Today on the Playbook podcast, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be testifying on the Hill. Donald Trump will be speaking with Vladimir Zelensky and other European leaders about Ukraine. And guess what? Trump is hosting a load of CEOs in his newly renovated Rose Garden tonight.

Hello, I'm Jack Blanchard.

And I'm Megan Messerly. It's Thursday, September 4th.

It's great to see Megan. How are you doing?

I'm doing fantastic. How are you, Jack?

I have spent all yesterday watching and re-watching and re-watching that clip of President

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin talking about how they want to live forever. Have you seen it?

And how abasing was it? I have seen it. It is so striking. The thing that jumped out to me is

like they're on board with where the tech portion of the new right is, right? You know,

just thinking about like immortality and tech and the possibilities of tech. Fascinating. I was looking at the pictures of it last night when they first came out thinking like, what do like aging nuclear power owning dictators talk about when they're chewing the fat? And now we know. Yeah. Answer is living forever in organ transplants.

Yeah. Who knew? Driving the day to day, there is a big moment coming this morning on the hill when

RFK Jr. The Health and Human Service Secretary is going to be before the Senate Finance Committee.

Megan, now, RFK Jr. is box office anyway. He is one of the most recognizable members of this administration for so many reasons, such a long history, such a prominent voice for the Make America Healthy Again movement. But the context for this hearing today comes after the firing of the CDC director just a week ago. And that means that this is going to be box office today.

It really is. I mean, this is such a hot button issue. We had not only the firing of CDC

director Susan Menares, but the departures of several other high-profile CDC members

that's raising a lot of questions about the future of the CDC and whether they have the brain trust

they need to perform many of the key functions that the CDC performs, like overseeing the

nation's public health. The message, of course, that we've heard from President Trump and

Secretary Kennedy is that the CDC is in good form. No one should be worried. But obviously this firing is just

raising a lot of questions about the direction that HHS and the CDC are headed in, and a lot of

questions that Secretary Kennedy is going to have to answer today. Yeah, because it wasn't actually

just the firing of one random public official, Susan Bedoures, there was a mass walkout

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