Billionaire Airbnb co-founder and President Donald Trump’s new design czar Joe Gebbia has gushed about how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reminds him of his health-mad mother.
Gebbia, who ditched his Democratic roots and voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election before joining his administration last week, sat down with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s wife on the latest edition of her eponymous production, “The Katie Miller Podcast,” released Monday.
They talked about his political U-turn, and how Kennedy’s MAHA policies helped shape his new outlook. He even gushed that Trump’s anti-vax health chief effectively reminds him of his own mother, who he said wouldn’t let him eat junk food.
“She did an amazing job educating us and helping us understand the quality of food that you put in determines the quality of your health,” he said, echoing some of the health secretary’s initiatives. “Fast forward to Bobby Kennedy, he’s saying that at a national stage.”
The leader of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement has championed stamping out junk food in favor of healthier alternatives. In one questionable example, Kennedy oversaw the effort to allow states to ban the use of SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps) to buy sugary products like soda.
The secretary’s dietary takes have not always aligned so well with what the science shows, however. His endorsement of drinking raw milk, for instance, backfired last December when a dairy farm had to suspend distribution of the beverage due to a bird flu scare.
Gebbia, meanwhile, said he arrived at the gates of the MAGAverse “through Bobby Kennedy, and supporting him.”
“I grew up in an alternative medicine, you know, health food household, credit to my mom,” Gebbia, who Elon Musk persuaded to join DOGE earlier this year, said.
He jokingly called his mother, Eileen Gebbia, an independent health food sales representative, the “original MAHA mom.”
“She was, in the early 80s, beating the drum. So I grew up in a very weird household, like, we were vegetarian, macrobiotic in fact,” he went on. “Which is an even more, like… weird, version of vegetarian.”
A macrobiotic diet is a strict plant-based eating regimen rooted in traditional Japanese principles. It centers on whole grains, vegetables, beans, and fermented foods, while limiting or eliminating animal products, dairy, and processed items.
Make America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/LLzr5S9ugf
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 17, 2024
Although Kennedy has championed gut-friendly fermented foods like unsweetened yogurt, coleslaw, and kimchi, he also enjoys meat. So much so, in fact, that his diet has been labeled “caveman.”
Gebbia, from Atlanta, Georgia, went on: “It would be weird growing up in the south and going to my friends’ houses for hotdogs and hamburgers and I can’t eat it, and everyone’s like, ‘Why can’t you have a hotdog?’”
Asked if his mother deployed an 80-20 rule, a flexible diet that allows some junk food, he said: “I did not have the Domino’s pizza. Especially if it had pepperoni on it!”
He simplified his mother’s approach, saying that “if you’re putting bad things in it can lead to bad cells,” which in turn can lead to ill-health.
The approach to life got more and more like Kennedy’s. “She kept me off antibiotics, forever, I was probably like 18 until I had any antibiotics—” he began to explain before Miller interrupted.
“Are you vaccinated?” she barked. He said he had “the basics.”
He then lauded his mother’s approach with the comparison to Kennedy.
Last week, Gebbia became first ever America’s ‘Chief Design Officer,’ part of a new federal design initiative to improve the administration’s online presence and usability.
The order called for a ‘National Design Studio’ that would work towards “updating the Government’s design language to be both usable and beautiful.”
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