The Highwire with Del Bigtree - Episode 467: AUTISM VACCINE TRUTH, HHS SHAKEUP, AND WE ARE COOKIN

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

Del returns from Washington, DC with major updates on vaccine injury and autism. Jefferey Jaxen reports on a HHS leadership shakeup, and the growing demand for accountability in public health. Del breaks down the MAHA Institute’s landmark conversation on vaccine injury, examines what Vinay Prasad’s departure from HHS could mean, and speaks with Tracy Slepcevic of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) about why having parents at the table matters. Plus, chef Aran Goldstein is cookin’! Chef joins the show to discuss school lunch reform, healthy meals, and practical ways to bring real food home.Guests: Tracy Slepcevic, Aran GoldsteinMarch, 12, 2026Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

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Yeah. Action. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you are out there in the world, it's time for us all to step out into the high wire. Well, it's been an amazing week. For me, I got an opportunity to travel back to Washington, D.C., the belly of the beast. if you will, for a Maha Institute. Incredible event looking at vaccine injury,

just really the focus. Mevi, you know, just all about vaccine injury and being focused and all of the scientists looking at it, all that we know, all that we don't know, symposium all day long. It was amazing. We live streamed it. And by the way, if you signed up to our newsletter

or signed up on our email list, you know every time we're going live. So you should make sure that you're signed up for that if you want to know events that are coming in the future. But this is just a taste of what that event was like. Many people in this room and around the country have been working for years to bring attention to the problem of vaccine injury. We've done studies. We've published books and movies. Thousands of parents have spoken out about their own experiences.

But still, vaccine injury is a taboo topic. Doctors shy away from it. Reporters don't dare touch it. Researchers risk their careers if they publish work on the subject. We are abandoned by science and our kids. are the representation of where we're at, the sickest nation in the world, the sickest generation this nation has ever seen.

No one gets to have pride under these circumstances. We're oftentimes told that vaccines are a purely scientific enterprise, but in fact they're a deeply metaphysical and deeply religious artifact as well. And oftentimes the line between faith and scientific evaluation is strongly blurred. From 1998 to 2002, the amount of research that I had done was very concerning. Because while I was in the hospital, I went down into the library and went into the literature, into the package inserts, into the textbooks. And I saw that there was no information about the ingredients that are in vaccines

and how, when injected into children, they understand what happens. I've evaluated about 600 kids with autism. 23% of my patients in answer to an open-ended question, what do you think might have caused or triggered your child's deterioration? We'll say the MMR vaccine. So we ought to believe parents when they say that. In 1986, when we had 11 vaccines,

our chronic disease rate in America was 12.8%. Then we had the 1986 Act took away liability. And suddenly the vaccine program became a gold rush, 54 shots, 72 vaccines. We went from 12.8% chronic disease to over 54% chronic disease. This isn't happening with any other mammal on the planet. Only the smartest mammal. 33 million children in the United States right now have some type of chronic condition, excluding obesity.

And that that has increased by fourfold since the 19, 80s and it does track directly with the vaccination schedule. So why would the federal government, why would the CDC, the HHS, the NIH, the FDA look everywhere else except for vaccinations? And it's not about just protecting against diseases. It's also about injuries. Any medical product can have an injury and you can want two things. You can want kids to be safe, but you can also want safe products, and those two things are not exclusive. I think the majority of Americans understand that the COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous. A Rasmussen survey came out a few months ago and found that, I believe, over 56% of American voters

believe that the COVID-19 shots caused mass deaths, so it appears it's now in the majority. 91% of American support-informed consent. 88% support the right to refuse medical treatment. 87% medical choice is a human right. Overwhelming majorities of our citizens support medical freedom. There's a culture of denial that is coming undone, not because of pediatricians, but because of parents. What they're seeing is real, and the gaslighting is on its way out. and it needs to be on its way up.

The religion is dissolving right before our eyes. Be gracious. We're winning. But be loud and more proud than you've ever been. It's just a spectacular event. I want to congratulate Mark Gorton in this incredible team there at Maha Institute. Really excellent panels of scientists and doctors and pediatricians looking at these issues, massive epidemic of vaccine injury.

is. It's just, it's absolutely unbelievable. If you want to go back and watch it or some parts of it, you can just click on this QR code or use the Bitley Mevy Roundtable and watch it. We, you know, recorded the entire event. Really spectacular. Later that evening, I went over and Maha Action had a really excellent event similar to the one we talked about here in Austin. The Eat Real Food Campaign continues on. Robert Kennedy Jr. was there and Callie Means and several other speakers. Ran Paul talking about his bill, trying to, you know, take liability or put liability back on the manufacturer so we can get vaccines back in a free market system. And you just sit here, you know, listening to speakers, watching real politicians in the center of Washington, D.C., panels of, you know, news

reporters from every major newspaper. And I just have to say, you sit there and just think, oh, my God, how far we have come. And I really love. that Mark Gordon and the Maha Institute decided to really focus on vaccine injury because I think at times it feels like, you know, Bobby is in there. He's working government. You can tell he's entrenched and trying to get as much done as he can. But what this really shows is Mahas a movement. Bobby's going to do everything you can do. Love the work that he's doing. Marty, Dr. Oz. But we've got to continue in this conversation with everyone we know and seeing a venue where these scientists could talk about what they're discovering. even every day there's a new discovery and a new horror coming out, especially on the COVID vaccine. So just spectacular time in Washington, D.C., and it really made us think about the fact that we haven't said this yet, but this is actually our 10th anniversary year for the work that ICANN has been doing, and ultimately the high wire. It's 10 years of impact.

We've won lawsuits that, you know, many of the scientists and doctors are referencing studies that came out of lawsuits that we won in court. You made that possible. Those of you that have been donating to make that possible. There's an inconvenient study was used. Graphs and, you know, storylines from that were used by other speakers. Of course, I spoke about it too. But all of this work we do is all about transparency, bringing transparency back to science. And, of course, demanding the scientific method take place. So one of the things we wanted to do we thought it would be really fun is so many of you come up to me in airports or even at that event in Washington, D.C., You know who you are and you'll come up and say, oh my God, you know, you saved my child's life. Sometimes I hear, you know, my child was regressing, you know, into autism. It didn't make sense.

Then I found the high wire and suddenly started putting the pieces back together. Or we never vaccinated our kid because we were watching the high wire. Or, you know, your lawsuit helped me stay in the military. I mean, everywhere we go. But we thought it would be really awesome to compile your personal stories, your incredible videos about how I, I can and the high wires maybe impacted your life or your family so we would love it if you would you know shoot a video and maybe involve some of the people in your family that were involved in your story have fun with it and submit them to info at I can decide.org who knows you may just see

us feature one of these stories on the high wire but we really wanted to have some fun and and give you an opportunity to express and maybe we'll put up a channel so people can see all of these different stories that are out there but It's one of the things we want to do is we focus this year, 10 years. You know, when I can the high wire started, I swear you could not say the word vaccines. If you weren't going to praise it and if it didn't follow by vaccines are safe and effective, you weren't allowed to say anything else. There was literally all that was allowed to be said.

If you went anywhere into questioning it, then you were kicked out of your mommy group, your mommy blog or your friends would stop talking to you. We were in a whole other world. The stats that Mary Holland was reached. and we've covered some of them from the Brownstone Institute, you know, looking at how many people really want medical freedom, how many people really believe in choice, how many people want liability back on the industry.

These are all things no one knew anything about before we started this work. So we're really excited just to reflect on what we've achieved. Of course, the job is not over, and we need your help more than ever. We're fighting it out, duking it out right now in West Virginia. I think I heard last, like 21 lawyers. 41 lawyers on the other side fighting Aaron and his team from, I mean, representing all different

groups that all apparently really do not want us to have medical freedom. So it continues on. West Virginia again bans religious reasons for school vaccine exemptions. They're hanging in there. This is in the appellate court. We're fighting for our lives. And then 90 other cases across the country. But that's what we do. Look, we love the fight. We know we're in it. No one expects this is all to change overnight. It's all a part of freeing the five. And we're still. focused on making that happen. And by the way, beating back any attempt to take away the freedoms, our abilities to opt out religious exemptions and personal belief exemptions across the country. Jeffrey's going to be getting to that in just a minute. But one of the things that really showed us

that we have a different government in place was IAC, the Inter-A autism Agency that was, what was it? I forget the C's. Coordinating Committee that was put to, together, some of the great people that have blessed this stage and been here and talked about either the issues in their family, their own children, many parents that have been fighting for this, many that have written legislation to try and make a world a safer place. And one of those people on that community, you know her. She's the Warrior Mom, Tracy Slapsavik. Take a look at this.

Our next presenter is a certified integrative health coach. I'm the proud author of Warrior Mom. Tracy Slepsovic is an Air Force veteran, public speaker, and integrative health coach. We turn to Tracy Slepsvik, author of Warrior Mom. For about 10 to 12 years, I wanted to write a book on my journey of healing my son. Our son was diagnosed with autism. I could have wallowed in my own self-pity and played the victim and been like, whoa, it's me, my kids got autism.

Or I do exactly what I did, and I suck the tears back up into my eyes, and I got to work. And I started Googling because back then in 2009 when he was diagnosed, you could Google healing autism and you could get a lot of resources. And a lot of people were spending thousands of dollars on attorneys to get 40 hours of ABA. When I was the one who just went and took the classes and bought the books and was like, you know what, I'm going to learn this myself. My goal and what it is that I look to achieve is to educate all parents. on how to address those underlying conditions

associated with autism and other neurological disorders. My main thing is to really just reach as many parents as I can and teach them that healing is possible. It's my purpose to create awareness and from a complete space of love. She's the author of Warrior Mom. She's the founder of the Autism Health Summit,

and she's one of the newest members of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee for the government in the United States of Americans. My honor and pleasure to be joined, once again by Tracy, Sleps a bit. Very light. There we go. All right.

Yep. Good. Ribs are still hurting a little bit. The audience knows what that means. Anyway, Tracy, what an amazing ride you've been on just this last couple of years that you've been visiting us. So to go from writing a book about being a mom,

a mother of an autistic son, then jumping into, to putting forward a summit where doctors and scientists and everyone can get together and talk about it. But now to be asked by Robert Kennedy Jr., I wanna start there. How did that happen? What did that moment feel like?

So it's been very surreal. And I am so honored and blessed to have been able to even put my hat in the ring. And so I submitted an application to be on the committee. And from there, I received a phone call. I was asked to submit, you know, updated resume, bio, answer some questions.

And within a few days, I received phone call saying that we would love to welcome you on to the committee. And from there, everything just started to move really fast. And there's a lot of forms to fill out because technically, you know, you're working under the government. So a lot of forms, some trainings, and everything except, you know, handing in my firstborn. Yeah. All good.

Well, wonderful. When, you know, when we look at that committee, this has to be something you've looked at as a parent, frustrated with the system. Frustrated with, you know, really the gaslighting, that's been the only thing that's ever come out of the U.S. government, it seems, around autism. So what do you think? Is this just going, is this going to make a difference? Can it do anything? You know, when you look at the other members of this committee, what are you thinking about? I think we have 21 very powerful new members.

We've all been, you know, neck deep in addressing underlying conditions, you know, fighting for our children in treatments and therapies and things to be covered for autism. in the community. You're absolutely right. This committee has been around since 2000, originally under the Children's Health Act and then was, you know, reformulated a few times, and then now it's under the Autism Cares Act that was rewritten in 2014 and 2019. But either way, nobody knew what it was until this big announcement comes out, 21 new members, that Kennedy assigns for the new interagency autism coordinating committee. Yeah, it's amazing.

So what is it, I mean, have you had a meeting yet? Do you find out what it is you're gonna be doing? Is it just, an advisory, does that mean, are you allowed to ask for a vaccinated versus unvaccinated study? Or are you allowed to open up files, look at what they know? I mean, what is it, you have a sense of what you can and cannot do? Not 100%.

but I am getting there. So we can advise. So we are an advice, a federal advisory committee. Okay. And we can advise departments under HHS or Kennedy himself on anything and everything, autism, right? Research, medical conditions, care, policies. We can advise.

We can't write the policies and we cannot vote on funding. Okay. So you don't worry about how much something costs. Do you say, you know, we have to start looking at adult autism aging out, you know, what systems are going to be there for them? These are things that, you know, I know so many parents of autistic children that are growing up now, teenagers moving on, some higher functioning like your son, others, not so much very difficult situations at home. But there's so much this government's going to need to do with the size and scope of autism now. in America. So adult care is a big thing. You're right. A lot of them are aging out. Also addressing comorbid conditions, underlying conditions. You said that several times. What does that mean

to someone that doesn't have a child with autism? So comorbid would be like a combination of underlying conditions. Underlying conditions, you know, could be gastrointestinal issues, pans pandas, inflammation on the brain. We have pre-genetics like MTHR, mitochondrial disorder that play a factor. You have heavy metal toxicity. I mean, there's mold. There's all these different conditions that are underlying. And this is where I was successful. I was taught early to address those underlying conditions for my son. And early intervention. is key. So you begin with the gut. If you don't lay a foundation and begin with the gut, then it's not, you know, throwing treatments and therapies at it, you know, expensive ones at that

isn't always going to work. But the thing with this is a lot of these treatments and therapy, this is where I'm passionate about it, is that they're not covered by insurance. Most of these treatments and therapies are out-of-pocket expenses for families impacted by autism. IVIG treatments for encephalitis, inflammation on the brain, pans pandas. That Steve and I had to pay out-of-pocket. That's crazy. And for anybody who doesn't know what an IVIG costs, one full round is about $22,000. Wow. And Noah had to get quarter rounds every two weeks. And It's crazy. If not, I had to take the risk of my son having more inflammation in his brain and further regression. And I wasn't willing to do that. Wow. So when you look at this issue now,

in the state we're in COVID, I think woke so many people up to vaccine dangerous issues, risk isn't doing what they said it could do, maybe is more dangerous than we thought. when, you know, this conversation of autism, is this changing on a public level? Do you feel like we're, you know, and I guess is the debate still that has to be worked out, this idea that you said regressive autism, this idea of regressing into autism because of an environmental, a moment, an environmental toxicity that the child regresses into autism. Are we still in a place where you feel like we haven't fully won the conversation that you're not born with autism, it's not there the whole time that these children are regressing,

or are we past that point? Do most people you run into going, oh, yeah, I understand it is a regression? Well, the people I surround myself with believe, you know, what actually is. So I say the proof is in the pudding, right? So I experienced, what I experienced is my experience, but I've talked to thousands of parents. Since I wrote my book, since I started my organization, that have the same story. How is it that we all have the same story that we took our child in for a well baby visit? They received.

I mean, the main one is MMR and Varsela. And then you started to see the slow regression, losing speech, motor skills. Noah got measles from the measles vaccine. A lot of children do get it. I think the statistics are more than 50% actually get the measles from the vaccine. So is it coming out? Yes, I believe it's coming out. Are there people that are still stuck and know this is the end all be all?

It's the right thing. You're at choice. I want people to have informed consent. We keep screaming this, right? You screaming in your organization. I want them to know what's going in their body. I want them to know that a vitamin K shot is not real vitamin K, that it has the biggest black box warning on it.

It has aluminum and it has so much in it. That's it. I just want you to know what's going in your child. Don't believe me. Don't, you know, I'm not trying to debate with anybody. I'm just trying to give the facts for the safety of children and adults. So, and you're doing that, I think, most spectacularly, with the Autism Summit now. So that's coming up.

One of the dates of the next? So our next conference is in San Diego, April 24th or 26th. Okay. We have a really... There we go. Autism Health Summit, Journey to Wellness, April 24th to 26th in San Diego. You can go to aHSconference.com. And so what is it about this?

Why was this conference necessary? So I wanted to develop a conference that didn't follow a narrative. That was important to me. To give knowledge... What do you mean by that? Didn't follow a narrative? So I believe there's, you know, a selective few out there that are, I'm just laid out simple, bought out by Big Pharma. Okay.

And told, you know, this is the way it should look. You should cross your T's and dot your eyes if you want to fit in. And for example, I can't get vendorized with the regional center so parents can actually have the regional center pay for their ticket. although my conference gives valuable medical information for these families, but yet they say that what we discuss is not scientifically based and that we could cause danger to these families. Right, and let me just say it, that one of the things we've watched many autism groups come forward. Some start out, very open-minded, no narrative like yours,

but if you want the big dollars to come in and we watch it, then you have to take on this different perspective, which is autism is beautiful. We're here to just make the lives of autistic people better, but we cannot have a discussion. There will be no discussion about causes of autism, susceptibilities to autism, and certainly anything, not from Tylenol to vaccines or anything like that. And frankly, I'd have to say even Luke of Oren, which, you know, I think what people didn't understand when Robert Kennedy Jr. said,

Luca Vorin can help reverse some of the issues around autism. Didn't say it's a cure. But I felt like that was the first time the government of the United States ever said, you know, that there is a way to reduce or reverse some of the symptoms of autism. And what people don't realize in that is that that's the first time our government says, if, if you can reverse something, that means it's not a genetic DNA problem. It means there's an environmental toxin. Something went wrong that can be corrected.

If it can be corrected, it is not genetic at its base. And so I think when you're talking about that narrative, it's this idea that autism is genetic. It's always been here. We're just diagnosing it better. And it's really hard to see several of the groups that I think even get on the right track and then just go for you just watch their dollars just get increased by major organizations. as soon as they step away from asking, how have we gone from 1 in 10,000 to now 1 in 30?

Yes. And originally, my husband and I had started the conference, and we had put our own money into it, and we lost about $40,000. Because... You guys like throwing money at stuff. I'm telling 20,000 for this thing to heal your child, 40,000 to inform the public.

And then afterwards, I'm like, this gets to become a nonprofit organization. And so I continue to do fundraisers. What's the best way to... Autism Health, or they can just email me directly. Tracy at AutismHealth.com. T-R-A-C-Y at AutismHealth.com. But my full-time job is autism health,

is counseling these families. I'm cooking dinner while I'm talking to one family and then scarfing down my food so I can hop on a Zoom call with another family. And I'm exhausted. We don't have the funding currently. for an assistant or any other funding. So we're writing our own grants,

and Dr. James Lyons Wheeler is assisting us. But I have a great community, and I will bust my bud. I'll do as many fundraisers as I need to do. I have one this weekend at my home and do whatever it takes to help these families, because that's my goal. I got Noah to a very functional place.

And he is doing great. He's working full time so he could travel the world, all on his own. That is absolutely amazing. Tell me, who are the some of the speakers you're most excited to have at the conference this year? So you, of course, so grateful for all your love and support. Aaron Siri.

Okay, great. Dr. Toby Rogers. Excellent. Dr. Dan Goodnow, we're also partnering with Ed Clay, who's gonna be coming and speaking. Oh, fantastic. And Ed Clay is the founder of Cellular Performance Institute, and they do stem cell therapy.

Now, originally I went to him and I said, do you do stem cell therapy for autism? And he said, I don't treat kids. And I said, well, why? And he said, because I don't know that it'll actually work, and unless I know that it'll work, I won't do it. Yeah. And I said, oh, well, you should do some research into that.

And so a couple weeks later, I didn't expect this. I get a call back and he's like, hey, I talk to my board about this, and we want to fund a clinical trial for autism. So they're actually working on what are the causes of autism. You know, they're doing a whole, and so we've partnered with Ed Clay and his team at CPI, and so he will be speaking. We have Dr. Sabine Hazan. Oh, love her. Fantastic.

She's also working on funding for a clinical trial for autism, and she's 12. and 12. I mean, she's doing really good. So getting these different types of treatments that are in the trial phase, right? Getting research studies funded and getting them excess, making them accessible to families who are impacted by autism is super important. And I feel that this is the goal of this body, you know, the new IAC committee. Well, I'm glad you're on it. I'm glad you're having so much success in the work that you're doing, your dedication. It's what I keep saying to everyone in the audience. I don't know what everyone's specialty is, but I think we're all live in this moment for a reason.

You're doing such great work, so just want to thank you for joining us. I'll see you just in a couple weeks at the Autism Health Summit. Yes, thank you. All right, great. Look, if you want to donate or get involved, obviously this is a very important issue, but more importantly, if you have a friend out there

that has a child struggling with autism, it is really hard to get good information. They're being gaslit by their doctors. This is one of these things you can just say, hey, I just heard about this Autism Health Summit and they're talking about children's lives really being made better, just thought it might be something

you'd be interested in checking out. Spreading the word is how we do this. There's millions of children that are now suffering with this in America and around the world. If we can make the lives better, to me, it's something we should really be involved with. Here is the new promotion for the Autism Health Summit.

Take a look. So my dream for probably a good 10 years or so has been to run an autism event. To really educate those parents on addressing those underlying conditions associated with autism. And truly hearing from the best speakers, Aaron Siri, Del Bigtree, Dr. Toby Rogers, Ed Clay, Dr. Dan Goodenow, Dr. Sabine Hazan, Tony Lyons, Siena, Siena, and the Sewell family, Dawn Marie Gavin, and the Spellers community. and all these amazing doctors, scientists, and parents on how to address the underlying biological conditions associated with autism and other neurological disorders. When I started this journey, I felt alone.

But we come together, we come together to unite, and that is the most important thing. What is it that you choose to create in your life? This is a one-of-a-kind experience you will not want to miss. There's a lot of bad stuff that's happening. And what is almost invisible to the eye is the good stuff that's happening. And I believe we're heading towards a wellness that we've not experienced in many, many decades or generations. It's important, though, regardless of what kind of power we think we hold or don't hold, that we understand that it's imperative that we all step forward.

We need to research. We need to find out. out because the people are watching this probably think, me alone can't save the world. But if we get a community, if we get a group, we can really affect the world. You know, it's amazing to me as I go to these conferences and, you know, I'm going to be at the autism health summit and coming out of the Maha event just this week in D.C., that there's still media out there that is pushing this idea that autism has always been here. We're just diagnosing it better. That argument alone has been, I mean, it's so easy to debunk it because we all know if we look back at our childhood, we didn't see this in our schools.

We didn't see asthma inhalers, maybe one in my entire school. I'm in my 50s now. I mean, there's one kid that had to have the asthma inhaler, and now they're, you know, one in 12 kids, I think, or something like that. Autism, one in 12.5 boys in California. If you think we've always had one in 12.5 boys with autism, then there's a bridge we can sell you somewhere in New York. But there's so many people that have just never given up in this space

and to really start in to see the light coming through real conversations happening. It's just an amazing time and an amazing moment around these topics. So I'm happy to be in the middle of it. Highwire, I can. So it's really the force that we've been involved with. for the 10 years that we've been making this impact. So anyway, coming up, we're going to have a great show here. I've got Aaron Goldstein is going to be in studio.

We're going to actually turn this set into a cooking station, believe it or not. We've been working on this for the last couple days, see if we can pull it off. It should be a lot of fun. But talking about how we can cook better at home, he, of course, is revolutionizing food in schools around Texas and around the country. And even around the world, I can't wait to, talk to him about that. But first it's time for the Jackson Report. All right, Jeffrey, what do we got going on this week? All right. All right, Del. Well, as we saw, as you showed there,

with the Maha Institute event last, at the beginning of this week, the spotlight is now on vaccine injury like never before. People want the culture changed. People want reform, and they want it now. And the media is busy doing what the media has always been doing, which is messaging that the idea trying to sell to you that the idea that liability protection for pharmaceutical companies and these products and their harms is a great idea like this article right here. Check this out. Vaccine litigation at the brink, a surge of cases threatens public health, so they're going with a fear angle here. It says when vaccines were challenged, judges consistently realize that the states possess a responsibility to protect communities from contagious diseases and that this

responsibility sometimes requires reasonable limits on individual choice. Well, that's not working anymore in the post-pandemic era. We don't want limits on individual choice to push products, injectable products that cause harm. But it goes on to say this. As the nation confronts a new wave of vaccine-related lawsuits, that balance is becoming strained in unprecedented ways. I think it's probably a good thing. The past few years have produced a volume, intensity, and ideological diversity of litigation unlike anything seen since the late 20th century. The result is a legal environment that is not merely unsettled but genuinely unstable. And it finally says this.

If a court were to allow a vaccine injury claim to proceed completely outside the BICP, it can potentially establish a dangerous precedent that potentially undermines the statutory scheme designed to balance compensation for injuries with predictable liability protections for vaccine manufacturers. So you got to think ICAN's in there somewhere making that unstable. We want instability in this system. We want them to hear the ideological shift that's happening because we want these manufacturers to be liable and to make better products, to have the market forces back on their shoulders, just like every other company has to have. I mean, they're just right in plain daylight, essentially saying to you, if we were treated like every other product, we couldn't be on the market, we would never stand up the lawsuits. We can handle the lawsuits you see on all the drugs that we make, and we survived those just fine, but vaccines, that's different.

and we could never survive the amount of lawsuits we would get from that. This can't be, you know, inside of the usual market forces that every other product you take is vaccines are different. Vaccines aren't tested for safety. They shouldn't have to be tested for safety and you shouldn't be able to sue. I mean, the whole thing is, it's absurd. You're right. To read it. Can you imagine being a journalist hired by that newspaper and that's the, I have to write what?

I have to say that free market forces are a bad idea that the ability to sue, which is the foundational principle of a free market system. a Democratic Republic. I mean, you know, good luck with that. Well, that's not my gig. And meanwhile, there's a critical mass of people just ripping the cover off of the fact that there's there's so many more vaccine injuries than people were taught to believe and understand. And so the idea, we're in this post-COVID era, the idea of legislatively, legally, even socially, even the media, trying to push these ideas, it's dead on arrival. And let's go to the legislation, state by state. That's where the battlefields are happening. right now. And this is Arizona. This is a big move here. A lot of winds going on. I'm going to

just chronicle these. Arizona bill will let voters decide if government can mandate vaccines. So this is a bill that's been approved by the measure that's been approved by the House. If it passes the Senate, it goes directly to the ballot for people, the people of Arizona to vote for it in November. So this isn't something that's going to rely on a governor's signature or a veto. This is letting the people vote if they want mandates for vaccines, for children, for adults. It's going to be really interesting to watch how this plays out. Very interesting. Yeah.

Truly, truly power to the people on this subject. And also, let's go to Florida. A lot of things happening in Florida, but let's stick on the vaccine topic here. Their medical freedom bill is moving. So Florida Senate passes bill to widen K through 12 vaccine exemptions, bill now in the House. Limbo. Pass the Senate's in the House. So it creates a third layer.

They already have medical exemptions. They already have religious exemptions for children, K through 12. It's now creating a conscientious exemption. So there's three layers of protection here. But it also sneaks in this little goody. It allows pharmacists to prescribe ivermectin over the counter to adults without a prescription. So whoever snuck that in there,

pretty interesting little goody for extra care there. So also now South Carolina, the defeat has happened. So religious rights, religious freedoms are really coming to the surface here. People are surging this idea. They're bringing it back. The idea of civil rights is just massive here. South Carolina, during a measles outbreak happening down there,

they tried to push through this bill that would end the religious exemption for the MMR vaccine for kids, but it did not go through. The state house was packed with parents and families, religious freedom concerns, sink vaccine exemption bill in South Carolina. Wow, that's amazing. So it's not working, right? The fear-mongering around these measles outbreaks, right there in the center of that state was not able to let them even slip through it

and, you know, removal of exemption for one vaccine. It's fantastic. Yeah, and it's not 2015 anymore. We have a whole different legislative space, which is really interesting to watch. And then back to Florida right now, outside the vaccine space, kind of a greater space here. This is the headline, after 67-year gap, Florida may be about to legalize pathic medicine. This is SB 688. Recognizes it's licensed naturopathic doctors. It's passed all of the votes, all the House, Senate, almost unanimous votes all the way there. So this goes to the governor's desk now to be signed or vetoed, so all eyes on that. But really expanding the idea out of this mainstream medicine paradigm for allowing people to have other choices, naturopathic choices.

Really interesting. It's a lot of what I think we have to start thinking about now is, okay, we don't trust our doctors. We don't trust the medical system. But where do we go? so many people really have not been introduced to all of the options there are in holistic health, whether it's naturopathy, homeopathy, acupuncture, Ayurveda, chiropractic, things that have been, some of these around for hundreds of years, thousands of years, oftentimes longer than even the medical practices that we're seeing. In fact, that's one of the newest kids on the block, if you will,

Western alopathic medicine was like one of the last things that were involved in. And there's been a lot failure there, especially in keeping and making people healthy. I'd be the first to say I was just in an ER in Whistler, Canada after breaking some ribs. There are moments where I love doctors, I love what they do, especially putting you back together, and even a pharmaceutical industry that can make a painkiller that you may need once in a while. So, but it's balanced, right? It's all about finding that balance. And shocking, Florida, that it wasn't, that naturopathy was not legal, I guess, or hasn't been for 70-something. year. So it's great to see. Hopefully DeSantis will sign that. And if you're in Florida,

you may want to make some phone calls on that. All right. Yeah, something that hasn't been there since 1959, according to the article. And it's just not about spotlighting the ills of the current system. It's about building what's next. People need an off-ramp. And this appears to be what this is going to look like, what we're witnessing here. And then we're talking about justice. We want to talk about writing the ills of the past. And this is what's happening not only in the United States, but in Canada, I want to start with Air Canada. That's their airline there. Air Canada ordered to pay pilots after religious vaccine exemption denial. So again, along this religious vaccine exemption line, this track, these are seven pilots. And in this, the judge said they're ordered

back pay, but they established workplace religious discrimination, but it also jive with the Canadian Human Rights Act. So that was violated as well by this, by Air Canada. In the United States, this just broke. United Airlines faces mass lawsuit over vaccine accommodation policy, well over 1,000 employees, the public facing employees that had religious exemptions. They put them on unpaid leave,

so they didn't really give them many other accommodations. And so this is now, they can join this class action. This is now going to a court, it'll be decided by a jury. The payout here and the ripple effect could be massive. This is maybe one of the most, the largest in history. religious class action lawsuit for a civil rights case. So all eyes on this one.

Now let's go to the federal level. A lot of movement going on here. We have this one for the second time. Vene Prasad is announcing he's stepping down. FDA vaccine chief, Dr. Venni Prasad, to leave agency next month. That's in April, so less than a month. He's the head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

And he has not released a statement. This was put out through Marty McCarrie, FDA head, during an interview. But everyone's asking what's going on, what's going on? I don't think we need inside sources who wish to remain anonymous like CNN uses. The writing's been on the wall. Vinay Persad has built his career in academic medicine

as an independent thinker who challenged weak evidentiary evidence that underpins drug approvals. He took that into FDA in his tenure there. And he challenged Moderna. He told us that the COVID vaccine killed at least 10 kids. He challenged the new flu shots. He said, he refused, they refused to review the flu shots and the data for that new mRNA-based flu shots for Moderna because they had weak data. They said, we're not going to review this. That was later reverse. But he really shook it up. And I think

stepping back here, one of the legacies in his short tenure was to just expose how bad this regulatory system is for new drug approval, new vaccine approval. And so this spot is going to be a massive of fill, whoever fills this spot, the people are watching, we want this momentum continued. We don't want it back to status quo before Kennedy, before this shakeup. So it's going to be very interesting. It's a very powerful position he's in at the FDA. So that's obviously all eyes on that. And then in Boston, the American Academy of Pediatrics, a lot of other trade groups are

suing HHS Secretary Kennedy. What are we looking at here? We're looking at this. RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine policies are unreviewable DOJ lawyer-tell. judge. Now just a point here, here at ICANN, we're obviously used to going against Department of Justice lawyers, but at this point, they're on the side of Kennedy. So just a caveat there, is I going to read these. It says U.S. Department of Justice lawyer, Isaac Belfour, argued that Kennedy has the broad authority to make all the changes he has already made and more.

He claimed that the AAP and other medical groups were asking the court to supervise vaccine policy indefinitely. Belfer argued on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services said the medical organizations were merely seeking to use courts to enact their favored vaccine policy. And you go into the actual ruling here and the court documents, and it says this. This was filed in February. It says the ASIP that conducted those meetings consists entirely of members appointed by the secretary after he fired en masse the 17 prior members of the ASIP on June 9, 2025 for pretextual reasons. The current composition of the ASIP violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act,

which requires federal advisory committees to be fairly balanced and not be inappropriately influenced. So the AAP, this is Rich, is saying, we are suing you because there's unfair balance and inappropriate influence on the current ASIP members. That's exactly why Kennedy reshuffle the deck because of conflicts of interest. We don't have anyone in there that's funded by pharma. That's not fair. We need pharma-funded-backed chills inside of there. This is illegal. It can't go this way. Exactly.

So our lawyers that I can't have an eye on this because it cuts both ways. So if Kennedy loses this, okay, there's a legal precedent. So when Kennedy gets out and if someone gets back in there and says, we want the old A-Sit members back, that's a lawsuit because it's not fair and balanced. And there's a precedent for that. So it'll be really interesting to see how this one plays out. And now I want to go to the umbrella issue, really what we're talking about here, the elephant in the room, the fundamental rights, human dignity, justice, the basic fundamental freedoms for the human rights that we enjoy. joy. People want those and they're pointing them out when they're being taken away, when they're being infringed upon. And sometimes it just starts with a simple apology. Here's Australian television presenter Carl Stefanovic. And he's pretty big over there in Australia. He works for the nine network. And here is Carl on an interview recently. Take a look. Can we talk about COVID for a little bit? Because it's often mentioned in the comments. Like I said, I read them all because I'm genuinely interested in how people view things.

The one thing they say about me is that I supported the COVID jab. This is my shot. This is my shot. This is my shot. Come on, Australia. Let's get the job done. And I have regrets from that time. Yeah.

And I am definitely sorry for the role I played in not questioning the science, in not questioning more the government mandates. and I feel like I isolated people because of that and I don't think the media should be involved in that kind of messaging. What I do believe is that we should have been there to offer some sort of education but we shouldn't have taken that step further

and been part of a campaign and I'm legitimately sorry for that because I don't know how that would have felt for people out there. Wow. Well, that was the most third. apology I think we've seen yet you know some of the staff when we talk about it's like a little bit too late I don't know I think it's always I think as many apologies we can get so that we can start getting back to honesty you know there was a mistake that was made here you have to admit that yeah yeah healing

healing this is how it's done is one apology at a time and it's the matter we're talking about a medical system here that does unjust things and it seems like now anytime that There's a hint of that. It's being pointed out reflexively, almost automatically. People are done with that. What do I mean? Here's the New York Post talking about what's happening in Canada.

This is the headline, Canada's set to surpass 100,000 assisted suicides more than the country's World War II death toll. Wow. What they're talking about is May. This is the medical assistance in dying. There's been no positive reporting on this. People are just repulsed by this. And what is this?

Okay. So there's two tracks on this made. through Canadian government, works through the medical system. The first track, which is in use right now, is it's for people who have a natural death in the reasonably foreseeable future. So some kind of terminal disease, they're probably going to die very soon. And this is a way to speed that up, to have, you know, there's a lot of ways to look at this, but it's through the medical system and the medical system speeds that process up for you. Here's some of the headlines that are coming out of this system.

Here's women euthanized against her will after requesting palliative care. So what this does is it puts a spotlight on a medical system. Remember that during COVID told us to stay home until you can't breathe and then come in, we'll put you on a ventilator. And we need some money if we put you on that ventilator. And these are a medical system. We can go through all of the issues with the medical system, but we're granting them that type of power, which is an ultimate power here. Here's another op-ed.

100,000 debt, Canada ignored the world and it shows. It says in this op-ed, let's say this by name, call it the truth, a systemic failure dressed up as compassion, made was sold as a narrow option for the terminally ill, a rare mercy. That fiction collapsed long ago. Today assisted death is a routine outcome for people struggling with disability, isolation,

poverty, and mental health challenges. And when the world looked at what we're doing, it did not approvingly, it recoiled. What they're talking about in that op-ed is track two. Track one is a death in the reasonably foreseeable future. Track two is this. We'll go right to Canada's website and point this out. It says, where a natural death is not reasonably foreseeable, assessors, these are bioethicists

at hospitals, must discuss with the person's suffering requesting made the reasonable and available means to require the person's suffering and determine whether the person has given serious consideration of these means. So this could be anything. What does it mean? There is no meaning. It's a gray area, a massive gray. area. And this is where even the United Nations says it's extremely concerned. UN tells Canada

to stop track two of Maid. And articles look like this now. Mental illness and the moral boundaries of Maid. It says the expansion of Maid has been criticized by mental health professionals, disability advocates, and those concerned about how poverty and the lack of access to adequate care can shape a patient's decision. This is all going on in Canada. And again, across the board through media, advocacy groups, even medical groups and doctors, they do not like this. They're pointing it out saying something is inherently wrong here. We're at 100,000 people, we haven't even a proof track true to, which would expand this to so many other people. And so again, I think this is a positive because we're pointing out something that has

the ability to go off the reels really hard. And how far can this go? Well, there's precedent. And again, there's also justice. Maybe sometimes too late. In Peru, we have this headline coming out. Inter-American Court finds Peru guilty of forced sterilization and reproductive violence and denial of autonomy. What are they talking about? We covered this before. It says for the first time the Inter-American Court of Health Rights, the region's highest tribunal, has held the state of Peru accountable for the forced sterilization in subsequent death of Celia Ramos. The ruling advances the production of women's reproductive autonomy, consolidating the principle that the right to health is inseparable from civil and political

and that states bear a heightened duty to guarantee free prior full and informed consent with particular rigor in surgical sterilization procedures. So Peru's government, with the help of USAID, went through and did a massive sterilization campaign decades ago. And this is the first time this human rights court has taken up this case, and this is what they said about that. So finally, there is some recognition here, and this is a massive step. And the final point on what I would say in this, we're talking about human rights.

It's the right to privacy and not being surveilled by mega corporations in your government is also something people hold near and dear to their heart. In fact, so much so that any time there's a poll that happens, and they ask about the kind of the big tech oligarchs out there, we have Mark Zuckerberg coming up dead last. Americans still hate Mark Zuckerberg more than Elon Musk. He just can't win in those polls, Mark. And Mark has come out with his company, Meta, and the Meta Glasses,

They partner with RayBand. And this is one of the headlines that came out. It's an investigation done by a media organization. It says this, Dear Meta Smart Glass Wares, you're being watched too. It says the investigation found that much of the footage captured by Meta Smart Glasses, of which more than 7 million pairs have been reportedly sold, is reviewed by contract workers at a Kenya-based company called Sama. These workers are data annotators who are tasked with reviewing footage

captured from the camera on the glasses and labeling it to help AI systems get better at identifying what they see. The process is tedious and labor intensive, requiring workers to meticulously label everything on the screen that can be identified. They see everything. They see everything in your house, your credit card, your text messages, everything. There's no privacy anymore. And finally, this article says this, it's bad enough that we live in a surveillance state. It's made even worse by the fact that corporations are convincing people to pay for products to participate in advantage. I mean, that's journalism right there. People are just calling out for what it is. And again, at the same time, we're being told artificial intelligence is so great. Elon Musk is telling us it's going to bring on utopia. People are going to get money is not going to mean anything.

People could just pursue what they want to make them happy. America's not buying it. Here's a poll. AI is one of the least liked things in America according to a new NBC poll. It says only 26% of voters said they view AI positively, 46 view it negatively, and 28% said they feel unsure, have no opinion, leaving AI with a net favorability of negative 20. And get this, it says in the study, AI ranked less favorably than U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that's ICE, President Donald Trump, former Vice President Camilla Harris, the Republican Party, and the late show host Stephen Colbert. So we're at a major turning point right now when it comes to looking at AI, you're thinking it's the savior. People are just not having it.

Wow, it's amazing. Well, maybe we should do something about it and not let it keep moving forward and taking up all the finances of American, other nations around the world. Jeffrey, amazing reporting. Speaking of amazing reporting, you're always right on top of the zeitgeist, the moment that we're in. And once again, as Bobby Kennedy is touring the country with Eat Real Food, the second part of your documentary series, which ironically was all about food. The Great American Food Fight is premiering on Sunday, March 15th. So tell me about it. What are we going to get in part two? Yeah, we saw this moment coming. We predicted it, and we put in a lot of hard work to have this

documentary available at this time to blast off. So this Sunday, like you said, Great American Food Fight, Part two, these are solutions. These are how we move forward. We talked in part one, how we got to the system, this kind of terrible food system we're in right now. It's how we move forward, all the solutions, how to cook better food. We have chef Aaron in there. We talk to to Vani Haru. We talk to Zen Honeycutt. And we talk about what it's going to take as a country to reform this system. We can rely on the federal government to only a certain degree, but it starts with our families and our communities. What does that look like? That's the Great American Food Fight we're in right now. Fantastic. Well, it's available to all of you that, you know,

give anything at all. If you're a monthly donor to ICANN, this is our way of giving back. on Highwire Plus, let's take a look at part two of the Great American Food Fight. For the last 50 years, American children have increasingly been living in a toxic suit of synthetic chemicals. Today marks the beginning of restoring the trust at the FDA and our regulatory institutions. Since 2012, the United States has seen no increase in life expectancy. Before you grab that box of cereal this morning, you might want to check the label, A new study says a chemical in weed killer has been found in popular cereals like Lucky Charms and Quaker Oates. Glyphosate is the most prevalent herbicide in our food supplies.

If you understand how glyphosate works, how it functions, you will understand why it causes over 40 different Western medical diseases. I started a petition online. It quickly got 50,000 signatures within a few weeks. We have over 400,000 petitions to deliver to Kellogg's today. please let us in. You cannot turn your back on this many voices. Our goal is to put health back in healthy human services, and that's why we're all here.

Will the shift away from processed foods be hard? There's this transition happening in America. An awakening, greater amounts of people are understanding something is wrong with our food. You really prioritize real food, whole food, nutritious food. What kind of changes have you seen in kids? It was just a couple weeks of super. Super clean food.

A teacher came to me. First week and said, I have never, ever had the kids with this amount of attention in the afternoon after lunch. Go back to what your great-great-grandmother was serving for dinner. End this gas-fighting campaign. And you do it one meal at a time. You are creating your culture and your legacy by the foods that you're choosing to eat.

You don't want any poisons, any pesticides in our food that have been banned in any other countries. And there's 85 of them. That's got to go. The FTA is finished as we know it. Thank God it's finished as we know it. All right, well, it's amazing. If you want to watch all the series, I mean, there have been so many great discussions on polio investigations that Jeffrey Jackson's done.

Please just become a recurring donor to the high wire and I can. Look, it's not easy to do this work. It's not easy to not reach out to just giant funding bodies like everyone else does say, hey, do you want to be a sponsor on our show? It'd be great. You'll get to see all the viewers. You know, we've got millions of people watching around the world. Sure, we could do that. But then slowly but surely go, oh, hey, we didn't really like the topic, the way you covered it this week,

didn't really put the pharmaceutical industry in the right light or our chemical food company or even, you know, our water treatment facility. Whatever the case, or I don't want to be aligned with the types of stories that say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The only way we're able to do this show, the way that we do it, is through, you. your donations, through your sponsorship. The only way we were able to fight lawsuits that have no money to be won. You realize what this is? The reason they all thought they were going to get away with this whole thing forever was who is ever going to stand in courtrooms against government agencies will nickel and dine them and stretch them out for years. It'll cost millions of dollars.

No one's going to do that if they can't recoup their money at the end of it. Unless you have have an ideology, unless you have people that really care about the United States of America, unless you create a nonprofit that just says, we're here, we're sending Airman Siri to stand in your courtroom as long as it takes until we win for the people. This experiment, where America's public health watchdog, this experiment has been incredibly successful. Can we combine media, advocacy, legal court wins, and legislation altogether in a way to start moving the needle. It has been 10 years of impact now, and I'm telling you, we're even ahead of where we thought we'd be when we started this whole thing. But can you imagine if we can keep our pedal to the

metal for 10 more years where we could be? If we could hold off the next pandemic when they try it again, if we could win lawsuits to say, hey, you don't want to go through what United did. You don't want to force us to mask again, do you? Because that didn't work out for you last time. You realize these legal wins, even if the WHO and the WEF try to take away your rights. again, winning in court sentence precedent so that it can never, ever happen again. We'll just go right to the institutions and say, you lost this lawsuit last time, and we're going to make it even bigger this time. This is what's happening in the 90 cases in the courtrooms across America.

We're fighting for our future, but we're also fighting to put pillars in this castle of truth and freedom and our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I don't know of any other network that works the way that this one does. I don't know any other network that takes you watching and then says, hey, why do we all get together and let's storm that castle and let's change the system? That is what's happening. So I hope if you were not already one of the great sponsors that make all this possible, join our team, join the informed consent action network,

becoming a recurring donor. You can hit the tab at the top of your page. We're asking for $26 a month for 2020. Come on, that's like lunch at Panda Express. Give up, you know, one meal and go ahead and donate to ICANN and make a difference in this world. We'll make it easy for you. You can just text the number if you're listening right now and you can't see it. Get out your phone.

Text the number 72022 and just write in the word donate. And I will personally respond to you and make this super easy so that you can join our team. They are, you know, they watch what we're doing. They're looking at our books. They always take a look and see, you know, what is ICANN up to this year? And we get to keep saying them, yeah, you know, we're up to you. We're winning a lot. Let's keep that role going because there's a lot of pressure coming as we've talked about.

You've got, you know, Donald Trump in this executive order, you know, covering up for glyphosate. I'm going to talk a little bit about that later. But this is all the part of our food. It's all a part of our food supply. If these aren't the most important issues of our lifetime, then what is? Really, sure, we can get distracted by skirmishes or wars or whatever you want to call it. But meanwhile, they are poisoning our kids. They are forcing products into them and onto them and through them that are destroying their lives and robbing them of the same life that we had when we were growing up.

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Well, speaking of family, when you send your kid off to the school, the one thing that you really wish was that they're being told that they're brilliant, amazing people and dynamic and are a gift. to this world, but you also want them to know that, like, that temple, that is their body that is being nourished, is being fed with the best food so that they can be the best that they want to be, that they can reach their absolute potential. That's not happening in most schools across this country. There's a lot of different people working on it. And one of them is Aaron Goldstein. I'm the middle child of five.

Born into a family that just love food, I was always concerned with what was for dinner, what dad was gonna bring home, or where we might go out to eat on the weekends. My earliest food memories were definitely probably involving eggs, you know, cracking eggs with mom. Every time I crack an egg with my kid, it brings me back to my own relationship

with my parents in the kitchen. Food was kind of everything. Being a kid in the 80s and 90s, the problem was, what was ubiquitous was just not, good for me. When you order a mchicken and large fries you get a dessert free a cone cookies by Sunday. Alright! There was plenty of McDonald's takeout pizza, store-bought cookies, the Doritos and the soda and the Gatorade, the candy after school. You win? I had no filter. I had no guide. That definitely led me down this path of being increasingly overweight and arriving at

middle school and I was over 200 pounds. The pediatricians said I was obese. I kind of started to have that like a fat kid role and I definitely didn't like that. I started to notice men's health magazines. It did get me down this road of paying closer attention to what I was eating. I started to feel good. Food definitely was giving me power. And so late in college I met this guy that had gone to a culinary school up in Vermont. A week later I was up there visiting.

I knew like this is what I have to do. I started culinary school at New England Culinary Institute. I met this woman that was a woman who was at a woman who I helped run a culinary school in Tuscany. I attended this school for two months. They set you up in different, you know, stages, different restaurants in Italy. I worked in three different places.

They all had a Michelin Star. I moved to New York. I got a job working as a sous chef. Started teaching cooking, open this cooking school. And then we were crazy enough to open a restaurant. And that was that chef at that restaurant. But then our son was born. I knew that food was going to be my career,

that it was my passion. I was never going to turn my back on that. But I had to figure out a way to still have balance and still be a family guy. The summer of COVID, a friend of mine called me and said, I'm starting the school in the north of Italy, in Pimonte. And looking for a cook.

We're looking for someone to feed the kids. I was a part of this incredible project. I got to feed these kids every day. I got to go to the butcher, and I would walk in, and there was lung and liver and spleen and meat, ready for him to do whatever I wanted with. So feeding these kids and witnessed certain kids

just like starting to thrive. I just knew in cooking there early on, like, I wanna do this. Like, this is something. I didn't know that I would be invited to open up another program in Texas, but that's where I found myself. Welcome back to the school lunch program.

Today's theme is Burrito Bowl. Chipotle's got nothing on this. spread, I'm telling you. Ooh. You know nice? This gorgeous veg curry with coconut oil, our coconut milk, and a little bit of yellow chili paste. I'm in Austin, and I've now been asked to open two more programs after this one.

So my approach to the food in these programs is the same as at home. I'm focusing on the main protein first. Add some seasonal produce. Let's get some grains, yeah. And then let's stop worrying about the rest of the noise. Keep it simple, but then you dial in your systems. You build those relationships with farms. You stop wasting money on stuff that doesn't offer us any kind of nutrition.

I'm essentially offering something to these kids and to these families, something that I just would have loved to have been offered when I was a kid. Delicious. Well, I know you're sitting here thinking, man, I'd be psyched if I knew that was the school lunch my kids were getting when they're at school to discuss more about that. How are we going to move into that future? It's my honor and pleasure to be joined right now by Aaron Goldstein. Thank you, Dallas and I.

It's good having you here. Kids food, I think, is it's probably never been a larger discussion that is right now in America with Robert Kennedy Jr. He's just launched his Eat Real Food campaign, which I think is super cool. I know when I was doing some work with Maha early on. That's where when we were trying to think about, you know, where would you, if you really want to make America healthy again, where would be the place to start,

where would we get the most bang for our buck, the most impact, and we all just kind of thought, geez, school lunches, you know. And you're doing it. So what is it about feeding kids? Is it hard? Are they fickle? Are the things that you have to think about that, or different than being a chef in a restaurant.

Well, let's start by maybe trying a reframe. And we open up talking about kids' food. And I don't really believe that we should have kids' food. I think we should just have food. I think we need to normalize what food is, right, and create a really healthy example of what that is as parents and in an institutional setting for sure and just normalized food, right?

So we can reclaim that. And the path forward has got to go through the institutions. It's got to go through schools. So I think it's an amazing place to start. Yeah. But it's got to also be at the home. You know, this work has got to happen in the home, in the schools, in tandem, hopefully, in a community setting where parents are integrated in the school process and back and forth. And I see this playing out across the world, actually.

Yeah? Yeah. So how much of this issue is that, I mean, that parents, are we not cooking as much? Is society changing? I don't really know. Like, we're pretty good at cooking in our family. My wife cooks, you know. almost every meal makes the lunches that go out the door in the morning but is that changed because

I haven't really paid attention to how people dramatically is dramatic as yeah yeah I was actually just looking at data just a few days ago yeah it's just been steadily going down for decades and interestingly as we know where is chronic disease going you know in the last number of decades and I think so much goes back to World War II you know pre-World War II there were just so many small farms food was more integrated in a community right we were making our own food and that's just gone away and look we were sold this like we'll make it easier for you by the industries right we got you go you know to both parents go go off into the workplace we got you and in a way that freed us up in some senses right and I think that we've

kind of reached this tipping point almost 100 years later where we just we have no other place to go other than back into our own kitchens and I think that it is the ultimate way we can reclaim our sovereignty. And I also think that beyond that, beyond like that reclamation process, it's the best way that we can get back to living a beautiful life. You know, I think so many of us are yearning for this, right? That's why you see this movement towards homesteads, right? And people looking for properties, like wanting to just kind of own this aspect of our lives. I yearn for that, right? Even though I still have one foot in this real world and I still love being in a city, right? And no more.

matter where we are, even if we live in a city, we can have our kind of micro example of that sovereignty in choosing really carefully and deliberately the food that we're making, and especially the food that we're making for our kids. When we look at, I mean, have you studied what the school lunch programs tend to be? I mean, in, you know, now I think when you're on your second or third school starting to open up, have you ever gone and looked at like public school lunch programs? Well, I witnessed it myself. Okay. I mean, I was a kid. going to public school, middle school, seventh, eighth grade. Well, I was packed a lunch, but I would witness what the kids were eating

that were getting the free school lunch in my elementary school. And I admit that I often was trading my turkey sandwich that my parents packed for like the hot dog. That I can still remember you had to rip the plastic off, right? And I can still. So it's like heated up inside of the plastic. And it was delivered from some commissary, you know, in the city. I can still smell like where that food. was delivered to in the old middle school like it had that kind of sterile like

hospital kind of food smell right yeah but it was also kind of lur like it had this lure right it was a hot hot dog versus my kind of boring turkey sandwich so i get it so i lived that i lived in middle school the middle school outsourced a local pizza chain and i ate that pizza pretty much every day for two years alongside a hawaiian punch or some chips or a snicker bar from the vending machine and that was the period time where I was really obese like really overweight yeah sure I mean that would be yeah amazing I remember I had a friend in elementary school he were in third grade who started at 7-11 getting a big gulp after school and I mean he was like a skinny twig of a kid and I remember just watching him within six months went to completely obese and the only chip that I saw him make was the after-school

you know, but it was like the big goal, but it got bigger and bigger where it needed the diving board on the side of it. Yeah, yeah. But it's amazing our kids, when you look at obesity now as such a major issue, pre-diabetes, you know, the numbers are just really staggering. I mean, we're careening towards half of our kids being, you know, overweight or obese. And, you know, Bobby Kennedy just keeps saying this isn't a lifestyle issue. This is actually a food. This is a, they are being poisoned. So how hard is it?

I mean, are you only going to be able to make meals like this? I mean, obviously these look like fairly elite schools. It looks like you got, these are private schools. Is there hope for public school systems to change how they're making food? Is it expensive, I guess is my question. So that's an interesting point, the expense or the cost, right? And I would argue that it's cheaper to just make real simple food, right? You could just serve ground beef with a fruit side or an arugula salad,

and you could just literally probably erase so much of this chronic disease just by that one intervention, right? And you don't necessarily need all the bells and whistles, right? And if you look at, I kind of want to take a step back and almost reframe the whole discussion. Okay, yeah. What we're kind of going, what we need to do is basically rebuild. We need to tear down systems and rebuild.

If you just kind of take, like, zoom out and just look down at this amazing earth, right? And look at the systems that we've built the last hundred years. It just doesn't match living an amazing life, right? All the fast food restaurants, you walk into a McDonald's, like, what is the experience like?

It's like I can smell the soaps, the chemical soaps in the bathrooms of these places. And I just have this, I just don't want any part of it, right? For me, for my family. So what does it look like to just go backwards? And I'm not, you know, I'm not going to say that life was necessarily so much easier and so much better in every way. But this piece of it, the slower ritual around a dinner table, walking home, right, or entering a home where somebody's cooking a loving meal, right? And that person knows exactly where that food came from, that it's trustworthy, that it speaks to us, that it has resonance, that it's, that it's, that it's, that it's, that it.

It's from members of our community. Like, isn't that what we want? Like, isn't that living here, right? Yeah. And I just don't imagine, I can't imagine, how we can keep on going building a new community. And it's just another row of your chain restaurants and that kind of like same boring experience

that is now not just in the United States, but now you can grab a Starbucks, right? You can go across the country. You can get on a flight across the world, and then you plopped out, and there's another Starbucks when you land, right? I know, it's amazing. I don't want a world that way.

Yeah. Right? And so how do we reclaim it? We just go back to real food. Like, real food. It is almost absurdly simple, right? But what is real mean? Well, you set that up, well, let's look at Robert Kennedy Jr.

We were just in Austin, Texas, I think a week or so ago, on his new Eat Real Food campaign. Let's take a look at this. The big problem now in our country is that everybody's forgotten how to cook. Nobody cooks anymore. And, you know, what we need to do in our agency and what we're talking about is go out and actually just start teaching people how to cook. How to get them, they don't have cutlery. They don't have knives.

They don't have cutting boards. They don't know how to shop. And people have to relearn this. And it's so critical, you know, Jason talked about the spiritual malays that we have in this country. One of the starting points of that of restoring ourselves spiritually in this country is to start eating together and cooking together again. Because that is a sacred ritual. Since the beginning of human history, that has brought people together.

And we need to start coming together again. And we need to put down the cell phones for a couple of hours and get together for a meal, for family meals. So part of what we're going to do is to really encourage people to start Americans to start cooking again. And if you cook, you can eat a lot cheaper than going to a restaurant, even the fast food restaurants. It's quite refreshing. It seems so simple, right? I mean, it's what you're saying. We've got to go back.

I actually found that shocking. I was in the room when he said that that people aren't cooking anymore. They don't even have knives. They don't have cutlery in their house. You know, so we've obviously gotten this sort of fast pace, fast food. We're just passing our families by. And also, it's really food is the place where we experience and remember our own cultures, right? Even if we're a multicultural family, the food is sort of how it's expressed.

Oh, Grandma made this, this is a meal. We're really losing touch with where we come from. Is that a huge part of what food is about? 100% and what Bobby just said and hearing him use the word sacred the sacred rituals the rights of passage Yeah, right? You know, so the sense of smell is so tied to our memory and our lived experience and I think about this very often I remember coming home to my mom Before I even open the door my mom's inside making dinner, but before I open the door I can smell the chicken soup that she was so good at making Yeah, and when I close my eyes and I think of that smell I literally like feel like like my mom's love, you know, and I will carry that with me to my grave. And I think about that,

I'm creating that same experience for my kids. Like, I'll be long gone, and they'll grow old, and they'll remember what my, what it felt and smelled like in their home. And when I talk about, like, choosing this life and this experience and the texture of this life, like, wouldn't we choose that? Like, and think about that smell and crafting that experience for our kids and our lineages, because then that gets passed on literally through our bloodlines, right? And right now we're kind of in danger of losing that, where we're passing down like that opening of the plastic bag, you know, and that more sterile experience, that it smells a certain way.

And, you know, by the way, that comes along with all the chemical sanitizers in our kitchens and the fragrances and the artificial scents and our candles and things like that. Our home no longer smells as it should. It no longer is a human experience. right that supports life right i remember my mom struggled with cooking she used to i think this and maybe it was the fault of the kids you know like oh mom oh what is this we're also like total like macrobiotic vegetarian which i don't think is an easy way to cook especially for kids i remember like bulgar wheat yeah i got no like tabuli right but like i'm just like like she would

just get a mound of bulgar i was like what is this is horrible And, you know, my, like, carib chip cookies made with whole wheat. Like, I'd go to a bake sale, and I'd have a pile of stones that you could not. You could break a tooth on these things. Oh, my gosh. It's humiliating. Every old, other kids got an empty blade and all my stones that I showed up with a still that didn't make any money for whatever project was in school. But for someone like that, I think for parents that have thrown in the towel, too many ooze, too many.

like I just, and they don't feel like they have talent. Yeah. I don't feel like I have talent here. It's just not a book, a busy, what would be your recommendation? Is there a place to start and sort of reimagining how you see food, how you cook it, simplifying it some way? Yeah, yeah. I think there's so much overthinking.

There's so much overthinking. And I get why, too. Like, it's so exciting, and we could cook anything at any given time, right? And a lot of the beauty of the industrialization, industrialization of the world is that we get to have, you know, olive oil from Italy or Greece or, you know, soy sauce from Japan. And it's right there. It can be overwhelming. Like, I could be making all this amazing food.

Probably was easier if you didn't have, like, you just, you only have your cultural food. Exactly, exactly. And that's, you know. So many options. And that's where we came from. We came from, like, the small farms, the homesteads or like the neighborhood where there was just these, you know, these ingredients that were regional. But we also, interestingly, you know, in the states, I think,

and is an interesting place where we're losing our cultural, you know, ties to our own past, our individual experience that very often is from another part of the world, right? And so a lot of our ancestors came about 100 years ago, maybe, or in the last number of decades, and we've kind of been assimilated and into a new world. And so no longer are we like learning grandma, grandpa, you know, their rituals and their recipes. And so now we're kind of lost. And we're kind of like trying to find out. figure this out, right? And we're going to have to turn to what Bobby's mentioning. We're going to

have to turn to somebody for these skills, right? But if parents are standing here today and they don't have these skills, what are you going to do? Yeah. Like, we better reclaim them now. And that's where, that's my life's passion is, you know, setting people up for success, setting parents up for success, having them realize that get a sharp knife, get a cutting board, grab an onion, and you can just go, right? Learn a few things. Learn a few techniques. And by the the time you're you find yourself committed to this process weeks months like it's just all becomes so intuitive it really really does but we have to have the commitment we have to start to draw our line in the sand that this is how we want to live and this is this is the life that my

kids deserve right right and I'm going to show up this way for them I don't care how hard it is because I signed up for this job right to have kids yeah I'm here now I'm not going to outsource it to somebody that does not care or could not love my kids the way that I do. Yeah. You know, it was interesting in the backstory that we did with you. You had mentioned that you saw an almost immediate change in some of these kids. And, you know, as the school lunches, you got involved, started giving them these whole foods. What changes are you talking about?

I had one parent after a couple weeks at the first school in Austin pulled me aside and said, my kid has had eczema that I have not been able to get rid of for years. And two weeks into that program, she said it's gone. It's gone. And that's just like, that's one example of many behavioral stuff for sure. Yeah. That I keep on getting. I just keep on getting this.

And I have just witnessed this with my own kids as well. And is food everything? No, like there's so many emotional components, of course, right? which I could get into forever and talk about, you know, the psychospiritual in our heads and the language we use around food with our kids and the energy that we hold around it as being as important as the ingredients themselves. But if we can just remove and clean up and just have real ingredients, you'll find, I think, that most of what ails us will just go away.

We're certainly seeing that. I know lots of people talking about how food is fixing so many different autoimmune issues, you know, and things like that. when you know when you came into the school when when you start does it take a while to teach kids to eat some of these things because I mean I think parents really struggle like cannot get my child to eat vegetables and we had that issue with our son my daughter no problem she'll eat salad anything my son yeah yeah how do you work through those issues especially on a group level yeah well there's a lot of different dynamics every kid has a different relationship with food they're

coming from a different household Certain examples being the parents were vegan when the kid was born. They started vegan. Then the parents kind of like started to introduce meat, but the kid had a certain relationship based on how he came into the world. Vegetarians, different cultural things, kosher, halal, all of it I've experienced, right? Sensory issues with certain kids. My plan, as always, to go into a school and always has been, to create an environment where they don't feel pressure. And I think that we can adopt this at home.

Imagine being a kid and sitting down the table and they feel the pressure to eat something at the table. Would you like that as an adult? Like to go to dinner, you don't even know what's being served and shows up and you're expected to eat that. And the parents are on the edge of the seat. Like, you know, is it good? Like, are you going to eat this or the whole you got to eat your vegetables? I don't prescribe to that, you know? I want the environment to feel natural.

I want the kids to feel and be sovereign, right? in those decisions. And so my approach to that is, okay, well, can I at least control the environment in the home where I'm proud to serve all of what enters the home to my kids? Yeah. Right? So if, for example, my son, like, just came in from three hours of bike riding and his body's really hot and he doesn't want a certain food maybe that I served, personally, I always welcome

him to, like, go into the fridge and have, like, a bowl of yogurt where sometimes he wants something more cool, right? And I'm happy to do that. And that's not everyone's approach. But this does not come easy. I'm never going to be at the table in making them try something. You've got to eat this.

It just feels so wrong and unnatural to me. And I'm definitely not going to reward them eating with dessert. Right. I think so much of what we need to break is that rewards punishment. Right. Because then it just sets them up to be people pleasers. Right. And then what is really going through them, right?

Like we want our kids to grow up and know themselves and know their truth. But how are we going to do that if we're constantly creating rewards and punishment as parents? And I think the really interesting playground to do that is at the dinner table. Yeah. Does it help in a school setting that every kid is seeing that we're all eating the same thing? Yeah. Yeah.

So going back to the school setting, there's a lot to be said for the kind of camaraderie, right? And the normalization of what the peers are eating for sure. It's still, the dynamics still play out in interesting ways, right? Because that also opens up to potential negative aspects, because we've had kids that were teased, right, because of certain relationships with food and certain beliefs, right? But that's an opportunity for a really good school and really good teachers to be able to hold space

for those dynamics, right, and for that conversation. But I have seen in this environment kids start to feel comfortable with voicing themselves. Where at first, maybe the first couple weeks, they don't want to come to say, you know, Chef Aaron, I don't like what you serve today. When I create the environment of, hey, you don't like something, you come to me.

I can always make you some eggs. I can always go into the fridge and see what we've got some raw cheese. We've got some fruit, right? And that is always welcome. And so that is also them practicing their voice, speaking up, being okay with disappointing someone and saying, right? I don't like that, right? That, I think, is a really powerful opportunity.

Well, very cool. I know I tasked you with the idea of, could you turn this studio into a kitchen of some sort? And I think one of the things is just how simple can we make this. And so you're gonna show us how to make a meal in one pan, is that right? One pan. I think we can do it for under 10 minutes too. Let's do that.

All right. All right, what we got here? Some meat, some vegetables. Looks pretty simple. Oh, there's an apron. Great. What are we making today? All right.

We're going to do a delicious steak lettuce wrap. Something I have never done at my house, actually. It's funny, not even mention it, I order, like, I'll get a burger, no bun. Can you put it in a lettuce wrap? But I don't actually do lettuce wraps at home. It's funny. I don't know why. So, this is one of my go-toes, right?

This is the kind of meal that you can make on a Wednesday night. You don't even have a plan, but you got some meat. You got some veg. You got some stuff that, you know, is from the pantry. Yep. And you're going to do it just one pan. Just one pan. The meat and the vegetables.

The meat and the vegetables. Of course, you have a sauce, we'll have a nice platter of, we're gonna do lettuce wraps, fresh herbs, kind of inspired by like kind of Vietnamese Thai. I love like yummy sauces full of salt, sweet, umami, dynamic flavors, optional chilies for the adults. Okay, or maybe other kids, let's get to it. All right, so let's get a pan hot first, right?

Very often, even when I don't know what to do, I'm like, I better we get a pan going. Okay, get it hot, right? Sometimes that's boiling water even. Now, like I grew up, everything like always medium mom was like just put it at medium put it at medium now that I'm getting older chefs like no no it's super hot pan searing like is there a yeah is there a set of rules you know it's hot it depends there's a lot of

depends there okay right with this one with stake and this lean cut in particular uh-huh so there are actually a couple different cuts here we get flank and we've got an eye round right okay okay both pretty lean actually especially the eye round I like to get a nice aggressive seer get some color on here especially their thin steaks. If it's not hot, right, it's going to overcook and be gray. You know what I mean? So actually having lower heat makes it cook more through.

Is that it? No, like the lower heat, we're not going to get nice color on it. And it's going to kind of be like that slow, boring heat, and it's not going to get good caramelization. Less delicious. What does caramelize mean for some of those? Imagine like a commercial for like A1 steak sauce and like that beautiful, you know, like, yeah, the grill marks and like that, yeah, where the meat changes and and starts to glisten and get that nice mahogany that's what we're going for okay but let's get cooking here all right so we got some beef tallow then okay good for high heat cooking right if i'm not

using beef tallow now i mean you get beef tallow at grocery stores now i haven't really you can even agree yeah grocery stores and you're seeing actually the potato chip world catch on yeah and now i'm seeing it everywhere yeah all right so let's get a little bit not too too too much you don't need too much right yeah stainless steel pan this is gonna smoke a little bit let's get this out of here great I'm gonna turn this down a little bit because this this pan actually heats up pretty hot this burner all right right but first we got actually season this meat okay okay I'm gonna use my tongs because we're without a sink here I'm gonna season pretty liberally I'm gonna use this thin part of the

flank a flank's a much bigger cut right okay season from above was that salt was it This is just salt. Just salt. Okay. And then into the pan we go. You always, by the way, especially if you're doing a steak, you're going to want to go away, okay? So you're not splattering, especially if the kids are around, okay?

Yep. So that's going. You can hear that sizzle. So in terms of that one pan idea, we're just going to build a veg and there's space in here, right? Of course, you know, scale up if you've got a bigger family, a bigger pan. But you can also just throw the grill on, you know, and have the steak going on the grill. but just for the sake of it, since we're going to do lettuce wraps and I want to contain basically these little bundles,

I'm going to cut these asparagus on a little bias, right, like that, and I'm just going to get them right in there. I always steam my asparagus. I'm always afraid I can't get it all the way cooked through when it's in a pan. Yeah, you totally could. I mean, these are just popping now. Yeah. These are like the first local asparagus. So they're going to easily get tender. Okay. And also, like, you can eat these raw. you know that's true i like a nice little bite overcook asparagus yeah not so much okay all right all right so we got this we got fish sauce my my daughter is a sauce freak me too and vinegar like she just likes like yeah we got both of these things so okay you see this is a fish sauce all right this is good what does fish sauce mean i never use it freaks so this is this is from

like salted and fermented and pressed anchovies basically they also use you this is use squid. We're going to get some, this is sherry vinegar. It could also be lime, lemon juice, different vinegars, apple cider, vinegar, and this is coconut aminos. Okay, basically the really beautiful, natural, sweet coconut sap. Okay, I'm going to get these out of here, just get more rum. So from here, and I'm going to keep an eye because I know this steak is going to cook pretty fast. Yep. And we can come back to the sauce in a second. I'm going to just check and see our color. See that beautiful color? Yeah. And a steak, this, light actually because it's not so heavy you might want to press down just to get that nice

surface area in contact i do this also with fish you ever see like fish wants to kind of curl up when you hit the pan you want to press it just a little bit okay okay so that was cooking by the way what did i forget to do i forget to season my asparagus all right a little salt okay so that's going let's get some other fun stuff in do you want to actually cut some of the scallions so scallion also I like to cut them in half just to kind of speed things up and then I line them up and when I say a bias I just mean an angle just kind of looks really nice nice thin slices and we can use some for garnish we can use some for our sauce I'm just gonna pop some here that's gonna look really nice let's throw that in there too yeah that can go right in there okay that'll be enough here great we're gonna get some ginger nice knob of ginger and just to show the folks at home It's going to move this. Spargas are getting kind of charred.

I'm going to flip this. Yeah, there we go. Nice. All right. So when I'm approaching ginger at home, I like to use this bird's beak knife. It just gives you really beautiful dexterity, just how quickly you can deal with this.

Some people like to use, I'm going to save this piece right there. The back of a spoon to kind of peel away. You can do that, too, by the way. Okay. But I find that having this little knife This is kind of like I think of my grandma. She was always cutting with a pairing knife towards herself.

Yeah. Potatoes like that. And look how nicely you can clean up the ginger. Very nice. So ginger, keeping an eye on our food there. I'm going to do a nice jolienne here. So I'm going to take my time. We don't need a ton for that amount.

Yeah. And then I'm going to line up. And this is a theme that I often teach, right? Like in my substack community, knife skills. Yeah. Talk about making life easier. yourself if you're adept with a knife and you're quick and things don't seem hard it's just going to be easier to make dinner happen right line those up and look

how beautiful we can get that delicious by yeah there's something about ginger just I always forget I don't know with enough because when I when you come out you're like oh my god and look how pretty yeah look how pretty right in there yeah so one thing we forgot do you want to squeeze some honey in there while I check sure what we thinking teaspoon tablespoon yeah it's good local raw honey so for me that's good stuff okay so I personally want to get the asparagus out of here and I've got actually some good clean water gonna just slow down the cooking a little bit in my asparagus okay because I'm with you I don't want too much charth

all right yeah I'm actually gonna get those out right here and I'm gonna show you something fun because our steak's basically done and look how quick that is yeah okay there's literally we were a couple minutes Before, yeah, so we're gonna put this aside for later. Beautiful chart. Look how, you can still see that there's some crispness, but some nice color. So even though this is kind of East Meets West, right? I'm gonna hit some garlic in the paper, in the clove, right?

Okay. I'm gonna hit this right here, some fresh time. It's gonna make sense with this dish, I promise. And then some beautiful local butter and a good amount of it. All right, yep. I think it's a misconception that we should be watching our butter intake. I'm telling you, like, I always feel great. I always feel satiated, and I love feeding my kids butter.

Yeah. It just feels right to me. Okay? I love it. All right. Talk me into butter. So you can listen to that pop and wait a little of the aromatics hit. And so then we're just going to base our garlicky time now, time butter basically.

All right. And you could treat any... And then that garlic, even with the paper still like... it's just to in yeah it's still get putting flavor it's to infuse that smell just because we likely we just we just slightly smashed it right in that beautiful foaming butter okay so that's enough of that you can just smell no delicious yeah next level okay so then what i like to do for resting steak here yeah this is fun it's gonna smell like home for the next couple weeks so this is this is a very thin steak right so this is probably gonna this is gonna cook fast especially this one which i don't mind too with flank

Usually there's that thinner is that a cheaper cut because I know one of the things that like me can be very expensive It can be so flank even though it's I think a luxurious cut it's on the on the lower lower price per pound rate Then way right way less than say a rib eye or a New York strip right? Okay, other example that my wife likes Tenderland my daughter they like the tenderland no fat my son and I like ribeye Yeah, where is this at just in terms of thinking like this is a crowd pleaser because it's got enough fat and flavor that it's gonna please the rib eye lovers but it's lean enough that I think your daughter that loves tenderloin is gonna live it too okay so I like to rest it like this on a rack if you can you know yeah maybe that allows the air circulation so the bottom's

not gonna you know overcook all right one thing we forgot that I did want to show is a quick garlic paste that we're gonna add to our sauce okay so we got our meat we don't need this butter anymore and I wanted to show this because it really bleeds nicely into this sauce okay so I smashed that garlic hit it with a little the sauce right and then I'm just going to mash that garlic into the pan and it's going to really bleed in beautifully and you're actually a little salt garlic is it is and by salting it it's going to mellow out even though it's going into a salty sauce it's going to mellow out the kind of astringency of that

garlic right okay so in there and it's also just going to kind of melt in there so we're going to whisk that up we got our honey in there we got our vinegar we got our coconut aminos which is also sweet and our fish sauce, and that's good to go. Optionally, you could add chilies in here. Okay. That's what I would do, but I think we should do them on the side, but there's actually one more thing that I want to show you, now that I'm looking at it.

Shallots. I think shallots are so underused. I love, yeah, they're just like so good. There's an elegance to shallots that I just love, and I love making dishes and showing the rings. There's something about seeing the rings in a dish that is just like, look at, look at it. have that pop in there like it's so pretty and a lot of this you know creating beauty for our kids and for our families yeah let's do lemon too okay let's do lemon too and this is where you see we're

just playing in here yeah you want to maybe juice a half a lemon in here sure yeah and that's it look how pretty like that on our lettuce wraps is going to be amazing all right let's get our lettuce wrap oh perfect great eat i'm getting hungry i'm starving you got me on a perfect day All right. I didn't eat this morning. Check out this array. All right. And this is how I love to set up meals for my kids, right?

But there's a couple more garnishes I want to do. I'm going to put my sauce aside. Okay. Stakes there, asparagus, carrots. Okay. Carrots really pop beautifully. So I'm going to quickly peel this carrot. I want to show you how quickly we can julienne.

Not that we're rushing here, but I want you to be able to do things quickly. Yeah. Not that we have to. All right. Let's get this guy, get each end off. And it doesn't have to be a perfect Julianne, but again, I like to come back to that bias and do nice thin cuts like this Okay, and then you can just line up those cuts rustically. It doesn't have to be perfect Like I see all this color. Does this is this part of it? Is this? Does kids need more colors? Does it matter?

I mean who doesn't love more color in their life, right? Yeah, and who doesn't love to sit down a table to add a table with all this just like beauty. It's beauty literally, right? Yeah. So here's our gorgeous carrot. Look how nice. And we'll just add that to our pile and we'll explain what's going on here. We'll just have this. I personally, Del, find it hard to live without spicy. Okay. Spicy red chili. Do you like spicy? Somewhat. I'm a medium spice person. I don't. use a lot my wife's mrs mild she needs everything all right so the pepper goes on last on my plate if it's going to happen at all now what about see like always with peppers seeds no seeds they're gonna be spicier yeah okay if you want to decede and take out the inside it's not gonna be as spicy yeah so sometimes you know we can we can just stop there for you okay all right so that last they'll put these near the carrots all right so a very often set up and i'll have you know very often i'll ferment peppers and i'll have that in a ball jar separately so that's just

What's that process? Salt it. It's a certain salt ratio, basically brine, and then a certain length of time at room temperature roughly until it starts to break down lactofermint. And it tastes amazing, really good, beneficial bacteria in our guts. Okay, so lastly, mango. I love playing with fruit for my kids. Love it.

And they love it, and it's delicious and fun and nourishing. So I'm going to peel just a piece of this mango so we can get started. All right. And this is also just going to make so much sense. We don't need all of it. with this bite okay so I'm gonna kind of set up again just a little this is just as an example a jolienne of the mango and you'll see why this is gonna be a great addition okay so we've got some nice thin mango slices let's set this up and then the last say these I think like you have a few things

are sweet here yeah there's a kids must love that just a little bit of sweetness I would imagine so in my experience all these years cooking for kids My own kids, kids in the school setting. They gravitate towards the meat and the fruit always, right? And certain veggies, right? Like cucumbers. They all like cucumbers, for the most part. And so I ride with that and honor it, okay? All right. So all we need to do is cut our steak and then we're gonna build a couple of these. Let me get this out of the way just so we can kind of focus. Right. So this is a nice one to practice this flank steak because we can see you ever hear of cutting against the grain? I have heard that. I can definitely see that. I can definitely see that. I can definitely see that. You can see the grain. You can see the grain. So this is a great one to practice, right? So against it means like this, not with it.

If we cut it like this, it's going to be long, kind of chewy strands, right? Okay. We want to go against it to kind of shorten those so it's easier on our teeth and it's an easier bite, right? It's just more pleasant. So we're going to slice this. We got this beautiful, oh, salivating. We'll do nice thin slices.

We got gorgeous pink. We did a good job there. Yeah. So there's our medium. And of course, you know, if you like, you like, more rare if you like more well done ride with it you can see how juicy this steak is okay so I'm to line this up I'm gonna put this great actually I'm gonna use this right here and just put the steak right back in it and let it kind of hang out in those juices yeah you know optionally we

could do finishing salt if we weren't if we didn't have such a salty delicious dressing but like this is going to be gorgeous so this is what dinner could look there it is families and look how quickly we put that together and who doesn't want to come to a dinner table and dive into this all right so this is what I love to do so we've got the the butter lettuce radicchio is fun it's also super colorful a little more bitter definitely a lot more bitter cilantro mint scallions we get our carrots we got our chilies always sauerkrauts and ferments in my fridge either homemade or store bought there's some really great companies doing some stuff that good bacteria good for the gut really delicious like really really delicious right

So pickles and two different ones. Yeah, Randy. Bobby's like only eating steak and fermentes right now. Yeah, so good. I mean, so, so good. Yeah. So if you want, we can play around with, we can use this for steak, and here's what I say we do. We got a nice lettuce wrap. We'll do a build our own. Here's one for you. We'll set this over. A little one here. You can use that for the steak, and then we can just use our hands.

Totally. This is what my kids are going to be doing, you know? Put a little piece right. I got that. I'm going to grab some steak too. I like to just pick it up like it's a taco. You can even do this too. I'm going in for a couple of chili. I can already, I feel like a kid right now, like making it.

I bet you they love the hands on like little food. Scalions. The basil for me makes it. Like to me it's like, you ever about? I'm a big cilantro fan. Same, same. How fresh it is. And then mint, I think is also just so under-

and it grows like literally like crazy grows too easily and then we got our sauce oh we got our asparagus oh yeah a little bit of asparagus and this is like here can I let you up a little perfect and then I'll leave it to you to sauce as you see fit but you know at home you could even like make these like little tacos and dip in the sauce yeah but then you got this gorgeous I'm gonna get the sauce I saw that oh okay ready well let's do it Cheers. Cheers.

Mmm. Oh man. That was delicious. So fresh and crunchy. I don't want to do this tonight. I'm at home. Tangy, sweet, salty. And that's it.

And then you just go in for more rounds. I can't tell you how many different meals we could make like this, right? It could be taco night, and we just play it, do the same thing, right? It could be kind of an Italian anti-paste night, where you've got marinated pepper. If you've got some meat or some meat, like I love the idea of family style for our kids. So they feel just like autonomous. They feel a part of it. And it's just fun, you know?

Oh, it's really amazing. Aaron, thank you so much. I'm going to make up another one of these. But for those of you out there, we're going to have a lot more fun with this show, right? Don't you love the cook? I think we can do more things like this. But look, you want your friends watching the show. You want to have them sharing all the information that you're getting here.

The best way to do that is a start of conversation like on your chest or, on your hat. This is how we highwire. We asked and you delivered. Showing us how you highwire. This is how we highwire. This is how we highwire. Team highwire is being rep from all over the world. Sporting our new highwire deer in the free state of Florida. When I wear this cap makes me feel proud. I am a doula and a childbirth educator and I love wearing my get vaccinated t-shirt. Sometimes it's not just what you wear. It's who you meet while wearing it. When I was wearing this shirt yesterday, a tourist came up to me and said, love that shirt.

Since 2020, when I woke up from The Matrix, I've been talking to neighbors, connecting with local groups. There are a lot of people that are a little bit hesitant about approaching the topic of vaccination. And this wearing this shirt allows them to approach me. And I know exactly where to send them. Whether you're dropping the kids at school or marching in rallies across the globe. We see your dedication. We feel your support. And now it's easier than ever to join.

the movement because we're having our biggest sale yet. We want to see millions of truth tellers showing the world how they highwire. Head to the highwire.shop to support our mission and stock up on gear for the whole family. Thank you so much. Keep it up. Thank you for spreading truth. We love you guys. Thanks for what you do. All right, well, a perfect opportunity to use that gear would be coming up on April 27th. We're going to keep talking about the people versus poison. This is going to be outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., where they will be having the official hearing on whether to give liability protection to one of the worst poison sprayed on 80 or 90 percent of our crops in America.

If that matters to you, I hope maybe you'll make the trip to Washington, D.C. It should be a really beautiful time of year to be there. And of course, we'll be broadcasting it on the high wire tube for those of you that can't make it. But I really think that that event, this is one of those opportunities. I think that we can get out of this politicization that's going on. crosses you know all you know all political spectrums I don't think anyone really wants to see liability protection even the polls show that about vaccines can imagine where we're at when we talk about herbicides and pesticides sprayed on

our crops we should have the right to soup those things are poisoning us and we should have you know have a force a market force that tells you know those people making those products to make a better product make one that doesn't poison us what are we talking about here so anyway this might be a really great way to reach out to you know your friends and family like I have there, you know, back on the environmental left side that many of us came from, we could reach across the aisle and say, hey, let's do this together. I think we can agree on this, right?

Why don't we all go march together? I think it's really time to sort of pull down the political rhetoric and get down to what's affecting our lives. You know, we're all human beings. We're brothers and sisters on this planet. And let's try to, you know, find commonality wherever we can. Anyway, what a great meal. I hope you enjoyed that segment with Aaron.

Aaron. Thanks for joining us today. And then, of course, really, this is just about expanding your horizon. Think about everything we're doing. Taking time to eat, taking time with your family. I love that statement that Robert Kennedy is making. It affected me, even running around, and we're pretty good at having a meal. But it is.

It's one of the most important things we'll ever do. For those few years, your children are in your home. Don't you want them to have memories of good home? cooked meal, whether mom or dad makes her, maybe the whole family makes it together. But it's such a great time to hear what's going on in their lives, have conversations about maybe what they're seeing in the world. We're passing each other, not thinking they must be being affected by all that's happening in the news too. So make that meal important in your life. I think it's a huge part of our experience on this earth. And have some great meals this week, and I'll see you next week

on the Highwire.