Yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr released the first episode of “The Secretary Kennedy Podcast“, billed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the first podcast ever hosted by a sitting cabinet secretary.

Something is fitting about this venture, given that the second Trump administration was arguably launched on Joe Rogan’s sofa in the latter half of 2024. The show is about what you’d expect from RFK, a thinly veiled discussion looking to push the MAHA agenda.

The first guest was Robert Irvine, the musclebound British-born Food Network fixture whose 2008 resume scandal revealed an invented knighthood, a fake friendship with Prince Charles, and a career as White House chef to four American presidents. Fake it until you make it clearly pays dividends. Irvine now runs a foundation with a Pentagon contract to rebuild Army food service, starting at Fort Hood, a major military base in Texas.

Understandably, the 48-minute episode is not so much about fixing food as fixing male bodies so that they can become draftable to the military. Kennedy opens by noting that 77% of American children cannot qualify for military service. Irvine returns to the figure repeatedly, telling Kennedy the Army now runs remedial fitness courses costing roughly $100,000 per recruit simply to shave off 10 pounds. The two men then spend the bulk of their conversation on procurement reform at military dining facilities: Pentagon purchasing systems, value-added products, and the cost per pound of fresh salmon against frozen.

Fort Hood sits in Killeen, Texas, where local news is now breathlessly running stories about the automatic Selective Service registration, a federal database that holds information on men aged 18-25 for potential military service. The initiative begins this December, courtesy of reforms tucked into the annual National Defense Authorization Act that Trump signed last winter. When viewed through this lens, this podcast makes MAHA look less like a health campaign than a state-building physical-culture project.

The food reforms at Fort Hood, the new dietary guidelines, the return of the presidential fitness test, and the November GLP-1 price deal that brought Ozempic and Zepbound down to $245 a month all point in a similar direction. Kennedy told reporters that the GLP-1 price deal would see Americans lose 125 million pounds within a year, while Irvine’s cafeteria reform can help them keep it off. Young men are federal inventory again, and the administration is investing in the food supply, drug pipeline and mess-hall procurement needed to make them usable.

There is a final irony here, which the administration might prefer nobody to notice. The two well-built older men are themselves products of the pharmaceutical boom that has tripled testosterone prescriptions over the past decade. Kennedy has openly acknowledged taking testosterone replacement therapy as part of an “anti-aging protocol” prescribed by his doctor, and has appeared shirtless at Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach in recent years. Irvine, at 60, has a similar build. Neither man’s physique existed among ordinary sexagenarians and septuagenarians before the arrival of anabolic steroids in the Fifties.

In any event, Kennedy has figured out how to deploy his own media operation inside the federal government. The first episode is aimed not at skeptical mainstream media but at the parents of 18-year-olds who will be auto-registered in eight months, and MAGA-curious enlisted soldiers whose menu Irvine is rebuilding.

Embedded in there is a broader pitch to the MAHA coalition, which the administration is counting on in the midterms. If he plays his cards right, the HHS secretary might be able to get Americans already skeptical of the food they’re being served to accept a new lifestyle altogether. This would involve a state-sponsored solution that combines ancestral eating, pharmaceutical enhancement, military discipline and the accompanying possibility of military service. Make America Military-Ready Again is inbound.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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