The Highwire with Del Bigtree - Episode 328: SOUL OF LIBERTY

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

The mainstream is losing comedians on COVID as Dana Carvey and David Spade tackle Fauci’s Sales Approach; CRISPR gene editing tech takes us into uncharted territory with new applications for food, insects, humans, and no understanding of the long term effects; Trans Women ‘Chest feeding’ babies?; Biden Admin shot down by Federal Judge; ‘Dirty Jobs’ Star Mike Rowe joins Del for a captivating conversation on common sense, risk taking, education, the heart of America, medical mandates, and more. Guests: Jefferey Jaxen, Aaron Siri, Esq., Mike RoweBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Did you notice that this show doesn't have any commercials? I'm not selling you diapers or vitamins or smoothies or gasoline. That's because I don't want corporate sponsors telling us what to investigate and what to say. Instead, you're our sponsors. This is a production by our nonprofit, the informed consent action network. If you want more investigations, more hard-hitting news. If you want the truth, go to Ican Decide.org and donate now. Hey everybody, we're here in Memphis, the home of blues, jazz, and the birthplace of rock and roll.

Trailblazers like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and B.B. King all got their start right here. And the high wires trailblazing our way all the way to Freedom Fest. So without further ado, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are out there in the world, it's time to step out onto the high wire. Well, welcome, everybody. We're here in the middle of Memphis, the Convention Center for this year's Freedom Fest, a libertarian extravaganza. People coming here to celebrate freedom from all around the world, all the different ways to celebrate freedom. We're right here in the middle of, I've got so many great vendors here. I've got the Tuttle Twins over here, the great books made for kids, talk about freedom and liberty. We got Reason Magazine, Judicial Watch, that have been out there fighting for freedom and rights all across this country.

is our nonprofit informed consent action network. We're really excited to be here. And I want to thank my incredible team for bringing our set from Austin, Texas, delivering it here. This is no small feat to be in the middle of the convention center. And the stage, over the next few days, you're going to have some really incredible speakers talking about what does it mean to be free. Is the United States of America hanging on the precipice of losing everything that the founding fathers of this nation dreamt about? So many interesting things. conversations and we're going to be having them here later on in the show. I am going to sit down and had the opportunity to talk to Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs, really excited about a lot of people

are really pumped about the speech he's going to be giving today. And I'm going to be on the stage tomorrow here at Freedom Fest. If you want to go to FreedomFest.com and check it all out. You can. I'm going to be giving a talk on weaponizing compassion. And then Aaron Siri and I are going to be on stage talking about vaccine experts under oath. We're going to go through a lot of the video depositions were top scientists in the medical industry and vaccine industry admit things you never thought were true. Go figure. It's amazing what happens in courtrooms.

But outside of courtrooms, there's always the court of public opinion, which is what the high wire is all about. And I've said it so many times that you know when things are shifting, you know it's shifting when comedians start joking about it. Well, it appears that COVID is far enough behind us now. that we're allowed to start cracking jokes like Dana Carvey and David Spade did. Take a look at this. I miss COVID.

I know. Dude, you know what I knew. There was trouble when anyone that came to our country didn't have to get a vaccine. And I go, if you're telling me I can't go to work, but everyone coming in doesn't have to get one. And I go, well, once we found out when Fauci said, okay, I'm sorry. If you've had two boosters and two vaccines, you can get and give COVID to another guy. guy who's had five vaccines with full boosts. Wasn't in between a vaccine or a booster?

I don't know, just more vaccine, but booster sounds better. Anyway, a guy with 25 vaccines would get and give COVID to another guy with 25 vaccines. That's why I'm introducing the daily COVID shot. Every day you get a shot. By the time you get to your car, you got no immunity, but it's a beautiful 39 seconds. I mean, there we have it right now.

the jokes are beginning. Unfortunately, the joke is not that funny for all of the people that lost their jobs, all the lives that were ruined around a vaccine that ultimately was never tested to see if it could stop transmission. So when I'm talking about weaponizing compassion, how many us were told that we had to get a vaccine to protect our neighbor? Now we know that entire thing was a lie delivered to us by the CDC, the FDA, Health and Human Services, our own government, our own president saying we couldn't go to work unless we got this vaccine because that was how we're going to protect one another. And now, you know, when we look at the Pfizer executive, Janine Smalley, who said we never tested to see if it could stop transmission. And as we're now

seeing a vaccine is completely ineffective at overcoming COVID. And thus the story has gone on, which has changed this conversation in so many ways across this nation. When we think about the things that we believe in, the trust we have in our government, Trust has been destroyed, trust in the CDC, trust in the FDA. And so much of that is unnecessary. It's really unfortunate to be in a time now where there is so little trust in the government of the United States of America and equally as low as our trust in mainstream media. This is why shows like the high wire and what we do here are becoming such success stories

because people are recognizing that you have got to go to independent media to find out what's really happening. and to all of the CNNs, the Foxes, the MSNBCs that lied to the American public about the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine, which is just one of the issues we've covered. I'd like to reach out to all of you and say, why don't you start following the High Wire Protocol? What we actually do is every time we have a show on Thursday, on Monday, we send everyone that's on our newsletter a copy of every single piece of evidence we discussed, every trial, every magazine article, so that you can read it yourself. That's evidence. Experts saying that they have an opinion about something is not truth. The evidence behind what they're saying is truth. That is what journalism is, and that's what the Highwire is here to celebrate.

I want to thank my amazing team that makes this happen every single week. All right. Well, it is going to take transparency. It's going to take truth and honesty and the ability for all of us to start having the difficult conversations to get this nation back on track as a beacon of light and hope and liberty. for the world, one of the people that's been brilliant on the high wire at bringing that light, bringing that truth is none other than Jeffrey Jackson. So it's time for the Jackson Report. All right, Jeffrey live in person.

This is really cool. Usually you're on a monitor. I have to watch you there. So first of all, you know, the energy here is electric. It's amazing. One of the things that I've been saying on the show for so long is I feel I'm politically maroon, right? It just feels like there's no party that represents me. And there just seems to be this real rise in this focus around the middle or the independent vote. Or I guess in this case, is that what libertarian means? Because so many people keep sort of talking about that here at this conference. Yeah, it's the middle ground of the debate. There's been such polarization in this country.

And even people waking up. I mean, it's very natural. I went through this process as well. It's a natural human process. When you wake up to certain truths, you go to far to an extreme. and then it takes a while to come back. So a lot of people are doing now, and they're finding this libertarian mindset,

they're going to this middle ground and saying, look, in order to move forward, we can't stay polarized. Whether we think we're doing good or we're not doing good, we have to find middle ground. We have to find this space where we can at least start a debate

and have a conversation. And as we're going to be talking about, a lot of this censorship that's happening is forcing this polarization. From the government, top down, it's forcing a polarization. So it's up to us as citizens to bring this divide

back together. And that's, you know, this is what we're trying to do each week here. I just keep thinking about, you know, the slogan we were raised with in America, we the people. Yeah. Right. It's really, when you think about that, that feels like that idea that we are the empowered part of this nation, somehow we seem to have forgotten that, where it's, it's, whatever my government allows me to do. So many of us just signed over to whatever the government told us to do throughout COVID. And I think deep down, there's a bit of, I think we're all a little bit upset with ourselves, right? We're going to get into some of those things,

some of those, you know, unconstitutional measures that were brought against us. But what do you have for us today as far as breaking stories? You know, as we're talking about this, society and the public conversation is grappling with a whole new era of genetic modification. And what am I talking about here? I'm talking about the CRISPR technology.

And for people that don't understand what this is, and we show a little animation. The CRISPR technology is basically the editing of the genome. So what people, what the scientists do is they can clip certain parts of this genome with these genomic clipping scissors. And it combined, they can take pieces out, they can put pieces in, it recombines. And that really makes a whole new genomic species at that point. Where the old GMOs, if you will, the GMO foods that we talked about, they were inserting genes. They were inserting insect resistant genes.

We're not inserting anything. We're going in and clipping and splicing and doing very, what we're told is targeted things with this. Almost like surgery on your DNA or something, right? And this idea, I mean, it's been, you know, for many years now, we keep waiting for CRISPR technology to come out and save us from cancer and all these things. Right. But it just seems to be stalled. Right. And that's what we're sold on. This is one of the big things is it's going to help people.

You just clip out those inconvenient parts of your genome that give you chronic illnesses and diseases and cancers. And so what we started to see, some of the first headlines in. in 2018, 2020 were headlines that looked like this. There were two studies that came out. CRISPR edited cells linked to cancer risk in two studies. They're finding their CRISPR editing is actually leading to a genomic change that is causing cancer. So that's what some of the studies are finding.

So let's pump the brakes here for a second. And so we start to look into this, into this phenomenon in the human capacity, in the human cells. And we have a study here. This was in 2022, and they were looking at on target. So they were looking at specific parts of the organs that they would actually use these on-target cells

to fight these diseases with CRISPR. And this is what the researchers found. Let's check out this study. So they said, they used a word called chromothripsis. Now remember that word as an on-target consequence of CRISPR CAS-9 genomic editing. The CAS-9 is kind of like the newest guy in the block.

It's the fastest, cheapest way to do this. It's the newest technique. It's the most accurate technique we're being told. And so what did these researchers find when they looked at these on-target human cells, this is what they reported. They said, here, using model cells and single-celled, whole genome sequencing as well as by editing a clinically relevant locus and clinically

relevant cells we show that CRISPR-Cast9 editing generates structural defects of the nucleus micro nucleiclii, chromosomal bridges which initiate a mutational process called chromatripsis. Chromal rearrangement restricted to one or a few chromosomes that can cause human congenital diseases and cancer. Now this chromatrypsis is this cascading, instantly cascading effect of these rapid changes. The scientists, the researchers, geneticists, they don't know what's going to happen at the end. They don't really know what it does downstream, but they know it's happening. They can witness it in the lab and in the cells here. Wow. It's very, you know, this is a phenomenon that

we're, you know, us as the public and some scientists are saying, wait a minute, does anybody looking what that's doing? And they're saying, no, we got CRISPR CAS 9. This thing is so accurate. We can, we can just clip these cells, look what we're doing. I mean, this is what's made. I mean, I don't know why. I don't even know if this is a good analogy. We're talking about It's almost like a paradox, right? What science keeps doing is going in and saying, we can mess with something in the future of the past or whatever and just fix that one little problem

and then everything's fixed. But there's this downstream cascading effect that just switching up that little piece of this chromosome is creating all these repercussions no one ever imagined was possible. It would happen, right? Why can't we just fix one little thing? And we keep covering this.

This is the problem with science, is how everyone's got a microscope, They're looking at the tiniest little part of what they're trying to do. I'm going to make a vaccine that kills one little virus amongst the million or billion that are already, you know, moving around in your stomach, moving around in your arms and your hands and think this isn't going to have any effect on the overall, you know, experience. Like that chaos theory, that butterfly flapping its wings that causes a hurricane on the other side of the world. Exactly. Exactly. So now let's move from human cells, because this is not just a phenomenon affecting human cells and cancer research, things like that. Let's go from human cells to the food we're eating. So this is where this CRISPR technology gets really interesting.

So in 1992, just to remind people, in 1992, the FDA basically said that genetically modified food is substantially equivalent to regular food. Therefore, it doesn't merit any risk analysis. It doesn't merit any labeling. We're good to go. Off we went to the market. Soy, canola, cotton, all of these things. Just go on to the market, papaya, mango.

And so what happened at that point, we saw the march against Monsanto. This was the biggest worldwide regular yearly marches against one corporation, really the biggest ones in the history of mankind when we saw this. And this was trying to get the Monsanto to label their foods, trying to get them to stop what they're doing because the EPA was not doing their job, nor was the FDA. So now what we get to is we get to the U.S. CRISPR technology, this new brand of genetically modified foods.

And in 2018, this was what the headlines looked like in case anybody missed it right before COVID. It says this, 2018, the USDA says CRISPR edited foods are just as safe as one's bred the old-fashioned way. So here we are right back to 1992. Looks good. Walks like a duck, acts like a duck. Let it through. No risk analysis needed. So that brings us to the European Union.

The European Union is kind of like the last stop gap measure. It's the bastion of defense against this. this just onslaught, this gates down onslaught, like it's happening unfortunately in the US. And the European Commission now has just posted draft legislation to do essentially the same thing. This is happening right now, this is the headline here. Super crops are coming.

Is Europe ready for a new generation of gene edited plants? It says here in the article, the new law aims to cut red tape and allow easier market access for plants grown with new genomic techniques. These are NGT, such as CRISPR Cas9, which targets specific genes without necessarily introducing genetic material from outside, the breeders gene pool. And here's where it intersects with our reporting. The rules are being

pushed by multinationals such as Bear, Syngenta, Cortiva, which together control the lion's share of the plant breeding sector as well as a host of similar companies, scientists, and farmers, such as Copa Coagua. So we go on and now this, we look at this EU draft and it says, and according to the leaked draft, EU countries will no longer be able to ban the cultivation of NGT crops. The law simplifies rules even more for subgroup NGT crops that are deemed equivalent to crops obtained by traditional breeding techniques. The obligation to label it as GMO foods will no longer apply to these conventional-like plants, and they won't be subject to risk analysis by food safety regulators.

We're back to 1992. I mean, this is the world that we live in. This is what the high wire has really stated our claim on. It's why we have gone from hundreds of thousands of years to millions now, because no one is talking about this. Thank you to everybody out there that's a ployance part of this audience. But we are watching technologies. We are watching the FDA, the EPA, the CDC approving things and saying they're perfectly safe with zero evidence that they're safe.

With no evidence whatsoever, no trials being done saying, oh, it's been done. Oh, we obviously have looked at it. And this is the problem with regulatory capture. Right. This is absolutely, the country we now live in is so completely owned by corporations. So many of our politicians, so many of our regulatory agencies, you know, our politicians are being funded to be elected by these massive corporations. And then what do they do? They take employees of those massive corporations and put them in the head of the EPA Put them in the head of the CDC, put them in the head of the FDA and then what do they say? Yeah, this brand new scientific

You know mutation we're going to do to your food is just as good as natural and you're not going to have any say about it It's going to be on your shelves and you will never know about it Right, and individual farmers small farmers? Do they get this in this technology? Do they get it in their their houses? No These are the big corporations that own the lion's share. So we have to be learn as the public has been doing the techniques from before. So we have Friends of the Earth, Europe. They have over 400,000 people sign a petition to stop these rules from being dropped. People can go to this website and sign that position if they want to at this point. But we go now to the research. So in 2022, there is a systemic review looking at all of the plant research with Christopher

Kastonine technology and these new genetically techniques. And what did they find? So they looked at all the papers, the systemic review, and they found this. If you want to look at this, this is called unintended genomic outcomes in current next generation GM techniques, a systemic review. And they found it varied from large to small genomic variations, chromothripsis, but they also found something else. They said in all of our case studies and reviews and studies that we looked at for this, only a tiny fraction use whole

genomic sequencing to look at the downstream effects of this. So again, like you were saying, these studies went, we clip this, We looked at that little section with binoculars, and it looks good to go. None of them were, it almost looked like they were purposely saying, you know, it's not going to look downstream. So, of course, the researchers, hats off to them concluded. The literature is essentially biased now. It's underreporting the possible issues downstream of this. And now we get to a new study that just came out, and it looked at the CRISPR technology in a tomato.

So now we're getting directly to our food shelves, directly to our dinner tables. And this is from GM watch. They've been really a watchdog in the genetically modified space. Yeah. Headline here, gene editing found to cause chaos in the genome of tomatoes. And they look at this study. They're calling it CRISPR-induced DNA break can trigger crossover chromosomal loss and chromothripsis-like rearrangements.

We have an independent impact assessment test biotech organization. And they're actually calling it CRISPR thrypsis because it's such a normal phenomenon. They're calling it CRISPR threpsis. plants. And they put out this warning after that study came out. They said the recent findings shed new light on the alleged precision of gene scissors. Although the new technology can be used to target and cut precise locations in the genome, the consequences of this, quote, cutting the genome are to some extent unpredictable and uncontrollable. Plants obtained from this new genetic form of engineering cannot, therefore be regulated as safe per se and need to be

thoroughly investigated for risks. This is where we're at. It's exactly, you know, and we sort of because we're here at Freedom Fest, we thought, let's just not bury this in all the vaccine work we've done. But this is exactly the problem. It's why you're watching David Spade and Dana Carvey have to crack jokes about how in effect the vaccine is, because the science was done this way. We made a vaccine out of MRNA had never been done before, and all we looked to see is, did it make antibodies? It made antibodies great, put it on the market. Forget about how long do those antibodies last?

Don't know. Do those antibodies actually, you know, create any sort of protection? Don't know. Are there any other health outcomes that could be being created by having these antibodies in your body or a spike protein floating around, a mutated spike protein, don't know, didn't look at it, didn't do any long-term trials, and now people are, you know, dealing with the consequences worldwide of decisions like this. And I always say to people that challenge me, it was like, oh, the COVID vaccine is perfectly safe. I said, well, if you go online, they'll find it, that probably isn't true. But even if it was, even if it was a success, do we really want to live in a world where you're going to rush products out that have never been injected to human beings, never really worked in a piece of fruit or a vegetable we're about to eat. Do you want these products rushed out within 12 months so that you have no idea what happens to your body two years down the road, three years down the road, 10 years down the road?

What about your offspring? Is it affecting the DNA that you're passing on to your offspring? Do you really want to live in a world where the pharmaceutical industries and these big agrochemical companies are able to change your food, change your body with no understanding the long-term effects and they can crank it out in 12 months because we're in a rush? We got to do this because we just told your government that it's an emergency to make this happen right away. I mean, this is, if these technologies haven't already destroyed our species or sending us down the road, if we stay in here, if we keep letting products being made this way, there's no way we survive this.

We will eventually make a scientific mistake, I believe, that will wipe our species off the planet. Certainly, certainly when you think the entire reason these products are being made this way is to somehow beat our war with nature, Nature has never wiped our species off the planet in all the time that we've been here as human beings. But we keep making mistakes like this, I think we'll be the ones that do it to ourselves. And, Del, the conspiracy-like phenomenon, people want to say of the downstream effects of, well, you can't affect my child's genes or their fertility or things like that. That's a conspiracy theory. Well, what did we discover? We went from human cells.

We went to plant cells. Let's talk about bugs. Okay. We're down here in the south. I'm sure very humid. Some people probably saw some mosquitoes floating around here and there. Remember this when we covered it in 2020. Florida Keys released its 750 genetically modified mosquitoes. This was a test. That's the headline here. And this is, they were approved by the EPA to do this. This was a test. This was by a company called OxyTech. They were doing genetically modifying of mosquitoes. And what they were doing was they were, just as a side note, it's the female mosquitoes that bite. Those are the ones that draw blood. They need that for their offspring. Male mosquitoes are just kind of a nuisance.

So what they did was they took, they basically put daughter killing genes into these male mosquitoes. So when they bred, their offspring would be, it would basically doom the female generation. The males would go forward with that gene. They would reproduce with females, doom that generation of females. So the idea was to get mostly male non-biting mosquitoes out there because the mosquito bite is how dengue and zika and malaria, all these mosquito-borne illnesses, That was the idea. That's how these things transmit. So that was such a good idea in 2022.

The EPA said, why don't you go ahead and just go two billion more? We're going to raise you. So that's where the headline here is California, millions of genetically modified mosquitoes may soon be buzzing in Florida and California. Here's why. So daughter killing genes, mosquitoes are out there. But fortunately, during the trials, even before they released them in the U.S., they were doing trials in Brazil. And independent researchers started to follow them around and do their own research. And this is a fascinating. fascinating paper here. So this is in the science, the researchers started to look at what they found, what really did carry forward. And the headline here, study on DNA spread by genetically modified mosquitoes prompts backlash. It says from 2013 to 2015, OxyTech released roughly 450,000 GM mosquitoes per week there, which the company reported reduced the overall mosquito

population by 90%. Powell and his collaborators, those are the researchers, collected mosquitoes from several neighborhoods before, during, and in the three months after the trial, Within these populations, they estimated, now remember, 90% we're not supposed to survive. This is what they say. They estimated between 5% and 60% of the insects had some DNA from OxyTex strain in their genome as much as 13% of the genome in one case.

So you have up to 60% of these mutant offstreaming moving forward. So to the exact, it's not doing what they said, which is they are seeing procreation take place. These daughters that should have died now having this, you know, are creating eggs. And we now have this mutant group that are carrying these killer genes inside of them, no idea what's going to, and it is not wiping out the population, but creating a superhero population that can overcome this.

This is one of the concerns of some of the scientists was it's creating a fitter mosquito, just like one of the concerns with the genetically modified salmon. You send these salmon out there, they're bigger, they're stronger, they're faster, they're going to have the advantage to mate and they're going to overpopulate. and overmate out the normal salmon. So that was a concern with the salmon, the genetically modified salmon. So this is what was happening there. And so it's interesting.

And you have these mosquitoes out there, and the whole idea is to stop mosquito-borne illness. And we released them in California, released them in Florida Keys. Just a couple of years later, you start seeing headlines like this one. News right now. Check it out.

Officials are now reporting five confirmed cases of locally acquired malaria in Florida and Texas. Concerns are growing as this marks the first time we're seeing local transmission in the U.S. in two decades. The CDC is now warning doctors and public health officials to be on the lookout for more cases. Experts say it's bound to happen. How many times are we going to watch science

create a solution to a problem we don't have and then suddenly the problem arises right in the middle of the solution? I mean, I don't know what this means. I don't know if these genetically modified mosquitoes are causing this, but we are clearly messing with nature. And I just think, even if this thing worked perfectly, right, I would imagine a mosquito is just a base of a food chain for so much of our wildlife and the earth we live on. This idea that you would put something in that basically it looks like it's designed to wipe out all mosquitoes as we know it, if it actually worked. What does that do? What does that do to all?

What other insects then are competing that now take over that space? Right. Just like we have those issues with bacteria. Viruses do the same thing. They start mutating and you get worse strains and we're being held at bay by the lesser. All of these things is what I, you know, when I see here thinking about, I'm looking over right now, I'm looking at Libertarian Christian Institute, this idea of libertarianism and spirituality coming together. We are messing with God in so many ways.

This is science playing God. And I'm sure there's a lot of people, unfortunately, this conjuring around the little, you're great. But the problem is this. There's just not that beautiful overseeing look that gets outside of the little microscope, gets away from what you're trying to say and says, wait a minute, how does this affect all of God's children?

How does it affect every animal implant on the planet? That's the trial that needs to be done before these things are released out into the world. Right, and to say mosquitoes are not really important. I mean, they're part of the huge biomass for fish migrating birds, turtles, amphibians. And we look at like scientific hypocrisy here because which is it? Are we going to shut down like the Netherlands are going to shut down the farming of their entire country because of like a white-breasted nut hatch needs to be saved

from nitrogen off fertilizer? Right. But we're going to take out the entire mosquito population in the U.S. at the low part of the food chain see what happens. So, you know, and we're not saying the malaria situation is a consequence of this. But yeah, like you said, it's a very, it's a coincidence, it's almost like, I don't know, a lab in Wuhan starts studying bat coronaviruses, and all of a sudden there's an outbreak of back coronavirus. And we need a vaccine that we're supposed to be creating for that exact problem. Yeah. So, amazing.

Let's jump into a topic here and finish up with something we covered quite a bit here, and that's the CDC. Okay. Last two weeks ago, we covered, there was a new director, Dr. Mandy Cohen. She was from North Carolina. She direct her health there. We covered her kind of track record during the coronavirus response. A little bit of authoritarian.

in a little bit of kind of just flip a coin and guess what kind of restrictions you want this week. Big kind of questions with her leadership skills. Well, she has been sworn in. So this week, she is now sworn in as the CDC director. Michelle Wulinski is out. And she, remember, she is taking the helm of an agency that has lost the integrity of the American people, lost to trust the American people. She has a lot of work to do. And she is coming in right on the back of headlines like this.

Check this out. CDC gives guidance for trans people, quote, chess feeding kids. accused of failing to consider possible health risk. It says in sections of the major health institute's guidance on breastfeeding, it considered, I'm sorry, contain information for those who have had much of their breasts removed in gender reassignment surgeries or for biological men taking hormones to grow breast on how to feed their newborn children. That is what the CDC is, I guess, on the front burner for them as she, as Mandy Cohen watching.

Top priority. Let's make sure that men can breastfeed their children. Right. And now, this is going over to the UK. as well. This is not just, you know, a conversation topic here. It's a conversation topic in the UK. This is the article covering that. It says here, how trans women use a powerful mix of hormone, drugs, and pumps to breastfeed babies. But how safe is it really? It's actually nearest the child. So this was a biological man. There was a picture in this article that a lot of people

were talking about. Biological man identifies as a woman breastfeeding their child. So that is the picture right there. Now, we look into this article, it really starts, we can pick this apart, because what do we see in here? We see this crossroads of the transgender community and the medical community in Big Pharma. It's like this axis that comes in. And this is what this article tells the story of. So we look at these quotes in here. It says, is unclear how many other trans women have been able to breastfeed since the first recorded case in the U.S. in 2018. It says, however, whether this milk can sustain a newborn or has any long-term effects is unknown. according to some experts, some of which have called for further research beyond single case studies. So again, the science isn't there. We're talking case studies, experiments, if you will.

So let's look at, so people are probably saying, wait a minute, let's pump, breaks here, hold on. How is this happening? Are they actually doing this or is this just posing for a selfie? Well, they are. And like some of the transition drugs that are used for this community, These are drugs being used off-label, which means they're drugs for one thing, but just turns out they also have this little side effect that's an advantage for some people to do this. So this is no different. So we have a drug called motilium. Motilum, we look at the package insert for this. Don't have to go very far. It's right there in black and white. Let's check it out. It says here, it is best not to take motilium if you're breastfeeding. Okay, full stop. Let's keep going. That's only the first sentence. Small amounts of motilum have been detected in breastfeeding. milk. That's problem. Motilium may cause unwanted side effects affecting the heart and a breastfed baby. Multilium should be used during breastfeeding only if your physician considers this clearly necessary. So you know how you and I always talk about. Look, if you're an adult, take off the... What is this drug supposed to do? This is essentially it's an anti-exiety drug.

It can help people if they have any problems with vomiting, nauseousness. And it has a side effect that it can make you start lactating if you're a man. Correct. Okay. Yeah. Got it. And so you have this drug. I want if anyone's anxious about that. Side effect or an advantage. Depends where you're looking at it from. So we look at this now, and let's look at that case report. So just keep that in mind, all right?

You have this drug, it has these side effects, and you have some of these warnings on there. So we look at the MHRA. The MHRA is this drug regulator in the UK. If any adverse events come up, this drug regulator steps in and says, hold on, we found some issues. Let's update the label so doctors can give informed consent to their patients so people know what they're really dealing with. Well, they actually found some issues with this drug beyond what we just talked about. So let's look what they're saying.

This is now the new guidance here. And it says here, the following advice is given by the U.S. drugs in lactation advisory services. They're saying now a maternal daily dose of 30 milligrams of dome peridone, now that's the actual. drug. Motilium is the marketed name, but don't, we're talking about the same drug here. So they're Don't Perignon. Don't Perri and Young, yeah. Only 30 milligrams. Don't drive after 30 milligrams. So we have 30 milligrams and it should not be exceeded. That's what they're saying. And they're also saying you shouldn't take it for more than a week.

That's it. So 30 milligrams max, not more than a week. Now, let's look at the case study. So they're saying all we have here is a few case studies to look at when we're talking about this kind of brave new world. So let's look at that case study, a 2018 case study, out of Canada and we look right in here. It says case report induced lactations in a transgender woman. And we start to go in here and talks about the details of it. It says the patient obtained Domperidone from Canada, an anti-medic used off-label as a galactagogue internationally. The patient was started on Domperid 10 milligrams po-tid. That's 10 milligrams three times a day, 30 milligrams total. You're already maxed out there. So this doctor said, let's just put the

pedal of the metal right off the bat. Let's just max it out. Cool. So no big deal. All right, so you're maxed out, you're still in the safe limit, but now let's keep reading in this case report. It says here, the patient's first follow-up visit occurred at one month. Wait a minute. You've been doing it for a month? I thought I was only supposed to happen for a week, but let's keep reading.

On physical examination, she was able to express droplets of milk. The dom-paradone dose was increased to 20 milligrams per quid. So now we have 20, 40, 60 milligrams a day. Double dose every day. Double dose every day. Max dose. So, okay, now we might be in some controversial territory if you're a doctor, but hopefully it's only for a month, right? Unfortunately, let's keep reading. This is in the case report. It says here, as at the time of this article submission, the baby is approaching six months.

The patient continues to breastfeed as a supplemental, as a supplement to formula feeding, and she continues to adhere to the medication regime described earlier. So this person is doing it for six months, 60 milligrams a day. Six months. It's breaking. All of the rules, but we have a case study. We have any, you know, can we have anything in the scientific literature to inform us to go forward into this uncharted territory? This is it. This is what they're talking about.

And that's what they've done. This is what they're doing. So the CDC, despite all, the only little tiny bit of evidence we have is now recommending to practitioners and trans people, you want to take these drugs so that you can breastfeed. Well, you know what I find amazing about this story is I think it was just a couple of years ago. We were covering the fact that the CDC. the FDA and I think even the WHO we're really trying to cut you know cut down on this idea of breastfeeding being natural it's unfair to those women that can't breastfeed and to call it natural I think here's some of the headlines are there unintended consequences to calling breastfeeding natural they said it was the gateway to other things that my people might think are natural like vitamins we need to stop calling breastfeeding natural there was an entire attack on breastfeeding so I find myself conflicted with the story because we've come full circle I guess now we're back to how important breastfeeding is, it's so important that we're normalizing men breastfeeding.

Right. I don't know where this leads to, but what, you know, and there'll be people that are going to attack the show saying that somehow we have a problem with trans, I really don't. I mean, what we've said over and over again, you know, what adults decide to do with their body, it is a free country. I think here, most people in the middle of this conference would agree, you know, live and let live. But we're talking about children here. We're talking about innocent children. If there's one job the CDC should have, it should be to make sure that children are being protected from being poisoned. And we know that there are side effects that can affect the hearts of these babies. And when the CDC goes out and promotes a product with no long-term science, so few case studies to even know what's going on and not caring about the baby,

more important for the mental health of this person, this man that wants to breastfeed, we're more focused on that than the future of our of our children. of our world, which is our children, I think it's clearly a demonstration of how out of balance and out of touch the CDC is with the goals of most people in America and the world. Yeah. And let's talk about the importance. We're talking about freedom of choice, but something just happened in the realm of freedom of speech that has resonated throughout this country like a bell. So the Biden administration has just received a preliminary injunction from a judge to stop basically contacting social media companies.

This is out of Reuters here, and this happened on July 4th. Here's the headline. U.S. judge restricts Biden officials from contact with social media firms, preliminary injunction, forbid the Biden administration as agencies from essentially colluding with big tech. This is Missouri v. Biden, the ruling. This was the attorneys generals in Missouri and Louisiana. And what they did was they also were joined by people like Martin Koldar, Jay Badacharya, these are the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration.

And they push forward this lawsuit and it has received a, you know, for... Limited injunction. You know, this is such an important story for what we do here because, as you know, we lost our Facebook channel because of this. We lost our YouTube channel, which is how we started doing this. That was our broadcast space. Luckily, we saw the writing on the wall. We had been transferring people over to the highwire.com.

And as it turns out, people were capable of typing in the highwire. dot com and we went from hundreds of thousands to millions of people checking in. But, you know, we have had our own lawyer, which does so much the work we do, Aaron, Siri, fighting that case for us. Actually, wait, we have Aaron here today. What are we doing here? Why don't have this conversation? Let's get Aaron here to have the conversation. If you don't know who Aaron Siri is, then this is the master of our legal team. Joining us now is Aaron Siri. Aaron Siri. Aaron Siri has led several high-profile lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers and federal health agencies.

Aaron, you have been fighting for information from the FDA. He's the guy that has been asking Pfizer to release the COVID-19 vaccine data. The judge today correctly ruled that the San Diego School District does not have the authority to require COVID-19 vaccine of its students. We sent this letter to the FDA CDC and NIH, detail in catastrophic, injuries from COVID-19 vaccines. This summer, we formally petition the CDC demanding that they support their position, that those that have natural immunity

cannot afford the same liberties that the CDC says that those who have vaccine immunities can have. We do intend to follow a lawsuit on behalf of our client, the Informant Action Network. Did the clinical trial rule out that the vaccine causes autism? No. If you don't know whether D-TAP or T-DAP cause autism,

shouldn't you wait? until you have the science to support that vaccines do not cause autism? No, I do not wait. There has been no check on vaccines. There's no moneyed interest, if you will, pushing back on pharmaceutical companies. Why did it take numerous legal demands, multiple appeals, two lawsuits, in fact, before the CDC finally handed over the V-safe data? When we finally had that data, you got a sense of why they didn't want the public to have it,

because it showed a little bit over 10 million reported eating medical care after a COVID-19 vaccine. That's how many individuals in the first week or so after vaccination. Yeah. Being a doctor, emergency room, or hospitalization. It should not be that any physician should have to quote unquote risk it all just to advocate for their patients. Think about this business model. You have a vaccine. You can't be sued for harms. You have a guaranteed market because kids are required to get it for school. and your health agencies promoted for you. If you want to secure civil and individual rights,

you need to act yourselves, because if you don't do it, who will? All right, well, Aaron, this is actually, Jeffrey, I don't think we've ever all sort of sat on a stage together. So this is an amazing historic moment here. I've got the power of our legal department for I can, the machine of our investigative team all together, so it's quite a moment.

And I think it's perfect for this moment because really this lawsuit that was filed by Missouri and these AGs to get the government out of control of social media. This is a case, we actually brought a case similar to this, right? Our argument was, you know, because I think one of the things we have to think about that Facebook or Twitter, these are private companies. They have, we talked about, they have a right to free speech. We shouldn't be telling them what they have to err or that they have. have to play our show. That would go against everything we believe in freedom. But our argument at the time was that it's not them making the choice. It's the government that is forcing their will upon these free agencies, if you will. They should be allowed to make a choice and they're being

pressured by the government. Our case really didn't make it through because they're like, you can't prove that the government's behind this, right? We'd have evidence that they were really coming after me and the high wire. Yeah. There were, um, there were, um, there were, There are numerous lawsuits filed across the country by many organizations for the censorship that Facebook and other private social media companies did kicking them a platform, putting labels on things that they said. And what the courts roundly held was it's not good enough to show that the government kind of encouraged or pushed these companies to censor generally in that category.

You have to show, the judge has said, pretty much uniformly, that there is evidence that the government specifically asked the social media company to censor you plaintiff, you, the person or entity bringing that case. That obviously is quite difficult to be able to prove in the, when you first bring a case. You don't have that proof. Right. So in our situation with the high wire, for example, we didn't have just to have a judge. direct email saying where, you know, President Biden was saying, hey, that guy, Big Tree,

get him out. Right. Right. Right. We don't have that. We didn't have that. Well, we did have at the time. I remember one of the big things was Adam Schiff wrote a letter to Amazon saying take down books and movies that have to do with vaccine risks or harms. Vax, the film I made got taken down. So we saw this direct reaction, right? We saw, you know, statements to different social media, but we couldn't, they weren't saying our name, right? And so that was such a. big part of it. So then why, what is it about this case? Is it because it's not a civil, private case that is being brought by Attorney General's that has put it in this position where now we are, or is it the Twitter files that came out? Is that what's playing in here, too?

I'd say the major difference between all those other lawsuits, which were all brought in behalf of singular individuals or entities, private indebt entities, and the currency that you guys were talking about a few minutes ago, Missouri versus Biden, is that in Missouri versus Biden, there was two states, Missouri and Louisiana, that are actually plaintiffs. The whole state themselves are plaintiffs. So every citizen of the state is a plaintiff? And the AGs are representing. So that takes it into a whole different space. They were able to bring the case not only on from that footing, but also using a different set of laws than private litigants would be able to essentially rely upon when they bring that kind of case against the social media companies.

And I think it's worth stressing again, they're private companies. Just like we all want freedom. Yeah. They're private companies. They're entitled to freedom too. They should have the freedom to make decisions what is on their platform, what they don't want on their platform. but left to their own devices, social media companies are there to get more eyeballs,

more viewers make money. They're not kicking anybody off, left to their own devices. They want to make money. It goes against the very model that they exist. A market force. Right. Any sort of entrepreneurship whatsoever. As you said, but for, as we call it,

the cats, you know, Paul, the government intervening with these companies, they wouldn't have engaged in censorship. And it took this suit, thankfully, and a big congratulations to the Attorney General's Missouri and Louisiana for bringing the suit and and and and and the judge who wrote an incredible 155 page decision what were some of the statements the judge made yeah when you think for the public out they're watching we think okay the judge issues a preliminary injunction well it's maybe just this black and

white you know judge speak you stop doing this and therefore i have it is told the hammer goes down no no no now this judge let's look at some of the actual word he says over 150 page decision He says this. Although this case is still relatively young, and at this stage, the court is only examining it in the terms of plaintiff's likelihood of success in the merits. The evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario during the COVID-19 pandemic and a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty. The United States government seems to have assumed the role similar to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. And it goes on to see... Wow, from a judge saying that. That's outrageous. It's from a judge saying that. Wow. I say some truth. Yeah.

Finally. Yeah. Finally, it's being stated. And he goes further to point out the direct to the CDC here. And this is kind of our in our wheelhouse. It says this about the CDC. The CDC became the determiner of truth for social media platforms, deciding whether COVID-19 statements made on social media were true or false.

And the CDC was aware it had become the determiner of truth for social media platforms. If the CDC said in a statement the social media was false, it was suppressed in spite of alternative of views. And then, Aaron, to your point to the White House, where they were compelling these companies to do this. That says in here, the judge says this. The White House defendants made it very clear to social media companies what they wanted to press and what they want in the appellate, faced with unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world, the social media companies apparently complied. And remember this headline in 2021. So you're having the White House saying, hey, by the way, most powerful in the office here calling, we need you to

take out this bulk spreadsheet of people, take them off Twitter, take them off Facebook. And then Biden goes out and, you know, almost recklessly says this. Biden says platforms like Facebook are killing people with COVID misinformation. Remember that headline. So it's amazing. Picture out. And remember we had the emails afterwards. They basically Facebook said, whoa, what was that?

Like, could you please have this guy back off, essentially? It's really amazing. I mean, those are, I mean, those are statements that are so defamatory. made by anybody else, you know, if you said the company's killing people, what are the protections around a president? When I think about all the things that he sort of said, accusations that are being made, can you sue a president for defamation? They have a very high degree of immunity from all kinds of suit while they're sitting in the office. And there's all kinds of protected speech, when it's including members of Congress,

judges and so forth. So typically no. It's really incredible when we think, I mean, I, and we've been saying it from the beginning, the First Amendment, you know, your right to free speech is like the most important part of what it means to be an American. I would say it's the one,

if there was the one thing you traveled around the world and spoke to other people in other nations, it's the thing they envy the most, the ability to just publicly, state and say what you believe to give your perspective on something, and to have that, to have an administration that sought to end that practice, to end literally the pillar of liberty and freedom in America. It's sadly the go-to, when you look at the long arch of history of authoritarian, thugs,

bullies, dictators, when they can't convince you on the merits, this is the type of conduct they engage in, censorship, bullying, coercion, mandates, and so forth. And that's, unfortunately, what we saw our government starting to do. And thankfully, we have a federal judge, and to the credit of the three branches of government that were set up in this country, you have a federal judge who can tell the entire executive government, branch of the government, stop. You can no longer engage in this type of conduct. And there were reports, I think you said it earlier,

meetings now between federal government officials and social media companies are now being canceled. Yeah. That were scheduled to be going on. But they're appealing, aren't they? I mean, like, unbelievable is not bad enough. Like, you lost. Right. You've been told by a judge it's unconstitutional.

They're like, we have to have this power. You can't take this away from us. Immediately. The Biden administration appealed. Biden administration asked appeals court to block order limiting its contacts with social media. Judge then rejected that, the Justice Department's request, to pause that. And what did that do? The State Department immediately had to start canceling its weekly meetings.

We have censorship that needs to happen today. We need meetings. We have got to stay on this. You cannot interfere with our censorship right now. We have a very important mission going on here. Yeah, yeah. Outrageous. It's outrageous.

And when we look at it, Aaron, you know, when we look at COVID, so many of the things we were forced to do. And we look, we were screaming from the mountain top here on the high wire. Don't comply. You know, don't comply. go with an illegal law. We're breaking our own constitution. We're breaking our own laws by going along with this. So many of the things have come crashing down in courtrooms, whether it was masking on airplanes or, you know, some of the cases that we've been involved in, many of the vaccine mandates. I think except for what was it, health care workers, those vaccine mandates

were ruled unconstitutional. I mean, there's a real trail of destruction to authoritarianism by our court system. Our court systems are actually. coming around on this pretty strong they've they're having a number of good decisions and you know I think that there's more that could have been done I will say that and there's a recent Supreme Court decision judge Gorsuch the US Supreme Court actually wrote a decision where he rails against judges across the country of federal and state courts for not doing enough for not protecting the rights of individuals when they were being locked in their homes

forced to take products where products do things they didn't want to do and I hope Judge Gorsuch's decision stands as a as a reminder to judges the next time this happens to act more quickly swiftly and decisively to stop executive overreach at every level federal state local well what was it exactly you said it was the yeah he said this was the largest intrusion on civil liberties in peace America perhaps ever. Wow. That was his statement. And it was one of the most, you know, Aaron had sentenced to me. He's like, you got to look at this thing. It was one of the most important pieces I've ever read from a judge. And, you know, when we look back at the, we're called the Biden

administration's COVID response, how, was it constitutional? How unconstitutional was it? Well, after the fact, the judges and the courts really started to show you by their decisions. And even we're going to go through some headlines here. As you said, Eric, this may not even have been enough because they could have done more. So we have here, this is the Head Start program. Remember that was the program for disadvantaged kids? This is the Judge Block's COVID vaccine mandate for Head Start program. Then we have the Navy, Judge Blocks Navy from enforcing COVID vaccine mandate against sailors with religious exemptions.

Air Force, Cincinnati Federal Judge Block's Air Force Air National Guard globally from discharging for religious vaccine refusers. Then San Diego, this was an ICAMPRA. funded lawsuit strikes down COVID-19 vaccine mandate for San Diego schools. We have judge orders NYPD union members fired over VACS mandate reinstated. Another one CDC mask mandate for planes, trains no longer in effect after judge rules it unlawful. This is another ICANN decision here in case you missed it. I-Can funded suit against OSHA vaccine mandate prevails and on and on it goes. And on and on. And, you know, it just, first of all, Aaron, the work that you've been doing for us,

I feel like when you're sitting here, we've taking you out, like you're like Rapunzel in the tower, I've got you up there working. So hard, just so many cases you guys are cranking out to great effect. And we're right after Freedom Fest, we're going to go to Mississippi and celebrate the return of the religious exemption to Mississippi, which has been gone since 1979 because of the work that you did for us. I mean, there's a really, really incredible moments. Is there hope here?

Is there a hope that, you know, that the courts are going to get this country back on track? Or are we, is it just a coin toss right now? And what is your sense? You're out there in these court rooms in America. Can we rely on the courts to pull us through? I'm incredibly hopeful. Yeah. Because, oh, I'm incredibly hopeful.

Look, not only do we have judges in many parts of this country who are very awake to the dangers of what's been occurring in terms of censorship, infringement of civil individual rights, you also have what effectively is the executive branch of various state governments recognizing that. When you think about this case, this was a case brought by two states against the federal government, before a federal judge. I mean, this is government fighting government, basically. Wow. To get back our rights. That is a very hopeful moment.

That is a very hopeful. And that is, that is, and we're seeing more and more of that. You know, one of the cases you just showed, for example, was the masks and on airplanes, right? Yeah. And there was, you know, we brought two lawsuits, one on behalf of, of somebody named Del Big Tree. That's right.

I was really getting pissed off having to wear the thing on the airplane. So we brought that suit. Our firm brought that in behalf of you against the CDC. And then we also brought another suit separately in a different district against 17 members of Congress, Rand Paul and a whole bunch of others. And that's 17 members of Congress who are willing to put their names as plaintiffs on a federal lawsuit against the Center for Disease Control. Wow. That's not common.

No. That doesn't happen often. That's, again, government's stepping up to push back against government. And when you have people in the government who know are seeing the problem, who are recognizing the problem, that's a hopeful sign that things are moving. And willing to speak public about it and say the truth, like you read Jeffrey from that decision. Right, right. Right.

But just as we sort of wrap this all up, though, I still think, you know, we can try to elect better, you know, people that are speaking truth to power. We can get into the courtrooms. but really the power of the people, which is what we start this whole conversation about, right? I think when I think about the mask mandate on planes, one of the, in some ways, one of the most conflicted feelings I've ever had is that day they finally lifted it and said, the judge has just ruled you don't have to wear your mask. And there's videos on social media of all these airplanes where the flight attendant says,

you know, as of today, it's just been ruled, you don't have to wear your mask. And like, 95% of the people are like, woo, they throw their masks in the air. air and everybody was celebrating. There's usually like four or five of the people that kept their masks on on the plane. And I just remember looking at that. First, I was excited because I wasn't going to have to wear one. But I just thought about all those people that tore it off and threw it in the air in that moment and realized all those people were doing it just to comply. You know, and I actually respect the four or five people that I would see in the picture still wearing it because they actually believed there was a virus. They were hiding.

from and they thought that this thing did something. When 95% of America was just like, I always knew this was, you know, I just was going along. That's the problem in this country right now. The problem in America is we are not standing in our rights. We are not standing up as the people and saying, I'm not going to take that. I am going to refuse. I am going to, you know, rebel against illegal laws and the destruction of my constitutional rights, which, by the way, are not, these are not our Constitution, our Bill of Rights are not telling, you know, telling, you know, the government what they can do to us is what they can't do is. We are protected.

We have rights by God. Those laws are holding back the government, not holding us back. I just really feel like we can't just trust courtrooms. And I think that conferences like this that we're at right now in Freedom Fest, I hope the message is each individual has power when they stand up and stand for what's right in their own freedom, more than any questions. courtroom or any president or any election we could possibly have. It's got to start with one person at least.

Yeah. Standing together. You know, well, look, it's an honor getting to work with both of you. For everyone out there that is watching this show right now, I just want to say that you make all of this possible. You've made it possible for us to bring these lawsuits that have brought freedom back and help freedom reign here once again in America. This is a unique experiment that I have been describing to friends.

Not only are we bringing the news, unlike any other news channel that I know of, you are supporting us and you're watching this show, and we are taking half of that to go and fight in the courtrooms across America to make sure that the news we're reporting on doesn't end up just plaguing us the rest of our lives. We're out to try and change it. And that is, I think, what the high wire informed consent action network, our nonprofit. This is an experiment that is really working. And just for those of you that are really watching this for the first time, when we started going to the courtrooms to fight for

transparency on vaccines, to get around the protections of liability that have been given by our government to these manufacturers so they can't be sued, therefore have no concern whether their product hurts us or not, the government, I think, always thought they were going to get away with it because who could afford to bring lawsuits if there was no money to be made from those lawsuits. Well, these cases are just about transparency. There's no money to be won, and the only reason we're able to stand there and wait out the government when they try to make it as expensive as possible and keep appealing and keep pushing back and keep trying to wait us out, we're able to keep you standing there because of all of you beautiful people out there that fund

the work that we're doing and allow us to stay in these cases until we win. And man, Have you won a lot of cases? Aaron, if you want to see this work continue, just donate now. You can go to the top of the screen where you're watching this, thehighwire.com, hit donate. And what we'd like for you to do is become a recurring donor. We're looking at, if you could, you know, go with $23 a month for $2023, but a dollar every month, you know, or a cup of coffee. How about $5 or $6 a month, skip a Starbucks, what you're calling a coffee, and I would call a milkshake. Might actually do you better to lay off of it this morning and instead support the work that is fighting to bring back our freedoms, our democracy, our republic.

It's such an honor to be sitting with both of you. Wouldn't be here without you. So thank you so much. Aaron. Thank you, Jeffrey. Really incredible. You never know what's going to happen when you come to an event like Freedom Fest, especially here. So many powerful speakers are wandering around.

Well, I ran into one that is one of the highlights of this festival here, and that's Mike Rowe. I was able to get with him this morning. He was very busy, but took some time to sit down and talk. If you don't know who Mike Rowe is, I guess you never had a dirty job. Mike Rowe, Mr. Mike Rowe. Mike Rowe, CEO of the Micro Works Foundation and All-Around Great Guy. America's famous dirty jobs guy. You, of course, know Mike for hosting Dirty Jobs.

He's an activist for the trades and for regular working people. Host CEO Micro of the Micro Works Foundation. I run a foundation called MicroWorks, and it evolved very organically 15 years ago out of a show called Dirty Jobs. Scale of 1 to 10, how bad is this? 10's the worst, right? Yeah. Yep. 11?

No doubt. Most people in the country got to know me as a guy crawling through, a sewer. And so they saw me literally covered in other people's crap as I attempted to do whatever the god-awful job was. There's a lot of poop in there. Yeah. Yeah, fever poop. It's a new one. And on my little show, Dirty Jobs, everywhere I went at this time of record high unemployment, all we saw was help wanted signs. And so that's when it first occurred to me. We got 7.2 million able-bodied men in prime working age, sitting out the workforce. That's never happened in peacetime.

Nothing in the history of Western civilization has gotten more expensive, more quickly than a four-year degree. Yet, we're still putting incredible pressure on kids. We're telling them if they don't take this path, they're going to be screwed. And it's crazy. The best path for the most people can't be the most expensive path. Mike Rowe, it's really a pleasure to have you joining me this morning. I know you're running around as I am here at Freedom Fest, so I appreciate you. taking the time.

It's a festival, man. It is. It's a festival. If there's a schedule, I don't know what it is. This is so cool. Literally, it's kind of early for me anyway. And they said, we're in a hotel. We're on the second floor.

Come down, have coffee, sit, chat. I said, fine, here we are. Here we are. So tell me, I mean, obviously we've all watched you in, you know, dirty jobs, taking us around the world and all these, you know, crazy things that people do, rolling up their sleeves. But how does that connect you to Freedom Fest? Why, like a libertarian conference?

or, you know, and you're one of the hot tickets here. A lot of people looking forward to seeing you speak. So what's connecting these things together for you? Well, I mean, the honest answer, I'm probably not equipped to know for sure. They've reached out over the years, many times, and this is the first time the schedule lined up. But I suspect, as I understand liberty and freedom, there's an unscripted element to both, right? Yeah. I mean, people who truly live that life have to embrace a certain randomness and uncertainty about the future. They're very certain about the present and they have great respect for the past. And I do too.

I'm a big fan of history and whatnot. But when you look forward, the sense that I get from the people here is that we don't know with certainty what's coming, right? But we're still good-humored about it and we're still optimistic. And humor and optimism were the pillars that held dirty jobs up, right? You can't crawl through a sewer for 20 years and not be in on the joke, right? Right. And not have a healthy respect for what could happen.

And also, you meet people day after day after day who share that sensibility. You know, Dirty Jobs was never a polemic, wasn't a political show at all. It was just an honest look at regular people working for a living. And our cameras were really unobtrusive, a very small crew. We never stopped rolling. We never did a second take. We just, they let me be a fly on the wall and work as an apprentice. So to answer your question, I think that that sensibility, that sense of curiosity,

and maybe even wonder at the world somehow resonates with the people here. So they saw something of that in me. And here we sit. A lot of conversations that I've seen you in right now. When we look at working class versus sort of white collar, blue collar, I guess, what you've really been covering. And it's weird that this show was so successful looking at what had always been. been considered just mundane jobs, things that were overlooked, as though we were watching it

inside of a zoo or something. Like, whoa, you can't believe what these people actually do, yet they keep our lives going. Yeah. So at a glance, you can look at that show and see a love letter to Blue Collar America, and in many ways it was. But if you peel back the layers, you'll really see that underneath all the dirt, it was never about the color of collars.

It was about the willingness to do a thing, a hard thing in many cases, the willingness to be uncomfortable, you know, and most of all the willingness to assume risk. So a lot of people on that show were small business owners, and many of them, maybe upwards of 40, were multi-millionaires. You would never know it. Yeah. Because the show wasn't about saying, look what I've built, look what I've done, look at the money I've made. And it's also very difficult to look at a person covered in somebody else's crap and go, ah, multi-millionaire. So we presented over time again and again many examples of success that didn't look like success.

But we always had at the heart of the show a celebration of labor, right? So I think when you look at that combined with the willingness to take risk, and also, Remember, Dirty Jobs went on the air in 2003. There was no reality TV, as we understand it. There was Survivor, which was a competition show. I think Jesse James was building motorcycles in his garage, right? Right. But that was it.

So to send a knucklehead like me out into the world with no script, no production, no pre-production, no second takes, and really trust me to satisfy my own curiosity simply by working with people, that was weird. Nobody quite knew what to make of it when it went on the air. And then, as you've experienced, there's always a moment

when you realize who you really work for, right? And it's almost never the people who are signing the checks. It's almost always the people who are watching. And the feedback that came in, the minute that show aired, it was unlike anything I'd ever seen

because it wasn't, it wasn't oh that was so funny or oh that was so interesting it was Mike you got to meet my dad you think that was dirty you got to meet my granddad my uncle my brother my cousin my sister my mom wait do you see what they do and that was the moment where it was like oh this isn't a show at all this is a mirror that people can see themselves in yeah and so when the audience responded in that way. I knew that we'd be on the air for decades. Absolutely.

At the heart of it, you know, I feel like my generation, I could be wrong, but I feel like my generation, you know, I was born in 1970, that suddenly the idea of fixing cars or being a plumber, it was just this,

that was not a life. It just became, you had to go to college, you should be going to university, you know, that is not a, way you're not going to have a family you want to have a house I mean I just feel like there's this shift where you know the daughter of salesman you know all all these ideas of people that just

are out there on the ground working are good solid American stock that they're doing what a nation does what people do suddenly there's just this shift we really look down upon the that those working class jobs my do you feel that that yeah I would say that we'd have a sense of that I would say that we didn't start looking down on them, we simply stopped looking at them. Before you can disparage a thing, you have to ignore it. And we started ignoring it. My granddad went to the seventh grade. He became a master electrician, steam fitter, pipe fitter, mechanic. He could build a house without a blueprint, right? He was that guy. And in his day, he was heroism. He was a I mean, his skills were highly valued.

And toward the end of his life, he and many other men and women in his world became transparent. There's a song in a, I forget the music, it's called Mr. Cellophane, right? You can just see right through them. So that's what started to happen, I think. And part of the reason it happened is because a lot of well-intended parents wanted something better. better for their kids. And that desire really reared its ugly head in the way we talk about education. It started there. We took shop class out of high school. Yeah. Right. And we started telling a whole generation of kids that the best path for the most people was a four-year degree. And if you

didn't do that, well, woe unto thee. Right. Right. So college and what we call higher education did need a PR campaign around the time you were born, 60s and 70s. We needed more people going to the big universities to pursue things like medicine and science. There was no doubt about that. But the thing is with PR, it always goes a little too far, sometimes a lot. So instead of just simply making a persuasive case for a four-year education, we started to tell, the generation you're talking about, that if they don't go that way, they're screwed. If they don't go that way, they're going to wind up turning a wrench or welding something and some dark, dirty hole somewhere.

They were going to, in other words, receive some kind of vocational consolation prize. So the push for college came at the expense of all other forms of education. And then, because our workforce is so tied to learning, a certain category of good jobs that required that four-year degree, became ascendant, and everything else became subordinate. And in my view, that's where the gap really presented itself. That's where the line between blue and white collar appeared. that's where ideas like entrepreneurship and freelancing fell out of favor. And a lot of unfortunate things happened after that as a result. But it began with the incredibly hairbrained decision to take shop class out of high school.

Right. I mean, and HOMAC and all these things. Like how to, you know, and frankly, I feel like we've been economics, most people can't even don't know how to work a checkbook or you mean all that disappeared we were going to have servants that take care of that all I guess while we right went and went to you know these higher spaces of learning it's interesting you say that because there there is a line I think you can draw between the practical skill of being able to change your oil right right and good luck today I don't know if you've looked under the hood but you need a software engineering degree I don't even know

where the oil is anymore right right and so bit by bit, the basic tasks that I grew up with have become arbitraged out of the set of necessary skills. And with that is financial literacy. I talk to Dave Ramsey about this a lot, because being financially literate, understanding how to balance your checkbook, is every bit as much an important skill as all the other things we're talking about. And so somehow, all of that did fall out of favor. We stopped valuing it to the degree that we should. And like I said, the first step to marginalizing or disparaging a thing is to ignore it.

One of the things I think about, you know, I feel lucky. I have a life, you know, I waited tables for 20 years trying to get into the film business and directing and writing and doing all of those things. probably because to be put it out there, my parents were not, they were 60s, hippies, but by the time I was college age, my dad was like, if you want to make film, why go to school? Like, you don't need to, you know, get an educate. What degree is going to do anything for you? I ended up just going to, like, a vocational film school and learned how to work cameras

and started just, I mean, I went in debt, you know, on credit cards, making short films, music videos and things until I finally sort of found my stride. but I think, you know, I'm very great for my life. I love what I do, but I'm a workaholic. I work all the time. I'm obsessed with what I do. And I will drive down the street and see, you know, Latino communities that are doing menial, like the hardworking, task-driven jobs. But by four in the afternoon, they're all playing with their kids in the yard and enjoying themselves.

And it looks like what our picture of America used to be. mom, dad out there, barbecuing, kids running around. And I don't feel like most of the people I know live that life anymore. There was beyond just sort of having education or looking down at certain ways of living, I feel like there was a shift where my job defines who I am. I'm supposed to be totally, you know, fulfilled by my work. Right. Versus it used to be, and you go anywhere else in the world.

culturally most other countries still I have a job my life my kids my vacations are what I live for not my job do you does that make some sense to you it's like this weird notion that we are our job well I think the American dream isn't that or this the American dream is being able to choose which one you'd like I'm a workaholic too yeah but I like it right I like what I do. I like the fact that no two days are the same. I like the fact that today I can be sitting here with you, waxing philosophical

about all the problems in the world. And yesterday, I was here at a liquor store called Busters, right around the corner, selling a whiskey brand that we launched to help benefit the foundation that I run today. Those two things have very little to do

with each other unless you choose a path that we've chosen. But this other thing that talk about, you know, that's one of the big lessons from Dirty Jobbers that is fun to talk about if you're looking for lessons from the dirt. I think what you've just described is balance. So you find people who again and again are happy to bust their butt 40, 50 hours a week, who are really good at what they do, but because they're in a trade and because they've crafted the life that they want, they flip a switch.

And then they coach their kids' Little League. Yeah. Right? And then they go to the PTA. And then, you know, maybe they're in a botchy ball tournament. And maybe they're hanging out with their kids. Or maybe they're just reading a book. So I'd be lying to you if I didn't say that there were times when I look at that vertical

and I envy it. Yeah. Right? I'm just like, that's a good path. But I also know from living long enough. that there are a lot of people who have chosen that path who look at my choice and go, dude, you're living the Vita Loka. How'd you do that?

That looks like fun. And of course it is. But part of its fear of missing out, part of it's just greener grass on the other side. But to me, you know, being able to become an adult with a fully formed brain and then have the opportunity to look broadly at the choices in front of you and select, that's freedom. That's worth having a festival over, right? That's liberty, you know.

And also, not having to live forever with your choice, you know? Sure. As Led Zeppelin put it, as Robert Plant saying it, there's still time to change the road you're on. Right. You know, I see this in my foundation all the time. I just talk to a kid named Michael Gammes, who applied for one of our work ethic scholarships. He was two and a half years through a university system in Southern California. He was already in debt.

He was going down the road of like a mechanical engineer when really all he wanted to do was work on cars. So he applies to our foundation, writes his story, jumps through all the necessary hoops. I'm like, that's rare today that this kid has the presence of mind to say, I'm going in the wrong direction. Today, he's the lead service technician at a BMW facility in California, and he's making six figures, doing what he loves. So he called an audible, which so many kids today are afraid to do. And why wouldn't they be afraid?

They're already in Hawk. They're paying, you know, 80 grand a year to go to a school to learn a thing that they're not even sure they want to do. So this is all, in my view, it all gets tied together, and before a person can make the choice of how they want to live their life, they have to be shown a whole rich, honest selection of what's possible. And we don't do that for our kids. This just recently, I mean, this, in the Biden administration, and, you know, I don't want to wax political, but this idea of reimbursing or bailing out, you know, these college tuition. Forgiving, I think, is the

work of giving the debt, which is a massive debt, it's a huge debt. It's a huge debt. but there was a real, I think, a real controversy in that, which was, what about everybody that either paid their debt or didn't use that avenue? Why are all the people that went and got jobs and are working and are doing my plumbing and fixing my cars? Why should they have to pay for that debt when they, you know, and it really brought about this a new, I think a fresh look at least at, what are we talking about here? Why is there so much debt? Why is it that the careers, these college students were promised aren't happening and paying off that debt. And then what responsibility do we have as a nation to that debt, that idea? And I think part of what you're involved in right now

is trying to bring some reality to this that we need a shift here. There's something out of balance. There's a promise being made to a lot of students and children that is not being fulfilled by this system or this nation. So two things, right? There's the past and there's the problem that we have today based on decisions that were made back there. And with respect to that, yeah, I forgive you. I'll forgive your debt. I'm not going to pay for it. But I'll forgive you. Right. I mean, we all make bad decisions that we have to live with. In fairness, to the other side, you know, a lot of people who want their loans forgiven are looking around at the giant bailout. of 2008 and 2010.

Right. And they're saying banks, hello. You know, we just paid trillions of dollars to bail out other people who made really bad decisions. And I get that, right? And I'm a little out of my lane here with regard to, you know, when to bail out a company and when not to bail out a company. Silicon Valley Bank, not far from where I live, right?

It's headline news. Yeah. That chaps. the ass of many people to see that kind of money, right? Sure. Dold out for them. Yeah. So I get it.

But this feels different to me for the reason you just said. When a person is trying to make a decision about how to live their life, about how much debt to personally assume, that's a personal decision. So if you decide for yourself, look, I'm going to invest in making films, I'm going to I'm going to use the tools in my toolbox and I'm going to invest my money and I'm going to assume my debt. And that's how I'm going to approach my career. Well, then you get to live with those consequences. So if you're a plumber and you want to hang out your own shingle and you buy a couple F-150s, that expenditure is every bit as important as the guy who wants to be an accountant who pays to go to Harvard or whatever.

Right? And so these are tools. Why don't we forgive the debt on the 150, right? Why don't we forgive those things? Why all of a sudden is education the thing? College education in particular that we're willing to just write another check for. People need to understand. We're already $1.7 trillion in the whole.

We are lending money still in real time that we don't have to kids who are never going to be able to pay it back to train them for these jobs that don't. really exist anymore. And that, to me, goes to the heart of the real crazy making. We have 11 million open positions right now. Most of them don't require a four-year degree. And yet, we're still telling the next generation of kids that they're screwed if they don't get their magic credential. So the opportunities are getting larger and larger. The skills gap is getting wider and wider. The debt is getting bigger and bigger. And if the solution to that is just

bail us out, well, then my question back would be, how in the world is the cost of college ever going to come down if we just keep bailing out the universities? Right. Harvard has a $50 billion endowment. Stanford is close to that. You can go down the list. The Ivy League has many, many hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, right? Who's asking them to help with the bailout? Who's asking the banks to help with the bailout? So I get why there's tension. And because I don't know really how to solve that, all I can do is look forward, right, and say, let's stop making the same mistake over and over again. Let's stop telling kids. Do you imagine the pressure being 17, 18 years old. Your guidance counselor is telling you, you've got to go this

direction. Your parents want you to go in this direction. Your cohort, your friends, everybody is saying you don't want to go over here. Meanwhile, I can give you hundreds of examples of welders making six figures a year, living their version of the dream. So we just have to get that into the conversation. Well, I mean, everything I pay for my house to have my septic pumped, it's amazing what that cost. It's amazing what these individuals are making because I didn't want to do that job. The plumbers, like all of it, it's absolutely astounding. They're doing well. They're driving really nice cars when they're not pulling up in the truck. Or they're living a modest, balanced life, right? So, yes, it's a heck of a thing. And I think, too, it's important to realize it's,

this conversation is not just about, oh, being a plumber is better than you think. Or, Hey, the skills gap is serious. Look at all these companies who can't hire. The conversation today is, how long do you want to wait for a plumber when you need one? I mean, I feel like our nation, honestly, like it's really starting to freak me out a little bit. Yeah.

Is crumbling to a grinding to a halt. You know, we just pulled in here, and there was no cars available to, they said no cars in the airport. I don't know what that means. There was one giant line to budget, You know, and then everyone else, there was people sitting behind desks and went to Alden, like, you know, we don't have any cars. So does that mean?

Someone was saying they just don't have the workers to move the cars or whatever the case. But there's a lot of things that are starting to feel like images of the Soviet Union where there's like we're all in a giant line to the one thing that's providing something and nothing else is working. Service is dead. I feel like most restaurants because that was something I did for years. Passion for serving. Passion for understanding the wine I'm talking about. engaging with me, you know, I'm looking around for a waiter everywhere. Like, what part of your, you know, I would love another glass of wine, which makes you more

money. I just feel like after COVID, we shut everything down and it's like we forgot how the world works. It's really terrifying. So look at it like this. Standards can be raised or lowered. We have it in our ability. in any scenario to raise or lower our expectations.

With COVID and with lockdowns, we had no real choice for a while but to lower them. And lowering expectations is much easier than raising them, which is why to this day you'll still see signs on restaurants outside, not just help wanted signs, preemptive apologies, right? Thank you for your patience. We are still at half staff. Thank you for understanding. You know, our servers didn't show up.

Our hostess didn't show up. I've seen dozens of signs like that where the service industry is preemptively apologizing. Right. Now, in the restaurant industry, they have to do that because the choices are still there for the time being. And an angry consumer is just going to go down the street and eat somewhere else. But in your scenario, just now, I've been in that budget line. Yeah. And there are no other choices, right?

You're just there. And so if you want a car in order to do the thing, you need to wait. So now your expectations get lowered even further and further, right? And so it's going to be very tempting to point a finger and blame somebody for this. But I think the 30,000 foot view comes back to what we started talking about. When you have an unbalanced workforce, when you draw bright lines between blue and white collar, when you value one form of education and labor affirmatively higher than the other, you create myths and misperceptions and stigmas and stereotypes that keep a whole generation of people

from looking at the opportunities over there. Consequently, we are where we are. The skills gap is not a great myth. mystery. It's just a reflection of what we value. Yeah. Right? In the same way, the incredible cost of college is not a great mystery. It's a reflection of what we reward. And not to belabor the point, but my God, you can't find anything in the last 50 years that's gotten more expensive, more rapidly than the cost of a four-year degree. It's outpaced inflation by something like 500 percent.

Not food, not energy, not health care, not even real estate. Nothing has become more expensive, more quickly than the cost of a four-year degree. And we're still telling kids they're screwed if they don't get one. Right. Is it any wonder you're standing in a line at budget for two hours? Speaking of a myth, you say myths that have been spoken. I think one of the real concerns was AI. Yeah.

That AI is going to come along and it's going to rob all of those workers, like we're going to have machines, they're going to build those cars, you won't have a job. Yet the first glimpse of AI we're really seeing chat, GPT and this, you know, I think part of the writer's strike and things that are happening in Hollywood right now are you can't let the computer do our job for us, even though it looks like you could probably do it pretty well. Right. And right? So upper, like it's really, it's AI shockingly outside, like almost in opposition to the myth is going after upper man. management writing, you know, contracts. Lawyers jobs are on the line, and what we don't see it able to do is fix the plumbing in my house. That's right. For decades, we've heard the robots are

coming to take our blue-collar jobs. And look, you can go through state-of-the-art factories today, and you can find all kinds of automated welding stations, and you can see examples of how tech and robotics have in fact had an impact on those traditional jobs, just like the Luddite revolution, right? You can, like the impact of looms on weavers, right? Right. Led to a war. I mean, so it's, this has been with us for a long, long time. With regard to AI, it's, I always chuckle when I hear it because AI is the reason dirty jobs got on the air. I pitched a segment on AI. And my boss was like, that sounds like, that sounds like, that sounds like, It sounds great. We're all about artificial intelligence. Well, I was talking about artificial insemination.

That's true story. Wow. I mean, dirty jobs got off the ground because basically I was doing stuff to animals on barnyards that might not have been entirely legal in the name of science. Point is AI is here for real today. It's coming. And it is ironic that the real existential threat that's got people paying attention is not robots coming for blue. collar, it's artificial intelligence coming for white collar. In the end, I don't have a crystal ball, but I do know that you're 100% right. When you look at opportunity through the lens of AI, you're going to see very clearly a list of jobs that can be replaced and very clearly a list of jobs that can't. My foundation, what we do is focus on those jobs that cannot be outsourced, ever. So the stuff you're working at MicroWorks is that foundation. You have a podcast?

Got a podcast called The Way I Heard it, which people seem to like. Check it out. MicroWorks.org is where to go to apply for work ethic scholarship. We'll be giving away. We give away a million dollars every six months now. Specifically for kids who want to learn a skill that's in demand. If you know one, if you are one, hit me up. You got some hoops to jump through, but there's a way forward.

Is this what it's going to take? I mean, you know, I think we're all worried that the future is looking dim. There's some really scary things. And we're here in a libertarian conference, a lot of things coming in. AI being one of them. We just went through a massive social experiment, no matter where you are in science and medicine, a lot of our freedoms and our First Amendment rights, our jobs were taken away from us if we didn't comply to certain behaviors mandated by the government. for someone that's just sort of been on the ground with people in a really beautiful and real way, how do we get through this month? What is it that we have to do? I believe that the trust that we've historically had in our institutions has been eroded to a point where we can't simply take people's word for anything. And that's a little scary. on the one hand. On the other hand, you know, I believe that everybody should embrace a new level

of skepticism. We have to. Caviate, umptur, buyer beware. Right. And this applies to everything, because we've just sat through a three-year period where a lot of very certain sounding people, scientists, politicians, doctors, they not only got it wrong, they haven't a policy. They haven't a apologized and they're doubling down on it. Meanwhile, we have a media that hasn't apologized either. Unbelievable. I agree. So there's a level of hubris and arrogance that and hypocrisy, right? I don't mean to get it political either because none of what I'm saying is inherently left or right center. It's just human. But when a guy like, I'll just say it, you know, because I live in California. When Gavin Newsom

tells us what to do and then very publicly doesn't do it, that lands hard. Yeah. Right? And when it happens in a lot of other ways, day after day after day after day, this erosion occurs. Here's what it comes down for me. I listen to Joe Rogan interview Robert Kennedy Jr. Yeah. Did you hear that one?

Of course. All right. So in that conversation, they talk about Peter Hottes. Okay. And so, obviously you're, I'm pretty well versed. This is my wheelhouse space. Oh. This is what a lot of what the high wire has gotten into.

We were on top of COVID. I came from a medical journalist background. Yeah. So we saw that the vaccine wasn't going to stop transmission before anyone got it. All of that was written by the FDA. Just no one was paying attention to it. Right. This is a lot of the space.

But to say that out loud two years ago gets you thrown off social. I did. I lost my YouTube channel, my Facebook channel for saying that. We're my hero. I want to start following you. This is terrific. My moment last week in listening to that interview and then Rogan's invitation to get Hotez back on just to have a debate. That was interesting.

The fact that he refused was interesting. The fact that other. people offered to throw in more money to see this debate was super interesting. The fact that Sam Harris, who runs a podcast called Making Sense, and who often does, he came out and he said, look, here's what I want to say about this. I wouldn't have Robert Kennedy Jr. on my podcast, because I'm not going to platform those ideas that I believe have been thoroughly debunked and discounted. I don't even want to dignify it. And that's when I said, wait, he, Sam, doesn't seem to understand that we have entered a new age of skepticism.

Yes. And you just can't point to the college professor or the doctor or the scientist. Our experts, to answer your question, sorry it took so long, but what has to happen, in my view, is our expert class has to step up. and persuade me. Amen. They have to persuade you. They have to persuade. It's time for the people

who've been given an enormous benefit of the doubt. The people who we've trusted as a result of all the letters after their names. As a result of their credential, as a result of all of the respect that those institutions

have been imbued with, it's time for them to say, you know what? I'd rather not, but I will. I will sit down and I will debate you. And I will make a persuasive case for the science. I will make a persuasive case for my politics. And the media has to help us.

They have to help us. They have to lead. We need a skeptical, indignant media. Agreed. That doubts every single thing they hear. And if we don't have that, we're going to be left to figure it out for ourselves. I've said for some time that science and media actually have a same foundational principle, or at least used to, which is the scientific method. I'm going to throw every challenge at it I can think of, and you're supposed to celebrate my challenge because it makes the product better.

It makes the theory more sound. We are now in a place where no challenge is allowed. A brand new vaccine, like a COVID vaccine, no one's allowed to say, hey, wait, are we rushing this? Oh, you're a denier. Are we rushing this around? Right. I mean, so this name calling, we are moving in a very scary place. and media is doing the same thing.

It's not challenging. That's right. We've lost the fourth estate, the fourth branch of government, which job was to challenge government, challenge industry. Any question you can think of, it should be celebrated as an opportunity for that entity, that government official or that corporation, to defend itself and show why it perseveres and rises up.

And I think a word maybe, you said earlier, that at least we as people maybe should let go of, is the skepticism, yes, but I think the softer and more beautiful part of is curiosity. I think we've lost our curiosity. Now, you're singing my, that's my thing, that the idea, if you're a fundamentally curious person, then you have an advantage built in that you probably don't quite understand the totality of that. To be genuinely curious, my friend John Hendricks, who founded the Discovery Channel in 1984, did so with one intention to satisfy curiosity.

That was the mandate of the entire channel. And that name is now atop the largest entertainment conglomerate on the planet, right? Right. So, yes, we need to be passionately in love with curiosity. But I would say also that the skepticism thing is so important. I had a drama teacher once. I don't know if this is true, I think it is, but Descartes famous expression, ergo-cagetum, ergo-sum, right? He's in jail and he's challenged to prove his existence on a philosophical level.

So he basically says, I think, therefore, I am. But what he actually said, apparently, was ergo-doubtitum-ergosum. I doubt, therefore I am. There's a difference between thinking and doubting. And I think we've entered a new age of doubt, and I think that scares the expert class. And they shouldn't be scared. They should be curious to figure out how to fix it. They should be determined to win back their reputation.

They should apologize for being. hypocritical, they should admit when they're wrong, you want to win the trust back of your consumers? Well, the first thing you have to do is honestly and sincerely apologize. And then you have to do something about it. Right. This, I forget its name, but I just read an article yesterday. The CEO of that brand said, I accept 100%. This is, this is on me. This, this, this is, was my fault. And then he pivoted to talk about what he was going to do moving forward, as opposed to quitting. Now, I'm not calling on the CEO of Anheuser-Busch, too. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying, isn't it interesting to live in a time where you can accept 100% responsibility

for devastating catastrophic results? 65,000 employees are liable to lose their job when a brand that big falls apart. So he's 100% accepting responsibility, but he's not resigning. Yeah. He's saying, as a result, I need to step back. I need to introduce you to my replacement. I believe she or he has their head screwed on straight. We're going to work hard to win back your trust.

And we're going to take the slings and arrows that we deserve for violating that trust. Yeah. If I hear that from a CEO, who wants to win my trust back, I'll give him a chance. If I hear it from a doctor who got it wrong or a politician or a journalist, okay. Right. Now, now I'm listening. But if you're going to march forward with the same old routine, la la, la, nothing to see here. Oh, he's just a doubter. He's just a denier. He's just a skeptic. I don't think that's going to fly in 2024. I don't think it is. I don't thing it's flying. Why I think you see mainstream media crashing. I think the attentiveness, podcasts like mine, things that you're doing are Rogan. You know, people want to hear the whole

story. They're not just wanting the sound bite anymore because it's left us short. What we've gone through with COVID's last several years have been a real wake-up call. A lot is destroyed in this country. But I love the work that you're doing because it's how we build, right? It's going to be through our own sweat equity, our own, you know, desire to get back, roll up our sleeves and realize not just for the workers out there, but for us that are, you know, electing people, that we've got to start asking questions and demanding we get the answer is not some soundbite. And I think, too, really, all things to me are big and small at the same time, micro macro, right? Yeah.

And we're here at this conference, and there is a political overtone, and we're talking about some very big brands and it's a very big companies and we're talking about the country at large that's macro and guys like us what can we do except speak our peace and push the boulder up the hill in a very stoic isisyphian way that's it yeah but there's also the micro thing right there's also our own homes there's our own personal economy there's our own sense of of the world and and we can move that Boulder too. We have to. So that's what I do like about the libertarian thing. That's what I do like about this conference. In the end, there is still a reverence for the individual and a belief that cookie cutter advice doesn't work and that a fellow ought to be free to find his own way. And maybe

that means falling on his face. Maybe that means borrowing some money. He can't pay back. Maybe a lot of things. But if we're landing the plane now, I'd end where we started. The future is always uncertain. Nobody has a crystal ball. But we can learn from the past. And we can learn from the present.

And we don't just have to sit on our hands and trust the people who are talking to us in a crisp, well-modulated baritone to always have the truth. If we've learned anything over the last three years, is that we're long on certainty and short on facts.

Amen. Mike Roe, it's really been a pleasure. Thank you for taking the time. I've never had so much fun at a conference room for this hour of the morning. This is great. Really appreciate it. Absolutely. I want to thank Mike Roe for taking the time.

This is just an amazing conversation you get to have at Freedom Fest. If you're out there and you want to support the work or look into what Mike Roe is doing, definitely check out micro works.org. That's where his nonprofit is helping people find another path to success in their life. And of course, you've got the way I heard it podcast by Mike Rowe. Definitely check that out. What a thoughtful guy. Such a great moment we had this morning.

For everybody that's here at the conference, make sure that you stop by our booth. If you have questions about the vaccine program, want to know what lawsuits we won. Did you know that we're the ones that were. able to, you know, bring you the evidence of the V-Safe data, which was the data collected to track the COVID vaccine. That's got 10 million people in it. All that evidence, they were trying to hide it. We sued in one. Aaron, Siri, our lawyer also sued FDA and got all the Pfizer data.

So the Pfizer trial data is now being released to the public millions of documents, all because of his work. So this is the type of thing that we're doing here. freedom is really our responsibility. Our founding fathers told us it would come under attack. It was inevitable that this experiment would one day be pressured from Central Reserve banking systems or corporate greed and corporate takeover of your government. We can come to conferences like this, but more importantly, we can start having conversations with one another, just like Mike Rowe and I did.

Who knew that he saw the podcast with Robert K. Kennedy Jr. and that that's something that's on his mind. I didn't know that until we were having a conversation. It's our ability to communicate, to talk about the problems of our time. And as he put it, develop a new level of skepticism. It is time to return to having a skeptical mind. I doubt. Therefore, I am. It is what makes us different than really many other animals on this planet. our ability to reason, reason looking for facts, demanding evidence, or as he's so well put it, it's time for the expert class to step up and persuade us. That is what the high wire is all about. We are demanding evidence to persuade us about the things that are being said,

whether it's about our environment, whether it's about our drugs, our vaccines, whether it's about school shootings, and many, many other things like mosquitoes. All of these things are ultimately going to affect our lives, and we should start demanding that we be a part of the process of deciding how we move forward instead of sitting back and letting it all be done for us. That hasn't worked for us so well, so it's time to step up and make a difference. Be skeptical. Realize that your freedom and your liberty is depending on it.

The Highwire is all about. That's what Freedom Fest is all about. I want to thank everybody that made all of this happen today. I want to thank the studio audience here. And may we all continue to do our work to help freedom reign. I'll see you next week.