30:40Speaker 2: contact shots.
- 30:41Speaker 3: Were all those twenty two Those are all twenty two
- 30:43Speaker 3: Capri twenty two.
- 30:44Speaker 2: But the bullets don't match. And the police efforts to
- 30:52Speaker 2: fix the ballistics are very well documented. The deception that
- 30:57Speaker 2: they tried. You know, one of the ballistics expert in
- 31:03Speaker 2: the police department was involved in a deception. Oh the
- 31:13Speaker 2: and if you listen, there's two audio tapes of what
- 31:16Speaker 2: happened that night, and they showed that there were thirteen
- 31:19Speaker 2: shots fired. There were thirteen distinct booms on that and
- 31:27Speaker 2: all of the shots were contact shots, meaning that the
- 31:31Speaker 2: barrel of the gun was either touching my father's skin
- 31:34Speaker 2: or less than a half inch or quarter inch from
- 31:37Speaker 2: the skin, because they all left carbon tattoos on his body,
- 31:41Speaker 2: and they were all fired at an upward angle, in
- 31:47Speaker 2: other words, that somebody was standing right behind him concealing
- 31:50Speaker 2: a gun and holding it, you know, against him, but
- 31:53Speaker 2: slightly upward, and all of them were fired at that.
- 31:57Speaker 2: And then the guy who almost certainly fired those shots
- 32:01Speaker 2: was a guy I'm called Eugene Thane Sazar, who was
- 32:06Speaker 2: a He worked for a security agency, he called a
- 32:11Speaker 2: security and he had gotten the job only two or
- 32:13Speaker 2: three days before, after my father's schedule was already known,
- 32:18Speaker 2: and he was the one who grabbed my father by
- 32:22Speaker 2: the elbow and then walked him toward the ambush where
- 32:27Speaker 2: Sir Hann was raided waiting. And the opposition is that
- 32:32Speaker 2: when Sir Hann was firing those shots and all eyes
- 32:35Speaker 2: were upon him, there were seventy seven people in the room,
- 32:39Speaker 2: and he drew his gun and was actually firing the
- 32:43Speaker 2: kill shots. And when my father fell, he fell backwards
- 32:49Speaker 2: onto Saysar. But he must have known that he was
- 32:52Speaker 2: being shot from behind because he twisted around and he
- 32:56Speaker 2: grabbed Seesar's tie and it was a pull clip on
- 33:00Speaker 2: high and if you see the pictures of my father,
- 33:02Speaker 2: the initial pictures of him lying on the ground, he
- 33:04Speaker 2: has that clip on tye in his head. Azar got up,
- 33:08Speaker 2: pushed my father off, and got up from under him
- 33:10Speaker 2: with his gun visible. There's a dozen eyewitnesses that showed
- 33:14Speaker 2: his gun was drawn. His gun was drawn, which says
- 33:17Speaker 2: or never denied, and the police has some weeks later,
- 33:22Speaker 2: I was your gun drawn? He changes history many times,
- 33:26Speaker 2: you know, he said he was firing and my father,
- 33:28Speaker 2: I mean firing at sir hand, which of course he wasn't.
- 33:32Speaker 2: And as it turns out, there's a woman, an historian
- 33:39Speaker 2: called Lesippes who's done a deep dive on saysar and
- 33:42Speaker 2: and his his employer was was uh Hughes Aircraft, which
- 33:51Speaker 2: is a defense contractor, you know, which was owned by
- 33:53Speaker 2: a Hour to Use who is deeply involved with with
- 33:57Speaker 2: the Las Vegas mob and then Bowing or Lockey. He
- 34:03Speaker 2: worked at a locky plant in la and he had
- 34:07Speaker 2: top secret clearance and he identifies himself as a CIA employee.
- 34:13Speaker 2: And he openly hated my father. He thought that my
- 34:16Speaker 2: father was going to turn the country over to black people,
- 34:20Speaker 2: which he complained about a lot. So I actually tried
- 34:26Speaker 2: to interview him. I tried to go meet with him.
- 34:28Speaker 2: He left the country after that and he went to
- 34:31Speaker 2: live in the Philippines, and I contacted him and said,
- 34:34Speaker 2: you know, would you be willing to sit down and
- 34:36Speaker 2: talk to me. And he initially said I'll do it
- 34:40Speaker 2: for ten thousand dollars, and then he raised it. When
- 34:44Speaker 2: I said okay, he said fifteen thousand. And then when
- 34:48Speaker 2: I was, you know, planning my trip, he said twenty
- 34:51Speaker 2: five thousand. I realized that he was that dude. This
- 34:57Speaker 2: was an andless game that he was going to play.
- 35:00Speaker 2: And and then he died during the pandemic. I mean, I
- 35:05Speaker 2: don't know why he died. You know, I don't mean
- 35:08Speaker 2: to imply that he died of COVID, but he died
- 35:11Speaker 2: during lockdowns.
- 35:14Speaker 1: When you we can move on after the after this
- 35:18Speaker 1: just one clarification.
- 35:18Speaker 3: When you when you went, how long did you talk
- 35:22Speaker 3: to him?
- 35:22Speaker 2: For I was there probably about four hours?
- 35:26Speaker 1: Was he.
- 35:28Speaker 3: What was what was his attitude towards you?
- 35:31Speaker 2: He was deeply, deeply grateful, He cried, He apologized to me.
- 35:36Speaker 2: For he doesn't he now no longer believes that he
- 35:40Speaker 2: killed my father. He is no memory of that night.
- 35:44Speaker 2: I mean, his history is very interesting because he was
- 35:47Speaker 2: working at a racetrack that was owned by one of
- 35:52Speaker 2: the top mobsters in l a. Mickey Cohen and Johnny Rizzelli.
- 35:57Speaker 2: And you know, the story is his lawyer was Johnny
- 36:02Speaker 2: Rizselli's attorney who suddenly appeared the night he killed my
- 36:05Speaker 2: father and said I'm representing him. And he was the
- 36:07Speaker 2: one who persuaded who would not look at the listics evidence,
- 36:10Speaker 2: and then persuaded Sirin to plead guilty. Sir is when
- 36:17Speaker 2: they were when he was working at that they they
- 36:19Speaker 2: got him to go on a horse one time, which
- 36:21Speaker 2: is crazy. He'd never been on a horse, and they
- 36:23Speaker 2: asked him to put him on. He five feet tall, right,
- 36:26Speaker 2: he's tiny.
- 36:27Speaker 3: Yeah, one hundred and thirty pounds or something.
- 36:29Speaker 2: Yeah, he's tiny guy. And he's yeah, I mean, if
- 36:33Speaker 2: you if you see him, he's a very sweet old man.
- 36:36Speaker 2: And he just kept he kept crying, telling me every
- 36:41Speaker 2: time I saw a picture of your mother and with
- 36:44Speaker 2: all of you kids, and you know, I realized my
- 36:47Speaker 2: part and in the death of her husband. It you know,
- 36:53Speaker 2: broke my heart. So he just, you know, he was
- 36:58Speaker 2: I feel like he was being honest with me. I
- 37:01Speaker 2: feel like he doesn't really have any guile, you know,
- 37:04Speaker 2: he's he kind of by then. I think he was
- 37:09Speaker 2: almost eighty years old, seventy seven or something, and he uh,
- 37:15Speaker 2: and he's been in prison for six years. Oh, in
- 37:20Speaker 2: the story of you know, of his story is interesting,
- 37:25Speaker 2: but you know, I know we got other things to
- 37:27Speaker 2: talk about. But anyway, it's uh, how how he uh
- 37:34Speaker 2: you know, his road is a really interesting road.
- 37:38Speaker 3: Yeah, it is.
- 37:40Speaker 1: But I just couldn't when I was reading about that,
- 37:43Speaker 1: I just couldn't picture from your perspective, what would be
- 37:46Speaker 1: like to sit across the room with someone who had
- 37:50Speaker 1: whatever happened that night was there with the intention he
- 37:53Speaker 1: was your father, and the desire to reach across and
- 37:59Speaker 1: strangle that guy, you know, would be strong for me.
- 38:03Speaker 1: You know you uh, you've done all kinds of first
- 38:09Speaker 1: descents like you're you You became a you're like you're
- 38:12Speaker 1: a white water enthusiast. Yeah, did your and then you've
- 38:15Speaker 1: worked like I said, you worked on behalf of fishermen
- 38:19Speaker 1: against polluters who are polluting waterways, destroying fisheries. Were you
- 38:26Speaker 1: Did you come into that love of water through environmental
- 38:30Speaker 1: work or did you come into that love of water
- 38:32Speaker 1: through outdoor experience?
- 38:33Speaker 2: Outdoors I was when I was I think I was
- 38:36Speaker 2: probably ADHD. I would go into a classroom, I it
- 38:42Speaker 2: was like they were talking in different language. I went
- 38:44Speaker 2: to school for the first grade at five years old.
- 38:47Speaker 2: I've never been in nursery school, and I just I
- 38:50Speaker 2: didn't know what they were. You know, I had no clue.
- 38:54Speaker 2: I was like non compistments, and all I was doing
- 38:58Speaker 2: was thinking of the woods. How I was going to
- 39:00Speaker 2: get you know, what I was going to do after school.
- 39:02Speaker 2: I was going to go in the woods. I was
- 39:04Speaker 2: going to check my traps. I was going to you know,
- 39:07Speaker 2: turn over rocks, climb trees, take a baby, grow, all
- 39:10Speaker 2: this kind of stuff that I was doing. Catching snakes.
- 39:12Speaker 2: I had My room was filled with aquariums with animals
- 39:16Speaker 2: that I caught, and from when I was little, that's
- 39:21Speaker 2: what I wanted to do. So and then my father,
- 39:24Speaker 2: you know, was brought us, taught us how to kayak
- 39:27Speaker 2: Askma role and we were very very young kids. We
- 39:31Speaker 2: went on all the big western whitewater rivers at the time,
- 39:35Speaker 2: and you know, that's pretty common now. I think we
- 39:39Speaker 2: were told that we were among the first two or
- 39:42Speaker 2: three hundred people to go down the Colorado River. We
- 39:46Speaker 2: went with Hatch Brothers Expeditions, which was the first whitewater company,
- 39:51Speaker 2: and we did the Colorado, We did a little Colorado,
- 39:54Speaker 2: we did the middle fork of the zam and my
- 39:56Speaker 2: dad took us on the amp.
- 39:57Speaker 3: But they multiday trips.
- 39:59Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, week long trips.
- 40:01Speaker 3: Camping on gravel bars.
- 40:02Speaker 2: Yeah huh. We did the sam and the Snake is
- 40:06Speaker 2: really the Upper Hudson, which we did. I did the
- 40:10Speaker 2: Upper Husband with my dad in March during a blizzard
- 40:14Speaker 2: and that was the coldest up all that time that
- 40:17Speaker 2: I'd ever been in my life. And we swam, you know,
- 40:19Speaker 2: there was ice in the river and my brother and
- 40:23Speaker 2: I tipped our we had a tobo duo kayak and
- 40:26Speaker 2: we tipped it over and you know, uh and this
- 40:29Speaker 2: way that was really cold, and so you know, I
- 40:35Speaker 2: he got us into that whitewater from when we were
- 40:38Speaker 2: really young, and then we did a lot of backcountry skiing.
- 40:41Speaker 2: We were my dad really loved the wilderness and I
- 40:46Speaker 2: and then I started training hawks. I was raising homing
- 40:48Speaker 2: pigeons from when I was seven years old, and I
- 40:51Speaker 2: was like a serious uh hobby or sport where I
- 40:55Speaker 2: you know, where I lived. And then when I was nine,
- 40:59Speaker 2: I got my hawk. I got a read Tellahawk and
- 41:03Speaker 2: I had read a book. You know, my uncle was
- 41:07Speaker 2: president and there was books around about Camelot and there
- 41:11Speaker 2: was a book by T. H. White called The Once
- 41:14Speaker 2: Future King and I read it. EH White was a
- 41:18Speaker 2: brilliant author, but he was also a fulconer, and he
- 41:21Speaker 2: was a British falconer, and he has a chapter and
- 41:23Speaker 2: the Once a Future King is about the young King Arthur.
- 41:27Speaker 2: It was a chapter in it about Arthur apprenticing as
- 41:31Speaker 2: a fulconer when he's a little boy. And I read
- 41:35Speaker 2: that and I said, this is what I got to do.
- 41:38Speaker 2: And I told my dad. My dad knew of a
- 41:41Speaker 2: falconer who lived about a mile from my house. He
- 41:44Speaker 2: was I called Alvin. I was one of the pioneers
- 41:47Speaker 2: of American falconry, and he had been an All American
- 41:50Speaker 2: football player at Penn State. He had then gone to
- 41:55Speaker 2: work designing jets for the Pentagon. But the state department
- 42:00Speaker 2: knew about him because whenever there was visiting Arab dignitaries,
- 42:04Speaker 2: they'd always send them over to fly birds with them,
- 42:07Speaker 2: because the Arabs are crazy for Fulton. And so my
- 42:11Speaker 2: dad knew about him, and my dad took me over
- 42:14Speaker 2: there and then I apprenticed under him, and I, you know,
- 42:17Speaker 2: I became a master faulk and ear at a young age.
- 42:19Speaker 2: I actually wrote the exam that people take seriously, Yeah,
- 42:24Speaker 2: what was bird? My first was a red tallowk. But
- 42:27Speaker 2: I'll tell you what I got. I got I think
- 42:30Speaker 2: probably one of the first Harris Hawks that anybody ever trained.
- 42:34Speaker 2: That Harris hawk is now the preferred hawk or globally
- 42:36Speaker 2: for ground quarry. If you if you train hawks, which
- 42:41Speaker 2: is what I actually prefer, you're taking ground quarry or
- 42:45Speaker 2: or you know, they can catch a pheasant on the rise,
- 42:48Speaker 2: or you know, occasionally occasionally, if they're really lucky, a
- 42:53Speaker 2: duck on the rise, but they could never catch it
- 42:56Speaker 2: in a tailchain. Duck flies ninety miles an hour. They
- 43:00Speaker 2: they can't nothing could take take it in a tail chase.
- 43:03Speaker 3: Like once that thing's off the water, you know, once.
- 43:05Speaker 2: They're they're like a bullet once they once they get
- 43:09Speaker 2: off the water, and they usually won't get off the
- 43:12Speaker 2: water if there's a hawk in the air. So you
- 43:14Speaker 2: have to have a dog, and it has to be
- 43:16Speaker 2: a very small pond like a golf course or something.
- 43:19Speaker 2: And but I I but Harris hawks are now the
- 43:25Speaker 2: preferred The people who trent hawks are called lost stringers,
- 43:29Speaker 2: and the preferred bird for them nowadays in every country
- 43:33Speaker 2: in the world are Harris hawks, because they're the only
- 43:36Speaker 2: hawk that flies that hunts communally. And in fact, when
- 43:40Speaker 2: Audubon first saw them in the desert Southwestn't he named
- 43:45Speaker 2: him after his friend, who is, you know, an ornithologist
- 43:48Speaker 2: named Harris. He assumed they were carrying eaters, because there's
- 43:54Speaker 2: no other predatory bird that eats in packs. I didn't
- 43:59Speaker 2: know this, Yeah, and and and so you'd see six
- 44:05Speaker 2: of them down on a quarry like a jack rabbit
- 44:08Speaker 2: or something, and you assumed they were you know.
- 44:10Speaker 3: Carries look like a bunch of vultures on there exactly.
- 44:13Speaker 2: And and that, but now you know, we know they
- 44:16Speaker 2: actually hunt in packs like wolves. And because they're communal there,
- 44:21Speaker 2: they're very very good companions for human beings. They understand
- 44:24Speaker 2: the relationship between the human and the dog and the
- 44:28Speaker 2: you know, the whole interaction is comes very naturally to
- 44:31Speaker 2: them because they understand the dynamics of hunting in a
- 44:34Speaker 2: pack and hunting and hunting cooperatively and with kind of
- 44:39Speaker 2: communicated strategies to each other. If you see that, if
- 44:42Speaker 2: you're hunting the squirrels, you'll see them ladder up. One
- 44:46Speaker 2: will ladder up from the bottom up, you know, up
- 44:49Speaker 2: the up, the branches and the other one will ladder
- 44:52Speaker 2: down and squeeze the squirrel. They can't catch the squirrel
- 44:54Speaker 2: on it and it's on the tree because they don't
- 44:57Speaker 2: have a tight enough turning radius, and the squirrel will
- 45:00Speaker 2: the bark look behind him and keep an eye on
- 45:03Speaker 2: where the hawk is, and right before the hawk hits him,
- 45:05Speaker 2: they'll go to the other side of the bark, the
- 45:07Speaker 2: other side of the tree, and the hawk can there's
- 45:10Speaker 2: no hawk that has that kind of turning radius. They
- 45:13Speaker 2: can dodge hawks a whole day just by staying on
- 45:16Speaker 2: that trunk. So for a hawk to catch the squirrel,
- 45:18Speaker 2: that has to get it off the trunk and onto
- 45:22Speaker 2: a branch. And so that's what they'll do. You'll see
- 45:25Speaker 2: them do it. And all of a sudden, the Harris
- 45:26Speaker 2: hawks are so smart, like I've hunted red taillahawks my
- 45:30Speaker 2: whole life. And if it red tellahawks, he's a squirrel
- 45:34Speaker 2: going to a squirrel dray right the nest. What do
- 45:38Speaker 2: you call the dray, Yeah, squirrel tray. So he sees
- 45:42Speaker 2: them going to the dray for the red taillahawk, which
- 45:46Speaker 2: has been here for you know, at least since the
- 45:48Speaker 2: place is seen in ice age is probably a million
- 45:51Speaker 2: years before that. But that squirrel in the in the
- 45:54Speaker 2: mind of Red Tallahawk, that squirrel just disappeared, and that's
- 45:58Speaker 2: the end of it. Harris Hawk. If he ever sees
- 46:01Speaker 2: the squirrel going to a squirrel dray, he knows that
- 46:05Speaker 2: that animal is still.
- 46:06Speaker 3: In there and highly vulnerable, and he'll.
- 46:09Speaker 2: Go jump on the top of it like a like
- 46:11Speaker 2: a trampoline to try to get it to come out.
- 46:14Speaker 2: And then from then on, anytime he sees a squirrel dray,
- 46:19Speaker 2: he'll go jump on it to see if there's a squirrel.
- 46:22Speaker 2: So they're very they're very enjoyable. But I got one
- 46:25Speaker 2: in a pet store when I was a kid, at
- 46:28Speaker 2: the pet store in Southeast Washington, and I brought him
- 46:32Speaker 2: home and he got it. He got untethered. And I
- 46:37Speaker 2: had a pheasant run and I had some exotic pheasants
- 46:41Speaker 2: in They're like golden pheasants, silver pheasants. I just gotta think,
- 46:45Speaker 2: and the pheasants would eat all the grass inside them
- 46:47Speaker 2: run and they just stick their head out of it.
- 46:50Speaker 2: I had turkey wire which is about the diameter of
- 46:53Speaker 2: the pheasants had so they can squeeze their head to
- 46:56Speaker 2: that turkey wire to get the tall grass that you
- 46:59Speaker 2: couldn't get with them more there was you know, tight
- 47:01Speaker 2: up against the side of the pheasant run. They'd eat
- 47:05Speaker 2: that that deep green grass and they stick their heads
- 47:07Speaker 2: were there to get it. But because it was a
- 47:10Speaker 2: tight fit, they couldn't pull their head right out immediately.
- 47:13Speaker 2: They had to kind of, you know, work it out.
- 47:16Speaker 2: And that Harris hawk went to the and and it
- 47:19Speaker 2: sat in a tree above that pheasant run, and one
- 47:23Speaker 2: at a time he took the head off of every
- 47:25Speaker 2: one of my pheasants. And I came home from the
- 47:29Speaker 2: school and all my peasants were dead in the peasant run,
- 47:34Speaker 2: and I realized what happened, and I was like, I
- 47:37Speaker 2: got to catch that hawk and train it, because this
- 47:39Speaker 2: is like a really smart bird.
- 47:52Speaker 1: How do you catch something like that? I mean, he
- 47:54Speaker 1: used to It probably wasn't that regulated then.
- 47:56Speaker 2: It was no In fact, when I until nineteen seventy two,
- 48:02Speaker 2: hawks raptors were vermin species in twenty one states. So
- 48:07Speaker 2: the and they paid bounties on them, and they you know,
- 48:11Speaker 2: if there were an annual hawks shoots that were they
- 48:14Speaker 2: were sponsored by the Audubon Society up and the people
- 48:17Speaker 2: would go up on the right, Yeah, because they thought
- 48:20Speaker 2: they were killing songbirds, and people didn't understand ecology at
- 48:24Speaker 2: that point. They just thought, okay, hawks are the enemies
- 48:29Speaker 2: of farm you know, of chickens, so exterminating them is
- 48:32Speaker 2: a good thing. And they didn't realize the hawks were
- 48:34Speaker 2: also controlling the rodents and controlling you know. They just
- 48:39Speaker 2: didn't understand the kind of the complexity sure of ecosystems,
- 48:45Speaker 2: and they still don't, by the way, you know, otherwise
- 48:48Speaker 2: we wouldn't be using so many petticides. But yeah, the
- 48:53Speaker 2: Audubon Society and the game clubs and hunting clubs, the
- 49:01Speaker 2: the conservation apartments would sponsoring these hawkshits every year so
- 49:07Speaker 2: we could go out and just drap hawks and fly them.
- 49:10Speaker 2: And then the Eastern paragrine went extinct in nineteen sixty
- 49:14Speaker 2: three and people started worrying about them then, and in
- 49:18Speaker 2: nineteen seventy two they passed the Migratory Birds Treaty Act.
- 49:23Speaker 1: The hormit I didn't realize this. The peregrines that are
- 49:26Speaker 1: in the East, now there was an Eastern.
- 49:28Speaker 2: There was an Eastern, the Eastern in the Eastern and
- 49:32Speaker 2: Adams peregrine. It was.
- 49:34Speaker 3: That one extinct that one extinct. So paragons that have
- 49:38Speaker 3: repopulated have come from different regions.
- 49:40Speaker 2: You know what if they're mainly there were some paragrines
- 49:44Speaker 2: in captivity and we learned around nineteen sixty nine, we
- 49:49Speaker 2: learned to breed them, and before that they had never
- 49:53Speaker 2: been bred in captivity, and so and then you know,
- 49:57Speaker 2: Faulkners were the only ones breeding them. And there was
- 50:01Speaker 2: a guy called Heinzmanng who is one of my mentors,
- 50:04Speaker 2: who was the first scientists to breed a raptor in captivity.
- 50:08Speaker 2: And then we figured out how to double clutch them,
- 50:11Speaker 2: which is you get the bird to lay a clutch
- 50:14Speaker 2: of eggs, three eggs. Take that away from them, she'll
- 50:17Speaker 2: she'll recycle, lay three more, take those away, and she'll
- 50:21Speaker 2: recycle a third time. And then so you have nine
- 50:24Speaker 2: eggs from the same bird every year, and you can
- 50:26Speaker 2: then incubate those and you can get the mother to
- 50:30Speaker 2: raise them because you're you're you know, handling handing her
- 50:33Speaker 2: unlimited food, so she can take care of nine offspring.
- 50:36Speaker 2: And we started mass producing them and then releasing them
- 50:42Speaker 2: to the wild. So the arrogrants that you see now
- 50:45Speaker 2: on the East coast are they're a little bit of
- 50:47Speaker 2: hybridized from some of the other subspecies, but you know
- 50:50Speaker 2: there are still there's a lot of them. Are you
- 50:52Speaker 2: know pure bread Eastern atoms? There were bread and captivity
- 50:58Speaker 2: and then released.
- 51:00Speaker 1: If walk through how you got how you transitioned into
- 51:09Speaker 1: environmental law and focused on the Hudson and then focused
- 51:12Speaker 1: on a widening bunch of rivers and then became aligned
- 51:16Speaker 1: with fishermen and fisheries restoration.
- 51:19Speaker 2: Yeah, so I got. I was a Heroinagton for fourteen years.
- 51:24Speaker 2: I got somber in nineteen eighty three, and then I
- 51:26Speaker 2: rethought my life and I had gone into the DA's
- 51:31Speaker 2: office and I kind of had this you know life
- 51:33Speaker 2: that was almost kind of trying to follow my father's footsteps.
- 51:37Speaker 2: I had gone to the same law school, the same college.
- 51:41Speaker 2: I had gone into prosecution the way that he and I.
- 51:45Speaker 2: I realized that I was not authentic for me, that
- 51:47Speaker 2: I really belonged doing something in the woods and in
- 51:50Speaker 2: the waterways, and you know that that's where I was
- 51:53Speaker 2: happy and that's what I wanted to do with my life.
- 51:57Speaker 2: When I was a kid, I wanted to be a
- 51:58Speaker 2: scientist or a vet or to do you know, something
- 52:02Speaker 2: like a field biologist. It's somebody who was outside all
- 52:06Speaker 2: the time. And so I decided to take you know,
- 52:14Speaker 2: my legal education and meld it with you know, in
- 52:18Speaker 2: some way with doing environmental environmental protection, environmental advocacy, and
- 52:23Speaker 2: I ended up working for a blue collar coalition of
- 52:30Speaker 2: commercial and recreational fishermen on the Hudson River and who
- 52:34Speaker 2: were trying to reclaim the Hudson from its polluters. We
- 52:37Speaker 2: have on the Hudson the oldest commercial fishery in North America.
- 52:41Speaker 2: It's three hundred and fifty years old. Many of the
- 52:43Speaker 2: people that I represent come from families that have been
- 52:46Speaker 2: fishing the river continuously since Dutch colonial times. It's a
- 52:49Speaker 2: traditional gear fishery, so they use the same fishing methods
- 52:53Speaker 2: that were taught by the Algonquin Indians city the original
- 52:56Speaker 2: Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, and then passed down through
- 52:58Speaker 2: the generations and one of enclaves. But the commercial fishery
- 53:02Speaker 2: is a little village called Crotonville, New York.
- 53:04Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I've been there.
- 53:06Speaker 2: Yeah. It's thirty miles north of New York City on
- 53:08Speaker 2: the east bank of the river. And the people who
- 53:11Speaker 2: live there in nineteen sixty six were not your kind
- 53:16Speaker 2: of prototypical affluent environmentalists. They were factory workers, carpenters, lay,
- 53:20Speaker 2: there's electricians. Half the people in Crotonville made their living
- 53:24Speaker 2: or at least some part of the living fishing or
- 53:26Speaker 2: crabbing the river. You have a big beautiful picture of
- 53:32Speaker 2: a basket of blue crabs Chesapeake Bay. But we have
- 53:36Speaker 2: the same fishery in the Hudson. You know, the blue
- 53:40Speaker 2: crabs come up to the Hudson as well. We have a
- 53:42Speaker 2: lot of the anagmus fish come up to the Hudson, include.
- 53:46Speaker 3: Shad, historic sturgeon, sturgeon.
- 53:49Speaker 2: Yeah, we have a sturge in the river that are
- 53:54Speaker 2: twelve feet long. Two hundred pounds of cavy are in them.
- 53:58Speaker 2: It's a very very big fishery, very gugre fishery for
- 54:00Speaker 2: a lot of people. Striped bass, and then the smaller
- 54:04Speaker 2: fisheries harrying ale wives, blue crab, and there's a little
- 54:09Speaker 2: bit of shrimp in the river, and and and then
- 54:12Speaker 2: there's some odd odd fisheries like shrimp and goldfish, you know,
- 54:16Speaker 2: and and there's carp There used to be a big
- 54:18Speaker 2: carb fishery for gefilter fish. The Jewish population during certain
- 54:24Speaker 2: Jewish holidays, it is a popular. So we have a
- 54:28Speaker 2: mixture of freshwater fish, saltwater fish, and an adremus fish
- 54:32Speaker 2: and an amus fish, the fish that evolved in fresh water,
- 54:36Speaker 2: but they figured out how to go to the salt
- 54:38Speaker 2: water to feed themselves in fat and they but their
- 54:42Speaker 2: eggs will not survive in saltwater. They have to come
- 54:45Speaker 2: back up into the freshwater their natal stream to spawn
- 54:49Speaker 2: because the eggs would die if they were in salt water.
- 54:53Speaker 2: And so and those are called a nadumant fish. And
- 54:55Speaker 2: they're also admous fishing, the HUDs, and those are fish
- 54:59Speaker 2: American American eel, of course, and they have the oddest
- 55:03Speaker 2: life cycle because they go out to the middle of
- 55:05Speaker 2: the North Atlantic to the Sargasso Sea and they meet
- 55:09Speaker 2: their European cousins there and then they breed and they
- 55:12Speaker 2: all go back to their natal streams. And you know,
- 55:15Speaker 2: of course an eel can breed air as well as water,
- 55:19Speaker 2: so they that's why you find them in ponds when
- 55:22Speaker 2: there's rainy, whether they go across the landscapes, you know,
- 55:25Speaker 2: at night during the rain and get in isolated ponds
- 55:29Speaker 2: and places. The incidentally, carp can also breed air and
- 55:34Speaker 2: catfish can you know the bullhead's kind of you. If
- 55:37Speaker 2: you ever if you leave a bullhead or a catfish
- 55:42Speaker 2: in two inches of water and there were four inches
- 55:44Speaker 2: of water in the bottom of your of your you know,
- 55:47Speaker 2: bait bucket, it will it will drought, it will die
- 55:49Speaker 2: asphyxiate because it'll use up the option. But if you
- 55:53Speaker 2: leave it, and if you just take all the water
- 55:56Speaker 2: out and throw it in there, it will live because
- 55:58Speaker 2: it can breed air. Yeah, it just like a lot
- 56:02Speaker 2: of carp can do that too. But anyway, that's a
- 56:07Speaker 2: real serious digression. I went on in nineteen sixty six
- 56:12Speaker 2: and Central Railroad began vomiting oil from a four and
- 56:15Speaker 2: a half foot pipe in the Croton Harmon rail yard,
- 56:18Speaker 2: and the oil went up the river and the tides
- 56:20Speaker 2: and blackened the beaches, and it made the shad taste
- 56:22Speaker 2: of diesel. The fishermen couldn't sell them in New York City.
- 56:27Speaker 2: The fload and fish market and all of the people
- 56:30Speaker 2: in Crotonville came together and the only public building in
- 56:33Speaker 2: the town, which was the American Legion Hall. This was
- 56:39Speaker 2: a very patriotic community.
- 56:41Speaker 1: Most of it speaks to the blue collar nature of
- 56:44Speaker 1: what you talk about, that that form of like blue
- 56:45Speaker 1: collar environmentalism exactly.
- 56:48Speaker 3: And the.
- 56:49Speaker 2: Almost all the original members and founders and board members
- 56:53Speaker 2: of Riverykeeople were former Marines. They were combat veterans from
- 56:57Speaker 2: World War Two, mainly from Korea. Also, I'm from Vietnam.
- 57:01Speaker 2: And they came back to the river, you know, to
- 57:04Speaker 2: fish again, and they found it was up polluted. They
- 57:07Speaker 2: came together that night in March of nineteen sixty six,
- 57:10Speaker 2: and there were three hundred people in the Parker Bale
- 57:13Speaker 2: American Legion, all leaning against the rifle racks hanging from
- 57:16Speaker 2: the rafters, men and women, furious about what was being
- 57:21Speaker 2: stolen from them, because then, you know, the Hudson was everything.
- 57:25Speaker 2: It was there. It was there, not just their recreation,
- 57:29Speaker 2: it was their livelihoods, it was their property values, it
- 57:32Speaker 2: was it was their backyard, and it was being stolen
- 57:36Speaker 2: from them by these large corporate entities over whom they
- 57:39Speaker 2: had no control. And they had been to the government
- 57:42Speaker 2: agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution, to
- 57:45Speaker 2: the Corps of Engineers, the State Conservation Apartment in the
- 57:48Speaker 2: Coast Guard, and they were given the bombs rush. Richie Garrett,
- 57:53Speaker 2: who was the first president of the of what was
- 57:56Speaker 2: then called the Hudson Fishermen's Association later became River Keep.
- 58:01Speaker 2: He was a grave digger from Austin, New York, and
- 58:03Speaker 2: he was a combat veteran from Korea. Really yeah, and
- 58:06Speaker 2: he used to say about it. He used to say
- 58:09Speaker 2: to his new fellers, I'll be the last to let
- 58:11Speaker 2: you down. Because he was a grave digger, but he
- 58:14Speaker 2: was also he was He went with another another marine
- 58:20Speaker 2: named Mark Glalco, who was at that point an Eastern
- 58:23Speaker 2: Airlines pilot. He went to the corp of Engineers a
- 58:29Speaker 2: dozen times, begging the core Colonel to do his job
- 58:33Speaker 2: and shut down the Penn Central Pipe, and the core
- 58:36Speaker 2: colonel finally told them an exasperation, these are important people.
- 58:40Speaker 2: We can't treat them that way, speaking of the Penn
- 58:42Speaker 2: Central Board of Directors. Oh. By this evening in March
- 58:45Speaker 2: of nineteen sixty six, virtually everybody in Crodenville had come
- 58:48Speaker 2: to the conclusion that government was in Cahouesi with the pluters,
- 58:51Speaker 2: and the only way they were going to reclaim the
- 58:53Speaker 2: river for themselves is if they confronted the polluters directly.
- 58:58Speaker 2: Somebody suggested that they put a match to the oil
- 59:01Speaker 2: slick coming out of the Pen Central pipe. And burnt
- 59:03Speaker 2: up the pipe. Somebody else said they should roll a
- 59:06Speaker 2: mattress up and jam it up the pipe and flood
- 59:08Speaker 2: the rail yard with its own waist. And then somebody
- 59:12Speaker 2: else said they should float a raft of dynamite into
- 59:15Speaker 2: the intake of the Indian Point power Plant, which at
- 59:18Speaker 2: that time was killing a million fish a day on
- 59:21Speaker 2: its intake screens and taking food off their family tables.
- 59:25Speaker 2: And a guy stood up whose name was Bob Boyle,
- 59:28Speaker 2: and he was a famous fly fisherman and spin fisherman.
- 59:32Speaker 2: He written dozens of book books on fly He has
- 59:34Speaker 2: a bunch of flies named after him. He was the
- 59:39Speaker 2: outdoor editor of the Sports Illustrated for sixty sixty five years.
- 59:45Speaker 2: He was a combat veteran from Vietnam. He actually was
- 59:48Speaker 2: at at the training camp. He was a roommate of
- 59:55Speaker 2: Robert Bork this, you know, the federal judge. But he
- 1:00:02Speaker 2: had been he was a first lieutenant, had eighty percent
- 1:00:05Speaker 2: mortality in Korea, and he had come back from Korea.
- 1:00:09Speaker 2: And he wrote about sports, mainly outdoor sports, for Sports
- 1:00:14Speaker 2: Illustrated for sixty five years. Two years earlier he'd written
- 1:00:18Speaker 2: an article about angling in the Hudson. There's some real
- 1:00:21Speaker 2: odd balls who fish in the HUDs. And there's these
- 1:00:24Speaker 2: sewer fishing clubs in Manhattan, you know that fished through
- 1:00:27Speaker 2: the Greats. And he was writing about all these these
- 1:00:30Speaker 2: weird sort of cultures of people who found, you know,
- 1:00:33Speaker 2: wilderness experience in the HUDs and you know, walked off
- 1:00:37Speaker 2: a pavement in New York and were renewing themselves spiritually
- 1:00:42Speaker 2: and in all these other ways through this contact with
- 1:00:44Speaker 2: the water. And it was a beautiful article. And in
- 1:00:48Speaker 2: researching that article, he came across an ancient navigational statue
- 1:00:54Speaker 2: called the eighteen eighty eight Rivers in Harbors Act. That
- 1:00:57Speaker 2: statute said it was illegal to pollute any waterway in
- 1:01:00Speaker 2: the United States. You had to be a big penalty
- 1:01:02Speaker 2: if you got caught. But also there was a bounty
- 1:01:05Speaker 2: provision that said that anybody who turned in the polluter
- 1:01:08Speaker 2: got to keep half the fine. And Boyle was stunned
- 1:01:12Speaker 2: when he read this, and he sent a copy of
- 1:01:14Speaker 2: it to the libel lawyer, said Time magazine, Time Ink,
- 1:01:18Speaker 2: which owned Sports Illustrated, And he knew those guys, they
- 1:01:21Speaker 2: were the only lawyers he knew, And he said, is
- 1:01:24Speaker 2: this still good law? And they sent him a memo
- 1:01:26Speaker 2: back saying it's still good law, but in eighty years
- 1:01:30Speaker 2: it's never been in force. And that evening, when all
- 1:01:33Speaker 2: these men and women were talking about violence, he stood
- 1:01:36Speaker 2: up in front of him with a copy of that
- 1:01:37Speaker 2: memo and he said, we shouldn't be talking about breaking
- 1:01:40Speaker 2: the law. We should be talking about in force here.
- 1:01:44Speaker 2: And they resolved that night they were going to start
- 1:01:46Speaker 2: a group that was then called the Hudson River Fishermen's
- 1:01:48Speaker 2: Association later became a River Keeper, and they were going
- 1:01:52Speaker 2: to go out and track down and prosecute every polluter
- 1:01:55Speaker 2: on the Hudson. Eighteen months later, they shut down the
- 1:01:58Speaker 2: Penn Central Pipe, elected the first bounty in the United
- 1:02:01Speaker 2: States history against the corporate polluter. They got to keep
- 1:02:03Speaker 2: two thousand dollars, which was a huge amount of money.
- 1:02:07Speaker 2: In Crotonville, New York in nineteen sixty eight, they were
- 1:02:11Speaker 2: two weeks of wild celebration in the town and they
- 1:02:14Speaker 2: used the money that was left over to go after
- 1:02:17Speaker 2: see Baguygee tuc tape, Standard brand, American cyanimid the biggest
- 1:02:21Speaker 2: corporations in the country and winning, collecting tens of thousands
- 1:02:26Speaker 2: of dollars in bounties, and then in nineteen seventy three,
- 1:02:29Speaker 2: they collected the highest penalty in the United States history
- 1:02:32Speaker 2: against the corporate polluter. They got two hundred thousand dollars
- 1:02:36Speaker 2: from Aniconda Iron Cable for dumping toxics at Hastings, New York.
- 1:02:41Speaker 2: They used the money to build a boat, which they
- 1:02:43Speaker 2: called the River Keeper, and they began patrolling the Hudson,
- 1:02:47Speaker 2: tracking down polluters and litigating against them. And then they
- 1:02:51Speaker 2: hired using bounty money. In nineteen eighty three, they hired
- 1:02:55Speaker 2: their first full time river keeper, a commercial fisherman named John,
- 1:03:01Speaker 2: and he hired me a year later using bounty money
- 1:03:04Speaker 2: as the first attorney and a full time attorney for them.
- 1:03:09Speaker 2: And I, you know, I started a clinic at a
- 1:03:13Speaker 2: local law school called Pace where my students were allowed
- 1:03:16Speaker 2: to practice law under my supervision. I got a special
- 1:03:19Speaker 2: court order, and you know, we just started litigating against
- 1:03:23Speaker 2: hundreds of polluters. We brought over five hundred lawsuits against
- 1:03:26Speaker 2: hundred river polluters. We forced polluters, just meant five and
- 1:03:30Speaker 2: a half billion dollars remediating the Hudson. Today, the Hudson
- 1:03:34Speaker 2: River is an international model for ecosystem protection. There's a
- 1:03:37Speaker 2: river when you know, when I started working on it.
- 1:03:40Speaker 2: It was dead water for twenty miles stretches zero dissoltd
- 1:03:43Speaker 2: auction from New York City north and twenty miles from
- 1:03:49Speaker 2: New York City south, I mean from Albany south. It
- 1:03:53Speaker 2: was dead water, no auction, you know, essentially no auction
- 1:03:58Speaker 2: breathing life, and it caught fire. It turned color every
- 1:04:03Speaker 2: week depending on what colors they were painting the trucks
- 1:04:06Speaker 2: at the GM plant and Arytown. And today the Hudson
- 1:04:09Speaker 2: is the richest waterway in the North Atlantic. It produces
- 1:04:13Speaker 2: more pounds of fish per acre, more biomass per gallon
- 1:04:15Speaker 2: than any of the waterway in the Atlantic Ocean north
- 1:04:19Speaker 2: of the Equator, on both sides of the Atlantic. It's
- 1:04:22Speaker 2: the last major rivers has some left on both sides
- 1:04:25Speaker 2: of the Atlantic, and all throw it in the Mediterranean
- 1:04:27Speaker 2: and the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Marmer Sea,
- 1:04:31Speaker 2: all these other waterways. There's only one river left that
- 1:04:34Speaker 2: still has strong splilnting stocks of all of its historical
- 1:04:37Speaker 2: species of migratory fish. And the Hudson is Noah's Ark.
- 1:04:42Speaker 2: It's a species warehouse. It's the last refuge for many
- 1:04:45Speaker 2: of these animals that are going extinct elsewhere. The miraculous
- 1:04:49Speaker 2: resurrection the Hudson inspired the creation of river keepers elsewhere.
- 1:04:53Speaker 2: So we had a bunch of commercial fishermen come down
- 1:04:57Speaker 2: and ask me to seho the you know, all of
- 1:05:00Speaker 2: the sewer plants in Connecticut. There were stor destroying the
- 1:05:04Speaker 2: oyster fisheries. And I issued every city. I sued Greenwich, Norwalk, Branford, Stanford,
- 1:05:13Speaker 2: and all the way up down, all the way up
- 1:05:16Speaker 2: and down, you know the rail line. I sued every
- 1:05:19Speaker 2: city on the coast of Connecticut, and we started collecting
- 1:05:23Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands dollars from them. We started Long Island Soundkeeper,
- 1:05:26Speaker 2: the commercial fishermen there. We got the surfers coming from
- 1:05:30Speaker 2: the West coast, you know, with the same thing, and
- 1:05:35Speaker 2: within a few years we had a couple of hundred
- 1:05:37Speaker 2: river keepers. We started a new group called water Keeper
- 1:05:40Speaker 2: Alliance to manage the licensing of these new groups, to
- 1:05:43Speaker 2: make sure we can protect the brand. And today we
- 1:05:46Speaker 2: have five hundred water We're the biggest water protection group
- 1:05:49Speaker 2: in the world. We have five hundred water keepers from
- 1:05:53Speaker 2: forty six countries and and you know there are there.
- 1:05:58Speaker 2: It's a law enforcement group. Most countries have laws that
- 1:06:01Speaker 2: forbid water pollution. The water belongs to people. It doesn't
- 1:06:05Speaker 2: belong to the government. It doesn't belong to you know,
- 1:06:09Speaker 2: corporations or big ag or you know the mining companies.
- 1:06:13Speaker 2: It belongs to the people. Everybody has a right to
- 1:06:15Speaker 2: use it. Nobody can use it in a way that
- 1:06:18Speaker 2: diminishes or injures. It's used in enjoyment by others. This
- 1:06:21Speaker 2: is an ancient law, goes back to Roman times. It's
- 1:06:24Speaker 2: in the Code of Justinian, it's in the Magna Carta,
- 1:06:26Speaker 2: and it's in the laws of most countries. The problem
- 1:06:29Speaker 2: is those laws are almost never enforced. And what we do,
- 1:06:33Speaker 2: a function we serve and water keeper is, you know,
- 1:06:36Speaker 2: is to enforce those laws on behalf of people who
- 1:06:40Speaker 2: are injured by pollution.
- 1:06:42Speaker 3: When you look at if you were in the White.
- 1:06:46Speaker 1: House and you looked at let's start with we can
- 1:06:51Speaker 1: start with priorities for EPA. If you have opinions on
- 1:06:57Speaker 1: what you do around Interior department, priorities for the Interior Department.
- 1:07:03Speaker 3: Who you'd like to see as Secretary of Interior.
- 1:07:05Speaker 2: How'd you like that job? Would you seriously would you
- 1:07:09Speaker 2: take would you look at taking a job?
- 1:07:11Speaker 3: I would? I would love to take it. I have
- 1:07:13Speaker 3: some people that would consult with.
- 1:07:14Speaker 1: And I was telling the other day if I ever
- 1:07:15Speaker 1: got into politics, I would do and I heard you
- 1:07:18Speaker 1: do it earlier. I would first make a list of
- 1:07:22Speaker 1: every bad thing I.
- 1:07:23Speaker 3: Ever did and make it a Google Drive doc and
- 1:07:27Speaker 3: hit share with the country.
- 1:07:29Speaker 1: And that's what I did. I was addicted to her
- 1:07:33Speaker 1: one fourteen years. No one's gonna dig that.
- 1:07:37Speaker 2: I said. When I announced, I said, you know, I said,
- 1:07:41Speaker 2: I didn't expect to run for president and I and
- 1:07:45Speaker 2: if I did, I would have lived a very very
- 1:07:47Speaker 2: different life. I led a very reckless life and you know,
- 1:07:52Speaker 2: high risk, a high risk individual. And I said, I am.
- 1:07:58Speaker 2: I told Eryl, I said, I've got I've got. I've
- 1:08:03Speaker 2: got so many skeletons in my closet. And if they
- 1:08:05Speaker 2: could vote, I could get elected king of the world.
- 1:08:18Speaker 1: Which one of those you want to Which one of
- 1:08:20Speaker 1: those you want to start with? If you really look
- 1:08:21Speaker 1: at like, what what would you what will be a
- 1:08:24Speaker 1: set of priorities for you with the e p A
- 1:08:28Speaker 1: or what would be a set of priorities.
- 1:08:29Speaker 2: Here's what I have. I have been working on environmentalities
- 1:08:36Speaker 2: for forty years and I found out from them from
- 1:08:39Speaker 2: the beginning that you need to be able to talk
- 1:08:43Speaker 2: to people. I you know, my whole thing was bringing
- 1:08:46Speaker 2: hundreds of hooking bullet of people into the environmental moment
- 1:08:49Speaker 2: who were left out because in the eighties when I
- 1:08:52Speaker 2: was doing this, the hooking Bullet people felt that, you know,
- 1:08:57Speaker 2: they felt alienated from you know, from the mainstream environmentalists.
- 1:09:01Speaker 2: They felt they didn't you know, there was a lot
- 1:09:03Speaker 2: of antagonism. There was a lot of antagonism of our
- 1:09:06Speaker 2: public lands issues in the world West. And you know,
- 1:09:09Speaker 2: whether you know, public lands should be managed exclusively for
- 1:09:14Speaker 2: game or wi should they be managed for hunting and fishing,
- 1:09:17Speaker 2: and you know, and these were all farming or ranching,
- 1:09:22Speaker 2: These were all areas of conflicts. And then there was
- 1:09:24Speaker 2: you know, you know, a lot of environmentalists were kind
- 1:09:27Speaker 2: of liberal and you know, and and maybe leaned a
- 1:09:31Speaker 2: little bit towards antique gun and so you had that conflict,
- 1:09:35Speaker 2: you had those areas of antagonism.
- 1:09:37Speaker 1: I think that that's why you wound up. These words
- 1:09:41Speaker 1: have their own etymology in their own use case, but
- 1:09:46Speaker 1: I think that's why you wound up eventually with people
- 1:09:49Speaker 1: who would identify as environmentalists and you have people that
- 1:09:53Speaker 1: would identify as the conservations. Yeah, right, So there's like, yeah,
- 1:09:57Speaker 1: you're within each of these, whether you describe yourself as
- 1:10:01Speaker 1: one or the other.
- 1:10:01Speaker 3: I often describe myself as a conservationists.
- 1:10:05Speaker 1: There's a I don't know eighty percent overlap right between
- 1:10:10Speaker 1: those views, you know.
- 1:10:13Speaker 3: But yeah, they just they just but.
- 1:10:17Speaker 1: Became comfortable with different terms even though they were largely talking.
- 1:10:20Speaker 3: About the same things. Yeah, but it's I think it's
- 1:10:23Speaker 3: it's that to avoid.
- 1:10:24Speaker 2: I mean, you know, like Ducks Unlimited's not consider itself
- 1:10:28Speaker 2: part of the environmental movement at all, right, and they
- 1:10:31Speaker 2: should have and that.
- 1:10:32Speaker 3: Well if you they are a leader of the environmental of.
- 1:10:35Speaker 2: Course, of course, but they weren't talking to you know,
- 1:10:42Speaker 2: you know, in our DC and EDS and to see
- 1:10:44Speaker 2: Era club. They were not. It was It's very it
- 1:10:47Speaker 2: was very and what I wanted.
- 1:10:48Speaker 3: They were litigating as much, right, either.
- 1:10:50Speaker 2: They were less litigious, but they were just I don't
- 1:10:55Speaker 2: know why, but it you know, there was they didn't
- 1:10:58Speaker 2: They they felt alienated and lot of my kind of
- 1:11:00Speaker 2: mission was to bring those groups in and I I started,
- 1:11:08Speaker 2: you know, I always tried to talk in a way
- 1:11:12Speaker 2: that was inclusive of those groups. And today, you know,
- 1:11:18Speaker 2: if you want to, I think one of the big
- 1:11:21Speaker 2: mistakes of the environmental movement has made. The biggest mistake
- 1:11:25Speaker 2: is to become the kind of carbon fundamentalists and to
- 1:11:29Speaker 2: forget about the issues that made us all environmentalists, which is,
- 1:11:33Speaker 2: you know, saving the oceans and saving the soils and
- 1:11:38Speaker 2: saving habitat and keeping our kids safe from toxins. And
- 1:11:43Speaker 2: if you talk about climate today, you're gonna you're gonna
- 1:11:47Speaker 2: cause a fistfight. And because you know, and with good reason,
- 1:11:52Speaker 2: one is because it's a it's an issue. You know,
- 1:11:58Speaker 2: I found this for the fishermen very early on, and
- 1:12:00Speaker 2: they didn't really want to talk about it. Because if
- 1:12:04Speaker 2: you're being asked to give up to something because of
- 1:12:07Speaker 2: a line that somebody shows you on a graph that
- 1:12:09Speaker 2: says you're going to be daddy here, and they're asking
- 1:12:13Speaker 2: you to give up income, you know that's going to
- 1:12:15Speaker 2: help your family, You're going to push back against that.
- 1:12:19Speaker 2: But if you ask somebody to make a sacrifice to
- 1:12:24Speaker 2: keep toxics out of their food, to keep their water
- 1:12:27Speaker 2: clean so there's no mercury in the fish, they will
- 1:12:30Speaker 2: pay anything to do that. And you know, when we
- 1:12:35Speaker 2: were fighting the lead contamination in the water in Flint, Michigan,
- 1:12:40Speaker 2: we had Hell's Angels standing shoulders shoulder with urban blacks.
- 1:12:43Speaker 2: When we went to you know, at Standing Rock, we
- 1:12:47Speaker 2: had business people, Republicans, union people, democrats, every kind of
- 1:12:52Speaker 2: person was at Standing Rock for the Keystone pipeline. Because
- 1:12:57Speaker 2: we didn't market it as a climate isge. He marked
- 1:13:00Speaker 2: protecting sacred places, and you know, purple mountains, majesties and
- 1:13:05Speaker 2: Americans will do anything to protect their sacred place. You know,
- 1:13:10Speaker 2: I've been fighting the coal industry for forty years, but
- 1:13:14Speaker 2: I don't focus on climate. I focus on things that
- 1:13:17Speaker 2: are tangible to people. I focus on, you know, the
- 1:13:21Speaker 2: destruction of the Appalachian Mountains. The Appalachians are the ridges
- 1:13:25Speaker 2: ecoism terrestrial ecosistm in North America. And the reason for
- 1:13:29Speaker 2: that is during the places in ice age, when they
- 1:13:32Speaker 2: were two and a half miles of ice over where
- 1:13:34Speaker 2: my house was in Mount Kisso, New York, the forest
- 1:13:38Speaker 2: disappeared in America. North American continent turned into a tundrad,
- 1:13:43Speaker 2: and the forest disappeared almost all together except in a
- 1:13:47Speaker 2: couple of tiny refuge ins, and the biggest one of
- 1:13:50Speaker 2: those was Appalasia. Oh and then when the ice melted
- 1:13:54Speaker 2: and withdrew all of North America was receded from the
- 1:13:58Speaker 2: Appalachian Mountains. So that's why you know, if you go
- 1:14:00Speaker 2: up to a forest and you know in upstate New
- 1:14:05Speaker 2: York or the Hudson Valley or New England, there's typically
- 1:14:08Speaker 2: three dominant species and an applash there's eighty six dominant species.
- 1:14:15Speaker 2: You know, the diversity is extraordinary. We're exploding I think
- 1:14:19Speaker 2: twenty eight hundred tons of ammonia nitrate explosives a week.
- 1:14:26Speaker 2: It's the equivalent of a Hirosima bomb once a week
- 1:14:29Speaker 2: by by these big companies Pebity Coso Massacre. They're blowing
- 1:14:33Speaker 2: the tops off the mountains to get at the coal
- 1:14:35Speaker 2: seams beneath. There's they've leveled one point four million acres.
- 1:14:40Speaker 2: That's bigger than the state of Delaware. If you drive
- 1:14:43Speaker 2: in West Virginia today, you drive on a road and
- 1:14:48Speaker 2: you'll see these beautiful mountain sides and eats either side.
- 1:14:50Speaker 2: But if you fly over it in a helicopter, they're
- 1:14:53Speaker 2: just Hollywood sets behind them. There's just one hundred square
- 1:14:57Speaker 2: miles of devastation. It looks like a open quarry. And
- 1:15:02Speaker 2: they can never refill them. They can never rebuild them.
- 1:15:05Speaker 2: And if Americans knew what was happening, there would be
- 1:15:07Speaker 2: a revolution about it because people don't want to see that.
- 1:15:10Speaker 2: These are the landscapes where you know Daniel Boone and
- 1:15:14Speaker 2: Davy Krock It came into bluegrass music came out of it.
- 1:15:16Speaker 2: Nests are racing, so much of our culture has tied
- 1:15:19Speaker 2: up in this Purple Mountain's majesty. They filled twenty two
- 1:15:24Speaker 2: hundred miles of rivers and streams with mining tailings and
- 1:15:28Speaker 2: you know, destroyed the water, destroy the fisheries, destroyed the
- 1:15:32Speaker 2: you know, the health of the population. It's the sickest,
- 1:15:36Speaker 2: sickest people in our country. And you don't need to
- 1:15:41Speaker 2: ever talk about climate. You talk, you know, you talk
- 1:15:43Speaker 2: about asset rain as it rain has destroyed the forest
- 1:15:47Speaker 2: cover on the Appalachians from Georgia to northern Quebec. You know,
- 1:15:51Speaker 2: I grew up in the Adirondacks, which is the oldest
- 1:15:54Speaker 2: protected wilderness on Earth. It's it's it was protected since
- 1:15:58Speaker 2: eighteen agers the Lincoln protect that it or you know,
- 1:16:02Speaker 2: since the eighteen eighties it's been protected. And I'm thinking
- 1:16:07Speaker 2: of Yosemite with Lincoln, but the Adirondeck since eighteen eighties.
- 1:16:10Speaker 2: You know, when Roosevelt was governor, it got protected, and
- 1:16:14Speaker 2: we had an expectation of rite to believe that the
- 1:16:17Speaker 2: Appalachian Mountains would be unspoiled for ever. It's called forever
- 1:16:23Speaker 2: while that's the act. And I, you know, I grew
- 1:16:28Speaker 2: up believing my children, then their children, their children would
- 1:16:30Speaker 2: be able to enjoy it. But today twenty percent of
- 1:16:33Speaker 2: the lakes and the Adirondacks is sterilized from acid rain
- 1:16:37Speaker 2: and nobody wants that, right. And you know, we're losing
- 1:16:40Speaker 2: the oyster fisheries in Washington where you've lived in Oregon,
- 1:16:46Speaker 2: because the oceans are now becoming so acidic that the
- 1:16:50Speaker 2: bivalves like oysters and mobilized calcium out of the water
- 1:16:55Speaker 2: column to build their shells. And this is this is terrifying.
- 1:16:59Speaker 2: And and then we have mercury and all the fish
- 1:17:03Speaker 2: in our country and nobody wants that and that so
- 1:17:07Speaker 2: if you all you're going to talk about is carbon
- 1:17:09Speaker 2: And then you know, we just went through COVID a
- 1:17:12Speaker 2: lot of Americans and they saw out totalitarian elements within
- 1:17:16Speaker 2: our society. Kind of elites use these crazies to clamp
- 1:17:23Speaker 2: down totalitary and top down totalitarian controls and to and
- 1:17:27Speaker 2: to shift wealth upward, and you know, the same thing
- 1:17:31Speaker 2: is happening with climate, you know, and I see it
- 1:17:34Speaker 2: with you know, even with with what Biden's done in
- 1:17:37Speaker 2: the Inflation Reduction Act, which is his big climate Act,
- 1:17:41Speaker 2: that the money is going to carbon capture projects hundreds
- 1:17:46Speaker 2: of billions of dollars, which are just a scam. It's
- 1:17:49Speaker 2: a boondoggle for the oil industry, for the methane industry.
- 1:17:53Speaker 2: And then to offshore wind farms which are producing energy
- 1:17:57Speaker 2: at five times the couse of onshore wind farms, and
- 1:18:01Speaker 2: they were exterminating the whales and the marine mammals that
- 1:18:04Speaker 2: you know, we all we were drawn to the environmental
- 1:18:07Speaker 2: moment out of love, not out of fear, out of
- 1:18:10Speaker 2: love for these creatures. And you know, and we're now
- 1:18:14Speaker 2: sacrificing those on the altar of carbon fundamentalism. And the
- 1:18:19Speaker 2: real way to deal with the carbon is is is
- 1:18:23Speaker 2: to deal with soils, is to restore our soils, because
- 1:18:26Speaker 2: they we got to. If we do regenerate agriculture across
- 1:18:30Speaker 2: this country, we absorb one hundred percent of our carbon budget.
- 1:18:35Speaker 2: That's what we ought to be focusing on. And so
- 1:18:37Speaker 2: I'm not you know, I think climate change is existential
- 1:18:40Speaker 2: I think it's linked to carbon, but I, you know,
- 1:18:44Speaker 2: I do only insist you believe that, and I think
- 1:18:47Speaker 2: the approach should be more words, we're habitat protection, reducing toxics,
- 1:18:54Speaker 2: restoring our soils, and then using markets to regulate our
- 1:19:00Speaker 2: you know, using markets to regulate energy use. So instead
- 1:19:05Speaker 2: of top down controls, we get rid of the subsidies.
- 1:19:08Speaker 2: We're giving five point two trillion dollars at subsidies to
- 1:19:11Speaker 2: carbon every year. We should get rid of. We should
- 1:19:13Speaker 2: get of all subsidies to you know, to mature industries
- 1:19:17Speaker 2: and then let let you know, let the different energy sources,
- 1:19:25Speaker 2: of generation sources compete in the marketplace, and we'll get
- 1:19:29Speaker 2: the cheapest energy and we'll get the most environmentally sound
- 1:19:37Speaker 2: energy policy. People's say free market capitalis capitalism is the
- 1:19:42Speaker 2: enemy of the environment. It's not in it. We don't
- 1:19:45Speaker 2: have free market capitalism. We have corporate chrony capitalism, and
- 1:19:48Speaker 2: we have capitalism for the rich, and this very kind
- 1:19:50Speaker 2: of or socialism for the rich, and that's very brutal,
- 1:19:54Speaker 2: kind of barbaric capitalism for the poor. In a true
- 1:19:58Speaker 2: free market, you can't make yourself rich without making your
- 1:20:02Speaker 2: neighbors rich, and without it rich in your community. A
- 1:20:04Speaker 2: true free market which promote efficiency, and efficiency means the
- 1:20:09Speaker 2: elimination of ways and pollution is ways. In a true
- 1:20:12Speaker 2: free market, we would be required to properly value our
- 1:20:15Speaker 2: natural resources. And it's the undervaluation of those resources that
- 1:20:19Speaker 2: cause us to use them wastefully. And like I said,
- 1:20:23Speaker 2: in a true free market, if you want to make
- 1:20:25Speaker 2: yourself rich, you're going to make your neighbors rich too,
- 1:20:28Speaker 2: in your community rich. What polluters do is they make
- 1:20:31Speaker 2: themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards
- 1:20:35Speaker 2: of living with themselves by lowering quality of life for
- 1:20:38Speaker 2: everybody else. And they do that by escaping the discipline
- 1:20:41Speaker 2: of the free market. You show me a polluter, I'll
- 1:20:44Speaker 2: show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat
- 1:20:47Speaker 2: using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market,
- 1:20:51Speaker 2: force the public to pay his production costs. That's what
- 1:20:53Speaker 2: all pollution is. It's always somebody who's getting a subsidy.
- 1:20:58Speaker 2: You know, a General Electric dumped its PCBs into the Hudson.
- 1:21:03Speaker 2: It was escaping the discipline of the market. The market.
- 1:21:07Speaker 2: A true free market, every actor in the marketplace should
- 1:21:11Speaker 2: pay one hundred percent of the costs up bringing his
- 1:21:13Speaker 2: product to market, and that includes the cost of cleaning
- 1:21:16Speaker 2: up your mess, which was the lesson we were all
- 1:21:18Speaker 2: supposed to learn the Kindergarten. What polluters do is they
- 1:21:22Speaker 2: figure out a way to externalize those costs and get
- 1:21:26Speaker 2: the public shoulder their costs. So General Electric dump its
- 1:21:30Speaker 2: piec of bees in the river. It it. You know,
- 1:21:33Speaker 2: when the State of New York said we don't want
- 1:21:35Speaker 2: you to do that anymore, that gee said to the governor,
- 1:21:38Speaker 2: Governor Carry and Governor Rockefellery, if you don't let us
- 1:21:41Speaker 2: do that, we're going to move our plant to New Jersey.
- 1:21:44Speaker 2: It'll get the taxes, it'll get the employment, and you're
- 1:21:46Speaker 2: still going to get the pollution because we're going to
- 1:21:48Speaker 2: do it from that side of the river. And so
- 1:21:50Speaker 2: they caved into them, and then you know, twenty years later,
- 1:21:54Speaker 2: General Electric left the Hudson Valley, left New York. They
- 1:21:57Speaker 2: don't have a single employee left in New York. They're
- 1:21:59Speaker 2: not paying any any tax revenues. They left behind a
- 1:22:03Speaker 2: four point five billion dollars cleanup problem that nobody in
- 1:22:07Speaker 2: the Hudson nobody can afford to clean up. And you know,
- 1:22:10Speaker 2: everybody in the Hudson Valley is General Electrics PCBs and
- 1:22:13Speaker 2: our flesh and our organs. They put out a business
- 1:22:17Speaker 2: all of my clients. You know, when I started, we
- 1:22:20Speaker 2: had a twenty five hundred fishing families in the river.
- 1:22:23Speaker 2: Today there's one left, you know, and the Hudson. The
- 1:22:28Speaker 2: abundance of the Hudson has never been more better. You
- 1:22:32Speaker 2: can't eat the fish because they got PCBs in them.
- 1:22:35Speaker 2: And you know, so they stole those fish from us.
- 1:22:38Speaker 2: We paid to clean up the river, and General Electric
- 1:22:42Speaker 2: privatize the Hudson. And now you know the Constitution of
- 1:22:46Speaker 2: New York says the people that stayed on the Hudson,
- 1:22:49Speaker 2: they own all the fish in the Hudson. But we
- 1:22:51Speaker 2: don't own them anymore. The General Electric Company owns them
- 1:22:54Speaker 2: because they privatize them. And that's what all pollution is.
- 1:22:57Speaker 2: It's somebody making a grab to privatize part the commons,
- 1:23:00Speaker 2: you know, part of the commonwealth, is part of the
- 1:23:02Speaker 2: public trust, and privatize it. And that's a subsidy. I
- 1:23:08Speaker 2: want to give rid of the subsidies. And that if
- 1:23:09Speaker 2: you talk about pollution that way, everybody nodds their head,
- 1:23:13Speaker 2: you know.
- 1:23:13Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, I imagine, yeah, it's it frames it in
- 1:23:17Speaker 1: the way, like you said earlier, frames it in the
- 1:23:19Speaker 1: way it frames environmentalism in a way where people understand
- 1:23:26Speaker 1: the implication for the battle for rural people, the implication
- 1:23:31Speaker 1: of the battle for you know, people who live closer
- 1:23:34Speaker 1: to the land, rather than viewing it as some mechanism
- 1:23:38Speaker 1: that is desirous to end their way of life.
- 1:23:41Speaker 2: Right or leads grabbing control of your your freedoms and
- 1:23:46Speaker 2: your property.
- 1:23:47Speaker 1: Yeah, and not seeing it as in some ways a
- 1:23:49Speaker 1: way to defend your way of life, defending your access
- 1:23:52Speaker 1: to clean water, defending your access to a stable fishery,
- 1:23:56Speaker 1: clean fish that you can eat, you know, clean water
- 1:23:59Speaker 1: you can enjoy. We talked I'd mentioned the Interior Department recently,
- 1:24:05Speaker 1: sitting in the same seat you're in. We had an
- 1:24:07Speaker 1: individual on who it was with the Nature Conservancy and
- 1:24:12Speaker 1: we were talking about offshore wind.
- 1:24:14Speaker 3: On the episode.
- 1:24:15Speaker 1: When we talked about offshore wind, I had shared a
- 1:24:17Speaker 1: fear of mind, and it's a fear of a lot
- 1:24:21Speaker 1: of my friends and associates who are who are involved
- 1:24:25Speaker 1: in the conservation movement, who are public lands advocates, and
- 1:24:31Speaker 1: it's a growing.
- 1:24:33Speaker 3: Fear that.
- 1:24:36Speaker 1: In the pursuit of alternatives, alternative energy, there we could
- 1:24:44Speaker 1: have some hasty maneuvers that takes some of our last
- 1:24:51Speaker 1: vestiges of grassland, you know, grassland ecosystems, sagebrush ecosystems. Move
- 1:24:59Speaker 1: it to a alternative. We went to solar arrays, wind farms,
- 1:25:05Speaker 1: and then a fear that we're gonna do this, We're
- 1:25:07Speaker 1: gonna make these compromises. Everybody's gonna do it. I think
- 1:25:09Speaker 1: it's the right thing. We're gonna exploit a bunch of
- 1:25:12Speaker 1: Bureau of Land Management properties, and then ten years down
- 1:25:16Speaker 1: the road, twenty years down the road, thirty years down
- 1:25:18Speaker 1: the road, we will see that we have not moved
- 1:25:19Speaker 1: the needle on carbon, and we will have developed and
- 1:25:24Speaker 1: industrialized portions of our landscape. That's a roundabout way of
- 1:25:30Speaker 1: asking that, how if we pursue moving away from coal,
- 1:25:36Speaker 1: if we pursue moving away from oil, how do you
- 1:25:39Speaker 1: picture doing it where we don't need to have a
- 1:25:42Speaker 1: net new or a radically net new usage of landscape
- 1:25:49Speaker 1: to generate.
- 1:25:50Speaker 2: Let me ask you get this. I presume the Nature
- 1:25:53Speaker 2: Conservancy guy that you were talking to was shared your
- 1:25:59Speaker 2: point of values, or was he saying, no, we need
- 1:26:02Speaker 2: to do you know, untethered wind offshore win.
- 1:26:06Speaker 3: I don't want to miss current help me out.
- 1:26:08Speaker 1: I don't want to missstate his perspective, but his perspective
- 1:26:11Speaker 1: was this is the best the offshore being the best
- 1:26:15Speaker 1: option we have.
- 1:26:16Speaker 2: Okay, well that's just not true. I mean, the offshore
- 1:26:19Speaker 2: is a cataclysm. And I've been fighting offshore win for
- 1:26:24Speaker 2: probably thirty years. You know. The big the first big
- 1:26:27Speaker 2: one was in Nantucket Sound and I was representing the
- 1:26:29Speaker 2: commercial fisherman there, and you know the problems. It destroys
- 1:26:33Speaker 2: the commercial fishery and we have a sustainable commercial fishery
- 1:26:37Speaker 2: and Nantucket Sound, you know, we have we have small
- 1:26:40Speaker 2: business people who are the heart and soul of America,
- 1:26:44Speaker 2: who've been the oldest industry in our country, three hundred
- 1:26:48Speaker 2: and fifty year old industry. And you know, you put
- 1:26:52Speaker 2: up these turbines and first of all, it kills the whales,
- 1:26:56Speaker 2: It kills the zeals. There's no doubt that that's what's happening.
- 1:27:00Speaker 2: You know, we're seeing these around.
- 1:27:01Speaker 1: It sure seems it, sure seems like it. I think
- 1:27:04Speaker 1: that there's a there's ways you can obfuscate that, or
- 1:27:08Speaker 1: ways you can act like there's a little bit of
- 1:27:09Speaker 1: a question.
- 1:27:10Speaker 3: Yeah, but if.
- 1:27:11Speaker 2: There's a question, there's a precautionary principle. There's only a
- 1:27:14Speaker 2: couple of hundred right whales left in the world, you know,
- 1:27:17Speaker 2: so uh and and you know, you there there's such
- 1:27:23Speaker 2: a precise time correlation between them doing the you know,
- 1:27:27Speaker 2: the hammering for the uh to put these turbines into
- 1:27:31Speaker 2: the into the you know, with these giant nomadic hammers
- 1:27:35Speaker 2: which make these reverberations, and then the whales all beach
- 1:27:39Speaker 2: with their ears bleeding, you know, and uh. And it's
- 1:27:45Speaker 2: it's happening so reliably and so consistently around all the
- 1:27:48Speaker 2: places where there's this construction. It's just a cataclysm. And
- 1:27:53Speaker 2: then the other thing is it's non market base. It's
- 1:27:55Speaker 2: all the subsidy based. Nobody would be buying that. Nobody
- 1:27:58Speaker 2: would be building these if they actually had a market,
- 1:28:01Speaker 2: if we had a free market. They're buying them because
- 1:28:04Speaker 2: you know, President Biden is giving them hundreds of billions
- 1:28:07Speaker 2: of dollars of free money to build these very lucrative towers.
- 1:28:12Speaker 2: And then they're charging a minimum three times the price
- 1:28:16Speaker 2: I'm on shore win and usually six times the price.
- 1:28:19Speaker 2: So it's going to turn the whole public against green
- 1:28:22Speaker 2: power because they're going to be paying more for electricity
- 1:28:27Speaker 2: than they are today. None of it makes any sense,
- 1:28:30Speaker 2: you know. And I, by the way, I know a
- 1:28:32Speaker 2: lot about this. I know because I built power plants.
- 1:28:36Speaker 2: I was on the board of them or as a
- 1:28:38Speaker 2: partner in the biggest green tech venture capital firm in
- 1:28:40Speaker 2: the country for a decade, and we built the ivanpap plant,
- 1:28:45Speaker 2: which is the biggest solar thermal plant in North America.
- 1:28:48Speaker 2: Another of my company has built the PVC plan at
- 1:28:55Speaker 2: I mean not the BVC, but the solar plant at
- 1:29:02Speaker 2: as Susanne Marie, which is the biggest you know, solar
- 1:29:07Speaker 2: panel plant in the in then North America. And I've
- 1:29:11Speaker 2: I've participated in wind power in all kinds. My brother,
- 1:29:16Speaker 2: you know, sells wind power for a living. I know
- 1:29:19Speaker 2: what the cauts are. And the price of wind power
- 1:29:22Speaker 2: on shore wind power right now is about eleven cents
- 1:29:26Speaker 2: of killo white hour and these offshore plants are you know,
- 1:29:30Speaker 2: are getting forty or more forty cents a kilo hour
- 1:29:33Speaker 2: or more. And nobody wants to pay that for energy.
- 1:29:37Speaker 2: It's destructive. So you know what I think is everything
- 1:29:49Speaker 2: should be market based. I think COLS should have to
- 1:29:53Speaker 2: internalize its costs and if it did, it be the
- 1:29:55Speaker 2: most meaning internalized.
- 1:29:56Speaker 3: That's clean up in mitigation.
- 1:29:58Speaker 2: Yeah, that you know, you can't have these piles of
- 1:30:01Speaker 2: you know, of at every stage coal is getting subsidized.
- 1:30:06Speaker 2: You know the roads that in West Virginia are twenty
- 1:30:09Speaker 2: two inches of asphalt that we pay for because the
- 1:30:13Speaker 2: coal trucks weighed ninety thousand pounds. But they're not paying
- 1:30:15Speaker 2: for that if they were, if that was affected, you know,
- 1:30:18Speaker 2: they can sell coal or you know, ten or twelve
- 1:30:22Speaker 2: cents of gill one hour in North Carolina cold cold
- 1:30:25Speaker 2: on energy and everybody thinks this is really cheap. If
- 1:30:30Speaker 2: it actually had to internalize the cause it wouldn't be cheap.
- 1:30:34Speaker 2: It would be the most catastrophically expensive way to boil
- 1:30:38Speaker 2: a pot of water that's ever been devised. Because you know,
- 1:30:41Speaker 2: because if they actually had to pay the real costs
- 1:30:44Speaker 2: of the acid rain of the mercury in our fish
- 1:30:47Speaker 2: of half trillion dollars a year in respiratory injuries from
- 1:30:54Speaker 2: hozone in particulates destructure of the Appalachians that you know,
- 1:30:59Speaker 2: the destruction of habits that if those were quantified and
- 1:31:02Speaker 2: then build their account. You know, the coal burning energy
- 1:31:05Speaker 2: costs forty to fifty cents, I'll kill one hour. Nobody
- 1:31:08Speaker 2: could be using it. There's no single solution to this.
- 1:31:14Speaker 2: The mining that's associated with these new technologies is extremely destructive,
- 1:31:20Speaker 2: and you know, with the rare earth minerals, et cetera,
- 1:31:24Speaker 2: it is extremely disruptive to some of the most beautiful
- 1:31:27Speaker 2: habitat place like the Congo, these like Alaska, you know,
- 1:31:31Speaker 2: which are going to get devastated by rare earth mining.
- 1:31:35Speaker 2: And those costs have to be assessed and they have
- 1:31:39Speaker 2: to be internalized. And then if you do that, you know,
- 1:31:43Speaker 2: and that's the way to do it. And what what
- 1:31:45Speaker 2: we'll get is we'll get a lot of localized power production.
- 1:31:51Speaker 2: We'll get you know, not one big bullet solution, but
- 1:31:57Speaker 2: we'll get a lot of smaller solution. And then there's
- 1:32:00Speaker 2: you know, listen, I'm not you know, I've always said
- 1:32:04Speaker 2: about nuclear power that.
- 1:32:06Speaker 3: This is good because this is my next this is
- 1:32:08Speaker 3: my next question.
- 1:32:09Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 1:32:10Speaker 3: I'm not a subject matter expert.
- 1:32:12Speaker 1: Yeah, but I I just I'm so far from a
- 1:32:17Speaker 1: subject matter expert. I just can't help though, with thinking
- 1:32:26Speaker 1: that we need to be reinvesting there in terms of footprint, right,
- 1:32:31Speaker 1: in terms of footprint.
- 1:32:32Speaker 2: Well, let me let me tell you. First of all,
- 1:32:37Speaker 2: what I think, you know my thinking about nuclear power,
- 1:32:40Speaker 2: and I no longer consider myself a subject matter expert
- 1:32:44Speaker 2: because I'm told that there are technological improvements that have
- 1:32:49Speaker 2: happened since I was litigating, you know, against nuclear power plants,
- 1:32:52Speaker 2: which I've done a lot of. But what I've always
- 1:32:56Speaker 2: said is I'm I am for nuclear power if they
- 1:33:01Speaker 2: ever make it safe and if they ever make it economical.
- 1:33:05Speaker 3: Is that heavily subsidized.
- 1:33:07Speaker 2: Yeah, it is the most heavily subsided so that.
- 1:33:10Speaker 3: But nowhere can put the seed money up to get
- 1:33:14Speaker 3: that going.
- 1:33:14Speaker 2: There's not a single utility in the world that will
- 1:33:16Speaker 2: build a nuclear power plant unless it's fully subsidized. But
- 1:33:19Speaker 2: they also they have a bill called the Price Anderson
- 1:33:23Speaker 2: Act because you know, if they say they're safe, but
- 1:33:27Speaker 2: they can't get an insurance policy, the insurance industry won't
- 1:33:30Speaker 2: write them a policy. And so it's not a bunch
- 1:33:32Speaker 2: of hippies and tied eyed T shirts who are saying
- 1:33:36Speaker 2: you're unsafe. It's guys in suits on Wall Street who
- 1:33:39Speaker 2: say we're not going to assure you, and you know
- 1:33:41Speaker 2: until they can buy an insurance. So they had to
- 1:33:43Speaker 2: go to Congress and get this act pass called the
- 1:33:46Speaker 2: Price Anderson Act, and a sleazy legislative maneuver in the
- 1:33:48Speaker 2: middle of the night to give them immunity from liability.
- 1:33:52Speaker 2: So if they're they're plant blows up, yeah, and you're
- 1:33:55Speaker 2: you go look at your home owners policy. You'll have
- 1:33:57Speaker 2: a line in it. This policy is not protect you
- 1:34:00Speaker 2: from from from nuclear radiation from powerful And I lived
- 1:34:05Speaker 2: eighteen miles from Indian points, so I saw that and
- 1:34:09Speaker 2: it was a possibility. This is going to happen and
- 1:34:11Speaker 2: I lose everything and I'm self insured for that insurance company.
- 1:34:14Speaker 2: You're not gonna pay me. Oh that's you know. What
- 1:34:18Speaker 2: I would say, don't get show is that you can
- 1:34:20Speaker 2: get an insurance policy like other industries and then we'll
- 1:34:24Speaker 2: believe you're safe. But you know, because nobody wants to
- 1:34:27Speaker 2: argue it with you, just get the insurance policy like
- 1:34:30Speaker 2: everybody else does, and then you know, I mean, the
- 1:34:34Speaker 2: other problem is they don't really know what to do
- 1:34:36Speaker 2: with the ways it's they it keeps when they when
- 1:34:39Speaker 2: they first said they said, we'll figure that out by
- 1:34:42Speaker 2: the time we need to, but they never have. And
- 1:34:45Speaker 2: there's you know, they have to set you have to
- 1:34:48Speaker 2: store this stuff now for thirty thousand years, which is
- 1:34:51Speaker 2: five times the length of recorded human history. So how
- 1:34:54Speaker 2: could that be economical? Right, You're just shifting the cost
- 1:34:57Speaker 2: to a future generation. And but I understand there's new
- 1:35:03Speaker 2: technologies that are promising and if that happens, what I
- 1:35:08Speaker 2: would say to you, what I will do as present
- 1:35:11Speaker 2: is the big problem in our country is we don't
- 1:35:15Speaker 2: have a market markets or energy real markets. Oh, in
- 1:35:23Speaker 2: North Dakota. You, North Dakota is one of the windiest
- 1:35:27Speaker 2: places on Earth at the sea level. There's enough Scientific
- 1:35:32Speaker 2: American to a study that showed there's enough harnessable to
- 1:35:35Speaker 2: wind in North Dakota, Montana, and Texas to provide one
- 1:35:38Speaker 2: hundred percent in the North American energy grid. Now, there
- 1:35:42Speaker 2: is enough solar energy in the desert in an area
- 1:35:46Speaker 2: seventy five miles by seventy five miles in the desert
- 1:35:48Speaker 2: southwest provide one hundred percent of the energy. You wouldn't
- 1:35:51Speaker 2: do that because if a cloud passed over Arizona, you'd
- 1:35:55Speaker 2: black out the country, right, But it shows you that
- 1:35:58Speaker 2: it's out there and available.
- 1:36:00Speaker 3: And if you have the technology, if you.
- 1:36:02Speaker 2: Store it and deliver it, really you don't even need
- 1:36:07Speaker 2: so much storage technology. If you have transportation technology. So
- 1:36:11Speaker 2: if you have a grid that is a national grid
- 1:36:14Speaker 2: with DC grid that can do long haul transportation of electrons,
- 1:36:20Speaker 2: it reduces your need to store because you can manage
- 1:36:25Speaker 2: the whole system like an orchestra. Conductor manages an orchestra.
- 1:36:29Speaker 2: Because the wind in our country tends to blow at night,
- 1:36:31Speaker 2: and the sun of course shines during the day, and
- 1:36:35Speaker 2: the sun shines the period you wanted the sun. But
- 1:36:38Speaker 2: you know, the twelve o'clock is peak energy use, and
- 1:36:40Speaker 2: that's the time you're getting peak sunshine. So it actually
- 1:36:44Speaker 2: and then if you throw in a lot of rooftop
- 1:36:46Speaker 2: solar and everybody is feeding into a marketplace, you have
- 1:36:50Speaker 2: abundance of energy to manage the system. And let me
- 1:36:53Speaker 2: let me just you know, finish this kind of thought.
- 1:36:57Speaker 2: In North Dakota, I think the revenue typicult revenue from
- 1:37:05Speaker 2: an acre of corn is about maybe two hundred dollars
- 1:37:09Speaker 2: a year. You're gonna get revenue if you have a
- 1:37:15Speaker 2: if you have a winter termine on that acre of corn.
- 1:37:19Speaker 1: I got to interrupt you here to point out for
- 1:37:20Speaker 1: people too, that when we're talking about corn there, we're
- 1:37:25Speaker 1: all talking about corn that goes a lot of that
- 1:37:27Speaker 1: corn goes to energy, yeah, of course.
- 1:37:31Speaker 3: Yeah. So I just want people to be clear.
- 1:37:32Speaker 1: It's not like it's not necessarily moving food to energy
- 1:37:35Speaker 1: because you do an ethanol productions not.
- 1:37:37Speaker 2: Food in any case, it's commodity.
- 1:37:39Speaker 1: It's not even you know, it's energy.
- 1:37:44Speaker 2: Yeah. So but if you have a wind turbine on
- 1:37:48Speaker 2: that property, that farmer is making eight thousand dollars a year. Right,
- 1:37:53Speaker 2: So every farmer in North Dakota wants to put a
- 1:37:56Speaker 2: wind wind farms on this property, you can't do it
- 1:38:00Speaker 2: because there's not an energy grid that can get those
- 1:38:02Speaker 2: electrons to markets in you know, Cleveland, Cincinnati, New Orleans,
- 1:38:08Speaker 2: New York, et cetera. Because the current system is antiquated.
- 1:38:14Speaker 2: It's it's it's underbuilt, under extended, and it's it's incapable.
- 1:38:19Speaker 2: It's an AC grid that's incapable of doing a long
- 1:38:22Speaker 2: haul transportation of electrons if you had the grid there.
- 1:38:27Speaker 2: There are huge amounts of capital from you know, General Electric, Seamens, Vestas,
- 1:38:32Speaker 2: all these giant companies that want to pour my capital
- 1:38:36Speaker 2: into building, into renting turbine, building turbines on those farmers lands.
- 1:38:40Speaker 2: So the capital is there to do it, and it
- 1:38:43Speaker 2: would provide a huge source of revenue for American farm families,
- 1:38:49Speaker 2: which we want to keep on the farm. We want
- 1:38:52Speaker 2: to keep them on the land and make sure that
- 1:38:54Speaker 2: they're prosperous. And you know that Main Street is prosperous,
- 1:38:57Speaker 2: et cetera. We have three different energy grids in our country.
- 1:39:02Speaker 2: They're not unified, and they none of them are capable
- 1:39:06Speaker 2: of doing these things that we need them to do.
- 1:39:09Speaker 2: We need to build that energy grid and that, you know,
- 1:39:12Speaker 2: the same way that we built a canal system in
- 1:39:14Speaker 2: this kind. We built a canal system in eighteen twenty five,
- 1:39:17Speaker 2: and you know, within a few years New York went
- 1:39:20Speaker 2: from a backwater to being the biggest port in the
- 1:39:22Speaker 2: world because you could the Erie Canal allowed Midwestern farmers
- 1:39:28Speaker 2: to put their produce on a barge and it would
- 1:39:32Speaker 2: never get off a boat until it went to Europe.
- 1:39:35Speaker 2: So all of a sudden, you didn't have to haul
- 1:39:37Speaker 2: stuff over the Appalachians. The government built that canhouse system,
- 1:39:40Speaker 2: the government built the highway system.
- 1:39:42Speaker 1: And I was going to make before you mentioned, I
- 1:39:44Speaker 1: was going to bring up people people. I think kind
- 1:39:46Speaker 1: of feel like the interstate system sort of fell from
- 1:39:48Speaker 1: the sky.
- 1:39:48Speaker 3: No, it was it was like in the post.
- 1:39:51Speaker 1: You know, not just the advent of the car, but
- 1:39:54Speaker 1: realizations we had during World War Two. It was a
- 1:39:57Speaker 1: like a very deliberately constructed system.
- 1:39:59Speaker 2: Yeah, and it was for national security reasons and for
- 1:40:02Speaker 2: commercial reasons and to bring us together as a country,
- 1:40:05Speaker 2: et cetera. And it was you know, I watched a
- 1:40:08Speaker 2: build when I was a kid. It was horrifying to
- 1:40:10Speaker 2: me because they know, plowed over the flora the pond
- 1:40:13Speaker 2: where you know, I went fishing every day, and you know,
- 1:40:15Speaker 2: but and it was but they did it, and it's
- 1:40:18Speaker 2: brought tremendous prosperity to our country. And so we need
- 1:40:24Speaker 2: to invest in building this grid system and we need
- 1:40:28Speaker 2: to you know, right now, we have an energy market
- 1:40:33Speaker 2: that is I'm governed by fifty public utility commissions, one
- 1:40:39Speaker 2: hundred and twenty control districts with these byzantine rules, this
- 1:40:44Speaker 2: very bulk and high system that operates under under rules
- 1:40:53Speaker 2: that were written by the incumbents by coal and oil
- 1:40:56Speaker 2: to reward. The dirty is filthy, is most poisonous, most toxic.
- 1:41:00Speaker 2: War mongering feels from hell. Other than the cheap glean green,
- 1:41:03Speaker 2: A wholesome and patriotic feel feels from heaven. Well, we
- 1:41:08Speaker 2: need to create a market that. Now, I'll give you
- 1:41:10Speaker 2: an example. I had a house in Mount Kisco, New York,
- 1:41:15Speaker 2: and I had a state of the art solar system
- 1:41:17Speaker 2: on the roof, and I had a geothermal system in
- 1:41:20Speaker 2: the basement. Every day of the year at home was
- 1:41:24Speaker 2: producing more energy than I was using. Why can't I
- 1:41:28Speaker 2: sell that access back onto the grid and get the
- 1:41:30Speaker 2: same price the utilities are getting, right, Why can't every
- 1:41:33Speaker 2: American do that?
- 1:41:35Speaker 1: Yeah, I was gonna I wanted to ask you about
- 1:41:36Speaker 1: that when this subject first came up. Is that when
- 1:41:40Speaker 1: you see those little bits of legislation come up basically
- 1:41:43Speaker 1: saying if you do a solar ray on your house,
- 1:41:45Speaker 1: it's a you can't sell back.
- 1:41:48Speaker 3: Is that?
- 1:41:48Speaker 1: Is there any argument for that other than them protecting monopoly?
- 1:41:53Speaker 2: There's no, there's no monopolies. That's what they're doing.
- 1:41:56Speaker 3: There's no other reason why.
- 1:41:58Speaker 2: Okay, and what we wanted to that And it would
- 1:42:01Speaker 2: democracize our country because you turn every American into a
- 1:42:05Speaker 2: into an energy entrepreneur, you turn every home into a
- 1:42:08Speaker 2: power plant. You can give people a chance to get
- 1:42:10Speaker 2: revenue from their homes to help pay their mortgage, et cetera.
- 1:42:13Speaker 2: And why do.
- 1:42:15Speaker 3: They ever get why do they ever get legislative assistance
- 1:42:18Speaker 3: on those bills that prevent people.
- 1:42:22Speaker 2: From those bills are all the state law lawmakers who
- 1:42:27Speaker 2: are passing them, and they're all, you know, owned by
- 1:42:30Speaker 2: the utilities. The utilities are given all the money. And
- 1:42:33Speaker 2: you can buy a state legislature very very cheap in
- 1:42:36Speaker 2: this country, and you can get that stuff past.
- 1:42:38Speaker 3: And in most citizens this is not on their radar.
- 1:42:40Speaker 3: They just start on their.
- 1:42:41Speaker 2: Radar and and you know, it's it's so important for
- 1:42:45Speaker 2: democracy because the political systems of countries tend to reflect
- 1:42:51Speaker 2: their economic organization. And if you have the economy controlled
- 1:42:55Speaker 2: by a few large energy producers oil coal utilities, the
- 1:43:01Speaker 2: political system will tend also towards sort of a more
- 1:43:04Speaker 2: totalitarian model. Whereas if the energy system is controlled by
- 1:43:08Speaker 2: two hundred million American homeowners, if they're your generators, you're
- 1:43:13Speaker 2: going to democratize the country as well. And you know,
- 1:43:18Speaker 2: we have such a pundan energy resources. We have some
- 1:43:20Speaker 2: of the best solo in the world in this country.
- 1:43:22Speaker 2: We have the best wind of any big nation in
- 1:43:25Speaker 2: the world, and we ought to be exploiting that, but
- 1:43:29Speaker 2: we can't do it until we build an energy grid.
- 1:43:32Speaker 2: And let me give you an example of what's going
- 1:43:33Speaker 2: to happen. We built an Arbaet grid for the Internet
- 1:43:38Speaker 2: in the Defense Department. Dart pub built the Arpanet grid,
- 1:43:42Speaker 2: which is was the beginning of the Internet in this
- 1:43:44Speaker 2: country in nineteen seventy nine. A year after we built it.
- 1:43:49Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty, the CEO of IBM said that IBM
- 1:43:54Speaker 2: was getting out of the personal computers because he said
- 1:43:56Speaker 2: it was a dead end technology. Dell did that. There's
- 1:44:01Speaker 2: a lot of other companies that got out of the
- 1:44:03Speaker 2: business then because they didn't see what was about to happen.
- 1:44:07Speaker 2: Within a few years, virtually every American has a personal computer.
- 1:44:11Speaker 2: And what happened because we built a grid, we built
- 1:44:14Speaker 2: a marketplace. And what happens happened to the cost of information.
- 1:44:20Speaker 2: It went to zero. Oh imagine you asked me it
- 1:44:25Speaker 2: was important for some reason for me to find out
- 1:44:27Speaker 2: the answer to some obscure question, like, uh, you know,
- 1:44:33Speaker 2: what was Malose Tongue's typical lunchtime, favorite lunchtime meal. Let's
- 1:44:38Speaker 2: say I.
- 1:44:38Speaker 3: Had to get you pre internet.
- 1:44:40Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, look, okay, yeah, you'd have to go to Washington,
- 1:44:44Speaker 2: spend a week going through the library of Congress of
- 1:44:46Speaker 2: the stacks to dig that out, and you may or
- 1:44:48Speaker 2: may not find it today. You can probably type it
- 1:44:51Speaker 2: into Google. It'll come right up.
- 1:44:53Speaker 1: I used a joke as a writer and I got
- 1:44:56Speaker 1: going before definitely not pre Internet, but for widespread, you know,
- 1:45:01Speaker 1: internet use. And I used to joke that I was
- 1:45:04Speaker 1: very anti Internet because I had a competitive advantage that
- 1:45:08Speaker 1: I was good at finding shit out with the card
- 1:45:11Speaker 1: catalog at the library, you know. And then all of
- 1:45:13Speaker 1: a sudden, I was like, now any idiots can find
- 1:45:15Speaker 1: out whatever they want.
- 1:45:16Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
- 1:45:18Speaker 3: And you say I liked it better when you had
- 1:45:20Speaker 3: to work for that.
- 1:45:20Speaker 2: You're irrelevant now, So your skills are irrelevant your big gift.
- 1:45:27Speaker 2: So so if the cause of information went to zero,
- 1:45:30Speaker 2: and that's what's going to happen to electrons if we
- 1:45:32Speaker 2: build an energy grid. The same thing happened with telecommunications.
- 1:45:36Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety six, President Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act,
- 1:45:41Speaker 2: and he forced all the baby Bells to consolidate their
- 1:45:44Speaker 2: grid system and create a marketplace with lowest cost provider
- 1:45:50Speaker 2: would prevail. In the marketplace, you couldn't exclude people anymore.
- 1:45:54Speaker 2: And that created a telecom revolution, and all these little
- 1:45:58Speaker 2: devices that we now have, like self, are the offspring
- 1:46:02Speaker 2: of that revolution. But what happened to the cause of
- 1:46:05Speaker 2: phone calls and went to zero? Yeah? I worked in
- 1:46:09Speaker 2: a university, you know, at law school, and.
- 1:46:12Speaker 3: I've tried, I've tried to explain to my kids.
- 1:46:15Speaker 1: Yeah, the thing that would happen of that your parents
- 1:46:19Speaker 1: would present you with a phone bill.
- 1:46:22Speaker 3: Yeah, and you would need to go through circling.
- 1:46:25Speaker 1: You would need to go through circling, you know, And
- 1:46:29Speaker 1: you're like, really, that was a seven.
- 1:46:31Speaker 2: Dollars when I called that guy. Oh, I remember making
- 1:46:34Speaker 2: a five minute call to England that was seventy four dollars.
- 1:46:38Speaker 2: At my university looks a law school, there was only
- 1:46:42Speaker 2: one professor in the law school that was allowed to
- 1:46:44Speaker 2: have a phone that made international calls. His name was
- 1:46:47Speaker 2: William Vese and he was the international law professor. Any
- 1:46:51Speaker 2: of the other professors who wanted to call internationally had
- 1:46:54Speaker 2: to go knock on his door and Tay, can I
- 1:46:56Speaker 2: use your phone? It was great, That's what it was like, right,
- 1:47:00Speaker 2: And now that call is free, and it's because we
- 1:47:02Speaker 2: built the marketplace, and that's what's going to happen to
- 1:47:04Speaker 2: electronsity as soon as we do this. My solution is
- 1:47:09Speaker 2: a bigger solution rather than hand picking you know, wind, solar, hydro, nuke.
- 1:47:15Speaker 2: What we do is we create a market and let
- 1:47:17Speaker 2: the market pick it, and we we get rid of
- 1:47:20Speaker 2: the subsidies we enforced. We make sure you can't pollute
- 1:47:24Speaker 2: the environment because that's a subside, and then we take
- 1:47:27Speaker 2: the lowest costs form of energy in each you know,
- 1:47:31Speaker 2: in each district that that and and that is going
- 1:47:35Speaker 2: to you know, create an economic boom the way that
- 1:47:38Speaker 2: the Internet did, but we got to invest in that
- 1:47:40Speaker 2: in that marketplace.
- 1:47:43Speaker 1: It's funny you're you're articulated concept to me that. I uh,
- 1:47:51Speaker 1: I'm almost embarrassed that it hadn't occurred to me before.
- 1:47:53Speaker 1: The way you're putting it would be these this idea
- 1:47:57Speaker 1: of looking at polluters as the subsidy, being like, oh, no,
- 1:48:02Speaker 1: we gave you that river and all of the fish
- 1:48:07Speaker 1: in it.
- 1:48:08Speaker 3: You use that.
- 1:48:10Speaker 1: I used that up, yeah exactly, and putting a value
- 1:48:14Speaker 1: and being like, and since you used.
- 1:48:15Speaker 2: That up, yeah, here's the bill.
- 1:48:19Speaker 1: Had it hadn't occurred to me, uh yeah, I know
- 1:48:22Speaker 1: you've mentioned hydro. I know you've worked on projects around.
- 1:48:28Speaker 3: Protecting rivers from hydro development. And damning.
- 1:48:31Speaker 1: You spend a bunch of time, you know, as you
- 1:48:33Speaker 1: laid out with your work on the Hudson River. Uh,
- 1:48:38Speaker 1: let's jump over for a minute to the Pacific Northwest.
- 1:48:44Speaker 3: Based on your expertise, there is Well, let me let
- 1:48:50Speaker 3: me put it a different way. If I came to
- 1:48:52Speaker 3: you and said, you have.
- 1:48:53Speaker 1: All the power in the world, within all the power
- 1:48:56Speaker 1: in the country, within practical consideration, is there any hope
- 1:49:00Speaker 1: for Pacific salmon in you know, south of Alaska?
- 1:49:06Speaker 2: Yeah, like you mean the Snake River runs sure.
- 1:49:08Speaker 1: Yeah, let's just let's just talk about the Columbia. Solet's
- 1:49:11Speaker 1: talk about the Columbia Snake salmon, right, like the Columbia Waterway. Yeah,
- 1:49:15Speaker 1: I mean there's all the damming, Like yeah, well, I
- 1:49:18Speaker 1: mean there is, you know, but there is, but it's
- 1:49:22Speaker 1: a conservation. It's become a conservation dependent resource. Yeah, Like
- 1:49:25Speaker 1: we have salmon now because we spend a lot of
- 1:49:28Speaker 1: money to have salmon.
- 1:49:29Speaker 2: Right, because we put them in elevators and lift them
- 1:49:32Speaker 2: up at the top of the dam. So, you know,
- 1:49:35Speaker 2: I'm any big dam you know there there I've seen
- 1:49:39Speaker 2: a lot of headwaters dams actually work with minimal environmental damage.
- 1:49:42Speaker 2: And you know, provide really good local sources of energy
- 1:49:47Speaker 2: the people if you put them, you know, these smaller
- 1:49:49Speaker 2: dams that you put up in the headwater before there's
- 1:49:51Speaker 2: any you know, complex ecosystems in that waterway, and it
- 1:49:54Speaker 2: really uh and they're very very functional and you know,
- 1:49:58Speaker 2: I think really efficient the big dams. I you know,
- 1:50:03Speaker 2: my inclination is to take dams down, but I'm most
- 1:50:07Speaker 2: mindful of competing interests, So I would I don't know
- 1:50:12Speaker 2: enough about all of the Columbia River dams to see
- 1:50:14Speaker 2: which one should be removed, which ones you know can
- 1:50:18Speaker 2: and then what happens when you remove him, because now
- 1:50:20Speaker 2: they've got all this sentiment that's you know, forty or
- 1:50:24Speaker 2: fifty feet high behind him, And what does that do
- 1:50:27Speaker 2: to the river when you just when you blow the
- 1:50:29Speaker 2: dam and release all.
- 1:50:30Speaker 3: That there's a bit of a ripping off the band
- 1:50:31Speaker 3: aid effect on some of that stuff. Yeah.
- 1:50:33Speaker 2: Yeah, So I don't know. I'd have to look and see.
- 1:50:37Speaker 2: My inclination would be to try to figure out ways
- 1:50:40Speaker 2: to take all those dams apart, you know, without causing
- 1:50:44Speaker 2: economic cataclysms to you know, to other stakeholders.
- 1:50:49Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a can you remember who we have on
- 1:50:53Speaker 1: the representative from Idaho talking about his If you're ever
- 1:50:58Speaker 1: in the White House, you gonna want to look this guy.
- 1:50:59Speaker 3: Up, That guy Mike uh An Idaho representative. He had
- 1:51:05Speaker 3: that very complicated, not complicated. I don't want to discredit it.
- 1:51:09Speaker 3: He had a proposal on the Columbia about damn removal.
- 1:51:14Speaker 2: Oh did he want the damns removed? Yeah?
- 1:51:17Speaker 1: But like you said, I mean, you have everything from
- 1:51:21Speaker 1: you know, you have kind of the Western bread basket, right,
- 1:51:25Speaker 1: so Mike's yeah, Mike's we had Mike Simpson on Tom
- 1:51:28Speaker 1: But but I mean you mentioned, you know, things is shipping. Yeah,
- 1:51:34Speaker 1: you have all that wheat production which is going out,
- 1:51:36Speaker 1: you know, so by you know, you have to move stuff,
- 1:51:40Speaker 1: barge traffic down to.
- 1:51:43Speaker 3: Convert to rail.
- 1:51:44Speaker 1: It's a yeah, you know, it takes three days to
- 1:51:48Speaker 1: talk to that one.
- 1:51:50Speaker 2: Well, you know what they say about Western water that
- 1:51:54Speaker 2: you know, whiskeys for drinking and waters for fighting. And
- 1:52:01Speaker 2: anytime you start talking about Western water, you're you know,
- 1:52:05Speaker 2: people want to kill you because there's so much economic
- 1:52:10Speaker 2: equity by you know, built into perverse economic systems, systems
- 1:52:19Speaker 2: that are encouraging people to do bad things with resources
- 1:52:23Speaker 2: just because of the way the West was settled, you know,
- 1:52:27Speaker 2: it was first in use, first, first in time, first
- 1:52:29Speaker 2: and right and all these other rules that and then
- 1:52:35Speaker 2: use it or lose it. So you know, if you're
- 1:52:38Speaker 2: if you're an agricultural interest, and you don't use your
- 1:52:41Speaker 2: entire water allocation, you use it, so it encourages you
- 1:52:44Speaker 2: to use the most wasteful water, wasteful you know, grow
- 1:52:48Speaker 2: cotton and alfalfa in the desert because so you you know,
- 1:52:53Speaker 2: I mean if you if you had to design it
- 1:52:55Speaker 2: from the start, you would not design those rules. And
- 1:53:01Speaker 2: now you know, now you've got one hundred and fifty
- 1:53:04Speaker 2: years of development that's based upon these perverse incentives, and
- 1:53:09Speaker 2: you have entire municipalities and you know, like Scottsdale and
- 1:53:14Speaker 2: Phoenix and that are all essentially unsustainable.
- 1:53:29Speaker 3: The thing I've tried to follow.
- 1:53:31Speaker 1: And I in the amount of time I have to
- 1:53:35Speaker 1: devote to reading to it, I can't come to an
- 1:53:37Speaker 1: understanding of it is.
- 1:53:40Speaker 3: Where are you on getting on all.
- 1:53:44Speaker 1: The state ballots? And what are the hurdles you have
- 1:53:47Speaker 1: to get on state ballots? I keep, you know, I
- 1:53:50Speaker 1: read like small lists of states, but then signature gathering efforts.
- 1:53:54Speaker 1: Is there a pathway to is there a path.
- 1:53:58Speaker 3: Not possible?
- 1:53:58Speaker 2: Well, it's you know, they just designed it to be.
- 1:54:00Speaker 3: Insurmountable for you for a third party.
- 1:54:04Speaker 2: A third party, the other guys don't have to do it, right,
- 1:54:07Speaker 2: they don't have to do it. They're already on the
- 1:54:09Speaker 2: Democrat and Republican already have automatic ballot line. So if
- 1:54:12Speaker 2: you get on their ballots, you're you're in. But I
- 1:54:15Speaker 2: have to do it, and then I also have to
- 1:54:17Speaker 2: pay for my own security because they won't let me
- 1:54:19Speaker 2: have a secret service, and that's a big cost.
- 1:54:23Speaker 3: And so I don't know this.
- 1:54:25Speaker 1: This is probably maybe of only marginal interest to our listeners.
- 1:54:29Speaker 1: So maybe there's a quick way of doing it.
- 1:54:30Speaker 3: What's what the.
- 1:54:31Speaker 1: Security think like, Well, I'm the first the third party
- 1:54:34Speaker 1: is ineligible for security.
- 1:54:36Speaker 2: No, no, I would be eligible. I'm the first candidate.
- 1:54:40Speaker 2: And you know, before my dad was killed, there was
- 1:54:44Speaker 2: no secret service until you got a party nomination. Then
- 1:54:49Speaker 2: at that that year they started giving it to everybody.
- 1:54:54Speaker 2: So they gave it. George Wallace was running that year
- 1:54:56Speaker 2: as an independent, you know, George McGovern, I mean, Hubert Humphrey,
- 1:55:04Speaker 2: Jean McCarthy all got it immediately. As soon as my
- 1:55:07Speaker 2: father was shot and Congress passed the law is saying
- 1:55:11Speaker 2: everybody is entitled to it who gets certain poll numbers
- 1:55:14Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty days outside of the election from
- 1:55:19Speaker 2: the election. In other words, one hundred and twenty days.
- 1:55:21Speaker 2: We're now we're now five months in eighteen days, so
- 1:55:25Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty days is what that's four months? Right?
- 1:55:28Speaker 1: No?
- 1:55:29Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, four months. Oh I'm five months and eighteen
- 1:55:34Speaker 2: days out. So in a month in eighteen days, I
- 1:55:36Speaker 2: should bet a title. But it's discretionary, so the president
- 1:55:41Speaker 2: can give it to anybody, and they've never refused it
- 1:55:44Speaker 2: to anybody, and they've given it to thirty three candidates
- 1:55:48Speaker 2: prior to the one hundred and twenty days. And I've
- 1:55:51Speaker 2: had a lot of you know, sort of dangerous things
- 1:55:54Speaker 2: happened during my campaign. I've had, you know, I've had
- 1:55:58Speaker 2: four housebreak ins. One occasion, you know, the intruder got
- 1:56:02Speaker 2: to my second floor with my family all home. And
- 1:56:07Speaker 2: on another occasion, a guy showed up at my at
- 1:56:13Speaker 2: one of my rallies in Los Angeles, and he had
- 1:56:18Speaker 2: he was you know, he was covered with concealed weapons.
- 1:56:21Speaker 2: He had two shoulder holsters with loaded magazines. He had
- 1:56:24Speaker 2: a backpack filled with guns, including a laser sighted pistol
- 1:56:31Speaker 2: that was fully loaded, a couple dozen extra ammunition clips,
- 1:56:35Speaker 2: and a lot of other weapons, knives and all this
- 1:56:37Speaker 2: other stuff he had.
- 1:56:40Speaker 1: He was like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the end of that
- 1:56:42Speaker 1: movie Commando, and he's got the stuffel bags exactly.
- 1:56:45Speaker 2: That's how he's outfitted. And he had a he had
- 1:56:50Speaker 2: a federal ID, so he had a federal US Marshall badge,
- 1:56:54Speaker 2: he had federal idea.
- 1:56:55Speaker 3: On his what was his? What was his?
- 1:57:00Speaker 2: Before he left home that day, he made a TikTok
- 1:57:05Speaker 2: tape saying, I'm going out on a mission now. If
- 1:57:08Speaker 2: I don't come back from this, report to your commander
- 1:57:11Speaker 2: in Chief, Donald J. Trump, you know. And he was
- 1:57:14Speaker 2: kind of like a he looked like a motorcycle bandit
- 1:57:19Speaker 2: kind of it. And that's the only TikTok he's ever made.
- 1:57:23Speaker 2: And then, you know, luckily one of my security to
- 1:57:28Speaker 2: look at took a close look at his his US
- 1:57:31Speaker 2: Marshall badge and just said, something looks wrong with it.
- 1:57:34Speaker 2: It looks too shiny. He was demanding to see me
- 1:57:37Speaker 2: in the the the green room. And so my guys thought,
- 1:57:44Speaker 2: is a US Marshall badge looked too shiny, and they
- 1:57:48Speaker 2: detained him, and then they found all these other weapons
- 1:57:50Speaker 2: on him, and they called the police. The police came
- 1:57:52Speaker 2: in and arrested him and released him, you know, the
- 1:57:57Speaker 2: next day. So despite the fact he had all all
- 1:58:00Speaker 2: this fake idea on them. And so there's been a
- 1:58:03Speaker 2: number of things like that that have happened, and you know,
- 1:58:06Speaker 2: President Biden has made a decision not to give me
- 1:58:10Speaker 2: Secret Service protection. And I'm pretty sure the reason, although
- 1:58:14Speaker 2: I don't like to look into other people's minds, is
- 1:58:16Speaker 2: that they know this is, you know, my security team
- 1:58:20Speaker 2: is causing our campaign a million dollars a month, and
- 1:58:24Speaker 2: they'd rather be spending that on security than on you know,
- 1:58:29Speaker 2: advertising on ballot access. The answer to your original question,
- 1:58:35Speaker 2: they've tried to make it insurmountable. We have an amazing team,
- 1:58:40Speaker 2: and we have now one hundred thousand volunteers. We have
- 1:58:43Speaker 2: more volunteers out there than any other campaign. And people
- 1:58:46Speaker 2: are very, very very happy about signing my signatures. In fact,
- 1:58:52Speaker 2: the professional ballot the professional signature gatherers, and there's a
- 1:58:57Speaker 2: whole industry that that's all they do. They charged typically
- 1:59:01Speaker 2: about ten bucks to fifteen bucks a signature, and it's
- 1:59:05Speaker 2: a big industry, and they're all saying that this is
- 1:59:07Speaker 2: the easiest campaign that they've ever done for any purpose,
- 1:59:11Speaker 2: commercial campaigns, referendums, that people are you know that there's
- 1:59:16Speaker 2: an enthusiasm for signing to give me on the ballot.
- 1:59:19Speaker 2: Whether people want to vote for me or not, I
- 1:59:21Speaker 2: don't know, but they people want to see me on
- 1:59:23Speaker 2: the ballot. So we've done the two hardest states. We've
- 1:59:27Speaker 2: done California, the three hardest we've done Texas, which is
- 1:59:32Speaker 2: the hardest of all. We only have forty six states
- 1:59:34Speaker 2: to get one hundred and I think one hundred and
- 1:59:36Speaker 2: thirteen thousand signatures in forty six days, and we got
- 1:59:41Speaker 2: a quarter million.
- 1:59:44Speaker 3: And then it's helpful to overshoot it so that they have.
- 1:59:47Speaker 2: To because the DNZ, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party
- 1:59:51Speaker 2: are going to come in and go through every signature
- 1:59:54Speaker 2: and try to find a problem with it. And so
- 1:59:57Speaker 2: we need to get you know, at least a sixty
- 1:59:59Speaker 2: percent and cushion. We try to get two and a
- 2:00:01Speaker 2: half times. We're going to get on every ballot. All right, Oh.
- 2:00:10Speaker 3: Uh, if.
- 2:00:15Speaker 1: Trump or Biden came on the show, what would be
- 2:00:17Speaker 1: the number one question you think I should ask them.
- 2:00:21Speaker 2: I mean, I'm curious about the lockdowns, about how they
- 2:00:24Speaker 2: feel about that right now, you know, shutting down every
- 2:00:28Speaker 2: business in this country for a year with no due process,
- 2:00:31Speaker 2: no scientific citation, no you know, no public hearings, no
- 2:00:36Speaker 2: environmental impact statement, and you know how they're going to
- 2:00:41Speaker 2: make sure that never happens again. They you know, they
- 2:00:43Speaker 2: destroyed the middle class in our country. They shifted four
- 2:00:47Speaker 2: trillion dollars upward to this new oligarchy of billionaires. They
- 2:00:52Speaker 2: created a billionaire a day in five hundred days, you know,
- 2:00:55Speaker 2: and they just devastated a lot of these all businesses
- 2:01:00Speaker 2: that they with the hard and soul of our country,
- 2:01:03Speaker 2: you know, are gone and they're never coming back. Forty
- 2:01:08Speaker 2: percent of black owned businesses, you know, will never reopen.
- 2:01:13Speaker 2: Many of them had three generations of equity in them.
- 2:01:17Speaker 2: And you know, we're turning now from a ownership society
- 2:01:22Speaker 2: into a into a into a rental society. And you know,
- 2:01:27Speaker 2: when we do that, we're going from being citizens to
- 2:01:30Speaker 2: being subjects. People don't have homes if they don't have equity,
- 2:01:34Speaker 2: access equity where they can pursue their entrepreneurial impulses. You know,
- 2:01:39Speaker 2: our country is then on a feudal model. It's not
- 2:01:42Speaker 2: a colonial model, not you know, not American democracy anymore.
- 2:01:47Speaker 2: And you know, I would really I would love to
- 2:01:50Speaker 2: if I was on a debating stage with them, you know,
- 2:01:53Speaker 2: I would drill down on that issue. And you know,
- 2:01:56Speaker 2: why in the world would they close the business press?
- 2:02:00Speaker 2: And Trump knew that it was wrong, he said it,
- 2:02:02Speaker 2: he said, I'll never do that, and then you know,
- 2:02:05Speaker 2: he went ahead and did it for a year, and
- 2:02:07Speaker 2: they did it for five hundred days, the two of them,
- 2:02:10Speaker 2: and it was just agony for small business people. So
- 2:02:16Speaker 2: you know, that's I guess. I mean, there's a million
- 2:02:19Speaker 2: other things that you know, I think the issue with
- 2:02:24Speaker 2: President Trump Prisent Biden is that they're very different. People
- 2:02:29Speaker 2: have different dispositions, they different personalities, they have different ideologies,
- 2:02:35Speaker 2: they're rhetoric. The whole way they interact with the public,
- 2:02:37Speaker 2: with the world is you know, it couldn't be more different.
- 2:02:41Speaker 2: But the actual issues that they that they're disputing each
- 2:02:45Speaker 2: other on, it's a really narrow Overton window. It's like guns, abortion, order, security,
- 2:02:52Speaker 2: trans rights, et cetera. It's all you know, they're all
- 2:02:56Speaker 2: important issues, but they're kind of marginal with accepted to
- 2:03:00Speaker 2: the border, which I think is really a big, big issue.
- 2:03:05Speaker 2: But the existential issues, the issues that are critical to
- 2:03:09Speaker 2: our survival is a nation. They never talk about that.
- 2:03:12Speaker 2: You know, we have a thirty four trillion dollar debt
- 2:03:14Speaker 2: now and we're spending more on our national We spend
- 2:03:20Speaker 2: more servicing that debt every year than our defense budget.
- 2:03:24Speaker 2: Within five years, fifty cents that have every dollar that's
- 2:03:27Speaker 2: collected in taxes, we'll go to the servicing the debt
- 2:03:30Speaker 2: within ten years one hundred percent is existential and nobody
- 2:03:34Speaker 2: you'll never hear President find or President Trump talk about
- 2:03:38Speaker 2: what they're going to do. Why is that because they
- 2:03:40Speaker 2: ran up the debt in each of them four years
- 2:03:44Speaker 2: off as half of that debt belongs to them a president.
- 2:03:48Speaker 1: But I mean, that problem too has become talking about
- 2:03:51Speaker 1: solving that problem is almost like talking about trying to
- 2:03:54Speaker 1: stop the sun from rising.
- 2:03:55Speaker 2: I don't think that's true, Really, I don't think that's true.
- 2:03:59Speaker 2: I think they're you know, look, we've got to wind
- 2:04:02Speaker 2: down the military. We've got to cut the military budget
- 2:04:05Speaker 2: in half. We can't be the policeman of the world anymore.
- 2:04:09Speaker 2: We're not, you know, doing global hegemony. We need to
- 2:04:12Speaker 2: harmor ourselves the teeth at home. We need to protect
- 2:04:16Speaker 2: the sea lanes and you know, the neutral areas and
- 2:04:19Speaker 2: have it. And we need to be able to fight
- 2:04:22Speaker 2: the wars the future. We're right now spending nine and
- 2:04:25Speaker 2: a half nine you know, half a trillion and a
- 2:04:29Speaker 2: half billion, nine hundred and fifty billion dollars a year
- 2:04:33Speaker 2: preparing for wars that will never be fought again. And
- 2:04:37Speaker 2: you know the whole and it's wrong, and we need
- 2:04:44Speaker 2: it's existential. If we don't solve the debt. We have
- 2:04:46Speaker 2: the biggest area that we can have saving this is
- 2:04:49Speaker 2: the chronic disease epidemic that's costing US four point three
- 2:04:53Speaker 2: trillion dollars. We can end that very very quickly, four
- 2:04:56Speaker 2: point three trillion dollars, five times our military. But when
- 2:04:59Speaker 2: my uncle the president, six percent of Americans had chronic disease.
- 2:05:03Speaker 2: Today is sixty percent to why is that? Why did
- 2:05:06Speaker 2: autism go from one in ten thousand in my generation
- 2:05:10Speaker 2: today one in every ten thousand seventy year old man
- 2:05:14Speaker 2: has autism and my kids generation one in every twenty
- 2:05:16Speaker 2: two boys. Why did that happen? And why did obese
- 2:05:21Speaker 2: that he go from thirteen percent when my uncle was president,
- 2:05:25Speaker 2: of fifty percent of our kids today? Why is diabetes?
- 2:05:28Speaker 2: When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician saw one
- 2:05:32Speaker 2: case of diabetes in a fifty year career. Today, one
- 2:05:36Speaker 2: out of every three kids who walks through his office
- 2:05:38Speaker 2: door is pre diabetic or diabetic. Why is that happening?
- 2:05:43Speaker 2: Nobody's answering those questions. Why did food allergies suddenly appear?
- 2:05:46Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty nine? I have eleven brothers and sisters.
- 2:05:50Speaker 2: I had seventy first cousins. Nobody, nobody I knew had
- 2:05:55Speaker 2: a peanut allergy? Why do five my seven kids have
- 2:05:57Speaker 2: food allergies? Something happen and we know the year it
- 2:06:01Speaker 2: happened because EBA answered that question nineteen eighty nine. Something
- 2:06:06Speaker 2: happened that year that ruined our health. And we have
- 2:06:10Speaker 2: the highest chronic disease burden in the world today. Nobody
- 2:06:14Speaker 2: else has this happening like us. We had sixteen percent
- 2:06:18Speaker 2: of the COVID deaths in our country, the highest body
- 2:06:22Speaker 2: count on earth. We only have four point two percent
- 2:06:25Speaker 2: of the world's population. What were we doing? Whatever we
- 2:06:30Speaker 2: did was wrong? And CDC says, well, it's just because
- 2:06:35Speaker 2: Americans are so sick. Well, that's you know, why aren't
- 2:06:39Speaker 2: they telling us why the CDC's had The average American
- 2:06:43Speaker 2: who died from COVID had three point eight chronic diseases.
- 2:06:46Speaker 2: They had obesity, they had diabetes, they had asthma, and
- 2:06:49Speaker 2: one other thing. Why do we have then nobody else
- 2:06:53Speaker 2: in the world has that, And you know, we know
- 2:06:57Speaker 2: it was something that happened in nineteen eighty nine or
- 2:07:00Speaker 2: there a ballots. And there's a very famous toxicologist in
- 2:07:04Speaker 2: New York who I've used as an expert in many
- 2:07:06Speaker 2: of my cases. His name's Phil Landrigan. He's looked at
- 2:07:10Speaker 2: this issue and he said, it's there's only about thirteen
- 2:07:14Speaker 2: things it could be. It has to be an environmental
- 2:07:16Speaker 2: toxin because genes don't cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability,
- 2:07:22Speaker 2: but you need an environmental exposure. And he said, here's
- 2:07:26Speaker 2: what it could be. It could be life estate from roundup,
- 2:07:30Speaker 2: which follows that timeline near nicotoid pessis. It's follow that
- 2:07:34Speaker 2: timeline aches in, which is another pestis on all of
- 2:07:38Speaker 2: our water, seventy percent of our water. Now, it follows
- 2:07:41Speaker 2: that timeline pfoas and PFAS is a class of what
- 2:07:45Speaker 2: they call forever chemicals. I litigated on them. They made
- 2:07:48Speaker 2: a movie out of my case called Dark Waters or
- 2:07:52Speaker 2: in Mark Ruffalo. If those are those chemicals are in
- 2:07:56Speaker 2: all of our furniture. They're in our child pajamas, you know.
- 2:07:59Speaker 2: And get around that timeline high fruitose corns here, okay,
- 2:08:06Speaker 2: follows that and nobody else allowed.
- 2:08:10Speaker 3: It became the leading ingredient for everything, yeah.
- 2:08:12Speaker 2: For everything, right, cell phone radiation.
- 2:08:18Speaker 3: So.
- 2:08:19Speaker 2: And then the vaccine schedule, of course, which went from
- 2:08:22Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty nine. It was a big change here,
- 2:08:25Speaker 2: but we went from the three vaccines I got as
- 2:08:28Speaker 2: a kid that the seventy two vaccines my kids got.
- 2:08:32Speaker 2: And if you look at the manufacturers insorts inserts for
- 2:08:36Speaker 2: those products, all of those disease are listed. The the
- 2:08:40Speaker 2: neurological disease add ADHD, speech delay, language LA tixt or
- 2:08:44Speaker 2: at syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, autism, the autoimmune disease like rheumatoid
- 2:08:50Speaker 2: Arthur wright Is, juvenile diabetes loop is Groan's disease. All
- 2:08:54Speaker 2: these exotic autoimmune disease suddenly appeared. And then the allergic
- 2:09:00Speaker 2: these punt allergies, food allergies, EXMA. I never knew anybody
- 2:09:03Speaker 2: what ezma. Every classroom has kids with EXEA now asthma
- 2:09:09Speaker 2: and uh anaphylaxis and then obesity. All of those are
- 2:09:13Speaker 2: listed as side effects, so you have to look at those.
- 2:09:17Speaker 2: Part of it. Probably what's happening is all of those exposures.
- 2:09:20Speaker 2: Our kids are swimming around in the toxics of today
- 2:09:23Speaker 2: and we're there. Their immune systems are constantly being challenged
- 2:09:28Speaker 2: and rechallenged because a lot of these toxics operate along
- 2:09:31Speaker 2: those same biological pathways. Oh and it's the kids probably
- 2:09:37Speaker 2: who have poor mitochondrial function to start off with. The mitochondrials,
- 2:09:43Speaker 2: the energy systems are asel and if you if you
- 2:09:47Speaker 2: if you target them enough, it paralyzed them and you
- 2:09:51Speaker 2: go into a cascading effect where you end up with
- 2:09:53Speaker 2: brain damage or with autoimmune disease or whatever. So we're
- 2:09:58Speaker 2: probably challenging and reaching challenge and the kids who just
- 2:10:02Speaker 2: have a weaker system who were born with you know,
- 2:10:04Speaker 2: mitochondrial dysfunctions which would never show in typically human but
- 2:10:10Speaker 2: if you challenge them enough, they're assault their immune sism
- 2:10:13Speaker 2: enough that's going to happen. And so you know, I
- 2:10:19Speaker 2: know how to fix it, and I'm going to fix
- 2:10:22Speaker 2: it very very quickly. And you know, you fix it
- 2:10:26Speaker 2: by doing real science, and i AGE by doing good science.
- 2:10:29Speaker 2: And i AGE when I was a kid, was the
- 2:10:31Speaker 2: premiere scientific agency in the world. It was gold standard.
- 2:10:36Speaker 2: There's no other country in the world that has anything
- 2:10:38Speaker 2: like it. And they were doing, you know, groundbreaking on
- 2:10:40Speaker 2: every issue. And in nineteen eighty we passed a law
- 2:10:44Speaker 2: that said called the Blood Bidole Act, that allowed NIAGE
- 2:10:49Speaker 2: scientists to collect royalties on any product that they regulated.
- 2:10:55Speaker 2: If you can imagine that. So, for example, and i
- 2:10:58Speaker 2: AGE itself, the more dear in a vaccine was created
- 2:11:03Speaker 2: by NIH and they own half of it. So they're
- 2:11:05Speaker 2: making billions of dollars on sales of a product that
- 2:11:08Speaker 2: they're promoting, that they're mandating. They're telling you you can't
- 2:11:12Speaker 2: go to work unless you take this product, and they're
- 2:11:15Speaker 2: not telling you they're making billions of dollars on it.
- 2:11:18Speaker 2: The sixth top scientists at an ihe are making one
- 2:11:22Speaker 2: hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year personally on that product.
- 2:11:26Speaker 2: So they're paying for their mortgages, their boats, their schools,
- 2:11:29Speaker 2: that their kids' education, their alimonies, and you know, these
- 2:11:34Speaker 2: are the guys who are supposed to be funding problems
- 2:11:37Speaker 2: in those products and protecting us from them. Instead they're
- 2:11:41Speaker 2: you know, they're they're getting rich on them. And when
- 2:11:44Speaker 2: you have those kinds of conflicts of interest, therese perverse incentives.
- 2:11:49Speaker 2: They it makes people turn a blind eye to some
- 2:11:52Speaker 2: of the problems. So I'm going to go into NIH
- 2:11:56Speaker 2: my first week in office. I'm going to get all
- 2:11:58Speaker 2: of that and what happened. And they after they passed
- 2:12:01Speaker 2: that act, NIH went from doing this cutting edge science,
- 2:12:06Speaker 2: tell us why you know how to keep ourselves well?
- 2:12:10Speaker 2: And they became an incubator for new pharmaceutical products. I
- 2:12:13Speaker 2: think it was in twenty twenty sixteen. There was two
- 2:12:16Speaker 2: hundred and twenty new drugs or something like that approved
- 2:12:19Speaker 2: by FDA, and one hundred percent of them came We're
- 2:12:23Speaker 2: incubated through NIH. So NIAH is now just a drug
- 2:12:26Speaker 2: development company. And what I'm going to do is go
- 2:12:31Speaker 2: over there and say we're going to give drug development
- 2:12:34Speaker 2: a break for if they have they have a budget
- 2:12:37Speaker 2: of forty two billion dollars, they distribute that to fifty
- 2:12:39Speaker 2: six thousand scientists at universities who also collect royalties on
- 2:12:45Speaker 2: new drugs. And I'm going to say, from now on,
- 2:12:48Speaker 2: we're not going to do anything until we figure out
- 2:12:50Speaker 2: why we have the sickest kids on earth, and what
- 2:12:55Speaker 2: are the products that are causing that, And then you know,
- 2:12:57Speaker 2: I'm going to generate enough science on those to make
- 2:13:01Speaker 2: sure that we can put an end to those exposures.
- 2:13:03Speaker 2: Now you're gonna say to yourself, see that even if
- 2:13:08Speaker 2: you figured out that high fruitose corn syrup was the culprit,
- 2:13:14Speaker 2: and you still could never get rid of it because
- 2:13:16Speaker 2: the forces behind it are so powerful. It's Monsanto, it's Cargill,
- 2:13:24Speaker 2: a million farmers who are tied up in its production,
- 2:13:27Speaker 2: and you know, entire industries and all that's true. But
- 2:13:31Speaker 2: the way that you do it is you produce enough
- 2:13:34Speaker 2: science enough in different kinds of science, epidemiological studies, clinical studies,
- 2:13:40Speaker 2: observational animal studies and and you know, and patriotage studies,
- 2:13:48Speaker 2: all of those. Once you get enough science, then the
- 2:13:50Speaker 2: lawyers come in and they do the work for you,
- 2:13:53Speaker 2: because then they come in if you prove high fruitose
- 2:13:57Speaker 2: corn syrup is behind the childhood diabetes epidemic, and the
- 2:14:03Speaker 2: lawyers were round up ten thousand kids with childhood diabetes
- 2:14:07Speaker 2: to the company and that's the end of the show.
- 2:14:09Speaker 2: That's what I did with Monsanto. Everybody said you'll never
- 2:14:13Speaker 2: you'll never get rid of Claife essay. But we had
- 2:14:17Speaker 2: forty thousand clients, all of them a home gardeners, almost
- 2:14:21Speaker 2: all home gardeners, who had gotten non Hodgkinson foma from
- 2:14:26Speaker 2: using roundup.
- 2:14:28Speaker 1: And I remember not to I remember in my adult life,
- 2:14:33Speaker 1: individuals from ARS Agricultural Research Services.
- 2:14:38Speaker 3: Yeah, the division of the USDA.
- 2:14:40Speaker 1: Individuals from there telling me that roundup had the toxicity
- 2:14:43Speaker 1: of coffee.
- 2:14:44Speaker 3: Yeah, well that's what in my adult life.
- 2:14:47Speaker 2: Well, that's what Monsanto was telling the public. And we
- 2:14:51Speaker 2: got forty thousand people who said I got cancer, you know,
- 2:14:55Speaker 2: Don Johnson's of this particular kind of cancer from spring roundup.
- 2:15:00Speaker 2: We soon round up. And the way that multi district
- 2:15:03Speaker 2: litigation works is you get forty thousand kids, You try
- 2:15:06Speaker 2: each one individually, one after the other, back to back,
- 2:15:11Speaker 2: until somebody says uncle and comes to the negotiating table.
- 2:15:15Speaker 2: The first case, we won two hundred and eighty nine
- 2:15:17Speaker 2: million from Monsanto. The second case we won eighty nine million.
- 2:15:21Speaker 2: The third case, we asked the jury for a billion
- 2:15:24Speaker 2: and they came back with two point two billion. At
- 2:15:27Speaker 2: that point, Monsanto came to negotiating tables and we want
- 2:15:29Speaker 2: to end this. They settled the case for thirteen billion
- 2:15:33Speaker 2: dollars for all of the cases, and they agreed to
- 2:15:37Speaker 2: take life and say out of home gardening products. So
- 2:15:42Speaker 2: you can stop them. You just need the right science
- 2:15:44Speaker 2: because once you get the right science, the courts will
- 2:15:47Speaker 2: allow them to be you know, you go to front
- 2:15:49Speaker 2: of a jury. And that's what I'm going to do
- 2:15:51Speaker 2: with all of these different exposures. There's only thirteen of them.
- 2:15:55Speaker 1: Yeah, plans are coming on today. I'm getting the I'm
- 2:15:58Speaker 1: getting the times up symbol. I appreciate the conversation.
- 2:16:02Speaker 2: Man, it was really fun talking to you.
- 2:16:04Speaker 3: I appreciate you coming on.
- 2:16:06Speaker 2: I hope maybe if you can, if you get a
- 2:16:08Speaker 2: chance in the autumn, when the falcony season's up, and
- 2:16:11Speaker 2: so maybe you'll come all.
- 2:16:12Speaker 3: So I would yeah, I would like to do that.
- 2:16:16Speaker 3: It'll be fun.
- 2:16:17Speaker 1: Do you have one last question? Do you ever fix
- 2:16:19Speaker 1: up the if you get do you ever like cook
- 2:16:21Speaker 1: rabbits and stuff?
- 2:16:22Speaker 3: Do you get it?
- 2:16:23Speaker 2: You always give it to my wife Cheryl.
- 2:16:26Speaker 1: That's what I was going to start the show by
- 2:16:28Speaker 1: telling you how much I'm in love with your wife,
- 2:16:30Speaker 1: but I don't want.
- 2:16:31Speaker 2: To get off now. She's very lovable.
- 2:16:36Speaker 1: That that that that uh, you know, I know she's
- 2:16:39Speaker 1: done many things.
- 2:16:40Speaker 2: But I'll tell you what if.
- 2:16:42Speaker 1: I was going to measure like like, uh, the highest
- 2:16:47Speaker 1: laughs per minute thing in my life is is Curber
- 2:16:54Speaker 1: just like that?
- 2:16:55Speaker 3: And she plays such a.
- 2:16:59Speaker 1: She does such a quiet show stealing job on that show.
- 2:17:04Speaker 2: Yeah, she plays common sense and it makes everything on time.
- 2:17:10Speaker 1: It's like it's it's it's so quietly her. It's so
- 2:17:14Speaker 1: quietly brilliant how she plays that role.
- 2:17:16Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean Larry. I lived with Larry for two
- 2:17:20Speaker 2: years and during the summertimes and then we have vaccasional together.
- 2:17:23Speaker 2: And that's how I met Cheryl when he was still
- 2:17:27Speaker 2: doing the Seinfeld. But he there was one season when
- 2:17:31Speaker 2: he got divorced from Cheryl, and the next season he
- 2:17:35Speaker 2: shot in New York and that was the season when
- 2:17:37Speaker 2: they shot the producers and Cheryl was not on that season,
- 2:17:43Speaker 2: and then he and the next season she came back
- 2:17:46Speaker 2: and I asked Larry about it, and he said, I
- 2:17:48Speaker 2: couldn't do it. She makes me funny, which is and
- 2:17:54Speaker 2: I'll tell you one thing she will not allow, which
- 2:17:57Speaker 2: is a dead rabbit in the house or a dead
- 2:18:00Speaker 2: dead squirrel.
- 2:18:01Speaker 3: Oh no, I don't love her anymore. Tell her it's
- 2:18:05Speaker 3: over between us, all right. Thank you very much for
- 2:18:10Speaker 3: coming on this right.
- 2:18:11Speaker 2: Thank you St.