Speaker 1: It hasn't been my goal to talk very much about Bobby Kennedy Jr's candidacy for the
Democratic presidential nomination. We did talk about his campaign launch. We talked
about polling. We talked about the undeniable reality that the DNC is simply not going to
hold debates as they never do when they have an incumbent president running for reelection. But
Bobby Kennedy Jr has really been scaling up the nuttiness he did at Twitter spaces with twitter
owner Elon Musk. And while there were fewer technical glitches, there were there was certainly
no shortage of lies. And the things that Bobby Kennedy Jr is saying don't make any sense. They
don't make any sense. And it's it's almost getting concerning to a degree. As I told you before,
I had dinner once with Bobby Kennedy with a small group. Charming, smart, able to talk logically
about so many different issues, anything so many different things, knowing that he had some odd
views about vaccines at the time, but now it's just building, building, building. He's become
the darling of Newsmax and other right wingers, and we have to look at some of the claims he's
making because they are so wrong and so dangerous. Business Insider Summarizing the recent Twitter
spaces with Elon Musk, says Robert F Kennedy Jr compares Elon Musk to the Patriots who died
fighting in the American Revolution. What on earth and blames anti-depressants for mass
shootings? Elon Musk hosted RFK Jr in a bizarre Twitter. Bizarre is right in a bizarre Twitter
spaces conversation littered with falsehoods and conspiracy theories, Kennedy compared Musk
to patriots who died in the Revolutionary War. He also claimed prior to the introduction of Prozac,
there were no mass shootings in the United States. News to historians. Let's go through this in
pieces, Kennedy said. Thank you for your service to our country, Ellen. We lost between 25,070
thousand people during the revolution who died to give us our Constitution. And those people also
put their livelihoods on the line. They put their property on the line, they put their financial
status and their social status on the line for principles. I've watched you do the same thing,
folks. He can't he's too smart to believe that. Right? He's just paying, obviously,
bogus lip service to Elon Musk, I hope. Right. I hope Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is a billionaire who owns a bunch of companies, has a net worth around or over
200 billion, although maybe it's less now because of the decline in Tesla stock. I don't know. The
Patriots who fought in the American Revolution, as Bobby Kennedy says, were mostly farmers, artisans,
merchants and laborers who quite literally risked their lives and livelihoods for the cause of
liberty and independence from England. Elon Musk hasn't sacrificed his life nor his fortune. Yes,
he's lost a few billion. What's a few billion to a guy who's as rich as he is? He's benefited
from government subsidies, government contracts, tax breaks for his businesses. The patriots who
fought in the American Revolution pledged their lives, fortunes and quite frankly,
put so much more at risk than Elon Musk has even thought of risking. Elon Musk hasn't
even consistently shown support for democracy or human rights in some situations. He has done some
praising of authoritarian regimes. He's criticized some democratically elected leaders. He's spread
misinformation about COVID. I mean, listen, I am not one of these people who says Elon Musk is a
uniquely bad guy. Check out my appearance on the Lex Friedman podcast, where I say
I think the focus on Elon Musk is just overblown. What he has done to advance electric vehicle
technology and battery technology. It's fantastic. It really is. SpaceX's super interesting. He's
done a lot of great things, but he's also done things that I think are terrible. And we're now
saying he's like the American patriots who fought for independence in the American Revolution. It's
just a crazy thing for Bobby Kennedy to say. He also talked about the SSRI violence connection,
and he said that, as the article here points out, he laid the blame for the massive increase in mass
shootings, not on guns, but on pharmaceutical companies for marketing antidepressants. Quote,
Prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events in our country. Now,
of course, that's not true. Prozac was introduced in the United States in 1987, approved by the FDA
there. Were endless mass shootings before that. Certainly fewer. The population was smaller. And
I'll tell you what the real reasons were. But if you look on Wikipedia at a list of mass shootings,
you see a bunch of mass shootings in the twenties when the American population was much smaller.
Not so many in the thirties and forties and fifties, but then they start to increase. In
the 1960s, we saw mass shootings. In the 1970s, we saw way more mass shootings in the 1980s,
before the introduction of Prozac, we saw even more. So what you actually see
is that the number of mass shootings scaled with not only the American population, but the
widespread availability of firearms as well as lax gun laws. When you look at a general now, okay,
let's then so we've seen that it's not true that there were almost no mass shootings before Prozac,
just not true. What about a general link between SSRI eyes, Prozac being one type of
SSRI medication and violence more generally? And this has been asserted before the claim
that SSRI eyes cause violence. It's sort of like blaming the fire extinguisher for the
fire. There is a fire and these all there's all these fire extinguishers there. All of a sudden,
SSRI eyes are prescribed for a number of different reasons, including depression,
anxiety or personality disorders. Most people with depression, anxiety and personality disorders
are prone to violence, but some are. And if you believe, as some do, that compared to the general
population, particularly certain personality disorders might predispose someone to violence.
You might be able to, might, might you might be able to find a correlation between those
taking SSRI and violence. But that would not be proof that the violence is caused
by the SSRI, as it would be the classic confounding factor. This is like basic,
you know, first level college research methods and stats sort of stuff. In other words, it would be
the underlying mental disorder rather than the medication that might be the cause of
the violence. But it's really important also to mention that most people who are, quote,
mentally ill are not violent. It's also really important to mention that if you also look at
the studies that look at SSRI and violence, there are often significant methodological limitations,
small sample size, lack of control groups, failure to account for other factors that might
influence violence like substance use or abuse, history of aggression, psychosocial stressors,
economic issues, etc.. So right now the causal link between SSRI eyes and violence is
extraordinarily weak. Now, I'll give you another side to this discussion. There are studies that
suggest SSRI ISE properly administered can reduce violence by simply improving mood
and impulse control for those who are taking them. So not only is it unfair and misleading
to blame the SSRI for violence based on what we currently know. It actually could be the opposite.
This is getting to be pretty dangerous stuff and I don't really know what the end game is here
for. Bobby Kennedy Jr. As you all know, he's not going to be the nominee. There aren't going to be
debates. I would love to see debates and I think everyone who wants to run should run. But when
you see the right wingers increasingly excited and titillated by Bobby Kennedy's campaign,
that really tells you a lot about the sort of campaign that is being run here. And it's not
a particularly exciting campaign to me. I know that there's a handful of people
in the audience who seem to like it, but I think that it is essentially a ruse,
sort of like Tulsi Gabbard was a ruse from wrong. I will correct the statement in the future.