"I INHALED FOR SURE!!!" RFK JR SPEAKS ON RECOVERING FROM HIS 14 YEAR ADDICTION THRU GOD

foreign [Music] I've never the the only presidential hopeful I've ever heard admit that he used any kind of barbiturate with Bill Clinton talking about smoking weed and he didn't inhale but sure I had help for sure and that's partly what I'm talking about like you're very open about the fact that this is a part of your history and before the interview really kicked off you talked about having a whole yes yes in your soul that you felt like shout out to Aerosmith that you felt like you couldn't feel yeah is that what caused you to yeah I mean a lot of people you know I've been going to 12 seven innings for I've probably been to I don't know 20 000 of them so you hear people's stories and there's a high percentage of people like me who believe they were born with the attention and then there's other people who think that they got it later on in life that they'd crossed a line and once you you know they say once you become a uh if you're a cucumber and once you become a pickle you can't become a cucumber again that once you cross this certain line then you know you can't go back for me I felt that that kind of gnawing empty hole from when I was a little kid and uh when I uh you know the first time I took a play like you did because you were you were saying at the beginning you know before we started right I think you had made this pledge to your dad about and that your dad uh and your dad said when you whenever you first do it you do it with me and then when your dad died you didn't do it which I'm so you know incredibly impressed well in the Irish Catholic communities that I grew up in and there was uh there was a tradition of taking the pledge which is I will never drink because it was known that our race is disproportionately impacted by um out particularly alcohol addiction it's got we call it the Irish flu Oh and and they would give you in Catholic school they would give you a pledge pen that you would wear on your collar and it was I took the pledge I'm never going to try and thumb my whole life very common in Ireland too and I did that um and I took it seriously and when my you know my father died when I was 14. and by the time I was 15 I only never even tasted coffee and that summer I went to a um a uh a party of the elder brother this is when I was living in Cape Cod the elder brother of a friend of mine was had been drafted and it was going to Vietnam and there was a going away party for him and I he didn't want to go and at the party there was a melee and he ended up hitting a cop and going to jail and he didn't go to Vietnam but I was hitchhiking home from that party and an older boy picked me up oh I knew but not well and he offered me LSD and LSD had come to that town that night this was in 1969. so um and I wouldn't have taken it it was it was a comic book I would we read there was a little store the only store in our town was a news story so ice cream candy and then the comics and the comics would come every Tuesday and my favorite comic was a comment called Tear rocks on a stone which was these two Indians and you know you're nodding your head I can't believe that you've heard of it but correct yeah I've definitely heard it too right you're right yeah so uh uh it's not Tupac it's true I know rock man okay that was a girl it's all right so anyway the week before there was an episode where the Indians had eaten like peyote or something and they had had hallucinations they'd seen dinosaurs they were like it was like they had come transport back in time and uh and so when this guy offered it to me I said I had an interest in paleontology when I was little and I said if I eat that well I see the highest scores and he said you might and I and so I took him and I had this you know incredibly Vivid hallucinations and then in the morning you know it lasted all night and you know when I got in trouble a lot of people in the town talking that night and I um and I was walking home from the town about three miles in the morning but I was crashing on the drug and I was getting depressed and remorseful and telling myself I'm never going to do this again I did something that was wrong and I I got I got near my and I had to go home and face the music because I had violated my curfew and my mother was you know invented tough love and I was going to get in a lot of trouble and she and I um I saw these boys in the woods and I went in to see what they were doing and I told them they they saw me and I said I'm really crashing on this stuff and they said try some of this and it was and I've been saying to myself I'm never gonna take a drug again and they offered me a line of crystal meth and I snorted it and I felt great and that was really the template for my addiction for the next 14 years 14 14 years I I got sober when I was 28. and if I don't constantly I'm saying I'm not going to do this again and then not being able to keep promises to myself now you know I had iron willpower in other parts of my life like I gave up candy from lent when I was 13 I never ate Candy again so I was in college and I I gave up desserts the next year and I um I never ate another dessert until I was in college and I was playing rugby at College I was trying to pull cops so I started eating desserts again but I felt like I could do anything with my willpower but somehow I it was impervious to the addiction it just didn't work against it I was cunning baffling powerful and the most immoralizing part of addiction is not being able to keep contracts with yourself of telling yourself I'm going to do this and then doing it or I'm not going to do that and then you know four hours and believing earnestly sincerely honestly I'm not gonna ever do that again and four hours later you're doing it and you don't know how it happened right and it's I you know it's really demoralizing out of it well then I guess I my progression was very fascinating is always progressed it always gets worse and I my driving Choice was heroin So within four weeks of that I was shooting heroin and I I had been around you know animals my whole life and and given them hypodermic needles and it made sense to me um you know that it would be more efficient to uh to inject the drug so I I you know I did that and I was addicted for it until I was 28 years old and then I got sober I was trying the whole time I just didn't know how to do it I would go for weeks I would go for months what was the difference in 28 well I got into a 12-step program and I had a spiritual awakening and it was like it was lifted so and it you know it was it was like a miracle as much a miracle for me is if I'd been able to walk on water because I had tried really tried in every way and could not do it on my own and then I did that you know this what was that programs are designed to induce a spiritual awakening a a profound spiritual realignment and uh and I had that very very quickly and the program as soon as I committed myself it happened to me and I and you know it just disappeared did you go willingly to the toaster program somebody oh I was no what happened is I got arrested and I got arrested on an airplane um somebody saw me going in the bathroom I was actually on my way to a rehab but before I went to the rehab stopped on 106th Street um the cop and then I went out to LaGuardia and I was flying out in the rehabit and I in Minnesota but I you know I got one last one before going and somebody saw me on the airplane going in the bathroom with it and when I landed and when I landed the police arrested me but I was a good thing for me because because of my name because my notoriety I could have never gone into a meeting and you know and and and spoken truthfully about my life because I was guarded you know and I I'd been you know raised in a family where if you talked about stuff publicly it would you know it would be their neighbors yeah and so it was an impossible situation but as soon as that happened there was nothing to hide anymore I was able to cover these meetings and get you know and talk honestly and um and so it was like a gift for me the arrest I know it was what was probably the greatest gift I got because it gave me then access to the 12-step programs into the arrest you know the spiritual way here and I want to act what was the spiritual awakening if you don't mind this action well I'll tell you what happened is that I I knew I you know I have been struggling all of this time to quit right and um so and I didn't want to be my life to be that okay I'm gonna quit but I'm going to be white knuckling it the whole time and thinking about it and stuff I I was like how do I how do I just become a different person who some a person who never thinks about it like a normal person wow and I knew I had read the lives of the Saints you know Saint Augustine and uh alcoholic and then he had a spiritual awaken he had walked away Saint Francis easy so I knew it happened to other people I had a friend my brother who was best friends with my brother I had two brothers who died of this this disease of addiction or addiction related um uh that's one of them you know skied into a tree but but this guy was a friend really close friend of my brothers and he used to take drugs with us he'd take them with the Saints and Addison that I had the same compulsion the same impulse that was uncontrollable and then he joined the unification church and we became a Mooney I you know guys know what that is no no it's a it's like a cult there's a Korean guy called reverend Sun young Moon oh I've heard of that yeah I've heard of him yeah and and he has a lot of followers and this guy joined it and he had a spiritual awakening and he didn't want to take drugs anymore and he would be with us and I'd be saying drugs in front of him but he didn't want him and I used to think about this guy you know when I when I was after you know I got arrested and I knew that I I had to get sober I think about this guy and I would say to myself I'd rather be dead than be a millenney but I wish that I could get whatever it was distill whatever it was that allowed him to be impervious to this impulse without becoming a religious nuisance you know or I got cold yeah or whatever right and um and then I I picked up a book like Carl Young that was just sitting on the on the you know on a table somewhere and it was called synchronicity and the word synchronicity means it means coincidence kind of it's like it's a kind of coincidence that happens if you're if you're talking about somebody that you haven't thought about in 20 years the phone rings it's that guy in the world and that's synchronously Carl Jung was and the reason I picked that that book up is because there was an album by the police at that time by the same name I didn't know what the word meant I started reading it and young was the one of the fathers of Psychiatry he was a Sigmund Freud was his mentor but Freud was an atheist and young was a deeply spiritual man he had these incredible spiritual experiences starting when he was three or four years old very authentic experiences and his form of Psychiatry is very connected to spiritual transformations and he had had a he had this experience one where where he was sitting in the third floor of his uh of his sanitarian he ran the biggest sanitarium in Europe he was up on the third floor and he's and what with a patient it was a woman and she's talking to him and she's talking about a dream and he was very much um you know his his style therapy is very oriented towards dream interpretation right she was telling him about this dream and the fulcrum of that dream was a scarab beetle which is a creature that is uh it's a piece of iconography on the on that hieroglyphics in Egypt and on the obelis the tunes that really doesn't exist in northern Europe where he was so he's hearing while he's talking to this woman he's hearing this bing bing bing bing bing on the window behind him and he doesn't want to turn and take his attention away from his patients but finally he gets exasperated and he swings around and he throws up in the window and a Scarab people why is it lands in his pop wow and he turns and he shows the woman he says this way you were dreaming about and she goes yeah so he he thought these little incidents of synchronicity are God's way of cutting through the rules and regulations that God have set up like the rules of mathematics and nature and physics and every once in a while he breaks his own rules and comes in and and Taps you on the shoulder and you know because the sad the chance of that happening it never happened right but but it seems so obvious like yeah you just said it this happened yeah it has to be connected it has to be connected it's key scarabs I believe they represent New Life yeah but they they have all this kind of spiritual significance right but um he but he had this uh so he then tried to reproduce that in a clinical setting so we would put one guy in one room and the other guy in another room and he'd have them flip cards and then guess what the other guy flipped and he thought that if he could if he could beat the laws of chance beat the laws of of nature the natural law it would have proven the existence of a super of a supernatural of some Force I was not explained by natural law why the laws of mathematics are chance or whatever but he's never able to do that so in this book he says I can't prove the existence of a god using empirical tools or scientific tools but is that having seen tens of thousands of patients come through his Hospital I can prove that people who believe in God get better faster and that their recovery is more enduring than people who don't oh in that sense it's irrelevant if there's a God up there if you believe in one your chance of living a happy life are better well that's what he was saying and that was really significant for me at that time it was much more significant than if he had said I approved the existence but God which I wouldn't have believed but him saying that I can improve your chat I can improve my chances of recovery I'm never having to take this drug again if I believe in God I said okay I'm going to do it and then I have the problem of how do you start how do you start on believing in something that you can't see or smell or touch or feel or acquire with your senses right and he gives the solution you fake it till you make it you act as if and um and so that's what I did I started saying okay I'm just going to act as if there's a God up there watching me all the time and life is just a series of tests and that I have to behave myself even when I don't have an audience I have to do the right thing right yeah and that and so you know then uh and I and every day is broken down into like 40 little choices and each one for me now has a moral implication you know when I when I wake up in the morning um the alarm goes off you know do I lie in bed for an extra 15 minutes with my indolent pornographic thoughts or do I get jumped right now and then when I go do I brush my teeth do I hang up the towels where you know when they do I make the bed that's the most important decision every day and start out making them do I put the water in the ice tray before I put the ice tray back in the freezer right do I when I reach into my closet and pull out a pair of blue jeans and all those little wire hangers fall on the floor do I actually go and hang them back out or do I say you know that's somebody else's job I'm too much of a big shot for that job right do I put the shopping cart with the shopping cart is supposed to go you know when I where do I leave it in the middle of the parking lot like everybody else I had I had this experience when I was when I first got sober in my life I'm very small through addiction and it started getting big very quickly when I you know when I got sober and I was running through national airport and I was at there was a plane that I was going to miss and it was mission critical that I got on that airplane I had to get on it you know I would have been away from that point and it was it was a whole bunch of consequences that would have happened so I had to get that plane and I was gonna miss it and I'm running through the airport in my mouth and I I'm rolling up the rapper and as I'm running I I threw the wrapper into a garbage can and it did a perfect art swish right but Kobe but out of the corner of my eye I saw it must have hit something in there because it jumped back out in my diagram and I was like that's God's fault because I made this shot oh I was running running trying to get the plane but it then it just started eating at me and I got about 50 feet down and I went God I gotta go back and pick it up I pick it up but that you know I end up making a plan that that to me was probably the most important thing I did is that not maintaining that posture of surrender when your life is broken and everything's going wrong it's easy to be you know in surrender to God about when all the cash and prizes start falling back in you know my inclination is to say okay thanks God I got it from here and I take the wheel and drive the car off the cliff again you know and I'm yeah but I'll tell you the answer your question very quickly what happened to me the day that I finished reading that book synchronicity I went out to play volleyball and um you know so what the synchronous about all these coincidences and I go out to play volleyball and they somebody has a volleyball in this very powerful uh you know hit where it went up on a kind of Aaron flight and it comes down and hits the top of the post and as it's going up again I said it out loud that ball is gonna get hit by a Mack truck I said I don't know why I said it but I said it and everybody heard me say and then the ball went up again it came down and he hit the top of a chain link fence and it dropped on the other side and then it rolled down this driveway for about I don't know 50 60 feet out into the middle of a a little Highway and a big 18 wheeler with a bulldog on the front comes and Pops it you know bang pop that's crazy everybody says everybody looks at me for a second like wow wow and then they went on but you know for me it was significant because I just finished that book and went out and then it happened and it was like okay so I'm reaching out I was like that was a cheer no poor man Spiritual Awakening but that's what it was yeah yeah the words it opened me to start looking at those things and saying you know I should pay attention to those things when they happen instead of just just missing them only smack rapper that you know stack rappers got bars I can hang with the Backpackers I'm in the hood with the work you heard making things [Applause]

Channel: MATH HOFFA

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Id: 0EpFVeCTte0

Length: 23min 11sec (1391 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2023